Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 2

It is some ungodly hour, and Sheldon stands naked in the bathroom of their apartment in Tøyen. Rhea and Lars are out, for some reason. They left in the middle of the night without a word, and have been gone for hours.

The light is off, and it is dark. He has one hand pressed against the cold tiles of the wall above the toilet, and with his other hand he is taking aim, such as it is. He’s waiting for his prostate to get out of the way so he can take a well-deserved leak and get back to bed where he belongs so that if, by chance, his heart stops this very second, he won’t be found — holding his pecker, dead on the floor — by a bunch of twenty-year-old medics who will gawk at his circumcision and bad luck.

It is not only his age that is slowing things down. A man and a woman are fighting upstairs in some Balkan language, with all its acid and spleen. It might be Albanian. Or not. He doesn’t know. It sounds vile, anti-Semitic, communist, peasant, rude, fascistic, and corrupt all at the same time. Every phoneme and slur and intonation sounds bitter. The fight is loud, and its constituent qualities cause his innards to constrict in some kind of primordial self-defence.

Sheldon slaps the wall a few times, but his strike is flaccid.

He recalls graffiti in the men’s latrine during basic training: ‘Old snipers never die, they just stay loaded.’

Sheldon shuffles back to his bed, pulls the duvet up to his shoulders, and listens as the woman’s hollers evolve into sobs. He eventually falls into a shallow, voiceless sleep.

When he wakes, it is — as expected — Sunday. There is light flooding the room. By the door there is a large man who is clearly not Korean.

‘Yuh? Sheldon? Hiyuh! It’s Lars. Good morning.’

Sheldon rubs his face and looks at his watch. It is just past seven.

‘Hello, Lars.’

‘Did you sleep OK?’

‘Where the hell were you two?’

‘We’ll explain over breakfast.’

‘Your neighbour is a Balkan fascist.’

‘Oh yeah?’

Sheldon scowls.

‘We’re about to put on the eggs. Come join us?’

‘You heard it, too, right? It wasn’t a hallucination?’

‘Come have breakfast.’

The apartment is on a small road off of Sars’ Gate near Tøyenparken. The building is brick, and the floors have wide, unvarnished planks. To Sheldon, there is a touch of the New York loft about it, because Lars’s father had torn down the walls between the kitchen and living room, and the living room and dining room, to create a wide-open space with white floors and ceilings. There are two massive bedrooms off the now-conjoined spaces, and a small, half-sized bedroom down a short flight of stairs that now houses Sheldon.

Unable to avoid the day any longer, Sheldon gets up, puts on a bathrobe and slippers, and shuffles into the living room that glows with early-morning sunlight as from an interrogator’s bulb. He is neither unfamiliar with, nor unprepared for, this problem. It is caused by the Norwegian summer light. The solution is a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses that he takes from his pocket and slips on.

Now able to see, he goes to the breakfast table, which is arrayed with goat cheese, a range of dried-pork products, orange juice, some chopped liver, salmon, butter, and a freshly baked dark bread just collected from the nearby 7-Eleven.

Rhea is in a faded pair of Levi jeans and a light-blue satiny blouse from H&M, and her hair is pulled back. She is barefoot and wearing no make-up, cradling a hot cup of café-au-lait, and leaning back against the kitchen sink.

‘Morning, Papa,’ says Rhea.

Rhea is familiar with Sheldon’s morning look. She is also prepared for his traditional greeting.

‘Coffee!’

Rhea is ready for this, and hands it over.

She sees that, beneath Sheldon’s maroon flannel bathrobe, his legs are hairless and pale, but they still have some form and muscle. He is clearly shrinking, but is lean and has good posture. It makes him look taller than he is. He shuffles and complains and bosses, but his shoulders are back, and his hands don’t shake when he carries his Penthouse coffee mug — a mail-order item from the back of the magazine during the 1970s, from the look of the girl.

She has begged him to retire the mug … but no.

In any venue beyond this apartment, Sheldon would have been arrested in this outfit. The real question, however, is why Lars has agreed to house this forlorn creature that Rhea loves so much.

But, of course, that is probably the answer right there. She adores Lars — especially for his gentle warmth, his dry humour, his calm temper — and she knows he feels the same. He has a transformative masculinity that hides itself from public view but comes alive privately in the way a cuddly brown bear transforms into a predator.

