Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 6

Rhea and Lars left the police station and then rode around the city for hours, looking for Sheldon. Their search was random at first. They rode through neighbourhoods close to the centre, and up and down the most popular roads. Karl Johan’s Gate. Kristian IV’s Gate. Wergelandsveien by the new Literature House. Up Hegdehaugsveien onto Bogstadveien, and then all around Majorstuen. Back to Frogner Park, down into Frogner, down to Vika, down to the port.

Then they chose locations. There was a synagogue, but no sign of Sheldon. There was an all-day topless bar, but no sign of Sheldon. There were bookstores, but no sign of Sheldon.

Lars suggested they stay overnight in town. Someplace nice. Someplace expensive. Perhaps the Grand Hotel? But the Grand Hotel had no rooms, so they stayed nearby at the Continental.

Lars slept deeply. He was exhausted.

Rhea stared into the ceiling, her life playing backwards and forwards.

The breakfast in the Hotel Continental this morning is good, but Rhea is not hungry. She dips her finger into the hot tea and places it on the edge of the water glass. Holding the base with her other hand, she circles the ring until a low tone rises out like the mournful cry of a lost baby whale.

‘If I did that, I’d be in trouble,’ says Lars.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘How did you sleep?’ he asks.

‘I’d rather be at home.’

‘No you wouldn’t.’

‘How are we going to go back there? Knowing a woman was murdered in our apartment? How long can we live at a hotel?’

‘There are people with worse problems than us.’

‘That’s true. And it would be rude if they were here right now, but they aren’t, so let’s talk about us.’

Lars smiles and, for the first time since checking in, Rhea smiles, too.

‘You sound like your grandfather sometimes. Mostly when he isn’t around.’

‘He raised me.’

‘You’re worried about him?’

‘I’m too shocked to be worried.’

‘We don’t have to stay in the hotel. We’ll go to the summer house. We’ll stay there. I can get time off from work.’

‘I don’t have anything with me but a toothbrush.’

‘We have some things there. We can get what we need before we leave.’

‘Are we allowed to leave?’

‘I’ll call Sigrid Ødegård and let her know where we’re going. Unless they want to pay the hotel bills.’

‘It’s in the paper this morning, you know. I saw a photo of the building on the front page.’

Lars is drinking black coffee and eating toast with an egg. He is wearing a white, short-sleeved dress shirt untucked over fashionable jeans and leather shoes.

‘How can you eat?’ she asks.

‘It’s breakfast.’

‘All this doesn’t invade you somehow? Disrupt everything? Hollow you?’

Lars puts down the coffee cup, and taps the table a few times. ‘I try not to think about it. I just try and think of what to do.’

‘Like a video game.’

‘That’s not fair or nice.’

‘You make it sound like a choice. Doesn’t it get into you? Actually terrify you? I’m terrified. My grandfather has all these hostile images in him. All this pent-up rage. I remember him, when I was little, looking at me with such love and tenderness and then, in a flash, becoming angry. Not at me. He never really got angry with me. Exasperated. He got exasperated all the time. He would throw up his hands and ask me what I was thinking. “What makes you think that’s a good idea?” he’d say.

‘It was the world itself he railed against. When I was older, he said that looking into my face showed him the infinite depth of humanity and all that is lost every time a person is taken from us. And it brings into focus the kinds of people who can look into a child’s face and harm them, and what the rest of us need to do about that.

‘And then he’d talk about the Holocaust. The Nazis shooting children in their heads in front of their parents to prove to themselves that they were above petty human kindness and were the supermen that Hitler said they were. Tying families together with piano strings along the Danube, and shooting only one so the others would drown. Gassing them. Throwing them into pits and covering them, still alive, with lime …’

‘Stop it,’ whispers Lars.

‘You want me to stop it?’ she says, slapping the table.

Sheldon wakes, and does not shave or bathe. Instead, he first walks to the door and finds the Aftenposten newspaper just outside. He can’t understand it, but he is looking for something specific, and he finds it.

The word for murder in Norwegian is mord. There is a picture of his building, a headline, and police tape across the entrance. There is a huddle of people standing around it. She is really dead. It is as if the reality of the experience is made doubly real by the world’s confirmation. Perhaps it’s just a function of the dementia that Mabel insisted he has.

