“Sad or dangerous things never happen,” my almost 3-year-old daughter said to me out of the blue, as I was tucking her in for the night last Sunday, in the double bed she shared with her sister in our hotel room in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina.
We had spent the day wandering around the old, eerily beautiful town. The river Neretva, which runs through it in a deep gorge, is a surreal shade of pure, bottle green. Stari Most – the elegant, 500-year-old bridge that was blown into smithereens in the early 90’s during the Balkan war – has been rebuilt meticulously, and the historical center has been restored with great care.
Outside it, you can still see a lot of post-war rubble and other remnants of horror. We walked past a Muslim graveyard with 1993 as the year of death on every headstone, of old and young people alike. Along the former front line stood the numerous, grim skeletons of houses, and the faςades of the ones still left standing were pockmarked by bullet holes and shrapnel scars. We took a few snapshots, feeling guilty about gawking. My daughters didn’t seem to pay any attention to the crumbled buildings.
Around the ruins, life was bustling. Billboards advertised mobile phones and boasted about faster Internet connections. People were going about their business of living, selling, buying, eating, sleeping and raising children, as normal as in any town I’ve ever visited, if perhaps a little subdued by the crisp, cold weather. I didn’t understand how any of it could be possible – not the war, nor the peace afterwards.
“No, they don’t happen,” I now heard myself reply to my daughter, immediately hating the dead weight of the lie around my neck. I should have been able to think of a way to dodge that one. It felt wrong. But I wanted her to go to bed peaceful and happy.
And I wanted to think she really believes it. For a little while longer.
“Sara’s grandma was so old that she died in her bed.”
“Oh… She must’ve been really old then.”
We were driving back home from IKEA. Grim thoughts sometimes plague me, too, after spending an afternoon there. But my daughter, who recently turned 5, didn’t seem to find the topic gloomy at all.
“Sara said that all her brothers and sisters cried. Or one brother and two sisters. But Sara didn’t. And her Mum didn’t cry either,” she continued.
“They didn’t cry?”
Must have been the mother-in-law.
“No. Sara already knows that everybody dies.”
“Oh.”
“Everybody dies sometimes.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“I will die one day, too,” my daughter said very matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, but not for a long time. You’ll have many years to do lots of things before that.”
She didn’t seem worried at all.
“Yeah, I’m only going to die after my own grandchildren are dead.”
“Well, you’ll be really, really old then.”
“And you’ll be dead, then, too,” she said cheerfully.
Nowadays, I have no problem talking about death with my kids. The first time it happened, it honestly freaked me out, but after a few times, you grow a little numb. Children want to know why people die, and when I’m going to die, and what happens afterwards. It’s not always simple, of course. Last summer my daughter asked me if children sometimes die, too. How the hell do you answer that? I dodged by saying that in all my life, I’d never met a child who died, so it’s very unusual.
“What if someone shoots them?” my four-year-old asked.
Now, before I had kids, I thought I’d never lie to them. Yeah, right.
“No-one ever does that,” I assured her.
At which point my daughter declared that when she grows up, she is going to shoot children so that they die. Alarmed, I told her that was a terrible idea. She said she’d shoot them and cut them in pieces and sell them in a shop.
“And people will taste it and go mmmm… yummy.”
I’m so glad her uncle and aunt are child psychologists. If she’s still sticking to that plan by next summer, we’ll set up some kind of intervention.
We were arriving home now. It was already dark. All this talk about death had made me drive slower than usual.
“I’m going to live with you when I’m a grown-up,” my daughter said.
“I know. You’re going to clean our house.”
It’s all part of her plan to grow up to be Cinderella.
“Yeah. And if Owen doesn’t want to live in our house, I’ll marry someone else.”
“Good thinking.”
Owen’s a brawny little fellow in her class, who hit little Louise very hard when all the children were fighting over the piñata sweets at my daughter’s birthday party. I like little Dirk much better. He has a crush on my daughter. And he was the only boy who didn’t refuse to eat the cupcakes we made for her class on her birthday. All the other boys said they were too sexy, because they had pink icing and tiny butterflies and Disney princesses on top.
“I promised Owen we’ll get married when we’re grown ups.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“But if he won’t live with us, I’ll just marry someone else.”
Dirk! Dirk! I was thinking, but I bit my tongue.
She’ll just have to figure out some things by herself.
“My t-shirt is not sexy!”
“It is too!”
“Are you saying it’s sexy?”
“It is sexy!”
I walked into the living room to find my daughters, 2 and 4 years old, in a heated debate just about to turn violent. The topic didn’t exactly surprise me. The concept of sexy has been popping up in our household lately, ever since the kids in my 4-year-old’s school taught her the word. It’s an insult. The little boys annoy the little girls by claiming pink (their all-time, unanimous favourite colour) is ”sexy”. Last time I heard it had ended with the girls running away screaming and the boys following them, yelling: “Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!” My daughter came home that day seething with indignation.
“Do you even know what sexy means?” I asked the girls now.
After a moment, they had to admit they had no idea.
