Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 3

Sigrid Ødegård has been a police officer with the Oslo Politidistrikt for just over eighteen years. She joined after completing her advanced studies in criminology at the University of Oslo. Her father convinced her to go there, rather than study farther north, because — in his view — ‘there will be more eligible men in the big city.’

As so often happens in both police work and life, her father’s theory proved both true and irrelevant.

‘The question, Papa, is the ratio of available men to those who are interested in me. Not just the number of available men.’ Sigrid made this point to her widowed father in 1989, before going to Oslo.

Her father was a farmer from the countryside. Though not a formally educated man, he did understand numbers, as they came in handy for organising life on the farm. He was also a reader of history. He did not call himself a student, as he had no tutor, but he found reading pleasurable, took an interest in the worlds that have passed before this one, and he had a good memory. All this served him, Sigrid, and the animals rather well. He also had a fine mind for reason, and he and Sigrid found comfort there when emotions were too tender.

‘If your argument holds,’ he had responded over a quiet dinner of salmon, boiled potatoes, and a bottle of beer, ‘then it is not a matter of ratios at all, but a statistic of likelihoods. What is the likelihood of there being a man sufficiently observant as to note your desirability and availability? And again, I stand by the claim that such a young man is more likely to be found in the big city.’

‘It’s not such a big city,’ Sigrid said.

Her father slid each section of pink meat off the subsequent section of pink meat to see how well prepared it was. They slid easily, and he said nothing.

‘It is the biggest one available,’ he offered.

‘Yes, well …’ she muttered, reaching for the butter.

Sigrid’s older brother had moved to America on being offered a position selling agricultural machinery. It was a good offer, and their father had insisted he take it. Though he stayed in touch, Sigrid’s brother almost never came home. This was family now. This and the animals.

‘I’ll grant you the point about the city, but there are still two problems,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ Her father raised his voice just enough to suggest a question.

‘The first is that I’m not pretty. I’m plain. The second is that it is near impossible to know if a Norwegian man is interested.’

She had learned this by way of empirical observation and comparison.

To wit, she had once met a British man named Miles. Miles was so forthcoming with his advances that the alcohol merely affected his aim rather than his behaviour.

She had also met a German boy who was sweet and affectionate and clever, and whose only flaw was being German — which was unfair, and she knew it, and she felt bad about it, but Sigrid still didn’t want to spend every other Christmas in Hanover. To his credit, though, neither did he.

Norwegian men, in contrast to the others, were problematic — even for Norwegian women, who presumably had the greatest motive to crack the code of their behaviour, if only for reasons of proximity.

She explained. ‘They are polite. Occasionally witty. They dress like teenagers, no matter what their age, and will never say anything romantic unless it’s during a drunken confessional.’

‘So get them drunk.’

‘I don’t think that’s the first step in a lasting relationship, Papa.’

‘Things can’t last unless they begin. Worry about duration after commencement.’

Sigrid pouted, and her father’s shoulders dropped.

‘Daughter, it’s not hard at all. You look for the man staring with the greatest intensity at his own shoes while in your presence. The kind of man who is too tongue-tied to even try talking to you. This is the one you’re looking for. And take it from me, you’ll have his love and you’ll win more arguments. In the long run, this is the key to longevity, which is apparently your goal.’

Sigrid smiled. ‘You know, Papa, they tend to be more loquacious in Oslo.’

‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘the world is a tricky place.’

Her father finished his second beer and sat back with a heavy wooden pipe that he lit with an experienced hand and a long match.

‘So,’ he asked, ‘what will you do after university?’

Sigrid now smiled broadly.

‘I’m going to fight crime,’ she said.

Sigrid Ødegård’s father nodded approvingly. ‘That’s the spirit.’

Sigrid’s interests had led her to specialise in organised crime. Traditionally, this meant drug, weapons, and human trafficking, and a smattering of economic and corporate crime — though Oslo’s police department was woefully understaffed to deal with white-collar problems. Back when she started, organised criminals were more opportunistic and disorganised than today; they were generally not linked with matters of global criminal networks and terrorism. Only in recent years, as Europe’s borders grew soft, and wars raged on in the Balkans and the Middle East and Afghanistan, did organised crime come to resemble the sorts of American TV shows she often watched alone in the early evenings after returning from work.

