Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 4

Sheldon never saw the attack on his son in Vietnam. But he imagined it, over and over and over again. It appeared faithfully in his dreams, night after night after night. Mabel would shake him awake. ‘You’re dreaming,’ she’d say.

‘No. It’s not like a dream.’

‘A nightmare, then. It’s a nightmare.’

‘No, not even that. It’s like I’m there. In the boat with him. Patrolling the Mekong. Up a tributary at night. I can taste the coffee. My feet itch.’

Mabel was forty-five. She slept naked, except for her wedding ring and a thin white-gold necklace adorned with a tiny diamond pendant at the end. She’d made it from the engagement ring that Sheldon gave her in 1951, and never took it off.

Mabel did not have trouble waking at odd hours of the night. Her husband’s bouts of fear did not disturb her. Twenty-three years earlier, Saul used to keep her up, as he was a colicky baby. Since then, she’d never needed much sleep. Since Saul died, it no longer mattered.

Sheldon’s dream started one summer night in New York, 1975. Saul was already buried. Mabel lay stretched out on top of the white sheets. She was curvy and petite, and liked to stretch her body by pointing her toes and arching her back and extending her fingers as far as she could until everything tingled. She’d hold the position until she cramped and then released …

They lay there awake in the dark.

Donny was also lying naked on the white sheet. It was scorching that summer. They had no air conditioning. An old antique ceiling fan, which looked as though it had been imported from colonial Kenya, was spinning slowly. It forced the hot air down.

Mabel switched on the bedside light.

They had not had the conversation yet. Donny had not asked the question that upset him. He had been, at least until tonight, prepared to go on like this. To wake in the morning, go to the watch-repair shop, put on an eyepiece, and replace a hairspring, oil a wheel train, change a broken balance staff, or just affix a new crown. Eat a sandwich. Come home. Make small talk. Read a paper. Smoke a pipe. Have a drink. Go to sleep. Day after day, quietly allowing time to pass while fixing the instruments that measured it.

But that summer night in 1975 was different. There was no way of knowing what made it different. Maybe it was the temperature — the way the heat in his imaginary Vietnam followed him to the lower-east side of New York, and the sweat from the jungle soaked into his bed sheets.

Maybe there was just no more room left inside him to contain his inner world any longer, and, regardless of the possible consequences, it needed to be released.

When she took his hand in hers and sighed, Donny asked the question.

‘Why are you still with me? Why haven’t you left me?’

His voice, as he remembers it, was calm. Quiet. Sincere. Drawing from a subterranean reservoir of humanity, still and quiet in our collective souls.

There was a long pause before Mabel answered. He looked at her painted toes as they flexed. She had beautiful arches.

‘You know what I’ve been thinking about?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I’m been thinking about those two spaceships that just found each other in all that emptiness.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She turned her head and frowned. ‘You don’t watch the news?’

‘I’ve been keeping my head down.’

‘The Apollo and a Russian spaceship. The Soyuz. They linked up two days ago. Out there in the blackness. In all that silence, they connected. I wonder what it was like to hear that sound. To be floating. Weightless. And then suddenly you hear the clang of metal against the hull of your spaceship. Your enemy extends his hand. You grip it with your glove. Above it all, finally. It gave me a feeling I used to have. I don’t remember what you call it. It was like … sort of like a smell that you walk past one day, and this world rushes back in and time vanishes, and you’re there again. What would you call that?’

‘Hope.’

‘You should have watched the news.’

‘I can’t tell if this is an answer or not.’

‘I’m still here, Sheldon. Does it matter why?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I need to know how fragile it is.’

‘It isn’t science, Donny.’

‘I’m working on a tough watch back at the shop. It’s an Omega Speedmaster. There’s a broken screw that sits just below the surface of the hammer spring. I have to strip the whole thing down to the bones to get a grip on it, and I’m not even sure I know how to put it all back together again once I do. All these in-house calibres are a little special. Anyway, it’s the same watch your astronauts wear out in space.’

‘Is this a coincidence?’

‘It’s a popular watch. I had one myself, but Saul took it. I don’t know where it went.’

‘That’s too bad. I like coincidences.’

‘Do you blame me?’

‘Do you blame yourself?’

‘Yes. Entirely. I brought him up on war stories. I told him that a man fights for his country. I encouraged him to enlist. Jews can’t get out of Russia. They file their papers to emigrate and they get blacklisted — they call them refuseniks. They live like nervous rats. We live like men. That’s because we’re Americans. And America is at war. So, Johnny, go get your gun, I said.’

‘You said so before.’

‘They’re smoking dope and listening to records. We’re all a bunch of change-the-world liberals now, I said.’

‘You said this before. We don’t need to do this again.’

‘I had to fill my kid with ideas.’

‘I know.’