Rhea attributes this to his upbringing, not just his character. It is as though the Norwegian nation has learned how to rein in unbridled masculine power and bring it into social balance, burying its rough edges from public view, but permitting expansive and embracing moments of both intimacy and force. He is such a sweet character, but he is also a hunter. Lars and his father have been shooting reindeer since Lars was a boy. Rhea has a year’s worth of meat in the freezer. She has tried, but she can’t imagine him pulling the trigger, slicing the hide, disembowelling the kill. And yet he does.

Lars is more than the mere product of his world, though. He has depths of kindness that Rhea feels she lacks in herself. She does not have his capacity for forgiveness. Her emotions and mind and self are more tightly wound, more intertwined in an eternal dialogue for meaning and purpose and expression. She has a compulsion to articulate and expound, to render the world explicable, if only to herself.

Letting it be, moving through, submitting to silence — these are not her ways.

They are for Lars. He comes to terms with humanity as it presents itself. He expresses himself not in a torrent of words and ideas and disruptions, revelations and setbacks, but through an ever-expanding capacity to face what comes next. To see it clearly. To say what needs to be said, and then stop. What is for her an act of will is for Lars a process of life.

They’d wanted children. Only recently, though. Rhea needed time to find her place, to see whether she could graft her American soul onto the Norwegian matrix. And so, when the birth-control pills ran out, she simply stopped going to the pharmacy to renew her prescription. She remembers the day. It was a Saturday in December, not long before Christmas, but after Hanukkah. It must have been one of the darkest days of the year, but their apartment glowed warmly with a Christmas tree and a Menorah. In a game, they listed the sensual accompaniments of holidays gone past.

Clove. Cinnamon. Pine. Marzipan.

‘No, no marzipan.’

‘It’s huge here,’ said Lars. ‘Covered in chocolate.’

‘So whose turn it is?’

‘Yours.’

Bells. Candles. Pie. Apples. Ski wax …

‘Really! Ski wax? Here, too. That’s exciting.’

‘I’m just screwing with you, Lars.’

‘Oh.’

Three words in a row. Sometimes four. That’s how much they had in common. A solid platform for a child.

Rhea sips her café-au-lait and looks at Lars reading Aftenposten’s front page. There is a picture of Kosovar independence from Serbia earlier this year. Something about Brad Pitt. Something about low-carb diets.

No, she hadn’t told Lars that she was trying to get pregnant. It was somehow unnecessary. As though he knew. Or that, being married, he didn’t have to know. What might have unfolded as opera in her New York culture passed here with a hug and his fingers moving through her hair, then gripping it all in his fist.

Lars is reading the newspaper like a normal person, whereas Sheldon is holding a piece of the newspaper up to the light as though looking for watermarks. It is, as always, unclear to Rhea what anything he is doing might mean — whether he is seeking attention like a child, whether his age is merely expressing itself, or whether he’s involved in some activity that, if probed, would sound childish and demented but logical all at once. When the three are combined in this way — his personality, his condition, his reason — it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.

This is Sheldon’s third week in the country. They wanted him to find his place here, to settle into his new life. They all knew there was no going back now. Sheldon was too old, the apartment in Gramercy was sold, and there was nowhere for him to go.

‘I’m not taking the bait,’ she says.

‘Huh?’

Lars and Sheldon each raise their newspapers a bit higher — one to hide, the other to provoke.

‘I said, you nutter, that I’m not taking the bait. I have no interest whatsoever in why you’re looking for the Da Vinci code in the newsprint.’

‘Norwegian sounds like English spoken backwards. I want to see if it reads the same way. I can check by holding it up to the light and reading the article on the other side. But the words on this side of the newspaper are blocking the words on the other side of the newspaper, so I can’t tell.’

Lars speaks: ‘It’s going to be good weather again.’

‘I think we should go out. Papa, how about a walk?’

‘Oh sure, they’d love that, wouldn’t they.’

‘The Koreans?’

‘You said that with a tone. I heard a tone.’

Rhea puts her empty cup in the sink and runs her fingers under some cold water. She wipes them on her jeans.

‘There’s something we need to tell you.’

‘Tell me here.’

‘I’d rather go out.’

‘Not me. I like it here. Near the food. All the pork. It needs me.’

‘We could slip out the back.’

At this, both newspapers drop.

‘There’s a backdoor?’ Sheldon says.

‘Bicycle entrance. Not many people know about it. It’s a secret.’

‘That’s good to know.’

‘Little things like that can save your life.’

‘You’re mocking me. I know you’re mocking me, but I don’t care. I know what’s what. I still got all my marbles, my family jewels, and a bit of savings from my book. And I’m over eighty. That’s something.’

