Norwegian by Night (14 page)

But she didn't remember any of this. Mabel told her. Just like she told her how Sheldon started slipping and became a sniper.

‘I remember the conversation. We got you home, put you into some of Saul's old baby clothes because that's all we had, and your grandfather said, “Well. We killed the first one, but God's giving us a second chance to get it right. I wonder if we get a prize if this one makes it to adulthood.” It was a horrible thing to say. To even think. Only a madman could have uttered a sentence like that. He started making up stories about the war shortly after that. Dementia was the only explanation I could imagine.'

Rhea sits on the back of the motorcycle and wonders. She wonders when personality lapses into eccentricity. When genius merges into madness. When sanity gives way to — what? Insanity is merely the absence of sanity. It is not a thing in itself. It is everything but sane. And that's all we know about it. We don't even have a real word for it.

She knows what Sheldon would say, and can't help but smile herself. ‘Sanity? You want to know what sanity is? Sanity is the thick soup of distraction we immerse ourselves in to keep us from remembering that we're gonna bite it. Every opinion and taste and order you place for brown mustard instead of yellow mustard is just a way to keep from thinking about it. And they call our ability to distract ourself “sanity”. So when you get to the end, and you forget whether you prefer brown or yellow mustard, they say you're going nuts. But that isn't it. What's really going on is this. In those little senior moments of clarity, when your head is flipping back and forth between brown and yellow like a tennis match on fast forward, and you suddenly pause, you find yourself undistracted. And it happens. You look straight across the net at all the other people trying to choose between brown and yellow mustard and … there he is! At the seat on centre court! Death! He's been there all along! Mustard on the left and right, distractions everywhere, and Death straight ahead! It hits you like a swinging vat of onion soup.'

The ride grows wilder. The trees thicken as the still, blue water of the fjord is left far behind and forgotten in the scented winds of pine and maple and birch. Lars steers the bike onto a subsidiary road to avoid the big rigs and anxious drivers of the city. They climb over the rolling hills, and lean into the turns of the valleys. The 1200cc adventure bike pulls up and then passes with the power of a Clydesdale.

It is a horrible thing happening to them. It is. Lars allows the circumstances to confront him as he shifts up into fourth. Sheldon is missing, and a woman has been murdered in their apartment. But Lars believes the murderer will be found, that Sheldon will be found, and that there is no real danger. Sigrid Ødegård had explained it. These were domestic disputes that took tragic and violent turns. And, as awful as it was, Rhea would need to understand that it wasn't a random act of violence and that they were never in any danger. It doesn't have to evoke ideas of the war, or genocide, or all the historical weight that she carries with her so intimately he sometimes wonders if … in another life … maybe she was there. She seems so able to describe these worlds.

There is something about the way the Jews bear witness to history that Lars has always found unsettling. They speak as though they were there. Since Egypt. Since the morning of Western civilisation when its light shone west from Jerusalem and Athens, and blanketed Rome and all that the Empire would leave behind. They have watched the Western tribes and empires rise and fall — from the Babylonians to the Gauls to the Moors, to the Hapsburgs and Ottomans — and have alone remained. They have seen it all. And the rest of us wait for the passing of a verdict that is still, even now, to come.

The road narrows again, and Lars drops it into second gear, bringing the RPMs up to four thousand and holding it steady — light hands, weight backwards — over the sand by the edge of the road.

It is awful, yes, the miscarriage. But no one did anything wrong. Rhea was in great shape. She ate well, she didn't touch a drop of wine, and she steered clear of tuna fish and blue cheeses. It simply wasn't meant to be. She's taken it better than he expected. But then again, there have been some distractions. Maybe he doesn't know her mind as well as he thinks.

Is it wrong, though, to be enjoying the moment? To feel her warm leather-clad thighs wrapped around him? They haven't ridden since learning about the baby. It took all his power of persuasion to get permission to keep riding at all. No, not at night. Never after a beer. I'll try and stay out of the rain. I won't yell at truck drivers and encourage them to crush me under the wheels of their rigs.

I will not even get irritated at Swedes.

It feels good to have her here, though. Despite it all. In the middle of unexpected chaos. Isn't that what a good marriage should be all about? Isn't this what life is while we have it?

There is nothing but forest now. The road here should not even exist. At the turn of the last century, this was a dirt path that led through a dense dale and opened over a wilderness inhabited by the northernmost wanderers of the species. It was only paved after the war. Norway extends endlessly northward from here. But out here and away from the city, the entirety of Scandinavia begins to form on the wind. The Finns came down through here, and some of them settled. The population bleeds over from Sweden. The Nordic tribes march past each other like nomads, and the vastness of humanity's northernmost outposts lies open, entire, and wild.

Lars slows even more now, and turns off the smaller road onto a dense dirt path that in winter he traverses on skis — the car left on the side of the road, a battery charger and a jerry can with petrol in the trunk, everything unlocked in case a poor soul, including him, needs shelter. He has had nightmares of fingers so frozen that he cannot get into the car and turn on the heated blanket.

The bike crunches over the gravel and rolls up the winding path, which soon lets out into a wide mews that gently climbs to the horizon where the squat, red house sits cleanly and freshly against the blue sky.

Even as Lars rolls on a bit more power to cross the grass, he and Rhea have the same sense. He hears her through the carbon fibres of his helmet.

‘He isn't here,' she says.

There is no way for either one to know this, but it feels true. They come to a stop on the left side of the house near some tall grass and a water cistern, and turn off the motorcycle.

The engine's fan whines, and then halts.

