Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 11

Sheldon did not dream of the woman who was killed. For the first time since he could remember, he also did not dream of his son. He dreamed instead of a young boy sitting with his back to him, playing with coloured blocks. Stacking them precariously, higher and higher and higher.

Sheldon slept because he had no worries about getting caught in the house. Something groundbreaking had happened some time around the millennium, when he turned seventy-five. He found he could pretty much get away with anything, and people would chalk it up to Crazy Old Man.

Not my house? No kidding!

So why worry?

Better to concentrate on real problems, like how to get to Glåmlia without taking public transportation or a taxi, or hitchhiking.

Paul is hard to wake, but Sheldon knows he’s been sleeping since at least nine o’clock last night, and eight hours is plenty for anyone.

‘Good morning,’ he says to Paul while leaning over his bed.

As Paul awakens, Sheldon can see that he is — like any other child — uncertain of his surroundings and taking stock, his eyes adjusting to the light. When he finally focuses on Sheldon, he wordlessly puts his arms around Sheldon’s neck and holds him.

It is not a hug of affection, but the grasp of the drowning around flotsam.

‘Come on,’ Sheldon says to Paul. ‘Back to the funky toothbrush, and then to breakfast. We need to look around a bit and think. No one says we have to go to the cabin. Which is good, seeing as I can’t think of a way to get us there. We could take that little boat out there all the way to Sweden, if we wanted to. Only I don’t want to. One day on the water is enough for an old man. I need to be near a toilet, see? You don’t see. You pee like a racehorse. You’re so young you don’t even know how to hold up a toilet seat that’s committed to falling down all the time. The trick — and I’m telling you this to save you a lot of trial and error — is to stand to the side of the bowl and prop it up with your thigh. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. In the fullness of time, you would have figured it out yourself, a bright boy like you. Probably true, but after how many embarrassing moments? And wait until you get to England and find they put carpets in the bathrooms, as if that isn’t the grossest idea in Western civilisation. One New Year’s party over there, and you’ll never walk barefoot again. What were we talking about?’

Into the kitchen, Sheldon raids the cupboards and makes them both a breakfast of instant coffee, hot tea, chocolate-chip cookies, frozen fish sticks, Wasa bread, and moose jerky.

Between courses, Sheldon nibbles at pistachio nuts, and hunts for the bits in his gums with a butter knife.

‘Let’s go rummage through the closets and see if we can’t find you something to wear.’

After a half-hearted, admittedly male effort at cleaning the kitchen, Sheldon takes Paul into the master bedroom and starts going through the closets.

In a plain cedar armoire with mirrors on the front doors, they find multi-seasonal clothes for men and woman. They are clothes for middle-aged people. Conservative people. People who can afford a house on the Oslo fjord, and don’t feel bothered about having to occupy it. People, Sheldon decides, with clothes to spare who wouldn’t mind passing on a bit of their good fortune.

‘I’m not saying that we’re doing a Robin Hood or anything. And I’m not going to mince my words. We’re stealing their clothes. The boat was more of a temporary thing. The clothes are for keeps. All I’m saying is that this guy can probably live with one less tweed jacket. And, to be fair, I’m leaving behind an excellent orange jacket that anyone would want.’

Sheldon keeps his own trousers, but takes some clean underwear and socks. He also takes a starched, white-collared shirt that looks as though it has been waiting for its owner’s attention for at least a decade. It is too big for him, naturally, but he tucks it deeply into his pants and pulls his belt tight.

Unexpectedly, on the woman’s side, on the top shelf, Sheldon finds a blonde wig. While his first thoughts immediately turn to sex and all-too-present — and all too-out-of-reach — memories of playing make-believe, one further glance back at the tweed jacket and the old shirts gives him a new thought. One less cheery.

‘Cancer,’ he says. ‘Probably explains why no one comes here. Now that I think about it, that moose jerky was pretty tough.’

Paul reaches up for the wig. Sheldon looks at it, then down at the boy, and hands it to him. Paul touches the blonde hair and carefully examines the curls. He turns it inside out, and sees the white mesh of its artificial scalp. Sheldon gently takes it back and expertly places it on his own head.