You need proof.

Fine. Proof. I’ll find proof. Can I go now?

‘I didn’t even call the ambulance,’ he says to no one. ‘What kind of animal am I? How did I forget to do this? Could she have survived if I’d fought? If I’d have so much as called out?’

And then here is the boy. Who is peeing in the bathroom. Trying to aim over the rim and not make a mess. Who flushes and then turns on the tap. Who washes his little hands under the water like his mother taught him to do, and then turns it off as tightly as he can and then dries them on a fresh towel before coming out of the bathroom while trying to buckle his belt.

He learns that her name was Senka, not Vera. There is, as far as he can tell, no mention of a boy. If this is true, someone is being very careful about how this story is being told.

Sheldon showers, shaves, and dresses them both in the new clothes that the porter brought up. He looks under the bed, in the bathroom, the drawers, and in the folds of the bed and chairs, to be doubly sure that nothing in the room can identify them. He hasn’t skipped out on a bill since 1955, and there is a skill to it. He doesn’t want to get it wrong when the consequences are so unusually high.

When he finishes the departure preparations, he sits on the edge of the bed and just thinks. He thinks slowly and he concentrates.

If the police know about the dead woman, they know about the boy. And seeing as Sheldon didn’t come home last night, Rhea is probably losing her mind right about now.

It occurs to Sheldon that Rhea may have walked in on the dead woman. That she might have thought he’d been murdered as well. A day after the miscarriage.

This life? You want my views on this life?

He holds the paper and looks at the building. They will hunt for the killer and possibly for the boy as well. They will be looking for him, for one reason or another. And if the killer is after the boy, the police will be checking every plane, train, and bus to lock down the city.

‘It’s like in the Navy,’ he says aloud. ‘You control the choke points, like Gibraltar or the Bosporus or Panama or the Suez. Control that, and then you wait for the enemy to come to you. On your terms. It’s what they’ll do. It’s what I would do. The Norwegians might lack a certain assertiveness, but they’re no fools. They’ll wait for us all to fall into the trap.’

Sheldon looks over at Paul, who is watching a cartoon in Norwegian.

‘I know what you’re thinking — I should turn you in, drop you off. But what if they don’t suspect the monster? What if they hand you over to him? What if they think I’m a crazy old man and that my testimony isn’t worth spit? And I never saw his face anyway. I’ll bet Rhea already told them I’m cuckoo. So then what?

‘Look, I’m not turning you in until they catch him. OK? So how do we get out of here?’

Sheldon imagines the city as he knows it. He imagines it as a crystal in the midst of a wild emerald-green forest with flowing rivulets of blue. He pictures planes and trains and taxis and cars. He imagines the police and the monster sitting on either side of the crystal city peering into it. Looking for the old man and the little boy.

‘The river,’ he says at last, referring to the Oslo fjord.

Sheldon puts down the paper and rubs his face.

‘I don’t want to go on the river.’

At breakfast, Lars takes the napkin from his lap and places it on the table beside his plate. He sits back further in the chair. Rhea rests her chin on her open hands and slumps forward. They say nothing for a long while.

‘What would we have done today?’ Rhea finally says.

‘You mean, if all this wasn’t happening?’

‘Tell me a story.’

When she was little and lived in Manhattan with her grandparents, she dreamed of New England the way that Sheldon had described it. The hills of the Berkshires would crest and dive like waves covered in wet autumn leaves. A giant doll’s house floated on that sea of leaves. Inside, the blueberry pancakes slid back and forth across the breakfast table. When the pancakes arrived at Sheldon’s side, he’d take a bite, then slide them back down to Rhea’s end, where she’d take a bite. Mabel sat in the middle, trying to pour freshly pressed cider into a cup without spilling it.

The teddy bear behind her on the hutch rocked and rolled, too, its blue bow-tie flapping like a butterfly.

At breakfast, in the doll’s house, they would tell stories.

The summer house was her doll’s house now; Hedmark, her Berkshires. And so life unfolds itself, and our dreams come true in ways we never imagined.

Lars is her imagination. He tells her stories in their doll’s house. They lie on the grass in summer and under the duvet in winter, and fly together in worlds both wonderful and sad.