Sigrid, just over forty, had recently been promoted to the rank of Politiførstebetjent, or Police Chief Inspector, in her district, after dutifully working her way up from constable, to sergeant, to inspector, and now this. Not politically minded, she had little interest in this post, but it did provide an opportunity to survey the wider range of crime in the city and to see the movement of the times from a greater height and wider angle. She confidently believed this job was her final destination, and she was grateful that she had reached her potential without undue strain or frustration.

From now on, Sigrid thought, I will work, witness, and assist when possible.

Being a professional witness, she was aided by a corps of able, respectful men in her unit who understood that she took pleasure in odd events. They each made a concerted effort to bring the most noteworthy matters to her attention, and no one was more eager to do so than Petter Hansen. Petter, thirty-six and still not needing to shave, was able to spot oddities with the careful eye of an antique collector.

His job had become easier over the past few years because Oslo was no longer the silent, uneventful city it once was. There were now rapes, thefts, armed hold-ups, violent domestic problems, and a growing tide of younger people who did not respect the police. New immigration from Africa and Eastern Europe — and Muslim countries farther east — created a new social tension in the city that still lacked the political maturity to address it. The liberals expounded limitless tolerance, the conservatives were racist or xenophobic, and everyone debated from philosophical positions but never from ones grounded in evidence, and so no sober consideration was being given to the very real question now haunting all of Western civilisation — namely, How tolerant should we be of intolerance?

Sigrid sets her sandwich — now half molested — onto the brown paper bag that had sheltered it for the night and looks up as Petter walks to her desk with a smile, which can only mean he’s uncovered another buried treasure.

‘Hi,’ she says.

‘Hi,’ he says.

‘Have something?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘Good for you.’

Petter says, ‘Something awful.’

‘OK.’

‘But different.’

‘Start with the awful.’

‘There’s been a murder. A woman in her thirties in Tøyen. She was strangled, then stabbed. We’ve already secured the location. We’re starting the process now.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘I got the call twenty minutes ago. We’ve been there for five. A person in the building heard a fight and called us.’

‘I see. And what’s different?’

‘This,’ says Petter, handing Sigrid a note. It is written in English. A sort of English, at any rate. She reads it carefully. And she reads it again.

‘Do you know what this means?’

‘No. But it has spelling mistakes.’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ve called the owner of the apartment. The woman who was killed didn’t live there. She lived upstairs with her son. The son is missing. The owner is Lars Bjørnsson.’

‘Do we know him?’

‘He makes video games. He’s really good.’

‘You’re thirty-six, Petter.’

‘They’re very sophisticated video games.’

‘I see.’

‘He’s here in room four. They came right away. Lars’s wife says her grandfather is missing from the apartment.’

‘He lives there?’

‘Ah, yup. American. Retired.’

‘I see. Are they suspects?’

‘Well, you know. We have to figure out where they were at the time, but I don’t think so. You’ll see.’ Petter pops his lips and then says, ‘So let’s go then.’

Sigrid looks down at her baby-blue shirt and black tie to see whether any of the sandwich’s contents are stuck to them. Satisfied, she stands up and follows Petter down the hallway, past the overhead Geographic Information System that maps the whereabouts of all police officers and vehicles in the city, and past the coffee machine that has been broken for so long that someone (probably Stina), has placed flowers in the pot. The coffee pot is now regularly watered.

Police room four has a round wooden table and five office chairs. There is no two-way mirror, and the chairs do not screech across the floor during an interrogation. Instead, there is a box of tissues and a few bottles of Farris water. There is a window on the far wall that is locked, but there are no bars or grates covering the glass. Opposite the window on the far wall is a public-awareness poster from the Norwegian Reindeer Police Service with a woman on a snowmobile speaking with two Sámi herders. Sigrid secretly imagines that the officer is asking directions.

At the table sit a man and a woman. The man is Norwegian, and the woman is not. He is tall and fair, with a boyish expression. She has black hair and unusually deep blue eyes. Both look grave.

They both look up as Sigrid enters the room and Petter follows.

The two police officers sit at the table. In English, Petter says, ‘This is Chief Inspector Ødegård.’

Rhea speaks in English. She says, ‘They say there’s a dead woman in my apartment.’

‘Ya, ya,’ says Sigrid. ‘We’re curious about that, too.’

‘Does this sort of thing happen often around here?’

‘No. Not so much.’

‘You don’t seem very surprised by it,’ says Rhea.

