Norwegian by Night

Part III

New River





CHAPTER 15

There is a Norwegian poem in Sheldon’s room, far away in Oslo. Rhea found it at an antiquarian bookshop in New York, and was struck by its power and early use of free verse in translation. She carefully photographed it, framed the print, and gave it to Lars as an anniversary present.

It hangs above the lamp by Sheldon’s bedside table. When he sits on the bed and looks at the photos of his lost family, he sometimes looks away. When he does, his eyes fall on the poem.

It was written in 1912, and translated into English by a professor at the University of Minnesota. The university published it in an obscure collection of works called Poems of Modern Scandinavia, seven years after Norway secured its independence from Sweden.

Norway. A gift

to the wandering tribes who pressed

ever northward into the sea split orchestral tumult

of salty shores and cragged earth

sheltering the gods that time forgot.

Wine spilling like children

through empty halls echoing

waiting, neverly for distant guests,

the fire and the song rising,

still and bright into the ever darkening sky.

A proclamation to the eternal night.

A chorus of candles and spice.

We … they say. Children of the norlands,

with fathers buried in this earth’s cradle.

All memory conspiring to a single story —

This … they say.

This is our land.

This world is all around him now. He has never seen it before. They have been on the move for several hours. With a panoramic view from high on the tractor, he can recall the pictures from his own mind that the poem created. He doesn’t remember the exact words, but does sense its mood and the flow of its metaphors. It comes back to him now, because the wind blows against his face as the carriage shimmies beneath him, with Paul and the raft in tow. This land around him — so silent before — now begins to speak as Sheldon gazes out on it. He begins to sense that silence itself is a kind of language. There is more there than death and memory. More than the voices of the lost. There is something in Europe’s silence that he has not heard before. But he will not live long enough to fully understand it. And so he holds this new insight as loosely as a poem found by accident. One with no title and no author. One experienced and never found again.

Defying age and gravity, he stands up straight and tall on the moving tractor, and lets the world slip underneath him. He watches the trees approach him, slowly at first, and then speed past.

He takes them on to Husvikveien, then Kirkeveien, then Froensveien. He turns them down Årungveien and Mosseveien, and then eventually out to the Rv 23 and the E18 where there is nothing between them and the gentle land that sways like the sea and says so much that Sheldon cannot comprehend.

Mario was putting a cloth to Sheldon’s head as he opened his eyes.

‘Donny, you OK?’

‘I don’t feel so good.’

‘A medic bandaged your leg. And put a note on your shirt.’

‘What does it say?’

‘“Shot but OK.”’

‘That seems clear enough.’

‘How did you get here?’ Mario asked.

Donny thought about this. He had been shot on the water as he approached the sea walls. He shot back. Then he’d passed out. Now he had a headache. Can a wound migrate?

‘I got here by boat.’

‘What boat? By LST? I didn’t see you on the boat.’

‘No. A little boat. A life raft. I borrowed it from the Aussies. I must have washed up. Or someone pulled me. Who knows.’

‘That’s why you’re wet?’

‘Yes, Mario. That’s why I’m wet.’

‘Can you stand up?’

‘I think so.’

Donny wasn’t sure what time it was or how much time had passed since the troops had secured the three beaches. T-34 tanks were in formation, crouched still and low on the beach, cooling and hungry. A MASH unit had already been set up. Above him, he could see the Korean lighthouse at Palmi-do. It was high tide, and the sun gleamed off the hulls of the landing craft. Men were smoking. It was all rather calm.

Mario pulled Donny up, and they stood eye to eye for a moment and both smiled.

‘It’s nice to see you,’ Mario said.

‘Don’t get all sappy on me.’

‘We should take a picture.’

‘Of what?’

‘Us.’

‘Why?’

‘We’re brothers in arms! We take a picture, and show our sons someday so they’ll be proud of us.’

‘You actually think we’re going to meet girls?’

‘Me, yes. You … maybe a nice cow. Or a duck. They say ducks make excellent lovers.’

‘Do they?’

‘Yes,’ said Mario. ‘And when the relationship sours, you can eat them.’

‘Where’s the camera?’

Mario took off his backpack and took out a Leica IIIc. It was stainless steel and shiny, with a sharkskin grip. He handed it to Donny.

‘I don’t know how to use it.’

So Mario taught Donny how to adjust the shutter speed and f-stop, take the white balance, and set the aperture. All the while, the American, Canadian, and South Korean forces hustled to clear the debris of battle from the beach and the water. They hammered at supply centres and heaved hard at the docks. As the boys talked about the intimate clicks and clacks of the camera, Inchon was transformed behind them into a northern operations base against the communist forces.

‘You get it now?’ Mario asked.

‘I suppose.’

‘Take one of me first.’

There were some gunshots in the distance — some vague sense that fighting was continuing over the hills, engaging the last of the local resistance, as Mario walked backwards to his mark. Donny’s hands were sticky from the oily sea, and he wiped his sandy fingers on his wet lapel so he wouldn’t ruin Mario’s camera.

Donny put the camera to his eye. It occurred to him, in that moment, that he had never looked through a camera before. Perhaps sometime, on some distant day, he might have fooled with one. But he had never looked. Every time he looked through a viewfinder it was through the scope of a rifle. The first time was a target at New River, North Carolina, where he trained with the Marines near Camp Lejeune, and he always had an itch he was trained not to scratch.

