Norwegian by Night (29 page)

Saul picked up a small pebble and tossed it at the window. It could just as well have been a grenade. There'd be an explosion in the window and then he'd return to the boat. But it wasn't a grenade. It was a pebble.

She opened the window almost immediately and looked down.

I guess all the guys do this
, he thought.

‘Well, I'll be damned,' she said.

‘Probably,' Saul said.

She was wearing a ripped T-shirt from a band he'd never heard of that hung loosely off her body. Her face looked especially pale. From the light of the street lamp he could make out the contours of her breasts.

‘So you're back.'

‘Whatever the hell that means.'

‘What do you want?'

‘I want to see you.'

‘You mean you want to fuck me. Big soldier back from the war with a hard-on. Right?'

‘Baby, I don't know what I want until after it's over.'

For some reason this made her smile.

‘Come in the back.'

And so he did.

When he was on top of her, and inside her, and his hands were gripping her thighs and his eyes were closed, he heard her say, ‘If I get pregnant, it's yours, you understand?'

In that moment, he thought she meant that the baby would be his and not someone else's. That she hadn't been with another man recently. That there was still something between them. That the past was secure.

In a few months' time, as the baby grew, Saul would be dead. He would never understand that she had not been talking about the past. She had been explaining the future.

The old watchmaker was asleep in his living-room chair when Saul came in the next morning at seven-thirty. He'd been kicked out of her bedroom early, so her parents wouldn't know he'd spent the night there. She insisted that, since she paid rent, she could do whatever she wanted in her upstairs apartment, but her father used vocabulary from a different age. He talked about what happened ‘under his roof' and how ‘no daughter of mine' would bring ‘shame to the family'.

There was no engaging this language with the vernacular of 1973. So they played the game and talked past each other, and hoped that the consequences would be manageable. With the pregnancy, all that would change. Nothing was manageable anymore. Some of this dynamic with her parents — had Rhea known it — might have explained what she would eventually hope to learn but never would. This enigmatic woman had been a stranger to Saul, and would remain one to Rhea.

Saul stepped quietly into the apartment so not to wake anyone. He carried his green canvas army duffle bag on his left shoulder as he struggled — as he used to — to free the key from the deadbolt. The trick was to turn it just slightly off-centre clockwise and give it a jiggle.

As he worked the lock, the smell of the house worked its way into him and made him suddenly nauseous. A thought he hadn't articulated until now came to him as powerfully as the scents of his childhood.

I can't do this.

Just then, just as his mind was able to put some words to the sensation, his father spoke.

‘Welcome home.'

The key was freed, and Saul closed the front door. He stepped to his right and looked into the living room that was entirely unchanged from the last time he had stepped into it. His father wore shapeless, colorless clothes, and his face was drawn and tired.

Saul put down the duffle bag by the umbrella stand and stretched his shoulders. He took a deep breath, pulling the past into his lungs, where it didn't belong.

‘Thanks.'

His father did not get up.

‘You look OK,' he said.

‘Yeah,' said Saul. ‘I do.'

‘You hungry? Want some coffee?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘You don't think so or no?'

‘I don't know the difference.'

‘Sit down.' Sheldon gestured to the sofa, where Mabel had been curled up with the Sunday magazine.

His father's calm was reassuring, as though he understood what might have happened over there. But he never entirely understood what his father had done in Korea. He'd asked before, and all his father had said was, ‘I did what I was told to do', which wasn't much help. It was more important now to learn what they might have in common. What his father understood. What was understandable at all.

‘How are you doing?' Sheldon asked.

Saul slumped back into the over-stuffed sofa cushions, but still visibly shrugged.

‘I don't know. I'm not completely here yet.'

Sheldon nodded.

‘I took off with the camera when I got back. You might need to do something.'

‘I guess.'

‘You thought about it?'

‘I haven't even started thinking about it.' He paused, and then asked, ‘What do you think of it?'

‘I don't think about it.'

‘It's not a choice. I saw stuff, Dad. I did stuff. There's no putting it in a box. I need to figure it out.'

‘You did what you did, and you saw what you saw, because your country asked you to. You did your service. You did what men do. And now it's over. You try and get back to it all. That's all there is.'

‘I know what burning people smell like.'

‘And now it's over.'

‘It's still in my clothes.'

‘Then wash them.'

‘That's not the point.'

‘It has to be the point. You know what's going on out there? There aren't many like you. You need to step out of Vietnam, and step into America and get into character.'

‘There are tens of thousands like me.'

‘Not Jews.'

‘What the hell does that have to do with anything?'

‘Everything. We fought like hell in World War II. We tripped over ourselves to sign up. But in Korea, not as many. And now? Every Jew is in college. Out there, protesting the war. Civil rights, and rock and roll, and smoking pot. We're not pulling our weight. We're getting weak. We're losing the ground we made.'

‘Dad,' Saul rubbed his face. ‘For Christ's sake, Dad. What do you think's going on out there?'

‘What's going on? America's at war. And rather than get behind our country, we're talking like the communists.'

