Until I Find You (123 page)

There they were on the Nyhavn, in front of Tattoo Ole’s; either Ladies’ Man Madsen or Ole himself had to have taken the picture. And in Stockholm, posing by a ship from the archipelago—it was docked at the Grand. Had Torsten Lindberg taken that one? Jack would never forget that he’d met his father, but he hadn’t known it, in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol—in Oslo, where William had never slept with Ingrid Moe. But who had taken the photograph of Jack holding his mom’s hand in front of the Domkirke, the Oslo Cathedral?

From his grave, Jack would not fail to recognize the American Bar in what was now the lobby of the Hotel Torni, but which of those lesbian music students in Helsinki had snapped that shot of Jack and his mom going up the stairs? (They were always climbing the stairs, because the elevator was never working, and they were always—as they were in the snapshot—holding hands.)

Why hadn’t William Burns removed every trace of Jack’s mother from his sight?

Jack was staring so intently at the pictures from Amsterdam that he hadn’t noticed how close to him his father was standing, or that William was staring intently at his son. There was a photograph of Jack with his mother and Tattoo Theo, and another of Jack with Tattoo Peter—the great Peter de Haan, with his left leg missing below the knee. Tattoo Peter had the same slicked-back hair that Jack remembered, but in the photo he seemed more blond; Tattoo Peter had the same Woody the Woodpecker tattoo on his right biceps, too.

“Tattoo Peter was only fifteen when he stepped on that mine,” William was saying, but Jack had moved on. He was looking at himself as a four-year-old, walking with his mom in the red-light district. Cameras were not welcome there; the prostitutes didn’t want their pictures taken. Yet someone—Els or Saskia, probably—must have had a camera. Alice was smiling at the photographer as if nothing were the matter, as if nothing had
ever
been the matter.

“How dare you look at your mother like that?” his father asked him sharply.

“What?”

“My dear boy! She’s been dead how many years? And you still haven’t forgiven her! How
dare
you not forgive her? Did she blame
you
?”

“She shouldn’t have blamed you, either!” Jack cried.

“
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum.
How’s your Latin, Jack?” (William clearly knew that Jack’s Latin wasn’t strong.) “Speak nothing but good of the dead.”

“That’s a tough one,” Jack said.

“If you don’t forgive her, Jack, you’ll never have a worthwhile relationship with a woman in your life. Or have you had a worthwhile relationship that I’m unaware of? Dr. García doesn’t count! Emma
almost
doesn’t count.” (He even knew about Dr. García!)

Jack hadn’t noticed when his father had started to shiver, but William was shivering now. He paced back and forth, from the bedroom to the sitting room—and into the bedroom again, with his arms hugging his chest.

“Are you cold, Pop?” Jack asked him. He didn’t know where the “Pop” came from. (Not Billy Rainbow, thankfully—not this time.)

“What did you call me?” his dad asked.

“ ‘Pop.’ ”

“I
love
that!” William cried. “It’s so
American
! Heather calls me ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’—you can’t call me that, too. It’s
perfect
that you call me ‘Pop’!”

“Okay, Pop.” Jack was thinking that his father might let him off the hook about his mom, but no such luck.

“It’s time to close the windows—it’s that time of the evening,” William was saying, his teeth chattering. Jack helped him close the windows. Although the sun hadn’t set, the lake was a darker color than before; only a few sailboats still dotted the water. His father was shaking so violently that Jack put his arms around him.

“If you can’t forgive your mother, Jack, you’ll never be free of her. It’s for your own sake, you know—for your
soul.
When you forgive someone who’s hurt you, it’s like escaping your
skin—
you’re that free, outside yourself, where you can see everything.” William suddenly stopped shivering. Jack stepped a little away from him, so that he could see him better; William’s mischievous little smile was back, once more transforming him. “Uh-oh,” Jack’s father said. “Did I say
skin
? I didn’t say
skin,
did I?”

“Yes, you did,” Jack told him.

“Uh-oh,” his dad said again. He was beginning to unbutton his flannel shirt, but he unbuttoned it only halfway before pulling the shirt off—over his head.

“What’s wrong, Pop?”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” William said impatiently; he was busy taking off his socks. “ ‘Skin’ is one of those triggers. I’m surprised they didn’t tell you. They can’t give me antidepressants and expect me to remember all the stupid
triggers
!”

