Norwegian by Night

They debated jazz and car engines. They fought over cigarettes. They learned to swear and how to insult each other’s ethnic and religious groups, and invented a highly specialised vocabulary to describe character types.

Snarf: A boy who sniffs girls’ bicycle seats.

Twerp: One who inserts false teeth between the cheeks of his arse.

They practised killing people in preparation for the moment when such knowledge would prove handy.

For the sniper, the index finger is an instrument of death. But with the Leica IIIc, he was being asked by his buddy to hold steady and use his training to find a composition in the image he saw, not a target. To use his finger to make that composition immortal, not to destroy it. To bring a moment into being, not to force its end.

Holding that camera in his hands, hours after killing men over a dawn sea, Donny felt transformed.

The sense of wonder, of humility, and of simple pleasure in setting the lens to take a photo was all immediate. Mario had once talked to him about the transubstantiation in the church, when the wafer and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Until holding the camera in his hands, he had always mocked Mario for the absurdity of it. Now, looking down the barrel of the lens, he believed such a thing might be possible.

He smiled at Mario. ‘Let’s make it a good one,’ he shouted.

There, in the upper-left corner, in what would eventually be a black-and-white photograph, was the lighthouse. Mario was slightly down to the right. The shore and the dark sea were to the left, and to the extreme right were the dunes, extending back towards the rise that would eventually lead to Palmi-do. Everything seemed set, except that Mario’s feet were cut off, and the composition didn’t look quite right.

‘Take a few steps back,’ Donny said. ‘I don’t want your feet cut off.’

Mario gave this no thought. He didn’t pause, didn’t push back against Sheldon’s presumption that he should be the one to move. Why should he? Mario was a soft-hearted and kind person who didn’t see his friendship with Donny as a competition for dominance. He was an Italian boy on a distant shore at a victorious battle with few dead, and here was his lost friend holding his undamaged and favourite camera ready to commemorate the moment.

For sixty years, Sheldon will ask himself a question. He will ask it as he repairs watches, and on his near- nightly rides with the Riverines after Saul’s death. He will ask it when Mabel leaves the restaurant tables for the powder room, and he fiddles with his cutlery. It is a question he will not be able to answer until just this moment, here in Norway, as once-safely-cloistered memories assert themselves and change their character. As they emerge from secret places in a hall closet and demand to be disclosed. All of it reminding him that, soon enough, he will have to face it all.

The question he will ask himself is why he told Mario to step backwards, rather than doing it himself.

Someone had to move. That much was clear. The lens on the Leica didn’t zoom at the press of a button. In 1950, there were no telephoto lenses. He couldn’t twist his wrist and bring the world closer or send it farther way. Back then, his relationship to the world was fixed. It was seen as it was through a 50mm lens. Back then, we captured what we experienced. We were one small step closer to being in the present than we are today.

That someone, however, did not necessarily have to be Mario. Donny himself could have stepped backwards a few yards. If he had been the one to move, Mario might have been perfectly framed. And if Mario had stepped backwards, the result would have been the same.

So why did he ask Mario to move, rather than do it himself?

I was sticky and uncomfortable and edgy, and had a wound in my leg, and I didn’t want to go anywhere. This was one answer. He tried using it for years, but it lacked conviction. I was always somehow the elder with Mario. Always playing the wise one. Maybe it was part of our game that he should move and I shouldn’t, that he should obey my instructions, rather than me taking the steps for him.

All of this was true. But none of it mattered. It may have made the request more natural, but this wasn’t the source of the impulse. Donny had nothing to prove with Mario.

The lighthouse at Palmi-do was small and stubby and white, offset against the grey and overcast sky. It was calm and unmoving against the bustle of foreigners creating a new world around it. It was steadfast in a world of change. It soothed him. It was… beautiful.

He did not want to move. He did not want anything to ever change.

The beauty of that eternal moment, passing through Donny, killed Mario.

No one knows what Mario stepped on. It was probably unexploded ordnance. Whatever it was, it only needed his gentle footfall to upset it.

The explosion blew Mario into the air. Whether it was the coincidence of the moment or the startling impact of the shock wave, he’ll never know. But, whatever the cause, it was just enough for Donny’s finger to depress the shutter at the very moment of the explosion, catching something horrible on film and forever.

In 1955, he opened Mario’s camera, found the film, and developed it. This was the year that Sheldon set off around the world with the Leica. There was only one photograph on the roll. It was not a photograph he ever published. He never showed it to Mabel. He never even hinted at its existence, or explained the power it had over him — how it set him off to wander through Europe, to visit the capitals and camps.

Rhea does not know it, but the photo is here in Norway. It is in a thick, old manila envelope at the top of his closet, along with forty or fifty others that no one has ever seen. Most are photos of Saul as a baby, a toddler, and pre-schooler. Some are of Mabel.

One, beneath all the others, shows his old friend Mario being pushed off the earth, his two legs already disconnected from his body, a white lighthouse in the corner, and a smile still on his face.

Chapter 16

‘Oh crap,’ says Sheldon.

In the left rear-view mirror of the tractor is the least intimidating police car that Sheldon has ever seen. It is a white Volvo station wagon with single red-and-blue stripes down the sides. It exudes no sense of doom. It commands as much respect as a high school hall monitor would.

And yet, inside it is a cop with a radio.

Sheldon considers his options. He cannot outrun the police officer. He cannot hide. Fighting is both impossible and completely inappropriate.

The eternal wisdom of the United States Marine Corps immediately returns to him in the voice of his staff sergeant.

When you have only one option, you have yourself a plan!

The nemesis emerging from the police car is a slightly overweight gentleman in his late fifties with a pleasant face and a relaxed composure. He does not carry a weapon, and does not look especially bothered.

Sheldon hears the man say something polite to Paul, but from this angle it isn’t possible to see Paul or hear his response. Most likely, he has just sunk further into the raft without replying.

Sheldon takes a breath and gets himself into character as the officer comes up to the side of the tractor.

The policeman speaks Norwegian.

Sheldon does not.

Nor, however, does he opt for English.

God ettermiddag, says the officer politely.

Gutn tog! replies Sheldon enthusiastically in Yiddish.

Er di fra Tyskland? asks the officer.

Jo! Dorem-mizrachdik, says Sheldon, hoping that this still means ‘south-east’ as it did about fifty years ago when he last used the term, while also assuming that ‘Tyskland’ means Germany in Norwegian.

Vil du snakke Engelsk? asks the officer, who apparently does not speak German, or the language that Sheldon is pretending is German.

‘I speak little English,’ says Sheldon — trying not to sound too much like either Wernher von Braun or Henry Kissinger.