Somewhere Over the Sea by Halfdan Freihow Page A

process of occupying and possessing the place. I can’t help you in any way other than by doing everything the way we usually do it, in the same order, with the same things. Showing you that nothing has changed here. They say that the goldfish in its bowl has such a short memory that each time it swims round it’s a new experience for it to reach the starting point once again. You, who have an associative memory that computer technology might envy, struggle with the opposite problem: until recognition has been established on an almost one-to-one basis you are hesitant and cautious, and dare not let yourself go.
    Except at home, for inside the house other rules apply. There we have unwittingly — because we have a considerable talent for making a mess, if not always an equally great tolerance for it — trained you since you were small to live with shifting disorder. Let them say what they like, the therapists and the pedagogues, but I am in no doubt that the unpredictability at home has been good for you and has lifted a burden from your heavily laden shoulders — obviously because the framework, the walls of the house, and your family, has remained stable and unchanging. Had we made the effort, moreover, had we made it our full-time job to ensure that you would always find the cheese slicer in the same place, the tape in the third drawer under the glass cupboard, and the toothpaste to the right and not to the left of the bathroom tap, then I fear we would have made you anxious in your own home. Just the thought of your first having to inspect the house each time you returned from school, checking that everything was as it usually is, that the rug that yesterday lay horizontal on the floorboards in the living room did not today lie perpendicular or at a diagonal, that home was a place you were able to feel at home!
    No, if we can’t find the cheese slicer then we’ll just have to teach you instead how to cut cheese with a knife. Because that’s possible too, Gabriel. It’s called improvising, which is exactly what I’m doing now, because believe it or not, I’ve managed to forget the brush to oil the chops with. How about that? We’ll have to use our fingers instead. Want to help?
    And, meticulously, you marinade the meat, first with your index finger, soon using your whole fist, delighted to have been almost ordered to mess with the food. As soon as the smells begin to waft from the grill, Balder runs up, tail wagging, and we chat away about this and that, nothing serious or important. The chops are juicy, the sun shines, and time flies. Not a word is mentioned about the lump of real gold you might be getting from Morten, for you are a prince and I am Your Highness, we’re filthy rich, and full to bursting, but of course we’ve room for a bar of chocolate for dessert, and coffee and warm cocoa — we’ve room for anything, and soon we’ll set out on a real treasure hunt again, because kings and princes can never get enough gold and silver and precious stones, that’s precisely why they’re kings and princes, and at home in our castle Queen Henni is waiting, and Princess Victoria, and there’s Children’s Hour on television, and we are something as simple and safe as a father and son and dog on our way home in a boat on a wonderful Tuesday evening in October.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he gym is full. There are so many pupils here, and parents and brothers and sisters, that the teachers exchange small, conspiratorial winks and neglect to enforce the prohibition against climbing on the wall-bars when some of the bigger, more audacious children have a go. There has to be some elasticity to the rules: it’s celebration time at school, and the air is already dense with tension.
    Practice makes perfect, they say, and God knows there’s been practising — at school, at friends’ houses, at home. But