Paul’s eyes are open wide. They even suggest playfulness. Though perhaps this is just the imagination of an old man who needs to believe this.

‘OK, let’s see you then.’

Sheldon takes it off and puts it snugly on Paul’s head. Closing the armoire, he points at Paul in the mirror.

Paul looks back.

‘Huck Finn dressed in drag, too, when he was checking the scene out from Jackson’s Island. There’s a strong literary history of boys dressing up like little girls when the going gets tough, so don’t give it a second thought. In fact, with the long white shirt, I’m starting to get an idea.’

From the woman’s side of the closet, Sheldon takes a thin brown leather belt and puts it around Paul’s waist.

‘We need a hat. Maybe a woollen cap or something. Oh! That. Up there. That’ll do nicely.’ Sheldon takes down a brown cap and sticks it on Paul’s wig-clad head.

‘OK, OK. This is taking form. I need the hat back. Now I need a clothes hanger and some tin foil. Back to the kitchen!’

Spry, and loaded up on caffeine and sugar, Sheldon leaps for the kitchen and starts opening and closing cabinets. As if divinely prepared, the tin foil drops from the cabinet above the refrigerator. Humming now, Sheldon takes hold of a paper-towel roll and starts pulling furiously at it. The paper spins and spins and spins. ‘Help me!’ he says to Paul, handing him an armful of paper.

Taking his cue, Paul gets behind Sheldon and pulls and pulls and pulls as though hoisting a mast up a mighty ship. Together, dressed like outpatients, they manage to get all the paper off the roll, and only then is Sheldon satisfied.

‘Now. Now we’ve got something to work with.’

Sheldon takes the cardboard tube, the wire coathanger, and the woollen hat, and sets to work. With the kitchen table drafted into service as his laboratory, Sheldon uses a steak knife to slice the tube in half. Wincing from a pang of arthritis in his knuckles, he manages to straighten the coathanger and then bend it into a giant, curvy ‘W’. Giving a wink to Paul, he weaves one end of the coathanger through one side of the woollen cap and out the other. Pulling the hat into position, he centres it on the bent wires, forming ram horns. He slips the cardboard tubes onto each horn and then very, very liberally wraps each one with tin foil.

The result is what Vikings might have worn in outer space.

Satisfied, Sheldon slips the whole contraption on Paul’s head and then pulls him over to the mirror again to get a gander at himself. With the expression of someone trying to sell a motorcycle to a pregnant woman, Sheldon smiles BIG as he presents Paul to himself.

‘Paul the Viking! Paul the Completely Disguised Albanian Kid who is not on the run through the Norwegian hinterland with the Old Fool. What do you think?’

‘Oh! But wait! One more thing. What’s a Viking — or Wiking, if you listen to Norwegians pronounce it — without a battleaxe or something equally destructive? If I had a copy of the Republican platform I could give you that, but in its absence I’m thinking … wooden spoon.’

Back to the kitchen one more time, Sheldon finds a nicely worn wooden spoon, and slides it into Paul’s leather belt.

Then he stands back and looks.

‘One last touch.’ And, with that, Sheldon draws an ancient symbol on Paul’s Viking chest with a black marker he’d noticed earlier in one of the kitchen drawers.

Sheldon is proud of himself.

Paul, with a newfound sense of purpose — and no longer looking like Paddington or any other stowaway — goes into the master bedroom again to pose in front of the mirror.

Sheldon takes the lull in his childcare obligations to fill his satchel with more water, some crackers, and the last of the moose jerky.

Leaving the back door open, he goes out to the yard and down to the pier to check on the boat they borrowed from Oslo. The sun is already high above the horizon, despite it being only eight o’clock. There is a chill in the morning air, but this only suggests a high front and continued good weather. He could turn on the television and find out the proper forecast easily enough, but he worries that the murder will be on the news. Every moment that Paul does not see his mother’s face, or can find a respite or even a distraction from the wider reality, is a blessing that Sheldon does not want to forsake.