‘So are we going out, or what?’

‘What’s with your neighbours?’ says Sheldon, changing the subject.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Sounds like the fascist beats his wife.’

‘We’ve called the police before.’

‘So you have heard it!’

‘Yes.’

‘You got a gun? Lars, you got a gun?’

‘Not here.’

‘But you’ve got a gun, right? I mean, you don’t run through the forest naked, blond hair flapping in the breeze, and tackle the reindeer with your bare manly chest, right? Kill ’em with your teeth? Blood-stained peach fuzz on your chin? Big grin? There’s a gun involved, right?’

‘Up at the summer house. Moses and Aaron. They’re in a locker by the sauna. One of them is broken.’

‘You have Jewish rifles?’

Lars smiles. ‘Ah, no. A Winchester and a Remington. They’re named after the two cannons in Drøbak that sank the German ship during the war. In the fjord.’

‘Norway has Nazi-killing Jewish cannons?’

‘I never thought of it quite that way.’

Sheldon raises his brows and opens his palms as though to ask what other way one could possibly think about two cannons named Moses and Aaron in Norway that sank a Nazi ship.

Lars relents. ‘Yes, Norway has Nazi-killing Jewish cannons.’

‘But the guns aren’t here. Moses and Aaron are wandering.’

‘At the summer house. Right.’

‘That’s OK. I’m sure we can win a knife fight. What does the Balkan mafia know about knife fighting compared to the three of us?’

‘You know, the cabin is out by the Swedish border. The Norwegian resistance used to operate there. We called them the Boys in the Woods. My father says my grandfather used to hide them in the sauna out back. They used to wear paperclips on their lapels. Many people did. It was an act of rebellion against the occupation.’

Sheldon nods. ‘So Operation Paperclip was effective, was it? That must have been what broke their backs. Who could tolerate such impertinence?’

Rhea says, ‘Papa, I think you need to take a shower, put on some matching clothes — some underwear even — and in return we can slip out the back door.’

Sheldon changes the subject.

‘You know why I wear this watch?’

‘To tell time?’ answers Rhea, submitting to the diversion.

‘No. That’s why I wear a watch. The question is why do I wear this watch. I used to wear one with the heart of your father in it. I’ll explain someday. But I decided, on account of your news, and my coming to the land of blue and ice, to splurge and get a new one. And you know which one I bought? Not an Omega. Not a Rolex. I’ll tell you what I bought. One from J. S. Watch co.

‘Never heard of them? Neither had I. Heard about them by chance. They’re in Iceland. Between the old world and the new. Four guys at the base of a volcano in the middle of the Atlantic who want to try making a buck by crafting exquisite and refined timepieces because they love them. Because they understand that a timepiece is an affirmative and creative act of engineering and beauty in response to a pitiless structure of functionality and form. Like life itself in response to death. Plus, mine’s a looker! See this?’

‘Outside. We’re going outside.’

‘I don’t have any keys to the house. I’m not autonomous.’

‘We’ll make you some. So what?’

‘When your father was little, he deliberately stopped matching his own clothes. It was an act of rebellion against his oppressive father. So we bought him nothing but Levis — the jeans named after a tribe of Israel that can magically match any top. Tie-dye, plaid, stripes, camouflage. You can throw anything at Levis. With this I out-manoeuvred your father. In return, we ended up with a child with no fashion sense.’

‘I think breakfast is over.’

‘He’s in the book, you know.’

‘I know, Papa.’

‘And your grandmother.’

‘I know.’

‘And a lot of angry Europeans.’

‘Yup.’

‘And a dog.’

‘Right-o.’

The book. ‘The book’ was Sheldon’s only verifiable claim to fame. In 1955, still a bit lost after the war and not much looking to be found, he somehow cottoned on to the idea of becoming a photographer. As it happened, he turned into a popular one. Long before thematic coffee books became the rage, Sheldon decided to travel and take portraits. Unfortunately, despite his talent with the camera, he lacked certain social graces — which was problematic, as taking portraits required willing subjects.

To Sheldon’s credit, however, he turned even this to his advantage by changing the subject of his portraits to unwilling subjects. In this, he demonstrated a certain penchant. And so, ‘Photos of Unwilling Subjects’ was the name of the project.

By 1956, Sheldon had collected exactly six hundred and thirteen photographs from twelve cities across five countries of people apoplectically angry at him. Over two hundred made it into the book. The rest remained in storage boxes that he guarded, hid, and never let anyone see. It wasn’t until Saul brought it up in conversation one time that anyone even suspected there were more photos. But even then Sheldon kept them hidden.

