Spring

One

You don't know what air is, yet you breathe. You don't know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don't know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don't know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.

You are three months old and as if swaddled in routines you lie on a bed of sameness through the days, for you don't have a cocoon like larvae do, you don't have a pouch like the kangaroos, you don't have a den like the badgers or the bears. You have your bottle of milk, you have the changing table with nappies and wet wipes, you have the pram with the pillow and the duvet, you have your parents' large warm bodies. Surrounded by all this you grow so slowly that no one notices, least of all yourself, for first you grow outwards, by gripping and holding on to the things around you with your hands, your mouth, your eyes, your thoughts, thereby bringing them into being, and only when you have done this for a few years and the world has been constituted do you begin to discover all that grips you, and you grow inwardly too, towards yourself.

What is the world like to a newborn baby?

Light, dark. Cold, warm. Soft, hard.

The whole array of objects in a house, all meaning deriving from the relations within a family, the significance that every person dwells within, all this is invisible, hidden not by the darkness but by the light of the undifferentiated.

Someone once told me that heroin is so fantastic because the feelings it awakens are akin to those we have as children, when everything is taken care of, the feeling of total security we bask in then, which is so fundamentally good. Anyone who has experienced that high wants to experience it again, since they know it exists as a possibility.

The life I live is separated from yours by an abyss. It is full of problems, of conflicts, of duties, of things that have to be taken care of, handled, fixed, of wills that must be satisfied, wills that must be resisted and perhaps wounded, all in a continual stream where almost nothing stands still but everything is in motion and everything has to be parried.

I am forty-six years old and that is my insight, that life is made up of events that have to be parried. And that the moments of happiness in life all have to do with the opposite.

What is the opposite of parrying something?

It isn't to regress, it isn't to withdraw into your world of light and dark, warm and cold, soft and hard. Nor is it the light of the undifferentiated, it is neither sleep nor rest. The opposite of parrying is creating, making, adding something that wasn't there before.

You were not there before.

Love is not a word I often use, it seems too big in relation to the life I live, the world I know. But then I grew up in a culture that was careful with words. My mother has never told me she loves me, and I have never told her I love her. The same goes for my brother. If I were to say to my mother or my brother that I love them, they would be horrified. I would have laid a burden on them, violently upsetting the balance between us, almost as if I had staggered around in a drunken fit during a childÕs christening.

When you were born I knew nothing about you, yet I was filled with feelings for you, overwhelming at first, for a birth is overwhelming, even to someone who is merely looking on - it is as if everything in the room grows denser, as if a kind of gravity develops that draws all meaning towards it, so that for a few hours it can only be found there, later becoming more evenly spread out, subjected to the everyday, diluted with the eventlessness of all the hours of the day and yet always there.

I am your father, and you know my face, my voice and my ways of holding you, but beyond that I could be anyone to you, filled with anything. My own father, your grandfather, who is dead, spent his last years with his mother, and their existence was pitiless. He was an alcoholic and had regressed, he no longer had the strength to parry anything, he had let everything slide, just sat there drinking. That he did so in his mother's home is significant. She had given birth to him, she had cared for him and carried him here and there, made sure he was warm, dry, fed. The bond this created between them was never broken. He tried, I know that, but he couldn't do it. That's why he stayed there. There he could let himself go to ruin. No matter how crippled, no matter how hideous, it was also love. Somewhere deep within there was love, unconditional love.

Back then I didn't have children, so I didn't understand it. I saw only the hideousness, the unfreedom, the regression. Now I know. Love is many things, most of its forms are fleeting, linked to everything that happens, everything that comes and goes, everything that fills us at first, then empties us out, but unconditional love is constant, it glows faintly throughout one's whole life, and I want you to know this - that you too were born into that love, and that it will envelop you, no matter what happens, as long as your mother and I are alive.

It may happen that you don't want anything to do with it. It may happen that you turn away from it. And one day you will understand that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't change anything, that unconditional love is the only love that doesn't bind you but sets you free.

The love that binds one is something else, it is another form of love, less pure, more mixed up with the person who loves, and it has greater force, it can overshadow everything else, even destroy. Then it must be parried.

I donÕt know what your life will be like, I donÕt know what will happen to us, but I know what your life is like now, and how we are doing now, and since you wonÕt remember any of it, not the least little thing, I will tell you about one day in our life, the first spring you were with us. You had thin hair, it looked reddish in the light, and it grew unevenly; there was a circle on the back of your head with no hair at all, probably because it was nearly always pressing against something, pillows and rugs, sofas and chairs, but I still found it strange, for surely your hair wasnÕt like grass, which grows only where the sun shines and air is flowing?

Your face was round, your mouth was small, but your lips were relatively wide, and your eyes were round and rather large. You slept in a cot at one end of the house, with a mobile of African animals dangling above you, while I slept in a bed next to yours, for it was my job to look after you at night, since your mother was sensitive when it came to sleep, whereas I slept heavily, like a child, no matter what happened around me. Sometimes you would wake at night and scream because you were hungry, but since I didn't wake up or only heard it as a sound coming from far, far away, you learned the hard way not to expect anything while it was dark, so that after only a few weeks you slept through the night, from when you were put to bed at six in the evening until you woke up at six in the morning.

