Norwegian by Night

Hours later, at two in the afternoon, he is alone in the apartment. His earlier insistence that Rhea and Lars go out had become quite different in tone when it was repeated later. He’d made it clear to them that he needed solitude, and so they went.

Dressed in jeans, a white button-down shirt, and a pair of workman’s boots, he has recovered his composure and is comfortably stretched on the sofa with a book by Danielle Steele when the shouting starts again.

He has heard domestic squabbles before — the rounds of yelling, the escalation, the occasional banging, and even the beatings and sobs. But this is different. The cadence of the argument is wrong. There is no turn-taking between angry participants. The man had started screaming and then kept it up. The woman, this time, hasn’t made a sound.

She must be in there, Sheldon thinks.

It doesn’t have the pauses of a phone conversation. The diatribe is too linear, too intimate. The hollering voice is too present.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest that Sheldon can’t understand a word, because the message is clear. He has had enough experience with humanity, with its range of rage, to know what is happening. There is cruelty and viciousness in that voice. It is more than a squabble. It is a battle.

Then there is a loud bang.

Sheldon puts the book down and sits upright on the sofa. He is attentive, his brows furrowed.

No, not a gunshot. It wasn’t sharp enough. He knows gunshots from his life and from his dreams. It was probably a door slamming. And then he hears approaching footsteps that are quick and even. The woman, perhaps. A heavy woman, or one wearing boots, or carrying something heavy. She is coming down the stairs. First the one flight, then a brief pause on the landing, then the other.

It takes her the same time to manoeuvre down the staircase as it does Sheldon to get to the front door and spy her through the peephole.

And there she is. The source, or focus, or even the cause of it all. Through the fisheye lens, Sheldon sees a young woman around thirty years old standing directly in front of his door. She is close enough that he can only see her from the waist up, but it is enough to place her. She wears a dark T-shirt under a cheap brown-leather jacket. She has gaudy costume jewellery, and her hair is styled with some thick mousse or gel that prevents it from responding to the normal forces of gravity.

Everything about her says Balkans. Sheldon can only guess her life, and yet everything about it seems scripted, aside from her incongruous presence in Oslo. But that is easily explained by asylum practices. Maybe she was Serb or Kosovar or Albanian. Or maybe Romanian. Who knows?

His first feeling is one of pity. Not for the person she is, but for the circumstances she faces.

The feeling lasts until a memory transforms it.

They did this with us, too, he thinks, looking through the peephole. And then the pity vanishes and is replaced by the indignation that lives just beneath the surface of his daily routines and quick retorts.

The Europeans. Almost all of them, at one time or another. They looked out their peepholes — their little fishy eyes peeping out through bulging lenses, watching someone else’s flight — as their neighbours clutched their children to their chests while armed thugs chased them through buildings as though humanity itself was being exterminated. Behind the glass some felt afraid, others pitiful, others murderous and delighted.

All were safe because of what they were not. They were not, for example, Jews.

The woman spins around. Looking for something.

What? What is she looking for?

The fight has taken place only one floor above him. The monster upstairs could be down in seconds. Why is she delaying? Why is she hesitant? What is taking so long?

There is rummaging upstairs. The monster is pushing and heaving and searching for something. He is moving walls and mountains. He is peeling the very darkness from the light to find it. At any moment he will stop and turn on her and demand it.

Sheldon mutters under his breath. ‘Run, you fool. Get out, go to the police, and don’t look back. He’s going to kill you.’

And then the bang echoes from upstairs. Same as before. It is the door hitting the wall behind it.

Aloud, Sheldon says, ‘Run, you dummy. Why are you just standing there?’

On a hunch, Sheldon turns his head and looks out the front window. And there is the answer. A white Mercedes is parked outside. Inside, men in cheap leather jackets are smoking cigarettes, barring her escape.

And that seals it.

Quietly, slowly, but without hesitation, Sheldon opens the door.

What he sees is not what he expected.

The woman is clutching an ugly pink box just big enough to hold an adult pair of shoes. And she is not alone. Pressed against her belly is a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old. He is clearly terrified. He is dressed in little blue wellington boots with yellow Paddington Bears painted on the sides by hand. Tucked inside carefully are beige corduroy trousers. On top, he is wrapped in a green jacket of waxed cotton.

The footsteps from up above pound the floors. A voice hollers a name. Vera, maybe? Laura? Clara? Two syllables, anyway. Barked out. Coughed up.

Sheldon ushers them in with his finger pressed against his lips.

Vera looks up the stairs, then out the door. She does not look at Sheldon. She does not wonder about his intentions or give him a chance to reconsider by looking into his eyes for clarity. She pushes the silent boy in front of herself and into the flat.

Sheldon closes the door very, very quietly. The woman with her wide Slavic face looks at him in conspiratorial terror. They all squat down with their backs against the door, waiting for the monster to pass.

Again he raises his finger to his lips. ‘Shhh,’ he says.

No need to look out the peephole now. He is no longer one of the people he abhorred. Sitting next to his neighbours, he wants to stand in the middle of a soccer field with a bull horn, surrounded by Europe’s oldest generation and yell, ‘Was that so fucking hard?’

But outside he is silent. Disciplined. Calm. An old soldier.

‘When you sneak up on a man to kill him with a knife,’ his staff sergeant explained sixty years ago, ‘don’t stare at him. People know when you’re staring at the backs of their heads. I don’t know how, I don’t know why. Just don’t look at their heads. Look at the feet, approach, get the knife in. Head forward, not back. Never let him know you’re there. If you want him dead, make him dead. Don’t negotiate it with him. He’s likely to disagree.’

Sheldon never had trouble with this end of things. Never pondered the imponderables, questioned his mission, doubted his function. Before he got lost and ended up on the HMAS Bataan, he was shaken awake one night by Mario de Luca. Mario was from San Francisco. His parents had emigrated from Tuscany with the intention of buying wine land north of San Francisco, but somehow his father never got out of the city, and Mario was drafted. Where Donny had intense blue eyes and sandy blond hair, Mario was dark like a Sicilian fisherman. And he talked like he’d been injected with some kind of truth serum.

‘Donny? Donny, you up?’

Donny didn’t answer.

‘Donny. Donny, you up?’

This went on for minutes.

‘Donny. Donny, you up?’

‘It will not help my cause by answering you,’ he’d said.

‘Donny, I don’t get this invasion. I don’t get this war. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. What are we doing here?’

Donny was dressed in flannel pyjamas that were not government-issue. He replied, ‘You get out of the boat. You shoot Koreans. You get back in the boat. What confuses you?’

‘The middle part,’ Mario explained. ‘Although, now that I think about it, the first part, too.’

‘What about the third part?’

‘No, that part is like crystal.’