Norwegian by Night

The sun will not set until after ten o’clock. Children are out everywhere, and people have come home early from work to enjoy the stretch of summer that lies before them as the reward for the darkness of the winter months. Parents order open-faced sandwiches, and feed little bits to their kids as fathers return plastic baby bottles to expensive prams with exotic names.

Quinny. Stokke. Bugaboo. Peg Perego. Maxi-Cosi.

This life? She should already know that this life is now the product of so many deaths. Mario. Bill. Rhea’s grandmother, Mabel, who died just eight months ago, prompting Sheldon’s move here.

There is no calculating the trajectory caused by Saul’s death.

Mabel’s funeral was held in New York, though originally she and Sheldon came from different parts of the country. He was born in New England and she in Chicago. Eventually, both settled into New York as visitors, then residents, and possibly, after many years, as New Yorkers.

After the funeral service and reception, Sheldon went alone to a coffee shop in Gramercy close to their home. It was mid-afternoon. The lunch hour was over. The mourners had dispersed. Sheldon should have been sitting shiva for seven days to honour the death of his wife and allow his community to care for him, and feed him, and keep him company, as was custom. Instead he sat at the 71 Irving Place Coffee and Tea Bar near 19th Street, eating a blueberry muffin and sipping black coffee. Rhea had flown in for the service without Lars, and noticed his escape from the reception. She found him a few blocks away, and took the seat across from him.

She was wearing a fine black suit, and her hair was down to her shoulders. She was thirty-two years old, and had a determined look on her face. Sheldon misread its cause, thinking she was going to reprimand him for skipping out on shiva. When she spoke her mind, he nearly spit a blueberry across the table.

‘Come with us to Norway,’ she said.

‘Get stuffed,’ said Sheldon.

‘I’m serious.’

‘Me, too.’

‘The area is called Frogner. It’s wonderful. The building has a separate entrance to the basement apartment. You’d have complete autonomy. We’re not in it yet, but we will be by winter.’

‘You should rent it to trolls. They have trolls there, right? Or is that Iceland?’

‘We don’t want to rent it out. It feels weird knowing strange people are under your feet all the time.’

‘That’s because you don’t have kids. You get used to that feeling.’

‘I think you should come. What’s here for you?’

‘Other than the blueberry muffins?’

‘For example.’

‘One wonders how much more there needs to be at my age.’

‘Don’t dismiss this.’

‘What am I going to do there? I’m an American. I’m a Jew. I’m eighty-two. I’m a retired widower. A Marine. A watch repairman. It takes me an hour to pee. Is there a club there I’m unaware of?’

‘I don’t want you to die alone.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Rhea.’

‘I’m pregnant. It’s very early, but it’s true.’

At this, on this day of days, Sheldon took her hand and touched it to his lips, closed his eyes, and tried to feel a new life in her pulse.

Rhea and Lars had been living in Oslo for almost a year by the time Mabel died and Sheldon decided to go. Lars had a good job designing video games, and she was settling into life as an architect. Her degree from Cooper Union in New York was already coming in handy, and, as the population of Oslo pushed ever-outwards and into mountain cabins, she decided to stay.

Lars — being Lars — was overjoyed and encouraging and optimistic about her ability to adapt and join the pod. Norwegians, true to their nature, prefer to spawn in their native waters. Consequently Oslo is peopled by Norwegians married to a shadow population of displaced souls who all carry the look of tourists being led like children through the House of Wax.

With his parent’s help, Lars had bought a nice split-level three-bedroom in Toyen back in 1992 that was now worth almost three-and-a-half million kroner. This was rather a lot for the part of town that Sheldon associated with the Bronx. Together they’d saved up five hundred thousand in cash, and with the necessary mortgage — which was a stretch, but not a terrible stretch — they were looking at a three-bedroom place in Frogner, which, to Sheldon, was the local Central Park West. It was a slightly stuffy area, but Lars and Rhea were growing tired of waiting for Toyen to gentrify, and the influx of immigrants was moving the money out to other areas and changing the character of the schools. There was a growing population from Pakistan and the Balkans. Somalis had moved into the local park for khat-chewing sessions, the local council in their wisdom had moved a methadone treatment facility into the shopping centre across the road that attracted heroin addicts, and all the while Rhea and Lars tried to explain that the area had ‘character’. But Sheldon only saw menace.

Luckily, though, there were no North Koreans, those slanty-eyed little bastards. And if there were any, they would stand out. Hiding a North Korean in Norway is hard. Hiding one in New York is like hiding a tree in a forest. They’re on every street corner, selling flowers and running grocery stores — their little beady eyes glaring at you as you walk down the street, sending messages back to Pyongyang by telegraph, letting them know your whereabouts.

They’d been tracking him since 1951 — he was sure of it. You don’t kill twelve men named Kim from the top of a seawall at Inchon and think they’re going to forgive and forget. Not the Koreans. They have Chinese patience, but an Italian-style vendetta streak. And they blend. Oh! It took Sheldon years to learn how to spot them, feel their presence, evade them, deceive them.

Not here, though. Here they stood out in a crowd. Each evil-hearted one of them. Each brainwashed manic nutter who was under surveillance from the next brainwashed manic nutter, in case the first one started to suffer from freethinking.

‘I have news for you bastards!’ he wants to yell to them. ‘You started the war! And when you learn this, you will owe me a serious apology.’

But Sheldon, even now, believes the deceived are not responsible for their actions.

Mabel never understood his aversion to Koreans. She said he was slipping, that his doctor also suspected it, and that it was time he listened to reason and accepted that he’d never been a romanticised sniper, but rather a pedestrian clerk in Pusan, and that the North Koreans were not following him. He’d never shot anybody. Never fired a gun in anger.

She was going on about this only a few months before she died.

‘You’re going senile, Donny.’

‘Am not.’

‘You’re changing. I see it.’

‘You’re sick, Mabel. How isn’t that going to affect me? Besides, you’ve been saying this since 1976. And maybe I’m not changing. Maybe it’s you. You’re just growing immune to my charms.’

‘It’s not an accusation. They call it dementia now. You’re over eighty years old. Rhea told me that at eighty- five, over 20 per cent of us get Alzheimer’s. It’s something we need to discuss.’

‘Is not!’

‘You need to eat more fish.’

‘Do not!’

In retrospect, this was a rather childish response, but it was also a tried-and-tested rebuttal.

His memories were just becoming more vivid with age. Time was folding in a new way. Without a future, the mind just turned back in on itself. That’s not dementia. One might even say it’s the only rational response to the inevitable.