Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 10

They approach the small village of Flaskebekk over the port side, and Sheldon sails as close to the coast as he dares. He figures the coast guard won’t be interested in a small craft skirting the shore, and that the physical dangers are minimised in case something goes wrong. The weather is not going to change, and the current is not strong.

He has no idea, of course, what is under the surface, but one of the great benefits of the jon boat is its shallow draught. While not an especially seaworthy boat, it is an easy one to pilot.

The rifles he needs are named Moses and Aaron. The cannons they are named after, according to the guidebook that Sheldon leafs through on the voyage, are located at Oscarsborg Fortress on an island not too far ahead, called Søndre Kaholmen. Evidently, on 9 April 1940, the Germans sent a 14,000-ton warship called the Blücher into the Oslo fjord to attack the capital, capture the king, and steal the national gold reserves. Though the fortress at Oscarsborg was poorly staffed and had limited defensive capabilities, it did have three 28-centimetre Krupp guns named Moses, Aaron, and Joshua, as well as a commanding officer who didn’t mind the odds.

As the ship came into the sound near Drøbak, Colonel Birger Eriksen and the few men under his command engaged the Blücher at eighteen hundred metres with Moses and Aaron. They only fired two shots, but they were decisive. The first round penetrated the hull, setting off the German ordnance and oil drums, and the second made it impossible for the ship to return fire.

As the ship burned on, the secret torpedo batteries on the island fired, sinking her and all hands from a range of only five hundred metres.

It is argued that Oscarsborg gave the government enough time to escape and form a resistance in exile that put Norway officially in the Allied camp. Norway soon fell to the Nazi invaders, and the puppet regime took over. Seven hundred and seventy-two Norwegian men, women, and children, who were Jewish, were rounded up by the Norwegian police and the Germans, and deported. Most were sent to Auschwitz.

Thirty-four survived.

Few of the Norwegian police received any punishment, and some were even kept on to retirement. The Holocaust itself was not on Norwegian university curricula for decades after the war. It took more than fifty years for Norway to build a national memorial commemorating the events, and a few more before the Norwegian Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies was opened.

The entire event, it seemed to Sheldon, was spoken of as though by witnesses, not participants. And where Norwegian actions were suspect, they were too easily dismissed in the easy memory of victimhood.

‘The question,’ Sheldon says aloud and looking south towards the Oscarsborg fort, ‘is whether we have enough gas to get there.’

The day draws on and on, and the sun never seems to move. Sheldon has never felt time pass so slowly. The entire journey from Oslo to just north of Drøbak is less than seventeen nautical miles, but time and distance on the water are a property of mind.

They sail for four hours before the small engine runs out of gas.

They drift for thirty more minutes as the rising tide brings them gently to shore in a small, rocky bay surrounded by evergreens.

Sheldon considers the line of sight of passing boats, and ties the jon boat off at an angle where it will attract the least attention.

If it were made of wood, he would have sunk it.

If he’d had the strength, he would have pulled it to shore and hid it.

If he’d been younger, he would have plunged a knife into the heart of the attacker and saved the boy’s mother.

But things are as they are.

Once safely on shore, with everything removed from the boat, Sheldon is winded. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ he asks Paul. ‘You can even hit me if you want. I deserve it. I’m sure I do. I should have called the police the second I heard the fight upstairs. Never even occurred to me. Didn’t cross my mind. I was too superior to the whole thing. I figured I knew what was what, and that this was all just going to play out with your mother running down the stairs and out to where someone else would look after her. I didn’t open the door for her. I opened it for me. Out of spite. To prove to everyone that this is what you’re supposed to do. Eighty-two years old, and I still think there’s an audience for my actions. Can you believe it? I’m playing to an audience that died fifty years ago. I should have called the police, and if we’d been lucky they would have showed up on time.’

Sheldon is taller than the boy, but he does not actually tower over him. Right now, he is slightly stooped and weary from the voyage. His back curves. They become almost the same height, and Sheldon tries to look him in the eyes.

‘Is it a coincidence,’ Sheldon asks, ‘that the older we get, the more we actually look like question marks? What I mean to say is this … I’m sorry. My best never seems to be very good. I’ve had a couple of moments. Not so many, though, when you consider how many chances I’ve had. I even missed Saul’s birth.

