Norwegian by Night (31 page)

The tractor fights against its watery grave, but to no avail. Steam rises from the lake, which bubbles and burps, but eventually digests its meal whole.

Sheldon lies panting on the floor of the rubber raft. Looking up into the sky, he is shocked by how tired he has become. Really, what just happened? Not much by a young man's standards, but apparently more than usual for him.

‘Old people really should be in better shape,' he says.

Sheldon sits up and looks around. It is truly lovely here. It reminds him of a small lake in Maine near Waterville where Rhea used to go to summer camp in the early 1980s. Like Rødenessjøen, East Lake's characteristic quality was of a simple and even common tranquillity. It was not overwhelming or unique. It was not a destination on someone's winding itinerary. It was a refuge. And this is what he and Paul need tonight, more than anything — to motor to the north-eastern corner, and to find a quiet and safe place to hole up in for the night. It will be their own Jackson's Island, where Huck and Jim first met up and set forth as the world closed in on both of them.

This is the plan now. Though still early, he wants to set up camp as far from the tractor as possible, in case someone noticed him disposing of it. They'll eat their rations from the bag, and pee in the woods, and Sheldon will dry his socks and try to make it as comfortable as possible. It is surprising how comfortable the dry forest can be with a little know-how. It is especially nice when there are no Koreans skulking about in the undergrowth. For once in quite some time, this seems to be a reasonable certainty. If they manage to find him here, then they possibly deserve to.

Tomorrow morning they'll hitchhike the rest of the way. It's a little risky, but there is no thread connecting them to Oslo now. So unless there is a national manhunt for them, it seems he can probably get a ride over the last ninety kilometres if they're lucky.

Paul is in a rather different mood from Sheldon. He is still in full regalia and energised. His little feet are pattering up and back on the raft, and he's looking overboard at the misbegotten tractor, and pointing and smiling. It's a pity he doesn't have grandparents here to see this. They can be an excellent source of whimsy.

They can also be useful when you have a dead parent, as in Rhea's case, and the other one turns out to be useless.

Rhea herself inevitably learned that there was supposed to be a generation of people between her and her grandparents, and in her twenties she went looking for her mother. Out of college— brazen, rash, and excitable — she kept talking about Truth. Finding her mother became a quest, and she was now old enough to embark on its perils.

He'd tried talking her out of it. He told her that people aren't usually lost. They aren't socks. They aren't wedged behind doors, hoping that someone will find them. They hide. And not from everyone. They hide from very particular people. In this case, her. He'd explained that his own watch-repair and antique shop hadn't moved since it opened, and all her mother needed to do was send a letter, or even just call. The connection between mother and daughter was a phone call away. But only one side could enter the magic code to unlock the conversation, and Rhea didn't have the code.

He knew this before she was old enough to understand it. Crushing her hopes was the only humane thing to do. But college and education have a way of instilling the most foolish ideas in the brightest of people, and Rhea went forth to turn hers into a reality.

It went about as badly as Sheldon expected, perhaps a bit worse than Mabel predicted, and it forced Rhea into a position that until then she couldn't have imagined.

It didn't matter where Rhea found her. It didn't matter what she was wearing, or what she'd been doing only moments earlier. What did matter was the expression of utter indignation on her mother's weathered and joyless face when she opened the door and met her adult daughter. The memory of that encounter — what they were holding, how they stood, what smell lingered longest in the air — dissipated into irretrievable fragments the moment it was over, because the words her mother used blotted out the rest. Her words were so definitive, so clear and concise and without equivocation, that they grabbed Rhea by the heart and shook apart every dream, every illusion, every rationalisation she had created and cherished for twenty years, so that nothing of the present or the past remained but the harsh reality of the new world.

I was done with you!

And so Rhea walked away from that door, and came home to New York to be with Sheldon and her grandmother.

She didn't talk about it for a long time. It was four months before Sheldon broached the topic at all, with an oblique, ‘Anything on your mind?'

The watch-repair and antique shop, by the 1990s, had changed with the tastes of the era. Sheldon stocked what people liked, figuring this was a reasonably strong business strategy. During the Clinton years, with property prices booming and the definition of sex on the national agenda, people were returning to mid-century Modern. Sheldon haunted estate sales and hunted auctions with a good eye for quality, beauty, and price. When Rhea was in her early twenties the shop was filled with Matt Gottschalk's leather chairs, Poul Kjærholm's delicate woods and steels, and Eames' classic lounges and ottomans. Wall Street was booming, and retro was back.

Rhea sat in an egg-shaped Danish chair suspended from the ceiling by a chain. Whatever was on her mind was about to hatch.

‘Why was Dad attracted to her?' she finally asked.

‘Oh, Rhea, that's a question for your grandmother, not me.'

‘I'll ask her later. For now …'

Sheldon shrugged. There was nothing left to protect her from, except lies.

‘I don't think he was. I think they had what counted as a fling in the seventies just before he went to war. Why? She was curvy and outgoing and fun, and was so obviously not a fit for him that she suited all kinds of bills. She was hardly the only girl he had flings with, by the way. When he got back, I think he ran for the nearest safe haven, so to speak. Why her and not another girl, I can't say. Things get lost to time. Stories dry up.'

‘So I wasn't conceived in love.'

‘That question is too self-pitying, and it isn't worthy of you. You know perfectly well that your grandmother and I adore you. For my two cents, being conceived in indifference but raised in love is better than the inverse. I'm sorry this woman is a disappointment to you. Truly. But you didn't miss out on anything, because there was nothing there to miss.'

