Chapter 12
“YOU SLEPT SOUNDLY, Jonas?” his mother asked at the morning meal. “No dreams?”
Jonas simply smiled and nodded, not ready to lie, not willing to tell the truth. “I slept very soundly,” he said.
“I wish this one would,” his father said, leaning down from his chair to touch Gabriel’s waving fist. The basket was on the floor beside him; in its corner, beside Gabriel’s head, the stuffed hippo sat staring with its blank eyes.
“So do I,” Mother said, rolling her eyes. “He’s so fretful at night.”
Jonas had not heard the newchild during the night because as always, he had slept soundly. But it was not true that he had no dreams.
Again and again, as he slept, he had slid down that snow-covered hill. Always, in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something—he could not grasp what—that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop.
He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant.
But he did not know how to get there.
He tried to shed the leftover dream, gathering his schoolwork and preparing for the day.
School seemed a little different today. The classes were the same: language and communications; commerce and industry; science and technology; civil procedures and government. But during the breaks for recreation periods and the midday meal, the other new Twelves were abuzz with descriptions of their first day of training. All of them talked at once, interrupting each other, hastily making the required apology for interrupting, then forgetting again in the excitement of describing the new experiences.
Jonas listened. He was very aware of his own admonition not to discuss his training. But it would have been impossible, anyway. There was no way to describe to his friends what he had experienced there in the Annex room. How could you describe a sled without describing a hill and snow; and how could you describe a hill and snow to someone who had never felt height or wind or that feathery, magical cold?
Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?
So it was easy for Jonas to be still and to listen.
After school hours he rode again beside Fiona to the House of the Old.
“I looked for you yesterday,” she told him, “so we could ride home together. Your bike was still there, and I waited for a little while. But it was getting late, so I went on home.”
“I apologize for making you wait,” Jonas said.
“I accept your apology,” she replied automatically.
“I stayed a little longer than I expected,” Jonas explained.
She pedaled forward silently, and he knew that she expected him to tell her why. She expected him to describe his first day of training. But to ask would have fallen into the category of rudeness.
“You’ve been doing so many volunteer hours with the Old,” Jonas said, changing the subject. “There won’t be much that you don’t already know.”
“Oh, there’s lots to learn,” Fiona replied. “There’s administrative work, and the dietary rules, and punishment for disobedience—did you know that they use a discipline wand on the Old, the same as for small children? And there’s occupational therapy, and recreational activities, and medications, and—”
They reached the building and braked their bikes.
“I really think I’ll like it better than school,” Fiona confessed.
“Me too,” Jonas agreed, wheeling his bike into its place.
She waited for a second, as if, again, she expected him to go on. Then she looked at her watch, waved, and hurried toward the entrance.
Jonas stood for a moment beside his bike, startled. It had happened again: the thing that he thought of now as “seeing beyond.” This time it had been Fiona who had undergone that fleeting indescribable change. As he looked up and toward her going through the door, it happened; she changed. Actually, Jonas thought, trying to recreate it in his mind, it wasn’t Fiona in her entirety. It seemed to be just her hair. And just for that flickering instant.
He ran through it in his mind. It was clearly beginning to happen more often. First, the apple a few weeks before. The next time had been the faces in the audience at the Auditorium, just two days ago. Now, today, Fiona’s hair.
Frowning, Jonas walked toward the Annex. I will ask The Giver, he decided.
The old man looked up, smiling, when Jonas entered the room. He was already seated beside the bed, and he seemed more energetic today, slightly renewed, and glad to see Jonas.
“Welcome,” he said. “We must get started. You’re one minute late.”
“I apologi—” Jonas began, and then stopped, flustered, remembering there were to be no apologies.
He removed his tunic and went to the bed. “I’m one minute late because something happened,” he explained. “And I’d like to ask you about it, if you don’t mind.”
“You may ask me anything.”
