Norwegian by Night

by Derek B. Miller

  Enver Bardhosh Berisha. KLA. Let into the country by Immigration on the basis of legitimate threats to his life in Serbia, and with a son in the country.

  KLA. The Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a paramilitary group that started off with Western and NATO support because of their armed struggle against Serbian ethnic cleansing, but eventually lost the backing of the West because of their drug running, and the executions, mass murders, and other atrocities they committed that undermined any moral standing they might have had. It all confounded the rest of Europe, and, without a clear good guy or bad guy, we just changed the channel.

  Sigrid puts down the file, rubs her eyes, and then shouts, ‘My light bulb’s burnt out,’ which for some reason causes laughter among her staff. So she adds, ‘I need a new light bulb,’ and this only make them laugh more.

  The thing about military people is that they have social standing. You work your way up, and people recognise your status. When the group breaks up, you lose the one thing that was precious during the rebellion: respect.

  Would a man like Enver — a senior soldier with confirmed kills but no family, no money, no roots — turn his back on his own status and reputation, and suddenly flee the fight to a remote Scandinavian country to become a peaceful family man? What kind of woman would have a man like that anyway?

  Sigrid’s thoughts leave the station and go to her father at their kitchen table. She recalls a conversation they had once when he explained something useful, which she has since had a hard time explaining to others.

  ‘It’s all artifice,’ he’d said with uncharacteristic seriousness.

  ‘You mean it’s all meaningless?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean that at all.’ He paused for a very long time before he spoke again. Her father was not an affected man and did not indulge in dramatic pauses. Rather, he was motivated to be precise. And sometimes, he said, that requires time to collect one’s thoughts. If the other people walk off in the meantime, then clearly they are not interested in the right answer.

  ‘What I mean,’ he’d continued, ‘is that the buildings, the desks, the great structures are all products of ideas. So it isn’t the buildings that matter. It is the ideas. But because the buildings are shiny and expensive, and the ideas are more elusive, we tend to become dazzled by the buildings — that is, the artifice. In fact, they distract us from the ideas that fill them. People stand on the steps of great buildings, and feel awe before they enter. Why? The ideas don’t know where they are being expressed. When I read history, I don’t read about the great buildings; I read about the ideas of empires. They all asked similar questions, but came to different answers. It is a fact that when we compare worlds, those worlds are different.

  ‘The interesting bit is this. For those worlds to hold together, the ideas must be shared. So I like to look to the ideas that are being shared. Who is involved? What are they thinking? What do these ideas make possible? What, for them, is obvious, and what is impossible to imagine? What is permissible and what is not?

  ‘And if you can’t start with the ideas, because they are hidden, first start with who is talking to whom to get things done. Patterns always emerge. If things are getting done, there is a pattern behind it. You can be sure that it’s more than mere motive. There is … a logic that holds the conversation together.’

  Sigrid had nodded and considered what her father had said.

  After some time she said, ‘You converse with the animals and live on a farm. What am I to make of that?’

  ‘Ah,’ her father had said. ‘But which animals? And what do we talk about?’

  Chapter 11

  Sheldon did not dream of the woman who was killed. For the first time since he could remember, he also did not dream of his son. He dreamed instead of a young boy sitting with his back to him, playing with coloured blocks. Stacking them precariously, higher and higher and higher.

  Sheldon slept because he had no worries about getting caught in the house. Something groundbreaking had happened some time around the millennium, when he turned seventy-five. He found he could pretty much get away with anything, and people would chalk it up to Crazy Old Man.

  Not my house? No kidding!

  So why worry?

  Better to concentrate on real problems, like how to get to Glåmlia without taking public transportation or a taxi, or hitchhiking.

  Paul is hard to wake, but Sheldon knows he’s been sleeping since at least nine o’clock last night, and eight hours is plenty for anyone.

  ‘Good morning,’ he says to Paul while leaning over his bed.

