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 sledge.”
He placed his hands on Jonas’s back.
IT WAS MUCH the same, this memory, though the hill seemed to be a different one, steeper, and the snow was not falling as thickly as it had before.
It was colder, also, Jonas perceived. He could see, as he sat waiting at the top of the hill, that the snow beneath the sledge was not thick and soft as it had been before, but hard, and coated with bluish ice.
The sledge moved forward, and Jonas grinned with delight, looking forward to the breathtaking slide down through the invigorating air.
But the runners, this time, couldn’t slice through the frozen expanse as they had on the other, snow-cushioned hill. They skittered sideways and the sledge gathered speed. Jonas pulled at the rope, trying to steer, but the steepness and speed took control from his hands and he was no longer enjoying the feeling of freedom but instead, terrified, was at the mercy of the wild acceleration downwards over the ice.
Sideways, spinning, the sledge hit a bump in the hill and Jonas was jarred loose and thrown violently into the air. He fell with his leg twisted under him, and could hear the crack of bone. His face scraped along jagged edges of ice and when he came, at last, to a stop, he lay shocked and still, feeling nothing at first but fear.
Then, the first wave of pain. He gasped. It was as if a hatchet lay lodged in his leg, slicing through each nerve with a hot blade. In his agony he perceived the word “fire” and felt flames licking at the torn bone and flesh. He tried to move, and could not. The pain grew.
He screamed. There was no answer.
Sobbing, he turned his head and vomited on to the frozen snow. Blood dripped from his face into the vomit.
“Nooooo!” he cried, and the sound disappeared into the empty landscape, into the wind.
Then, suddenly, he was in the Annexe room again, writhing on the bed. His face was wet with tears.
Able to move now, he rocked his own body back and forth, breathing deeply to release the remembered pain.
He sat, and looked at his own leg, where it lay straight on the bed, unbroken. The brutal slice of pain was gone. But the leg ached horribly, still, and his face felt raw.
“May I have relief-of-pain, please?” he begged. It was always provided in his everyday life for the bruises and wounds, for a mashed finger, a stomach ache, a skinned knee from a fall from a bike. There was always a daub of anaesthetic ointment, or a pill; or in severe instances, an injection that brought complete and instantaneous deliverance.
But the Giver said no, and looked away.
Limping, Jonas walked home, pushing his bicycle, that evening. The sunburn pain had been so small, in comparison, and had not stayed with him. But this ache lingered.
It was not unendurable, as the pain on the hill had been. Jonas tried to be brave. He remembered that the Chief Elder had said he was brave.
“Is something wrong, Jonas?” his father asked at the evening meal. “You’re so quiet tonight. Aren’t you feeling well? Would you like some medication?”
But Jonas remembered the rules. No medication for anything related to his training.
And no discussion of his training. At the time for sharing-of-feelings, he simply said that he felt tired, that his school lessons had been unusually demanding that day.
He went to his sleepingroom early, and from behind the closed door he could hear his parents and sister laughing as they gave Gabriel his evening bath.
They have never known pain, he thought. The realisation made him feel desperately lonely, and he rubbed his throbbing leg. He eventually slept. Again and again he dreamed of the anguish and the isolation on the forsaken hill.
The daily training continued, and now it always included pain. The agony of the fractured leg began to seem no more than a mild discomfort as the Giver led Jonas firmly, little by little, into the deep and terrible suffering of the past. Each time, in his kindness, the Giver ended the afternoon with a colour-filled memory of pleasure: a brisk sail on a blue-green lake; a meadow dotted with yellow wildflowers; an orange sunset behind mountains.
It was not enough to assuage the pain that Jonas was beginning, now, to know.
“Why?” Jonas asked him after he had received a tortuous memory in which he had been neglected and unfed; the hunger had caused excruciating spasms in his empty, distended stomach. He lay on the bed, aching. “Why do you and I have to hold these memories?”
“It gives us wisdom,” The Giver replied. “Without wisdom I could not fulfil my function of advising the Committee of Elders when they call upon me.”
“But what wisdom do you get from hunger?” Jonas groaned. His stomach still hurt, though the memory had ended.
“Some years ago,” the Giver told him, “before your birth, a lot of citizens petitioned the Committee of Elders. They wanted to increase the rate of births. They wanted each Birthmother to be assigned four births instead of three, so that the population would increase and there would be more Labourers available.”
Jonas nodded, listening. “That makes sense.”
“The idea was that certain family units could accommodate an additional child.”
Jonas nodded again. “Mine could,” he pointed out. “We have Gabriel this year, and it’s fun, having a third child.”
“The Committee of Elders sought my advice,” the Giver said. “It made sense to them, too, but it was a new idea, and they came to me for wisdom.”
“And you used your memories?”
The Giver said yes. “And the strongest memory that came was hunger. It came from many generations back. Centuries back. The population had got so big that hunger was everywhere. Excruciating hunger and starvation. It was followed by warfare.”
Warfare? It was a concept Jonas did not know. But hunger was familiar to him now. Unconsciously he rubbed his own abdomen, recalling the pain of its unfulfilled