“When we’re married we’ll live here in New York, with you, I hope.”
“We are leaving New York,” Yasha told his mother as simply and loudly as he could. “To look for you, in fact.” The perversity of his family’s many overlapping errors, and his singular power to make things right, or more wrong, made Yasha giddy. “Papa bought tickets to Moscow. He thinks he’s going to find you there. He wants—”
“How absurd,” his mother said. “Listen. You must tell your father, tell him, Mama is here, she is terribly happy, she has made a new life for herself, and the best thing to do—the only civilized thing—is to let the woman go. Just like that. Then you give him these.” She retrieved a manila folder of papers from her bag. “And see that he signs. He will sign if you ask him, Yasha.”
“He will die if I ask him,” Yasha said. “But you’re right, he would die faster and harder if the news came directly from you.” His mother stood clutching the thin stack of divorce papers, a stack no thicker than a bialy. “We are leaving on Thursday,” Yasha said. “We are going to conquer Moscow, Papa keeps saying, and have a great time while we do it. Papa hasn’t gotten out of the bakery since … well, actually since we moved in, but we’re going all-out this time. He calls it Gregoriov’s Last Great Adventure. If you want to break his heart, you can wait until we’re back and they’ve implanted his defibrillator. Maybe with that thing in his chest you won’t ruin him completely.”
“By that time the police will be after me.” Yasha could think of a million reasons to arrest her, but she provided one that hadn’t occurred to him. “They’ll kick me out of this country,” she said. “You must understand—no divorce, no marriage, no residence permit, for an alien like me,” she said.
“They won’t find you so fast,” Yasha said. “You’re very hard to find.” Yasha thought of his father in the bathroom, talking into the telephone, asking her to come. He thought of a faceless man who must have been in the room with her during those calls, kissing her neck while she said, Soon, soon, soon. “Your bogus wedding can wait a little while, can’t it?” Yasha said. “We won’t be gone for ten years. I promise. Tell your fucking boyfriend—”
“Ian,” his mother said.
“Tell Ian he can hold his horses.”
A speckled, sad-looking carriage horse clopped just then over the footbridge. Yasha had taken over as ringleader; the actors and animals were taking his cues now. Following the horse he had conjured, Yasha turned and walked out of the park, two blocks west to Broadway, down from 67th to 59th, picking up into a run that led him into the waiting mouth of the B train.
At the bakery, he found his father singing the Simon part and Mr. Dobson singing the Garfunkel part of “Homeward Bound.” Mr. Dobson was slapping a loaf of rye against the counter, keeping time, which helped, as neither man was singing in tune. His father was throwing out all the bread in the store. He walked around with a big black garbage bag, emptying all the baskets.
Home! (He dumped the challahs.)
Where my thought’s escaping!
Home! (He dumped the babkas.)
Where my music’s playing!
Home! (He dumped the egg, everything, and onion bagels.)
Where my love lies waiting silently for me. (He dumped, finally, the bialys, tied the bag up, and threw it to the floor beside the cat bowl.)
“Silently for me,” Vassily whined, solo.
“Dum, dum dum dum, dum dum,” crooned Mr. Dobson.
“Yakov Vassiliovich!” said Vassily, looking up.
“Jesus Christ,” said Yasha.
“It’s only Mr. Dobson!” said Vassily. “He’s our final customer.”
“The Gregoriovs visit the homeland!” Mr. Dobson sang out.
Vassily started shimmying his shoulders—a dance Yasha would never have expected to see his father’s body perform—and waving his hands in the air. The fourth finger of his left hand still bore a gold ring.
“Papa,” said Yasha.
“Yasha!” said Vassily. “I have some shirts to show you.”
“When do you leave?” asked Mr. Dobson.
“Thursday,” Vassily said. “Back before winter, but who knows when?”
“Come here, Sam,” Yasha called. The cat looked up at him. Yasha lifted him under his front legs and held him up, while his father hoisted the bag of bread over his shoulder, knocking the cat bowl to the wall. Vassily opened the door.
Yasha looked out the door in the direction of the ocean. Rows of clouds pushed inland. His father had written BACK INDEFINITELY onto a piece of butcher paper and hung the sign on the front door. Yasha inhaled, and the bakery smelled empty.