This morning began like all the others. You woke up in the darkness and started to scream.

What time was it?

I fumbled around for my phone, which should be on the windowsill just above my head.

There it was.

The light from the screen, no larger than my hand, filled nearly the entire dark room with a vague glow.

Twenty to six.

'Oh, it's still early, little girl,' I said and sat up. The movement set off a rustling, wheezing sound in my chest, and I coughed for a while.

You had gone quiet.

I walked the two steps over to the cot and bent over you, placed a hand on either side of your little ribcage and lifted you up, holding you close to my chest and supporting the back of your head and neck with one hand, even though you were already able to hold your head up by yourself.

'Hi there,' I said. 'Did you sleep well?'

You breathed calmly and seemed to press your cheek against my chest.

I carried you down the hall and into the bathroom. Through the window I saw a narrow band of light just above the eastern horizon, reddish against the black sky and the black ground. The house was cold, the night had been starlit and the temperature must have dropped, but fortunately the dryer had been on all night, and some of its heat, which at times seems almost tropical, still lingered in the room.

I laid you down carefully on the changing table, which had been squeezed in between the bath and the sink, coughing again. A glob of mucus came loose in my throat, I spat it into the sink, turned on the tap to wash it down, saw how it clung to the metal wall of the plughole, smooth and sticky, while water ran over it on both sides until it slowly began to slide over to one side and then, abruptly as if acting of its own volition, disappeared down the drain. I glanced briefly at the mirror above the sink, saw my own masklike face staring at me, turned off the tap and bent over you.

You looked up at me. If you were thinking about something, it couldn't have been put into words or concepts, it couldn't be anything you formulated to yourself, only something you felt. There he is, is maybe what you felt as you looked at me, and along with the face you recognised came a whole set of other feelings associated with what I usually did with you and in what ways. A great deal must still have been vague and open within you, like the shifting light in the sky, but once in a while everything must have fused together and become definite and unavoidable: those were the basic bodily sensations, the tide of hunger, the tide of thirst, the tide of tiredness, the tide of too hot and too cold. Those were the times you started to cry.

'What are you thinking?' I said to distract you a little as I undid the top buttons of your white pyjamas. But you still thrust out your lower lip, and your mouth began to quiver. With my index finger I struck the tail of one of the little wooden aeroplanes hanging above the changing table so that it began revolving. Then I did the same with the next one, and the next after that.

'Don't tell me you're going to fall for that same old trick today too?' I said.

But you did. You stared wide-eyed at all the movement in the air while I took off your pyjamas. As I put them in the laundry basket, steps sounded on the ceiling above us. It must have been your younger sister, since the elder one always slept as long as she could and your brother was probably up already. I loosened the flaps of the nappy and pulled it off. As I carried it over to the waste bin it felt unexpectedly heavy, as nappies often do, since the material creates an expectation of lightness. That weight felt good, it told me that you were all right, that your body was functioning as it should. Everything else seemed to be falling apart, from the fluorescent tube above the stove, which had begun blinking more than a year ago and then gone out completely, and which still remained uselessly in its socket, to the car, which had suddenly begun to vibrate whenever it passed a certain speed and had been collected by a tow truck and taken to a garage - to say nothing of all the food that got mouldy or spoilt, shirt buttons that fell off or zips that got stuck, the dishwasher which had stopped functioning or the kitchen sink drainpipe which had got clogged somewhere in the garden, probably with congealed grease, the plumber said when he came to fix it. But the bodies of the children in our house, so smooth and soft on the outside, and infinitely more complex than any machine or mechanical device on the inside, had always functioned perfectly, had never broken down, had never gone to pieces.

I put on a new nappy, widened the opening of a romper suit with my hands and pulled it over your head. You moved your legs and arms slowly, like a reptile. I lifted you up and carried you into the kitchen just as your younger sister came in, barefoot and narrow-eyed with sleep.

'Good morning,' I said. 'Did you sleep well?'

She nodded. 'Can I hold her?'

'Yes, that would be great,' I said. 'Then I'll make her some milk. Here, sit on the bench.'

She sat down on the bench, and I handed you to her. While I filled the bright yellow electric kettle with water, got out the milk formula and the bottle, measured out six spoons and poured them into the lukewarm water, you half sat, half lay in her lap, kicking your feet.

'She's pretty happy, I think,' your sister said, taking your little fists in her own, which suddenly seemed big.

She was nine years old and given to thinking more about others than about herself, a character trait of hers that I had often wondered about, what had caused it. She had a light-filled soul, life flowed through her without encountering many obstacles, and maybe the fact that she didn't doubt herself, didn't question herself, somehow meant that what was her self didn't demand any effort or exertion, leaving plenty of space within her for other people. If I got angry with her and raised my voice even a little she reacted strongly, she began to cry so despairingly that I couldn't stand it and immediately tried to take it all back, usually in one of the many corners of the house which she sought out to be alone in her misery. But that almost never happened, firstly because she hardly ever did anything wrong, secondly because the consequences were so dire for her.