Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 7

The BMW GS 1200 runs high on the road, and the boxster engine thumps gently. Rhea looks over Lars’s right shoulder as the bike glides undramatically at sixty-five kilometres an hour past the new Opera, which is shimmering white and angular against the blue fjord, as Oslo’s city centre disappears behind her.

She unzips the vents on her leather jacket to let in some more warm air.

River Rats of the 59th Parallel.

It wasn’t madness. It could only mean one thing — that Sheldon was headed north and east along the Glomma river into the hinterland, where the cold-water summer house hid two rifles he’d learned about just yesterday.

Lars had made the case plainly back at the Continental.

‘If we’re wrong, we can be back here in four or five hours to keep looking for him, though I’m not sure what good that would do, and we should probably stay there, given that we can’t go home. If we’re right, we get there before him, I can lock up the rifles more safely, and we can wait for him. Then, depending on what we think, we take him in, we take him to the hospital, or maybe we even take him to the police.’

Rhea had been wringing her riding gloves like dishtowels.

‘The guns aren’t locked up?’

‘Well, yeah, sure, but he can get to them.’

‘How do you figure?’

‘He was a watchmaker,’ Lars shrugged. ‘I’m sure he can pick a lock. Don’t you think?’

‘That’s not very reassuring.’

‘No.’ Then Lars asked, ‘Was he really a sniper in Korea?’

Rhea shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. My grandmother told me that he started saying that after my father was killed. She thought it was a kind of fantasy.’

‘He wanted revenge?’

‘No. He always blamed himself. There was no one to take revenge on.’

After that, they had mounted the bike and left.

It took more than two hours to get to Kongsvinger and the little town past it, out in the forest, by the Swedish border, way beyond the edge of Sheldon’s known universe.

‘It all started when you came to live with us,’ Rhea’s grandmother had said. ‘First he lost one marble, then another. After a while he’d lost all his marbles. But he kept playing.’ Mabel never said that Sheldon got worse because of Rhea. But she did say it started around the same time.

She was only two years old in July 1976 during the bicentennial celebrations when America rejoiced in itself. Wide-eyed and frightened, with nothing but a one-eared blue bunny, she was handed over to her grandparents. They were near strangers.

Her mother? Gone. One day she didn’t come back. Saul had been dead for more than a year. She drank, she yelled, and then she disappeared when the flags started coming out. It was simply more than she could take.

Sheldon and Mabel had both tried supporting her during the pregnancy. Her own parents were disgusted with her, and she clearly needed help. Unfortunately — for her, for the child, for them all — she was beyond reach. They didn’t know her well enough to know why. There was an anger inside her that, they were sure, preceded Saul and her predicament. Why he was attracted to her they could never say. Beyond the obvious curves and invitations, Mabel had speculated that Saul had wanted to disappear, and the only way to do that without being alone was to find a woman incapable of seeing him.

In the end, none of this mattered. Only the child did.

Rhea asked her grandfather where she she’d gone. She was a little older then. Five. They were in the shop, and she was holding a brass sextant that she’d found in a purple box. Sheldon had been working intensely on something small and complicated.

When she asked, he was momentarily diverted.

He’d put down whatever he was holding and said, ‘Your mother. Your mother, your mother, your mother. Your mother … grew wings one day and flew off to become the princess of the dragon people.’

Having answered, he put on his eyeglasses and started working again.

Rhea pulled on his leather apron.

‘What?’

‘Can we go find her?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Aren’t you happy with us?’

Rhea did not know how to respond to this. She wasn’t sure if it was related to her question or not.

Sheldon sadly accepted that Rhea wasn’t going to let this go.

‘You got wings?’ he asked.

Rhea frowned and tried to look behind herself, but couldn’t.

‘Turn around.’

Rhea turned. Sheldon lifted the back of her dress, exposing her red panties and pale back, and then dropped it.

‘No wings. You can’t go. Sorry. Maybe some other day.’

‘Will I grow wings someday?’

‘Look, I don’t know. I don’t know why people suddenly fly off. But they do. One day some grow wings, and then they’re gone.’ Seeing her expression, he added, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t grow wings. I’m a flightless bird.’

She remembered from when she was five. But 1976, when she arrived, was too far back. She was too young. She couldn’t remember the flags everywhere. The streamers. The bands playing in the streets. The speeches by politicians. The newly minted coins and toy drums. It was two years after the near-impeachment of a president, one year after failure in a twenty-five-year war, in the midst of civil-rights turmoil, an emboldened Soviet Union, a declining economy, an oil crisis, a baffled intelligentsia, and a movie about a giant shark that ate people. America celebrated its existence as this little girl was transferred to a new life, set on a new course, and would forever live in the shadows of the dead and disappeared.

Under fireworks and a combat-jet escort, Rhea was dropped off by social services with her grandparents — thumb in mouth, bunny in tow — in a parking lot by a Sears department store, way past her bedtime. She’d been alone for two days by the time the neighbours realised that her crying was not being soothed by anyone, and they placed a call.

Mabel put her in the back seat of the borrowed Chevy wagon, and pulled the thick black seat belt across her with a click. Rhea watched the explosions in the sky, and the clouds turn green, then red, then orange.

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.’