“Well, my dear Gregoriovs…” said Mr. Dobson.
“Good riddens,” said all three men, each at his own pitch, and it sounded more like harmony than any of their singing.
• • •
After school on Wednesday, Yasha said goodbye to Stephen, did not say goodbye to Alexa, and ran directly to the subway. Now that he’d asked his mother to stay away, it seemed only more likely that she’d appear. She hadn’t been at the school door, and Yasha feared that he would find her at home with Papa, getting her papers signed if it cost her Papa’s life. Yasha rode the empty subway home standing up, in preparation.
When Yasha got to the Gregoriov Bakery, it was closed. The lights were off, and the shelves empty. The door to the basement was propped open, and from the sidewalk he could see a single lit bulb dangling from a cord. He ran down. Vassily was there, alone, his jeans rolled above his knees, frantically swatting at a foot of water with a garbage bag.
“Flood,” said Vassily, his forehead covered in sweat. “The whole boulevard. The pipes are telling us, Get out of here!” He laughed and dragged his wet hand across his forehead, making water run down his face. He was smiling, but the drops resembled tears, and Yasha was paralyzed. “Help me clear this out, Yakov Vassiliovich,” Vassily said, “so we can go upstairs and pack.”
“Has anyone come to see you today?” Yasha asked in a quiet voice, knowing that the answer was no, knowing that his father would hardly have been in flood-fighting condition had the news been broken, but needing to check, all the same.
“Only Dostoyevsky,” his father said. “Mr. Dobson is too soft to handle a second goodbye. I told Dostoyevsky to get his sourdough at Ilya’s this summer. He looked very upset. I told him that I would read to you while we’re away. I told him not to bother reading to old Ilya.”
Yasha laughed, not at old Ilya, their fat, friendly competitor of seven years, but at his mother. She was incapable of doing anything, Yasha thought, feeling some relief, and some pity. She was incapable of showing up, even when she needed to for her own sake, even to make her own gross wishes come true.
“Put that flour in the garbage,” Vassily said. “I’ll get the pump.”
Vassily and Yasha worked together for an hour. Vassily, sweating, chattered on the subjects of suitcase name tags, a brown dress Yasha’s mother had once worn, airplane drink menus, walking shoes, and a haircut he would get from a man in Kitai-Gorod. Yasha filled three garbage bags with pounds of wet white bread flour. Vassily finished pumping the basement and ushered his son upstairs, with modest shoulder dances and some clapping, for one last Brooklyn night. Yasha, seventeen, wanting to get his mother back but refusing to take her back, wanting distance, wanting the place he was from, wanting a little time, wanting his father to breathe air that had been blown through the sky and not baked, said nothing to stop their journey.
• • •
The next day, Yasha carried Septimos to the fence of Mr. Dobson’s yard, kissed his head, and lowered him into the garden. Around the cat’s neck, a red string was tied with a note that read Call me Sam.
• • •
Olyana Gregoriov placed an international call from Ian’s apartment at 480 Leonard Street. When Daniil picked up, she spoke clearly: “Vassily will soon be in Moscow. When he asks for me, tell him I am in New York, in love. My cousin is on his way to yo
ur house with some papers. My youngest cousin. You needn’t spend any time with him. See that Vassily signs immediately. Once he has signed, call this number, and calm him down. I’ve heard he isn’t well.”
• • •
That evening, a new upright piano was delivered to Ian’s apartment. Yasha’s mother christened it with Scriabin. Daniil had fallen asleep reading through the divorce papers that Evgeny had delivered, and the pages fell to the floor as he rolled in bed, dreaming about his brother and a pack of hounds. At the back of a Delta Airbus, Vassily stretched his legs into the aisle, while Yasha looked out the window. Alexa looked for Yasha on the Sunset Terrace at Chelsea Piers. It was prom night.
