by John Irving
It was no doubt the crack in Lindberg’s ass that Jack’s mom hadn’t wanted him to see. But a thin man’s bum is only a mild shock, and Lindberg had nothing more offensive than an eyeball on the left-side cheek and a pair of pursed lips on the right. The eye appeared to be glancing sideways at the crack in his scrawny ass, and the lips looked like a kiss that had been newly planted there—when the lipstick was still wet.
“Very nice,” Alice said, in a way that let Mr. Lindberg know she disapproved of his display. He quickly pulled up his pants.
But he had other tattoos—in fact, many. The public life of an accountant is generally conducted in clothes. Possibly none of Mr. Lindberg’s business associates knew that he was tattooed—certainly not that he had an eyeball on his ass! He also had a Tattoo Ole, which Alice recognized right away; it was Ole’s naked lady with her oddly upturned eyebrow of pubic hair. There was something a little different about this naked lady, however. (Jack couldn’t tell what was different about it, because his mother wouldn’t let him have a closer look.) And Torsten Lindberg had a Tattoo Peter from Amsterdam and a Herbert Hoffmann from Hamburg as well. But even among this august company, it was the Doc Forest that most impressed Alice.
On Mr. Lindberg’s narrow, sunken chest was a tall clipper ship in full sail—a three-masted type with a fast hull and a lofty rig. Under its bow, a sea monster was cresting. The serpent’s head was as big as the ship’s mainsail; the beast rose out of the sea on the port side of the bow, but the tip of its tail broke water off the starboard side of the stern. The doomed ship was clearly no match for this monster.
Alice announced that Doc Forest had to have been a sailor. In her view, the sailing ship on Torsten Lindberg’s chest was better than that HOMEWARD BOUND vessel on the breastbone of the late Charlie Snow. Torsten Lindberg knew where Doc Forest lived—he promised to take Jack and Alice to meet him. And the following day Lindberg would make up his mind about what kind of tattoo to get from Alice.
“I am inclining toward a personalized version of your Rose of Jericho,” he confessed.
“Every tattooed man should have one,” Alice told him.
Mr. Lindberg didn’t seem convinced. He was a worrier; it was the worrying, more than his metabolism, that kept him thin. He was worried about Alice’s situation at the Grand, and about Jack’s well-being in particular.
“Even in the Swedish winter, a boy must have exercise!” Did Jack know how to skate? Lindberg asked Alice.
Learning to skate had not been part of Jack’s Canadian experience, Alice informed him.
Torsten Lindberg knew the remedy for that. His wife skated every morning on Lake Mälaren. She would teach Jack!
If Alice was at all alarmed at how readily Mr. Lindberg offered his wife’s skating services, she didn’t say—not that Jack would have heard what his mother said. The boy was in the bathroom. He had a stomachache, having eaten too much for breakfast. He missed the entire skating conversation. By the time Jack came out of the bathroom, his winter exercise had been arranged for him.
And it didn’t strike the four-year-old as odd that his mother spoke of Lindberg’s wife as if she’d already met the woman. “She’s as robust as Lindberg is lean,” Jack’s mom told him. “She could keep a beer hall singing with her relentless good cheer.”
Alice further explained to Jack that Mrs. Lindberg had no desire to be tattooed herself, although she liked them well enough on Lindberg. A big, broad-shouldered woman who wore a sweater capable of containing two women the size of Alice, Mrs. Lindberg took Jack skating on Lake Mälaren as her husband had promised. Jack noted that Agneta Lindberg seemed to prefer her maiden name, which was Nilsson.
“Who wouldn’t agree that Agneta goes better with Nilsson than it does with Lindberg?” Alice said to her son, putting an end to that conversation.
What most impressed Jack was how well the large woman could skate, but that Agneta became so quickly out of breath bothered him. For someone who skated every morning, she got winded in a hurry.
The personalized Rose of Jericho that Torsten Lindberg had selected might be a three-day job—given his limited availability. The outlining would take nearly four hours; perhaps the shading of the cleverly concealed labia would require a fourth day.
It was unfortunate that Jack’s mother didn’t let him take a close look at the finished tattoo, for had the boy seen what Lindberg meant by a personalized version of Alice’s Rose of Jericho, he might have realized that there were other things that were not as they seemed.
