Norwegian by Night

by Derek B. Miller

  ‘And then Saul — my Saul — decided to go to Vietnam because his father had been to Korea, and his father went to Korea because he didn’t go to Germany. And Saul died there. It was me. I encouraged him. I think I took the life of my boy in the name of a moral cause. But in the end I was nothing like Abraham. Nothing like Saul. And God didn’t stay my hand.’

  For the first time that Sheldon can recall, the boy is looking at him. So he smiles. He smiles the kind of smile that only the old can deliver. The smile that appreciates the importance of the moment more than the reality of it.

  The boy does not smile back. So Sheldon smiles for both of them.

  ‘And then there was the other Saul — Rabbi Saul of Tarsus. A Roman. Liked to fall off horses. According to you Gentile types, he persecuted the early Christians until he had a revelation, a vision, on the road to Damascus. And so Saul became Paul. And Paul became a saint for the Church. And a good man he was.

  ‘You didn’t know I knew all this stuff, did you? I do. No one ever asks me. Lucky for me, though, I’ve got a rich inner life. Now I’ve got you.

  ‘What if I call you Paul? A boy transformed? The one who fell and got up again? The Christian reborn from the fallen Jew? Would you mind that? It’ll be my own private joke. All the best ones are.

  ‘All right. Let’s go hide at the movies.’

  It is hard for Sheldon to remember the last time he’d held a boy’s sticky hand in his own. The chubby fingers and light but purposeful grip. The trust and responsibility. The moderation of gait and the slight stoop of his own shoulder. Was the last time really with Saul? That would make it over fifty years ago. The feeling is too familiar, too immediate to assimilate that answer, even if it is true. The prospect of fifty years existing between this feeling and the last time he had it fills him with remorse.

  There was Rhea, of course. A love he never expected. But this was a boy’s hand.

  Rhea and Lars stand outside the police station in silence. They are free to go, but are instructed to remain reachable at all times. Lars watches the cars pass. Rhea bites a piece of her lip, takes it into her fingers, and flicks it off her fingertip into the light breeze. They both stand there for a couple of minutes. Eventually, Lars speaks up.

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  ‘I suppose we could take the bike around town and look for him,’ he says.

  ‘I can’t believe he doesn’t have a mobile phone.’

  ‘He refused. Said we’d use it to track him.’

  ‘And we accepted that.’

  ‘Only because he never left the house.’

  ‘He’s left now,’ says Rhea.

  A few more cars pass and a thick cloud passes overhead, bringing a quick chill. It is a reminder of the distance they have all come. How far they are from home.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Lars says. ‘He sure did.’

  Chapter 5

  It irritates Sheldon to no end that movie theatres in Oslo assign seating to its patrons.

  ‘You think we can’t sort it out for ourselves? We need supervision? Direction?’

  He says this to the innocent girl behind the counter.

  Her pimply face puckers. ‘Is it different where you’re from?’

  ‘Yes. First come, first serve. Survival of the fittest. Law of the jungle. Where competition breeds creativity, and out of conflict comes genius. In the Land of the Free, we sit where we like. We sit where we can.’

  Sheldon snatches his ticket and mumbles. He mumbles at the price of hot dogs at the concession stand. He mumbles about the temperature of the popcorn, the distance between the restroom and the theatre, the steepness of the theatre’s seats, and the average height of the average Norwegian, which is well above average.

  It is when he stops mumbling — for only the briefest moment as he catches his breath — that the murder rushes back in and finds purchase. It occupies the space.

  He’s familiar with this problem on a larger scale. This is just an instance of it. History itself constantly threatens to take him over and leave him defenceless under its weight. It’s not dementia. It’s mortality.

  The silence is the enemy. It breaches the wall of distraction, if you let it.

  Jews know this. It’s why we keep talking at all cost. With what we’ve been through, if we stop for a second, we’re done for.