It’ll give away your position and get you killed. Any questions?

His class of Raiders consisted of fifteen volunteers. They shot targets for five weeks. They learned scouting, patrolling, map reading, demolitions, camouflage, and how to shoot with a scope. They learned immobility, misdirection, balance, resistance to impulse, breathing, and control. Sheldon was taught to slow the beating of his own heart.

They learned range and wind and light. They talked about rifles and ammunition and gunsmithing and girls. They debated jazz and car engines. They fought over cigarettes. They learned to swear and how to insult each other’s ethnic and religious groups, and invented a highly specialised vocabulary to describe character types.

Snarf: A boy who sniffs girls’ bicycle seats.

Twerp: One who inserts false teeth between the cheeks of his arse.

They practised killing people in preparation for the moment when such knowledge would prove handy.

For the sniper, the index finger is an instrument of death. But with the Leica IIIc, he was being asked by his buddy to hold steady and use his training to find a composition in the image he saw, not a target. To use his finger to make that composition immortal, not to destroy it. To bring a moment into being, not to force its end.

Holding that camera in his hands, hours after killing men over a dawn sea, Donny felt transformed.

The sense of wonder, of humility, and of simple pleasure in setting the lens to take a photo was all immediate. Mario had once talked to him about the transubstantiation in the church, when the wafer and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Until holding the camera in his hands, he had always mocked Mario for the absurdity of it. Now, looking down the barrel of the lens, he believed such a thing might be possible.

He smiled at Mario. ‘Let’s make it a good one,’ he shouted.

There, in the upper-left corner, in what would eventually be a black-and-white photograph, was the lighthouse. Mario was slightly down to the right. The shore and the dark sea were to the left, and to the extreme right were the dunes, extending back towards the rise that would eventually lead to Palmi-do. Everything seemed set, except that Mario’s feet were cut off, and the composition didn’t look quite right.

‘Take a few steps back,’ Donny said. ‘I don’t want your feet cut off.’

Mario gave this no thought. He didn’t pause, didn’t push back against Sheldon’s presumption that he should be the one to move. Why should he? Mario was a soft-hearted and kind person who didn’t see his friendship with Donny as a competition for dominance. He was an Italian boy on a distant shore at a victorious battle with few dead, and here was his lost friend holding his undamaged and favourite camera ready to commemorate the moment.

For sixty years, Sheldon will ask himself a question. He will ask it as he repairs watches, and on his near-nightly rides with the Riverines after Saul’s death. He will ask it when Mabel leaves the restaurant tables for the powder room, and he fiddles with his cutlery. It is a question he will not be able to answer until just this moment, here in Norway, as once-safely-cloistered memories assert themselves and change their character. As they emerge from secret places in a hall closet and demand to be disclosed. All of it reminding him that, soon enough, he will have to face it all.

The question he will ask himself is why he told Mario to step backwards, rather than doing it himself.

Someone had to move. That much was clear. The lens on the Leica didn’t zoom at the press of a button. In 1950, there were no telephoto lenses. He couldn’t twist his wrist and bring the world closer or send it farther way. Back then, his relationship to the world was fixed. It was seen as it was through a 50mm lens. Back then, we captured what we experienced. We were one small step closer to being in the present than we are today.

That someone, however, did not necessarily have to be Mario. Donny himself could have stepped backwards a few yards. If he had been the one to move, Mario might have been perfectly framed. And if Mario had stepped backwards, the result would have been the same.

So why did he ask Mario to move, rather than do it himself?

I was sticky and uncomfortable and edgy, and had a wound in my leg, and I didn’t want to go anywhere. This was one answer. He tried using it for years, but it lacked conviction. I was always somehow the elder with Mario. Always playing the wise one. Maybe it was part of our game that he should move and I shouldn’t, that he should obey my instructions, rather than me taking the steps for him.

All of this was true. But none of it mattered. It may have made the request more natural, but this wasn’t the source of the impulse. Donny had nothing to prove with Mario.

The lighthouse at Palmi-do was small and stubby and white, offset against the grey and overcast sky. It was calm and unmoving against the bustle of foreigners creating a new world around it. It was steadfast in a world of change. It soothed him. It was … beautiful.

He did not want to move. He did not want anything to ever change.

The beauty of that eternal moment, passing through Donny, killed Mario.

No one knows what Mario stepped on. It was probably unexploded ordnance. Whatever it was, it only needed his gentle footfall to upset it.

The explosion blew Mario into the air. Whether it was the coincidence of the moment or the startling impact of the shock wave, he’ll never know. But, whatever the cause, it was just enough for Donny’s finger to depress the shutter at the very moment of the explosion, catching something horrible on film and forever.

In 1955, he opened Mario’s camera, found the film, and developed it. This was the year that Sheldon set off around the world with the Leica. There was only one photograph on the roll. It was not a photograph he ever published. He never showed it to Mabel. He never even hinted at its existence, or explained the power it had over him — how it set him off to wander through Europe, to visit the capitals and camps.

Rhea does not know it, but the photo is here in Norway. It is in a thick, old manila envelope at the top of his closet, along with forty or fifty others that no one has ever seen. Most are photos of Saul as a baby, a toddler, and pre-schooler. Some are of Mabel.

One, beneath all the others, shows his old friend Mario being pushed off the earth, his two legs already disconnected from his body, a white lighthouse in the corner, and a smile still on his face.