The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should
involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be
going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.
The parent has to second-guess what the cry, the kick, the grief, or the anger
is really about. And what marks out this project of interpretation—and makes it
so different from what occurs in the average adult relationship—is its charity.
Parents are apt to proceed from the assumption that their children, though they
may be troubled or in pain, are fundamentally good. As soon as the particular
pin that is jabbing them is correctly identified, they will be restored to native
innocence. When children cry, we don’t accuse them of being mean or self-
pitying; we wonder what has upset them. When they bite, we know they must be
frightened or momentarily vexed. We are alive to the insidious effects that
hunger, a tricky digestive tract, or a lack of sleep may have on mood.
How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct
into adult relationships—if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and
viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion, and exhaustion which almost

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invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human
race with love.
Esther’s first Christmas is spent with her grandmother. She cries for most of the
train journey up to Inverness. Her mother and father are pale and wrung out by
the time they reach the grandmother’s terraced house. Something is hurting
Esther inside, but she has no way of knowing what or where. The attendants’
hunch is that she is too hot. A blanket is removed, then tucked around her again.
New ideas come to mind: it might be thirst. Or perhaps the sun, or the noise from
the television, or the soap they have been using, or an allergy to her sheets. Most
tellingly, it isn’t ever assumed to be mere petulance or sourness; the child is only
ever, deep down, good.
The attendants simply cannot get to the root cause despite trying milk, a
backrub, talcum powder, caresses, a less itchy collar, sitting up, lying down, a
bathe, and a walk up and down the stairs. In the end the poor creature vomits an
alarming confection of banana and brown rice across her new linen dress, her
first Christmas present, on which her grandmother has embroidered 
Esther
—and
falls asleep at once. Not for the last time, but with infinitely greater concern from
those around her, she is violently misunderstood.
As parents, we learn another thing about love: how much power we have over
people who depend on us and, therefore, what responsibilities we have to tread
carefully around those who have been placed at our mercy. We learn of an
unexpected capacity to hurt without meaning to: to frighten through eccentricity
or unpredictability, anxiety or momentary irritation. We must train ourselves to
be as others need us to be rather than as our own first reflexes might dictate.
The barbarian must will himself to hold the crystal goblet lightly, in a meaty fist
that could otherwise crush it like a dry autumn leaf.
Rabih likes to play at being various animals when he looks after Esther in the
early morning on weekends, when Kirsten is catching up on sleep. It takes Rabih
a while to appreciate how scary he can appear. It has never occurred to him
before what a giant he is, how peculiar and threatening his eyes might look, how
aggressive his voice can sound. The pretend lion, on all fours on the carpet, finds
to his horror that his little playmate is screaming for help and refuses to be
calmed down despite his assurances that the nasty old lion has now gone away
and Dada is back. She wants no part of him; only the gentler, more careful
Mama (who has to be roused from bed in an emergency and is not especially
grateful to Rabih as a result) will do.

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He recognizes how cautious he has to be when introducing aspects of the
world to her. There cannot be ghosts; the very word has the power to inspire
terror. Nor does one joke about dragons, especially after dark. It matters how he
first describes the police to her, and the different political parties and Christian-
Muslim relations. . . . He realizes that he will never know anyone in such an
unguarded state as he has been able to know her—having witnessed her
struggling heroically to roll from her back onto her stomach and to write her first
word—and that it must be his solemn duty never to use her weakness against
her.
Although cynical by nature, he is now utterly on the side of hope in presenting
the world to her. Thus, the politicians are trying their best; scientists are right
now working on curing diseases; and this would be a very good time to turn off
the radio. In some of the more run-down neighborhoods they drive through, he
feels like an apologetic official giving a tour to a foreign dignitary. The graffiti
will soon be cleaned up, those hooded figures are shouting because they’re
happy, the trees are beautiful at this time of year . . . In the company of his small
passenger, he is reliably ashamed of his fellow adults.
As for his own nature, it, too, has been sanitized and simplified. At home he is
“Dada,” a man untroubled by career or financial worries, a lover of ice cream, a
goofy figure who loves nothing more than to spin his wee girl around and lift her
onto his shoulders. He loves Esther far too much to dare impose his anxious
reality upon her. Loving her means striving to have the courage not to be entirely
himself.
The world thereby assumes, during Esther’s early years, a kind of stability that
she will later feel it must subsequently have lost—but which in fact it only ever
had thanks to her parents’ determined and judicious editing. Its solidity and
sense of longevity are an illusion believable only to one who doesn’t yet
understand how haphazard life can be and how constant are change and
destruction. To her, for example, the house in Newbattle Terrace is simply and
naturally “home,” with all the eternal associations of that word, rather than a
quite ordinary house picked according to expedient considerations. The degree
of repressed contingency reaches its apogee in the case of Esther’s own
existence. Had Kirsten’s and Rabih’s lives unfolded only slightly differently, the
constellation of physical features and character traits which now seem so
indelibly and necessarily coalesced under their daughter’s name might have
belonged to other entities altogether, hypothetical people who would forever
remain frozen as unrealized possibilities, scattered genetic potential that never
got used because someone canceled dinner, already had a boyfriend, or was too
shy to ask for a phone number.

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The carpet in Esther’s room, a beige woollen expanse on which she spends
hours cutting out pieces of paper in the shapes of animals and from which she
looks up at the sky through her window on sunny afternoons, will have for her
the immemorial feel of the surface on which she first learnt to crawl, and whose
distinctive smell and texture she’ll remember for the rest of her days. But for her
parents it was hardly predestined to be an impregnable totem of domestic
identity: it was in fact ordered just a few weeks before Esther’s birth, in
something of a hurry, from an unreliable local salesman on the high street next
to the bus stop who went out of business shortly thereafter. Part of the reassuring
aspect of being new to the earth stems from the failure to understand the tenuous
nature of everything.