Lake Mälaren is a large freshwater lake that discharges itself into the Baltic Sea right next to the Old Town at a place called Slussen. When it doesn’t snow too much, the lake is perfect for skating. Despite his experience with the thin ice on the Kastelsgraven, Jack had no fear of falling into Lake Mälaren. He knew that if the ice could support Agneta, it could easily hold him. And when they skated, she often took his hand in hers—as assertively as Lottie had. While Jack learned how to stop and to turn, and even how to skate backward, Alice completed the Rose of Jericho on Torsten Lindberg’s right shoulder blade. It was the shoulder that he turned toward his wife when they were sleeping, Jack’s mom told him. When Agneta opened her eyes upon her husband in the morning, there would be a vagina hiding in a flower. When he was older, Jack would wonder why a woman would want to wake up to that—but tattoos were not for everybody. Without the Torsten Lindbergs of this world, Jack’s mother wouldn’t have become such a successful Daughter Alice.
When Mr. Lindberg’s Rose of Jericho was finished, he took Jack and Alice to meet Doc Forest. Where Doc lived was no place special, but for the walls of flash in the small room where he’d set up his tattoo practice. Alice much admired Doc. He was a compact man with forearms like Popeye’s, a neatly trimmed mustache, and long sideburns. He was sandy-haired with bright, twinkling eyes, and he had indeed been a sailor. He’d gotten his first tattoo in Amsterdam from Tattoo Peter.
Doc regretted that he couldn’t hire Alice as his apprentice, but it wasn’t easy for him to find enough work to support himself; in fact, he was looking for a benefactor, someone to help him finance a first shop.
As for The Music Man—because, of course, William Burns had found Doc Forest—this time it had been either an aria quarta or a toccata by Pachelbel, Jack’s mom told him. She mentioned a Swedish movie that had made some piece by Pachelbel famous. “Or maybe that was Mozart,” Alice added. Jack wasn’t sure if she meant the music in the Swedish movie or his dad’s tattoo. But the boy was badly distracted by a snake. (An entire wall of flash was devoted to snakes and sea serpents, and other monsters of the deep.)
“I don’t suppose you have any idea where William might have gone,” Alice said to Doc Forest. She’d outworn her welcome at the Grand, or maybe the manager of the Grand had outworn his welcome with her.
“He’s in Oslo, I think,” Doc Forest said.
“Oslo!” Alice cried. There was more despair in her voice than before. “There can’t be anyone tattooing in Oslo.”
“If there is, he’s doing it out of his home, like me,” Doc replied.
“Oslo,” Jack’s mom said, more quietly this time. Like Stockholm, Oslo wasn’t on their itinerary.
“There’s an organ there,” Doc added. “An old one—that’s what he said.”
Of course there was an organ in Oslo! And if there was anyone, good or bad, tattooing there—even if only in his home—William would find him.
“Did he mention which church?” Alice asked.
“Just the organ—he said it had a hundred and two stops,” Doc Forest told her.
“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Alice said, more to herself than to Doc or Jack.
A theme was emerging from the wall of flash, and the boy had almost grasped it—something having to do with snakes wrapped around swords.
“You should stay at the Bristol, Alice,” Torsten Lindberg was saying. “You won’t get as many clients as you got at the Grand, but at least the manager
isn’t onto you.”
Years later, Jack would consider all that Lindberg might have meant by “onto you.” But Alice made no response, other than to thank the accountant; naturally, she thanked Doc Forest, too.
Doc picked Jack up in his strong arms and whispered, “Come back and see me when you’re older. Maybe then you’ll want a tattoo.”
Jack had loved the lobby of the Grand, and waking in the morning to the ships’ horns—the commuter traffic from the archipelago. He’d enjoyed skating on Lake Mälaren with Agneta Nilsson, the formidable Mrs. Lindberg. Aside from the darkness, he would have been content to stay in Stockholm, but he and his mom were on the move again.
They traveled by train to Göteborg, then by ship to Oslo. Much of this journey must have been beautiful, but all the boy would remember was how dark it was—and how he felt cold. After all, it was still January and they were way up north.
