Free Until I Find You by John Irving Page B

if he didn’t want to see Jack go.
    Without turning around, the boy reached behind him. His hand, the one the clerk had hurt, instinctively found hers. When Jack Burns needed to hold his mother’s hand, his fingers could see in the dark.

4
    No Luck in Norway
    A lice found few clients for tattoos in Oslo. Among the foreign guests and restaurant-goers at the Bristol, those intrepid souls who accepted her offer had been tattooed before.
    Because their breakfasts at the Bristol were included in the price of their room, Jack and his mom continued their habit of overindulging in that meal. During one such exercise in overeating, they met a German businessman who was traveling with his wife. The German had a Sailor’s Grave on his chest (a sinking ship, still flying the German flag) and a St. Pauli lighthouse on his right forearm—the solid maritime tattooing of Herbert Hoffmann, whose shop in Hamburg was just off the Reeperbahn.
    The German wanted Alice to tattoo his wife, who already had an eighteen-inch lizard tattooed on her back. After breakfast, the businessman’s wife selected an iridescent-green spider from Alice’s flash. Alice tattooed an all-black spiral on the German woman’s earlobe; the spider, suspended from a red thread, hung out in that hollow between her collarbone and her throat.
    “Ambitious work, for Oslo,” Alice told the German couple.
    Alice was looking forward to meeting Herbert Hoffmann; she’d always wanted to visit St. Pauli. Hoffmann, like Tattoo Ole and Tattoo Peter, represented those North Sea tattoos she’d first seen in her dad’s shop. She knew that Tattoo Ole had given Herbert Hoffmann his first tattoo machine, and that Hoffmann had been tattooed by Ole and Tattoo Peter.
    Jack’s eagerness to get a look at Herbert Hoffmann was less professional. Ole had told the boy that Hoffmann had a big bird tattooed on his ass—the entire left cheek of his bum was a peacock with its fan in full-feather display! And Jack’s curiosity about Tattoo Peter had less to do with his reputation as a tattoo artist than the tantalizing fact that he had one leg.
    But if seeing the German’s Herbert Hoffmanns made Alice wish she were in Hamburg, she was further disappointed that she was a whole week in Oslo before she got to tattoo a first-timer—“virgins,” Alice called them. Perhaps no one in Norway was seeking a pilgrim experience—at least not of that kind, or not at the Bristol.
    In their continuing gluttony at breakfast, which stood in flagrant contrast to their near-starvation tactics at lunch and dinner, Jack learned to prefer gravlaks to smoked salmon. The cloudberries, which were offered with repeated zeal to children at every meal, turned out to be quite good; and while it was impossible to avoid the reindeer in one form or another, Jack managed to resist eating the poor creature’s tongue. But despite limiting their lunches and dinners to appetizers and desserts, the cost of their food was greater than the amount Alice was earning. And no one in Oslo wanted to talk to them about William. In Norway, the alleged object of William’s desire (and his subsequent ruin) was a girl too young to be comfortably discussed—even among adults.
    From the front entrance of the Bristol, the view of the Oslo Cathedral is slightly uphill. From that perspective, the first dark morning they saw it, the Domkirke appeared to rise out of the middle of the road at the end of the long street marked by trolley tracks. But they never took the streetcar; the cathedral was within easy walking distance.
    “I’ll bet that’s the one,” Alice said.
    “Why?” Jack asked.
    “I just bet it is.”
    The Domkirke looked important enough to have an old organ with one hundred and two stops. A German-made Walcker, the organ had been rebuilt in 1883 and again in 1930. The exterior dated back to 1720. It had been painted gray in 1950—the original was green—and its grayness enhanced what was monumental and somber about