The Sunlit Night

by Rebecca Dinerstein

  • • •

  Early in the morning on the first of June, I rode the A train from West 4th Street to JFK. It took an hour and a half; the city’s population boarded and exited the train along the way, and I focused on the presence of so many people, soon to be replaced by artists, mountains, animals. I entered the departures terminal and checked in.

  Some people claim that life is not making love to them. My father claimed this. Some people have never been made good love to, or don’t remember, or haven’t been taught how, and cheat their lives out of the pleasure we each can make in one another.

  I thought: one must want to make love to life.

  From my father, I had inherited a certain amount of discipline. We both could wake early and work intensely for hours. We were both comfortable in our own company. We were not lonely, or lazy. But discipline, I felt certain, had to be paired with joy. Otherwise it went to waste. Waste, like pictures that nobody sees, or waking up early without then slicing your bread, nodding to the weather, and relishing the fabric of your sleeves as you push your arms through.

  Lofoten lay some ninety-five miles above the Arctic Circle, a string of six islands in the Norwegian Sea.

  I was looking for a love unlike my parents’ love or my sister’s love or the love on a foreign kitchen floor. I wanted my own kitchen to keep clean and full of bread and milk and hot sauce and a big clean empty sink where I could wash my dishes. I wanted to forgive my mother and father for their misery and find myself a light man who lived buoyantly and to be both his light and his dark, serious baby.

  PART TWO

  • • •

  The Gregoriov Bakery

  Yasha had begun to measure time in bread. The Gregoriov Bakery was in its tenth year. His father had propped up in the store window a “10” made out of a cruller twist and an everything bagel, which he replaced on the first of each month. The stale twists were fed to Septimos, their Brooklyn cat, named after Septimos, their Russian cat. Both cats were black. Yasha’s mother, a piano teacher, had chosen the name in honor of their first cat’s unusual purring: precise musical sevenths. Brooklyn Septimos purred like a normal cat. Yasha had taken to calling him Sam. Yasha could no longer recall, even when he tried, the sound of his first cat’s sevenths. He could recall only the image of Russian Septimos licking his mother’s hands as she played piano. This anniversary would also mark the tenth year since Yasha had seen his mother.

  They had been doing all the work without her. Yasha’s primary responsibilities were maintaining the window displays and “customer seduction,” as his father Vassily called it. Vassily knew what he had working in his favor: his son’s natural handsomeness, his store’s plot on central Oriental Boulevard, the age-old significance of bread, the fact that bread went stale and needed replenishing. These were the forces driving his business. He was not driven, himself, to increase the bakery’s sales, especially in this tenth year. Aside from the special window display, the anniversary went uncelebrated. He no longer wanted the bakery; he no longer wanted America. He wanted his wife.

  The two Gregoriov men woke each morning, did stretching exercises—Vassily was a proponent of stretching in the morning—and baked. It was Yasha’s senior year of high school and he was the only kid he knew who woke up before five. There was, because of that necessary principle of replenishing, a great amount to bake each morning. Yasha moved the loaves in pairs, from the cooling rack to the window display. The window became a kind of ark, and Yasha sometimes tried to make the twin babkas and Danishes look like mating animals. It was hard to make bread look alive—it had no legs, no face. Yasha had once tried carving a smiley face into a particularly yellow challah. His father had slapped him for making the bread look cheap. Sudden movements, like slaps, or a loaf slipping from Yasha’s hands to the floor, lifted the thin coat of cornmeal from the bakery’s every surface into a brief fog.

  • • •

  One June Friday, Yasha made a window display out of fresh cheese Danishes. It was his favorite kind of Friday—dark, warm, and foggy. This fog, unlike the sour air of the bakery, was thick and odorless. He liked to move through it, feeling it part for him and cling to his sides. He went to school feeling unusually relaxed. There were only three more days of school. He had American government, gym, and comparative economics, followed by a lunch of three plain pizza slices. In senior workshop, his teacher asked him to write a story that revolved around one central problem. Yasha was astounded by how little came to mind. It should be easy, he thought. He started a list.

  A problem:

  Cat scratched customer

  Out of bialys

  Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

  Friday night oven cleaning

  He erased the whole list. He looked at the blank page, and then wrote his name in the upper right-hand corner.