Given all their tattoo paraphernalia, they had a lot of luggage. Upon their arrival anywhere, they never looked as if they were visiting for a short time. At the Hotel Bristol, the front-desk clerk must have thought they’d come for an extended stay.
“Not your most expensive room,” Alice informed the clerk, “but something nice—not too claustrophobic.”
They would be needing a hand with their bags, the clerk was smart enough to observe; he called for a bellboy and gave Jack a friendly handshake, but the handshake hurt the boy’s fingers. Jack had never met a Norwegian before.
The Bristol’s lobby was not so grand as the Grand’s. Jack hoped he wouldn’t have to get used to it. It didn’t matter to him that the organ was an old one; for all he cared, the stupid organ could have had two hundred and two stops.
So far, Jack and his mom were indebted to three tattooers, two organists, a small soldier, and a tattooed accountant. In whose debt would they be next? the boy wondered, as they followed the bellboy and their luggage down a dark, carpeted hall.
Their hotel room at the Bristol was small and airless. When they checked in, it was already dark outside—it almost always was—and the view from their room was of another building. (There were some dimly lit rooms with their curtains closed, which spoke to Alice of dull, silent lives—not the life she had once imagined with William, anyway.)
They’d not eaten since their last breakfast at the Grand. The bellboy told them that the Bristol’s restaurant was still serving, but he urged them not to dally. Jack’s mother had forewarned her son that the restaurant was no doubt expensive and they should order sparingly.
Jack didn’t much care for the bellboy’s suggestions. “You must try the cloudberries,” he said, “and of course the reindeer tongue.”
“Have the salmon, Jack,” his mom said, after the bellboy had gone. “I’ll split it with you.”
That was when the boy began to cry—not because his fingers still throbbed from the front-desk clerk’s handshake, or because he was hungry and tired and sick of hotel rooms. It wasn’t even because of that winter darkness special to Scandinavia—the absence of light, which must compel more than a few Swedes and Norwegians to jump into a fjord, if it’s possible to find one that’s not frozen. No, it was not the trip but the reason for the trip that made him cry.
“I don’t care if we find him!” he cried to his mother. “I hope we don’t find him!”
“If we find him, you’ll care—it’ll mean something,” she said.
But if they were his father’s abandoned responsibilities, didn’t that mean that his dad had already expressed his disappointment with them both? Hadn’t William rejected Alice and Jack, and wouldn’t finding him mean that he might reject them again? (Not that the boy, at four, could ever have expressed these thoughts, but this was what he was feeling—this was what he was crying about.)
At his mother’s insistence, Jack stopped crying so that they could go down to dinner.
“We’ll share the salmon,” Alice told the waiter.
“No reindeer tongue,” Jack said, “no cloudberries.”
Virtually no one else was eating in the restaurant. An elderly couple sat in silence; that they had nothing to say to each other did not necessarily predispose them to wanting a tattoo. A man was alone at a corner table. He looked depressed beyond desperation, a candidate for a fjord.
“A tattoo can’t save him,” Alice said.
Then a young couple came into the restaurant. It was the first time Jack saw how his mom was affected by a couple in love; she looked like a surefire fjord-jumper, one who wouldn’t even hesitate.
He was thin and athletic-looking, with long hair to his shoulders—like a rock star, only better dressed—and his wife or girlfriend couldn’t take her eyes or her hands off him. She was a tall, lanky young woman with a wide smile and beautiful breasts. (Even at four, Jack Burns had an eye for breasts.) Whether they were guests at the hotel or Oslo natives, they were as cool as any young couple who’d ever walked into Tattoo Ole’s. Probably they’d already been tattooed.
“Ask them,” Jack said to his mom, but she couldn’t bear to look at them.
“No,” she whispered, “not them. I can’t.”
Jack didn’t understand what was the matter with her. They were a couple in love. Wasn’t being in love a pilgrim experience, like getting your first tattoo? Jack had heard his mom and Ole talk about those turning points in people’s lives that inspire a tattoo—almost any pilgrim experience will do. Obviously this young couple was having one. And if they were guests at the hotel, they’d probably already had sex that evening—not that Jack knew. (In all likelihood, they couldn’t wait to eat their dinner so they could have sex again!)
