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