“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 colour.
“Close your eyes and be still, now. I’m going to give you a memory of a rainbow.”
DAYS WENT BY, and weeks. Jonas learned, through the memories, the names of colours; 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 colour, 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 colours to keep.
“But I want them!” Jonas said angrily. “It isn’t fair that nothing has colour!”
“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 colourless 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 colours, 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 colours. 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 colour he knew as red.
Then the men were gone, speeding towards the horizon in a vehicle that spat pebbles from its whirling tyres. 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 pedalled 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 sceptically. “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