Norwegian by Night Page 2

  Donny Horowitz was twenty-two years old then. He had a clear mind, a steady hand, and a chip on his Jewish shoulder the size and shape of Germany. For the Army, it was only a matter of assigning him to the proper role and then tasking him with the right job. The role was scout-sniper. The task was Inchon.

  Inchon was a tactically challenging mission. The North Koreans had weakened themselves against the Pusan Perimeter for almost a month and a half, and Douglas MacArthur decided now was the time to flank them by taking Korea’s western port city of Inchon. But Inchon had poor beaches and shallow approaches, and it restricted invasion options to the rhythm of the moon’s tidal pull.

  The naval bombardment had been going on for two days, weakening Inchon’s defences. There wasn’t a man there who wasn’t thinking of D-Day. Nor a man there not thinking about what happened at Omaha Beach when the American bombers missed their targets and the DD tanks sank to the bottom of the sea during their approach, giving the Americans no armour on the ground to provide cover and firepower. No bomb craters to use as foxholes.

  Donny would be damned if he wasn’t going to be at the front of that invasion.

  That morning, amidst the smoke and the artillery fire, with birds flying wildly amidst the noise, as the Third and Fifth Marine regiments were advancing towards Green Beach on amphibious landing craft, called LST, with M26 Pershing tanks in their bellies. Donny eased the borrowed rowboat down the side of the Bataan, slid down after it with his rifle, and rowed face-forward into the artillery fire directed at the naval craft.

  On Red Beach, the North Koreans were defending a high sea wall that the South Korean Marines were scaling on ladders. Across the top of the wall there was a row of sharp shooters trying to pick off Americans, South Koreans, and everyone else fighting under the UN flag. Missiles arced overhead. The Koreans were firing green tracer bullets supplied by their Chinese allies, which crossed with the Allied red ones.

  They started firing at Donny directly. The bullets came in slow at first and then sped past him, splaying into the water or puncturing the rowboat.

  Sheldon often wondered what the Koreans — a superstitious lot — were thinking when they saw a lone soldier standing face-forward in the water, illuminated by the reds, greens, oranges, and yellows of combat reflecting off the water and clouds of the morning sky. A diminutive, blue-eyed demon impervious to their defences.

  One barrage of bullets hit Donny’s boat hard. Four bullets punctured the prow, and then the deck. Water started coming in, and ran around his boots. The Marines had already touched the beach, and were advancing towards the wall. The green tracers were tracking low into his regiment.

  Having come this far, and being a bad swimmer — from four hundred yards offshore, and with two feet in his watery grave — Sheldon decided to use his ammunition, goddamn it, rather than drown with it.

  He had such soft hands for a boy. Five foot seven inches tall, he’d never known hard labour or heavy lifting. He added up the figures in his father’s cobbler shop, and dreamed of hitting one deep into left field over the Green Monster for the Red Sox. The first time his fingers touched the bottoms of Mabel’s breasts — under the wire of her bra during a Bogart movie with Bacall — she said his fingers were so soft it was like the touch of a girl. This confession had made him more sexually ravenous than any picture show he’d ever seen.

  When he’d enlisted, they’d chosen him as a sniper. They could see he was even-tempered. Quiet. Smart. Wiry, but rugged. He had a lot of anger, but a capacity to direct it through reason. A sensitive touch.

  We think of guns as brutal things used by heavy men. But the art of the rifle demands the most subtle feel — the touch of a lover or a watchmaker. There is an understanding between the finger and trigger. The breath is kept under disciplined control. Every muscle is used to provide only stillness. The direction of the wind on the cheek finds expression in the rise of the barrel, lifted lightly as from the heat of a warm blueberry pie on a winter afternoon.

  And now, his feet in the water, Donny’s eyes were focused on the distant objects above the wall, flickering in the fog and the smoke. The artillery fire did not unnerve him. The water in his socks was just a sensation with no meaning. The bird that flew into his upper thigh, in the confusion of noise and smoke, was only a feeling. He was withdrawn, and to this day, he remembers the moment with music. What he heard, and hears even now in his memories, is the unaccompanied Cello Suite Number 1 in G major by Bach.

