The Sunlit Night (26 page)

“We used to have the strangest arguments,” his mother said.

“We never have any arguments,” the man said. He kissed Olyana on the lips. I’m right here, Yasha thought again. One of Olyana’s knees bent and her foot flicked up behind her, the way Yasha had only seen happen in cartoons, and her other leg sank deeper, with all her weight now on it, heel-first, into the sand. The slipper hung off her floating foot. Yasha grabbed it. He walked it up to the nearest target and punctured the bull’s-eye with the stiletto. The rest of the clear slipper hung out of the target like drool from an open mouth. When Yasha turned back toward his mother, the kiss had not yet ended.

•    •    •

I called my parents. Small car crash, I told them, no injury, just shock. They were upset. They were upset for their own reasons. My father had gotten hired to illustrate a report documenting the effect of cell-phone use on human thumbs, and he’d stabbed his own thumb with an X-Acto knife. The skin between the thumb and index finger, he informed me, was called the
thenar space
. It was this skin my father had punctured, and actually infected (his knife generally lay out on his desk uncovered, dusty, inky, covered in his shed hairs). It was now stitched up, but the infection needed monitoring. Thankfully, my mother said, they had Dr. Cordon.

I asked him how he was feeling. He started saying something about “motherfucking fingernails.” If he had tried to distract himself, by way of injury, from his everyday distress—it hadn’t worked. I wondered what he would have to do to himself to succeed, to distract himself from the endless stream of clinical studies and cow’s-eye dissection kits that needed their materials illustrated. I hoped my mother would be around to stop him from doing it. I guessed she wouldn’t be, now. Our leaving each other had become dangerous—I had left them alone when I went north; they were leaving my sister alone to give herself away; they were leaving each other alone now to who knows what result. I wondered if my father would ever draw again. If I am lucky enough, I thought, someday to make a painting for the cover of a toy helicopter user’s manual, I will not be outraged, because the painting is the thing itself, the fulfilling thing. Illustrations had long since ceased fulfilling my father.

His illustrations filled a corner of a page. He wanted something larger for himself, and why shouldn’t he? He wanted to make his own work. The difference between drawing and illustrating, he said, is that you draw for yourself and you illustrate for some schmo who can’t draw. He’d wanted to contribute something significant, something fine, to the profession. The professionals had made his work feel like marginalia. I looked at the blueberries Agnes had gifted me on her Princess Mette-Marit plate. My father could have drawn their blue guts exactly, could have drawn the difference between the berries’ skin and their flesh. He could have drawn consummate fingernails. But as the industry paid less attention to him, he had lost the joy in paying attention.

“For a bunch of holier-than-thou orthopedists,” he was saying in conclusion.

My mother looked intently at my father. Behind them, the apartment was emptier than ever. All my father’s drawings had been taken off the wall, and my mother’s vases no longer lined the countertops. Where had they moved these things? Where were they going, and how far from each other could it possibly be? They had lived in our tiny apartment for thirty years. They had no more obvious place to go, I thought, than I did. Than Yasha did, for that matter. All of us were reentering New York, our former home, as though we’d never lived there. My sister was the only one of us who knew where she was going. Who thought she did, at least.

My father’s left hand and wrist were mittened in white bandages.

“One more thing we won’t need to explain at the wedding,” my mother said, pointing at the gauze. “And a good thing too. Imagine the questions.”

“Did you stab yourself because your daughter is throwing away her life? No! I stabbed myself because thirty years later my best audience is nine-year-old schoolchildren. Not to mention my own nine-year-old marrying herself off like a child courtesan—”

“Dad,” I said to cut him off, “have you told Sarah about your hand?”

“Sarah doesn’t speak to us,” my mother said.

“I sometimes wonder why I do,” I said.

“Don’t you turn against us now,” she said. “Who’s going to schlep these boxes?” She pointed behind her. There were the vases: in a box labeled
Vases
with my mother’s porcelain handwriting. “We’re both counting on you for the heavy lifting, in case you didn’t know. You can take turns. One day my boxes, one day his. I’ll tip, your father won’t.”