Jonas tried to sort it out in his mind so that he could explain it clearly. “I think it’s what you call seeing-beyond,” he said.
The Giver nodded. “Describe it,” he said.
Jonas told him about the experience with the apple. Then the moment on the stage, when he had looked out and seen the same phenomenon in the faces of the crowd.
“Then today, just now, outside, it happened with my friend Fiona. She herself didn’t change, exactly. But something about her changed for a second. Her hair looked different; but not in its shape, not in its length. I can’t quite—” Jonas paused, frustrated by his inability to grasp and describe exactly what had occurred.
Finally he simply said, “It changed. I don’t know how, or why.
“That’s why I was one minute late,” he concluded, and looked questioningly at The Giver.
To his surprise, the old man asked him a question which seemed unrelated to the seeing-beyond. “When I gave you the memory yesterday, the first one, the ride on the sled, did you look around?”
Jonas nodded. “Yes,” he said, “but the stuff—I mean the snow—in the air made it hard to see anything.”
“Did you look at the sled?”
Jonas thought back. “No. I only felt it under me. I dreamed of it last night, too. But I don’t remember seeing the sled in my dream, either. Just feeling it.”
The Giver seemed to be thinking.
“When I was observing you, before the selection, I perceived that you probably had the capacity, and what you describe confirms that. It happened somewhat differently to me,” The Giver told him. “When I was just your age—about to become the new Receiver—I began to experience it, though it took a different form. With me it was . . . well, I won’t describe that now; you wouldn’t understand it yet.
“But I think I can guess how it’s happening with you. Let me just make a little test, to confirm my guess. Lie down.”
Jonas lay on the bed again with his hands at his sides. He felt comfortable here now. He closed his eyes and waited for the familiar feel of The Giver’s hands on his back.
But it didn’t come. Instead, The Giver instructed him, “Call back the memory of the ride on the sled. Just the beginning of it, where you’re at the top of the hill, before the slide starts. And this time, look down at the sled.”
Jonas was puzzled. He opened his eyes. “Excuse me,” he asked politely, “but don’t you have to give me the memory?”
“It’s your memory, now. It’s not mine to experience any longer. I gave it away.”
“But how can I call it back?”
“You can remember last year, or the year that you were a Seven, or a Five, can’t you?”
“Of course.”
“It’s much the same. Everyone in the community has one-generation memories like those. But now you will be able to go back farther. Try. Just concentrate.”
Jonas closed his eyes again. He took a deep breath and sought the sled and the hill and the snow in his consciousness.
There they were, with no effort. He was again sitting in that whirling world of snowflakes, atop the hill.
Jonas grinned with delight, and blew his own steamy breath into view. Then, as he had been instructed, he looked down. He saw his own hands, furred again with snow, holding the rope. He saw his legs, and moved them aside for a glimpse of the sled beneath.
Dumbfounded, he stared at it. This time it was not a fleeting impression. This time the sled had— and continued to have, as he blinked, and stared at it again—that same mysterious quality that the apple had had so briefly. And Fiona’s hair. The sled did not change. It simply was—whatever the thing was.
Jonas opened his eyes and was still on the bed. The Giver was watching him curiously.
“Yes,” Jonas said slowly. “I saw it, in the sled.”
“Let me try one more thing. Look over there, to the bookcase. Do you see the very top row of books, the ones behind the table, on the top shelf?”
Jonas sought them with his eyes. He stared at them, and they changed. But the change was fleeting. It slipped away the next instant. “It happened,” Jonas said.
“It happened to the books, but it went away again.”
“I’m right, then,” The Giver said. “You’re beginning to see the color red.”
“The what?”
The Giver sighed. “How to explain this? Once, back in the time of the memories, everything had a shape and size, the way things still do, but they also had a quality called color.
“There were a lot of colors, and one of them was called red. That’s the one you are starting to see. Your friend Fiona has red hair—quite distinctive, actually; I’ve noticed it before. When you mentioned Fiona’s hair, it was the clue that told me you were probably beginning to see the color red.”