  As Paul awakens, Sheldon can see that he is — like any other child — uncertain of his surroundings and taking stock, his eyes adjusting to the light. When he finally focuses on Sheldon, he wordlessly puts his arms around Sheldon’s neck and holds him.

  It is not a hug of affection, but the grasp of the drowning around flotsam.

  ‘Come on,’ Sheldon says to Paul. ‘Back to the funky toothbrush, and then to breakfast. We need to look around a bit and think. No one says we have to go to the cabin. Which is good, seeing as I can’t think of a way to get us there. We could take that little boat out there all the way to Sweden, if we wanted to. Only I don’t want to. One day on the water is enough for an old man. I need to be near a toilet, see? You don’t see. You pee like a racehorse. You’re so young you don’t even know how to hold up a toilet seat that’s committed to falling down all the time. The trick — and I’m telling you this to save you a lot of trial and error — is to stand to the side of the bowl and prop it up with your thigh. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. In the fullness of time, you would have figured it out yourself, a bright boy like you. Probably true, but after how many embarrassing moments? And wait until you get to England and find they put carpets in the bathrooms, as if that isn’t the grossest idea in Western civilisation. One New Year’s party over there, and you’ll never walk barefoot again. What were we talking about?’

  Into the kitchen, Sheldon raids the cupboards and makes them both a breakfast of instant coffee, hot tea, chocolate-chip cookies, frozen fish sticks, Wasa bread, and moose jerky.

  Between courses, Sheldon nibbles at pistachio nuts, and hunts for the bits in his gums with a butter knife.

  ‘Let’s go rummage through the closets and see if we can’t find you something to wear.’

  After a half-hearted, admittedly male effort at cleaning the kitchen, Sheldon takes Paul into the master bedroom and starts going through the closets.

  In a plain cedar armoire with mirrors on the front doors, they find multi-seasonal clothes for men and woman. They are clothes for middle-aged people. Conservative people. People who can afford a house on the Oslo fjord, and don’t feel bothered about having to occupy it. People, Sheldon decides, with clothes to spare who wouldn’t mind passing on a bit of their good fortune.

  ‘I’m not saying that we’re doing a Robin Hood or anything. And I’m not going to mince my words. We’re stealing their clothes. The boat was more of a temporary thing. The clothes are for keeps. All I’m saying is that this guy can probably live with one less tweed jacket. And, to be fair, I’m leaving behind an excellent orange jacket that anyone would want.’

  Sheldon keeps his own trousers, but takes some clean underwear and socks. He also takes a starched, white-collared shirt that looks as though it has been waiting for its owner’s attention for at least a decade. It is too big for him, naturally, but he tucks it deeply into his pants and pulls his belt tight.

  Unexpectedly, on the woman’s side, on the top shelf, Sheldon finds a blonde wig. While his first thoughts immediately turn to sex and all-too-present — and all too-out-of-reach — memories of playing make-believe, one further glance back at the tweed jacket and the old shirts gives him a new thought. One less cheery.

  ‘Cancer,’ he says. ‘Probably explains why no one c
omes here. Now that I think about it, that moose jerky was pretty tough.’

  Paul reaches up for the wig. Sheldon looks at it, then down at the boy, and hands it to him. Paul touches the blonde hair and carefully examines the curls. He turns it inside out, and sees the white mesh of its artificial scalp. Sheldon gently takes it back and expertly places it on his own head.

  Paul’s eyes are open wide. They even suggest playfulness. Though perhaps this is just the imagination of an old man who needs to believe this.

  ‘OK, let’s see you then.’

  Sheldon takes it off and puts it snugly on Paul’s head. Closing the armoire, he points at Paul in the mirror.

  Paul looks back.

  ‘Huck Finn dressed in drag, too, when he was checking the scene out from Jackson’s Island. There’s a strong literary history of boys dressing up like little girls when the going gets tough, so don’t give it a second thought. In fact, with the long white shirt, I’m starting to get an idea.’