  At this moment of deepest calm, of the most complete peace, he lost the anger of his youth. The venom against the Nazis was bled from his veins by the music, the smoke, the water.

  Now, in this moment of grace, Donny killed.

  Through the business end of an unusually straight-shooting .30 calibre M 1 Garand, Donny emptied three clips of armour-piercing 168-grain ammunition in under thirty seconds. He killed twelve men, clearing them off a high wall from a distance of four hundred yards, allowing the first US Marines to assault the peak without loss while he bled from a surface bullet-wound to his left leg.

  His action was the smallest of gestures, like dropping a pebble into a still pool of water and disturbing the image of the night sky.

  He didn’t tell Mabel any of this until much, much later, of course. So late, in fact, that she never came to believe it. They had a son to think about, and heroism was a private matter for Sheldon. He said he’d been a logistics officer, far south and much safer. The wound? The wound was caused by carelessly walking into a toolshed, where he was punctured by a rake. He made it a joke.

  Compared to me, it was the sharpest tool in the toolshed.

  Sheldon was, as he recalls, awarded the Navy Commendation Medal and the Purple Heart for his part in the invasion. The question is, however, where had he put them? He ran an antique and watch-repair shop. They could be anywhere, in any crevice. He couldn’t find them anywhere. They were the only tangible proof that he still had his marbles. And now the shop is gone, its contents sold off. Everything once so carefully assembled is scattered now. Back in the world, they will be assembled into new collections by new collectors, and then scattered again as the collectors return to the mist.

  ‘This life.’ What a question! No one really wants to know the answer to this.

  In this life, my body has become a withered twig, where once I stood tall. I remember, distantly, the lush earth and beech forests of New England — outside my bedroom window as a child — growing in kingdoms. My parents near me.

  In this life, I hobble as an old man, when once I could fly over doubts and contradictions.

  In this life, my memories are the smoke I choke on, burning my eyes.

  In this life, I remember hungers that will never return. When I was once a lover with the bluest eyes she had ever seen — deeper than Paul Newman’s, darker than Frank Sinatra’s.

  This life! This life is coming to an end without any explanation or apology, and where every sense of my soul or ray of light through a cloud promises to be my end.

  This life was an abrupt and tragic dream that seized me during the wee hours of a Saturday morning as the sunrise reflected off the mirror above her vanity table, leaving me speechless just as the world faded to white.

  And even if they did want to know, who is there left to tell?

  Chapter 2

  It is some ungodly hour, and Sheldon stands naked in the bathroom of their apartment in Tøyen. Rhea and Lars are out, for some reason. They left in the middle of the night without a word, and have been gone for hours.

  The light is off, and it is dark. He has one hand pressed against the cold tiles of the wall above the toilet, and with his other hand he is taking aim, such as it is. He’s waiting for his prostate to get out of the way so he can take a well-deserved leak and get back to bed where he belongs so that if, by chance, his heart stops this very second, he won’t be found — hol
ding his pecker, dead on the floor — by a bunch of twenty-year-old medics who will gawk at his circumcision and bad luck.

  It is not only his age that is slowing things down. A man and a woman are fighting upstairs in some Balkan language, with all its acid and spleen. It might be Albanian. Or not. He doesn’t know. It sounds vile, anti-Semitic, communist, peasant, rude, fascistic, and corrupt all at the same time. Every phoneme and slur and intonation sounds bitter. The fight is loud, and its constituent qualities cause his innards to constrict in some kind of primordial self-defence.

  Sheldon slaps the wall a few times, but his strike is flaccid.

  He recalls graffiti in the men’s latrine during basic training: ‘Old snipers never die, they just stay loaded.’

  Sheldon shuffles back to his bed, pulls the duvet up to his shoulders, and listens as the woman’s hollers evolve into sobs. He eventually falls into a shallow, voiceless sleep.