‘I don’t want to turn you in yet, do you understand? What if that guy is your father? He was in your apartment at all hours of the night, from the sound of things recently. He was probably there a lot. A boy like you doesn’t go mute all of a sudden. You had to learn this. You’ve probably been terrorised for ages. I could drop you off and then he could rush out and say, ‘My son, you found my son,’ and then I’d be handing you into the clutches of your mother’s killer. What kind of a friend does that?’

Paul listens. Sheldon does not know why.

‘You hungry? You must be famished. Let’s go borrow some food.’

Paul does not take Sheldon’s hand, but he does follow. They move slowly, because the long hours of sitting have hurt Sheldon’s lower back. Sharp pains jut down his left leg with each step, and he readjusts the satchel over his shoulder.

‘Let’s call it a day. We’re going over there.’

Sheldon extends his right hand and points to a lovely blue house close to the water. They are walking south, the fjord to their right. On the coast is a private metal pier for a boat that is not there.

Sheldon leads the boy around the front of the house, and looks for signs of life. There are no cars in the driveway, and few on the street itself. The house feels empty.

Together, they head around to the back again, and Sheldon shows Paul how to cup his hands while pressing his face to the glass. Paul doesn’t actually do it, but Sheldon feels it is a valuable lesson, all the same.

No lights are on. The television is off. Everything is tidy and clean. Unmoved.

Sheldon walks a few more metres along the house to the back door, which lets out to the backyard and down to the pier. He presses his face against the window one more time, still sees nothing of interest, and decides to call it.

‘So this brings us back to Lesson One,’ he says to Paul.

Putting the satchel down on the wood porch that lets into the kitchen, Sheldon takes out a hammer and, without comment, smashes the glass window-panel next to the door handle.

He pauses for a moment, listens carefully, and then says, ‘No alarm. That’s helpful. Now watch your step. There’s glass there.’

In an Eames-era-inspired living room of fine Scandinavian and mid-century American furniture, Sheldon finds a magazine cradle with maps and the local bus and train times, which he gathers up and brings into the kitchen for review as he starts the water boiling for pasta.

Finding a good area map, he unfolds it delicately across the tabletop and, using the dry tip of a wooden sauce spoon, he points to the Glomma, tracing the blue meandering line up a few centimetres to Kongsvinger.

‘That’s where we’re headed. I’ve never actually been there, but I’ve seen a photo of the place on the refrigerator door in Oslo. So I’m pretty sure we can find it.’ Sheldon starts tracing an overland route. ‘I never knew this country had so many lakes. There’s a lake everywhere.’

With the boiling water, Sheldon makes some instant coffee for himself and pours it into a glass from IKEA. He opens the cabinet to the left of the sink, finds a box of fusilli, and dumps the whole thing into the pot. He has no idea how much a hungry child can eat, and he’s curious to find out. He finds a can of tomatoes, some salt and pepper, some garlic powder, and, with the nuanced expertise that only a grandfather can summon, he combines them into a concoction that only a child could eat.

For himself, he adds three heaping teaspoons of sugar to his coffee, and then comes back to the table, where Paul has grown transfixed by the maps.

‘We’re going there,’ Sheldon points, ‘but the issue is how to get there. While I can barely make head or tail of these timetables here, what is clear is that almost all buses getting you from Drøbak to Kongsvinger seem to pass through Oslo. And I don’t want to go to Oslo. I want to avoid Oslo. Oslo is where we came from. So now we’re stuck again. We could hitchhike, but I hardly think that’s inconspicuous, and the chances of a police car coming by and finding us is higher than I’d like. We still can’t rent a car. I suppose we could borrow one, but let’s consider that a last resort. What I’m saying is … we have some thinking to do.’

When dinner is served, Sheldon watches Paul devour the pasta in one long, continuous, and strangely fluid movement.

The experience covers them both in tomato sauce. The boy does not smile. Instead, Sheldon senses a sort of convergence take place, as though the child’s body and mind are both in the same place for the first time since his mother’s murder.

‘All right. Now let’s get you out of those clothes and into bed.’

