“What’s your name?” Yasha asked.
“Frances,” she said.
She didn’t seem to have any interest in him—she didn’t crowd him the way Alexa had, nor was she running away, his mother’s signature trick. He had nothing in particular to say to her, but he wanted to keep her attention—her level, undemanding attention. He wanted to simply say Please, as Nils had.
“I have to go,” Frances said. She went.
Yasha found her stunningly reliable.
• • •
It was dark inside Room 16. Yasha considered what might have happened had Frances stepped inside with him. When he parted the thick, sun-blocking curtains, every corner was blasted with a brightness he hadn’t anticipated. The walls were orange, the floor red, the ceiling blue. It felt like being inside the guts of an animal.
The room had two twin-sized beds against opposite walls. One bed frame was made of metal, the other of wood. Yasha sat on the wooden bed, still unmade from the night before. His hands looked freakishly white against his jeans, and the light in his eyes made the room fade, and his cheeks sweat, and his mouth dry. He yawned, swallowing and loosening his jaw.
As the light settled in his room, the colors mellowed slightly. Yasha focused on what lay outside. From his bed it seemed nothing but water, but standing up at the window he could see the shore that came first. Flat white sand. The water looked tropical and freezing. It was cleaner than Manhattan Beach—no cigarettes, no tubby Russians, no babies, no person of any kind, and no trash. A wild boar ate in its pen, on a small patch of grass between the beach and the museum.
Yasha yanked open the room’s rickety window. The air that came in felt like it had never touched anything before touching him right now, like it came directly from the place where air is made. He was glad to be up here. He wasn’t exactly glad to be at the Viking Museum. Vikings would always mean death to him now, just as they had to lots of people, he supposed. But he understood why his father had wanted to come up here. It was good here: far, high. He wondered why his father had never come up here while he was alive.
Things his father had done in his life: collected frogs, repaired radios, learned English, learned French, learned how to make bread, learned how to play the piano, married his piano teacher, moved to Brooklyn, opened the Gregoriov Bakery, painted the name Gregoriov over their awning in big blue letters.
Things his father had loved: the awning, a bialy in autumn, roller skates, his wife, the baby his wife gave him, the patronymic system that injected his own name into his son’s name, binding them forever, the Atlantic Ocean, fishes, the place he came from, the place he moved to, the whole planet, flour, yeast, salt, the subway named B.
Yasha wanted to schmear cream cheese on a bialy for his father. He wanted to serve it to him. The loss was spread unevenly over the day: he had been able to wake up this morning, and he was up on his feet, at least, thanks to Frances. Now that he was alone, the absence drew its invisible weapons. His gut-colored room was full of violence. He lay down, his head hanging off the side of the bed. All he could see was the red floor. The window, still open, let in a breeze that smelled of horse and pasture and lulled Yasha with its oxygen. The red of the floor disappeared and returned. It alternated with brown. When the light moved across the floor, his eyelids changed in color.
The sun was high. It could have been ten in the morning, or noon, or eight at night. It could have been midnight. No, it wasn’t midnight yet. Frances would be with him again at midnight. He would be with Papa again at midnight. Yasha pulled his head back onto the bed and pressed his face into the mattress.
• • •
Yasha slept for several hours, then woke up with a start, stood up, and left his room. He followed the smell of bread down the hallway, past a large metal sculpture of a tree, past the receptionist in the lobby, and straight ahead through the open double doors of the Ceremonial Hall. It was seven in the evening. Soon they would need to gather the necessary tools and drive the casket to Eggum, but the museum staff was dispersed—the Ceremonial Hall was empty. Then came the sound of boots stomping down the hallway.
“You haven’t eaten, my darling,” his mother said. “You’re starving.”
“I ate,” Yasha said. He hadn’t, and he was starving.
“What did you eat? This?” She surveyed the buffet platters: the bread was unsliced, the tea was red, the eggs were runny, and everything was pickled. She reached out and touched a piece of fish. It shook under her touch, and she drew her hand away.
“Herring,” she said. “My father’s favorite. I always hated the way it wiggles.”
Yasha couldn’t remember Russian herring. He could barely remember Brooklyn bagels. He saw a block of brown matter on a silver platter, and a cheese slicer with a handle in the shape of a bearded man. He gripped the man’s face and shaved off the top of the block. It tasted like nuts, caramel, and potatoes. It looked like solid peanut butter. A note lying before it on the table, in angular, rune-like handwriting, read, BROWN CHEESE.
“My darling,” his mother said while he was looking down at the cheese. “Here we are, aren’t we? Here we are.” She flapped her hands in the air, indicating the general space of the hall.
He did have a kind of urge toward her—to hold those hands, or let them hold him, for once, because it was Saturday, and they both knew what that meant. But he didn’t reach out to her, and his mother put her breakfast together. She sawed two slices of bread from the loaf. On the side of her plate she added a packet of mayonnaise she mistook for butter. Yasha stuffed a thin, heart-shaped waffle into his mouth.
