Derek Miller - Norwegian by Night

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.’

‘So what about the first two?’

‘My motivation? What’s my motivation?’

‘They’ll be shooting at you.’

‘Then what’s their motivation?’

‘You’ll be shooting at them.’

‘What if I don’t shoot at them?’

‘They’ll still be shooting at you because other people will be shooting at them, and they won’t differentiate. And you’ll want them to stop, so you’ll shoot back.’

‘What if I ask them not to?’

‘They’re too far away, and they speak Korean.’

‘So I need to get closer and have a translator?’

‘Right. But you can’t.’

‘Because they’re shooting at me.’

‘That’s the problem.’

‘But that’s absurd!’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘It can’t be true!’

‘Most things are both true and absurd.’

‘That’s also absurd.’

‘And yet…?’

‘It may also be true. Jesus, Donny. I’m going to be up all night.’

Then Donny whispered, ‘If you don’t go to bed, there will be no tomorrow. And it’ll be all your fault.’

The monster’s feet stop outside the door. What were stomping, pounding footfalls of a pursuer are now gentle shuffles. Whoever is chasing them is now spinning around, looking for them as though they might be hiding in a shadow or under a ray of light. Outside, a car door slams. Then another slams. There is fast talking in Serbian, or Albanian, or whatever it is. The conversation is easy to imagine.

‘Where did they go?’

‘I thought they were with you?’

‘They must have come out the front door.’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

And then, because they are amateurs, because they are fools, they turn on each other and away from the task at hand.

‘That’s because you were smoking and talking about that slut again.’

‘It was your job to bring them out. I’m just waiting.’

And so on.

One sound is all it would take to give them away. One squeal of glee from the hiding child who thinks it is all a game, or a whine because of his immobility. Or simply a cry of fear — something so human as a cry of fear.

Sheldon looks at him. The boy’s back is against the door like his own, and his knees are up. He has wrapped his arms around them and is looking down at the floor in a gesture of defeat and isolation. Sheldon understands at once that he is assuming a familiar position. He will be silent. It has been a learned skill in his world of terror.