‘I remember when Harry James hit that C-note above high C at Carnegie Hall in 1938. It was Benny Goodman’s orchestra. No one was sure if jazz deserved that level of respectability — if those musicians were serious enough to deserve Carnegie Hall. And then that one note. The city went wild. Can you even imagine a single note being heard across this country anymore? They smash their guitars on stage now. My son could have played music. I sent him to war.’

‘It wasn’t his nature.

Sheldon shook his head.

‘We used to worry that if we picked him up when he cried, he’d never learn self-reliance. What the hell were we thinking?’

‘I’m staying with you, Sheldon. I think it’s enough for now. OK?’

‘Yeah. OK.’

And that was it, the last time they brought it up. If there was more to be said, she took it to the grave.

They manage to escape shortly before the police arrive.

Sheldon gently cracks opened the closet door and listens as carefully as he can. He listens for several minutes. Listens for the crush of glass on the steps, the sound of doors opening, closing. He knows there is no defence if they are discovered, but he can help prevent that from happening.

The struggle had been horrible and long. The boy had buried his face in Sheldon’s chest. And when it was over, Sheldon had felt a wave of shame and regret as powerful and unavoidable as the years after Saul died. In his mind, any other sequence of events — not opening the door for her, not keeping them there so long, calling the police, anything — would have resulted in that poor woman living on to raise her gentle son. He may as well have murdered her himself.

He fully opens the closet door and looks around the room. Nothing has been disturbed. The monster has not come here.

Sheldon yanks down the rug that covers the back door and works the lock. He jiggles it, and presses on the door, and lifts up and finally manages to push it open just enough to let them out. It is noisy and heavy. Something heavy had been pressed against the door. He could not have done it without being heard. This is small comfort.

Speaking into the dark closet, Sheldon whispers — so as not to startle the boy — ‘You stay here for just one moment. I’ll check to make sure the coast is clear, and then we’ll go. Because we can’t walk through the living room.’

Sheldon slips through the doorway into a small alley behind the building. A garbage bin had been pressing against the door. Rust had formed on the hinges, from neglect. And together these could have killed them.

Sheldon walks a few metres to his left and emerges on a side street where the sun is shining and couples walk by. It is calm and safe and uneventful. The events in the apartment do not radiate from it, disrupting the world around. We are all truly unconnected.

Before Sheldon turns to collect the boy from the apartment, a white Mercedes slowly drives by. It is the same Mercedes he saw from the window. In the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead, is a man in a black leather jacket with gold chains. Beside him is another man.

This other man and Sheldon look at each other as the car drives by. There is no recognition on his face. He has never seen Sheldon before. He has no reason to suspect that the old man is anything more than a random bystander near a murder scene.

But there is a connection. Some moment has passed between them. Sheldon feels it immediately.

As the car drives past, Sheldon mutters quietly so that the words have been spoken, even if there is no one there to hear them: You can’t have him. As God is my witness, you can’t have him.

Inside, he writes the note. The message comes to him as if the words were prophetic. Rhea will understand, won’t she? She’ll get the reference. She’ll know where he’s going. She’ll know what it all means.

He leaves it on his dresser table by the photos and under his jacket patch from the Marine Corps. Though the idea comes to him, he chooses not to write down the time.

On leaving the apartment through the back door, Sheldon and the boy do not need to wander far to find a safe and public place where they are unlikely to be found. Like so many other Norwegians, they drift into the Botanical Gardens and hide themselves in the beauty of the day. Only they are not like other Norwegians.

Sitting on a park bench after buying the boy an ice-cream cone, Sheldon checks his watch so he can know precisely the moment he ran out of ideas.

2:42 p.m. As good a time as any.

A police car drives by behind them with its lights on and siren going. Soon after, another follows. He knows immediately that they must have found her. And soon they’ll find the note.

‘What we need to do, kid, is hole up in a cave like Huckleberry Finn for a while. Do you know that story? Huck Finn? He went upriver after confronting his evil father. Faked his own death. Met up with a runaway slave named Jim. Sort of like you and me, if an old Jew and a little Albanian dressed like Paddington Bear are reasonable stand-ins for the original cast. Point is, though, we’ve got to hole up somewhere. Our own version of Jackson’s Island. We’ve also got to go up-river. Go north to freedom. And I’ve got an idea about how to do that. The trouble is, though, I’m out of my element here. I don’t know what use I am to you. I can’t give you up. I can’t just hand you over to the police and hope that the Norwegians don’t just hand you over to the monster from upstairs. How should I know who he is? What I do know is that it isn’t your fault, and that’s enough for me right now. So I’m on your side. Got it?’

The boy chews the remaining stump in silence, looking down at his wellingtons.

‘You’re going to need a name. What’s your name?’

The Paddingtons dangle.

‘I’m Donny.’ He points at himself. ‘Donny. You can try Mr Horowitz, but I think that’s a doomed proposition. Donny. I’m Donny.’