With his hands on his hips, Sheldon walks out onto the pier and scopes out the spot where he had moored the boat last evening. It is a nice spot, gently shaded, well protected from most angles. The kind of place a person might go for a picnic with a loved one, and lay out a blanket and throw stones into the water. He can see all this very well now, because the boat isn’t there blocking his view.

Huh?

It’s possible it was borrowed by some teenagers, or even that it floated off on the tide. Whatever the cause, the effect remains the same. They now have one fewer option than they had a moment earlier.

‘All the better,’ says Sheldon quietly as he turns away from the river for good.

From the pier, and with less to demand his attention than there was last night, the old scout-sniper also notices something else that had escaped his eagle-eye vision — namely two massive tyre tracks leading from the edge of the water to the back of a garage beside the house.

With nothing else in particular to do, Sheldon follows the tracks. The garage looks like a small American barn that should be red, but instead is the same bright blue as the lonely house belonging to the couple with cancer.

The doors to the garage are painted white, and there are windows at eye level. Using the trick he tried to teach Paul the night before, Sheldon presses his nose against the glass and peers inside. There are windows across the way on what he suspects are identical doors on the other side, but they do not illuminate the otherwise dark room. All he can really tell is that it is filled with something long and large.

Sheldon tries the handle, but is surprised to find the doors locked.

This brings him to his drill sergeant’s Lesson No. 2.

If you can’t use a hammer, try to find the key.

Nothing was too obvious not to deserve a formal lesson in the United States Marine Corps.

In the kitchen, where he’d found the marker, there is a ring of keys with labels on each one. The labels are in Norwegian, but, as chance would have it, one of them does in fact unlock the padlock to the garage door facing the street.

So, without much optimism, Sheldon opens the padlock, places it back on the door in an open position, and then swings the doors open in a dramatic gesture, for no other reason than because it feels good.

What he sees inside gives Sheldon the first genuine desire to laugh since Rhea told him about the miscarriage.

Leaving the garage door open, he shuffles back to the living room and finds the lower half of the Viking alighting from under the vintage three-seater sofa. Sheldon addresses the boy’s bottom.

‘Whatcha doing under the sofa?’

Hearing Sheldon’s voice, he slides back out. When he’s fully out from under, he turns over. The boy holds up a very large ball of dust and hair.

Sheldon pulls over a curvy Danish chair and sits in it. He considers first the boy and then the dust bunny he’s raising overhead like a trophy.

‘That’s a mighty impressive hair ball you’ve got there.’

Paul considers it.

‘You know, this is a good sign. I guess. You see, before Huck and Jim hit the road, Jim had a hair ball. His could talk if you put a coin under it. I don’t have a nickel, though. And this one probably speaks Norwegian. I think we should go now.’

Sheldon takes a pillowcase from the bedroom and places the dust bunny in the middle of it. He folds the four corners over it and ties them together. From the hall closet he takes a broom and unscrews the handle from the plastic head. He slides the handle through the knot on the pillowcase and puts the whole rig on Paul’s shoulder.

‘Now you’re a Norwegian-Albanian Dust-Bunny Hobo Viking. Bet you didn’t know you’d be one of those when you woke up this morning.’

Their battle Wellingtons on, the dishes washed and put back, the beds stripped, the sheets piled on the floor, and the toilets flushed again for good measure, Sheldon snaps his fingers a few times to signal that it’s time to go. He shoulders his satchel and adjusts the strap so it rests better on his thin shoulder, and walks with Paul out into the light of a new day to show him his special discovery.

‘Come, come, come. Now, you stand there. And don’t move. OK?’

It’s not OK, and Paul has no idea what Sheldon is talking about, but, horns and all, he stands at attention as Sheldon disappears into the garage.

There is a long silence. Paul looks down to the fjord, where beautiful sailboats skim over the surface of the cold and salty sea. Where seagulls glide, high and free in the morning sky. Where …

A thunderous noise startles the boy, who steps away from the garage.

Smoke billows from the open door and slips in from under the closed one. The windows undulate, and the birds all fly away. And out of the darkness comes Sheldon Horowitz on a massive yellow tractor, pulling a huge rubber raft on a two-wheeled boat trailer with a Norwegian flag affixed to the stern.

