‘Donny. Donny, you up?’
This went on for minutes.
‘Donny. Donny, you up?’
‘It will not help my cause by answering you,’ he’d said.
‘Donny, I don’t get this invasion. I don’t get this war. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. What are we doing here?’
Donny was dressed in flannel pyjamas that were not government-issue. He replied, ‘You get out of the boat. You shoot Koreans. You get back in the boat. What confuses you?’
‘The middle part,’ Mario explained. ‘Although, now that I think about it, the first part, too.’
‘What about the third part?’
‘No, that part is like crystal.’
‘So what about the first two?’
‘My motivation? What’s my motivation?’
‘They’ll be shooting at you.’
‘Then what’s their motivation?’
‘You’ll be shooting at them.’
‘What if I don’t shoot at them?’
‘They’ll still be shooting at you because other people will be shooting at them, and they won’t differentiate. And you’ll want them to stop, so you’ll shoot back.’
‘What if I ask them not to?’
‘They’re too far away, and they speak Korean.’
‘So I need to get closer and have a translator?’
‘Right. But you can’t.’
‘Because they’re shooting at me.’
‘That’s the problem.’
‘But that’s absurd!’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘It can’t be true!’
‘Most things are both true and absurd.’
‘That’s also absurd.’
‘And yet …?’
‘It may also be true. Jesus, Donny. I’m going to be up all night.’
Then Donny whispered, ‘If you don’t go to bed, there will be no tomorrow. And it’ll be all your fault.’
The monster’s feet stop outside the door. What were stomping, pounding footfalls of a pursuer are now gentle shuffles. Whoever is chasing them is now spinning around, looking for them as though they might be hiding in a shadow or under a ray of light. Outside, a car door slams. Then another slams. There is fast talking in Serbian, or Albanian, or whatever it is. The conversation is easy to imagine.
‘Where did they go?’
‘I thought they were with you?’
‘They must have come out the front door.’
‘I didn’t see anything.’
And then, because they are amateurs, because they are fools, they turn on each other and away from the task at hand.
‘That’s because you were smoking and talking about that slut again.’
‘It was your job to bring them out. I’m just waiting.’
And so on.
One sound is all it would take to give them away. One squeal of glee from the hiding child who thinks it is all a game, or a whine because of his immobility. Or simply a cry of fear — something so human as a cry of fear.
Sheldon looks at him. The boy’s back is against the door like his own, and his knees are up. He has wrapped his arms around them and is looking down at the floor in a gesture of defeat and isolation. Sheldon understands at once that he is assuming a familiar position. He will be silent. It has been a learned skill in his world of terror.
And then the talking, the bickering, ends. The doors to the Mercedes open and close again, and the powerful engine starts. In a few moments, the car pulls off.
Sheldon sighs. He rubs his hands all over his face to stimulate some blood flow, and then forcefully massages his scalp. He has always imagined his brain like the liquid iron core of the earth — grey and heavy, constantly in motion, producing its own gravity, and carefully balanced on his neck’s vertebrae like the earth is balanced on the backs of turtles in the cosmos.
Events like this tend to cause the iron flow to slow or even reverse, which can result in ice ages. A little massage usually takes care of the grey matter, though.
This time he is cold all over.
He looks up at his companions, who are still foetal on his floor. The woman looks more pasty, more podgy, than she was when viewed through the fisheye lens. The thin leather jacket is thinner. The trampy shirt is trampier. It all speaks to lower-class Balkan immigrant. He never saw the man outside the door. He could only imagine him being fat and sweating, wearing a Chinese-made Adidas tracksuit with white stripes down the arms and legs. His equally foul-breathed colleagues are probably in dark open shirts under poorly fitting, fake designer jackets, the texture of vinyl.
It is all so hopelessly predictable. Everything except the painted Paddington Bears on the boy’s bright-blue wellingtons. These have been painted by someone with love and imagination. Sheldon is, at this moment, inexplicably prepared to credit them to the pasty hooker on his floor.
The car has moved off, so Sheldon says to the boy, ‘Those are nice boots.’
The boy looks up from the crook of his arm. He does not understand. Sheldon can’t be sure if it’s the comment itself that he doesn’t understand, the timing of the comment, or else the language. There is no good reason, after all, to think he speaks English, except that everyone these days speaks English.
I mean, really. Why speak anything else? Stubbornness. That’s why.
It also occurs to him that perhaps it is the soothing and encouraging male voice that is so rare and so unfamiliar. He lives in a world of violent men, like so many boys do. With this thought, he can’t help but try again.
‘Nice bears,’ says Sheldon, pointing at the bears and giving the thumbs up.
The boy looks down at the boots and turns one leg inward to get a look at the boots for himself. He does not know what Sheldon is saying, but he does know what he’s talking about. He looks back at Sheldon without a smile, and then places his face back into the crook of his arm.
The woman stands up during Sheldon’s gesture to the boy and is now talking. She is speaking quickly. The tone is grateful and seemingly apologetic, which seems to follow, given the circumstances. The words themselves are gibberish but, luckily, Sheldon speaks English, which is universally understood.
