Norwegian by Night

by Derek B. Miller

  The only experience he could liken it to was landing in Vietnam over a year before. He’d met the riff-raff of conscripted America at boot camp, but it didn’t prepare him for the layers, patterns, and perplexities he found in Vietnam. For the interweaving stories and motives, moods, and memories of all these people.

  He didn’t understand the Navy. He didn’t understand Saigon. He couldn’t make sense of the silent shopkeepers or the treasonous VC. He was confused by the communists and their Buddhist families.

  He tried to see some glint of familiarity in the eyes of a woman — a teenager, really — as she shot at him, a month after he arrived, from beside a thatched hut in a muddy village, and just before she was burned alive in a torrent of fire spewed from the flamethrower carried by the Monk.

  Custom dictated that Saul thank him after this took place. He had opened his mouth to try, but the Monk just turned away.

  He understood — vaguely, and with some partial information pieced together from the papers and the military and former soldiers and rumours and newsreels — what the war was about. But he had no idea what these people were about. Somehow the war was the product of what all these people were doing when they woke up each morning. But what they did seemed insane, and so the war — the term used for the theatre-piece he was involved in — became an abstraction, just as it became more vivid and tangible.

  Unable to understand the big picture, he tried to take in the small storylines. The relationship with a buddy. The reason the colonel was rumoured to cry himself to sleep. What his father might make of all this.

  On the plane ride home, he imagined different ways he might discuss these things with his father, who had spent years in Korea with the Marines. They’d be more than father and son when he returned. They’d also be veterans of foreign wars: American vets who’d seen action — boys who’d passed through a looking glass. They were both altered and permitted by ancient and universal tribal law to speak in new ways, and command respect and authority that is not permitted to those who haven’t been baptised in the fires of war.

  Over time, Saul was able to sort out the people he met in Vietnam, and learned to place them into categories. These are on my side. And those are not. These can be reasoned with. And those cannot. Eventually, a category emerged that he could slot himself into as well. It was a box that was built by his father, and it was labelled — on the outside at least — Patriotic Jew. Inside, though, it was filled with stuff that neither of them could ever have imagined. Sheldon had stocked it with ideas from a past war and a past era. Saul just filled it with nightmares and impressions.

  Saul was in San Francisco for only one night before heading back east. He took a cab to a cheap motel near the airport, and watched TV all night while drinking Coke and Fanta from the mini-bar. Between eight and eleven, he watched All in the Family, the second half of Emergency, Mary Tyler Moore, and The Bob Newhart Show, and then fell asleep sometime in the middle of Mission Impossible. He had crossed the International Date Line, and it was only the second time he’d ever experienced jetlag. He slept with his shoes on. The dirt from Vietnam soiled the motel bed covers.

  He was out-processed the next day in a surprisingly brief visit at the base, and before he could realise that he was now a civilian with nothing to do and no one to report to, he was already on a plane towards Manhattan.

  When he arrived at the front door of his parents’ apartment in Gramercy, the sun was high and the city smelled good. He looked at the doorbell with his parents’ name in it — a name he momentarily forgot was also his own — and considered whether to press it.

  Without knowing why, or stopping to question the impulse, he turned and went away.

  ‘He should be here by now,’ Sheldon had said to Mabel, who sat on a settee with both feet tucked underneath her, reading the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine. It was already very late.

  ‘We didn’t set a time.’

  ‘We set a day. According to my perfectly serviced watch, that day is going to be over in less than an hour. And then he’ll be late.’

  ‘He’s been through a lot.’

  ‘I know what he’s been through.’

  ‘No, Sheldon. You don’t.’

  ‘What do you know about what I know about?’

  ‘Vietnam isn’t Korea.’

  ‘What’s not Korean about it?’

  ‘All I’m saying is that you can’t presume to know what he’s been through just because he walks through the door looking the same.’

  ‘That’s what you did to me.’

  ‘You were a clerk.’

  ‘You don’t know what I was.’

  Mabel tossed the magazine into the middle of the living room floor and raised her voice.

  ‘Well, what the hell were you, then? First it’s one thing, and then it’s another. You want my respect? You want my sympathy? You want me to understand why you shout “Mario” in your sleep? Then tell me.’

  ‘I did what I was told to do. That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘Because that’s how men act?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘I’m staying up until he gets home.’

  ‘Why? So he can come home from a war and you can tell him, first thing out of your mouth, that he’s late?’

  ‘Go to bed, Mabel.’

  ‘Aren’t you looking forward to seeing him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mabel was angry, and walked to the bedroom door.

  ‘I don’t even know what that means, Sheldon. I really don’t.’

  ‘I don’t either.’

  Saul was on the last number 5 train from Union Square out to Beverly Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, while his parents were arguing. He stared at his own hands during the whole trip.

  The woman who would eventually become Rhea’s mother lived on the second floor of her parent’s house on a tiny plot of land, so small that residents in the bathrooms of the adjacent homes could have handed each other rolls of toilet paper without getting up.

  Saul’s clothes were a little too big for him. He’d lost twenty pounds on the river. He stood in front of the dark house looking up at the window, like he did when he was a teenager hoping to get laid. They’d met on a bus four years ago. In the fumbling way of adolescents, they neither chose nor rejected each other. As the relationship continued, they were unable to pull the other close or let go because it all seemed so significant. So they kept at it. They cheated and repented. Then he went to Vietnam.

  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 und
erstand?’

  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.’