PART THREE
• • •
The Yellow Room
To get to the Leknes Artist Colony, I had taken one train from Oslo to Trondheim, another from Trondheim to Bodø, and completed the journey by boat. The boat’s name was Hurtigruten, and it had been commercially crossing fjords since 1893. A man named With had captained its maiden voyage. A man named Nils would fetch me (they used the word fetch a lot, the Norwegians, and never in a canine context) from the Hurtigruten’s landing dock in Stamsund.
In Stamsund, in a loading area surrounded by small red houses, a man stood beside a brown car, holding a green can of beer and a kitchen rag. Seeing me, he waved his rag in the air, not smiling. I smiled furiously. I was sweating from working my suitcase down the Hurtigruten’s loading ramp. I wheeled it to him over loud pebbles. He popped open the trunk and said, “Nils.”
I was delighted. Here was a man so blank, so short, so clearly unflustered by these raging mountains, so disinclined to make a new friend—he couldn’t have had less to do with pregnancy, or divorce, or New Jersey. Here was mankind in his original state, I thought, in all his innocence.
He finished his beer while he drove. The mountains we drove through were horrifying—many-peaked and oversized—a species of mountain far wilder than the snowcapped triangles of picture books. The fjordwater that cut between the mountains was bright turquoise. Nils and I made our way up the E10 road across Vestvågøy, the fifth of six islands in an archipelago called Lofoten. It was two latitudinal degrees north of the Arctic Circle, separated from mainland Norway by the Vestfjord and mercifully warmed by the Gulf Stream. Tall flowers grew along the side of the road. Behind the flowers rose sheer gray rock. We drove until we reached a clearing, in the middle of which stood a long house with a curved roof that ended in dragon gargoyles. A stake with a blue sign read BORG. A shorter stake with a white sign read VIKINGMUSEET.
In the museum’s lobby, I signed the receptionist’s log. Nils led me out a side door, across a field, and into an empty barn. Light poured in through attic windows and shone on Nils’s brown sweater, brown shoes.
“You are to be my apprentice,” Nils said, and I felt I was being both knighted and warned.
“Yes,” I said. I’d seen pictures of this barn in the fellowship brochures, but its setting hadn’t been mentioned. I asked, “Is the Yellow Room part of the Viking Museum?”
“The Yellow Room stands alone,” Nils said. Then, flinging out his arm, he added, “These are my walls.” I looked around and found three of the barn walls painted over in a patchwork yellow mural. This was no simple monochrome; he had harnessed the difference between mustard and saffron to create the subtle outlines of fish, hexagons, extraordinary asymmetries. Nils pointed to the fourth wall and said, “Yours.” Three virgin brushes, an emptied bucket of Troms frozen prawns, and an assortment of acrylic tubes lay heaped at the base of my wall.
“The minister comes in one month,” Nils said. “The Yellow Room will be inspected by KORO officers, and if they like it, they will put me on the map.” I was surprised that Nils would use this colloquial expression, and then he pulled out an actual map. Small orange K’s marked hundreds of spots across the Norwegian mainland. A thin line connected each K to a thumbnail image: massive sculptures, neon light displays, geometric domes. Nils dragged his finger up the country, then across the Vestfjord to the amoeba shapes that represented the Lofoten Islands. “The government wants more art up here in the northern districts,” he said. “They pay for it. They give it to the people. And the people actually come to look.” Nils looked around the barn, giving each wall its turn.
“Use these walls as an example,” Nils said. “The fourth must be painted immediately, to be dry when the officers come. You will have time and silence, to concentrate. You will be alone in here. I will be painting the exterior.” I didn’t say anything, and Nils consoled me with “Music will play,” pointing toward a miniature battery-powered boom box I hadn’t seen in the corner. “Schubert,” Nils said, squatting and turning the volume up on a melody that had been playing all along. He said, “‘The Trout.’”
I listened, and the yellow walls pulsed when I blinked.
“Come,” Nils said, after a few measures. “The chief wants to meet the New Yorker.”
We walked toward lush black smoke and entered the museum’s smithy. The blacksmith welcomed me and suggested that I forge myself a nail. The chief was on his way. I sat beside a freestanding anvil, and the blacksmith presented me with a tiny hunk of iron. I only managed to strike the thing once, and weakly, each time the iron was hot. I struck four times. Then the blacksmith stuck the mangled nail back into the coals. Nils excused himself for a moment and vanished.