This morning — the morning of the second day — he wants to be somewhere else.

So Lars talks. He tells of a nice day at the bookshop with the terrace at Aker Brygge, and the mid-summer sales on Bogstadveien, and ice-cream on some corner of Grünerløkka, and cinnamon buns at the Åpent Bakeri across from the new Literature House near the Royal Palace. Rhea follows the circuitous route in her mind and imagines herself pushing a pram.

Inside the pram is her baby, who is between three and four months old. She looks in. It is a boy, and he is sleeping. He sways as the pram sails the city streets. He doesn’t wake when the wheels cross the frequent drainage runs in the sidewalk. It is part of the rhythm of the city, and he was born here. Born here, so far from her home. He both is, and will never be, of this place.

As she listens to Lars, she populates the city with familiar and unfamiliar faces. She matches the clothing styles to the neighbourhoods. She recalls Sheldon mapping the city against New York.

‘Frogner is Central Park,’ he’d said. ‘Grünerløkka is Brooklyn. Tøyen is the Bronx. Gamlebyen is Queens. And that peninsula. What do you call it?’

‘Bygdøy.’

‘That’s Long Island.’

‘What about Staten Island?’

‘What about it?’

The boy’s name is Daniel. They pass a toy store and she looks inside the window. Suddenly, she imagines Sheldon standing inside holding a bloody knife.

‘I think we should settle the bill and go to the summer house,’ Rhea says abruptly.

Outside the window, in a white Mercedes across the street from the hotel, Enver’s fingers roll back and forth across the black vinyl of the steering wheel to a rhythm that no one else hears. His trigger finger is permanently stained yellow by old Yugoslavian cigarettes. There is a CD playing the music of a dark and raspy singer strumming a gypsy guitar.

The car’s engine is off. The hood crackles under the sun.

The woman he is watching inside the building is slumped onto her hands, and the man is stretched over his chair. They have been there over an hour as the hot morning sun shines into Enver’s weathered face. The sun doesn’t just set late here: it rises early.

He puts on a pair of gold aviator sunglasses, and inhales deeply.

Soon, his exile from his native land will end. After the war — when Kosovo was still Serbian — he fled. He was wanted and hunted. But now things are different. Kosovo has declared independence. It has been recognised by states all around the world. And there, Enver is not a wanted war criminal. There, in this new state, with new laws, new rules, and a new memory, he will return a quiet hero. Yes, the new state has all the trappings of a modern government. It will be good, of course. It will act in accord with all international laws and treaties. It will be grateful for the support of the kindly nations that have recognised its right to exist. But it will be crafty and wise, too. It will first remember its own. It will protect Enver and his comrades. It will welcome him into its warm embrace. It will learn to justify his past actions in the way that all states celebrate their soldiers.

Before all that, however, there is something that needs to be done here, in this Nordic land. Before all that, he needs to find the boy.

Kosovar independence should have been a time of rejoicing — of dancing and drinking and f*cking — a decade of fighting in the KLA against the Serbian scum finally vindicated. His comrades in arms have been living in every God-forsaken land, furtively, like rats hiding from the light. When you fight for a land that has no government of its own, there is nothing to protect you. But now Kosovo is free. And the government knows who helped make it free. And it will be good to its returning sons.

Enver was there in March ’98 when Adem Jashari’s house was raided a second time by the police. He personally put a knife in the soft space between the ribs of a burly cop wearing a flack vest, and stared him down as the life drained out of him, watching the last emotion register on his victim’s face.

Hate. It is always hate. Never remorse. Never regret that this life is ending, or for the beauty that is passing.

Perhaps if he saw sadness — the sadness of final knowledge in all that is still undone, unexperienced, unloved — he could look onto something new in the light of this asylum summer. But it never comes. You cut a man open, and all that flows out is the hate that is inside. It drips from the knife, and sanctions the kill.

He wipes his brow with a white handkerchief. They never said it would be so hot here.

During the war, the Serbs tried to drive him, his family, his clan, his fellow Albanians, from the land in what the West called ethnic cleansing. But when NATO starting dropping the bombs, and the KFOR soldiers moved in, the tide turned. Enver and his men formed quickly. Their revenge was not random. They targeted the family members of the men who had done this to them. And after the war ended, there was still justice to deliver.

