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
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 became 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.
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.
Jack’s eagerness to get a look at Herbert Hoffmann was less professional. Ole had told the boy that Hoffmann had a big bird tattooed on his ass—the entire left cheek of his bum was a peacock with its fan in full- feather display! And Jack’s curiosity about Tattoo Peter had less to do with his reputation as a tattoo artist than the tantalizing fact that he had one leg.
But if seeing the German’s Herbert Hoffmanns made Alice wish she were in Hamburg, she was further disappointed that she was a whole week in Oslo before she got to tattoo a first-timer—“virgins,” Alice called them. Perhaps no one in Norway was seeking a pilgrim experience—at least not of that kind, or not at the Bristol.
In their continuing gluttony at breakfast, which stood in flagrant contrast to their near-starvation tactics at lunch and dinner, Jack learned to prefer gravlaks to smoked salmon. The cloudberries, which were offered with repeated zeal to children at every meal, turned out to be quite good; and while it was impossible to avoid the reindeer in one form or another, Jack managed to resist eating the poor creature’s tongue. But despite limiting their lunches and dinners to appetizers and desserts, the cost of their food was greater than the amount Alice was earning. And no one in Oslo wanted to talk to them about William. In Norway, the alleged object of William’s desire (and his subsequent ruin) was a girl too young to be comfortably discussed—even among adults.
From the front entrance of the Bristol, the view of the Oslo Cathedral is slightly uphill. From that perspective, the first dark morning they saw it, the Domkirke appeared to rise out of the middle of the road at the end of the long street marked by trolley tracks. But they never took the streetcar; the cathedral was within easy walking distance.
“I’ll bet that’s the one,” Alice said.
“Why?” Jack asked.
“I just bet it is.”
The Domkirke looked important enough to have an old organ with one hundred and two stops. A German- made Walcker, the organ had been rebuilt in 1883 and again in 1930. The exterior dated back to 1720. It had been painted gray in 1950—the original was green—and its grayness enhanced what was monumental and somber about the Walcker’s old baroque facade.
The Oslo Cathedral was brick, the dome that greenish color of turned copper, and the tower clock was large and imposing. The clock’s face suggested an elevated self-seriousness, beyond Lutheran, as if the building’s purpose lay more in the enshrinement of sacred relics than in the usual business of a house of worship.
Consistent with this impression was Jack and Alice’s first encounter with the church’s interior. There were no candles; the cathedral was illuminated by electric lights. Huge chandeliers were hung from the ceilings; old- fashioned bracket lamps cast a fake candlelight on the walls. The altar, which unmiraculously combined the Lord’s Last Supper with His Crucifixion, was as festooned with bric-a-brac as an antiques shop. The short, squat staircase leading to the pulpit was ornate, with wooden wreaths painted gold. Overhanging the pulpit, as if the firmament itself were about to fall down, was a floating island of angels—some of them playing harps.
No one was playing the organ; not a soul was praying in a pew, either. Leaning on her mop as if it were a cane, only a cleaning woman was there to greet them—and she did so warily. As Alice would later explain to Jack, no one even marginally associated with the Domkirke wished to be reminded of William. Jack was a reminder.
When the cleaning woman saw the boy, she froze. She drew in her breath and stiffened her arms, the mop held in both hands in front of her; it was as if her mop were the Holy Cross, and, clinging to it for protection, she hoped to fend Jack off.
“Is the organist here?” Alice asked.
“
“How many are there?” Alice replied.
Scarcely daring to take her eyes off Jack, the cleaning woman told Alice that a Mr. Rolf Karlsen was the organist in the Domkirke. He was “away.” The word
“Mr. Karlsen is a big man,” the cleaning woman was saying, although it wasn’t clear if
