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Jonas opened his eyes and lay contentedly on the bed, still luxuriating in the warm and comforting memory. It had all been there, all the things he had learned to treasure.
“What did you perceive?” the Giver asked.
“Warmth,” Jonas replied, “and happiness. And – let me think. Family. That it was a celebration of some sort, a holiday. And something else – I can’t quite get the word for it.”
“It will come to you.”
“Who were the old people? Why were they there?” It had puzzled Jonas, seeing them in the room. The Old of the community did not ever leave their special place, the House of the Old, where they were so well cared for and respected.
“They were called Grandparents.”
“Grand parents?”
“Grandparents. It meant parents-of-the-parents, long ago.”
“Back and back and back?” Jonas began to laugh. “So actually, there could be parents-of-the-parents-of-the-parents-of-the-parents?”
The Giver laughed, too. “That’s right. It’s a little like looking at yourself looking in a mirror looking at yourself looking in a mirror.”
Jonas frowned. “But my parents must have had parents! I never thought about it before. Who are my parents-of-the-parents? Where are they?”
“You could go and look in the Hall of Open Records. You’d find the names. But think, son. If you apply for children, then who will be their parents-of-the-parents? Who will be their grandparents?”
“My mother and father, of course.”
“And where will they be?”
Jonas thought. “Oh,” he said slowly. “When I finish my training and become a full adult, I’ll be given my own dwelling. And then when Lily does, a few years later, she’ll get her own dwelling, and maybe a spouse, and children if she applies for them, and then Mother and Father—”
“That’s right.”
“As long as they’re still working and contributing to the community, they’ll go and live with the other Childless Adults. And they won’t be part of my life any more.
“And after that, when the time comes, they’ll go to the House of the Old,” Jonas went on. He was thinking aloud. “And they’ll be well cared for, and respected, and when they’re released, there will be a celebration.”
“Which you won’t attend,” the Giver pointed out.
“No, of course not, because I won’t even know about it. By then I’ll be so busy with my own life. And Lily will, too. So our children, if we have them, won’t know who their parent-of-parents are, either.
“It seems to work pretty well that way, doesn’t it? The way we do it in our community?” Jonas asked. “I just didn’t realise there was any other way, until I received that memory.”
“It works,” the Giver agreed.
Jonas hesitated. “I certainly liked the memory, though. I can see why it’s your favourite. I couldn’t quite get the word for the whole feeling of it, the feeling that was so strong in the room.”
“Love,” the Giver told him.
Jonas repeated it. “Love.” It was a word and concept new to him.
They were both silent for a minute. Then Jonas said, “Giver?”
“Yes?”
“I feel very foolish saying this. Very, very foolish.”
“No need. Nothing is foolish here. Trust the memories and how they make you feel.”
“Well,” Jonas said, looking at the floor, “I know you don’t have the memory any more, because you gave it to me, so maybe you won’t understand this—”
“I will. I am left with a vague wisp of that one; and I have many other memories of families, and holidays, and happiness. Of love.”
Jonas blurted out what he was feeling. “I was thinking that … well, I can see that it wasn’t a very practical way to live, with the Old right there in the same place, where maybe they wouldn’t be well taken care of, the way they are now, and that we have a better-arranged way of doing things. But anyway, I was thinking, I mean feeling, actually, that it was kind of nice, then. And that I wish we could be that way, and that you could be my grandparent. The family in the memory seemed a little more …” He faltered, not able to find the word he wanted.
“A little more complete,” the Giver suggested.
Jonas nodded. “I liked the feeling of love,” he confessed. He glanced nervously at the speaker on the wall, reassuring himself that no one was listening. “I wish we still had that,” he whispered. “Of course,” he added quickly, “I do understand that it wouldn’t work very well. And that it’s much better to be organised the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live.”
“What do you mean?”
Jonas hesitated. He wasn’t certain, really, what he had meant. He could feel that there was risk involved, though he wasn’t sure how. “Well,” he said finally, grasping for an explanation, “they had fire right there in that room. There was a fire burning in the fireplace. And there were candles on a table. I can certainly see why those things were outlawed.
“Still,” he said slowly, almost to himself, “I did like the light they made. And the warmth.”
“Father? Mother?” Jonas asked tentatively after the evening meal. “I have a question I want to ask you.”