Haldor had changed into a white tunic. He entered the hall now, looking clean and capable; his beard looked extra red. He bowed with his whole body again, deeply, to Yasha’s mother.
“It is a dark day,” he said.
Olyana nodded. Yasha looked out the Ceremonial Hall’s windows. The sun was as bright as it had been for the past thirty-six hours. The fjord was calm. The wild boar was sleeping.
“The darkest days are made of a weather we cannot help but admire,” Olyana said. She set her full plate down on the buffet table and picked up one of her slices of bread.
“Your English is very fine, Mrs. Gregoriov,” said Haldor.
“Chief Haldor”—Olyana curtsied—“my father was a wealthy man. If you can consider any Russian rich.” Nobody laughed, so she went on. “We had—we had so many pleasures. I grew up with tutors, you can imagine, and extra rooms, and herring in the morning. It wasn’t for me, such luxuries,” she said. “I married a baker.”
She held the bread up as evidence. She chewed. Haldor spoke about the darkness of Russian bread compared to the darkness of Norwegian bread. The Norwegian bread, even at its darkest, was lighter than Russia’s black bread. Yasha didn’t know what they were talking about, or why they were talking. He asked to go back to his room. As he walked away, he heard Haldor begin to speak about sunberries.
• • •
There was no such thing as sunberries. There was no such thing as chitchatting about imaginary fruit on the day of your husband’s funeral. Yasha grabbed the doorknob to his room. Through the door of the room next to his, he heard Frances speaking. The museum had given her Room 18 for the night, to spare her the trip back to Leknes. All this meant to Yasha was that Frances would be separated from her teacher and their strange yellow barn. She would be sleeping one wall away from him. Somebody answered her—a few people, but none of them sounded like Nils. He stepped over to her door and listened.
Frances was saying, “Their children will not be assholes.”
“How do you know?” a man shouted.
“Like father, like son!” a woman shouted.
There was a silence. Yasha knocked on her door.
“One second!” he heard, and shuffling. “Ett øyeblikk!”
When she opened the door, she was wearing yellow short-shorts. He couldn’t look at them, but he couldn’t look too hard at her shirt either. He was pretty sure
it had flowers on it. He looked down. Her legs were tan and smooth.
“Sorry,” Frances said, “I didn’t think I was needed until ten.”
“You aren’t needed,” Yasha said. He regretted saying that. “I wanted to thank you for before,” he said. “I’m interrupting.”
“Ongoing family crisis,” she said. “Is there anything you—” she hurried to tighten the drawstring of her shorts. “Anything you need?”
Behind her, Yasha could see her laptop open on a little desk by the window and a tiny man and woman on the computer screen. The woman waved slightly. He waved back. The woman waved more vigorously.
“Who’s your friend?” came from the laptop’s speakers.
“This is Yasha,” Frances said, turning away from Yasha, leaving the door open and walking back to the desk by the window.
“Yasha, Yasha, Yasha,” said the man.
“Are you the dad?” Yasha said.
“I’m the dad.”
Yasha nodded. “My dad just died.”
The man and the woman stopped bobbing around.
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “We’ve just been hearing about the funeral your family has planned. How extraordinary it will be.”
“I only told them about his wish,” Frances said, “the top-of-the-world one.”
“He makes dying sound good,” the dad said.
“Saul,” said the mom.
Yasha took in Frances’s room. Like his own, hers had two separate twin beds. The bed she slept on was made, the other had paintbrushes and necklaces scattered across it. One change of black clothes lay neatly folded in her open closet, and the window curtains were drawn to the side, revealing her head-on view of the wild boar’s pen. Her toenails were painted orange.
“My parents needed to talk to me before the ceremony begins,” she said.
“Where do your parents live?” Yasha asked. He didn’t know why he’d entered her room, but having been admitted, he wanted to stay.
“New York,” her parents answered in unison.
Yasha sat in Frances’s desk chair. “I used to live there.”
“In the city?” the dad said.
“In Brooklyn,” Yasha said. “The Gregoriov Bakery.”
“Your family?”
“My father and I,” Yasha said. He looked at Frances. “I didn’t know you were from New York.”
“Born and raised,” said the dad. “Now, you, I think you were born somewhere else.”
“Saul.”
“I mean, just maybe! Were you born somewhere else?”
“Please don’t interrogate him, Dad,” said Frances.
“Russia,” said Yasha.
“See!” cried the dad.
“I’m sorry,” said Frances.
“It’s no problem,” Yasha said. “I didn’t need anything.” Squatting to speak into the microphone, he said, “It was nice to meet you both.” Frances looked embarrassed. He liked having embarrassed her; he hadn’t thought he was capable. He left.
