(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  All that could be seen of the littlest soldier was his feet. He must have been lying with his head between Alice’s breasts, which were under the covers; he was probably recovering from a nightmare, or so Jack deduced. (That would explain the quivering of the bed.) Besides, Jack knew it was a night for bad dreams, having just had one himself; it seemed perfectly obvious to the boy that the soldier had suffered one, too, and had therefore climbed into bed with his mom. Jack no doubt still thought of the soldier as a fellow child.

  Suddenly the littlest soldier’s nightmare returned with a vengeance. He violently kicked the covers off—Jack saw his bare bum in the bathroom light—and Alice must have squeezed him too hard, because he whimpered and groaned. That was when her eyes opened and Jack’s mom saw him standing there—another little soldier, this one at attention. Alice didn’t recognize her son at first; it must have been the uniform.

  Her scream was a shock to Jack, as it was to the littlest soldier. When he saw the four-year-old in uniform, he screamed, too. (He sounded like a little boy again!) And Jack was suddenly so afraid of the mutual nightmare they must have been having that he, too, began screaming. He also peed in his pants—actually, in the littlest soldier’s pants.

  “Jackie!” his mother cried, when she caught her breath.

  “I dreamed I drowned in the moat,” Jack began. “Dead soldiers, from the past, were with me. You were there, too,” he told the littlest soldier.

  The soldier didn’t look so little now. Jack was astonished at the size of his penis; it was half as long as the bayonet on the rifle he’d used to rescue Jack, and it was thrust forward, at an upward angle, in the manner of a bayonet, too.

  “You better go,” Alice told the littlest soldier.

  True to his calling, he took orders well; he marched straightaway into the bathroom, without a word of protest, and when he’d done his business there, he came back to Alice’s bedroom to fetch his clothes. Jack had taken off the soldier’s uniform, folded it neatly on the chair, and crawled into bed with his mom.

  Together they watched the littlest soldier dress himself. Jack was embarrassed about pissing in his rescuer’s pants, and he could tell the exact moment when the little hero discovered what had happened. An expression of uncertainty and distress was on his face—not unlike the anxiety and discomfort Jack had seen there when the brave lad was inching across the thinly frozen moat in his long underwear.

  But after all, he was a soldier; he gave Jack a glance of vast understanding and grudging respect, as if the boy’s peeing in his pants struck him as appropriate to the situation. And before he left, the littlest soldier gave Jack and his mother what Jack had intended to give them: a proper salute.

  Despite having seen him stark naked, Jack hadn’t noticed a tattoo—not even a bandage. The boy thought about it, in lieu of falling back to sleep—which would, in all probability, return him to his nightmare about drowning in the Kastelsgraven.

  He asked his mom his troubling question. “Did you give him a free tattoo? I didn’t see one.”

  “I . . . certainly did give him one,” she replied, with some hesitation. “You just missed it.”

  “What was it?” Jack asked.

  “It was . . . a little soldier,” she answered, with more hesitation. “It was even littler than him.”

  Having seen his half-a-bayonet of a penis, Jack had revised his impression of how little the soldier was, but all he said to his mother was: “Where did you put it?”

  “On one of his ankles—the left one,” she said.

  The boy thought that the bathroom light must have been playing tricks on him, because he’d looked closely at the soldier’s ankles and hadn’t seen a tattoo there. He assumed that he’d just missed it, as his mom had said.

  Jack fell asleep in her arms, as he often did after nightmares—and not at all in such an uncomfortable-looking position as the one the littlest soldier had taken up with her.

  That was Copenhagen, which Jack Burns wouldn’t visit again for almost thirty years. But he would never forget Tattoo Ole and Ladies’ Man Madsen, and their kindness to his mom and him. Or the frozen moat—the Kastelsgraven, which almost claimed him. Or the littlest soldier, who saved him—and by so doing, saved his mother, too.