‘Ah, well, not much point in that now, is there. So, Petter told you about it. Did you know her?’

Lars and Rhea both nod.

Sigrid notes how the woman does all the talking.

‘She lived upstairs from us with her son. She didn’t talk much. I think she’s from Eastern Europe somewhere. She used to fight with a man a lot.’

‘What man?’

‘I don’t know. But he was there a lot recently. They spoke the same language. He was very violent.’

Sigrid takes notes, and Petter does as well. The conversation is also being recorded.

‘What was she doing in your apartment?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘The door was kicked in,’ says Petter.

‘See, that’s interesting,’ says Sigrid. ‘A small woman like that. Probably didn’t do it herself, right?’

Petter shakes his head. ‘A man’s large boot print is all over the door.’

‘So she was in your apartment when it was locked. Did she have a key?’

‘No,’ says Rhea.

‘Do you usually lock the door when you leave?’

‘Yes, but my grandfather was there. Sheldon Horowitz.’

‘Ya,’ Sigrid says. ‘Do you want to tell me about that?’

And so Rhea speaks and does tell her something she has never heard before. She speaks about her grandfather who is missing. She talks about New York City in the 1930s when Sheldon was a boy. She mentions E. B. White’s memoir of the city. About the coming war and Sheldon’s youth watching the older boys go off to fight the Nazis, and how he stayed behind because he was still a boy. How many of the older ones never came back. She speaks of Mabel and their courtship. How he enlisted in the Marines and worked as a clerk in Pusan, though he’s started to say something different these days.

How Sheldon and Mabel had a son, Saul, and how Saul spent countless hours in Sheldon’s Antique and Watch Repair Shop, learning how to take everything built from 1810 to 1940 apart with a screwdriver, and then run like hell.

She talks about how her father, Saul, died in Vietnam. How all of Sheldon’s friends died of old age, how Mabel died, how the pressure of this world and its spiritual weight was weighing him down, and how this move to the northern frontier of Western civilisation was her own failed effort to share a final moment before the end came. She explains his fears. Now the unimaginable has happened in her home, and her grandfather is missing.

Rhea has spoken carefully and with love. She has spoken with some terror of what she is experiencing. She has spoken in waves of insight and humanity.

She has spoken for a long time. When she is finished, she has a question for Sigrid.

‘So, do you understand?’

Sigrid has indeed been listening carefully. So she answers with precision.

‘An eighty-two-year-old demented American sniper is allegedly being pursued by Korean assassins across Norway after fleeing a murder scene. Either before or after.’

Rhea furrows her eyebrows. ‘I don’t think I’d phrase it quite like that,’ she says.

‘What did I miss?’ Sigrid asks, looking at her notes.

‘Well … he’s Jewish.’

Sigrid nods and makes an additional note. Then she looks up.

‘Well …’ says Rhea, ‘that part’s important. It sort of frames everything else. It’s not just a fact. It’s not like he’s wearing a blue coat and not a brown one. It matters.’

‘How so?’

‘Well,’ says Rhea again, trying to find words to express the essence of the thing. ‘It means, well … he’s Jewish. He’s not your normal whacko. You know. He’s Jewish. His name is Sheldon Horowitz. Can’t you hear it? It’s like his whole history is built right into his name. He’s a missing old man in a foreign country. He has dementia. He must have seen something. Something happened.’

Nothing Rhea has said makes any sense to Sigrid, who has grown puzzled by what is a new and clearly sensitive topic. She knows little about Jews. There are only a thousand Jews in all of Norway. His name just sounds foreign.

All the same, Sigrid appreciates that Rhea is trying to impart something she considers so obvious as to not need explanation. So in trying to explain it for the first time she is frustrated and halting. Though she still needs to discuss it with Petter, she can sense already why this woman and her husband are not suspects.

Rhea, sitting across from the policewoman, sees on her face the very foreignness of the Jewish experience to Norway, and she now feels a tremendous guilt in bringing her grandfather here.

It wasn’t as though Sheldon hadn’t attacked the issue head-on one morning during a breakfast rant while gesturing with his mug … making Norwegian Jewish history forever conjoined to images of airbrushed Penthouse nudes in her mind.

Not that this wouldn’t have delighted Sheldon, had he known.