  Turning to Paul, he says, ‘I don’t know anything about this movie, other than it’s over two hours long, at which point we’ll get you the world’s most expensive pizza at Pepe’s, and then we’re going to relax in style tonight at the Hotel Continental. It’s near the National Theatre. The Grand Hotel, I’m sure, is all booked. It’s the last place they’d think to find us, because it’s not the kind of place I tend to haunt. But, personally, I think we deserve a little calm tonight.’

  And then the trailers end and the movie begins. It involves a spaceship on its way to the sun to save the world. The movie begins with wonder, but degrades into horror and death.

  Sheldon closes his eyes.

  President Jimmy Carter did not retain his position long enough to see the hostages come home from Iran in 1980. On the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the planes departed from Tehran with the Americans who had been held in captivity for four hundred and forty-four days. The cameras filmed Reagan take the oath of office in a light rain — his wife wore red under a grey sky.

  But the drama was on the aeroplane where these people cried, and talked, and worried that it was all a lie and that they were merely being flown in circles in a further act of cruelty. What Sheldon understood, watching it all on TV, was that the grand sweep of American history was not in Reagan’s poised pronouncement, but in the lonely and pensive look on Jimmy Carter’s face as he stood, no longer president, on the tarmac. And beneath the grand sweep of history were the lives of people like him and Mabel and Bill Harmon, his colleague from the pawnshop down the block from his own place in New York.

  Mabel read the newspaper in those days. She formed her opinions at the end of each article, and then allowed them to evaporate like so much water off a dead pond. She did not allow Sheldon to discuss politics in the house, and he had no desire to do so anyway. Saul had only been dead for six years by 1980 — which, as time works, was no time at all.

  The city had become still for them, purposeless. It was a succession of yellow streaks of cabs going by. Black sheets of rain. A palette of greens from a farmer’s market. A red steak for dinner. Sleep again. The only movement came from the watches in Sheldon’s shop.

  The watch-repair and antique store was in Gramercy, just off of Park Avenue South. It was inconspicuous, but locals knew it was there. Passers-by could easily miss the thickly barred iron door that opened into the small workshop in the front and the larger showroom in the back.

  By the 1980s, Sheldon’s business was suffering from a Japanese invention called the ‘digital watch’. They had extremely few moving parts, kept remarkably accurate time, inexplicably excited people’s imaginations, and they were cheap. Worse yet, they were disposable. And so the Swiss-watch industry was in turmoil, and those who depended on it for their livelihoods were, too. No longer did men and women of every economic stratum come to Sheldon’s shop for a minor repair, or a service to oil the parts, or to put in a new gasket. Instead, only the old-timers were coming in. The quality of the watches improved steadily, as people replaced the cheap ones but fixed the good ones. There were fewer clients, the work was more complicated, and the pay did not improve. The decade grew silent and unremarkable.

  Bill Harmon’s pawnshop was three doors down on the right. Bill was also in his fifties, was American of Irish decent, and had a shock of pure white hair over his ruddy face. He and Sheldon sent customers back and forth between them like they were ping pong balls.

  ‘Not for me. T
ry Bill’s shop. He buys power tools.’

  ‘No, no. You go to Donny’s with the fancy gold watch. I don’t know the first thing about these.’

  ‘This is a Nikon. What am I going to do with a Nikon? Go to Bill.’

  ‘Go to Donny.’

  ‘Go to Bill.’

  ‘So Donny, take a look at this one,’ said Bill one day. He handed Sheldon a remarkably thin gold watch on an original leather band by Patek Philippe. ‘Guy says he bought it in Havana before they went red. Wanted to sell it to me. I sent him to you, but …’

  ‘I got in late.’

  ‘You got in late. So I bought it.’

  Sheldon was wearing a leather apron and a white shirt, and had slid his reading glasses to the top of his head. He was looking a bit scruffy, and his blue eyes caught a glint of the afternoon. Not that Bill noticed. Bill had no sense for the dramatic, the fleeting, the ethereal. Nothing magical existed for Bill. Which was a pity, because as Sheldon saw it, Bill had one of the most magical shops in New York — aside from his own — and no one knew this better than his son had.