  In reality, Jack understood little of what had happened there. Although he didn’t know it, a pattern had begun. At the time, he had lots to learn, especially in those areas his mom kept largely to herself—not only the meaning of a free tattoo but all the other things as well.

  And when he had that nightmare about drowning in the moat, it was always the same. He had already drowned. There was no more struggle, only a lasting cold. In eternity, Jack was joined by centuries of Europe’s dead soldiers. The little hero who’d saved him stood out among them—not for the disproportionate size of his penis but for the stoic quality of his frozen salute.

  3

  Rescued by a Swedish Accountant

  One day, when Jack was older, he would ask his mother why his father hadn’t gone to England—why they’d not looked for him there. After all, England has its share of women and organs—and a long-established history of tattooing as well.

  Alice simply said that William was Scots enough to hate the English. He would never have gone to England for a woman, let alone for an organ—not even for a tattoo. But William Burns wasn’t quite Scots enough to have kept the Callum, was he?

  From Copenhagen, Alice and Jack took the ferry across the sound to Malmö and then the train to Stockholm. In Sweden, in January, the hours of daylight are few. It was the New Year, 1970. It seemed that William had gone underground not long after his arrival, and Doc Forest wouldn’t open his first tattoo parlor for two years. Doc was almost as hard to find as William Burns.

  Alice and Jack went first to the Hedvig Eleonora Church. The building was a glowing dome of gold, surrounded by tombstones in the snow; the altar and the altar rail were also gold. The organ façade was a greenish gold, and the pews were painted a gray-green color—a faint, silvery tint, not as dark as moss. The glass in the paired, symmetrical windows of the rotunda was uncolored, as somber as the winter light.

  The Hedvig Eleonora was the most beautiful church Jack had ever seen. It was Lutheran, with a fine choir tradition. This time, William had made the fond acquaintance of three choirgirls before the first learned of the third. Although it was the second choirgirl, Ulrika, who exposed him, surely the other two, Astrid and Vendela, were just as upset. Until then, William had been doing rather well—assisting Torvald Torén on the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora, and studying composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

  Poor Astrid, Ulrika, and Vendela—Jack later wished he could have met them. He remembered meeting Torvald Torén; even to Jack, Torén seemed young. Twenty-four is young, and Torén was a slight man with quick movements and lively eyes. Jack had the feeling that his mom was as utterly disarmed by Torén as she was by his devastating news of the three choirgirls. And unlike many organists Jack would meet, Torvald Torén was well dressed. The boy was struck by the businesslike efficiency of Torén’s black briefcase, too.

  Given his youth, his alert presence, his bright future—he was teaching the organ to a few carefully selected students—Alice may have seen in Torén all the promise that William had once embodied. Jack thought at the time that it might have been hard for his mom to say good-bye to Torvald Torén. As Jack and Alice were leaving the Hedvig Eleonora, the boy saw his mother turning to look at that golden altar—and out in the snow, in what struck them both as Stockholm’s perpetual darkness, Alice kept glancing over her shoulder at the lighted dome of the church. But Jack had heard very little of Alice’s conversation with Torén; the church itself and the young organist’s appearance had completely captured the four-year-old’s attention.

  Here they had yet to find Doc Forest, and William was already underground! But Alice believed that William was incapable of passing through a port without being tattooed, and somewhere in Stockholm th
ere was at least one good tattoo artist. Just possibly, Doc Forest might know where William had gone. If only to distract himself from the pain, a man getting a complicated tattoo is inclined to talk.

  In the meantime, while they were trying to find Doc Forest, Alice was spending a fair amount of money. They were staying at the Grand, which was the best hotel in Stockholm. Their room faced the Old Town and the water, with a view of the wharf where the boats to and from the archipelago docked. Jack would remember posing with one of those ships as if he were the captain, just stepping ashore. He knew the hotel was expensive because his mom said so on a postcard she sent to Mrs. Wicksteed, which she read out loud to him. But Alice had a plan.