  YAKOV VASSILIOVICH GREGORIOV

  It was a long name. Too long. He leaned his chair onto its two back legs. Americans didn’t have such long names. They were economical with their syllables. If he was going to have such a long name, Yasha thought, he might as well get more bang out of his syllables. Under his name, he wrote:

  YASHA: THE SUBHARMONIC

  THUNDERGROWL OF THE WEST

  “Five minutes,” his teacher said.

  Yasha tried to focus on his problems. He imagined his father at the bakery, alone, eating a bialy. It was too hot to eat soup. He could see his father sitting with a quarter-pound tub of cream cheese, dipping his bialy into it. High school would end next week. Good riddens, his father would say, imitating the voice of the landlord, Mr. Dobson, who had taught him the expression. Good riddens to high school.

  Yasha could blame his father’s current despair on the institution of American schooling. And the Berlin Wall. He pictured Vassily scooping up a fresh mound of cream cheese with the edge of his bialy, and tearing a bite off with his small teeth.

  This was the legend his father had told him: the Berlin wall had fallen, Russia’s emigration laws had shifted, and Yasha’s mother Olyana had said, “Let Yakov go to an American school.” Olyana had grown up speaking French and English, with tutors. Vassily had grown up imitating the snorts of his family’s pigs. Olyana had married Vassily, his father claimed, for a taste of the other side. The “simple,” she had generously called it. Vassily could not imagine that the simple would hold her attention. Then the drama came. The drama appealed to her: the wall fell, the doors opened, and they left.

  But they didn’t all leave. Olyana had put on her best dress—brown with small green buttons at the back of the neck—and gone to her father’s old accountants for the Moscow–Paris–New York plane tickets. Tickets were nearly impossible to come by. The men were good to her; she reminded them of her late father, their boss, a presiding member of the Duma, who had always paid them on time and celebrated every Christmas with gifts of herring. They gave her one first-class ticket, for herself. It was the only one they could spare. For her simple husband and her simple child, they gave a pair of standard seats, on a flight that would leave before hers. Three tickets of any kind was great luck, they said, considering the demand, may her father rest in peace.

  Olyana came home to Vassily that night and allowed him to peel her brown dress from her body, beginning with the green buttons. Afterward, still undressed, she gave Vassily the two tickets. The tickets became fused in Vassily’s mind with this moment of his wife’s radiant nakedness, and he took them, and that evening he let Yasha, who was seven, hold them and measure their length with a ruler. Yasha couldn’t remember the ruler.

  He only remembered that the week after Olyana secured the tickets, he and his father entered New York City. Vassily’s brother had been in touch with a friend of a second cousin. This friend lived in Brighton Beach. Yasha, not yet four feet tall, slept for three nights in the man’s armchair, while Vassily slept on his couch. The apartment looked out over Oriental Boulevard, where prominent Cyrillic letters soothed Vassily’s homesickness. One empty storefront flashed a si
gn: FOR RENT. CALL CHARLES DOBSON. On the phone, Mr. Dobson responded well to Vassily’s accent, and assured him that Brighton Beach was where he belonged. The previous owner’s ovens were still installed, Mr. Dobson said, and the upstairs space would accommodate the whole family. The Gregoriov Bakery opened its doors. In the attic apartment above the bakery, Vassily and Yasha made two beds—one single, one double. They waited for Olyana to join them. She did not.

  • • •

  Yasha chose Out of bialys from his original list and wrote a story in which his father had eaten the last one, and Mr. Dobson came by for a dozen for Mrs. Dobson’s birthday, and Mr. Dobson was terribly disappointed and screamed, Good riddance, Gregoriovs! and kicked them out of their bakery forever, and the cat ran away out of shame. Yasha stood up and read it before the class, winning giggles from the two curliest-haired girls, Sidney and Alexa. They had loved him since tenth grade. Yasha figured that they mostly liked his hair, which was also curly. Sidney and Alexa were best friends, and admired and encouraged each other in loving Yasha as a team.