  When he wakes, it is — as expected — Sunday. There is light flooding the room. By the door there is a large man who is clearly not Korean.

  ‘Yuh? Sheldon? Hiyuh! It’s Lars. Good morning.’

  Sheldon rubs his face and looks at his watch. It is just past seven.

  ‘Hello, Lars.’

  ‘Did you sleep OK?’

  ‘Where the hell were you two?’

  ‘We’ll explain over breakfast.’

  ‘Your neighbour is a Balkan fascist.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  Sheldon scowls.

  ‘We’re about to put on the eggs. Come join us?’

  ‘You heard it, too, right? It wasn’t a hallucination?’

  ‘Come have breakfast.’

  The apartment is on a small road off of Sars’ Gate near Tøyenparken. The building is brick, and the floors have wide, unvarnished planks. To Sheldon, there is a touch of the New York loft about it, because Lars’s father had torn down the walls between the kitchen and living room, and the living room and dining room, to create a wide-open space with white floors and ceilings. There are two massive bedrooms off the now-conjoined spaces, and a small, half-sized bedroom down a short flight of stairs that now houses Sheldon.

  Unable to avoid the day any longer, Sheldon gets up, puts on a bathrobe and slippers, and shuffles into the living room that glows with early-morning sunlight as from an interrogator’s bulb. He is neither unfamiliar with, nor unprepared for, this problem. It is caused by the Norwegian summer light. The solution is a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses that he takes from his pocket and slips on.

  Now able to see, he goes to the breakfast table, which is arrayed with goat cheese, a range of dried-pork products, orange juice, some chopped liver, salmon, butter, and a freshly baked dark bread just collected from the nearby 7-Eleven.

  Rhea is in a faded pair of Levi jeans and a light-blue satiny blouse from H&M, and her hair is pulled back. She is barefoot and wearing no make-up, cradling a hot cup of café-au-lait, and leaning back against the kitchen sink.

  ‘Morning, Papa,’ says Rhea.

  Rhea is familiar with Sheldon’s morning look. She is also prepared for his traditional greeting.

  ‘Coffee!’

  Rhea is ready for this, and hands it over.

  She sees that, beneath Sheldon’s maroon flannel bathrobe, his legs are hairless and pale, but they still have some form and muscle. He is clearly shrinking, but is lean and has good posture. It makes him look taller than he is. He shuffles and complains and bosses, but his shoulders are back, and his hands don’t shake when he carries his Penthouse coffee mug — a mail-order item from the back of the magazine during the 1970s, from the look of the girl.

  She has begged him to retire the mug … but no.

  In any venue beyond this apartment, Sheldon would have been arrested in this outfit. The real question, however, is why Lars has agreed to house this forlorn creature that Rhea loves so much.

  But, of course, that is probably the answer right there. She adores Lars — especially for his gentle warmth, his dry humour, his calm temper — and she knows he feels the same. He has a transformative masculinity that hides itself from public view but comes alive privately in the way a cuddly brown bear transforms into a predator.

  Rhea attributes this to his upbringing, not just his character. It is as though the Norwegian nation has learned how to rein in unbridled masculine power and bring it into social balance, burying its rough edges from public view, but permitting expansive and embracing moments of both intimacy and force. He is such a sweet character, but he is also a hunter. Lars and his father have been shooting reindeer since Lars was a boy. Rhea has a year’s worth of meat in the freezer. She has tried, but she can’t imagine him pulling the trigger, slicing the hide, disembowelling the kill. And yet he does.

  Lars is more than the mere product of his world, though. He has depths of kindness that Rhea feels she lacks in herself. She does not have his capacity for forgiveness. Her emotions and mind and self are more tightly wound, more intertwined in an eternal dialogue for meaning and purpose and expression. She has a compulsion to articulate and expound, to render the world explicable, if only to herself.

  Letting it be, moving through, submitting to silence — these are not her ways.