“And the faces of people? The ones I saw at the Ceremony?”
The Giver shook his head. “No, flesh isn’t red. But it has red tones in it. There was a time, actually —you’ll see this in the memories later—when flesh was many different colors. That was before we went to Sameness. Today flesh is all the same, and what you saw was the red tones. Probably when you saw the faces take on color it wasn’t as deep or vibrant as the apple, or your friend’s hair.”
The Giver chuckled, suddenly. “We’ve never completely mastered Sameness. I suppose the genetic scientists are still hard at work trying to work the kinks out. Hair like Fiona’s must drive them crazy.”
Jonas listened, trying hard to comprehend. “And the sled?” he said. “It had that same thing: the color red. But it didn’t change, Giver. It just was.”
“Because it’s a memory from the time when color was.”
“It was so—oh, I wish language were more precise! The red was so beautiful!”
The Giver nodded. “It is.”
“Do you see it all the time?”
“I see all of them. All the colors.”
“Will I?”
“Of course. When you receive the memories. You have the capacity to see beyond. You’ll gain wisdom, then, along with colors. And lots more.”
Jonas wasn’t interested, just then, in wisdom. It was the colors that fascinated him. “Why can’t everyone see them? Why did colors disappear?”
The Giver shrugged. “Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences.” He thought for a moment. “We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”
“We shouldn’t have!” Jonas said fiercely.
The Giver looked startled at the certainty of Jonas’s reaction. Then he smiled wryly. “You’ve come very quickly to that conclusion,” he said. “It took me many years. Maybe your wisdom will come much more quickly than mine.”
He glanced at the wall clock. “Lie back down, now. We have so much to do.”
“Giver,” Jonas asked as he arranged himself again on the bed, “how did it happen to you when you were becoming The Receiver? You said that the seeing-beyond happened to you, but not the same way.”
The hands came to his back. “Another day,” The Giver said gently. “I’ll tell you another day. Now we must work. And I’ve thought of a way to help you with the concept of color.
“Close your eyes and be still, now. I’m going to give you a memory of a rainbow.”
Questions
Imagine a world without color. What color would you miss most?
What value, if any, is there to Sameness?
Chapter 13
DAYS WENT BY, and weeks. Jonas learned, through the memories, the names of colors; and now he began to see them all, in his ordinary life (though he knew it was ordinary no longer, and would never be again). But they didn’t last. There would be a glimpse of green—the landscaped lawn around the Central Plaza; a bush on the riverbank. The bright orange of pumpkins being trucked in from the agricultural fields beyond the community boundary—seen in an instant, the flash of brilliant color, but gone again, returning to their flat and hueless shade.
The Giver told him that it would be a very long time before he had the colors to keep.
“But I want them!” Jonas said angrily. “It isn’t fair that nothing has color!”
“Not fair?” The Giver looked at Jonas curiously. “Explain what you mean.”
“Well . . .” Jonas had to stop and think it through. “If everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things! A blue tunic, or a red one?”
He looked down at himself, at the colorless fabric of his clothing. “But it’s all the same, always.”
Then he laughed a little. “I know it’s not important, what you wear. It doesn’t matter. But—”
“It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?” The Giver asked him.
Jonas nodded. “My little brother—” he began, and then corrected himself. “No, that’s inaccurate.
He’s not my brother, not really. But this newchild that my family takes care of—his name’s Gabriel?”
“Yes, I know about Gabriel.”
“Well, he’s right at the age where he’s learning so much. He grabs toys when we hold them in front of him—my father says he’s learning small-muscle control. And he’s really cute.”
The Giver nodded.
“But now that I can see colors, at least sometimes, I was just thinking: what if we could hold up things that were bright red, or bright yellow, and he could choose? Instead of the Sameness.”
“He might make wrong choices.”