  To Saul’s boyish delight, Bill’s pawnshop was the exact same size and shape as Sheldon’s. There was something about the identical shape that allowed Saul to feel proprietary over Bill’s shop, too. Bill, divorced and childless, welcomed this.

  In his father’s shop, Saul had to walk down a few steps to enter through a single gated door. On the left was the repair centre. Sheldon had a big wooden desk there, and along the wall behind him were thousands — maybe millions — of tiny little shelves, each one smaller than a card catalogue at the library, with nothing but numbers on them. The light was good here, and Saul watched as people passed through, all of them nice to his father.

  In Bill’s, there was a big display case so people could look in and see all the strange things he had for sale. At one time he had a Viking shield with fur on the front side. Another time he had Rock’em Sock’em Robots from Mattel, an antique pistol from the Wild West, a broken typewriter, a letter opener from France, a vase with fish for handles, and a mirror surrounded by gold leaves.

  Bill did not wear a leather apron like Sheldon did, nor a watchmaker’s loupe, and so there was still something special back in his father’s. The apron was faded and folded, and clearly had been worn by knights as they fought dragons. Saul knew this, because Sheldon had told him. In fact, Sheldon had no special interest in looking like an old-world horlogeur, but he couldn’t deny that leather aprons were extraordinarily handy when he dropped tiny watch pieces. With the apron he could hear the pieces hit the leather, which let him know that, yes, he had dropped something. Also handy was how the tiny pieces could be easily collected from the folds. So while it actually belonged to a cobbler — not a watchmaker — it was both handy and had magical dragon-fighting qualities. Together, they made it easy to don and hard to remove.

  When Bill walked in that morning, Sheldon had a thermos of coffee on the workbench and was carefully fitting a used balance spring into a new Ollech & Wajs diver’s watch.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Sheldon. ‘Now you have a watch.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Bill.

  ‘Something that’s been on my mind for a while.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘It’s complicated, right? Technical? I wouldn’t understand.’ Bill shook his head and whistled. ‘You Jews. You’re so clever. There’s nothing you’re not good at.’

  Sheldon didn’t take the bait. ‘Staying out of trouble doesn’t seem to be our thing.’

  ‘So tell me what you’re doing, Einstein.’

  Sheldon took off the eye loupe and placed it to the right of the work space. He pointed to the watch casing on the left.

  ‘That was Saul’s. They recovered it from his body. It came home with his personal effects.’

  ‘So you’re fixing it.’

  ‘No. I don’t want to fix it. I’m doing something else. Have you ever heard of elinvar?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a metal alloy that’s incredibly resistant to changes in temperature. The word is from the French elasticité invariable, which they shortened to elinvar. It’s used to make the balance spring on a mechanical watch like these two watches here.’

  ‘Valuable?’

  ‘No. It’s just iron, nickel, and chromium, but it makes a lot of stuff useful. The balance spring is a very delicate piece. It coils around and around and around. When you wind a watch, you’re coiling the balance spring. As it uncoils, the tension causes the watch parts to move and the whole thing to tick. The balance spring is the heart of the watch.

  ‘Thing is, there are only a few foundries actually producing the stuff. So most balance springs can be traced back to the same foundries. It’s like … the hearts all come from the same place. Like every watch has a soul, and is connected to every other one because they all came from the same home.

  ‘Saul’s watch was a modest Ollech & Wajs. Bought it from a magazine. Nothing you’d have ever heard of. Fancy people don’t own them. Working-class people do. Soldiers. And they get what they pay for. I like them. So I bought a new one recently, and I’m taking the balance spring from Saul’s old watch and I’m placing the old heart in the new one. This way, when I go about my day, and I check the time, and I make some decision or other, we’re connected. It makes me feel a little closer to him.’