‘You’re welcome. Yes. Yes — yes. Look, I’m old, so take my advice. Leave your husband. He’s a Nazi.’
Her babbling continues. Even looking at her is exasperating. She has the accent of a Russian prostitute. The same nasal confidence. The same fluid slur of words. Not a single moment taken to collect her thoughts or search for a phrase. Only the educated stop to look for words — having enough to occasionally misplace them.
Sheldon labours to his feet and brushes off his trousers. He holds up his hands. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I’m not even sure I care. Just go to the police and get your boy a milkshake.’
She does not slow down.
‘Milkshake,’ says Sheldon. ‘Police.’
Sheldon decides her name is Vera. Sheldon watches Vera gesture towards the boy and nod. She points and nods. She nods and points. She puts her hands together in a praying gesture. She crosses herself, which makes Sheldon lift his eyebrows for the first time.
‘In that case, why not just stay, have a cup of tea, and wait this out for an hour? Waiting is wise. He might come back. You don’t want to go back to the apartment. Believe me.’
He thinks for a moment. There is a word they used in the Ukrainian part of Brooklyn. Yes. ‘Chai.’ It is Russian for tea. He makes sipping sounds and says it again. To be absolutely certain he is communicating, he sticks out his pinkie finger and makes yummy slurping sounds.
‘Tea. Nazi. Milkshake. Police. Are we clear?’
Vera does not respond to Sheldon’s pantomime. Exasperated, Sheldon throws up his hands. It is like p
ersuading a plant to move.
As Vera keeps talking and the boy sits, Sheldon hears a rumbling — the familiar if distant sound of a German diesel engine pinging and ponging its way slowly around a nearby bend.
‘They’re coming back. We have to leave. Now. They might not be as stupid as they absolutely seem to be. Come on. Come-come-come-come-come.’ He gestures, and when the car stops and the door opens, he decides the time for niceties has ended.
With extraordinary effort, Sheldon bends down and lifts the boy up, cradling him under the bottom like a toddler. He is not strong enough to use a free arm to grab Vera’s sleeve and pull her. He needs all his strength for the boy. He has nothing to move her but his power to convince. And he knows his power is limited.
‘Puzhaltzda,’ he says. Please.
It is the only real Russian he knows.
He moves with the boy to the three stairs that descend into his own apartment.
There is a bang at the door.
‘Puzhaltzda,’ he says.
She talks more. She is explaining something crucial. He cannot make any sense of it, and then makes the kind of decision a soldier makes with simple, irreproachable logic.
‘I cannot understand you and I am not going to. A violent man is at the front door. I am therefore leaving through the back door. I am taking the boy. If you come with us, you will be better off. If not, I am removing you from the equation. So here we go.’
Sheldon steps down into his bedroom, past the bathroom, and past the closet on his right. Beyond the bookshelf there is a hanging Persian rug that covers the bicycle entrance, which Sheldon has known about for three weeks — not just this morning — but didn’t want to admit finding on the day he moved into their apartment.
Say what you want, but there is a value to knowing the entrances and exits to places and problems.
With his elbow, he pushes the rug aside and sees the door behind.
‘Right, that’s it. We’re going. Now.’
The banging has changed from a firm knock to a frontal assault on the door. The monster is attempting to get in. He is kicking it with his boot. Hammering at the spot where the thin deadbolt holds the fifty-year-old dry-wood door to the opposing wall.
It is only a matter of time.
The problem is that the door in front of Sheldon is also locked, and he can’t manage to get it undone while holding the boy.
‘Come here, you fruitcake. Open this. Open it! Goddamn it!’
But she does not open it. She has crouched down under his bed.
Is she hiding there? That would be madness. Why hide when escape is possible?
There is no option. Sheldon has to put down the boy to struggle with the lock. And when he does, the boy rushes to his mother.
Just then the front door is kicked in.
It slams into the wall. Though he can’t see the front door from his angle, he hears the wood splinter and something metallic clank on the ground.
What Sheldon does next is focus.
‘Panic is the enemy,’ said staff sergeant O’Callihan in 1950. ‘Panic is not the same as being scared. Everyone gets scared. It is a survival mechanism. It tells you that something is wrong and requires your attention. Panic is when scared takes over your brain, rendering you utterly fucking useless. If you panic in the water, you will drown. If you panic on the battlefield, you will get shot. If you panic as a sniper, you will reveal your location, miss your mark, and fail your mission. Your father will hate you, your mother will ignore you, and women across this planet will be able to smell the stench of failure oozing from your very pores. So, Private Horowitz! What is the lesson here?’
‘Hold on a second. It’s on the tip of my tongue.’
Sheldon focuses on the lock. There is a chain lock that he slides off. There is a deadbolt that he twists. There is a door latch that he presses downward as he also lowers his weight onto it in the hopes the hinges will not squeak.