In the book, there were women screaming, men shaking their fists, children hysterical, and even dogs in mid-flight with their teeth bared. In his own graceless sarcasm, the book — which found an unusually fine publisher and no small audience — was entitled ‘What?’

In a brief interview with Harper’s, they asked what he did to make everyone so angry.

‘Whatever I could think of,’ he’d replied. ‘I pulled hair, teased kids, hassled dogs, tipped over ice-cream cones, heckled the elderly, left without paying, snatched cabs, cracked wise, walked off with other people’s luggage, insulted wives, complained to waiters, cut in line, tipped hats, and I didn’t hold the elevator for anyone. It was the best year of my life.’

Saul was on page one. Sheldon had just taken the toddler’s candy away, and then took photos of him with a flash that enraged him entirely. Mabel became livid, thereby earning herself a place on page two.

There is a copy of the book in Rhea’s living room. She has shown it to Lars. Their favourite photo is modelled on Doisneau’s ‘Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville’ in Paris, which had only just been printed in Life magazine. Sheldon had intuited the photo’s iconic power of being a moment snatched from time during a period of change. In Sheldon’s version, two lovers have been interrupted during a kiss. They are gripping the iron railing of the bridge, and the woman is hurling a bottle of wine at the camera (technically, at Sheldon). It was a bright day, so Sheldon had used a small aperture-setting to capture a long depth of field, which managed to keep most of the scene in focus. The black-and-white photo — of superb composition — captured not only the angry face of the woman (her hand still extended from the throw, her face contorted, her body bent slightly over the railing as though hurling her very self at the camera), but also the vintage of the flying bottle (1948 Chateau Beychevelle, St Julien, Bordeaux). It was, genuinely, a brilliant photograph. And in 1994, when Doisneau admitted that his own photo had been staged (because the girl in it wanted some cash forty years on, and sued him, thereby forcing the photographer’s admission that she’d been hired, thus breaking the spell of the original photo), Sheldon went bananas and proclaimed himself the master.

‘The original was a fake, and the fake was an original!’ In 1995 his own photo was reissued, bringing him another week of notoriety and an opportunity to be incorrigible at family gatherings. This, for Sheldon, was a joy beyond description.

‘Get dressed. We’ll take a walk,’ Rhea says.

‘You two go. I’ll catch up.’

Lars looks up at Rhea, who glances back knowingly.

‘Papa, we want to tell you something about last night. Come with us.’

Sheldon looks at Lars, who is innocently placing a piece of herring on dark bread.

‘You don’t want me wandering around alone. You want me supervised. Which is why you want to strap that mobile phone on me. But I won’t have it!’

‘We like your company.’

‘Your grandmother was better at manipulating me than you two. I’m not giving in until you raise your game.’

‘Right, well, I’m going out. So who’s with me?’

Lars raises his hand.

‘Lars! Great! Anyone else?’ She looks around the room. ‘No one else?’

‘I have things to do,’ says Sheldon.

‘Like what?’

‘Private things.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘So what?’

‘It’s a nice day, and I want you out of the house.’

‘Did you know that I went through eight cameras making that book? Six were brutally smashed by the subjects — Mario’s was the first to go, one I dropped in the Hudson, and one was actually eaten by a dog. What I loved was how the dog blamed the camera and not me. The photo of the inside of his mouth is on page thirty-seven. And, of course, having pushed the button himself, the dog got the photo credit.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘It’s cute how you think I have a point.’

She scowls. Sheldon smiles. Lars announces he is going to get dressed. Breakfast is over.

Rhea is alone with Sheldon.

‘What’s with you? I said there was something I wanted to tell you.’

‘Go out with your husband. Go to the cabin. Make love on a fur blanket. Eat moose jerky. Drink akevitt that’s crossed the equator a few times. Two hundred years ago, we Jews wouldn’t have been allowed in this country. Now you’ve found a nice boy, and he loves you, and you’re going to have pretty babies. I’ll be here when you get back.’

‘Sometimes I think there’s an actual person in there with you, and then other times … I think it’s just you.’

‘Go get dressed and go. I’ll rinse my mug.’

Rhea’s arms are still crossed. She looks at Sheldon as though deciding something. And then, in a low voice touched with anger, she says, ‘I had a miscarriage.’

There is a deep silence from her grandfather, and his face settles. The muscles release, and for a moment she sees him in all his force. The years flow into him. A frightening weariness comes to his mouth and brow. She immediately regrets saying this. She should have stuck to her agreement with Lars. To break it slowly. To prepare the ground.