  The girls, as well as most of his classmates, assumed that Yasha didn’t like them. He did well on his tests and had a naturally sour twist on his lips and never stopped to talk in the halls. He was tall, and his shoulders were fully developed, making him look stronger than he was. The girls assumed that in Russia, Yasha had enjoyed a succession of fur-wearing, princess-like girlfriends. Of course, Yasha had been far too young in Russia for girls. And in America, throughout middle school, he had still been too Russian, and consequently, too shy. By high school, he had lost his accent and grown to a full six feet. He felt comfortable looking at the girls he liked. He could in most cases stare straight over their heads without ever making it known that he was paying attention to them—but he wasn’t going to approach them. He’d had little practice talking to girls of any kind, and the American teenage girl was a particularly challenging place to start. In any case, Yasha didn’t have time to try. He was due at the bakery immediately after school. His father relied on him to manage the afternoon rush.

  The only girl he had ever managed to speak to, outside of class, before going home, was a redheaded flutist whom he’d seen perform in the symphonic band. He had complimented her fingering, a term he found in A Flutist’s Handbook, and regretted it feverishly ever since. When he realized that this girl bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, as he remembered her, he went off girls for a good year. He had never yet kissed.

  • • •

  “I have been given a few new piano students,” Olyana had explained at first. “I need more time.” She asked, “Is Yasha healthy? Is Yasha in school?”

  “Yes,” Vassily said. “Both. Please come.”

  “She is coming,” Vassily told Yasha.

  “I don’t see her,” Vassily’s brother, Daniil, said when he called from Moscow. “I don’t see her in your window.”

  “She is coming,” Vassily told Yasha.

  The Gregoriov Bakery’s phone number was added to the public directory. Yasha’s father was proud and flattered when she found it. Olyana called the store phone every couple of weeks.

  “Is Yasha healthy? Is Yasha in school?”

  “Yes,” Vassily said. “Are you coming?”

  “Our recital is in the spring,” she said, or she said, “The Christmas Concert.”

  “I can’t find her,” Daniil told Vassily. “She doesn’t live in your house anymore.”

  The phone rang, and Vassily took the phone into the bakery’s bathroom.

  “Is Yasha healthy? Is Yasha in school?”

  “Yes,” Vassily said. “Please come.”

  Yasha stopped asking about his mother after his third year in America, the year he turned ten.

  Vassily did not visit a doctor during his first four years in New York. In April of the bakery’s fifth year, Yasha saw his father faint while moving a twenty-pound bag of flour. Mr. Dobson scheduled and paid for a physical exam.

  “They call it hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,” Vassily told his son. “My heart muscle is extra thick,” Vassily said, making himself laugh. His hair, waist, and legs had always been too thin. “They say many people live a normal life,” he said.

  When Vassily told his brother, Daniil replied with another piece of news. “I found her,” Daniil said. “She has moved to her cousin’s estate.” Vassily wrote down her new phone number, and even the loops of the nines and sixes looked luxurious. He showed the number to Yasha, and said Olyana had finally found her way back to the grand from the “simple.” “Damn the estate,” Vassily said, in one of his life’s few bouts of anger. The bakery was flourishing. Why give her family another reason to sneer at him, at his abnormal valve function, his latest inadequacy? Yasha was twelve years old. He had never seen his father so angry, nor felt less able, himself, amid his personal squirming, suddenly tall and usually silent, to confront his long-invisible mother. Father and son agreed to keep the news of Vassily’s heart quiet, and Mr. Dobson scheduled a series of checkups with the cardiologist.

  The slowness with which Vassily was forced to knead his dough, in order to avoid chest pain, made his bread fluffier and more elastic. The Gregoriov Bakery put the Arkady Bakery out of business.

  Four more years passed before it was time to implant a defibrillator. This was the last resort, according to Vassily’s medical pamphlets. This was what the doctors did when the heart was so unstable it needed to be monitored from the inside. Vassily retrieved the old slip of butcher paper from under the cash register, where he’d hidden his wife’s number instead of throwing it out years earlier. Cornmeal had eroded the ballpoint ink, but each digit was still legible. He called, carefully entering the country code first. No rings, then a prerecorded message: . This number has been disconnected.

  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-doos 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 a
t 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.