The Sunlit Night (5 page)

Daniil had no new information. Vassily had no way of reaching her. The doctors allowed Vassily six months until the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator would have to be inserted over his right ventricle. In this six-month period, while he could still travel, Vassily wanted to see Moscow one more time, face his wife’s family, and demand her whereabouts. Yasha had finally stopped wondering where she could be.

•    •    •

Senior workshop ended for the day and Sidney and Alexa said, “Got bread?” to Yasha in unison. Yasha made it out of the room and down the stairs without having to look at the ceramic tea mugs they were working on together and had in Sidney’s locker, if he wanted to see. Outside it was still dark, warm, and foggy. He descended calmly into the subway. When he got out onto the elevated platform at Brighton Beach, the air had grown even saltier, and the Friday-ness of the whole planet’s atmosphere lifted him home, slowly, down Oriental Boulevard. Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” poured out of the open door at Yefim’s Barbershop. Yefim was singing along, and Yasha too continued the song’s
da-doo
s as he walked past. When he finished singing “Mrs. Robinson,” he began to sing “America.” He had learned both off his father’s copy of
Bookends
, the first album they’d bought in New York.

Yasha performed the opening hums of “America” with real zest, wildly off pitch, scaring a squirrel who had just found a piece of kebab meat. People liked him. Girls liked him. Girls wanted to show him their tea mugs. Yasha looked out toward the shore of Manhattan Beach and sang, “Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together.” The waves were low and steady. Yasha felt a fortune coming to him. He intended to share it, whenever it came—whether it was wealth or a Ducati Streetfighter S—with his father. His father wouldn’t be able to ride the Ducati. His father worried him. Certain mornings, his father stopped kneading, rested his floury hands on the counter, and breathed heavily for a few moments. When it passed, he began kneading again, with a little less force.

Yasha looked down at his own body as he walked. He wondered if he was still growing. He was tall enough, but he wanted his heart to grow stronger than his father’s. He wanted to get from his heart its full worth: natural instructions for kissing, more courage at the right moments—the reckless blood-pumping that would make him a real American lover. It had been a decade since he’d arrived in Brooklyn, and now he was nearly a legal American adult, but today, for the first time—saluting a dog who’d just peed on a bag of garbage, smelling salt and exhaust on the breeze, scanning the straight course of the avenue beyond him—Yasha felt like a genuine New Yorker.

When he reached the bakery, his father was sitting just inside the window, chewing a toothpick, holding an envelope and a steel ruler.

“Just in time,” Vassily said. He stood up, slid the envelope under a large knife, spat his toothpick out, and tucked his shirt into his pants. It was just before three o’clock, and the usual crowd would soon arrive—the delirious cookie children, a few nurses, Mr. Dobson, and the man they called “Dostoyevsky.” Yasha put his books in the back and tied a black half-apron around his waist. His Garfunkely feeling of contentment had worn off a little. He cleaned his glasses and waited for the customers to come. The door opened.

Dostoyevsky arrived first. He had a beard and a straight nose and hair that looked meticulously combed. He’d come in the past couple Fridays, always wearing leather boots, his jeans rolled up as if to show them off, with a collection of child-sized instruments hanging off his shoulder. Tucked into the miniature guitar case he kept one or another paperback Dostoyevsky novel. He would place his order, and then read aloud while Yasha wrapped the bread. Yasha did nothing to encourage him. Still, the man came every week and read.

Today’s quotation: “‘He was seldom playful, seldom even merry, but anyone could see at once, at a glance, that this was not from any kind of sullenness…’” Dostoyevsky looked up at Yasha, and then back down. He went on, “‘Maybe for that very reason he was never afraid of anyone…’” The man grinned and nodded broadly. Yasha handed him the sourdough.

“Thank you,” Yasha said.

“Thank
you
,” said the man, pushing his thick
Brothers Karamazov
back in with the miniature guitar. He met Yasha’s blank expression with a face-stretching smile that lasted longer than Yasha could bear. At last, he turned to leave. Yasha watched him go. Hard to say whether the man just loved Russian literature or had lost his mind. Dostoyevsky walked cheerfully out to the street. His sourdough banged against his set of chimes as he walked. Vassily laughed and turned on the commercial-sized mixer.