Sheldon stands quietly and wraps the robe around himself. And then, as though the tears were there all along, he walks back to his room and openly weeps alone.

Hours later, at two in the afternoon, he is alone in the apartment. His earlier insistence that Rhea and Lars go out had become quite different in tone when it was repeated later. He’d made it clear to them that he needed solitude, and so they went.

Dressed in jeans, a white button-down shirt, and a pair of workman’s boots, he has recovered his composure and is comfortably stretched on the sofa with a book by Danielle Steele when the shouting starts again.

He has heard domestic squabbles before — the rounds of yelling, the escalation, the occasional banging, and even the beatings and sobs. But this is different. The cadence of the argument is wrong. There is no turn-taking between angry participants. The man had started screaming and then kept it up. The woman, this time, hasn’t made a sound.

She must be in there, Sheldon thinks.

It doesn’t have the pauses of a phone conversation. The diatribe is too linear, too intimate. The hollering voice is too present.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest that Sheldon can’t understand a word, because the message is clear. He has had enough experience with humanity, with its range of rage, to know what is happening. There is cruelty and viciousness in that voice. It is more than a squabble. It is a battle.

Then there is a loud bang.

Sheldon puts the book down and sits upright on the sofa. He is attentive, his brows furrowed.

No, not a gunshot. It wasn’t sharp enough. He knows gunshots from his life and from his dreams. It was probably a door slamming. And then he hears approaching footsteps that are quick and even. The woman, perhaps. A heavy woman, or one wearing boots, or carrying something heavy. She is coming down the stairs. First the one flight, then a brief pause on the landing, then the other.

It takes her the same time to manoeuvre down the staircase as it does Sheldon to get to the front door and spy her through the peephole.

And there she is. The source, or focus, or even the cause of it all. Through the fisheye lens, Sheldon sees a young woman around thirty years old standing directly in front of his door. She is close enough that he can only see her from the waist up, but it is enough to place her. She wears a dark T-shirt under a cheap brown-leather jacket. She has gaudy costume jewellery, and her hair is styled with some thick mousse or gel that prevents it from responding to the normal forces of gravity.

Everything about her says Balkans. Sheldon can only guess her life, and yet everything about it seems scripted, aside from her incongruous presence in Oslo. But that is easily explained by asylum practices. Maybe she was Serb or Kosovar or Albanian. Or maybe Romanian. Who knows?

His first feeling is one of pity. Not for the person she is, but for the circumstances she faces.

The feeling lasts until a memory transforms it.

They did this with us, too, he thinks, looking through the peephole. And then the pity vanishes and is replaced by the indignation that lives just beneath the surface of his daily routines and quick retorts.

The Europeans. Almost all of them, at one time or another. They looked out their peepholes — their little fishy eyes peeping out through bulging lenses, watching someone else’s flight — as their neighbours clutched their children to their chests while armed thugs chased them through buildings as though humanity itself was being exterminated. Behind the glass some felt afraid, others pitiful, others murderous and delighted.

All were safe because of what they were not. They were not, for example, Jews.

The woman spins around. Looking for something.

What? What is she looking for?

The fight has taken place only one floor above him. The monster upstairs could be down in seconds. Why is she delaying? Why is she hesitant? What is taking so long?

There is rummaging upstairs. The monster is pushing and heaving and searching for something. He is moving walls and mountains. He is peeling the very darkness from the light to find it. At any moment he will stop and turn on her and demand it.

Sheldon mutters under his breath. ‘Run, you fool. Get out, go to the police, and don’t look back. He’s going to kill you.’

And then the bang echoes from upstairs. Same as before. It is the door hitting the wall behind it.

Aloud, Sheldon says, ‘Run, you dummy. Why are you just standing there?’

On a hunch, Sheldon turns his head and looks out the front window. And there is the answer. A white Mercedes is parked outside. Inside, men in cheap leather jackets are smoking cigarettes, barring her escape.

And that seals it.

Quietly, slowly, but without hesitation, Sheldon opens the door.

What he sees is not what he expected.

The woman is clutching an ugly pink box just big enough to hold an adult pair of shoes. And she is not alone. Pressed against her belly is a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old. He is clearly terrified. He is dressed in little blue wellington boots with yellow Paddington Bears painted on the sides by hand. Tucked inside carefully are beige corduroy trousers. On top, he is wrapped in a green jacket of waxed cotton.

