Norwegian by Night (9 page)

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.'

Chapter 5

It irritates Sheldon to no end that movie theatres in Oslo assign seating to its patrons.

‘You think we can't sort it out for ourselves? We need supervision? Direction?'

He says this to the innocent girl behind the counter.

Her pimply face puckers. ‘Is it different where you're from?'

‘Yes. First come, first serve. Survival of the fittest. Law of the jungle. Where competition breeds creativity, and out of conflict comes genius. In the Land of the Free, we sit where we like. We sit where we
can
.'

Sheldon snatches his ticket and mumbles. He mumbles at the price of hot dogs at the concession stand. He mumbles about the temperature of the popcorn, the distance between the restroom and the theatre, the steepness of the theatre's seats, and the average height of the average Norwegian, which is well above average.

It is when he stops mumbling — for only the briefest moment as he catches his breath — that the murder rushes back in and finds purchase. It occupies the space.

He's familiar with this problem on a larger scale. This is just an instance of it. History itself constantly threatens to take him over and leave him defenceless under its weight. It's not dementia. It's
mortality
.

The silence is the enemy. It breaches the wall of distraction, if you let it.

Jews know this. It's why we keep talking at all cost. With what we've been through, if we stop for a second, we're done for
.

Turning to Paul, he says, ‘I don't know anything about this movie, other than it's over two hours long, at which point we'll get you the world's most expensive pizza at Pepe's, and then we're going to relax in style tonight at the Hotel Continental. It's near the National Theatre. The Grand Hotel, I'm sure, is all booked. It's the last place they'd think to find us, because it's not the kind of place I tend to haunt. But, personally, I think we deserve a little calm tonight.'

And then the trailers end and the movie begins. It involves a spaceship on its way to the sun to save the world. The movie begins with wonder, but degrades into horror and death.

Sheldon closes his eyes.

President Jimmy Carter did not retain his position long enough to see the hostages come home from Iran in 1980. On the day of Ronald Reagan's inauguration, the planes departed from Tehran with the Americans who had been held in captivity for four hundred and forty-four days. The cameras filmed Reagan take the oath of office in a light rain — his wife wore red under a grey sky.

But the drama was on the aeroplane where these people cried, and talked, and worried that it was all a lie and that they were merely being flown in circles in a further act of cruelty. What Sheldon understood, watching it all on TV, was that the grand sweep of American history was not in Reagan's poised pronouncement, but in the lonely and pensive look on Jimmy Carter's face as he stood, no longer president, on the tarmac. And beneath the grand sweep of history were the lives of people like him and Mabel and Bill Harmon, his colleague from the pawnshop down the block from his own place in New York.

Mabel read the newspaper in those days. She formed her opinions at the end of each article, and then allowed them to evaporate like so much water off a dead pond. She did not allow Sheldon to discuss politics in the house, and he had no desire to do so anyway. Saul had only been dead for six years by 1980 — which, as time works, was no time at all.

The city had become still for them, purposeless. It was a succession of yellow streaks of cabs going by. Black sheets of rain. A palette of greens from a farmer's market. A red steak for dinner. Sleep again. The only movement came from the watches in Sheldon's shop.

The watch-repair and antique store was in Gramercy, just off of Park Avenue South. It was inconspicuous, but locals knew it was there. Passers-by could easily miss the thickly barred iron door that opened into the small workshop in the front and the larger showroom in the back.

By the 1980s, Sheldon's business was suffering from a Japanese invention called the ‘digital watch'. They had extremely few moving parts, kept remarkably accurate time, inexplicably excited people's imaginations, and they were cheap. Worse yet, they were disposable. And so the Swiss-watch industry was in turmoil, and those who depended on it for their livelihoods were, too. No longer did men and women of every economic stratum come to Sheldon's shop for a minor repair, or a service to oil the parts, or to put in a new gasket. Instead, only the old-timers were coming in. The quality of the watches improved steadily, as people replaced the cheap ones but fixed the good ones. There were fewer clients, the work was more complicated, and the pay did not improve. The decade grew silent and unremarkable.

Bill Harmon's pawnshop was three doors down on the right. Bill was also in his fifties, was American of Irish decent, and had a shock of pure white hair over his ruddy face. He and Sheldon sent customers back and forth between them like they were ping pong balls.

‘Not for me. Try Bill's shop. He buys power tools.'