Once Paul is clean and his teeth brushed — with whatever toothbrush is in the bathroom — they look for clothing in the junior bedroom, and find a long, white T-shirt that Paul can use as a nightgown. The bed is made, and covered by a thick woollen blanket that reminds Sheldon of the Hudson Bay blankets he used as a child in western Massachusetts — the kind that had tick marks on the side. His mother said they showed how many beaver skins they should be traded for, but he wasn’t so sure. The method didn’t seem to count for inflation.

It occurs to him, as a passing thought, that he’s spent so much time remembering his own son’s childhood that he has almost entirely forgotten his own. At his age, it can be overwhelming and painful to harbour a thought accompanied by too much nostalgia. Not that he wanted to. Mabel, in her final years, had stopped listening to music. The songs of her teenage years brought her back to people and feelings of that time — people she could never see again, and sensations that were no longer coming. It was too much for her. There are people who can manage such things. Those of us who can no longer walk, but can close our eyes and remember a summer hike through a field, or the feeling of cool grass beneath our feet, and smile. Who still have the courage to embrace the past, and give it life and a voice in the present. But Mabel was not one of those people. Maybe she lacked that very form of courage. Or maybe her humanity was so complete, so expansive, that she would be crushed by her capacity to imagine the love that was gone. Those of us with the courage to open ourselves to that much lost love and not fear it — who can give joy to a dying child until the very end without withdrawing to save ourselves — those are our saints. It is not the martyrs. It is never the martyrs.

With the boy prepared for bed, Sheldon presses his nose into the thick wool, and takes in as much of the past as he can handle.

In only a moment his eyes begin to tear up, and he stops. He composes himself and goes into the bathroom to wash his face. In the mirror, he sees a man he does not entirely recognise. And for this he is grateful.

At the police station in Oslo, Sigrid loosens her tie just enough to let the blood start flowing again, but not enough to suggest the pressure is getting to her. Her team is working hard, it is late, and everyone is tired. She has issued more orders and instructions in the last twelve hours than in the last twelve weeks, and, while not overwhelmed, she would certainly welcome a break.

For solidarity and convenience, she’s taken a seat in the big, central room with most of the other police, and left her office vacant. There’s nothing in there of special use, other than her work terminal, and she can get the same access to the servers from Lena’s seat, now that Lena’s been sent out to the asylum reception-centre to interview known associates of this former KLA guy who Immigration — somehow, in their infinite, well-meaning wisdom — decided to allow into the country and even provide with a taxpayer-supported stipend. ‘To help him get on his feet.’

Her conversation with her counterparts at Immigration — just to get the name of the director of the reception centre, really — was terse, and ended on a sour note far off the intended topic.

‘They come here with nothing,’ the man on the other end said, with unyielding idealism. ‘How are they going to integrate without some support?’

‘We’ve grouped them together in centres outside the city where they’re forming gangs. How’s that helping them, or strengthening Norway?’

‘It’s a transitional measure,’ the man continued to say. ‘The Kosovars have been through a terrible war, and they’re traumatised by the conduct of the Serbs. The best way to provide the needed psycho-social counselling is by working with them all together. You saw the videos. It was like the concentration camps.’

Sigrid sighed. Everything these people avoided ended up on her desk, sooner or later. Sigrid was developing a theory that many of her compatriots took the same cooperative, optimistic, good-hearted approach to every problem, domestic or international, because it helped them feel more Norwegian. It might even be how they achieved being Norwegian.

It wasn’t the compulsion to be good that irked her. That, she admired. It was how they endeavoured to solve every problem with the same approach, independent of the problem. Because that just won’t do. The analysis and the solution simply have to align, and anything else is dreamlike and unrealistic. It’s not for cops, anyway.

Her father — and, as best she could tell, her father’s entire generation — did not exhibit this same kind of self-assured confidence in their own goodness. Something new is clearly afoot, and she doesn’t like it.

She also lacks that particular skill of keeping it all to herself.

‘Did you know that a large proportion of Europe’s heroin is trafficked through the Balkans? Much of it through Kosovo? You didn’t help them integrate. You created a new, isolated node in that network.’

‘That’s bigoted,’ the man had actually said.

‘That’s a fact,’ Sigrid said. And, since she knew this interview was going nowhere added, ‘I’m sorry to have bothered you.’ Then she hung up gently.