“Just because I am Russian doesn’t mean I am Alyosha, for fuck’s sake,” Yasha muttered.

Vassily laughed, then sneezed. “Yakov Vassiliovich,” he said, attempting ceremoniousness.

“Hm?”

Vassily inched toward the knife that lay over the envelope.

“You see,” Vassily began. Yasha turned to him brusquely, still irritated by Dostoyevsky’s quote. The windows that spread out behind Yasha were full of a gray mist. Yasha’s face was in shadow. Vassily’s shoulders sank, and he took a step back. “I am going to the bathroom,” Vassily said.

“Okay.” Yasha squinted and waited to hear the rest. “Is that all?”

Vassily didn’t answer. He walked into the back office and closed the door. Yasha turned on the television that was hidden in the crevice behind the front door. Brazil was playing Portugal. From behind the counter, he watched the tiny running shoes racing after the ball. Beside him, the mixer folded the flour into the eggs, and the large bowl buzzed against the wall. Brazil scored a goal. Now there was the bowl buzzing, the eggs smacking, and the roar of the crowd. The screen switched to instant replay. Without his glasses, all Yasha could see was the same old homework geometry—the kicker’s body was a vertical line, and his leg was horizontal, curving the trajectory of a small shooting sphere. Yasha followed the kicker’s outward leg line, through the ball and the blurred mesh of the goal, just off the screen, through the window, and out onto Oriental Boulevard, where there was a woman beside the mailbox. It was his mother. There was a commercial break.

Yasha did not doubt his identification. Nicknames for “Mother” in Russian flooded him. Her chin, lips, and eyes matched both his memory and the only two photographs he’d seen of her in the last ten years. Her hair was still red. She had come. His mind emptied for a moment. Then he thought: Let her look for me, good. Yasha turned to see if his father had come back, if he too had seen her. The door was still closed. When Yasha looked out again his mother was running, clumsily, in heels, away from the mailbox and toward the elevated subway tracks.

•    •    •

It was an ordinary Friday in Brighton Beach but now everyone was running. Even the man who was standing still on the curb seemed to be running backward at exactly Yasha’s pace. When Yasha came to the end of the block he leapt down too forcefully and was shin-shocked, the sting rushing up to his knee. The discomfort as he ran made him feel old, older than his mother, who, from the back, could very well have been the flutist from symphonic band.

Yasha wanted to stop, or did not know why he had started. If she hadn’t wanted to see him all these years, why had she come now? She kept on running, and he was close behind. She was thin and could twist between the street crowds. They were one window apart. Yasha saw his mother stop. They met in front of the chocolate store.

“Do not tell your father,” she said, smiling horridly, resting her hands on her knees. Yasha forgot all his languages.

Being with her, face-to-face, Yasha felt like a child. The rumbling of train tracks above made it impossible to hear anything. His mother looked around at all the Russian shop fronts. She had painted a black line fanning out from the corner of each eye, and wore a necklace of small pink pearls. She looked so happy to see him, Yasha almost fell into her arms. To keep from hugging her, he crossed his arms behind his back and stood up straight.

In spite of his posture, he wanted his mother to touch him, to take his face into her hands. She only looked up at him. He wondered how he looked. He wondered if he looked seven years old to her, or like a “man,” which was a stupid word that he hated having to think about. He hadn’t yet cared if he was a man or not, he had been taking it all as it came—his height, his torso as it grew—but now she must have been evaluating him on the whole. Did he look right, or old, or even recognizable? She turned away from him and examined the candies in the window. His brain offered up one definite memory: that his mother was fond of milk chocolate, that they had, on some warm-weather day, shared a long bar of milk chocolate shaped like Saint Basil’s Cathedral.

It started to rain. Everybody passing in the street seemed to be looking at her—she was wearing a bright blue knee-length short-sleeved dress that lifted in the wind. Her pearls were getting wet and extra shiny across her neck. She was smiling so ferociously, her arms were so thin, and her dress was so blue, that it was impossible not to look at her, to want to invite her inside.