  The Grand was near the opera and the theater—people met there for drinks and dinner. Local businessmen had breakfast and lunch there, too. And the lobby of the Grand was both bigger and less gloomy than the lobby of the D’Angleterre. Jack lived in that lobby as if the hotel were his castle and he was the Grand’s little prince.

  Alice’s plan was simple, but for a while it worked. Jack and Alice had few dressy clothes, and they wore them day and night; their laundry bill was expensive, too. Looking most unlike the solicitors they were, they ate a huge breakfast every morning. The buffet was included with the price of their room; it was their only complete meal of the day. While they gorged themselves, they would try to spot the tattoo-seekers among the well-heeled people eating breakfast.

  They skipped lunch. Few people at the Grand ate lunch alone, and Alice knew that the decision to get a tattoo was a solitary one. (You didn’t make a commitment to be marked for life in the company of colleagues or friends; in most cases, they tried to talk you out of it.)

  In the early evening, Jack stayed alone in the hotel room, snacking on cold cuts and fruit, while his mom checked out the potential tattoo clients at the bar. Later at night, after Jack had gone to bed, Alice would order the least expensive appetizer in the dining room. At the Grand, apparently, many hotel guests ate their dinners alone—“traveling businessmen,” in Alice’s estimation.

  Her approach to a potential client was always the same. “Do you have a tattoo?” (She’d even mastered this in Swedish: “Har ni någon tatuering?”)

  If the answer was yes, she would ask: “Is it a Doc Forest?” But no one had heard of him, and the answer to the first question was usually no.

  When a potential client said he or she didn’t have a tattoo, Alice asked the next question—in English first, in Swedish if she had to. “Would you like one?” (“Skulle ni vilja ha en?”)

  Most people said no, but some would say maybe. Maybe was good enough for Alice—all she ever needed was her pretty foot in the door.

  When Jack couldn’t sleep, he recited this dialogue; it worked better for him than thinking about Lottie or counting sheep. Maybe what made Jack Burns an actor was that he never forgot these lines.

  “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (“Jag har rum och utrustning, om ni har tid.”)

  “How long does it take?” (“Hur lång tid tar det?”)

  “That depends.” (“Det beror på.”)

  “How much does it cost?” (“Vad kostar det?”)

  “That depends, too.” (“Det beror också på.”)

  Jack would wonder one day at the line “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” Were those traveling businessmen, whom Alice solicited alone, ever confused by her intentions? The one lady who said she wanted a tattoo wanted nothing of the kind. Not only was she surprised to find a four-year-old in Alice’s hotel room; she wanted him to leave.

  Alice refused to send Jack away. The lady, who was neither young nor pretty, seemed greatly offended. She spoke English very well—in fact, she may have been English—and she was the likeliest source of the hotel manager discovering that Alice was giving tattoos in her hotel room.

  The tattoo machines, the pigments, the power pack, the foot switch, the little paper cups, the alcohol and witch hazel and glycerine, the Vaseline and paper towels—there was such a lot of stuff! Yet everything was put away, completely out of sight, when the maid came. As underground as tattooing was in Stockholm, Alice knew that the Grand would not have been happy to discover she was earning an income at that enterprise there.

  Though he later suspected that the trouble with the hotel manager probably came from the English-speaking lesbian, at the time, Jack wasn’t aware of the negotiations that transpired between his mother and the manager. He simply observed that his mom’s attitude toward the Grand abruptly changed. She began to say things like, “If I don’t get a lead on Doc Forest today, we’re out of here tomorrow”—although they continued to stay. And Jack often woke at night to find her absent. He was too young to tell the time, but it seemed to him that it was very late at night for anyone to be having dinner in the dining room. So where was Alice on those nights? Was she giving a free tattoo to the hotel manager?

  They were lucky to meet the accountant. Jack would soon wonder if, in every town, his mother needed to meet someone in order for them to be saved. It was a little anticlimactic to be rescued by an accountant, especially after encountering such a hero as the littlest soldier. Naturally, not knowing he was an accountant, Jack and his mom spotted him in the Grand at breakfast.