The sun is finally below the horizon now, and she switches on her desk lamp. As she does, the bulb blows out with a pop.

Enver Bardhosh Berisha, aka Miftar Vishaj. Against the dimming light, Sigrid lifts his file up, and leans far back in her chair. This man, this killer, is here. In Oslo. There is a file on him, but no charges against him. No warrant for his arrest. No request from the Serbs for extradition. He is here with the Norwegian government’s blessing, using taxpayers’ money to take the tram and buy cigarettes. It might not have incensed her so much had all the facts not been laid out so clearly in the file. Immigration knew he was KLA, knew he’d been in death squads, knew he was fleeing from the Serbian government. Somehow, all that information had been used to make the case for his asylum. After all, didn’t he have a legitimate claim that his life was under threat? Wasn’t he able to prove, through new DNA testing, that he had a son in the country, and thereby entitled to benefit from Norway’s efforts to unite families?

Why haven’t the Serbs tried to get him? She can only speculate. Maybe they have, and she doesn’t know the story. Maybe they plan to kill him off the books, given that Serbia abolished the death sentence in 2002. Maybe they’re happy to be rid of him, and want to call it a day. Maybe they know about his own family, and worry that a prosecution against him will only open up their own crimes to further international scrutiny.

So much falls through the cracks. This veil of equal justice under the law is always breeched by those who practise realpolitik on the international stage. Justice is given up for expedience the further we get from the crimes and their victims. So, for whatever reason, here he is — shopping at GlasMagasinet for saucers, and at Anton Sport for winter socks, like the rest of us.

Families. Such a loose term. Sigrid picks up the woman’s file. Background, birthday, education, date of immigration — all of this is now stapled to her new file. Date of the murder, location, cause of death. It’s still an open file, of course. New information is being added all the time.

There is a list of her personal effects. Everything is remarkably common. A Pulsar wristwatch. Some costume jewellery from Arts and Crafts in Oslo. Clothing. A little key for a lock box of some kind — maybe a diary or even the mailbox key. A lovely little white gold ring with a single blue sapphire that must have been a gift, or something of sentimental value. No earrings. No money.

Despite the buzz and energy of the main office, she hears only silence as she imagines Enver placing the cord around the woman’s throat and squeezing the life out of her.

‘Where’s my file on the boy?’ she shouts.

Some officer yells something about it being on the way. Sigrid shakes her head. Things should be moving faster than this.

‘Where’s my information on Horowitz?’

‘The records from the Marines are in archives and haven’t been digitised yet, because they’re so old, so some private is spelunking for them with a flashlight.’

‘I need to know what we’re actually dealing with from that end, OK?’

Whether he was a sniper or a clerk, Sheldon Horowitz had been a Marine. And this being a murder case, involving — one way or another — a former US soldier, Sigrid has had the idea of placing the request for information through the Foreign Ministry, given that Norway and the US were NATO allies, to see how that worked out. To her surprise, the Americans were getting right on it.

Her theory was that the staff at the massive, fortified American embassy in Oslo on Henrik Ibsen’s gate were bored. Yes, Norway is in NATO, and there is a lot of fish and oil and gas here. But … really. What could they possibly be doing in there?

‘Yes. Absolutely. We’re tracking down that information,’ said one of her officers. ‘It just hasn’t arrived yet.’

‘Nothing from the terminals?’

‘No,’ said another. ‘Nothing from the bus lines, the trains, the taxis, the airport, or the central tourist office. Nothing from the patrol cars. Nothing from the bicycle police. Nothing from the lookout across from the apartment building. Nothing from the hospitals.’

‘What about the granddaughter?’

‘They’re at the summer house at Glåmlia,’ replies yet another officer. ‘They have a phone. They’ve been calling in like we told them to.’

‘Maybe the old man is headed there,’ Sigrid says.

Everyone is quiet.

How? they wonder silently.

But no one says anything. Then someone suggests, ‘They’ll call us, won’t they? They’ve been staying in touch like we asked.’ And some people agree. Others mumble.

‘Call the local police and send someone out there tomorrow morning. Let them know there’s a problem. What about car rentals?’

Faxes were sent around. We’ve got nothing there.