The footsteps from up above pound the floors. A voice hollers a name. Vera, maybe? Laura? Clara? Two syllables, anyway. Barked out. Coughed up.

Sheldon ushers them in with his finger pressed against his lips.

Vera looks up the stairs, then out the door. She does not look at Sheldon. She does not wonder about his intentions or give him a chance to reconsider by looking into his eyes for clarity. She pushes the silent boy in front of herself and into the flat.

Sheldon closes the door very, very quietly. The woman with her wide Slavic face looks at him in conspiratorial terror. They all squat down with their backs against the door, waiting for the monster to pass.

Again he raises his finger to his lips. ‘Shhh,’ he says.

No need to look out the peephole now. He is no longer one of the people he abhorred. Sitting next to his neighbours, he wants to stand in the middle of a soccer field with a bull horn, surrounded by Europe’s oldest generation and yell, ‘Was that so f*cking hard?’

But outside he is silent. Disciplined. Calm. An old soldier.

‘When you sneak up on a man to kill him with a knife,’ his staff sergeant explained sixty years ago, ‘don’t stare at him. People know when you’re staring at the backs of their heads. I don’t know how, I don’t know why. Just don’t look at their heads. Look at the feet, approach, get the knife in. Head forward, not back. Never let him know you’re there. If you want him dead, make him dead. Don’t negotiate it with him. He’s likely to disagree.’

Sheldon never had trouble with this end of things. Never pondered the imponderables, questioned his mission, doubted his function. Before he got lost and ended up on the HMAS Bataan, he was shaken awake one night by Mario de Luca. Mario was from San Francisco. His parents had emigrated from Tuscany with the intention of buying wine land north of San Francisco, but somehow his father never got out of the city, and Mario was drafted. Where Donny had intense blue eyes and sandy blond hair, Mario was dark like a Sicilian fisherman. And he talked like he’d been injected with some kind of truth serum.

‘Donny? Donny, you up?’

Donny didn’t answer.

‘Donny. Donny, you up?’

This went on for minutes.

‘Donny. Donny, you up?’

‘It will not help my cause by answering you,’ he’d said.

‘Donny, I don’t get this invasion. I don’t get this war. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. What are we doing here?’

Donny was dressed in flannel pyjamas that were not government-issue. He replied, ‘You get out of the boat. You shoot Koreans. You get back in the boat. What confuses you?’

‘The middle part,’ Mario explained. ‘Although, now that I think about it, the first part, too.’

‘What about the third part?’

‘No, that part is like crystal.’

‘So what about the first two?’

‘My motivation? What’s my motivation?’

‘They’ll be shooting at you.’

‘Then what’s their motivation?’

‘You’ll be shooting at them.’

‘What if I don’t shoot at them?’

‘They’ll still be shooting at you because other people will be shooting at them, and they won’t differentiate. And you’ll want them to stop, so you’ll shoot back.’

‘What if I ask them not to?’

‘They’re too far away, and they speak Korean.’

‘So I need to get closer and have a translator?’

‘Right. But you can’t.’

‘Because they’re shooting at me.’

‘That’s the problem.’

‘But that’s absurd!’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘It can’t be true!’

‘Most things are both true and absurd.’

‘That’s also absurd.’

‘And yet …?’

‘It may also be true. Jesus, Donny. I’m going to be up all night.’

Then Donny whispered, ‘If you don’t go to bed, there will be no tomorrow. And it’ll be all your fault.’

The monster’s feet stop outside the door. What were stomping, pounding footfalls of a pursuer are now gentle shuffles. Whoever is chasing them is now spinning around, looking for them as though they might be hiding in a shadow or under a ray of light. Outside, a car door slams. Then another slams. There is fast talking in Serbian, or Albanian, or whatever it is. The conversation is easy to imagine.

‘Where did they go?’

‘I thought they were with you?’

‘They must have come out the front door.’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

And then, because they are amateurs, because they are fools, they turn on each other and away from the task at hand.

‘That’s because you were smoking and talking about that slut again.’

‘It was your job to bring them out. I’m just waiting.’

And so on.

One sound is all it would take to give them away. One squeal of glee from the hiding child who thinks it is all a game, or a whine because of his immobility. Or simply a cry of fear — something so human as a cry of fear.

Sheldon looks at him. The boy’s back is against the door like his own, and his knees are up. He has wrapped his arms around them and is looking down at the floor in a gesture of defeat and isolation. Sheldon understands at once that he is assuming a familiar position. He will be silent. It has been a learned skill in his world of terror.