  From the woman’s side of the closet, Sheldon takes a thin brown leather belt and puts it around Paul’s waist.

  ‘We need a hat. Maybe a woollen cap or something. Oh! That. Up there. That’ll do nicely.’ Sheldon takes down a brown cap and sticks it on Paul’s wig-clad head.

  ‘OK, OK. This is taking form. I need the hat back. Now I need a clothes hanger and some tin foil. Back to the kitchen!’

  Spry, and loaded up on caffeine and sugar, Sheldon leaps for the kitchen and starts opening and closing cabinets. As if divinely prepared, the tin foil drops from the cabinet above the refrigerator. Humming now, Sheldon takes hold of a paper-towel roll and starts pulling furiously at it. The paper spins and spins and spins. ‘Help me!’ he says to Paul, handing him an armful of paper.

  Taking his cue, Paul gets behind Sheldon and pulls and pulls and pulls as though hoisting a mast up a mighty ship. Together, dressed like outpatients, they manage to get all the paper off the roll, and only then is Sheldon satisfied.

  ‘Now. Now we’ve got something to work with.’

  Sheldon takes the cardboard tube, the wire coathanger, and the woollen hat, and sets to work. With the kitchen table drafted into service as his laboratory, Sheldon uses a steak knife to slice the tube in half. Wincing from a pang of arthritis in his knuckles, he manages to straighten the coathanger and then bend it into a giant, curvy ‘W’. Giving a wink to Paul, he weaves one end of the coathanger through one side of the woollen cap and out the other. Pulling the hat into position, he centres it on the bent wires, forming ram horns. He slips the cardboard tubes onto each horn and then very, very liberally wraps each one with tin foil.

  The result is what Vikings might have worn in outer space.

  Satisfied, Sheldon slips the whole contraption on Paul’s head and then pulls him over to the mirror again to get a gander at himself. With the expression of someone trying to sell a motorcycle to a pregnant woman, Sheldon smiles BIG as he presents Paul to himself.

  ‘Paul the Viking! Paul the Completely Disguised Albanian Kid who is not on the run through the Norwegian hinterland with the Old Fool. What do you think?’

  ‘Oh! But wait! One more thing. What’s a Viking — or Wiking, if you listen to Norwegians pronounce it — without a battleaxe or something equally destructive? If I had a copy of the Republican platform I could give you that, but in its absence I’m thinking … wooden spoon.’

  Back to the kitchen one more time, Sheldon finds a nicely worn wooden spoon, and slides it into Paul’s leather belt.

  Then he stands back and looks.

  ‘One last touch.’ And, with that, Sheldon draws an ancient symbol on Paul’s Viking chest with a black marker he’d noticed earlier in one of the kitchen drawers.

  Sheldon is proud of himself.

  Paul, with a newfound sense of purpose — and no longer looking like Paddington or any other stowaway — goes into the master bedroom again to pose in front of the mirror.

  Sheldon takes the lull in his childcare obligations to fill his satchel with more water, some crackers, and the last of the moose jerky.

  Leaving the back door open, he goes out to the yard and down to the pier to check on the boat they borrowed from Oslo. The sun is already high above the horizon, despite it being only eight o’clock. There is a chill in the morning air, but this only suggests a high front and continued good weather. He could turn on the television and find out the proper forecast easily enough, but he worries that the murder will be on the news. Every moment that Paul does not see his mother’s face, or can find a respite or even a distraction from the wider reality, is a blessing that Sheldon does not want to forsake.

  With his hands on his hips, Sheldon walks out onto the pier and scopes out the spot where he had moored the boat last evening. It is a nice spot, gently shaded, well protected from most angles. The kind of place a person might go for a picnic with a loved one, and lay out a blanket and throw stones into the water. He can see all this very well now, because the boat isn’t there blocking his view.

  Huh?

  It’s possible it was borrowed by some teenagers, or even that it floated off on the tide. Whatever the cause, the effect remains the same. They now have one fewer option than they had a moment earlier.