His father must have been out of the bathroom by now. Yasha wondered if he was calling the neighbors, looking for him. Yasha had left the cash register and the door open. Why wasn’t she saying anything? The only thing she had said, before she began her rapturous survey of the neighborhood, was,
Do not tell your father
. Yasha wondered if she was, at bottom, cruel. He wanted to get her inside. He wanted to touch her, if she wasn’t going to touch him. It wasn’t impossible. For the first time in ten years, touching her wasn’t impossible. He placed his hand on her elbow and led her into the chocolate store.

His mother laughed.

“Sweets!” his mother said. The shopkeeper nodded her head and gave the blue dress a skeptical once-over.

“Don’t you need a paper towel?” the shopkeeper said, in Russian. Olyana walked up to the cash register and responded in low, animated Russian—something about an umbrella whose handle had snapped off. Her Russian was strange. At home, she had spoken to Yasha almost exclusively in English—in her old-fashioned, tutor-taught British accent. She’d demanded that he speak English every day, “for his future.” The kids at his Moscow primary school had nicknamed him Bill Clinton.

When she turned around from the counter she was already eating something—a single nonpareil.

“You live here,” she said, part statement, part question, looking past him and out the window. She uncurled her fist, revealing two more nonpareils.

Yasha turned to the window, to see what she was watching. It wasn’t pretty. Old men and women were buying tomatoes, and it was raining hard now, and the raised subway platform seemed to be dripping grit onto the street. Cars honked. Everything had gone gray with the clouds except two neon signs, one pink, one orange. They looked sickly and overcharged. His mother looked satisfied, and ran her now empty hand through her hair.

“You sent us here,” Yasha said, and for a first thing to say, he thought that wasn’t bad.

His mother’s face lit up, as if it were exactly what she had wanted to hear. “Yes!” she said, and clasped her hands, “and look!” She looked at him from his toes to his hair. Yasha wished that he had showered. His hair was stuck to his head with sweat and rain, and he was still wearing, to his horror, an apron. “You look marvelous,” she said, still not touching him. Perhaps, Yasha thought with some pleasure, she did not feel that she had permission to touch him, having so long ago given him up. Perhaps he wasn’t really hers anymore. Perhaps that was fine. Perhaps it would be better, after all, to shake her hand, get a good look at her, and leave.

He glanced at the doorknob.

“Your father—” She caught herself and shook her head fondly. “How is he? And the bakery? Selling millions and millions?”

“It’s our tenth anniversary.” It wasn’t really the right thing to say. He pictured the cruller twist and the everything bagel, hanging week after week in the window, barely recognizable as a “10.” It hadn’t, now that he thought of it, done much to increase their business.

“Yes, well, that is why I wanted to talk to you, absolutely now,” his mother said. “I’ve been saying,
ten years
, good lord.”

I’ve been saying, Yasha thought. Who had she been saying this to?

“Only let’s take our time,” she said, “yes,” and turned completely around, flipping the bottom of her dress up into a high, floating ring. She tore a plastic bag from the dispenser and opened the bucket of gummy bears. She plunged the scoop as deep as it would go and came up with a heap of bears. After the gummy bears came the gummy worms, the sour cola bottles, the gummy raspberries and blackberries, the peanut toffees, the caramels, the Nerds, the Dots, and then one entire twelve-ounce brick of chocolate.

“It’s Friday,” his mother explained, in Russian, to the shopkeeper.

Their total was $35.50 and she paid with a fifty-dollar bill. She pulled it out of an orange leather wallet that was full of fifty-dollar bills. She carried no credit cards or identification. She put fifty cents in the tip jar.

Yasha’s mother held the door open and motioned for Yasha to exit. He couldn’t move. He was yearning himself desperately toward her and away from her simultaneously, making his stomach turn, and she was holding the door, and was he supposed to be holding the door?

Outside, the rain picked up right where it had left off, flattening his hair to his head. His mother didn’t seem bothered by the weather in the least. She led him briskly down Brighton Beach Avenue, as if she had lived there all her life. As if she had lived there, with them, for ten years, at the Gregoriov Bakery, as she had once said that she would.