Not even the presence of the waiter, who stood ready to tell them the specials, could keep them from fondling each other. After the waiter had left with their order, Jack nudged his mom and said: “Do you want me to ask them? I know how to do it.”
“No, please—just eat your salmon,” she said, still whispering.
Even in that brutal weather, the young woman wore a skimpy dress and her legs were bare. Jack thought that they must have been staying in the hotel, because no one would have gone out in such a dress—not in that weather. He also thought that he spotted a tattoo—it might have been a birthmark—on the inside of one of her bare knees. It turned out to be a bruise, but that was what propelled the boy out of his chair and gave him the courage to approach the couple’s table. His mother didn’t come with him.
Jack walked right up to that beautiful girl and said the lines he still said in his bed to help him sleep.
“Do you have a tattoo?” (In English first. But if he’d spoken in Swedish, most Norwegians would have understood him.)
The girl seemed to think Jack was telling her a joke. The guy looked all around, as if he’d misunderstood what sort of place he was in. Was the boy what amounted to live entertainment? Jack couldn’t tell if he’d embarrassed the young man, or what else was the matter with him; it was almost as if it pained him to look at Jack.
“No,” the young woman answered, also in English. The guy shook his head; maybe he didn’t have a tattoo, either.
“Would you like one?” Jack asked the girl—just the girl.
The guy shook his head again. He regarded Jack strangely, as if he’d never seen a child before. But whenever Jack looked at him, he looked away.
“Maybe,” his beautiful wife or girlfriend said.
“I have the room and the equipment, if you have the time,” Jack told her, but something had distracted her. Neither she nor the man was looking at Jack; instead they were staring at his mom. She’d not left her table but she was crying. Jack didn’t know what to do.
The girl, seemingly more concerned for Jack than for his mother, leaned so far forward that the boy could smell her perfume. “How long does it take?” she asked him.
“That depends,” Jack managed to say, only because he knew the lines by heart. He was frightened that his mom was crying; in lieu of looking at his mother, Jack stared at the girl’s breasts. He be
came even more alarmed when he could no longer hear his mom crying.
“How much does it cost?” the guy asked, but not as if he were serious about getting a tattoo—more like he was trying not to hurt Jack’s feelings.
“That depends, too,” Alice said. She had not only stopped crying; she was standing right behind her son.
“Maybe some other time,” the guy said; a certain bitterness in his voice made Jack look at him again. His wife or girlfriend only nodded, as if something had frightened her.
“Come with me, my little actor,” Jack’s mom whispered in his ear. The guy, for some reason, had closed his eyes; it was as if he didn’t want to see Jack go.
Without turning around, the boy reached behind him. His hand, the one the clerk had hurt, instinctively found hers. When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.
4
No Luck in Norway
Alice found few clients for tattoos in Oslo. Among the foreign guests and restaurant-goers at the Bristol, those intrepid souls who accepted her offer had been tattooed before.
Because their breakfasts at the Bristol were included in the price of their room, Jack and his mom continued their habit of overindulging in that meal. During one such exercise in overeating, they met a German businessman who was traveling with his wife. The German had a Sailor’s Grave on his chest (a sinking ship, still flying the German flag) and a St. Pauli lighthouse on his right forearm—the solid maritime tattooing of Herbert Hoffmann, whose shop in Hamburg was just off the Reeperbahn.
The German wanted Alice to tattoo his wife, who already had an eighteen-inch lizard tattooed on her back. After breakfast, the businessman’s wife selected an iridescent-green spider from Alice’s flash. Alice tattooed an all-black spiral on the German woman’s earlobe; the spider, suspended from a red thread, hung out in that hollow between her collarbone and her throat.
“Ambitious work, for Oslo,” Alice told the German couple.
Alice was looking forward to meeting Herbert Hoffmann; she’d always wanted to visit St. Pauli. Hoffmann, like Tattoo Ole and Tattoo Peter, represented those North Sea tattoos she’d first seen in her dad’s shop. She knew that Tattoo Ole had given Herbert Hoffmann his first tattoo machine, and that Hoffmann had been tattooed by Ole and Tattoo Peter.