‘A thousand Jews!’ Sheldon had said. ‘I read it in the Lonely Planet guidebook! Five million people, and one thousand Jews. The Norwegians do not know what a Jew is. They only think they know what a Jew is not.’

What Sheldon said next upset her because he said it in front of Lars, who is married to a Jewish woman and who has a strong affection for Sheldon. When Lars looked at her afterwards she just looked at the floor.

‘Jews, the Norwegians have been taught, are not greedy, duplicitous, weak, pale, sneaky, plotting, impotent, salacious, or mendacious. They do not have crooked noses, bony fingers, or evil appetites. They are not scheming, evolutionarily inferior to the Nordic blond, or working on secret plots to overthrow the world,’ said Sheldon. ‘They have been taught this so they can grow up to be nice liberals with their ears flushed of bad old Nazi propaganda. The thing is, this sort of description doesn’t exactly make you want to rush out and date one, does it?

‘So, despite being here — or somewhere, anyway — for three thousand years, all they think of when they hear the word “Jew” is Holocaust, and the Israeli–Palestinian fiasco. The problem is, nowhere in that twisted and limited story is there a place for Sheldon Horowitz or a brooding little siren like you. Nowhere is there three thousand years of history, philosophy, theatre, art, craftsmanship, scholarship, writing, pontificating, fornicating, or extremely well-timed and perfected humour, goddamn it!

‘Don’t worry,’ he added for Lars. ‘That’s what everyone else in Europe has been told, too.’

And this is what he said next, for himself. Mug lowered to the table: Look to the cemeteries on France’s northern coast, he’d said. Look, Europe. Look and see the tombs of Jews who landed on your beach. Over here. Here in the oppressive silence of Europe that has squandered the music of Jewish ideas. Where we were your victims. You look carefully, because we came from America where we were five hundred thousand Sons of David fighting under Old Glory against the apocalypse of Western civilisation.

Breathe deep this lesson, Europe: as you killed us, we liberated you.

But not Sheldon. Sheldon did not go to that war. He was too young.

‘What I mean to say,’ says Rhea to Sigrid, ‘is that he’s an old, remarkable man who is coming undone at the end of a long and hard life, and he’s missing.’

Sigrid nods. Lars and Petter remain silent. Sigrid looks again at her notes, and then says, ‘I’d like to revisit the discussion of his dementia.’

‘Yes, OK.’

Sigrid notices a change on Lars’s face, but cannot make sense of it.

Rhea explains. ‘My grandmother died not long ago. Sheldon has been lost ever since. They were unusually close. Before she died, she told me he was suffering from dementia. She recommended I watch it and stay informed.’

‘This was in New York.’

‘Yes. I looked up the symptoms from the National Institute of Health in America.’

At this, and for the first time, Lars audibly snickered.

‘What?’ says Rhea.

‘You must admit that your grandfather had an answer to each of those symptoms.’

The conversation Lars is referring to took place three weeks ago outside Vestbanen near Aker Brygge in Oslo Harbour. The entire area was being developed. The Tourist Information Office had been moved out of the old train station and replaced by the museum for the Nobel Peace Prize. They sat at Pascal’s, with its excellent cakes and absurdly priced ice-cream served in pathetic plastic cups. A massive ocean liner was at anchor by Akershus Fortress, and a stream of large humans with cameras and appetites was approaching.

On seeing the hungry tourists, Sheldon pulled his $12 cup of ice-cream a little closer.

‘Papa, all I’m saying is that there are five symptoms, and we should consider them.’ Reading from a piece of paper, she said — in as cooperative and supportive a voice as she could muster — ‘First, asking the same questions repeatedly. Second, becoming lost in familiar places. Third, being unable to follow directions. Fourth, getting disoriented about time, people, and places. And fifth, neglecting personal safety, hygiene, and nutrition.’

It was Saturday morning, and the edge of spring was giving way to the long, lush days of Norway’s eternal summers.

Sheldon listened and nodded. Then he ran two fingers up the sides of the beer glass and collected the condensation. He closed his eyes and ran the cool water over his eyelids.

‘Ever do this? Feels great.’

‘Papa.’

‘What?’

‘Why do you keep buying beer if you never drink it?’

‘I like the colour,’ he said, his eyes closed tightly.

‘Do you have any thoughts about what I just said?’

‘Yup.’

‘Do you remember the question?’

That provoked him. Sheldon turned to Lars, who was attentive. ‘Watch this.