The day that brought him to Oslo began in Gracko. The Serbian boys and men were working the fields. It was scorchingly hot. Enver was lying beside a sickly grey brook with a rifle resting on his fist, looking down the long barrel through the iron sights. The flies on his hair and face made him twitch. They made it hard to keep the farmer covered by the iron pin.

His other men, twelve in all, were in the forest at the edge of the field. Enver had picked the target. It was his mission. The killing would begin as soon as he pulled the trigger.

And he did. But the farmer didn’t fall. Instead, the man turned to his left looking for the source of the small explosion. Perhaps a car had backfired? A stone had hit another stone? An axe had struck a buried brick? Anything but this. The war was over, wasn’t it?

Then the farmer fell, shot by someone else’s rifle — killed in his confusion and tranquillity. Perhaps his last thought was of the peace he lived in and the safety of his family. Enver hoped so. Because then, in the afterlife, he would be ashamed of his final moments. And perhaps this would be the first shame he ever felt. And through that feeling he might come to understand what he and his people had done to others in this life.

Enver was a poor shot. His targets dropped, one by one, at the hands of other men in the team, and his own rage mounted. He couldn’t seem to put a bullet on target. His compatriots would complain that he didn’t do his fair share, that he didn’t earn his fair share of the honour. They would secretly scoff at his manhood — at his failure to avenge his people against the marauders.

Because of flies. The distraction of the damn flies.

With no bullets left, he dropped the rifle and ran into the field to find someone to kill with his bare hands and teeth.

It was dry. His feet pounded on the cracked earth as his heart pumped in his chest. A boy, maybe fourteen, stood like a deer clutching a rake as Enver charged at him. The boy was terrified into paralysis. He peed into the left leg of his trousers like a child. But before Enver was on him, before he could slit his throat, a bullet clipped the boy in the neck, splaying blood over the golden field.

The boy thrashed on the ground, crying for his mother, as Enver picked up his rake and ran towards the farmhouse.

What right did they have, these Serbs? They did this to him in Shala. They created this moment. Wrath does not invent itself. It is the product of the ways of others. We all must brace for the impact of what we put into this life. These farmers — these killers — were fools not to do so. And now, God the merciful is taking them, in his infinite wisdom.

Shala. Enver’s own family had been toiling over their own land. It was an unremarkable day, just like this one. Daily life was in the details: a bit of thirst, a blister, a bad joke half-heard, a stubborn root. The Serbs came in uniforms, walking slowly. They were in no rush. They were on government business. To terrorise them. To drive them out like rodents from the garden of Eden.

Enver’s family was surrounded.

His sister was raped. Her ears were cut off. One eye was gouged out. She was left to live like this. Enver was just a boy, hiding alone in a closet as he listened to the screams of his sister outside, too scared to try to stop it. He heard it all. As he entered the kitchen to see what had happened, he heard someone laughing. To this day, he is sure it was the Devil.

And now, years on, here they were, the killers. The torturers. The families of these people had been sipping water from flasks, and their women were serving them cold beer in the middle of the noon-day heat to soothe them. These murderers. These parasites. Acting as though they, too, knew human emotion. But they were empty. Soulless. Without remorse or faith.

Past the wounded boy, Enver broke into a run and ran into the front room of the farm house. The water from the tap was still running. Outside he heard the pop-pop-pop of low-calibre rifles and a few muffled yells. But inside it was so quiet.

They are hiding.

Even an empty house speaks more than this. You can hear an empty house breathe. This one was holding its breath.

He put down the rake and took a thick knife from the sink. He tried to control the beating of his heart.

‘Come out. Face your fate,’ he called out.

He walked into the living room. The television was on, playing a Western film dubbed into Serbian. A black American cop with a gun was running down a city street after a robber. The city was New York. The robber was clutching a bright-red handbag and sprinting between a line of cars.

‘Come out!’ Enver yelled. And perhaps his voice was scary enough, because there was a muffled cry in the closet.

If there is a gun, and should the bullet kill me now, so be it. At least I died honouring my dead.

Prepared for his last breath, he opened the closet door and looked into the darkness.