Sigrid would be content to have nothing if there was nothing to have. She was always reasonable about aligning her expectations with reality. But surely, in a search for an old man, a younger man, and a small boy in such a small city, there had to be something out there?

The conversation with the immigration official grated on her. This was no time to be thinking about it, sure, but how could the authorities put the safety of the Norwegian people and their general welfare — the ones who are citizens, and vote, and have struggled for their democracy — after those of the foreigners? Surely it should not come at their expense, but it shouldn’t come after, either.

And how can the aspirational ideals of good Norwegians be allowed to eclipse the data? Good, hard data? How can we be this foolishly optimistic about the world only sixty years after having been occupied by the Nazis? Are we thick?

Or maybe it’s a generational thing, which explains why older people are voting for the more conservative parties.

It’s enough to encourage a trip to the Vinmonopolet.

Sigrid isn’t political — except when the politicians irritate her — but it strikes her that there are two ways you can act. On faith or on evidence. And if it’s going to be faith, then the liberals and the conservatives alike have to be grouped in the same camp as people who govern from their hearts and not their heads. The only decision to be made about them is whether their views give you a warm feeling. And on the other side are those trying to make things better by facing the way that things are, and working from there. It doesn’t seem like just a coincidence to Sigrid that doctors and engineers bicker less than politicians.

Enver Bardhosh Berisha. KLA. Let into the country by Immigration on the basis of legitimate threats to his life in Serbia, and with a son in the country.

KLA. The Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a paramilitary group that started off with Western and NATO support because of their armed struggle against Serbian ethnic cleansing, but eventually lost the backing of the West because of their drug running, and the executions, mass murders, and other atrocities they committed that undermined any moral standing they might have had. It all confounded the rest of Europe, and, without a clear good guy or bad guy, we just changed the channel.

Sigrid puts down the file, rubs her eyes, and then shouts, ‘My light bulb’s burnt out,’ which for some reason causes laughter among her staff. So she adds, ‘I need a new light bulb,’ and this only make them laugh more.

The thing about military people is that they have social standing. You work your way up, and people recognise your status. When the group breaks up, you lose the one thing that was precious during the rebellion: respect.

Would a man like Enver — a senior soldier with confirmed kills but no family, no money, no roots — turn his back on his own status and reputation, and suddenly flee the fight to a remote Scandinavian country to become a peaceful family man? What kind of woman would have a man like that anyway?

Sigrid’s thoughts leave the station and go to her father at their kitchen table. She recalls a conversation they had once when he explained something useful, which she has since had a hard time explaining to others.

‘It’s all artifice,’ he’d said with uncharacteristic seriousness.

‘You mean it’s all meaningless?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean that at all.’ He paused for a very long time before he spoke again. Her father was not an affected man and did not indulge in dramatic pauses. Rather, he was motivated to be precise. And sometimes, he said, that requires time to collect one’s thoughts. If the other people walk off in the meantime, then clearly they are not interested in the right answer.

‘What I mean,’ he’d continued, ‘is that the buildings, the desks, the great structures are all products of ideas. So it isn’t the buildings that matter. It is the ideas. But because the buildings are shiny and expensive, and the ideas are more elusive, we tend to become dazzled by the buildings — that is, the artifice. In fact, they distract us from the ideas that fill them. People stand on the steps of great buildings, and feel awe before they enter. Why? The ideas don’t know where they are being expressed. When I read history, I don’t read about the great buildings; I read about the ideas of empires. They all asked similar questions, but came to different answers. It is a fact that when we compare worlds, those worlds are different.

‘The interesting bit is this. For those worlds to hold together, the ideas must be shared. So I like to look to the ideas that are being shared. Who is involved? What are they thinking? What do these ideas make possible? What, for them, is obvious, and what is impossible to imagine? What is permissible and what is not?

‘And if you can’t start with the ideas, because they are hidden, first start with who is talking to whom to get things done. Patterns always emerge. If things are getting done, there is a pattern behind it. You can be sure that it’s more than mere motive. There is … a logic that holds the conversation together.’

Sigrid had nodded and considered what her father had said.

After some time she said, ‘You converse with the animals and live on a farm. What am I to make of that?’

‘Ah,’ her father had said. ‘But which animals? And what do we talk about?’