  Torsten Lindberg was his name, and he was so thin that he seemed in need of more than a meal. But breakfast was a huge event for him, as it was for Jack and Alice. They’d noticed him not because he looked like a potential tattoo client, but because he had heaped on his plate a platter-size serving of herring—Jack and Alice hated herring—and Lindberg was making his way through the fishy mound with remarkable relish. With no thought of asking this tall, lugubrious-looking man if he had a tattoo or wanted one, Jack and his mother watched him eat, spellbound by his appetite. They couldn’t help but wonder if the breakfast buffet at the Grand was his only complete meal of the day, too. At least in his appetite, if not in his taste for herring, he seemed a kindred soul.

  Probably they were staring; that would explain why Torsten Lindberg began to stare at them. He said later that he couldn’t help but notice how much they were eating—just not the herring. As a shrewd accountant, he might have guessed that they were trying to keep their expenses down.

  Jack had carefully removed the mushrooms from his three-egg omelet; he’d saved them for his mom. She’d finished her crêpes and had saved her melon balls for him. Lindberg plowed on, devouring his archipelago of herring.

  Whoever thinks accountants are penny-pinchers and emotional misers, not to mention joyless in the presence of children, never met Torsten Lindberg. When his great meal was finished—before Jack and Alice were through with their breakfast, because they were still scouting the café for potential tattoo clients—Lindberg paused at their table and smiled benevolently at Jack. He said something in Swedish, and the boy looked to his mom for help.

  “I’m sorry—he speaks only English,” Alice said.

  “Excellent!” Lindberg cried, as if English-speaking children were in special need of cheering up. “Have you ever seen a fish swim without water?” he asked Jack.

  “No,” the boy replied.

  While his dress was formal—a dark-blue suit and necktie—his manner was that of a clown. Lindberg may have looked like a man attending a funeral—worse, like a skeleton dressed for an overlong coffin—but in presenting himself to a child, he took on the magical promise of a circus performer.

  Mr. Lindberg removed his suit jacket, which he handed to Alice—both politely and presumptuously, as if she were his wife. He ceremoniously unbuttoned one sleeve of his white dress shirt and rolled it up above his elbow. On his forearm was the aforementioned fish without water; actually, it was an excellent tattoo, and the fish looked very much as if it belonged there. The fish’s head curled around Lindberg’s wrist, the tail extending to the bend at his elbow; the tattoo covered most of his forearm. It was almost certainly of Japanese origin, though not a carp. The colors alternated b
etween an iridescent blue and a vibrant yellow, blending to an iridescent green, which turned to midnight black and Shanghai red. As Torsten Lindberg tightened the muscles of his forearm, and slightly rotated his wrist and lower arm, the fish began to swim—undulating in a downward spiral, like a fantail diving for the palm of Lindberg’s hand.

  “Well, now you have,” Mr. Lindberg said to Jack, who looked at his mother.

  “That’s a pretty good tattoo,” she told Lindberg, “but I’ll bet it’s no Doc Forest.”

  He replied calmly, but without hesitation: “It would be awkward to show you my Doc Forest in a public place.”

  “You know Doc Forest!” Alice said.

  “Of course. I thought you did!”

  “I only know his work,” Alice answered.

  “You obviously know something about tattoos!” Lindberg said, with mounting excitement.

  “Put your fish away,” Alice told him. “I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time.” (In retrospect, it disappointed Jack that he and his mom never learned the Swedish for “Put your fish away.”)

  They took Torsten Lindberg to their hotel room, where Alice showed him her flash and set up her outlining machine. The latter action was premature, as it turned out. Torsten Lindberg was a connoisseur; he wouldn’t get any tattoo on the spot.

  First of all, he insisted on showing Alice his other tattoos—including the ones on his bum. “Not around Jack,” Alice said, but he assured her that the tattoos were safe for children to see.