‘River Rats!’ he shouts, flapping his map high above his head, ‘Let the journey commence!’

All around them the world is alive and in bloom. The road winds and twists with gentle curves, and the wilderness is close enough to touch. The birches and spruce stand tall and gallant amidst the beech and pine. Birds, relishing the long summer days, sing full-bellied songs that dance through shimmering leaves and pipe above the gently swaying tips of tops of trees.

Paul’s rubber-clad feet flip and flop around inside the rubber boat as he waves his spoon at passing cars, and carries on almost like a normal child.

Sheldon shifts the tractor into the wrong gear about a dozen times before figuring out — to a point — how the thing works. Once he gets into a groove, at about twenty kilometres an hour, he holds his course and counts his blessings.

He pulls them out onto Husvikveien and then onto the 153, which also seems to be called Osloveien if he’s reading the map correctly. His first marker is Riksveg 23, which he hopes will be announced by some kind of sign or something, and is about thirty minutes away at their current pace. He figures he can settle into the trip for a bit and try to adapt to this unfamiliar place.

It doesn’t feel so unfamiliar, though. It feels like the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, where white-steepled churches keep vigil over the salt-box houses with their black, blue, and green storm shutters, and school children carry tin lunch boxes with cartoon characters, and policemen stop traffic on Main Street to make way for ducklings as they walk across the road with their stubby orange legs and curious little faces.

The last time he was in the Berkshires was in 1962, when Saul was ten. It was the perfect time to take the family ‘leafing’ to see the magnificence of the New England tapestry unfold all around them and envelop them in the seasonal bliss of autumn and the coming of Halloween.

They were staying in a bed-and-breakfast near the town where Sheldon was born. Saul had run down the carpeted stairs, absurdly early, to launch an untethered attack on the breakfast table as he and Mabel idly wondered what it might have been like to have had a girl.

‘Quieter,’ Sheldon figured.

‘For you. I was tough on my mother,’ she’d said.

‘Mothers and daughters.’

‘Right.’

‘But we might have slept later.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I can go down and keep him company. Wanna stay in bed a bit?’

And so Mabel slept for another hour as Sheldon watched Saul consume twice his body mass in cranberry muffins, blueberry pancakes, hot chocolate, eggs, bacon, maple syrup, and butter.

It was mid-October, and Sheldon was reading about the Cuban missile crisis in the Boston Globe when the story finally broke. The Soviets were trying to get missiles into Cuba, and Kennedy had set up a blockade to try to keep them out. The stand-off almost resulted in a nuclear war. This would have ruined Halloween entirely.

‘If there’s a nuclear war, you know what you’re supposed to do, right?’ he’d asked Saul.

‘Ruff and rubber.’

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full.’

Saul swallowed and then said, ‘Duck and cover.’

‘Right.’

Parenting done, Sheldon refilled his coffee and decided that today would be an excellent day to pick apples at the orchard. And after that, he’d take in the front nine on a round of golf. Mabel could do some leafing with the kid, and he’d give himself a break. Take a deep breath in his native state, and get the car fumes of New York out of his lungs.

The apple-picking went well. They paid ten cents for a big basket and set off into the rows of trees.

Mabel was in a red shirt and a white blouse. Remembering it now, he marvelled at how tiny her waist was, how shapely her calves. How she wobbled ever so slightly in her shoes over the uneven ground. He walked behind her and smiled as the heels speared the fallen leaves and followed her around like a stack of receipts on a spike back at the repair shop.

It was a pity that day was ruined.

Mabel came down with a bit of a headache in the afternoon, so Sheldon decided to take Saul to the golf course to teach him to hold the putter properly. What ten-year-old kid wouldn’t want to caddy for his dad?

There was an old country club with a low and long white colonial home at its centre, and the course stretched out behind it like puddles of emeralds. The blue of the sky lit out to the heavens, and a string quartet was playing on the terrace on account of some fancy catered event. It was a delightful place.

Sheldon and Saul walked into the lobby and smiled at the man who waited like a maître d’. The man smiled back.

‘Hi. My son and I want to play a round of golf. Just the front nine. He’ll caddy. We won’t hold anyone up.’