  ‘That’s something, Donny.’

  ‘It’s what I’m doing, anyway.’

  ‘So how’s that any different from taking a battery from one watch and sticking it in another?’

  Sheldon rubbed his face. ‘And you wonder why you never get laid.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You really don’t, do you …?’

  ‘How much for the new one?’

  ‘About thirty-five bucks or so. They used to be around seventeen.’

  ‘So look, guess how much I paid for the gold watch.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Donny. Ask it like you mean it.’

  Sheldon opened his hands a bit and asked in the same bored tone of voice, ‘How much?’

  ‘That’s more like it. Eight hundred.’

  ‘Eight hundred what? Dollars? Jesus, Bill. For a watch? You’ll never be able to sell that!’

  ‘I’m not gonna sell it. It’s an investment. I’m gonna buy a dozen of these things, stick ’em in a vault, and in twenty years when we sell these shops those watches will be worth thousands! We’ll retire. Get a place on Long Island. Fill it with Playboy bunnies, and drink champagne.’

  The wooden desk chair creaked as Sheldon rocked on it.

  Sheldon asked, ‘What are we going to do with Playboy bunnies when we’re in our seventies? Admire the way they carry drinks?’

  ‘You mark my words, Donny. By that time, with the way science is rushing on today, they’ll make a pill or give us a shot or something that’ll build a rocket in every old man’s trousers. We just landed on the moon ten years ago. That’s a young man’s dream. By the time those same scientists are our age, they’ll set their sights closer to home. They won’t want to go where no man has gone before. They’ll want to go where every man has gone before. And you know why? Because it’s nice there.’

  ‘What about our wives?’

  ‘Our wives … ’ said Bill, taking the question seriously, ‘I won’t be married and … by then … Mabel will be glad you’ve found a hobby.’

  Sheldon leaned forward and opened his desk drawer. ‘You’re a visionary, Bill. I’ll grant you that. A horny, spendthrift visionary.’

  Sheldon took out a small box and handed it to Bill.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Bill.

  ‘I want you to store these at your place. Just stic
k them someplace. Don’t sell them.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Some medals they gave me, coming home from Korea.’

  Bill took the box without opening it.

  ‘Why do I have to take them?’

  ‘I don’t want my wife to find them. Or Rhea. She’s getting bigger, and running around asking questions.’

  ‘You’re the one who taught her to speak.’

  ‘If I’d known the consequences …’

  Bill looked around the antique shop. ‘You can’t hide them here? It’d be like hiding a tree in the forest.’

  ‘Do something useful.’

  ‘When do you want ’em back?’

  ‘Let’s see if I do.’

  ‘Is it really about the girls?’

  ‘In part. If you must know, I don’t want to be reminded that I let Saul see them. And as I’m doing this thing with the watches, I can’t handle them being so near me. Look, you don’t have to understand it. You just need to do it because I’m asking. How isn’t that enough?’

  ‘It’s enough.’

  ‘Good.’

  Bill took the box and hovered as Sheldon worked. After a few minutes, Sheldon looked at him.

  ‘What’s with you today?’

  ‘I’m dead.’

  ‘What did you do now?’

  ‘I’m dead. Actually dead. Don’t you remember? It happened in November during the elections. Drunk driver. You took it hard. I guess you’re still taking it hard. I’m your first death since Saul. That’s why you’re doing the watch thing.’

  ‘I’m doing it because of my boy.’

  ‘Yes. But my death is why you’re doing it now.’

  ‘So this isn’t just a memory, then.’

  ‘Sure it is.’

  ‘Not this part. I mean, that just stands to reason. I can’t be remembering a conversation with a ghost. I have to be making this up.’

  ‘Well, no. I guess it’s not a memory per se. It’s more like a vision or something. Neither of us is here. You’re at the movies with the little foreign kid you picked up in Iceland.’