Norwegian by Night Read online

  ‘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.

  ‘Come on. It’s OK.’

  Paul does not step forward.

  ‘Really, look, I’ve been in a rowboat before. And that one didn’t even have an engine. I can do this. I can. Really. No problem. None at all. I’m sure. More or less.’

  The impulses and inner worlds of children have never been entirely clear to Sheldon. When his son Saul was a little boy, under two years old, he would spring out of the stroller and run like a little drunk to the toddler swing.

  Go da, go da, he would say.

  ‘Go there? You want to go there? Sure. Why not.’

  So Sheldon would lift Saul into the swing, upon which Saul would immediately break into tears and a squirming fit.

  ‘This wasn’t my idea. It was your idea! I’m nothing but a human forklift! I pick you up and put you down. You said in, I put you in. So down now? OK.’

  And out Saul would come, which would enrage him further. It was this sort of behaviour that Sheldon blamed entirely on female influence.

  How come Paul wouldn’t get in one moment, and then did the next?

  Who knows. That’s why.

  Once in the jon boat, Sheldon works quickly. He hasn’t hotwired an outboard engine since his training for Korea. At the time, it was part of a host of fun and unexpected lessons they taught his group as part of the ‘scouting’ portion of their training. The logic came down from his drill sergeant, as so much wisdom often did.

  We can’t push you out of a plane with a rifle, have you march twenty miles across enemy terrain, evading commie forces and local wildlife, only for you to show up and realise you forgot the key. So we’re going to learn to live without keys. Lesson one starts with a hammer …

  Lesson ten (or so) involved more sophisticated techniques, like how to find the relevant bits in a motor’s power head and get around the main wire harness to jump the starter directly from the battery. It wasn’t brain surgery, so long as the motor was simple. And this one was.

  Sheldon checks the fuel level by following a tube from the intake pump to a plastic tank on the deck. On the outside of the tank are small indicator marks. It has about ten litres. It is a small four-stroke engine — which gives it a better range than the older two-strokes — so he takes a guess and figures that they can get about four or five hours out of it, which is plenty. No real telling where they would end up, of course, but that doesn’t matter for now.

  As Sheldon checks whether the spark plugs are corroded, a police officer walks down the stairs onto the pier and heads in their direction.

  Sheldon is removing the plastic housing from the twenty-horsepower engine as the police officer walks by without looking at them.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he says to Paul as he works. ‘Don’t we look suspicious? The truth is, we don’t. When was the last time you heard of an eighty-two-year-old man wearing a bright orange jacket stealing a boat moored next to the police? Never, that’s when. It’s inconceivable! This is how you get away with things on this planet. Do the unimaginable in plain view. People assume it has to be something else.’

  As the engine starts with a sputter and cough, Sheldon unties the mooring lines from the cleats and throws the lines to the pier.

  ‘Tougher to do this in New York, though. Some smart-arse would have come over to tell me how to fix the engine, or asked what I thought of the Yankees losing to the Red Sox. You know what I think? I think it’s great — that’s what I think. The Yankees deserve to lose. Let’s just hope no one asks us anything in Norwegian.’

  Sheldon pushes the tiller hard to port and gently twists the throttle, easing the little boat away from the dock and out into the Oslo fjord. He runs their little raft along the edge of the Christian Radich and its gleaming steel hull, and out to the deep, blue sound, leaving Oslo and the little he knows of this strange country far behind him.

  Part II

  River Rats

  Chapter 9

  Sheldon has only been on the water in his imagination until now. It started with visions he described to Mabel in 1975. Their source was vivid, though mercifully simple: a letter from Herman Williams, one of Saul’s buddies from the boat who was with him when he was wounded. It explained the circumstances of Saul’s death.

  In this way, the visions were derived from facts, but they were larger than the facts themselves. They were terrifying and alive, and became truly enveloping and relentless when Rhea came to live with them in 1976.

  In this vision, Sheldon was patrolling the Mekong Delta with Saul, Herman Williams, Ritchie Jameson, Trevor Evans, and the Captain — a man they called the Monk.

  It all began with a sort of open-hearted optimism.

  Sheldon was on assignment for Reuters. His early photography book was just the sort of in-your-face realism they needed then. His own war record gave him the credibility among the younger men that he needed to document their contribution to the war effort. He was only in his forties and, while not stupendously fit, was still slender and alert. The call came late one night while he was watching Johnny Carson. Carson was interviewing Dick Cavett, and their comic timing and quick repartee had him and Mabel in stitches.

  ‘This is Reuters calling. We need you there. You up for it?’

  ‘My bags have been packed since the Tet Offensive.’