‘Your name, please?’

‘I’m Sheldon Horowitz, and this is my son, Saul.’

‘Mr Horowitz.’

‘Yes. So, who do I pay and where do I get some clubs?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but the club is for members only.’

Sheldon furrowed his brows. ‘You’re the only course in town. I asked at the B&B. They said everyone plays here.’

‘Oh, no, no. They were mistaken. It’s members only.’

‘How can the guy be mistaken? He lives here and runs a tourist business.’

The man used the old technique of raising his ears and leaving the question unanswered in the hope that the other conversant would see where the conversation was headed and, not wanting to pursue it, leave off there. This technique was not designed with Sheldon in mind.

‘Sounds like you didn’t hear me. Allow me to repeat. “How can the guy be mistaken? He lives here and runs a tourist business?”’

‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

‘Fine. I come up here pretty often. How much for membership?’

‘It’s very expensive. And there’s a selection process. You need to be nominated by a member.’

In a gesture that surely harkens back to the Greek chorus, Sheldon looked around him for witnesses to the insanity he was experiencing.

‘What kind of thing is that to say? Are you trying to attract new members, or repel them?’

Out of habit, which can overpower learning, the man tried the same technique again, upon which Sheldon decided that the man had some screws loose, and so chose to speak slowly. As one does to foreigners and small animals.

‘Do you, or do you not, want to sell people memberships to your clubhouse so we can play on your shiny green fields with little white balls and then drink your drinkies in the bar?’

‘Mr Horowitz,’ he said with emphasis. ‘Surely you understand. And there’s no need to shout. We don’t want a scene.’

Sheldon, genuinely trying to do the maths, squinted as he looked at the man. Then, perhaps for moral support, or to be reminded of the face of normality, he looked down at his well-fed ten-year-old son. And, on looking at his son, his eyes fell upon the gold Star of David that Mabel’s sister had given him for Hanukkah last year.

Then Sheldon turned back to the man.

‘Are you saying you won’t sell me a membership to your country club because I’m a Jew?’

The man looked to the left and right, and then whispered, ‘Sir, please, there’s no need to use language here.’

‘Language?’ Sheldon shouted. ‘I’m a United States Marine, you pipsqueak. I want to play a round of golf with my son. You will make that happen now.’

It did not happen then or even later. A security guard, larger than him and with darker features, made towards Sheldon.

At this moment, Sheldon was undecided, and he looked back at Saul. He should have walked away. He should have accepted that the world was a big place and that change happens gradually. He did not want — sincerely — to do anything scary that could upset or even traumatise his son. He didn’t want to get arrested and upset Mabel. A higher wisdom was, even then, available for consultation.

But it was not convincing. Because what he saw on his son’s face was shame. And Sheldon, being no intellectual, made his decision. And the decision was based on what he felt was the least shameful way to respond, given who he was, and who he wanted his son to be. The line from this moment to Saul’s death in Vietnam was to be, for Sheldon, immutable and absolute.

As soon as the guard was in range, Sheldon sprang into the space between them and swung his right elbow like a punch into the man’s lower jaw, dropping him immediately. Then, for good measure, he jabbed the other guy in the nose and watched him drop behind the desk like a clown in a tank of water.

This is when Sheldon took Saul’s hand and led him from the country club, certain he would not be pursued and that the cops would not be coming for him. The only thing worse for an anti-Semite than a Jew is being beaten up by a Jew. The fewer people who knew about it, the better.

When they were good and far from the scene of the scene, Sheldon spun Saul around and wagged his finger at him and said this:

This country is what you make it. You understand that? It isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It’s just what you make it. That means you don’t make excuses for America’s bullshit. That’s what the Nazis and Commies do. The fatherland. The motherland. America isn’t your parent. It’s your kid. And today, I made America a place where you get your nose broken for telling a Jew he can’t play a round of golf. The only one allowed to tell me I can’t play golf is the ball.

Saul was wide-eyed, and clearly had no idea what his father was saying.

It was, however, a moment that Saul would never forget.

And, unlike the Cuban missile crisis, it ruined the whole day.