Information System that maps the whereabouts of all police officers and vehicles in the city, and past the coffee machine that has been broken for so long that someone (probably Stina), has placed flowers in the pot. The coffee pot is now regularly watered.
Police room four has a round wooden table and five office chairs. There is no two-way mirror, and the chairs do not screech across the floor during an interrogation. Instead, there is a box of tissues and a few bottles of Farris water. There is a window on the far wall that is locked, but there are no bars or grates covering the glass. Opposite the window on the far wall is a public-awareness poster from the Norwegian Reindeer Police Service with a woman on a snowmobile speaking with two Sami herders. Sigrid secretly imagines that the officer is asking directions.
At the table sit a man and a woman. The man is Norwegian, and the woman is not. He is tall and fair, with a boyish expression. She has black hair and unusually deep blue eyes. Both look grave.
They both look up as Sigrid enters the room and Petter follows.
The two police officers sit at the table. In English, Petter says, ‘This is Chief Inspector Odegard.’
Rhea speaks in English. She says, ‘They say there’s a dead woman in my apartment.’
‘Ya, ya,’ says Sigrid. ‘We’re curious about that, too.’
‘Does this sort of thing happen often around here?’
‘No. Not so much.’
‘You don’t seem very surprised by it,’ says Rhea.
‘Ah, well, not much point in that now, is there. So, Petter told you about it. Did you know her?’
Lars and Rhea both nod.
Sigrid notes how the woman does all the talking.
‘She lived upstairs from us with her son. She didn’t talk much. I think she’s from Eastern Europe somewhere. She used to fight with a man a lot.’
‘What man?’
‘I don’t know. But he was there a lot recently. They spoke the same language. He was very violent.’
Sigrid takes notes, and Petter does as well. The conversation is also being recorded.
‘What was she doing in your apartment?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘The door was kicked in,’ says Petter.
‘See, that’s interesting,’ says Sigrid. ‘A small woman like that. Probably didn’t do it herself, right?’
Petter shakes his head. ‘A man’s large boot print is all over the door.’
‘So she was in your apartment when it was locked. Did she have a key?’
‘No,’ says Rhea.
‘Do you usually lock the door when you leave?’
‘Yes, but my grandfather was there. Sheldon Horowitz.’
‘Ya,’ Sigrid says. ‘Do you want to tell me about that?’
And so Rhea speaks and does tell her something she has never heard before. She speaks about her grandfather who is missing. She talks about New York City in the 1930s when Sheldon was a boy. She mentions E. B. White’s memoir of the city. About the coming war and Sheldon’s youth watching the older boys go off to fight the Nazis, and how he stayed behind because he was still a boy. How many of the older ones never came back. She speaks of Mabel and their courtship. How he enlisted in the Marines and worked as a clerk in Pusan, though he’s started to say something different these days.
How Sheldon and Mabel had a son, Saul, and how Saul spent countless hours in Sheldon’s Antique and Watch Repair Shop, learning how to take everything built from 1810 to 1940 apart with a screwdriver, and then run like hell.
She talks about how her father, Saul, died in Vietnam. How all of Sheldon’s friends died of old age, how Mabel died, how the pressure of this world and its spiritual weight was weighing him down, and how this move to the northern frontier of Western civilisation was her own failed effort to share a final moment before the end came. She explains his fears. Now the unimaginable has happened in her home, and her grandfather is missing.
Rhea has spoken carefully and with love. She has spoken with some terror of what she is experiencing. She has spoken in waves of insight and humanity.
She has spoken for a long time. When she is finished, she has a question for Sigrid.
‘So, do you understand?’
Sigrid has indeed been listening carefully. So she answers with precision.
‘An eighty-two-year-old demented American sniper is allegedly being pursued by Korean assassins across Norway after fleeing a murder scene. Either before or after.’
Rhea furrows her eyebrows. ‘I don’t think I’d phrase it quite like that,’ she says.
‘What did I miss?’ Sigrid asks, looking at her notes.
‘Well… he’s Jewish.’
Sigrid nods and makes an additional note. Then she looks up.
‘Well…’ says Rhea, ‘that part’s important. It sort of frames everything else. It’s not just a fact. It’s not like he’s wearing a blue coat and not a brown one. It matters.’
‘How so?’
‘Well,’ says Rhea again, trying to find words to express the essence of the thing. ‘It means, well… he’s Jewish. He’s not your normal whacko. You know. He’s Jewish. His name is Sheldon Horowitz. Can’t you hear it? It’s like his whole history is built right into his name. He’s a missing old man in a foreign country. He has dementia. He must have seen something. Something happened.’
Nothing Rhea has said makes any sense to Sigrid, who has grown puzzled by what is a new and clearly sensitive topic. She knows little about Jews. There are only a thousand Jews in all of Norway. His name just sounds foreign.
All the same, Sigrid appreciates that Rhea is trying to impart something she considers so obvious as to not need explanation. So in trying to explain it for the first time she is frustrated and halting. Though she still needs to discuss it with Petter, she can sense already why this woman and her husband are not suspects.
Rhea, sitting across from the policewoman, sees on her face the very foreignness of the Jewish experience to Norway, and she now feels a tremendous guilt in bringing her grandfather here.
It wasn’t as though Sheldon hadn’t attacked the issue head-on one morning during a breakfast rant while gesturing with his mug… making Norwegian Jewish history forever conjoined to images of airbrushed
Not that this wouldn’t have delighted Sheldon, had he known.
‘A thousand Jews!’ Sheldon had said. ‘I read it in the Lonely Planet guidebook! Five million people, and one thousand Jews. The Norwegians do not know what a Jew is. They only think they know what a Jew is
What Sheldon said next upset her because he said it in front of Lars, who is married to a Jewish woman and who has a strong affection for Sheldon. When Lars looked at her afterwards she just looked at the floor.
‘Jews, the Norwegians have been taught, are not greedy, duplicitous, weak, pale, sneaky, plotting, impotent, salacious, or mendacious. They do not have crooked noses, bony fingers, or evil appetites. They are not scheming, evolutionarily inferior to the Nordic blond, or working on secret plots to overthrow the world,’ said Sheldon. ‘They have been taught this so they can grow up to be nice liberals with their ears flushed of bad old Nazi propaganda. The thing is, this sort of description doesn’t exactly make you want to rush out and date one, does it?
‘So, despite being here — or somewhere, anyway — for three thousand years, all they think of when they hear the word “Jew” is Holocaust, and the Israeli–Palestinian fiasco. The problem is, nowhere in that twisted and limited story is there a place for Sheldon Horowitz or a brooding little siren like you. Nowhere is there three thousand years of history, philosophy, theatre, art, craftsmanship, scholarship, writing, pontificating, fornicating, or extremely well-timed and perfected humour, goddamn it!
‘Don’t worry,’ he added for Lars. ‘That’s what everyone else in Europe has been told, too.’
And this is what he said next, for himself. Mug lowered to the table:
