Derek Miller - Norwegian by Night

And then the talking, the bickering, ends. The doors to the Mercedes open and close again, and the powerful engine starts. In a few moments, the car pulls off.

Sheldon sighs. He rubs his hands all over his face to stimulate some blood flow, and then forcefully massages his scalp. He has always imagined his brain like the liquid iron core of the earth — grey and heavy, constantly in motion, producing its own gravity, and carefully balanced on his neck’s vertebrae like the earth is balanced on the backs of turtles in the cosmos.

Events like this tend to cause the iron flow to slow or even reverse, which can result in ice ages. A little massage usually takes care of the grey matter, though.

This time he is cold all over.

He looks up at his companions, who are still foetal on his floor. The woman looks more pasty, more podgy, than she was when viewed through the fisheye lens. The thin leather jacket is thinner. The trampy shirt is trampier. It all speaks to lower-class Balkan immigrant. He never saw the man outside the door. He could only imagine him being fat and sweating, wearing a Chinese-made Adidas tracksuit with white stripes down the arms and legs. His equally foul-breathed colleagues are probably in dark open shirts under poorly fitting, fake designer jackets, the texture of vinyl.

It is all so hopelessly predictable. Everything except the painted Paddington Bears on the boy’s bright-blue wellingtons. These have been painted by someone with love and imagination. Sheldon is, at this moment, inexplicably prepared to credit them to the pasty hooker on his floor.

The car has moved off, so Sheldon says to the boy, ‘Those are nice boots.’

The boy looks up from the crook of his arm. He does not understand. Sheldon can’t be sure if it’s the comment itself that he doesn’t understand, the timing of the comment, or else the language. There is no good reason, after all, to think he speaks English, except that everyone these days speaks English.

I mean, really. Why speak anything else? Stubbornness. That’s why.

It also occurs to him that perhaps it is the soothing and encouraging male voice that is so rare and so unfamiliar. He lives in a world of violent men, like so many boys do. With this thought, he can’t help but try again.

‘Nice bears,’ says Sheldon, pointing at the bears and giving the thumbs up.

The boy looks down at the boots and turns one leg inward to get a look at the boots for himself. He does not know what Sheldon is saying, but he does know what he’s talking about. He looks back at Sheldon without a smile, and then places his face back into the crook of his arm.

The woman stands up during Sheldon’s gesture to the boy and is now talking. She is speaking quickly. The tone is grateful and seemingly apologetic, which seems to follow, given the circumstances. The words themselves are gibberish but, luckily, Sheldon speaks English, which is universally understood.

‘You’re welcome. Yes. Yes — yes. Look, I’m old, so take my advice. Leave your husband. He’s a Nazi.’

Her babbling continues. Even looking at her is exasperating. She has the accent of a Russian prostitute. The same nasal confidence. The same fluid slur of words. Not a single moment taken to collect her thoughts or search for a phrase. Only the educated stop to look for words — having enough to occasionally misplace them.

Sheldon labours to his feet and brushes off his trousers. He holds up his hands. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I’m not even sure I care. Just go to the police and get your boy a milkshake.’

She does not slow down.

‘Milkshake,’ says Sheldon. ‘Police.’

Sheldon decides her name is Vera. Sheldon watches Vera gesture towards the boy and nod. She points and nods. She nods and points. She puts her hands together in a praying gesture. She crosses herself, which makes Sheldon lift his eyebrows for the first time.

‘In that case, why not just stay, have a cup of tea, and wait this out for an hour? Waiting is wise. He might come back. You don’t want to go back to the apartment. Believe me.’

He thinks for a moment. There is a word they used in the Ukrainian part of Brooklyn. Yes. ‘ Chai. ’ It is Russian for tea. He makes sipping sounds and says it again. To be absolutely certain he is communicating, he sticks out his pinkie finger and makes yummy slurping sounds.

‘Tea. Nazi. Milkshake. Police. Are we clear?’

Vera does not respond to Sheldon’s pantomime. Exasperated, Sheldon throws up his hands. It is like persuading a plant to move.

As Vera keeps talking and the boy sits, Sheldon hears a rumbling — the familiar if distant sound of a German diesel engine pinging and ponging its way slowly around a nearby bend.

‘They’re coming back. We have to leave. Now. They might not be as stupid as they absolutely seem to be. Come on. Come-come-come-come-come.’ He gestures, and when the car stops and the door opens, he decides the time for niceties has ended.

With extraordinary effort, Sheldon bends down and lifts the boy up, cradling him under the bottom like a toddler. He is not strong enough to use a free arm to grab Vera’s sleeve and pull her. He needs all his strength for the boy. He has nothing to move her but his power to convince. And he knows his power is limited.

‘ Puzhaltzda,’ he says. Please.

It is the only real Russian he knows.

He moves with the boy to the three stairs that descend into his own apartment.

There is a bang at the door.

‘ Puzhaltzda,’ he says.

She talks more. She is explaining something crucial. He cannot make any sense of it, and then makes the kind of decision a soldier makes with simple, irreproachable logic.

‘I cannot understand you and I am not going to. A violent man is at the front door. I am therefore leaving through the back door. I am taking the boy. If you come with us, you will be better off. If not, I am removing you from the equation. So here we go.’

Sheldon steps down into his bedroom, past the bathroom, and past the closet on his right. Beyond the bookshelf there is a hanging Persian rug that covers the bicycle entrance, which Sheldon has known about for three weeks — not just this morning — but didn’t want to admit finding on the day he moved into their apartment.

Say what you want, but there is a value to knowing the entrances and exits to places and problems.

With his elbow, he pushes the rug aside and sees the door behind.

‘Right, that’s it. We’re going. Now.’

The banging has changed from a firm knock to a frontal assault on the door. The monster is attempting to get in. He is kicking it with his boot. Hammering at the spot where the thin deadbolt holds the fifty-year-old dry-wood door to the opposing wall.

It is only a matter of time.

The problem is that the door in front of Sheldon is also locked, and he can’t manage to get it undone while holding the boy.

‘Come here, you fruitcake. Open this. Open it! Goddamn it!’

But she does not open it. She has crouched down under his bed.

Is she hiding there? That would be madness. Why hide when escape is possible?

There is no option. Sheldon has to put down the boy to struggle with the lock. And when he does, the boy rushes to his mother.

Just then the front door is kicked in.

It slams into the wall. Though he can’t see the front door from his angle, he hears the wood splinter and something metallic clank on the ground.

What Sheldon does next is focus.

‘Panic is the enemy,’ said staff sergeant O’Callihan in 1950. ‘Panic is not the same as being scared. Everyone gets scared. It is a survival mechanism. It tells you that something is wrong and requires your attention. Panic is when scared takes over your brain, rendering you utterly fucking useless. If you panic in the water, you will drown. If you panic on the battlefield, you will get shot. If you panic as a sniper, you will reveal your location, miss your mark, and fail your mission. Your father will hate you, your mother will ignore you, and women across this planet will be able to smell the stench of failure oozing from your very pores. So, Private Horowitz! What is the lesson here?’