The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

Love Lessons
Having always imagined that they would have children one day, they decide,
four years into their marriage, to stop preventing the possibility. After seven
months they get the news beside the bathroom sink, in the form of a faint blue
line within a cotton-backed porthole on a plastic stick—which doesn’t seem a
wholly fitting medium to herald the arrival of a new member of the race, a being
who might still be around ninety-five years from now, and who will come to
refer to the two presently underwear-clad people with an as yet unbelievable
sobriquet: “my parents.”
During the long months of the phoney war, they wonder what exactly they
should be 
doing.
Familiar with the difficulties of their own lives, they look on
this as a chance to get everything right from the very start, beginning with the
details. A Sunday supplement recommends more potato skins and raisins,
herring and walnut oil, which Kirsten zealously commits herself to as a way of
warding off some of the terror she feels at her lack of control over everything
occurring inside her. While she is in meetings or on the bus, at a party or doing
the laundry, she knows that just a few millimeters from her belly button there are
valves forming and neurons stitching and DNA determining what sort of chin
there will be, how the eyes will be set and which bits of their individual
ancestries will make up the filaments of a personality. Small wonder she goes to
bed early. She has never been so concerned about anything in her life.
Rabih often places his hand protectively over her belly. What’s going on
inside is so much cleverer than they are. Together they know how to do budgets,
calculate traffic projections, design floor plans; what’s inside knows how to
build itself a skull and a pump that will function for almost a century without
resting for so much as a single beat.
In the last weeks they envy the alien its final moments of complete unity and
understanding. They imagine that in later life, perhaps in some foreign hotel
room after a long flight, it will try to drown out the noise from the air-
conditioning and dampen the disorientation of jet lag by curling up into itself in
that original fetal position in search of the primordial peace of the long-lost
maternal brine.
When she at last emerges after a seven-hour ordeal, they call her Esther, after
one of her maternal great-grandmothers, and secondarily Katrin, after Rabih’s

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mother. They can’t stop looking at her. She appears perfect in every way, the
most beautiful creature they have ever seen, staring at both of them with
enormous eyes that seem infinitely wise, as if she had spent a previous life
absorbing every volume of wisdom in the world. That wide forehead, those
finely crafted fingers, and those feet as soft as eyelids will later, during the long,
sleepless nights, play a not-incidental role in calming nerves when the wailing
threatens to test parental sanity.
At once they begin to fret about the planet they have brought her into. The
hospital walls are a sickly green; she is held awkwardly by a nurse and jabbed at
by a doctor’s inquiring spatula; screaming and banging can be heard from
neighboring wards; she’s alternately too hot and too cold—and in the exhaustion
and chaos of the early hours there seems little else left for her but to weep
without measure. The cries pierce the hearts of her desperate attendants, who can
find no dictionary with which to translate her furious commands. Huge hands
stroke her head and voices keep murmuring things she can’t make sense of. The
overhead lamps emit a fierce white light, which her paper-thin eyelids are not yet
strong enough to resist. The task of latching onto the nipple is like trying to cling
for life to a buoy amid a raging ocean storm. She is, to put it mildly, a bit out of
sorts. After titanic struggles, she eventually falls asleep on the outside of her old
home, heartbroken to have left without keys, but comforted somewhat by the rise
and fall of familiar breaths.
Never have they cared so intensely and conclusively about anyone. Her arrival
transforms what they understand about love. They recognize how little they had
previously grasped of what might be at stake.