“So, how can you call something sexy then?”
Mum 1, kids 0. But now they wanted to know what it means.
How do you explain the idea of sexiness to people who don’t know what sex is? My oldest is aware of the cell-level mechanisms of procreation as well as the workings of pregnancy, because she asked about it last summer and I explained. She still tells me sometimes how she finds it such a pity that it doesn’t work in the neat way she had imagined: that men give birth to little boys and women to little girls. But as far as I know, she has no idea yet that something called sex is (well, most of the time) involved in the process of making babies. Even if she does (never underestimate the schoolyard as a source of less-than-accurate information), I don’t think it would have helped me much here.
In the end, I just told the girls sexy is something grown ups like to look at.
“Eww,” was their spontaneous reaction, as if there was something inherently icky about grown up preferences.
But ever since this discussion, the word has substituted “pretty” when my daughters want to flatter me.
“Mum, that is a sexy shirt.”
“Mum, your nose ring is so sexy.”
“Mum, you look sexy today.“
It doesn’t help one bit that hearing it never fails to crack me up. My guess is the girls believe they have found the ultimate compliment. My husband gets his share, too. According to his wee daughters, his whole wardrobe is steaming hot and his soul patch is smoking. (As it is, actually.)
I’ve decided not to make a fuss about it, although I really wouldn’t mind if the girls scrapped the word from their vocabulary before we visit my in-laws on Christmas. I suppose I just have to practice keeping a straight face and not reward them with attention whenever they call me sexy. After all, they quickly forgot the “we will, we will f*ck you” song my oldest had picked up from school as well.
At least I hope they have.
A friend of mine sent me a message yesterday: she had bought my book.
Among all my friends and family, she and her husband are the first people to actually hold the book in their hands. She had been moving fast (which is impressive for someone eight months pregnant), because I myself had got word from my editor only a couple of hours earlier, saying the book is printed and out in stores now. My box of copies has been mailed to me here in Holland. It will probably arrive some time next week, which means everyone else will have seen the book before me.
“You will celebrate it, won’t you?” my friend asked.
I know I’m supposed to, and I really should. Celebrating endings is good for the soul. But the thing is, I have been asked this same question so many times during the entire novel-writing process. One thing I learned all along is that there are no endings in it. No natural moments of closure. No point in time when the whole thing is finally completely finished and you can put it down and party. That moment you see in movies and on television when you type “The End” and yank triumphantly the last page from the typewriter? It never happens.
“You’ll celebrate now, won’t you?” I was asked when I had more or less finished the first draft. But there was never a moment when I was really done with it. I didn’t even finish at The End, because I had written the ending earlier. And when the whole story was written down, I went back and added some. Deleted some. Changed things. Undid the changes. At some point I had a draft decent enough to send to some selected people for comments. They all got slightly different versions, though – depending on when I sent them their copy – because their comments led to more changes. I was too busy to celebrate.
“You’ll celebrate, won’t you?” I was asked when I had a version I was happy enough with to send to some publishing houses. But in stead of celebrating, I went back and improved some bits (horrified by the thought of having sent such a flawed version to anyone!), so that other publishers I sent it to a few months later got yet a different version.
I kept going back to the manuscript until the first positive reply from a publisher finally came, after several months of rather depressing waiting. The novel would get published!
“You’ll celebrate now, right?”
I admit those were giddy days – but I also immediately started to call other, slower publishing houses to get competing offers. After that, I had to compare them. When I finally chose a publisher, I found myself immediately in talks with the editor they assigned to my book, negotiating some unpleasant changes she wanted me to bring in. The moment of celebration had slipped past me again.
Last June I finished the revisions the editor had asked for and the (several) improvements I wanted to make myself that the editor hadn’t objected to. I guess it should have been a moment to celebrate, but rather than that, I sank into a week-long grey despair – the slump people often go through after an intense creative period. And it’s a good thing I didn’t jump the gun anyway, because in August, the manuscript was suddenly flung back onto my desk for some small but significant last minute revisions some people somewhere had suggested (one of them being me). That was a messy process, requiring negotiating back and forth with my editor, and again I could never yank that last page out of my typewriter (or even wait impatiently for the printer to slowly spit it out, hopefully without yet another paper jam).
So it didn’t end with a bang – I think the very last bit was some worried email I sent to my editor saying: “OK, I guess I’m just going to trust your professional judgement on this.” Woohoo. I’m sure someone suggested celebrating then, too, and I did fly off to New York with my husband shortly after that – but I wasn’t thinking about the book or about rewarding myself at that point any more. I just wanted to put the whole thing out of my mind (and to spend a few days away from my exhausting little angels). And whenever a fleeting thought about the book passed my mind, it was in anticipation of the moment it would finally come out.
So, now’s the time to celebrate. Again. But should I celebrate now that I know the book is out there somewhere? Or next week, when I receive my box of copies? I’m opting for the latter, but it might be just me wanting to put off writing “The End” for a little while longer.
Perhaps because it makes me feel like I should get started with something new.