His helmet off, Lars goes to the front door and tries the handle. It is locked. He presses his face against the glass, and looks into the rustic and orderly kitchen. Nothing is out of place. The coffee grinder is where he left it. The propane tank is still unconnected to the hob. The cutting board hasn't been used. The four chairs around the small wooden table are all pushed in and at rest. Even the hand-cranked transistor radio is on top of the cupboard.

On his way back to the bike, he sees that water in the cistern is low. It hasn't rained in some time. The grass in the mews has faded to a mustard yellow in the hot sun. Lars walks around to the back of the house, past the axes, hoes, and rakes, and presses his hands against the window again and looks in. Still nothing: books and magazines, puzzles and games, oil lamps and blankets, an armful of dry wood for the fire. The blue-and-white plates and cups on the hutch along the north wall, and the pillows of the window bench, are all unmoved.

Little has changed in the cabin over the last century, aside from the back-up generator and some communications equipment. It is how he and his father like it. While Rhea's New York sensibility first found it quaint to the point of hokey, she has since learned about the sounds one can hear without interruption. And this has rescued the cabin from being a sentimental relic to being a refuge in an ever-encroaching universe.

They could stay here tonight. It's past four o'clock already, and the sun is high in the sky. It's possible that Sheldon is on his way. It might even make sense. There's a train and a bus that come out to Glåmlia from Oslo; being resourceful, he'd probably hitch a ride to where the road ends as the path begins. He doesn't know the address, but he knows it's the red house on the hill at the end of the mews. There's only one. And everyone knows who owns it. Getting here wouldn't be a problem.

Unless she's right. Unless he does get disoriented, and ends up in Trondheim or somewhere. Or the police catch him. Or unless something has happened to him already.

Lars comes back around the house and sees Rhea standing several metres away from the motorcycle, staring back across the mews into the forest. She's still zipped into her gear and is holding her helmet under one arm. Her black hair hangs low, and she is still as a statue.

As Lars comes up behind her, he sees Rhea silently move her hand away from her thigh and open her palm, signalling him to halt.

Then she raises the same hand and points to the woods as she turns back to him. Her voice is low.

‘I think there's someone there.'

Chapter 8

‘First we watch,' says Sheldon quietly. ‘We learn their ways. How they move. What they wear. We mimic their behaviour so we can blend and become one of them. So we can merge into their culture and go native. Then, and only then,' he tells Paul, as he raises the binoculars to his eyes, ‘do we make our move.'

From the edge of Akershus Fortress along the fjord, Sheldon and Paul squat on the grass by a cobblestone street and look down at some extraordinarily fat people emerging from a Carnival Cruise ship. They flow from the gangplanks like thick blubber from a wounded white whale, washing into the road below the fortress and then oozing into the city by the City Hall and Aker Brygge.

‘There, there, look over there. Near that big sailing ship, the
Christian Radich
. Look at them. Those little boats. Maybe a twelve-footer with an outboard. Looks like it hasn't moved in years.'

Sheldon puts down the binoculars and flips through his Lonely Planet, which has started to become awfully handy for finding his way around the city and figuring out what he's looking at.

If he'd had one of these for North Korea, his scouting missions would have been far easier.

‘We're going to blend in with the lard arses, we're going to borrow one of those boats, and then we're going south. I'd go north, but then we'd need a car.'

Sheldon sits up and looks at how Paul is dressed. He still looks like Paddington Bear without the red hat.

‘We need some camouflage. Come on. They're not going to disembark forever. We've got about fifteen minutes to use them as cover while we take the boat.'

With Paul in hand, Sheldon takes the path away from the city, past obsolete cannons, and down to the edge of the fortress, where a small path descends to a squat stone tower and then on to the harbour.

At the waterfront they turn right and stroll casually towards the cruise ship, where the colourful blobs have coagulated into small groups flowing northwards towards Sheldon's intended mark.

‘Watch this,' he says to Paul.

As they pass an especially large and distracted pod of vacationers, Sheldon bumps into one of them and casually — with unusual grace — lifts a thin, orange Gore-Tex jacket from an open backpack. Rather than hide it, he immediately slips it on despite the clement weather.

‘You hide in plain sight. It's where they never look,' he says to Paul. ‘Now, over there, onto that pier.'

Walking among the sandal-clad minions now, Sheldon and Paul go with the flow like leaves on a river. He talks to Paul as they shuffle up the road.

‘Why do people always compare the size of a growing foetus to food? “It's the size of a lima bean. Size of a pea. Size of a cherry. Size of a banana.” There's something creepy about that. Don't you think that's creepy?'

Paul looks at his feet as they walk. It has been less than twenty-four hours since he hid in the closet. Sheldon is not unaware of this. He simply does not know what to do about it.

‘They never say, “It's the size of a small-change purse” or “It's the length of a parking ticket.” They're thinking of eating you before you even show up. There, there, look. Over there. That's the one. All we have to do now is look purposeful.'

Sheldon and Paul walk past the three-masted steel ship and hug the waterfront, breaking off from the colourful flow of city-goers. Like convicts, they slip down behind the port authority to a small flight of stairs that lets out onto a short dock. To the right is an unoccupied police boat bobbing on the calm water just in front of the boat that Sheldon has decided is now his.

Once painted brightly in the red, whites, and blues of the Norwegian flag, the little boat now looks haggard and tired. It looks to Sheldon like an over-sized rowboat with a small outboard motor at the stern that has to be steered directly from the tiller.

Sheldon regards the vehicle. He shakes his head at Paul.

‘Jews aren't supposed to eat shellfish. I think it was His way of letting us know we aren't a seafaring people. All right, let's do what needs to be done.'

Sheldon takes hold of a mooring line and pulls the little boat so it is close enough to step in to. He puts one leg cautiously inside and then reaches out to Paul.