Norwegian by Night (13 page)

Enver's family was surrounded.

His sister was raped. Her ears were cut off. One eye was gouged out. She was left to live like this. Enver was just a boy, hiding alone in a closet as he listened to the screams of his sister outside, too scared to try to stop it. He heard it all. As he entered the kitchen to see what had happened, he heard someone laughing. To this day, he is sure it was the Devil.

And now, years on, here they were, the killers. The torturers. The families of these people had been sipping water from flasks, and their women were serving them cold beer in the middle of the noon-day heat to soothe them. These murderers. These parasites. Acting as though they, too, knew human emotion. But they were empty. Soulless. Without remorse or faith.

Past the wounded boy, Enver broke into a run and ran into the front room of the farm house. The water from the tap was still running. Outside he heard the pop-pop-pop of low-calibre rifles and a few muffled yells. But inside it was so quiet.

They are hiding.

Even an empty house speaks more than this. You can hear an empty house breathe. This one was holding its breath.

He put down the rake and took a thick knife from the sink. He tried to control the beating of his heart.

‘Come out. Face your fate,' he called out.

He walked into the living room. The television was on, playing a Western film dubbed into Serbian. A black American cop with a gun was running down a city street after a robber. The city was New York. The robber was clutching a bright-red handbag and sprinting between a line of cars.

‘Come out!' Enver yelled. And perhaps his voice was scary enough, because there was a muffled cry in the closet.

If there is a gun, and should the bullet kill me now, so be it. At least I died honouring my dead.

Prepared for his last breath, he opened the closet door and looked into the darkness.

Outside, the killing was steady and without mercy. The iron circle enclosed around the farm, as the others had done to his own village. Snipers covered three directions, ensuring that no one escaped the shrinking perimeter.

It took time for his eyes to adjust to the dull grey and flecks of gold in the closet. But when they did, it was as though God himself had placed them there for him.

There was a woman in her early twenties, wearing a flower skirt and no shoes. And beside her, nestled into her sister's nape, was a soft little one. Maybe twelve years old.

It was clearly a gift. A chance to have his revenge but assert his moral superiority, all in the same simple gesture. There was such purity to the offering, its cosmic balance almost made him cry.

He addressed the older one.

‘Get out. Get on your hands and knees, and prepare yourself for me. Otherwise I will slit her throat and have you anyway.'

He remembers the feel of her hips in his hands, the movement of the flower skirt across her back, the whimpers of fear, pain, and pleasure confusing her. And when the moment came, he raised his face to the heavens and — unsure if his act was profane — shouted that God is truly great.

It was over. And yet these moments do not merely end. They do not pass unremarked and drift lightly into the hinterlands of memory to be eclipsed — like so much else — by the present and its seductions of imagined futures. Sometimes, they live. And they grow. And the past matures until it takes over the world and gives birth to a new reality that commands us and subjugates us, making us face who we are and all we have done. And so, when Enver learned that this girl, Senka, had become pregnant and had fled to the Nordic countries to hide her shame, he was unprepared for the feelings that came over him, and the bright light that shone down on it all — directly from above — casting no shadows in which to hide from this new world of his own making.

Now Enver was a father.

He opens his eyes in the car, and realises he has nodded off like some old man. He looks again, in vain, for a cigarette to place in the crook of his finger and the corner of his lips, where it belongs. He wipes his face with a tissue that leaves bits of white on his temple and that snags on his glasses.

The couple in the hotel sign some paper and stand to leave. Enver shakes his head in bemusement. The mailbox to the apartment where he and Senka had words yesterday showed that these two people lived together. If they have been together for so long as to share a mailbox — married, perhaps — how could they have so much to talk about? Does this man have no friends to confide in that he will chat with this girl for company?

For hours?

It is such a strange place, this Norway. Such strange people.

The CD in the car ends, and he turns on the radio. He checks his mobile phone for messages, but there are none. The radio begins to play old American rock and roll from the 1950s, and he leaves it on. He fiddles with the rear-view mirror and wonders when he'll have some time to eat today. He'd forgotten to eat breakfast, and now that he is tailing these two to find the old man — the one Kadri saw in the alley — he just can't see when he'll get something to eat.

Maybe an ice-cream. There might be a chance for an ice-cream. That would be delicious. Maybe strawberry. Or mint. They have good mint here. And a cone. Or a cup.

No, a cone.

There is a 7-Eleven in sight. They have ice-cream. Not especially good ice-cream, though. So perhaps not. But they do have the
Lollipop,
which is icy and fruity. That would be delicious. Assuming a short line, he could be in and out in … say … four minutes.

Which is too much time. Such is his fate, they are coming out of the hotel now, carrying two unusual pieces of hard-cased luggage. They are wearing leather jackets, and carrying helmets. They walk around the corner, still in sight, and mount a large off-road motorcycle that immediately makes Enver worry. It is very hard to tail people on motorcycles. Even when they don't know they are being followed, they can weave through cars in traffic, advance to the front of queues at red lights, and take sudden turns onto roads that disappear through forests.

The Norwegian places a call on his mobile phone, speaks for only a moment, and then puts it back in his jacket.

The white Mercedes will be conspicuous. No one drives a white Mercedes here. His friends bought it for him. Stupid. You leave it to a bunch of foreigners, and they inevitably bring their own ideas with them.

