The boy shouts wordlessly: “O Tannenbaum” (or “The Red Flag” if you prefer), “The Blue Danube,” Vivaldi’s “Spring.” He’s heard them on the adverts.
The men who studied mothers and sons, had daughters. Freud was a case in point. Did he study her? No, he pretended she had not occurred.
In any case love must be passed on with no return. Not even with feedback.
It is cruel to expect me to be both mother and daughter — such different expectations. My daughter tosses her hair. I see it from far away, as someone who does not know her will see it, a man. She is twelve years old. It is the same gesture she used at nine, at ten. One day it will become sexual. Is it yet? I don’t know. Why am I frightened by this progress? It will happen. It must happen. And it happens in only one direction. She will gain power, but it is not much. This is power with no balance. I can weigh nothing against it. She cannot stop becoming powerful. She is not powerful yet. When she becomes powerful, it is not a power she will know what to do with. There is not much that can be done with this power, not by its possessor.
Some women take power in a country by souveniring. I try to imitate them, look only for what I can buy, but my heart’s not in it. The bargain is the thing to treasure: the leap of possession, of which the keepsake is only the echo. And maybe for you it has been the act of stealing. I can’t tell you not to take the stone; it is so beautiful. Your eyes have allowed you to see it out of place already, on your desk perhaps, a shelf. Now, even if you put it back, it would not be where it was before. I have been tempted, seen one carving balanced on another behind the rope, about to fall — an acanthus leaf detaching from its finial — but I couldn’t have taken it. Happy with a tourist’s herded pleasures, really I’m helpless without you. Could I ask for anything more? Yes, but only what you don’t see within these safe parameters, and secretly. To enjoy the smallest allowed thing, to take these pleasures privately — is this an act of rebellion?
It is something I can take away that you cannot.
We’ve been invited to transgress, in any case, continually: to cross inefficient barriers, to enter without paying, not to pay for the children, or to offer the smaller price for them because that was demanded last time.
How big is a find, anyway? Yours is pretty big. Other pieces that look like nothing may also be finds — pebbles with no carvings may be equally missing from the whole. And, if you leave it, someone else will take it, of course …
I say nothing. I think you take nothing. As we go, I think we leave: a lolly stick, some peanut shells. They will biodegrade.
In the car park of the ruin, no other tourists, only a man loading into his car brightly colored squat plastic horses for children to ride. They are beautiful! Or not. On holiday it is so difficult to judge. Should the ornamentation on the fire hydrant be admired like the ornamentation on the finial? It is very similar. But is it authentic/typical of the region/linked to a social/political/cultural event/unique/historic, or is it found everywhere?
In the car, I drive, he speaks:
“What did you enjoy most?” he asks the children.
They weigh only the things he suggests.
As for me, I enjoyed the people, ate them up. I do not say it; no one else saw me do it. There are three of them, now, farmwomen, stooping in the furrows behind the tractor, as though looking for dropped change. Then a man kneeling by his motorbike in a lay-by. Here no one will help. You have to fix it yourself, or push the bike a long way.
TUNA PREFABRIK homes rise up, pink as tinned salmon. The cliffs remain as unimaginable as a picture. The restaurant we passed said, OPEN ALL THE YEARS.
The drive up the mountain now consists of stretches of road that have been memorized, can be linked together, until almost every meter of the road is expected — and as it becomes expected vertigo decreases.
Last journey up. How much of my fear is put on? To give you some perspective, my teeth feel like cliffs to my tongue.
The man in the row of seats in front says, SHIT. He does not look or sound like the sort of man who says SHIT often, and I am shocked to hear the word come out in his pleasant sixty-year-old voice. He is arguing with the airline stewardess about exchange rates while paying for coffee. The stewardess says she will check the exchange rate for him. I do not know whether the exchange rate is SHIT, or the coffee.
The man’s t-shirt. Khaki. Between the seats, a glimpse: across the back just by the neck, a small logo, LIFE IS GOOD.
She realized she was happy and it was terrible to be happy with anything so ordinary. It was like looking down from a height on nothing in particular, only the feeling of being able to see it all at once, and the feeling of falling, which was not falling, and the irritation at being provoked to that feeling by nothing in particular. She swatted it away but the happiness would not leave. She was surprised to find things went on just the same beside the happiness, which did nothing practical, like make the stewardess arrive sooner, or the children behave better.
A pregnant child passes along the plane. No, she is a woman. I am used to the coarse skin of those my own age. Even the very old begin to seem normal.
The stewardess. No, I am not hungry. I will deny it very quickly, almost as soon as I feel it, or rather as soon as I feel the not being hungry, which is not the same as feeling nothing. I will deny it out loud so I don’t feel it, or rather so that I feel what I say — which is an absence, or rather an absence of the absence that is hunger: so that I don’t feel the absence. And, no, I am not one of those women who has learned how not to eat, only how not to want. And it is not food only.
She said when the children were small she was not happy, but the children had already escaped what they were, made away with the evidence. All she had left was the declaration. So why continue to be unhappy? It was almost impossible to be unhappy now. To hold onto the unhappiness would be absurd. But to let it go …
Children who are bigger than their parents are folded into the seats behind, their limbs bent in all the wrong directions, a padded girl (fifteen?) clutching a fat cushion decorated with the photo of a pug sitting on a drawing of a heart.
When she tried to brush the happiness away, it buzzed back around her. In her son’s drawings she could see how complexity might develop and, from it, how the Book of Kells was made, Icelandic woodcarvings, those tiles in the Blue Mosque. It seemed masculine, this pursuit of pattern, or she ascribed it to masculinity because it was something she did not do herself.
Geological faults. From the plane we look down on things that would do us harm were we to encounter them. She felt no vertigo although she could have dropped a hairpin onto the canopy of cloud and it would have fallen through as though there had been nothing there, which there was not. On the other side of the window, ice particles kissed the glass, which was not glass but was made from the same material as her kitchen blender that broke, even though it was made from the same material as aircraft windows.
The third person. There was no sign of this happiness on the outside, she knew. She was bored by this happiness that seemed out of place, impatient to get rid of it. The feeling was less pleasurable than she had imagined it might have been, less well-defined, and when she felt along its strings she found it was not easily traced or attached to the objects she thought it might have been attached to. Perhaps it was not attached to anything at all.