‘Number one. Getting people to repeat their own questions forces them to figure out what they’re asking. If you’re not willing to ask a question three times, then you don’t really want to know the answer. Number two, you have brought me to Norway. Nothing’s familiar. I can’t become lost in familiar places. I just become lost. Number three, I don’t speak Norwegian, so I can’t follow any directions. If I understood … that would be demented. Number four, I don’t know of any half-intelligent, self-aware person who — if they give it a moment’s thought — doesn’t find time, people, or places all highly disorienting. In fact, what is there to disorient us other than time, people, or places? And for the three-part finale I say this. I have no idea what it means to be neglectful of personal safety. As measured against what? Under what conditions? As judged by whom? I’ve sailed into a storm of tracer bullets, face first, on the Yellow Sea at dawn. Was I neglectful? I married a woman and stayed with her until the end of her life. You call that safe? As for hygiene, I brush my teeth and shower daily. The only one who thinks I’m dirty is someone who thinks I don’t belong, and so is probably an anti-Semite, and you can tell him Sheldon Horowitz says so. And nutrition? I’m eighty-two and I’m alive.

‘How did I do, Lars?’

‘Better than I could have done, Sheldon.’

Rhea remembers the story. But she says to him, in front of Sigrid, ‘He was lucid. He has powerful reasoning skills. He was showing off.’

Lars shrugs. ‘It worked on me.’

‘OK, maybe it isn’t dementia per se. But he’s odd. Really odd. And he’s increasingly talking to the dead.’

Even as she speaks, she accepts the doubts. Whatever is going on in his overtaxed mind is complicated. It comes and goes. She does know that Sheldon isn’t well. That Mabel’s death has fundamentally altered his place in this world. That he is unmoored. Beyond that, she can’t say.

Sigrid listens and then says to Lars, in English, ‘You don’t think it’s dementia.’

Lars taps his fingers on the table. He doesn’t want to disagree with Rhea. Not in public. Not about her own family. But he feels an obligation. Before saying it, though, he wonders whether he can set the scene so Rhea will arrive at the same truth herself. The moment can be hers.

‘Rhea told him something this morning. Something that affected him.’

Sigrid turns to Rhea and waits.

‘I had a miscarriage last night. They sent me home from the hospital. I was still in my first trimester. I told Papa this morning.’

It is Petter who responds to this. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

Rhea nods. She does not want to be the centre of attention.

Lars says, ‘We weren’t unprepared for this. But I think Sheldon was.’

Rhea says nothing. So he continues on.

‘I don’t think it’s dementia. Sheldon has outlived everyone he knows, including his own son and wife. I think he came to Norway because of the baby. For a chance to see life continue beyond him. But then the baby died.’

‘What do you think it is?’ Sigrid asks Lars.

‘I think it’s a kind of guilt. I think he is consumed by guilt for surviving. His son, Saul, Rhea’s father, for starters. Maybe also his older friends in World War II. His cousin, Abe. The Holocaust. People in Korea. His wife. This baby. I don’t think he can take any more guilt. Even with the Koreans. I know there’s some debate about whether he actually saw combat, but I think he did because he sees them hiding in trees. I don’t think they’re just any Koreans. I think he sees the people he killed, and feels bad about it. Even though it was a war.’

Rhea does not agree. ‘My grandfather does not feel guilty for surviving the Holocaust. Trust me. If anything, he feels guilty for not lying about his age and going to fight the Nazis.’

‘He was fourteen when America entered the war. He was a boy.’

‘Have you met him?’

Sigrid writes this down in her notebook, along with other observations about Rhea and Lars and the timing of the disappearance.

There is really only one last order of business.

‘What do you make of this?’ says Sigrid, handing the murder-scene note to Rhea.

The note rests lightly in Rhea’s hands as she reads and re-reads it.

‘It’s from my grandfather.’

‘And what do you think it says?’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘it isn’t so much what it says as what it means.’

‘Ya. OK.’

‘This is why Lars and I slightly disagree on Sheldon’s diagnosis.’

Sigrid takes back the note and reads it aloud as best she can, not knowing what accent it is meant to mimic:

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory, because they’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

— River Rats of the 59th Parallel

‘So,’ Sigrid says, ‘That’s what it says. What does it mean?’

‘Yeah,’ says Rhea. ‘I don’t know.’