He waits.

‘Eye contact would be helpful here.’

He waits again. Another police car drives by with the sirens blasting.

They are sitting on a bench not far from the Zoological Museum. Plush grass surrounds trees in full flush. Lilies line the base of bushes, and children — many about the boy’s age — are gliding along on odd sneakers that seemed to have wheels in their heels.

A dark cloud passes over, cooling the air and bringing with it a thousand shadows.

Sheldon continues speaking for both of them. Silence is not a practised skill of his.

‘My son’s name was Saul. He was named for the first king of Israel. This was three thousand years ago. Saul had a hard life. And it was a hard time. The Philistines had taken the Ark of the Covenant, people were miserable, and he had to pull it all together. Which he did. But he couldn’t hold it. He was a flawed man in many ways. But not in others. One of the things I like best about Saul is how he spared the life of Agag. This was the king of the Amalekites. Saul’s army defeated them and, according to Samuel — whom I do not like — Saul was supposed to put Agag to death because it was the will of God. But Saul spared him.

‘I see these men, men like Saul, men like Abraham. They hear God’s vengeful voice, raining down to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, to take the life of the defeated king. But these men stand between God and what he’d destroy, and refuse to let it happen. And so I wonder to myself, Where are they getting these ideas about right and wrong, about good and evil, if not from God himself? It’s as though, at one time, the river of the universe flowed through the veins of these men, and connected us to eternal truths — truths deeper than even God could remember in his anger. Truths that Jewish men stood on like firm ground and looked into Heaven and insisted remain. What are these truths? Where are these men?

‘I picture Abraham standing on a hilltop, a rocky, reddish hilltop, above Gomorrah as the clouds gather for their attack, and he extends a hand to the sky and says, “Will you destroy this city if there are still a hundred good people?” And at that moment, wretched though he is, standing before the forces of the eternal, he is the height of everything man can be. That one person. Standing there alone with dirty feet, a filthy robe in the hot coming wind. Confused. Alone. Sad. Betrayed by God. He becomes, at that moment, the voice beyond the voice. The gathering. ‘Is God acting justly’ he wonders. In that moment, humanity transforms itself into a conscious race.

‘God may have breathed life into us. But it was only when we used it to correct God that we became men. Became, however briefly, what we can be. Took our place in the universe. Became the children of the night.

‘And then Saul — my Saul — decided to go to Vietnam because his father had been to Korea, and his father went to Korea because he didn’t go to Germany. And Saul died there. It was me. I encouraged him. I think I took the life of my boy in the name of a moral cause. But in the end I was nothing like Abraham. Nothing like Saul. And God didn’t stay my hand.’

For the first time that Sheldon can recall, the boy is looking at him. So he smiles. He smiles the kind of smile that only the old can deliver. The smile that appreciates the importance of the moment more than the reality of it.

The boy does not smile back. So Sheldon smiles for both of them.

‘And then there was the other Saul — Rabbi Saul of Tarsus. A Roman. Liked to fall off horses. According to you Gentile types, he persecuted the early Christians until he had a revelation, a vision, on the road to Damascus. And so Saul became Paul. And Paul became a saint for the Church. And a good man he was.

‘You didn’t know I knew all this stuff, did you? I do. No one ever asks me. Lucky for me, though, I’ve got a rich inner life. Now I’ve got you.

‘What if I call you Paul? A boy transformed? The one who fell and got up again? The Christian reborn from the fallen Jew? Would you mind that? It’ll be my own private joke. All the best ones are.

‘All right. Let’s go hide at the movies.’

It is hard for Sheldon to remember the last time he’d held a boy’s sticky hand in his own. The chubby fingers and light but purposeful grip. The trust and responsibility. The moderation of gait and the slight stoop of his own shoulder. Was the last time really with Saul? That would make it over fifty years ago. The feeling is too familiar, too immediate to assimilate that answer, even if it is true. The prospect of fifty years existing between this feeling and the last time he had it fills him with remorse.

There was Rhea, of course. A love he never expected. But this was a boy’s hand.

Rhea and Lars stand outside the police station in silence. They are free to go, but are instructed to remain reachable at all times. Lars watches the cars pass. Rhea bites a piece of her lip, takes it into her fingers, and flicks it off her fingertip into the light breeze. They both stand there for a couple of minutes. Eventually, Lars speaks up.

‘So now what?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘I suppose we could take the bike around town and look for him,’ he says.

‘I can’t believe he doesn’t have a mobile phone.’

‘He refused. Said we’d use it to track him.’

‘And we accepted that.’

‘Only because he never left the house.’

‘He’s left now,’ says Rhea.

A few more cars pass and a thick cloud passes overhead, bringing a quick chill. It is a reminder of the distance they have all come. How far they are from home.

‘Yes, he did,’ Lars says. ‘He sure did.’