On the tops of both feet, where it is painful to be tattooed, were Jack’s name and Heather’s
—Jack
on his father’s right foot,
Heather
on his left. (Since Jack couldn’t read music, he didn’t know what the notes were, but their names had been put to music.)

By now, Jack’s father had taken off his T-shirt and his corduroy trousers, too. In a pair of striped boxer shorts, which were too big for him—and which Jack could not imagine his father buying on one of the shopping trips with Waltraut Bleibel—his dad appeared to have the body of a former bantamweight. At most, William weighed one-thirty or one-thirty-five—Jack’s old weight class. The tattoos covered his father’s sinewy body with the patina of wet newspaper.

Doc Forest’s tattoo stood out against all the music as vividly as a burn. The words, which were not as near to his heart as William would have liked them, marked the left side of his rib cage like a whiplash.

The commandant’s daughter; her little brother

“It’s not the tattoos, my dear boy,” Jack’s father said, standing naked before him—the shocking white of William’s hands and face and neck and penis being the only parts of him that weren’t an almost uniform blue-black, some of which had faded to gray. “It’s everything I truly heard and felt—it’s everything I ever
loved
! It’s not the
tattoos
that marked me.” For a small man, he had overlong arms—like a gibbon.

“Perhaps you should put your clothes on, Pop—so we can go out to dinner.”

Jack saw that messy music, a wrinkled scrap of a page on his dad’s left hip, where Jack’s mom was once convinced that Beachcomber Bill had marked him—the tattoo that had failed in the planning phase, according to Tattoo Ole. Jack got only a glimpse of those notes that curled around the underarm side of his father’s right biceps; most of that tattoo was lost from view, either the Chinaman’s mistake or the Beachcomber’s. And that fragment of a hymn on his left calf—the
“Breathe on me, breath of God,”
both the words and the music—was every bit as good as Tattoo Ole had said. (It had to be Charlie Snow’s work, or Sailor Jerry’s.)

As for his dad’s favorite Easter hymn, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” it was upside down to Jack—but when his father sat on the toilet, William could read the music. Since this tattoo was strictly notes, without the words, Jack knew it was “Christ the Lord” only because of where it was, and it was upside down—and of course Jack remembered that Aberdeen Bill had given it to William. As Heather had told Jack, this long-ago tattoo had been overlapped by a newer one, Walther’s “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme”—the top two staffs beginning where the alleluia chorus to “Christ the Lord”
should
have been.

His father was leaping up and down like a monkey on the bed; with a remote, which William held in one hand, he had lowered the hospital bed to a flat position. It was hard to get a definitive look at all his tattoos—for example, to ascertain exactly
which
lengthy and complicated phrase by Handel was in the area of William’s kidneys. Jack knew only that Tattoo Ole had done that one. (“More Christmas music,” Ole had said dismissively.) But Jack got a good enough look to guess that this was the soprano aria (“For Unto Us a Child Is Born”) from Handel’s
Messiah—
and, in that case, Widor’s Toccata was right next to it.

All but lost in an ocean of music, Herbert Hoffmann’s disappearing ship was even more difficult to see because of William’s monkey business on the bed. And there, on his father’s right shoulder, Jack recognized another Tattoo Ole—it lay unfurled like a piece ripped from a flag. It was more Bach, but not the Christmas music Jack’s mother had thought it was—neither Bach’s
Weihnachtsoratorium
nor his
Kanonische Veränderungen über das Weihnachtslied.
It was tough to see his dad’s shoulder clearly, with all the bouncing up and down, but Jack’s Exeter German was getting better by the minute—“Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich.”

Jack also caught Pachelbel’s name, if not the particular piece of music, and—in a crescent shape on his father’s coccyx—Theo Rademaker’s cramped fragment, “Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott.” (The composer was Samuel Scheidt.)

Bach’s “Jesu, meine Freude” (“Jesus, My Joy”), which Tattoo Peter had given Jack’s dad in Amsterdam, was indeed missing part of the word
Largo—
as his sister had said. The Balbastre tattoo (“Joseph est bien marié”), which was newer and only slightly overlapped the Bach, was not by a tattoo artist Jack could identify.