‘I'm never going to have kids,' she'd said.

Sheldon put down the Tudor Submariner he'd been working on and frowned.

‘Why would you say that?'

‘What if I don't love them? It clearly happens, right?'

‘It wouldn't happen to you.'

‘How do you know? Maybe it's all hormonal and stuff. They say everything changes when you have kids.'

Sheldon sounded sad when he corrected her.

‘Everything doesn't change when you have them. Everything changes when you lose them.'

Rhea rocked on the chair, and Sheldon said
Don't rock on the chair
, and Rhea stopped.

From out of nowhere, at least to Sheldon's mind, Rhea asked, ‘Why don't you go to synagogue anymore?'

Sheldon leaned back in his own chair and then rubbed his face.

‘Why are you punishing me?'

‘I'm not. I really want to know.'

‘It's not like I made you go. I'm entirely fair.'

‘I want to know why. Is it because of Dad?'

‘Yes.'

‘You stopped believing in God when Dad died?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘What then?'

How many of their conversations took place right here? Right in this very spot over a period of twenty years? All of them? It seemed that way. It was as though there were no apartment upstairs. No kitchen. No den or bedroom. Sheldon just sat here, year after year, being interrogated by various women. The antiques changed, the women aged, but Sheldon was always there, fixing timepieces, answering questions. The only conversation he remembers having in the apartment was the one with Saul.

‘You know what Yom Kippur is?' he'd answered.

‘It's the day of atonement.'

‘You know how it works?'

‘You ask for forgiveness.'

‘You ask for two kinds of forgiveness,' Sheldon explained. ‘You ask God to forgive you for your trespasses against Him. But you also ask people to forgive you for your trespasses against them. You do the second in Jewish tradition because, according to our philosophy, there is only one thing God can't do. He can't forgive you for what you do to other people. You need to ask forgiveness from them directly.'

‘Which is why there is no forgiveness for murder. Because you can't ask forgiveness from the dead.'

‘Right.'

‘Why did you stop going to synagogue, Papa?'

‘Because in 1976, the year you arrived on my doorstep, and a song about a sinking ship was on the radio, I took you to temple on Yom Kippur, and I waited for God to apologise to us for what he did to your father, and he never did.'

Chapter 18

It was a good night. They found a dry and secluded spot in from the shoreline and out of view from the road and nearby houses. It was still best not to light a campfire, which was a pity, but they managed well without it.

Paul was willing to take off the horns, but would not give up the world's most unusual crusader outfit. This seemed to Sheldon the least weird decision of the day.

Lying close together, Sheldon whispered, ‘You wake me if you hear any trouble.' And then they both fell into a glorious, restful sleep.

By six o'clock the sun was so high that its warmth stirred them. The fresh air had probably done them both some good, but the ground had not been kind to Sheldon. He was stiff and sore and grumpy. It felt as though rigor mortis was getting an early start on him. Worse yet, there was not a drop of coffee to be found anywhere.

It did not take them long to break camp. There was little to gather up, and they hadn't left much of a footprint in the forest. They weren't being tracked, after all, and since they'd made it through the night without being caught under searchlights, it likely meant that no one had witnessed the tractor's final moments.

Within an hour they have made their way through the thicket of evergreens to a reasonably large road that holds the promise of passing motorists. After about twenty minutes on that road, Sheldon feels winded.

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. I need a rest.' Sheldon eases himself down gently in the high grass by the side of the road. Paul, who was up ahead, comes walking back towards him.

‘Don't get old,' he says to Paul. ‘If Peter Pan shows up, just go.'

Paul is standing tall with his wooden spoon, magic dust bunny, and woollen hat. He looks good. The way a young boy is supposed to look.

Sheldon looks at his watch. It has bright white hands, and insists that it is only eight o'clock in the morning.

‘Come here,' says Sheldon.

He waves him over and the boy comes. ‘Do this.' Sheldon sticks up his thumb to hitchhike.

Paul doesn't quite get it, and his thumb angles off towards Germany over his extended index finger. ‘It's more … sort of towards Finland. Like this.' He reaches over and fixes Paul's thumb, tucks in his extra appendage, then tilts the whole hand-and-thumb arrangement backwards and down the road a bit. ‘Good. Let's hope this isn't an obscene gesture up here.'

Paul stands looking down the road for a couple of minutes, and nothing happens. In the meantime, Sheldon catches his breath and stands up again. He walks over, stands beside Paul, and says, ‘Right, now we start walking backwards. If we're lucky, we'll go backwards in time, before yesterday and the day before. Before you were born, all the way back to at least 1952, when Saul was born.

‘We could stop for lunch in 1977. I knew an excellent sandwich shop in 1977.'

They cover several kilometres on a road that winds northward. There are few signs of civilisation, other than the perfect ribbon of road running alongside the green strip of grass that edges the forest.

Sheldon has placed two pencils in his lips, insisting he is a walrus. To entertain Paul, he has started walking like one. Before long, however, Sheldon stops.

‘Big walrus thirsty. Little walrus thirsty? Big walrus also needs to pee again. Big walrus is eighty-two years old with a bladder the size of a lima bean.'

Sheldon makes the universal symbol of an old man chugging a beer.

Paul intuitively understands and nods. Yes, he says, he too would like to be an old man chugging a beer.

‘Right. Then it's time to scare up a ride. Enough of this playing around.'

Sheldon then says to Paul, ‘Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to count down from ten and when I do, a car will show up and offer us a ride to a place that has ice-cold Coke in a bottle. OK?'