And then the talking, the bickering, ends. The doors to the Mercedes open and close again, and the powerful engine starts. In a few moments, the car pulls off.

Sheldon sighs. He rubs his hands all over his face to stimulate some blood flow, and then forcefully massages his scalp. He has always imagined his brain like the liquid iron core of the earth — grey and heavy, constantly in motion, producing its own gravity, and carefully balanced on his neck’s vertebrae like the earth is balanced on the backs of turtles in the cosmos.

Events like this tend to cause the iron flow to slow or even reverse, which can result in ice ages. A little massage usually takes care of the grey matter, though.

This time he is cold all over.

He looks up at his companions, who are still foetal on his floor. The woman looks more pasty, more podgy, than she was when viewed through the fisheye lens. The thin leather jacket is thinner. The trampy shirt is trampier. It all speaks to lower-class Balkan immigrant. He never saw the man outside the door. He could only imagine him being fat and sweating, wearing a Chinese-made Adidas tracksuit with white stripes down the arms and legs. His equally foul-breathed colleagues are probably in dark open shirts under poorly fitting, fake designer jackets, the texture of vinyl.

It is all so hopelessly predictable. Everything except the painted Paddington Bears on the boy’s bright-blue wellingtons. These have been painted by someone with love and imagination. Sheldon is, at this moment, inexplicably prepared to credit them to the pasty hooker on his floor.

The car has moved off, so Sheldon says to the boy, ‘Those are nice boots.’

The boy looks up from the crook of his arm. He does not understand. Sheldon can’t be sure if it’s the comment itself that he doesn’t understand, the timing of the comment, or else the language. There is no good reason, after all, to think he speaks English, except that everyone these days speaks English.

I mean, really. Why speak anything else? Stubbornness. That’s why.

It also occurs to him that perhaps it is the soothing and encouraging male voice that is so rare and so unfamiliar. He lives in a world of violent men, like so many boys do. With this thought, he can’t help but try again.

‘Nice bears,’ says Sheldon, pointing at the bears and giving the thumbs up.

The boy looks down at the boots and turns one leg inward to get a look at the boots for himself. He does not know what Sheldon is saying, but he does know what he’s talking about. He looks back at Sheldon without a smile, and then places his face back into the crook of his arm.

The woman stands up during Sheldon’s gesture to the boy and is now talking. She is speaking quickly. The tone is grateful and seemingly apologetic, which seems to follow, given the circumstances. The words themselves are gibberish but, luckily, Sheldon speaks English, which is universally understood.

‘You’re welcome. Yes. Yes — yes. Look, I’m old, so take my advice. Leave your husband. He’s a Nazi.’

Her babbling continues. Even looking at her is exasperating. She has the accent of a Russian prostitute. The same nasal confidence. The same fluid slur of words. Not a single moment taken to collect her thoughts or search for a phrase. Only the educated stop to look for words — having enough to occasionally misplace them.

Sheldon labours to his feet and brushes off his trousers. He holds up his hands. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I’m not even sure I care. Just go to the police and get your boy a milkshake.’

She does not slow down.

‘Milkshake,’ says Sheldon. ‘Police.’

Sheldon decides her name is Vera. Sheldon watches Vera gesture towards the boy and nod. She points and nods. She nods and points. She puts her hands together in a praying gesture. She crosses herself, which makes Sheldon lift his eyebrows for the first time.

‘In that case, why not just stay, have a cup of tea, and wait this out for an hour? Waiting is wise. He might come back. You don’t want to go back to the apartment. Believe me.’

He thinks for a moment. There is a word they used in the Ukrainian part of Brooklyn. Yes. ‘Chai.’ It is Russian for tea. He makes sipping sounds and says it again. To be absolutely certain he is communicating, he sticks out his pinkie finger and makes yummy slurping sounds.

‘Tea. Nazi. Milkshake. Police. Are we clear?’

Vera does not respond to Sheldon’s pantomime. Exasperated, Sheldon throws up his hands. It is like persuading a plant to move.

As Vera keeps talking and the boy sits, Sheldon hears a rumbling — the familiar if distant sound of a German diesel engine pinging and ponging its way slowly around a nearby bend.

‘They’re coming back. We have to leave. Now. They might not be as stupid as they absolutely seem to be. Come on. Come-come-come-come-come.’ He gestures, and when the car stops and the door opens, he decides the time for niceties has ended.

With extraordinary effort, Sheldon bends down and lifts the boy up, cradling him under the bottom like a toddler. He is not strong enough to use a free arm to grab Vera’s sleeve and pull her. He needs all his strength for the boy. He has nothing to move her but his power to convince. And he knows his power is limited.