“What is it, Jonas?” his father asked.
He made himself say the words, though he felt flushed with embarrassment. He had rehearsed them in his mind all the way home from the Annexe.
“Do you love me?”
There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle. “Jonas. You, of all people. Precision of language, please!”
“What do you mean?” Jonas asked. Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated.
“Your father means that you used a very generalised word, so meaningless that it’s become almost obsolete,” his mother explained carefully.
Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory.
“And of course our community can’t function smoothly if people don’t use precise language. You could ask, ‘Do you enjoy me?’ The answer is ‘Yes’,” his mother said.
“Or,” his father suggested, “‘Do you take pride in my accomplishments?’ And the answer is wholeheartedly ‘Yes’.”
“Do you understand why it’s inappropriate to use a word like ‘love’?” Mother asked.
Jonas nodded. “Yes, thank you, I do,” he replied slowly.
It was his first lie to his parents.
“Gabriel?” Jonas whispered that night to the newchild. The crib was in his room again. After Gabe had slept soundly in Jonas’s room for four nights, his parents had pronounced the experiment a success and Jonas a hero. Gabriel was growing rapidly, now crawling and giggling across the room and pulling himself up to stand. He could be upgraded in the Nurturing Centre, Father said happily, now that he slept; he could be officially named and given to his family in December, which was only two months away.
But when he was taken away, he stopped sleeping again, and cried in the night.
So he was back in Jonas’s sleepingroom. They would give it a little more time, they decided. Since Gabe seemed to like it in Jonas’s room, he would sleep there at night a little longer, until the habit of sound sleep was fully formed. The Nurturers were very optimistic about Gabriel’s future.
There was no answer to Jonas’s whisper. Gabriel was sound asleep.
“Things could change, Gabe,” Jonas went on. “Things could be different. I don’t know how, but there must be some way for things to be different. There could be colours.
“And grandparents,” he added, staring through the dimness towards the ceiling of his sleepingroom. “And everybody would have the memories.
“You know about memories,” he whispered, turning towards the crib.
Gabriel’s breathing was even and deep. Jonas liked having him there, though he felt guilty about the secret. Each night he gave memories to Gabriel: memories of boat rides and picnics in the sun; memories of soft rainfall against windowpanes; memories of dancing barefoot on a damp lawn.
“Gabe?”
The newchild stirred slightly in his sleep. Jonas looked over at him.
“There could be love,” Jonas whispered.
The next morning, for the first time, Jonas did not take his pill. Something within him, something that had grown there through the memories, told him to throw the pill away.
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TODAY IS DECLARED an unscheduled holiday. Jonas, his parents and Lily all turned in surprise and looked at the wall speaker from which the announcement had come. It happened so rarely, and was such a treat for the entire community when it did. Adults were exempted from the day’s work, children from school and training and volunteer hours. The substitute Labourers, who would be given a different holiday, took over all the necessary tasks: nurturing, food delivery and care of the Old; and the community was free.
Jonas cheered, and put his homework folder down. He had been about to leave for school. School was less important to him now; and before much more time passed, his formal schooling would end. But still, for Twelves, though they had begun their adult training, there were the endless lists of rules to be memorised and the newest technology to be mastered.
He wished his parents, sister and Gabe a happy day, and rode down the bicycle path, looking for Asher.
He had not taken the pills, now, for four weeks. The Stirrings had returned, and he felt a little guilty and embarrassed about the pleasurable dreams that came to him as he slept. But he knew he couldn’t go back to the world of no feelings that he had lived in so long.
And his new, heightened feelings permeated a greater realm than simply his sleep. Though he knew that his failure to take the pills accounted for some of it, he thought that the feelings came also from the memories. Now he could see all of the colours; and he could keep them, too, so that the trees and grass and bushes stayed green in his vision. Gabriel’s rosy cheeks stayed pink, even when he slept. And apples were always, always red.
Now, through the memories, he had seen oceans and mountain lakes and streams that gurgled through woods; and now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and colour and history it contained and carried in its slow-moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going.
On this unexpected, casual holiday he felt happy, as he always had on holidays; but with a deeper happiness than ever before. Thinking, as he always did, about precision of language, Jonas realised that it was a new depth of feelings that he was experiencing. Somehow they were not at all the same as the feelings that every evening, in every dwelling, every citizen analysed with endless talk.
