Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 17

‘I killed my son, Bill. He’s dead because he loved me.’

‘He loved you very much.’

‘I’ve always remembered that morning as a fight. I guess it wasn’t.’

‘No. He wasn’t looking for an argument. He didn’t have a side to argue.’

‘I don’t know how to talk without arguing.’

‘It’s part of your charm.’

‘What should I have done?’

‘You mean, when he came in? Started questioning you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You should have hugged him and said how you felt.’

‘I did say how I felt.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘What do you know?’

‘Who do you think you’re talking to?’

‘So how did I feel?’

‘You felt love and relief. You loved him so much you had to keep your distance.’

‘You talk like a girl.’

‘That feeling — in your hands. The one that makes you clench your fists sometimes. Do you know what that is?’

‘It’s arthritis.’

‘You never touched him. That last time. In your living room. He was right there. And you never held him. Never touched his hands. Never put your palm against his cheek like you used to do when he was a baby. You never pressed your cheek against his. That’s what you wanted to do. He was such a beautiful boy. Can you remember? He glowed with the eternal. And you didn’t touch him. And you can’t get the feeling of it out of your hands.’

‘What feeling?’

‘The emptiness. You told him about the silence. You never told him about the emptiness.’

‘You’re a real killjoy, Bill. You know that?’

‘The lake is coming up. Now’s your chance to hide the tractor.’

‘Yup.’

They have been travelling for fifty kilometres. There, on the left and coming up slowly, is Rødenessjøen. It is a small lake in Akershus, and it is Sheldon’s planned destination for the day. They have been on the road for hours. The boy is probably hungry, and he’s certain they both need to pee.

What Sheldon is planning to do would best be done at night, under the cover of darkness. The time of day when most fakakta ideas get a second look and start to seem better than they did a few hours earlier.

With an aching back and stiff hands, Sheldon pulls the tractor to the side of a quiet and wooded street, and turns off the engine. He waits a full minute before gingerly stepping down the full metre to the pavement.

Paul is napping in the raft. He has not taken off the Viking helmet, and his right hand clutches the long wooden spoon. The magic dust bunny is safely tucked under one of the bench seats. Sheldon smiles and chooses not to wake him.

Standing back from the rig, he notices how tall the tractor really is. The top of it must be a good two metres high. The tyres alone come up to the middle of his own chest. It isn’t an easy item to hide — you can’t put an orange tarp over it and hope it goes unnoticed.

This is farm country. He does not know the people, their mentality, their ways of getting through the day. But the trappings of this place resonate, and he suspects they are not as foreign as their language. People here probably know one another. There are likely to be only a few schools, and they’d cater to a rather wide age-range of children. Families would be familiar with each other’s children. Cars and maybe even livestock might be known to one another.

They are not far from Oslo, and this is not a desperately rural terrain. It is, however, a place where societies form tighter bonds and people begin to speak of the land, not ‘real estate’.

So the cover of night would have been better. Because this is definitely the kind of place where people would notice a tractor that didn’t belong here. It is probably also the kind of place where they’d talk if they saw someone drive one directly into the lake.

Once again, as has so often happened in Sheldon’s life, there really does seem to be only one reasonable course of action. As Paul rests in the boat, Donny stares at his amphibious recreational unit and considers the situation. The most important fact at the moment is that he was pulled over by a local cop. He was asked if he was American. There are good explanations for that. One — which he doesn’t believe for a second — is that his fake German–Swiss accent wasn’t good enough to fool Barney Fife back there. No chance on earth he could sense that Sheldon was from New England.

None.

The other, however, is more troubling and more plausible.

He has not turned on the television for Paul’s sake, so he does not know for certain that the police haven’t issued a missing person’s alert on him — assuming that such things even exist here. But it’s possible that they have, and that Rhea is behind it. Even if they haven’t, they could certainly have told other police about him and the boy. It’s possible that he was stopped because he fitted some profile.

Like, for example, ‘Foreign old man with young boy.’

But maybe he got lucky. Maybe they said, ‘American old man and young boy missing.’ In that case, he and Paul didn’t fit the box.

Who knows? In any case, it all points to the same conclusion: this tractor is going to be trouble, and needs to go in the drink.

Looking both ways before crossing the street again, he steps back to the raft and releases it at four points from the trailer frame. He checks very carefully to be sure nothing is connected or would obstruct it from detaching itself when the time comes.

When he is satisfied, he starts up the tractor again. As the beast coughs and gurgles, Paul wakes up. Sheldon can tell because he can see silver horns in the mirror. He turns around and waves. Paul, he is delighted to find, waves back.

He pulls back onto the road now and, staying in first gear, drives along slowly, looking for a parallel, subsidiary path along the lake. This does not take long. The absence of power steering makes the hard-left turn a challenge, so he leans hard into it like a bus driver through a city street. The tractor falls right in line, and soon enough they are chugging along the western side of the small lake.