“I am Sigbjørn,” the blacksmith said, and with his free hand he shook mine.
“Frances,” I said.
He nodded. Sigbjørn had the build of a soccer player. He was thin and of medium height, but his frame suggested agility and power. Sandy hair had begun to recede from his temples, and he hadn’t shaved in a few days.
In a long, continuous gesture, Sigbjørn removed his tongs from the coal pile. The nail’s shaft was square from my four petty blows. Its tip was not sharp enough, and its head was not flat. He cooled the metal in a bucket of water. When its color had returned from orange to black, he placed the nail in my palm.
“You know about the sun?” Sigbjørn asked, plunging a new piece of iron into the coals. I told him I did not. “It never goes down,” he said, smiling. I was looking at the black stripe of iron in my hand, the darkest thing I would see for several months, when the chief entered and told me to call him Haldor. He was bald, had a red beard, and wore a red felt tunic. A leather belt cut into his significant belly, and a royal blue satchel hung over his left hip. The whole outfit was trimmed with what looked like teeth. He walked straight past me to the fire the blacksmith was goading and reached from his hip to the smoking coals. He stood a moment warming the one hand. Nils reappeared.
“New York,” Haldor said to Nils.
Sigbjørn rolled his sleeves all the way up to his shoulders, revealing his grotesquely wide forearms.
“We don’t know why she wanted to come here,” Sigbjørn said, “to Borg!”
“Have you done some shooting? Have you mounted the boat?” asked Haldor.
Sigbjørn said, “She hit the nail.”
“The boat goes at two.” Haldor pulled a wristwatch from his satchel. “Good time,” he said, replacing it.
“Take her to the boat. She cannot be only painting all the time, as you are,” Sigbjørn said to Nils.
I watched Nils consider this—he looked first embarrassed, then puzzled. He shifted his kitchen rag from one pocket to another.
“She has come here to paint all the time,” Nils said.
“She lives at the asylum?” Haldor asked.
“Where?” I asked.
“Ja,” Nils said. “We have not gone home yet. She has only just come from Bodø.”
“Straight to work,” Haldor said. “Nils. Take her home. Be civilized.”
Sigbjørn wiped coal onto his bruised leather apron. His movement made the teeth on Haldor’s tunic shake and clatter. Nils, the only modern man in the smithy, coughed from the fire’s smoke.
“How long will you stay?” Sigbjørn asked me
. “If she stays,” he said to Nils.
“Until the wedding. My sister is getting married,” I said to everyone in the hut.
“Fine!” Haldor said.
“In California,” I added, and turned my head to the left, as if it were the West.
“Fine!” Haldor said again.
Sigbjørn pulled a glowing orange lump from the coals. He began to whack it mercilessly.
Over the steady noise, Haldor said, “You will not leave us before the KORO inspection, I hope.” He looked to Nils and added, “The government is hard to please.”
“It is true that Nils is needing help,” Sigbjørn said. He kicked open a small door and emptied one bucket after another of ash, water, and scrap iron into the back field. The wind mixed the lighter pieces into a black vapor and spread the rest across the grass.
Right then Nils hurried out of the smithy, and I followed. The chief and the blacksmith remained, speaking all at once their own language. Nils was walking very fast in the direction of the docks, where I could make out a few figures and the approaching prow of a boat. We walked away from the sparse trees that surrounded the smithy. They added a bark smell to the hut’s smoke, and a few clouds rolled in from the water we were now running toward, making it all smell of camp, campfire.
“Why are you running?” I shouted ahead.
“Bad time,” Nils cried without turning his head back to me.
“I thought the chief said good time!”
“You see the boat?” Nils flung out a finger and shook it.
I caught up with him, and we ran the last stretch of the road side by side. Nils’s legs were short, like mine, and we pumped our arms. We were kicking dirt from the road onto the many roadside flowers—these were not house orchids, my mother had never told me their names—and into shrubs hung with dark berries. We both began to sweat. When it seemed we would have to stop to catch our breath or wipe our foreheads, we stopped. The path had ended.
The Sunlit Night Page 6