  ‘Good man. Leave in the morning?’

  ‘Morning? Why wait? How about now?’

  In an hour he was transported to Saigon, where an elephant took him to Saul’s base in three minutes while Nepalese Sherpas carried the luggage. The colonel in charge shot Sheldon a thumbs-up, and Donny winked back. It wa
s good to be on the line again, out among the men. How young they were now! Not like in his day. Was he ever this young? Of course not. Korea was fought by men, and not just any men. Men with better taste in music.

  All the guys gave a ‘hoo-ah!’ when the old Marine walked into the barracks. Despite rank, they all saluted him, and he returned it. Just this once, of course. Respecting the old guard. They knew he was one of them, and not some chump from Stars and Stripes here to snap a few shots to put over whatever propaganda they’d just thought up. And he wasn’t some hippie dreaming of planting a wet one on Jane Fonda’s misguided arse. Nope. This was a real man to take some photos of life on the river. Where the insects where big enough to carry away little Vietnamese children, the air was thicker than the tension, and the only rule was that you couldn’t eat the dead.

  Donny tossed his duffle bag on the upper bunk and swung up. He’d need to get a good night’s sleep, because tomorrow he was getting on the boat with his son. And he didn’t want to make him look bad in front of the guys.

  Before drifting off, he whispered, ‘Hey, Herman? You up?’

  ‘Yeah, Donny. What’s up?’

  ‘Why do they call the Captain “the Monk”?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That. He doesn’t want to be here.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘No, I mean, he really doesn’t want to be here.’

  The Oslo fjord runs gently under the hull of the jon boat, and the twenty-horse-power motor pushes them steadily south-west. Sheldon is seated on the white plastic bench near the stern, with his hand on the tiller. He wears the stolen Gore-Tex shell, and has put on the aviator sunglasses he found in the pocket. Paul sits on the third bench closest to the prow. Sheldon wonders if the boy has ever been in a boat before.

  The Lonely Planet has a map of the Oslo fjord, and Sheldon uses it to navigate. Rather than follow the wider channel to the north, where the Danish ferries and cruise ships run — and could run over him — he passes through the sound between Hovedøya and Bleikøya islands, and then between Lindøya and Gressholmen, all the time hoping that Norwegians don’t have an overly nervous coast guard that asks too many questions.

  Their boat is not the only one making the summer run south. There are ketches, kayaks, and catamarans; skiffs, scows, and even catboats. People wave to Sheldon and Paul. From the calm of splendid anonymity, Sheldon waves back.

  Most of the smaller leisure craft seem to be headed out past Nesoddtangen at the tip of a massive peninsula and then south. Slow and steady, staying as close to land as possible, Sheldon follows them like driftwood. He and the boat and the boy putter on together, out into the water, away from the horrors of yesterday and into a blue-and-green world that knows nothing of who they are or where they came from.

  Against the gentle wind and glimmering waves, Sheldon and Paul make their escape. As the tension of the city recedes, along with the harbour, the Opera, and City Hall, silence returns and brings with it the unheeded cries of the morning and all the mornings before it.

  From inside the closet, Sheldon had heard her gasping for air. He had heard her being choked, her arms losing purpose, grace, and fight, flailing and clawing for any purchase on life. He had heard the hate that possessed the hands of the killer. He imagined her eyes growing wide as the terror overcame her, robbing her of any chance to save herself.

  Looking at Paul sitting on the prow of the boat, leaning over to touch the water passing under its shallow draught, he wonders what the boy imagined as the tortured sounds of his mother’s life settled into stillness. He hopes that the boy’s own imagination is not as horribly refined as his own, which inevitably returns to the journey upriver in Vietnam.

  It’s the dementia, Donny, said Mabel.

  She didn’t understand. She had other anchors to steady her. But he wanted to correct her, all the same.

  ‘How demented is it to have the past rush up to meet us just before the end? Isn’t that the final act of the rational mind as it struggles to comprehend its step into the darkness? The last push for coherence before the great unravelling? Is that so mad?’

  ‘We should be in and out in about three or four hours,’ Herman said to the team. ‘An F-4 went down about seven clicks from here, and HQ thinks the pilot bailed. So we’re to go recover his skinny little arse before he has to do any actual soldiering.’

  The Monk was speechless, as usual, as the other men put the supplies on the boat. It was raining, and everyone was still a little hung over from a three-day bender in honour of Saul rejoining the Navy for a second tour and getting back to the boat.