  They are for Lars. He comes to terms with humanity as it presents itself. He expresses himself not in a torrent of words and ideas and disruptions, revelations and setbacks, but through an ever-expanding capacity to face what comes next. To see it clearly. To say what needs to be said, and then stop. What is for her an act of will is for Lars a process of life.

  They’d wanted children. Only recently, though. Rhea needed time to find her place, to see whether she could graft her American soul onto the Norwegian matrix. And so, when the birth-control pills ran out, she simply stopped going to the pharmacy to renew her prescription. She remembers the day. It was a Saturday in December, not long before Christmas, but after Hanukkah. It must have been one of the darkest days of the year, but their apartment glowed warmly with a Christmas tree and a Menorah. In a game, they listed the sensual accompaniments of holidays gone past.

  Clove. Cinnamon. Pine. Marzipan.

  ‘No, no marzipan.’

  ‘It’s huge here,’ said Lars. ‘Covered in chocolate.’

  ‘So whose turn it is?’

  ‘Yours.’

  Bells. Candles. Pie. Apples. Ski wax …

  ‘Really! Ski wax? Here, too. That’s exciting.’

  ‘I’m just screwing with you, Lars.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Three words in a row. Sometimes four. That’s how much they had in common. A solid platform for a child.

  Rhea sips her café-au-lait and looks at Lars reading Aftenposten’s front page. There is a picture of Kosovar independence from Serbia earlier this year. Something about Brad Pitt. Something about low-carb diets.

  No, she hadn’t told Lars that she was trying to get pregnant. It was somehow unnecessary. As though he knew. Or that, being married, he didn’t have to know. What might have unfolded as opera in her New York culture passed here with a hug and his fingers moving through her hair, then gripping it all in his fist.

  Lars is reading the newspaper like a normal person, whereas Sheldon is holding a piece of the newspaper up to the light as though looking for watermarks. It is, as always, unclear to Rhea what anything he is doing might mean — whether he is seeking attention like a child, whether his age is merely expressing itself, or whether he’s involved in some activity that, if probed, would sound childish and demented but logical all at once. When the three are combined in this way — his personality, his condition, his reason — it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.

  This is Sheldon’s third week in the country. They wanted him to find his place here, to settle into his new life. They all knew there was no going back now. Shel
don was too old, the apartment in Gramercy was sold, and there was nowhere for him to go.

  ‘I’m not taking the bait,’ she says.

  ‘Huh?’

  Lars and Sheldon each raise their newspapers a bit higher — one to hide, the other to provoke.

  ‘I said, you nutter, that I’m not taking the bait. I have no interest whatsoever in why you’re looking for the Da Vinci code in the newsprint.’

  ‘Norwegian sounds like English spoken backwards. I want to see if it reads the same way. I can check by holding it up to the light and reading the article on the other side. But the words on this side of the newspaper are blocking the words on the other side of the newspaper, so I can’t tell.’

  Lars speaks: ‘It’s going to be good weather again.’

  ‘I think we should go out. Papa, how about a walk?’

  ‘Oh sure, they’d love that, wouldn’t they.’

  ‘The Koreans?’

  ‘You said that with a tone. I heard a tone.’

  Rhea puts her empty cup in the sink and runs her fingers under some cold water. She wipes them on her jeans.

  ‘There’s something we need to tell you.’

  ‘Tell me here.’

  ‘I’d rather go out.’

  ‘Not me. I like it here. Near the food. All the pork. It needs me.’

  ‘We could slip out the back.’

  At this, both newspapers drop.

  ‘There’s a backdoor?’ Sheldon says.

  ‘Bicycle entrance. Not many people know about it. It’s a secret.’

  ‘That’s good to know.’

  ‘Little things like that can save your life.’

  ‘You’re mocking me. I know you’re mocking me, but I don’t care. I know what’s what. I still got all my marbles, my family jewels, and a bit of savings from my book. And I’m over eighty. That’s something.’

  ‘So are we going out, or what?’