‘Dad. Dad, this country's a mess. There are different ways to try and make it better. And besides, we have nothing to prove anymore. I was born here. You were born here. Your parents were born here. How American do we need to be?'

‘There are still firms on Wall Street that won't hire us. There are law firms that don't want us.'

‘In the south they're still killing black kids.'

‘This country has a lot of ground to cover. I know that. But we've still got ground to cover ourselves. Ground to hold.'

‘What happened to you in Korea?'

‘I did what I was told.'

‘Mom says you were a clerk.'

‘That's what I want Mom to say.'

‘So, basically, men don't talk about it. Who do you tell? What about Bill?'

‘Bill was there, too.'

‘Not with you.'

‘No. He was Armour. He was somewhere else. We met afterwards. On the street. Near the shops.'

‘You talk to Bill?'

‘I talk to Bill every day. I can't get him out of my shop. I have to lock the door. And when I do, he just calls me.'

‘Maybe he has a crush on you.'

Sheldon snorted. ‘That's the kind of thing your generation says.'

‘It happens.'

‘You take things and turn them into things they aren't, and then insist you're right and that everyone else is blind. That's what the communists do.'

‘I don't know who the communists are, Dad.'

‘They were the ones shooting at you. Who want you enslaved to their own view of the world. Who put people in the Gulag for independent thought. For being free. For not upholding the imperatives of the state and the revolution.'

‘Everyone was shooting at me. I don't know why.'

‘You sound like Mario.'

‘Who's Mario?'

‘Doesn't matter.'

‘Who's Mario?'

‘A friend.'

‘Anyone I know?'

‘He died before you were born. You don't need to know about it.'

‘I saw a lot of stuff, Dad. I did a lot of stuff.'

‘I know. You hungry? You want coffee?'

‘I think I want to tell you what I did.'

‘I don't want to know.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because you're my son, that's why not.'

‘I want to tell you because you're my father and you might understand.'

‘Your country is grateful, that's all that matters.'

‘My country isn't grateful, and it doesn't matter at all. I need to figure out how to sit here.'

‘You need a distraction.'

‘Like repairing watches?'

‘That's so awful?'

‘You can't fix time, Dad.'

‘You should eat something. You've lost weight. You look sickly.'

‘I am sickly.'

Sheldon said nothing.

‘Where's Mom?'

‘She's sleeping.'

Saul hoisted himself up from the sofa cushions and walked up the stairs, two at a time. Sheldon didn't move. He sat for ten minutes waiting for Saul to return. He assumed that Saul was seeing his mother. He wouldn't learn for many years that he had simply gone upstairs to sit. To look over the banister as he did as a child to see who just rang the doorbell or what kind of mood Dad was in when he came home from work.

When he came back downstairs, he sat in the wing-backed armchair across from his father where his mother often sat with a book or to watch television.

‘How have you been?' he asked his father.

‘Me? I've been working hard. Minding my own business. Trying to stay out of trouble.'

‘Yeah, but how have you been?'

‘I just told you.'

‘What did you think about when you came home from Korea?'

‘Why?'

‘Because I'm home from a war, too, and I want to know what you thought about. I want to know if it's the same.'

‘When I came back from Korea, I thought about Korea. Then I thought about thinking about Korea, and realised it was a waste of time, so I stopped.'

‘How long did that take?'

‘Don't be a sissy, Saul!'

‘You took a camera and went to Europe.'

‘Yes.'

‘What did you find there?'

‘It was nine years after World War II. You know what I found there.'

‘You didn't just go there to take funny pictures of them, did you?'

‘Sure I did. And I was good at it.'

‘You hated them, didn't you? Each and every anti-Semitic one of them, didn't you? You went to look into their souls to see it for yourself. To document it, because you couldn't put them in a rifle sight and shoot them.'

‘Where do you come up with this stuff?'

‘I had time on the boat.'

‘You want to know what I found in Europe? I found silence. An awful, dreadful silence. There wasn't a single Jewish voice left. None of our children. Just a couple of meek, shell-shocked hangers-on who hadn't left or been murdered. And Europe just closed up the wound. Filled that silence with their Vespas and Volkswagens and croissants, like nothing had happened. You want psychology? OK. I probably pissed them off to let them know I was still there. To get a reaction from them.'

‘What did this have to do with Korea?'

‘Everything! It made me proud. It made me proud to be American. It made me proud to have fought for my country. It reminded me that the tribes of Europe will always be just that. Tribes. You want to call them nations? Go ahead. But they're a bunch of petty tribes. America isn't a tribe. It's an idea! And I'm part of that idea. And so are you. How have I been? I've been proud that you're fighting for your country. That you're defending the dream. My son is defending the dream. My son is an American. My son has a rifle in his hand and is facing down the enemy. That's how I've been.'

Saul did not answer right away. Sheldon did not fill the lull.

‘Where are the pictures?' Saul asked.

‘What pictures?'

‘All the pictures you took.'

‘They're in the book.'