‘Puzhaltzda,’ he says. Please.

It is the only real Russian he knows.

He moves with the boy to the three stairs that descend into his own apartment.

There is a bang at the door.

‘Puzhaltzda,’ he says.

She talks more. She is explaining something crucial. He cannot make any sense of it, and then makes the kind of decision a soldier makes with simple, irreproachable logic.

‘I cannot understand you and I am not going to. A violent man is at the front door. I am therefore leaving through the back door. I am taking the boy. If you come with us, you will be better off. If not, I am removing you from the equation. So here we go.’

Sheldon steps down into his bedroom, past the bathroom, and past the closet on his right. Beyond the bookshelf there is a hanging Persian rug that covers the bicycle entrance, which Sheldon has known about for three weeks — not just this morning — but didn’t want to admit finding on the day he moved into their apartment.

Say what you want, but there is a value to knowing the entrances and exits to places and problems.

With his elbow, he pushes the rug aside and sees the door behind.

‘Right, that’s it. We’re going. Now.’

The banging has changed from a firm knock to a frontal assault on the door. The monster is attempting to get in. He is kicking it with his boot. Hammering at the spot where the thin deadbolt holds the fifty-year-old dry-wood door to the opposing wall.

It is only a matter of time.

The problem is that the door in front of Sheldon is also locked, and he can’t manage to get it undone while holding the boy.

‘Come here, you fruitcake. Open this. Open it! Goddamn it!’

But she does not open it. She has crouched down under his bed.

Is she hiding there? That would be madness. Why hide when escape is possible?

There is no option. Sheldon has to put down the boy to struggle with the lock. And when he does, the boy rushes to his mother.

Just then the front door is kicked in.

It slams into the wall. Though he can’t see the front door from his angle, he hears the wood splinter and something metallic clank on the ground.

What Sheldon does next is focus.

‘Panic is the enemy,’ said staff sergeant O’Callihan in 1950. ‘Panic is not the same as being scared. Everyone gets scared. It is a survival mechanism. It tells you that something is wrong and requires your attention. Panic is when scared takes over your brain, rendering you utterly f*cking useless. If you panic in the water, you will drown. If you panic on the battlefield, you will get shot. If you panic as a sniper, you will reveal your location, miss your mark, and fail your mission. Your father will hate you, your mother will ignore you, and women across this planet will be able to smell the stench of failure oozing from your very pores. So, Private Horowitz! What is the lesson here?’

‘Hold on a second. It’s on the tip of my tongue.’

Sheldon focuses on the lock. There is a chain lock that he slides off. There is a deadbolt that he twists. There is a door latch that he presses downward as he also lowers his weight onto it in the hopes the hinges will not squeak.

The steps down into Sheldon’s flat are not immediately visible from the kitchen. There are two other bedrooms off the living room for the monster to search first before reaching the stairs.

It is just a matter of seconds now.

Sheldon grabs the boy by the shoulders just as the mother emerges from under the bed. There is a moment when all three are standing silently. Looking at each other. Pausing before the final assault.

A stillness happens.

Vera is framed by the doorway leading upstairs. The Norwegian summer light floods around her, and in that blessed moment she looks like a saint from a Renaissance painting. Eternal and beloved.

And then there are heavy footfalls.

Vera hears them. She opens her eyes wide, then — slowly, quietly — pushes her boy towards Sheldon, mouths something to him Sheldon doesn’t understand, and then turns. Before the legs of the monster can descend the three steps, Vera, determined, rushes up the stairs and launches her whole body at him.

The boy takes a tentative step forward, but Sheldon grabs him. With his free hand, he tries the back door one more time. It still won’t open. They are trapped.

Releasing the rug and letting it fall back into position, Sheldon opens the closet door and leads the boy in. He raises his finger to his lips to signal silence. His eyes are so stern, and the boy so terrified, that not a sound passes between them.

There is screaming, heavy-body heaving and crashing, and cruelty upstairs.

He should go. He should grab the poker from by the fireplace and swing with all the force of mighty justice, and lodge the spike into the monster’s brainstem, standing tall as his lifeless body collapses full force to the floor.

But he doesn’t.

With his fingers under the door’s edge, he pulls it closed as far as it will go.

As he hears the sound of choking, the smell of urine fills the closet. He pulls the boy to his chest, presses his lips against his head, and places his hands around the boy’s ears.

‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. This is the best I can do. I’m so sorry.’