In five minutes, a nice open space emerges, and Sheldon executes a sweeping left-hand turn away from the lake, and then swings the wheel all the way to the right, bringing her in face to face with stage two of Operation Hide the Tractor.

It is all working perfectly. All he has to do now is drive straight into the lake. If it is deep enough, and the tractor lives long enough, it will disappear below the surface where it belongs, and the raft will gently drift off the trailer onto the clear and bright waters where Paul can then start the engine and sail off into the distance alone, because Sheldon will end up under the lake behind the wheel of the tractor.

This is not a perfectly devised plan as such.

A stick would do it. He could just wedge the stick under the seat and on to the pedal. That would probably work.

The trouble then — which has been the same trouble he’s been facing for three days — is that he is eighty-two. How exactly is he to get on the moving raft? Outrun it? Dive onto it as it rushes by? Have Paul hook out an arm and wrestle him up like a rodeo cowboy?

Once again, logic dictates the final conclusion: I’m going to get very, very wet.

Over the course of five minutes, Sheldon stands on the ground talking to Paul, the Balkan Jewish Viking who stands in the raft. They both have their hands on their hips. Sheldon points and gestures. He explains and draws pictures on his palm. He makes quizzical faces and explains the odds.

Paul nods.

Sheldon smiles.

It is all going to work out just fine.

So he starts the engine and wedges the stick under the seat, and if he’d been a Christian he would have made a cross or kissed one, and off goes the whole contraption towards the water.

It can all go badly. Someone might notice and think there has been an accident. Helicopters and TV people arriving would be counter to the spirit of the operation. Sheldon himself might swim after the raft and — having not swum in thirty years — drown. None of which would be ideal.

Perhaps, if Bill showed up, he could drive the tractor. But Bill does not show up. The man’s timing is self-serving and capricious.

As it turns out, it does not go badly. In fact, it goes surprisingly well.

Not only does Paul laugh, thereby making his first sound since the death of his mother, but as the raft detaches from the trailer, it actually floats backwards a little, on account of the waves from the tractor. By wading in just to his knees, Sheldon is able to grab hold of a tow line and pull the raft back towards shore where — with only minor difficulty — he hoists his leg over its side and flops into it.

The tractor fights against its watery grave, but to no avail. Steam rises from the lake, which bubbles and burps, but eventually digests its meal whole.

Sheldon lies panting on the floor of the rubber raft. Looking up into the sky, he is shocked by how tired he has become. Really, what just happened? Not much by a young man’s standards, but apparently more than usual for him.

‘Old people really should be in better shape,’ he says.

Sheldon sits up and looks around. It is truly lovely here. It reminds him of a small lake in Maine near Waterville where Rhea used to go to summer camp in the early 1980s. Like Rødenessjøen, East Lake’s characteristic quality was of a simple and even common tranquillity. It was not overwhelming or unique. It was not a destination on someone’s winding itinerary. It was a refuge. And this is what he and Paul need tonight, more than anything — to motor to the north-eastern corner, and to find a quiet and safe place to hole up in for the night. It will be their own Jackson’s Island, where Huck and Jim first met up and set forth as the world closed in on both of them.

This is the plan now. Though still early, he wants to set up camp as far from the tractor as possible, in case someone noticed him disposing of it. They’ll eat their rations from the bag, and pee in the woods, and Sheldon will dry his socks and try to make it as comfortable as possible. It is surprising how comfortable the dry forest can be with a little know-how. It is especially nice when there are no Koreans skulking about in the undergrowth. For once in quite some time, this seems to be a reasonable certainty. If they manage to find him here, then they possibly deserve to.

Tomorrow morning they’ll hitchhike the rest of the way. It’s a little risky, but there is no thread connecting them to Oslo now. So unless there is a national manhunt for them, it seems he can probably get a ride over the last ninety kilometres if they’re lucky.

Paul is in a rather different mood from Sheldon. He is still in full regalia and energised. His little feet are pattering up and back on the raft, and he’s looking overboard at the misbegotten tractor, and pointing and smiling. It’s a pity he doesn’t have grandparents here to see this. They can be an excellent source of whimsy.

They can also be useful when you have a dead parent, as in Rhea’s case, and the other one turns out to be useless.

Rhea herself inevitably learned that there was supposed to be a generation of people between her and her grandparents, and in her twenties she went looking for her mother. Out of college— brazen, rash, and excitable — she kept talking about Truth. Finding her mother became a quest, and she was now old enough to embark on its perils.

He’d tried talking her out of it. He told her that people aren’t usually lost. They aren’t socks. They aren’t wedged behind doors, hoping that someone will find them. They hide. And not from everyone. They hide from very particular people. In this case, her. He’d explained that his own watch-repair and antique shop hadn’t moved since it opened, and all her mother needed to do was send a letter, or even just call. The connection between mother and daughter was a phone call away. But only one side could enter the magic code to unlock the conversation, and Rhea didn’t have the code.

He knew this before she was old enough to understand it. Crushing her hopes was the only humane thing to do. But college and education have a way of instilling the most foolish ideas in the brightest of people, and Rhea went forth to turn hers into a reality.