“Oh.” Jonas was silent for a minute. “Oh, I see what you mean. It wouldn’t matter for a newchild’s toy. But later it does matter, doesn’t it? We don’t dare to let people make choices of their own.”
“Not safe?” The Giver suggested.
“Definitely not safe,” Jonas said with certainty. “What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?
“Or what if,” he went on, almost laughing at the absurdity, “they chose their own jobs?”
“Frightening, isn’t it?” The Giver said.
Jonas chuckled. “Very frightening. I can’t even imagine it. We really have to protect people from wrong choices.”
“It’s safer.”
“Yes,” Jonas agreed. “Much safer.”
But when the conversation turned to other things, Jonas was left, still, with a feeling of frustration that he didn’t understand.
He found that he was often angry, now: irrationally angry at his groupmates, that they were satisfied with their lives which had none of the vibrance his own was taking on. And he was angry at himself, that he could not change that for them.
He tried. Without asking permission from The Giver, because he feared—or knew—that it would be denied, he tried to give his new awareness to his friends.
“Asher,” Jonas said one morning, “look at those flowers very carefully.” They were standing beside a bed of geraniums planted near the Hall of Open Records. He put his hands on Asher’s shoulders, and concentrated on the red of the petals, trying to hold it as long as he could, and trying at the same time to transmit the awareness of red to his friend.
“What’s the matter?” Asher asked uneasily. “Is something wrong?” He moved away from Jonas’s hands. It was extremely rude for one citizen to touch another outside of family units.
“No, nothing. I thought for a minute that they were wilting, and we should let the Gardening Crew know they needed more watering.” Jonas sighed, and turned away.
One evening he came home from his training weighted with new knowledge. The Giver had chosen a startling and disturbing memory that day. Under the touch of his hands, Jonas had found himself suddenly in a place that was completely alien: hot and windswept under a vast blue sky. There were tufts of sparse grass, a few bushes and rocks, and nearby he could see an area of thicker vegetation: broad, low trees outlined against the sky. He could hear noises: the sharp crack of weapons—he perceived the word guns—and then shouts, and an immense crashing thud as something fell, tearing branches from the trees.
He heard voices calling to one another. Peering from the place where he stood hidden behind some shrubbery, he was reminded of what The Giver had told him, that there had been a time when flesh had different colors. Two of these men had dark brown skin; the others were light. Going closer, he watched them hack the tusks from a motionless elephant on the ground and haul them away, spattered with blood. He felt himself overwhelmed with a new perception of the color he knew as red.
Then the men were gone, speeding toward the horizon in a vehicle that spit pebbles from its whirling tires. One hit his forehead and stung him there. But the memory continued, though Jonas ached now for it to end.
Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it stroked the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh.
Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape. Jonas had never heard such a sound. It was a sound of rage and grief and it seemed never to end.
He could still hear it when he opened his eyes and lay anguished on the bed where he received the memories. It continued to roar into his consciousness as he pedaled slowly home.
“Lily,” he asked that evening when his sister took her comfort object, the stuffed elephant, from the shelf, “did you know that once there really were elephants? Live ones?”
She glanced down at the ragged comfort object and grinned. “Right,” she said, skeptically. “Sure, Jonas.”
Jonas went and sat beside them while his father untied Lily’s hair ribbons and combed her hair. He placed one hand on each of their shoulders. With all of his being he tried to give each of them a piece of the memory: not of the tortured cry of the elephant, but of the being of the elephant, of the towering, immense creature and the meticulous touch with which it had tended its friend at the end.
But his father had continued to comb Lily’s long hair, and Lily, impatient, had finally wiggled under her brother’s touch. “Jonas,” she said, “you’re hurting me with your hand.”
“I apologize for hurting you, Lily,” Jonas mumbled, and took his hand away.