The steps down into Sheldon’s flat are not immediately visible from the kitchen. There are two other bedrooms off the living room for the monster to search first before reaching the stairs.
It is just a matter of seconds now.
Sheldon grabs the boy by the shoulders just as the mother emerges from under the bed. There is a moment when all three are standing silently. Looking at each other. Pausing before the final assault.
A stillness happens.
Vera is framed by the doorway leading upstairs. The Norwegian summer light floods around her, and in that blessed moment she looks like a saint from a Renaissance painting. Eternal and beloved.
And then there are heavy footfalls.
Vera hears them. She opens her eyes wide, then — slowly, quietly — pushes her boy towards Sheldon, mouths something to him Sheldon doesn’t understand, and then turns. Before the legs of the monster can descend the three steps, Vera, determined, rushes up the stairs and launches her whole body at him.
The boy takes a tentative step forward, but Sheldon grabs him. With his free hand, he tries the back door one more time. It still won’t open. They are trapped.
Releasing the rug and letting it fall back into position, Sheldon opens the closet door and leads the boy in. He raises his finger to his lips to signal silence. His eyes are so stern, and the boy so terrified, that not a sound passes between them.
There is screaming, heavy-body heaving and crashing, and cruelty upstairs.
He should go. He should grab the poker from by the fireplace and swing with all the force of mighty justice, and lodge the spike into the monster’s brainstem, standing tall as his lifeless body collapses full force to the floor.
But he doesn’t.
With his fingers under the door’s edge, he pulls it closed as far as it will go.
As he hears the sound of choking, the smell of urine fills the closet. He pulls the boy to his chest, presses his lips against his head, and places his hands around the boy’s ears.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. This is the best I can do. I’m so sorry.’
Chapter 3
Sigrid Ødegård has been a police officer with the Oslo Politidistrikt for just over eighteen years. She joined after completing her advanced studies in criminology at the University of Oslo. Her father convinced her to go there, rather than study farther north, because — in his view — ‘there will be more eligible men in the big city.’
As so often happens in both police work and life, her father’s theory proved both true and irrelevant.
‘The question, Papa, is the ratio of available men to those who are interested in me. Not just the number of available men.’ Sigrid made this point to her widowed father in 1989, before going to Oslo.
Her father was a farmer from the countryside. Though not a formally educated man, he did understand numbers, as they came in handy for organising life on the farm. He was also a reader of history. He did not call himself a student, as he had no tutor, but he found reading pleasurable, took an interest in the worlds that have passed before this one, and he had a good memory. All this served him, Sigrid, and the animals rather well. He also had a fine mind for reason, and he and Sigrid found comfort there when emotions were too tender.
‘If your argument holds,’ he had responded over a quiet dinner of salmon, boiled potatoes, and a bottle of beer, ‘then it is not a matter of ratios at all, but a statistic of likelihoods. What is the likelihood of there being a man sufficiently observant as to note your desirability and availability? And again, I stand by the claim that such a young man is more likely to be found in the big city.’
‘It’s not such a big city,’ Sigrid said.
Her father slid each section of pink meat off the subsequent section of pink meat to see how well prepared it was. They slid easily, and he said nothing.
‘It is the biggest one av
ailable,’ he offered.
‘Yes, well …’ she muttered, reaching for the butter.
Sigrid’s older brother had moved to America on being offered a position selling agricultural machinery. It was a good offer, and their father had insisted he take it. Though he stayed in touch, Sigrid’s brother almost never came home. This was family now. This and the animals.
‘I’ll grant you the point about the city, but there are still two problems,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ Her father raised his voice just enough to suggest a question.
‘The first is that I’m not pretty. I’m plain. The second is that it is near impossible to know if a Norwegian man is interested.’
She had learned this by way of empirical observation and comparison.
To wit, she had once met a British man named Miles. Miles was so forthcoming with his advances that the alcohol merely affected his aim rather than his behaviour.
She had also met a German boy who was sweet and affectionate and clever, and whose only flaw was being German — which was unfair, and she knew it, and she felt bad about it, but Sigrid still didn’t want to spend every other Christmas in Hanover. To his credit, though, neither did he.
Norwegian men, in contrast to the others, were problematic — even for Norwegian women, who presumably had the greatest motive to crack the code of their behaviour, if only for reasons of proximity.
She explained. ‘They are polite. Occasionally witty. They dress like teenagers, no matter what their age, and will never say anything romantic unless it’s during a drunken confessional.’
‘So get them drunk.’
‘I don’t think that’s the first step in a lasting relationship, Papa.’
‘Things can’t last unless they begin. Worry about duration after commencement.’
Sigrid pouted, and her father’s shoulders dropped.
‘Daughter, it’s not hard at all. You look for the man staring with the greatest intensity at his own shoes while in your presence. The kind of man who is too tongue-tied to even try talking to you. This is the one you’re looking for. And take it from me, you’ll have his love and you’ll win more arguments. In the long run, this is the key to longevity, which is apparently your goal.’
Norwegian by Night Page 4