It went about as badly as Sheldon expected, perhaps a bit worse than Mabel predicted, and it forced Rhea into a position that until then she couldn’t have imagined.

It didn’t matter where Rhea found her. It didn’t matter what she was wearing, or what she’d been doing only moments earlier. What did matter was the expression of utter indignation on her mother’s weathered and joyless face when she opened the door and met her adult daughter. The memory of that encounter — what they were holding, how they stood, what smell lingered longest in the air — dissipated into irretrievable fragments the moment it was over, because the words her mother used blotted out the rest. Her words were so definitive, so clear and concise and without equivocation, that they grabbed Rhea by the heart and shook apart every dream, every illusion, every rationalisation she had created and cherished for twenty years, so that nothing of the present or the past remained but the harsh reality of the new world.

I was done with you!

And so Rhea walked away from that door, and came home to New York to be with Sheldon and her grandmother.

She didn’t talk about it for a long time. It was four months before Sheldon broached the topic at all, with an oblique, ‘Anything on your mind?’

The watch-repair and antique shop, by the 1990s, had changed with the tastes of the era. Sheldon stocked what people liked, figuring this was a reasonably strong business strategy. During the Clinton years, with property prices booming and the definition of sex on the national agenda, people were returning to mid-century Modern. Sheldon haunted estate sales and hunted auctions with a good eye for quality, beauty, and price. When Rhea was in her early twenties the shop was filled with Matt Gottschalk’s leather chairs, Poul Kjærholm’s delicate woods and steels, and Eames’ classic lounges and ottomans. Wall Street was booming, and retro was back.

Rhea sat in an egg-shaped Danish chair suspended from the ceiling by a chain. Whatever was on her mind was about to hatch.

‘Why was Dad attracted to her?’ she finally asked.

‘Oh, Rhea, that’s a question for your grandmother, not me.’

‘I’ll ask her later. For now …’

Sheldon shrugged. There was nothing left to protect her from, except lies.

‘I don’t think he was. I think they had what counted as a fling in the early seventies just before he went back to the war. Why? She was curvy and outgoing and fun, and was so obviously not a fit for him that she suited all kinds of bills. She was hardly the only girl he had flings with, by the way. When he got back, I think he ran for the nearest safe haven, so to speak. Why her and not another girl, I can’t say. Things get lost to time. Stories dry up.’

‘So I wasn’t conceived in love.’

‘That question is too self-pitying, and it isn’t worthy of you. You know perfectly well that your grandmother and I adore you. For my two cents, being conceived in indifference but raised in love is better than the inverse. I’m sorry this woman is a disappointment to you. Truly. But you didn’t miss out on anything, because there was nothing there to miss.’

‘I’m never going to have kids,’ she’d said.

Sheldon put down the Tudor Submariner he’d been working on and frowned.

‘Why would you say that?’

‘What if I don’t love them? It clearly happens, right?’

‘It wouldn’t happen to you.’

‘How do you know? Maybe it’s all hormonal and stuff. They say everything changes when you have kids.’

Sheldon sounded sad when he corrected her.

‘Everything doesn’t change when you have them. Everything changes when you lose them.’

Rhea rocked on the chair, and Sheldon said Don’t rock on the chair, and Rhea stopped.

From out of nowhere, at least to Sheldon’s mind, Rhea asked, ‘Why don’t you go to synagogue anymore?’

Sheldon leaned back in his own chair and then rubbed his face.

‘Why are you punishing me?’

‘I’m not. I really want to know.’

‘It’s not like I made you go. I’m entirely fair.’

‘I want to know why. Is it because of Dad?’

‘Yes.’

‘You stopped believing in God when Dad died?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What then?’

How many of their conversations took place right here? Right in this very spot over a period of twenty years? All of them? It seemed that way. It was as though there were no apartment upstairs. No kitchen. No den or bedroom. Sheldon just sat here, year after year, being interrogated by various women. The antiques changed, the women aged, but Sheldon was always there, fixing timepieces, answering questions. The only conversation he remembers having in the apartment was the one with Saul.

‘You know what Yom Kippur is?’ he’d answered.

‘It’s the day of atonement.’

‘You know how it works?’

‘You ask for forgiveness.’

‘You ask for two kinds of forgiveness,’ Sheldon explained. ‘You ask God to forgive you for your trespasses against Him. But you also ask people to forgive you for your trespasses against them. You do the second in Jewish tradition because, according to our philosophy, there is only one thing God can’t do. He can’t forgive you for what you do to other people. You need to ask forgiveness from them directly.’

‘Which is why there is no forgiveness for murder. Because you can’t ask forgiveness from the dead.’

‘Right.’

‘Why did you stop going to synagogue, Papa?’

‘Because in 1976, the year you arrived on my doorstep, and a song about a sinking ship was on the radio, I took you to temple on Yom Kippur, and I waited for God to apologise to us for what he did to your father, and he never did.’