  Saul didn’t talk to his father very much. Just normal stuff. ‘Pass me that rope,’ or ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ Sometimes, ‘How’s it goin’?’ Sheldon didn’t mind that. He watched what the boys were doing as carefully as he could. He didn’t want to get in the way. But in this vision — in this memory of a place he has never been — he was terrified of losing even a single moment. He felt that Jewish compulsion to document. To remember. To hold onto every last ray of the day and ensure that others would know that it has been seen. What once existed and no longer does.

  The Monk was a careful pilot. Sheldon photographed his hands on the wheel and took the Monk’s portrait when the sun was over his shoulder, and all you could see of his face and body was the dark edges and stance against the river.

  There was a darkness to his demeanour. A hidden pain. A plan of some kind. Sheldon, through the lens, saw it all.

  He then photographed Herman’s slender and delicate black fingers that could have been trained to repair a watch, had they all been born on a different planet.

  He watched Trevor clean his rifle with the care one would give to a hunting weapon inherited from a grandfather.

  He photographed Ritchie and his smile, and wondered why people so often resemble their own names.

  It was good on the boat. Since Sheldon had started taking this ride regularly in 1975, he seldom worried about Saul, despite knowing the end of the story. He didn’t watch his son with the plaintive gaze of a father or even a war buddy. He just went along for the ride. Taking it in. Being there. Basking in the warmth of camaraderie and life.

  He enjoyed watching his son as a man. This is what he wanted, Sheldon reminded himself. Right? For his son to be a man? To become an American soldier.

  The F-4 Phantom had been shot down with a Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile. The pilot, as everyone knew, was utterly blameless. But airmen had it easy, and everyone knew that, too. They sat in their air-conditioned tents, filing their precious nails, sipping tonic, playing gin, and jerking off to new and unsoiled magazines. Then, when a dinner bell was rung, they would don their spiffy gear that made all the girls swoon, get in the cockpits of their shiny planes — that some lackey had just cleaned and polished for them — and for fifteen minutes they’d drop napalm on people, and cattle, and open fields, and whatever else. Then, once their thumbs got tired, they’d go back to base, wipe a single drop of sweat from their foreheads as the press took their photos, and then resume their so rudely interrupted card hands as Red Cross girls named Heather or Nicky massaged their exhausted shoulders while the pilots flooded their ears with stories of derring-do.

  Given the cushy life of the pilots, the boat boys weren’t going to give them the benefit of any doubts. It didn’t matter a lick to them, for instance, whether or not that SAM was the finest heat-seeking missile the communists could design, and it was fired at a low-flying plane that only had 1.7 seconds to respond before losing the left half of its fuselage. They didn’t care whether he was outgunned or not. That pilot was going to catch nothing but shit on his ride home, and knowing that gave each and every man on the tiny boat something really great to look forward to.

  The real trick to a search-and-rescue mission was getting to the downed plane before the Viet Cong. The VC were murderous arseholes, but it was
their country, and they had a demonstrable knack for knowing where things were. So when a plane went down, they just headed on over. The Riverines, on the other hand, had to find the way.

  That was the Monk’s job as skipper. As they all puttered up the river, there really wasn’t much to do other than train the M60 into the woods and think of jokes and the girls they’d surely never have sex with. Not in person, anyway.

  The rain came down steadily as the boat grunted through a estuary about twenty metres wide. Local boats passed by under the rifle barrels of the men, but none stopped, and no one even looked up as they passed.

  Trevor sat behind the Monk in a manner that Sheldon found tense, as though he was prepared to spring from the bench and … something. It was hard to sense what would happen. Jump overboard, maybe? Tackle the Monk?

  Sheldon sat far back in the boat, snapping pictures. Taking in the jungle. Trying to understand the terrain, the men, this war. It was so different from Korea. In Korea, the communists attacked the South with Soviet backing, and the United Nations passed a resolution while the Soviet ambassador was in the bathroom, and so the whole to-do was pretty straightforward. This one was all rather less straightforward. And, of course, the big trick in Korea was that the Southern ones wanted us there. Over here, not so much.

  After three hours on patrol, the boat came to a rest by a small pier. The Monk didn’t move. He just tossed a radio to Saul and looked at Herman. Ritchie, who outranked them both, then said, ‘Witzy and Williams. Go.’

  That’s what they called Saul. ‘Witzy’. Because ‘Horowitz’ was too long, and ‘Saul’ was too old-fashioned.

  Why these two? Witzy and Williams? Because who can avoid saying it, that’s why.

  ‘I’m going, too,’ said Sheldon. No one replied. It was as though, for the first time on the trip, Sheldon wasn’t really there.

  Saul handed a letter he’d been writing to Ritchie. ‘Mail it for me if I bite it.’