  ‘All the better,’ says Sheldon quietly as he turns away from the river for good.

  From the pier, and with less to demand his attention than there was last night, the old scout-sniper also notices something else that had escaped his eagle-eye vision — namely two massive tyre tracks leading from the edge of the water to the back of a garage beside the house.

  With nothing else in particular to do, Sheldon follows the tracks. The garage looks like a small American barn that should be red, but instead is the same bright blue as the lonely house belonging to the couple with cancer.

  The doors to the garage are painted white, and there are windows at eye level. Using the trick he tried to teach Paul the night before, Sheldon presses his nose against the glass and peers inside. There are windows across the way on what he suspects are identical doors on the other side, but they do not illuminate the otherwise dark room. All he can really tell is that it is filled with something long and large.

  Sheldon tries the handle, but is surprised to find the doors locked.

  This brings him to his drill sergeant’s Lesson No. 2.

  If you can’t use a hammer, try to find the key.

  Nothing was too obvious not to deserve a formal lesson in the United States Marine Corps.

  In the kitchen, where he’d found the marker, there is a ring of keys with labels on each one. The labels are in Norwegian, but, as chance would have it, one of them does in fact unlock the padlock to the garage door facing the street.

  So, without much optimism, Sheldon opens the padlock, places it back on the door in an open position, and then swings the doors open in a dramatic gesture, for no other reason than because it feels good.

  What he sees inside gives Sheldon the first genuine desire to laugh since Rhea told him about the miscarriage.

  Leaving the garage door open, he shuffles back to the living room and finds the lower half of the Viking alighting from under the vintage three-seater sofa. Sheldon addresses the boy’s bottom.

  ‘Whatcha doing under the sofa?’

  Hearing Sheldon’s voice, he slides back out. When he’s fully out from under, he turns over. The boy holds up a very large ball of dust and hair.

  Sheldon pulls over a curvy Danish chair and sits in it. He considers first the boy and then the dust bunny he’s raising overhead like a trophy.

  ‘That’s a mighty impressive hair ball you’ve got there.’

  Paul considers it.

  ‘You know, this is a good sign. I guess. You see, before Huck and Jim hit the road, Jim had a hair ball. His could talk if you put a coin under it. I don’t have a nic
kel, though. And this one probably speaks Norwegian. I think we should go now.’

  Sheldon takes a pillowcase from the bedroom and places the dust bunny in the middle of it. He folds the four corners over it and ties them together. From the hall closet he takes a broom and unscrews the handle from the plastic head. He slides the handle through the knot on the pillowcase and puts the whole rig on Paul’s shoulder.

  ‘Now you’re a Norwegian-Albanian Dust-Bunny Hobo Viking. Bet you didn’t know you’d be one of those when you woke up this morning.’

  Their battle Wellingtons on, the dishes washed and put back, the beds stripped, the sheets piled on the floor, and the toilets flushed again for good measure, Sheldon snaps his fingers a few times to signal that it’s time to go. He shoulders his satchel and adjusts the strap so it rests better on his thin shoulder, and walks with Paul out into the light of a new day to show him his special discovery.

  ‘Come, come, come. Now, you stand there. And don’t move. OK?’

  It’s not OK, and Paul has no idea what Sheldon is talking about, but, horns and all, he stands at attention as Sheldon disappears into the garage.

  There is a long silence. Paul looks down to the fjord, where beautiful sailboats skim over the surface of the cold and salty sea. Where seagulls glide, high and free in the morning sky. Where …

  A thunderous noise startles the boy, who steps away from the garage.

  Smoke billows from the open door and slips in from under the closed one. The windows undulate, and the birds all fly away. And out of the darkness comes Sheldon Horowitz on a massive yellow tractor, pulling a huge rubber raft on a two-wheeled boat trailer with a Norwegian flag affixed to the stern.

  ‘River Rats!’ he shouts, flapping his map high above his head, ‘Let the journey commence!’