I went swimming last week, and saw what must be the Oldest Swimming Man in Holland in the pool. Or at least he looked like he could enter the contest.
I swam past him several times, until at one point I accidentally kicked him in the hand. I turned to apologize, and he winked. I don’t mean winking like old men sometimes wink at young(er) people: “You kids!” It was most definitely a very, very flirty kind of wink. I swallowed a pint of chlorinated water and finished my laps still grinning. I guess if someone is 90+ and still afloat, it is just to be expected they also have the zest to flirt with people 60 years younger.
Another encounter with old people. The ancient nutty woman living next door rang our doorbell at 5AM this morning. She was shouting half-hysterically about some music she heard from the house next to hers and demanded we came to her apartment to hear it, too. My husband is a sweet guy, so he got dressed and went with her.
There was nothing to hear, of course. Silence. Like you’d expect – and prefer – at 5AM.
- You hear this? It’s been going on all night!
My husband said he couldn’t hear anything. The woman was indignant.
- What, am I crazy then?
Old age. I know it will happen to me too. I’ll start to hear non-existent music. I just hope it will be the kind of music that will make me feel like getting frisky with young people, and not the kind that keeps me awake at night when the rest of the world sleeps.
I need a nap.
The walk from Penn Station to our hotel in itself would have been worth the trip. At first glance, New York City was chaotic. It was vibrant, it was flashy, it was disorienting, and at times, it made me think of a Third World country. The city felt both familiar and completely strange – a bit like someone you have known for a long time, yet only recently met in person. There were all the places I grew up seeing on television and in movies, suddenly real.
Every time I saw a police car race through the streets, it made the opening tune of NYPD Blue play in my mind. Beauty salons, fancy restaurants and stores with ridiculously posh handbags made me think of Sex and the City. The bright lights of Times Square reminded me of, well, just about every European documentary I have ever seen about America. And watching the fire brigade at work, while smoke was billowing out from the underground floor of a bank, immediately evoked other pictures – of the rescue operation right after the attack on the World Trade Center six years ago.
I found myself thinking about 9/11 many times during my stay in New York, and not only when we visited Ground Zero. I remember how right after the attack, some of my fellow Europeans would mock the collective wave of horror and grief most of us felt, chastising us for being hypocrites. Countless people die of natural disasters, acts of violence or just plain starvation around the globe all the time, was their argument. Why get so emotional now? We were suckered into the American media hysteria, they derided. Sentimentalists, lacking real empathy, as we were only able to feel compassion when we could see the catastrophe with our own eyes, captured on camera. Racist, even, for not waking up every morning with an equal feeling of dismay at the thought of all the suffering masses in Africa – we were numb to their plight, yet wept for the people in business suits jumping from WTC windows, and rescue patrols caught in the rubble of the collapsing towers. I heard the same arguments – quite possibly from the same people – in the wake of the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, claiming the international relief donations only started to pour in because of the video tapes, because of the tourists caught in the violent gush of the ocean, because of hotels we ourselves could have stayed in, had we been there. ”You only cry because you can imagine it happening to you, and not just to the faceless Others in the Third World.”
It was ludicrous and infuriating, of course, this demand to justify the sorrow people felt on both occasions. And yes, I do sometimes also feel paralysed by the thought of all the other horrible things happening in the world right now – the ones unwitnessed by camera crews and never caught on tape by accidental bystanders. But it is different, of course, when you don’t have to see it. When it doesn’t connect to anything or anyone you know. It remains abstract. Requires an effort to really grasp. Is easier to tune out.
For some reason, this was never very far from my thoughts in NYC.
This was my first time in USA, yet in many ways, New York City was familiar from before. I had heard all the street names. I recognized shops, brands and products. In all the countries I have lived in, everybody grows up with a little, flickering window into America in our living room. Studies show Finnish school kids know the American justice system better than their own (our special thanks to Law and Order, LA Law, the Practice, Judging Amy…). Americans are loved, hated, admired, criticised, imitated and measured up against as only intimate acquaintances can be. We learn the language, eat the food, watch the commercials, lust for the celebrities, dread the politics and their consequences to the rest of the world. And when they die in a horrifically spectacular way, we are deeply shocked.
NYC wasn’t all familiar, though. In reality, it came with sounds and smells and sights and impressions I hadn’t expected or imagined, and sometimes didn’t like at all. Like the way Americans seem to enjoy being refrigerated. We would walk around in the balmy, just-above-(European)-room-temperature September weather, and then pull on our sweaters and jackets to step inside somewhere for dinner. (But the dinner itself was always great.)
As always, what I liked most about my trip was just watching people, the streams and torrents of them, pouring through the streets, walking through the red lights, grabbing their lunch in the delis, staring at empty air in the subways. I never saw the same face twice. All this made the city seem both bigger and smaller. New Yorkers were just like people everywhere, only most of them in a bigger hurry, or so it seemed. And somehow, in the deep canyons between the huge buildings – passing me by at touching distance, not seen on TV, played by actors – all of them looked quite fragile.
Like people everywhere.
