Held

Chapter 6 investigates a novel angle of The Challenges of Coping With Loss, for the family members of the pregnant Mara must find a way to navigate their fear of a loss that has not yet happened and may not happen at all. When Mara resolves to leave a peaceful home and return to the overseas work that killed her mother, Alan and Peter brace themselves for an inconceivable loss and take solace in each other’s company. In moments past, Mara has already hinted to Alan that returning to the war zone would be “a kind of suicide” (120), and unlike her mother, she has not yet borne a child to carry on the family line. That night, as Alan seeks haven with Peter in his flat, the latter introduces him to his oldest friends: the half-brothers Marcus and Sandor, who have also had a long acquaintance with mourning, and these common themes imbue the scene with the sense that the men are grieving the death of a loved one who has not yet left them. 

When the four men’s conversation turns to loss, the spiritual similarities in their stories also include brief rays of hope, hinting at the lasting nature of people’s “essence” and showcasing the novel’s interwoven threads and recurring motifs. For example, Peter tells of how he was able to return to a young woman (Helen James) a sacred vestige of her dead father: a favorite hat that “fitted her perfectly” (139). This story leads Alan to share about his own father’s “return”—the man’s partial reemergence from the mental fog of Alzheimer’s, which came in tiny flickers of recognition and a memory of a long-ago swim in a river glittering with reflected stars. This setting is designed to echo John’s dying moments as he immersed himself in a river that blended with the starry sky above. To further explore the rich and multilayered symbols that enhance the text, the author then seamlessly connects this reference to Alan’s own epiphany, which occurred as he revisited the river and felt the “overpowering” presence of his dead father. When his father’s ghostly presence was followed by an even more powerful sense of the man’s sudden “absence,” this departure paradoxically “proved” to Alan the existence of his father’s spirit. As Alan retells this story, Mara appears as if invoked by her loved ones’ memories and longing, having reconsidered her plans entirely. This return of the living woman for whom all four men preemptively grieved now forms a mirror image of the aforementioned visitations from the departed.

In 1910, Lia (Peter’s future mother and one of the novel’s many widows), meets a stranger in yet another liminal space—the edge of a forest—and her first sight of him raising the “skirts” of his camera slyly foreshadows the intimacy to come. Both she and the photographer share an interest in things lost and vanishing: she in evolution, which continually erases as it advances; and he in the world’s ever-changing landscapes and cityscapes, which he tries to preserve through his work. His long exposures are essentially “spirit photos,” in the sense that they show a hidden world where living things have become ghosts, lingering, like memories, only as blurred shadows. As such, the photographer’s work represents yet another of the novel’s liminal spaces, where interlocking worlds (of the living and dead, past and present) meet and bleed into each other, emphasizing The Value of Faith and the Unseen. Fittingly, the photographer becomes the medium for Lia’s own invocation of her dead husband. When she tells him about her husband’s death, she feels a “shimmer of wind” (157) that suggests her husband’s spectral presence, and this moment evolves into an epiphany of “permission […] to leave her loneliness behind” (162). There by the edge of the forest, heeding this impulse of “tenderness” and hope, she conceives a child with the man, to be named Peter, her husband’s name. By this, she has freed her husband’s “ghost” into a new life—somewhat as Helena does years later, under a similar spell of longing, when she sketches her late husband John and summons his presence from the depths. As if by fate, Helena and Lia’s respective chance encounters with these men who work with light and shadow draw their husbands out of limbo and into the light.

In Estonia in 1980, music, not light, becomes the next medium that allows for the evocation of a lost world, and in this case, the music itself becomes a liminal space. The composer Paavo, who has been cut off from much of the beauty and feeling of his country’s past due to the Iron Curtain, tries to channel some of his homeland’s essence through his muse-like wife, Sofia. For him, the idea of sacred music—a forbidden realm of freedom and faith—becomes inseparable from his concupiscent love for Sofia, who whispers beautiful hymns in his ear as they lie together in bed. His choral rearrangements of these songs of the past preserve their rippling essence while changing the details to create a secret insurgency of hope and longing. Though the music remains within the letter of the law, its subversive qualities alert the apparatchiks, or Communist administrators, since its “excruciating intimacy,” which exists “beyond the spectrum of human sight” (180), arouses the Soviets’ suspicions about the composer’s true loyalties. 

When the “enforcers” respond by expelling Paavo and his family and forcing them to relocate to Poland, the recurring motif of water once again punctuates the narrative, imbuing the text with deeper layers of meaning. Specifically, Sofia has a recurring dream of being marooned with her son Aimo on a dissolving precipice by the sea, while Paavo vanishes under the angry torrents, having ignored her warnings. Finally, Sofia tells Paavo of her nightmare, this act partially exorcises it from her mind. In Held, a haunted borderline—whether a physical boundary or a political border between two countries—can become a site of both terror and resurrection. For Sofia, it is both; Paavo suggests that the reason for her recurring nightmare was to allow her to wake up and find him there, restored to her—like John and Peter, or like Mara returning from the airport in the night. As Peter observes in 1984, “Love [is] always a kind of rescue” (149).