Jack’s French, which was nonexistent, gave him fits with Dupré’s
Trois préludes et fugues pour orgue—
not to mention Messiaen’s “Dieu parmi nous,” which followed the Roman numeral IX.

Did that mean “God is among us”? Jack was wondering.

“I have a son!” his father was shouting, as he bounced up and down on the bed. “Thank you, God—I have a son!”

“Dad, don’t hurt yourself.”

“ ‘
Pop,
’ ” his father corrected him.

“Better be careful, Pop.”

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed. Jack was trying to identify the Bach tattoo Sami Salo was alleged to have given William on his backside—and the notes that Trond Halvorsen (the
scratcher
) gave him in Oslo, where Halvorsen also gave William an infection—but Jack was making himself dizzy with the effort.

“Do you know what
toccata
means, Jack?”

“No, Pop.”

“It means
touch,
basically—almost a
hammered
kind of touch,” his father explained; he wasn’t even out of breath. Jack saw no evidence that Dr. Horvath had been right about the
psychological
benefits of the Sanatorium Kilchberg’s jogging program, but the
aerobic
benefits were obvious.

Stanley’s Trumpet Tune in D, which marked William’s chest in the area of his right lung, seemed to make a visual proclamation. (Didn’t you need good lungs to play the trumpet?) And there was that fabulous Alain quotation, in French and English, on his dad’s bare ass—not that William was standing still enough for Jack to be able to read it.

“Pop, maybe you should get dressed for dinner.”

“If I stop, I’ll get a chill, dear boy. I don’t want to feel cold!” his father shouted.

For Professor Ritter and the doctors—they were listening outside, in the corridor—this must have been a familiar enough utterance to give them a signal. There was a loud, rapid knocking on the door—Dr. Horvath, probably.

“Perhaps we should come in, William!” Professor Ritter called; it wasn’t really a question.

“
Vielleicht!
” Jack’s father shouted. (“Perhaps!”)

William bounded off the bed; he put his hands on the rubberized floor and bent over, facing Jack while he lifted his bare bottom to the opening door. When Professor Ritter and the doctors entered, William was
mooning
them.

Reason has reached its limit. Only belief keeps rising.

“I must say, William—this is a little disappointing,” Professor Ritter said.

“Only a
little
?” Jack’s father asked; he’d straightened up and had turned to face them, naked.

“William, this is not what you should wear to the Kronenhalle!” Dr. Horvath admonished him.

“I won’t have dinner with a naked man—at least not in public,” Dr. von Rohr announced, but Jack could see that she instantly regretted her choice of words. “
Es tut mir leid,
” she added. (“I’m sorry,” she said to Jack’s father.) The other doctors and Professor Ritter all looked at her with dismay. “I
said
I was sorry!” she told them in her head-of-department way.

“I think I heard the word
naked,
” William said to his son, smiling. “Talk about
triggers
!”

“I said I was sorry, William,” Dr. von Rohr told him.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Jack’s father said irritably. But Jack saw the first sign that his dad felt cold again—a single tremor. “It’s just that I’ve
told
you I’m
not
naked. You
know
that’s not how I
feel
!”

“We know, William,” Dr. Berger said. “You’ve told us.”

“But Jack hasn’t heard this,” Professor Ritter joined in.

Dr. von Rohr sighed; if she’d been holding a pencil in her long fingers, she would have twirled it. “These tattoos are your father’s
real
clothes, Jack,” Dr. von Rohr said. She put her hands on William’s shoulders—running her hands down the length of his arms, which she then held at the wrists. “He feels cold because so many of his favorite composers have died. Most of them are dead, in fact. Aren’t they, William?”

“Cold as the grave,” Jack’s father said, nodding his head; he was shivering.

“And what is here, and here, and here, and
everywhere
?” Dr. von Rohr asked, pointing to William’s tattoos repeatedly. “Nothing but praise for the Lord—hymns of praise—and prayers of lamentation. With you, everything is either adulation or mourning. You thank God, William, but you mourn almost everyone or everything else. How am I doing so far?” she asked him. Jack could tell that she had calmed his father down, but nothing could stop the shivering. (Dr. Horvath was trying, rubbing William’s shoulders while attempting to pull a T-shirt over his shaking head—more or less at the same time.)