It was strange how they still said
us
and
we
and
both
. The walls behind them had never looked whiter, and my father’s enormous yellow hair looked like a halo painted onto a canvas. My mother’s skin was the same white as the walls, her eyes especially dark by contrast. My mother and father both looked younger, as if the blank walls brightened their faces, reflecting light into lines where shadows had built up over time.

Kurt came back to my room as I was looking at them. He needed help with the festival’s honey mead.

“Are you well enough?” Kurt asked.

“Of course.” I turned back to the computer. “I have to go.”

My father waved his white paw.

I spent the evening serving honey mead to three French brothers. One was twenty-six, one was twenty, and one was nine. They stuck around after the official activities had ended and sat with us in the staff lavvo well into the night. The littlest didn’t speak English and spent the night grinning shyly at his brothers. With perfect grace they paid no special attention to any of us, neglected none of us, wrestled their littlest brother, and roasted their dinners. Even Sigbjørn was moved by their elegance: he offered them all his beers, and when they didn’t drink any, Sigbjørn followed their example and put the cans away.

A dog ran laps around the bonfire. Every couple of laps, Sigbjørn would catch the dog by its collar and hold it still a moment. The dog would look up, examining his captor, and Sigbjørn would say,
“Jo.”
It was my favorite Norwegian word. It was pronounced
you
. It meant “But yes,” or, “Yes, even though you say no,” or, “Yes after all.” Sigbjørn squeezed the dog’s jaws shut with one hand, scratched its ears with the other, and moaned his long
“Joooo.” Youuuu.
The dog, looking up, said, I am not a dog, and Sigbjørn answered again and again, But yes, you are. Yes after all.

The dog sat by Sigbjørn for the rest of the night. I spoke my high school French to the little boy and taught him how to make his hands into a flute and how to put his feet in ballet positions. I had two weeks until I had to go home. My flight would depart on my birthday. The French brothers said they were staying on the island for some time. I could have asked to see them again. Their presence would have been soothing. But I wanted to be light like them and pass in and out lightly, so I said goodnight knowing I would not see them again.

Sigbjørn offered to drive them home. The oldest said they’d set up camp on Utakleiv Beach. Sigbjørn told them they’d chosen well—the winds would be moderate overnight, and they’d wake to a great view. He lifted the sleeping youngest brother and led the others to the tractor. Yasha promised to put out the fire. I promised to clean up the trash and stack the benches.

They left. We stood still and listened to the tractor driving off until we could no longer hear it. I looked at Yasha and I did not want to pass lightly. I did not want any more light.

•    •    •

To be free, Yasha thought, to be free to be free to be free. He kissed her. The fire had weakened, but a few logs still hissed. Yasha stepped away from her and saw Sigbjørn’s empty cooling bucket; he picked it up, took Frances’s hand, and walked out onto the beach to fill it. All the red and orange had left the sky and it was almost dark—the blue-gray felt luxurious. Frances took off her shoes and walked into the water. It was hilariously cold. Yasha bent over and made imprints of his palms in the wet sand. A wave came and filled them. Frances kissed him. Here was his relief, his rest.

Frances stacked the benches in pairs, and picked bits of tinfoil from the ground around the bonfire. Yasha put out the fire and found Frances’s hand in the dark. Walking down the road toward the museum, they watched how still the fjord kept and how fast the sky moved. Here was the living world. Yasha felt the air sink through him as he breathed.

In her room, the beds lay pushed together. Yasha smiled sheepishly. Frances turned off the lights. He removed her shoes, her necklace. She removed his glasses. They undressed.