“I felt angry because someone broke the play area rules,” Lily had said once, making a fist with her small hand to indicate her fury. Her family – Jonas among them – had talked about the possible reasons for rule-breaking, and the need for understanding and patience, until Lily’s fist had relaxed and her anger was gone.
But Lily had not felt anger, Jonas realised now. Shallow impatience and exasperation, that was all Lily had felt. He knew that with certainty because now he knew what anger was. Now he had, in the memories, experienced injustice and cruelty, and he had reacted with rage that welled up so passionately inside him that the thought of discussing it calmly at the evening meal was unthinkable.
“I felt sad today,” he had heard his mother say, and they had comforted her.
But now Jonas had experienced real sadness. He had felt grief. He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those.
These were deeper and they did not need to be told. They were felt.
Today, he felt happiness.
“Asher!” He spied his friend’s bicycle leaning against a tree at the edge of the playing field. Nearby, other bikes were strewn about on the ground. On a holiday the usual rules of order could be disregarded.
He skidded to a stop and dropped his own bike beside the others. “Hey, Ash!” he shouted, looking around. There seemed to be no one in the play area. “Where are you?”
“Psssheeewwww!” A child’s voice, coming from behind a nearby bush, made the sound. “Pow! Pow! Pow!”
A female Eleven named Tanya staggered forward from where she had been hiding. Dramatically she clutched her stomach and stumbled about in a zig-zag pattern, groaning. “You got me!” she called, and fell to the ground, grinning.
“Blam!”
Jonas, standing on the side of the playing field, recognised Asher’s voice. He saw his friend, aiming an imaginary weapon in his hand, dart from behind one tree to another. “Blam! You’re in my line of ambush, Jonas! Watch out!”
Jonas stepped back. He moved behind Asher’s bike and knelt so that he was out of sight. It was a game he had often played with the other children, a game of good guys and bad guys, a harmless pastime that used up their contained energy and ended only when they all lay posed in freakish postures on the ground.
He had never recognised it before as a game of war.
“Attack!” The shout came from behind the small storehouse where play equipment was kept. Three children dashed forward, their imaginary weapons in firing position.
From the opposite side of the field came an opposing shout: “Counter-attack!” From their hiding places a horde of children – Jonas recognised Fiona in the group – emerged, running in a crouched position, firing across the field. Several of them stopped, grabbed their own shoulders and chests with exaggerated gestures, and pretended to be hit. They dropped to the ground and lay suppressing giggles.
Feelings surged within Jonas. He found himself walking forward into the field.
“You’re hit, Jonas!” Asher yelled from behind the tree. “Pow! You’re hit again!”
Jonas stood alone in the centre of the field. Several of the children raised their heads and looked at him uneasily. The attacking armies slowed, emerged from their crouched positions, and watched to see what he was doing.
In his mind, Jonas saw again the face of the boy who had lain dying on a field and had begged him for water. He had a sudden choking feeling, as if it were difficult to breathe.
One of the children raised an imaginary rifle and made an attempt to destroy him with a firing noise. “Pssheeew!” Then they were all silent, standing awkwardly, and the only sound was the sound of Jonas’s shuddering breaths. He was struggling not to cry.
Gradually, when nothing happened, nothing changed, the children looked at each other nervously and went away. He heard the sounds as they righted their bicycles and began to ride down the path that led from the field.
Only Asher and Fiona remained.
“What’s wrong, Jonas? It was only a game,” Fiona said.
“You ruined it,” Asher said in an irritated voice.
“Don’t play it any more,” Jonas pleaded.
“I’m the one who’s training for Assistant Recreation Director,” Asher pointed out angrily. “Games aren’t your area of expertness.”
“Expertise,” Jonas corrected him automatically.
“Whatever. You can’t say what we play, even if you are going to be the new Receiver.” Asher looked warily at him. “I apologise for not paying you the respect you deserve,” he mumbled.
“Asher,” Jonas said. He was trying to speak carefully, and with kindness, to say exactly what he wanted to say. “You had no way of knowing this. I didn’t know it myself until recently. But it’s a cruel game. In the past, there have—”