The correct answer to the problem would have been an Audi A6 estate car, in silver. That would have been the least suspicious car for him to use in Oslo. Schools of them swim through the city. He could have been in any of them, but he isn't. He is in a gangster's white Mercedes, with no air conditioning and one CD, following a BMW motorcycle now pulling away onto the road, heading east.

He starts the CD again. Despite himself, Enver smiles.

At least the hunt has begun.

Chapter 7

The BMW GS 1200 runs high on the road, and the boxer engine thumps gently. Rhea looks over Lars's right shoulder as the bike glides undramatically at sixty-five kilometres an hour past the new Opera, which is shimmering white and angular against the blue fjord, as Oslo's city centre disappears behind her.

She unzips the vents on her leather jacket to let in some more warm air.

River Rats of the 59th Parallel.

It wasn't madness. It could only mean one thing — that Sheldon was headed north and east along the Glomma river into the hinterland, where the cold-water summer house hid two rifles he'd learned about just yesterday.

Lars had made the case plainly back at the Continental.

‘If we're wrong, we can be back here in four or five hours to keep looking for him, though I'm not sure what good that would do, and we should probably stay there, given that we can't go home. If we're right, we get there before him, I can lock up the rifles more safely, and we can wait for him. Then, depending on what we think, we take him in, we take him to the hospital, or maybe we even take him to the police.'

Rhea had been wringing her riding gloves like dishtowels.

‘The guns aren't locked up?'

‘Well, yeah, sure, but he can get to them.'

‘How do you figure?'

‘He was a watchmaker,' Lars shrugged. ‘I'm sure he can pick a lock. Don't you think?'

‘That's not very reassuring.'

‘No.' Then Lars asked, ‘Was he really a sniper in Korea?'

Rhea shook her head. ‘I don't think so. My grandmother told me that he started saying that after my father was killed. She thought it was a kind of fantasy.'

‘He wanted revenge?'

‘No. He always blamed himself. There was no one to take revenge on.'

After that, they had mounted the bike and left.

It took more than two hours to get to Kongsvinger and the little town past it, out in the forest, by the Swedish border, way beyond the edge of Sheldon's known universe.

‘It all started when you came to live with us,' Rhea's grandmother had said. ‘First he lost one marble, then another. After a while he'd lost all his marbles. But he kept playing.' Mabel never said that Sheldon got worse because of Rhea. But she did say it started around the same time.

She was only two years old in July 1976 during the bicentennial celebrations when America rejoiced in itself. Wide-eyed and frightened, with nothing but a one-eared blue bunny, she was handed over to her grandparents. They were near strangers.

Her mother? Gone. One day she didn't come back. Saul had been dead for more than a year. She drank, she yelled, and then she disappeared when the flags started coming out. It was simply more than she could take.

Sheldon and Mabel had both tried supporting her during the pregnancy. Her own parents were disgusted with her, and she clearly needed help. Unfortunately — for her, for the child, for them all — she was beyond reach. They didn't know her well enough to know why. There was an anger inside her that, they were sure, preceded Saul and her predicament. Why he was attracted to her they could never say. Beyond the obvious curves and invitations, Mabel had speculated that Saul had wanted to disappear, and the only way to do that without being alone was to find a woman incapable of seeing him.

In the end, none of this mattered. Only the child did.

Rhea asked her grandfather where she she'd gone. She was a little older then. Five. They were in the shop, and she was holding a brass sextant that she'd found in a purple box. Sheldon had been working intensely on something small and complicated.

When she asked, he was momentarily diverted.

He'd put down whatever he was holding and said, ‘Your mother. Your mother, your mother, your mother. Your mother … grew wings one day and flew off to become the princess of the dragon people.'

Having answered, he put on his eyeglasses and started working again.

Rhea pulled on his leather apron.

‘What?'

‘Can we go find her?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Aren't you happy with us?'

Rhea did not know how to respond to this. She wasn't sure if it was related to her question or not.

Sheldon sadly accepted that Rhea wasn't going to let this go.

‘You got wings?' he asked.

Rhea frowned and tried to look behind herself, but couldn't.

‘Turn around.'

Rhea turned. Sheldon lifted the back of her dress, exposing her red panties and pale back, and then dropped it.

‘No wings. You can't go. Sorry. Maybe some other day.'

‘Will I grow wings someday?'

‘Look, I don't know. I don't know why people suddenly fly off. But they do. One day some grow wings, and then they're gone.' Seeing her expression, he added, ‘Don't worry. I won't grow wings. I'm a flightless bird.'

She remembered from when she was five. But 1976, when she arrived, was too far back. She was too young. She couldn't remember the flags everywhere. The streamers. The bands playing in the streets. The speeches by politicians. The newly minted coins and toy drums. It was two years after the near-impeachment of a president, one year after failure in a twenty-five-year war, in the midst of civil-rights turmoil, an emboldened Soviet Union, a declining economy, an oil crisis, a baffled intelligentsia, and a movie about a giant shark that ate people. America celebrated its existence as this little girl was transferred to a new life, set on a new course, and would forever live in the shadows of the dead and disappeared.

Under fireworks and a combat-jet escort, Rhea was dropped off by social services with her grandparents — thumb in mouth, bunny in tow — in a parking lot by a Sears department store, way past her bedtime. She'd been alone for two days by the time the neighbours realised that her crying was not being soothed by anyone, and they placed a call.

Mabel put her in the back seat of the borrowed Chevy wagon, and pulled the thick black seat belt across her with a click. Rhea watched the explosions in the sky, and the clouds turn green, then red, then orange.