The Course of Love. A novel pdfdrive com

escapes us, following a meaning we can’t properly lay bare to those we depend
on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in,
with whom we are truly dealing, and what sort of behavior the person before us
is rightfully owed. We can be a little tricky to be around.

---

Rabih is not so different from his wife. He, too, constantly interprets the present
through the distortions of his past and is moved by obsolete and eccentric
impulses which he cannot explain to himself or Kirsten.
What does it mean, for example, to come home from the office in Edinburgh
and find in the hall a big pile of clothes which Kirsten planned to take to the dry
cleaner’s but then forgot about and says she will get around to sometime in the
next few days?
There’s one swift and leading answer for Rabih: that this is the onset of the
chaos he fears and that Kirsten may have done this specifically to unnerve and
wound him. Unable to follow her advice to leave the pile until the next day, he
takes the clothes out himself (it’s seven at night) and then, on his return, spends
half an hour noisily cleaning up the rest of the flat, paying particular attention to
the muddle in the cutlery drawer.
The “chaos” is no small matter in Rabih’s mind. All too quickly his
unconscious draws a connection between minor things that are out of place in
the present and very major things that were once out of place in the past, such as
the scarred hulk of the InterContinental Phoenicia Beirut hotel that he used to
see from his bedroom; the bombed-out American embassy that he walked past
every morning; the murderous graffiti that routinely appeared on the wall of his
school and the late-night shouting he would hear between his mother and father.
With complete clarity, he still sees today the black outline of the Cypriot refugee
ship that finally took him and his parents out of the city on a dark January night,
and the apartment that they later heard had been looted and now housed a family
of Druze fighters, his room reportedly serving as an ammunition dump. There is
a good deal of history in his hysteria.
In the present, Rabih may be living in one of the safer, quieter corners of the
globe, with a wife who is fundamentally kind and committedly on his side, but in
his mind Beirut, war, and the cruelest sides of human nature remain threats
forever just out of his line of sight, always ready to color his interpretation of the
meaning of a pile of clothes or an organizational erosion in the cutlery drawer.
When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people
and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the
worst conclusions that the past once mandated.
Unfortunately, to admit that we may be drawing on the confusions of the past
to force an interpretation onto what’s happening now seems humbling and not a
little humiliating: Surely we know the difference between our partner and a
disappointing parent, between a husband’s short delay and a father’s permanent
abandonment; between some dirty laundry and a civil war?

---

The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and
necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize
sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come
to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly
caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride.
Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion.
By the time Rabih gets back from his trip to England, Kirsten has reverted to
some of the habits she indulged in when she lived on her own. She’s drunk a
beer while having a bath and eaten cereal from a mug in bed. But soon enough
their mutual desire and capacity for closeness reasserts itself. The reconciliation
starts, as it often does, with a little joke which puts its finger on the underlying
anxiety.
“Sorry to have interrupted you, Mrs. Khan. But I think I used to live here,”
says Rabih.
“Definitely not. You must be looking for 34A, and this is 34B, you see. . . .”
“I think we once got married. Do you remember? That’s our child, Dobbie,
over there in the corner. He’s very silent. Kind of like his mum.”
“I’m sorry, Rabih,” says Kirsten, turning serious. “I’m a bit of a bitch when
you go away. I seem to be trying to punish you for leaving me, which is
ridiculous, because you’re only trying to pay off our mortgage. Forgive me. I’m
a bit of a nut job sometimes.”
Kirsten’s words act like an immediate balm. Rabih is flooded with love for his
slightly inarticulate and very unself-righteous wife. Her insight is the best
welcome-home present she could have given him, and the greatest guarantee of
the solidity of their love. Neither he nor she have to be perfect, he reflects; they
only need to give each other the odd sign they know they can sometimes be quite
hard to live with.
We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships;
all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with
good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

---

Universal Blame
For their third wedding anniversary Rabih surprises Kirsten with a weekend trip
to Prague. They stay in a little hotel near the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and
Methodius, take photos of themselves on the Charles Bridge, talk of life back at
home, reflect on how quickly the years are passing, and visit the Sternberg
Palace to have a look at the early European art. There, Kirsten pauses before a
small early-sixteenth-century Virgin and Child.
“It’s so awful what happened to her adorable baby in the end. How could
anyone get over that?” she asks pensively. She has an endearing way, Rabih
muses, of thinking even the most basic things through afresh for herself. The
painting isn’t, for her, an object for dutiful academic analysis; instead it’s a
prefiguring of a parent’s most grievous tragedy, and as such, it earns from her a
sympathy no less lively or immediate than that she might offer to someone
whose son had just died in a motorcycle accident on the road to Fort William.
Kirsten is keen to visit Prague Zoo. It’s been a long time since either of them
has spent any time around animals, save perhaps for the occasional cat or dog.
Their first thought is how very strange all of the inmates look: the camel, for
one, with its U-shaped neck, its two furry dorsal pyramids, its eyelashes that
might be coated in mascara, and its set of yellow buckteeth. A free brochure
gives them some facts: camels can go ten days in the desert without drinking;
their humps are filled not with water, as common wisdom holds, but with fat;
their eyelashes are designed to shield their eyeballs during sandstorms; and their
liver and kidneys extract every drop of moisture possible from the food they eat,
causing their dung to be dry and compact.
All animals are distinctive, because they have evolved to thrive in very