“’Cept your apology,” Lily responded indifferently, stroking the lifeless elephant. “Giver,” Jonas asked once, as they prepared for the day’s work, “don’t you have a spouse? Aren’t you allowed to apply for one?” Although he was exempted from the rules against rudeness, he was aware that this was a rude question. But The Giver had encouraged all of his questions, not seeming to be embarrassed or offended by even the most personal.
The Giver chuckled. “No, there’s no rule against it. And I did have a spouse. You’re forgetting how old I am, Jonas. My former spouse lives now with the Childless Adults.”
“Oh, of course.” Jonas had forgotten The Giver’s obvious age. When adults of the community became older, their lives became different. They were no longer needed to create family units. Jonas’s own parents, when he and Lily were grown, would go to live with the Childless Adults.
“You’ll be able to apply for a spouse, Jonas, if you want to. I’ll warn you, though, that it will be difficult. Your living arrangements will have to be different from those of most family units, because the books are forbidden to citizens. You and I are the only ones with access to the books.”
Jonas glanced around at the astonishing array of volumes. From time to time, now, he could see their colors. With their hours together, his and The Giver’s, consumed by conversation and by the transmission of memories, Jonas had not yet opened any of the books. But he read the titles here and there, and knew that they contained all of the knowledge of centuries, and that one day they would belong to him.
“So if I have a spouse, and maybe children, I will have to hide the books from them?”
The Giver nodded. “I wasn’t permitted to share the books with my spouse, that’s correct. And there are other difficulties, too. You remember the rule that says the new Receiver can’t talk about his training?”
Jonas nodded. Of course he remembered. It had turned out, by far, to be the most frustrating of the rules he was required to obey.
“When you become the official Receiver, when we’re finished here, you’ll be given a whole new set of rules. Those are the rules that I obey. And it won’t surprise you that I am forbidden to talk about my work to anyone except the new Receiver. That’s you, of course.
“So there will be a whole part of your life which you won’t be able to share with a family. It’s hard, Jonas. It was hard for me.
“You do understand, don’t you, that this is my life? The memories?”
Jonas nodded again, but he was puzzled. Didn’t life consist of the things you did each day? There wasn’t anything else, really. “I’ve seen you taking walks,” he said.
The Giver sighed. “I walk. I eat at mealtime. And when I am called by the Committee of Elders, I appear before them, to give them counsel and advice.”
“Do you advise them often?” Jonas was a little frightened at the thought that one day he would be the one to advise the ruling body.
But The Giver said no. “Rarely. Only when they are faced with something that they have not experienced before. Then they call upon me to use the memories and advise them. But it very seldom happens. Sometimes I wish they’d ask for my wisdom more often—there are so many things I could tell them; things I wish they would change. But they don’t want change. Life here is so orderly, so predictable—so painless. It’s what they’ve chosen.”
“I don’t know why they even need a Receiver, then, if they never call upon him,” Jonas commented.
“They need me. And you,” The Giver said, but didn’t explain. “They were reminded of that ten years ago.”
“What happened ten years ago?” Jonas asked. “Oh, I know. You tried to train a successor and it failed. Why? Why did that remind them?”
The Giver smiled grimly. “When the new Receiver failed, the memories that she had received were released. They didn’t come back to me. They went . . .”
He paused, and seemed to be struggling with the concept. “I don’t know, exactly. They went to the place where memories once existed before Receivers were created. Someplace out there—” He gestured vaguely with his arm. “And then the people had access to them. Apparently that’s the way it was, once. Everyone had access to memories.
“It was chaos,” he said. “They really suffered for a while. Finally it subsided as the memories were assimilated. But it certainly made them aware of how they need a Receiver to contain all that pain. And knowledge.”
“But you have to suffer like that all the time,” Jonas pointed out.
The Giver nodded. “And you will. It’s my life. It will be yours.”
Jonas thought about it, about what it would be like for him. “Along with walking and eating and—” He looked around the walls of books. “Reading? That’s it?”
The Giver shook his head. “Those are simply the things that I do. My life is here.” “In this room?” The Giver shook his head. He put his hands to his own face, to his chest. “No. Here, in my being. Where the memories are.”