Outside, the killing was steady and without mercy. The iron circle enclosed around the farm, as the others had done to his own village. Snipers covered three directions, ensuring that no one escaped the shrinking perimeter.

It took time for his eyes to adjust to the dull grey and flecks of gold in the closet. But when they did, it was as though God himself had placed them there for him.

There was a woman in her early twenties, wearing a flower skirt and no shoes. And beside her, nestled into her sister’s nape, was a soft little one. Maybe twelve years old.

It was clearly a gift. A chance to have his revenge but assert his moral superiority, all in the same simple gesture. There was such purity to the offering, its cosmic balance almost made him cry.

He addressed the older one.

‘Get out. Get on your hands and knees, and prepare yourself for me. Otherwise I will slit her throat and have you anyway.’

He remembers the feel of her hips in his hands, the movement of the flower skirt across her back, the whimpers of fear, pain, and pleasure confusing her. And when the moment came, he raised his face to the heavens and — unsure if his act was profane — shouted that God is truly great.

It was over. And yet these moments do not merely end. They do not pass unremarked and drift lightly into the hinterlands of memory to be eclipsed — like so much else — by the present and its seductions of imagined futures. Sometimes, they live. And they grow. And the past matures until it takes over the world and gives birth to a new reality that commands us and subjugates us, making us face who we are and all we have done. And so, when Enver learned that this girl, Senka, had become pregnant and had fled to the Nordic countries to hide her shame, he was unprepared for the feelings that came over him, and the bright light that shone down on it all — directly from above — casting no shadows in which to hide from this new world of his own making.

Now Enver was a father.

He opens his eyes in the car, and realises he has nodded off like some old man. He looks again, in vain, for a cigarette to place in the crook of his finger and the corner of his lips, where it belongs. He wipes his face with a tissue that leaves bits of white on his temple and that snags on his glasses.

The couple in the hotel sign some paper and stand to leave. Enver shakes his head in bemusement. The mailbox to the apartment where he and Senka had words yesterday showed that these two people lived together. If they have been together for so long as to share a mailbox — married, perhaps — how could they have so much to talk about? Does this man have no friends to confide in that he will chat with this girl for company?

For hours?

It is such a strange place, this Norway. Such strange people.

The CD in the car ends, and he turns on the radio. He checks his mobile phone for messages, but there are none. The radio begins to play old American rock and roll from the 1950s, and he leaves it on. He fiddles with the rear-view mirror and wonders when he’ll have some time to eat today. He’d forgotten to eat breakfast, and now that he is tailing these two to find the old man — the one Kadri saw in the alley — he just can’t see when he’ll get something to eat.

Maybe an ice-cream. There might be a chance for an ice-cream. That would be delicious. Maybe strawberry. Or mint. They have good mint here. And a cone. Or a cup.

No, a cone.

There is a 7-Eleven in sight. They have ice-cream. Not especially good ice-cream, though. So perhaps not. But they do have the Lollipop, which is icy and fruity. That would be delicious. Assuming a short line, he could be in and out in … say … four minutes.

Which is too much time. Such is his fate, they are coming out of the hotel now, carrying two unusual pieces of hard-cased luggage. They are wearing leather jackets, and carrying helmets. They walk around the corner, still in sight, and mount a large off-road motorcycle that immediately makes Enver worry. It is very hard to tail people on motorcycles. Even when they don’t know they are being followed, they can weave through cars in traffic, advance to the front of queues at red lights, and take sudden turns onto roads that disappear through forests.

The Norwegian places a call on his mobile phone, speaks for only a moment, and then puts it back in his jacket.

The white Mercedes will be conspicuous. No one drives a white Mercedes here. His friends bought it for him. Stupid. You leave it to a bunch of foreigners, and they inevitably bring their own ideas with them.

The correct answer to the problem would have been an Audi A6 estate car, in silver. That would have been the least suspicious car for him to use in Oslo. Schools of them swim through the city. He could have been in any of them, but he isn’t. He is in a gangster’s white Mercedes, with no air conditioning and one CD, following a BMW motorcycle now pulling away onto the road, heading east.

He starts the CD again. Despite himself, Enver smiles.

At least the hunt has begun.