The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

particular threat which has now somehow been subconsciously re-evoked. The
overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the
“transference” of an emotion from the past onto someone in the present—who
perhaps doesn’t entirely deserve it.
Our minds are, oddly, not always good at knowing what era they are in. They
jump a little too easily, like an erstwhile victim of burglary who keeps a gun by
the bed and is startled awake by every rustle.
What’s worse for the loved ones standing in the vicinity is that people in the
throes of a transference have no easy way of knowing, let alone calmly
explaining, what they are up to; they simply feel that their response is entirely
appropriate to the occasion. Their partners on the other hand may reach a
rather different and rather less flattering conclusion: that they are distinctly odd
—and maybe even a little mad.
Kirsten’s father leaves her when she is seven. He walks out of the house without
warning or explanation. On the very day before he goes, he plays at being a
camel on the living room floor and carries her on his back around the sofa and
armchairs. At bedtime he reads to her from a book of German folktales, those

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stories of lonely children and wicked stepmothers, of magic and of loss. He tells
her they are only stories. And then he disappears.
There could have been many responses. Hers is not to feel. She can’t afford
to. She is doing so well; that’s what everyone says—the teachers, her two aunts,
the counselor she sees for a time. Her schoolwork actually improves. But she’s
not even remotely coping inside: it takes a certain strength to cry, the confidence
that one will eventually be able to staunch the tears. She doesn’t have the luxury
of feeling just a little sad. The danger is that she might fall apart and never know
how to put the pieces back together. To prevent the possibility, she cauterizes
her wounds as best she can, aged seven.
She can now love (in her own way), but what she really can’t countenance is
missing someone too much, not even if the person is only in a town a couple of
hours to the southeast and is most definitely going to be returning home in a few
days on the 18:22 train.
But of course she can’t explain or even quite grasp this habit of hers. It
doesn’t make her popular at home. She would ideally have in her employ a
guardian spirit with magical powers to pause the action just as Rabih begins to
get annoyed, in order then to whisk him out of his budget hotel and bear him
aloft, through the dense clouds of the lower atmosphere, to the Inverness of a
quarter century before, where he could peer through the window of a little house
and into the narrow bedroom in which a small girl in bear pajamas is sitting at
her desk, coloring in squares on a large piece of paper with methodical precision,
trying to hold on to her sanity, her mind blank from a sadness too overwhelming
to admit.
If Rabih were presented with this picture of Kirsten’s stoic endurance,
compassion would come naturally to him. He would understand the touching
reasons for her reserve and would immediately quell his own hurt so as to offer
her tender reassurance and sympathy.
But as there is no spirit waiting in the wings, and therefore no stirring sensory
narrative cued up to illuminate Kirsten’s past, Rabih has only her affectless
response to try to make sense of—a challenge that inspires in him a predictably
irresistible temptation to judge and to take offense.
We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all
but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now