“My Instructors in science and technology have taught us about how the brain works,” Jonas told him eagerly. “It’s full of electrical impulses. It’s like a computer. If you stimulate one part of the brain with an electrode, it—” He stopped talking. He could see an odd look on The Giver’s face.
“They know nothing,” The Giver said bitterly.
Jonas was shocked. Since the first day in the Annex room, they had together disregarded the rules about rudeness, and Jonas felt comfortable with that now. But this was different, and far beyond rude. This was a terrible accusation. What if someone had heard?
He glanced quickly at the wall speaker, terrified that the Committee might be listening as they could at any time. But, as always during their sessions together, the switch had been turned to OFF.
“Nothing?” Jonas whispered nervously. “But my instructors—”
The Giver flicked his hand as if brushing something aside. “Oh, your instructors are well trained. They know their scientific facts. Everyone is well trained for his job.
“It’s just that . . . without the memories it’s all meaningless. They gave that burden to me. And to the previous Receiver. And the one before him.”
“And back and back and back,” Jonas said, knowing the phrase that always came.
The Giver smiled, though his smile was oddly harsh. “That’s right. And next it will be you. A great honor.”
“Yes, sir. They told me that at the Ceremony. The very highest honor.”
Some afternoons The Giver sent him away without training. Jonas knew, on days when he arrived to find The Giver hunched over, rocking his body slightly back and forth, his face pale, that he would be sent away.
“Go,” The Giver would tell him tensely. “I’m in pain today. Come back tomorrow.”
On those days, worried and disappointed, Jonas would walk alone beside the river. The paths were empty of people except for the few Delivery Crews and Landscape Workers here and there. Small children were all at the Childcare Center after school, and the older ones busy with volunteer hours or training.
By himself, he tested his own developing memory. He watched the landscape for glimpses of the green that he knew was embedded in the shrubbery; when it came flickering into his consciousness, he focused upon it, keeping it there, darkening it, holding it in his vision as long as possible until his head hurt and he let it fade away.
He stared at the flat, colorless sky, bringing blue from it, and remembered sunshine until finally, for an instant, he could feel warmth.
He stood at the foot of the bridge that spanned the river, the bridge that citizens were allowed to cross only on official business. Jonas had crossed it on school trips, visiting the outlying communities, and he knew that the land beyond the bridge was much the same, flat and well ordered, with fields for agriculture. The other communities he had seen on visits were essentially the same as his own, the only differences were slightly altered styles of dwellings, slightly different schedules in the schools.
He wondered what lay in the far distance where he had never gone. The land didn’t end beyond those nearby communities. Were there hills Elsewhere? Were there vast wind-torn areas like the place he had seen in memory, the place where the elephant died?
“Giver,” he asked one afternoon following a day when he had been sent away, “what causes you pain?”
When The Giver was silent, Jonas continued. “The Chief Elder told me, at the beginning, that the receiving of memory causes terrible pain. And you described for me that the failure of the last new Receiver released painful memories to the community.
“But I haven’t suffered, Giver. Not really.” Jonas smiled. “Oh, I remember the sunburn you gave me on the very first day. But that wasn’t so terrible. What is it that makes you suffer so much? If you gave some of it to me, maybe your pain would be less.”
The Giver nodded. “Lie down,” he said. “It’s time, I suppose. I can’t shield you forever. You’ll have to take it all on eventually.
“Let me think,” he went on, when Jonas was on the bed, waiting, a little fearful.
“All right,” The Giver said after a moment, “I’ve decided. We’ll start with something familiar. Let’s go once again to a hill, and a sled.”
He placed his hands on Jona's back.
Questions
Do you agree with Jonas that people have to be protected from wrong choices?
As Jonas continues his training, he often finds himself angry with his groupmates and his family. Why?
The Giver says that without memories, knowledge is meaningless. What does he mean?