Yasha opened his eyes and saw a streak of green across Frances’s floor—a stripe of light coming in between the curtains. There were famous versions of this morning in a boy’s life. Yasha had imagined eagles landing on his shoulders and invisible fountains erupting from under the fields. He had not imagined his mother in a floor-length gown playing the Cheburashka birthday song. She played loudly enough to wake up the whole museum. Yasha walked into the Ceremonial Hall. His mother sat erect on the piano bench, her fingers curled over the keys like talons.

“Our little man has arrived,” she said. She played a two-note drumroll with her left hand. Ian clapped his hands beside the piano.

“Good morning, Yasha,” Frida said, holding out a fresh waffle topped with a baseball-sized dollop of sour cream.

Our little mourning man,
Yasha thought. These were the right words. Incredible, he thought, to be no longer merely
his
: his son Yasha, the Gregoriov boy, his assistant, his window display maker, his boy, his company, his substitute wife. He had not been
our
anything before. If he tried, he could remember living in the same Russian house as his mother and father; even then, he had never been called
our son
. He was his modest father’s son, and his flaming mother’s son. They hadn’t shared him. They had each claimed him separately, and wholly.

Now I belong to many people, Yasha thought with immense satisfaction, as his mother picked out high notes with her pinkie finger and nobody rushed him to answer.

Kurt left to feed the leftover whale meat to the boar. Haldor went out to start taking down the five lavvos, pole by pole. The festival was over and left in its wake traces of grease on the archery targets, firecracker husks in the grass, and stomped blueberries all along the path from the smithy to the boats. Frances had been assigned to clean the berries and cardboard pieces out from the gravel pathways and the fields. Haldor had assigned Yasha the cleaning of the Ceremonial Hall, the easiest task.

Frances came into the hall. She wore an orange shirt, yellow shorts, and red sheakers. Her hair sat on the top of her head in the same baseball-sized clump as the sour cream. Yasha beamed at her with his teeth showing.

Frances squinted, and nodded questioningly, and Yasha nodded back with utter confidence.

“Just checking,” Frances said, and she turned around and walked back to her room.

“Give me that waffle,” Yasha said to Frida.

“Anything you want,” Frida said.

“Anything I want,” said Yasha.

“Ja byl kogda-to strannojj,”
sang his mother, with feeling.

Sigbjørn was sitting at a window-side table, having his own breakfast. Kurt had prepared a sausage he claimed would cure any hangover. “Hey, birthday,” Sigbjørn called out. “What was that about?” He bucked his chin toward Frances’s room. “What happened last night?”

“I guess she thought it might have been a dream,” Yasha said. He took the seat across from Sigbjørn, and unwrapped a knife and fork from within a rolled-up paper napkin. The napkin, once unfolded and placed in his lap, read
GRATULERER MED DAGEN
.

“Granule med dragon?” Yasha said.

“Congratulations with the day,” Sigbjørn said. “What dream?”

Yasha wondered if Kurt had set the whole Ceremonial Hall with birthday napkins. He saw Frances leave her room again and go outside to begin her work. Not since his last Friday in Brighton Beach, a couple of hours before his mother had appeared, the last ordinary hours of his life, when he’d come home to his father, full of pizza, singing American songs—not since then had Yasha felt the sum of energy around him collect so obviously in his favor.

•    •    •

I was on my hands and knees flinging ants into the bushes, cleaning up the blueberries, thinking about virginity. It was one of the things—they seemed to be accumulating—that didn’t come back. Three things had vanished, had fallen off this upper edge of the world: Vassily, in his beach grave; Nils, in his forest; and then this thing I had taken from Yasha, in our double bed, in Room 18. He would have to go on without it. I hoped I had taken it kindly. I hoped he didn’t want it back.

Now it was eleven o’clock, a blue sky again. A brighter blue than the berries. They were mashed, and everywhere, and I had cleared all the trash from the Viking ships—the festival guests and their berries had stained a good deal of very old wood—and I was making my way, clearing this little path, toward the smithy. Of course, the path reminded me of Nils. It was the one we had run down, my first time here, sweating, to the boats. I hadn’t heard anything more from him, in any language.