Her dad’s voice, audible from within the room, restarted the conversation with, “Well, he…”
Yasha walked back down the hall, toward the door that led out to the parking lot, to see if the casket was still there.
“Who lives in that room?” Yasha’s mother called to him. She was standing in the lobby, looking at the Yggdrasil tree sculpture.
“No one,” Yasha said. “A girl—”
“Yakov,” his mother said, “you didn’t tell me you’d taken a lover.”
“Jesus Christ,” Yasha said.
“We don’t use that expression. Look at this,” she said, forgetting his lover. “It says it’s a tree of life!”
Yasha approached her with caution.
“And there’s a goat!” she said.
He looked up at the enormous metal sculpture. There wasn’t any goat. There was, as far as he could see, one bronze tree trunk, anchored in three places to the floor of the lobby, with many branches extending up toward the lobby’s low, domed ceiling. He noticed, for the first time, four wooden dwarves, which had been glued to the ceiling, evenly spaced around the tree. Each dwarf wore a shirt with a different letter: N, S, V, and Ø.
Still, he couldn’t see any goat.
“Where?” Yasha said.
“‘The goat stands on the roof of Valhalla and eats its leaves,’” Olyana read from a plaque, bending down to the height of the pedestal. She looked very funny to Yasha, so short. Her whole body was collected, a clump, under her long black dress. When she stood to full height again, he could see that she had always been taller than his father. She was almost as tall as Yasha. On the plaque, where she pointed, a diagram showed the complete system of Yggdrasil.
The sculpture replica was incomplete. There was no miniature Valhalla under the tree, only a metal floor molded to look like grass. Yasha put both his hands on the trunk.
“Don’t touch,” Olyana said. “It says don’t touch. Don’t touch the tree of life. Well, can you imagine!” she said, smiling. “Four dwarves are responsible for holding up the sky.”
“Where do you think Papa is?” Yasha asked, not smiling, still touching the tree. “With the dwarves in the sky or down with the goat? I think he’s under the goat. In the big hall.”
“Yasha. You think your father is in Valhalla?”
“I do.”
“Well.” She ran her hands through her hair. The corners of her mouth, which were giddy by nature, fell.
“‘Valhalla,’” she read from the plaque. “‘The hall of the slain. At Valhalla, dead warriors drink mead from the udders of the goat called Heiðrún. But there is never so big a crowd in Valhalla that they don’t get enough pork from the boar called Sæhrímnir. He is boiled every day, and comes alive every evening.’ Well. Your father was no warrior, Yasha,” she said.
“And he didn’t like to eat red meat. But where do you think you’ll go?” Yasha said. He pointed to the diagram, tapping at three different places. “Asgard? Valhalla? Niflheim?”
“Stop that, dear.” Olyana said.
“No, really. Where do you think?” Yasha bent down the way she had. He sensed that somehow he was gaining on her. “See, if you go up with the dwarves, you have to deal with the wolves who are chasing the sun, and if you go down under the tree’s roots”—he kicked the trunk and lost his balance, then got it back—“there’s a crazy hedgehog down there, chewing at the roots, pretty rough, and below the hedgehog there’s a serpent, and you—”
Olyana read aloud over Yasha’s talking. She bent down next to him, at the level of the plaque, their shoulders touching. “‘THIS COSMIC PILLAR,’” she read, “‘at the centre of the world is described as a giant ash tree’”—she swept one arm in a rainbow motion—“‘binding together the disparate parts of the universe.’”
Yasha went quiet and let her big voice bounce off the lobby walls. He looked at the tree. Here it was, binding together the disparate parts of the universe.
“Don’t worry,” Yasha said, standing up. “Papa isn’t with the goat. I don’t know where he is, you don’t know where he is. That’s okay. It’s good where he is. He has lots of flour and ovens there, and when you die, you won’t have anything because you don’t love anything.”
Olyana was still crouching when she looked up at her son. She was red now, not only in her hair, but in her cheeks and neck. As she blushed, her eyes darkened.
Yasha turned away from his mother and found Haldor’s great belly waiting directly behind him. They were standing nose to nose.
“We are prepared,” Haldor said to Yasha, “and at your service,” he continued, bowing to Olyana. Yasha wondered how Haldor could have arrived so soundlessly.
“Yes, my son was just telling me something terribly interesting,” Olyana said, running her hand through her hair and then reaching it out to Haldor, who held it. “About Valhalla.”
“Valhalla!” Haldor said, helping her up. “I didn’t know it was familiar to you.”
The three o
f them turned back to the tree. Its bulging roots sank into the lobby floor, as if continuing into the underworld.
“You would have made a fine Valkyrie, Mrs. Gregoriov,” Haldor said. “They were tall women, like you, with wings.”
“I would have made a fine goat,” Yasha said.
“No, no,” Haldor said, shaking a finger, “at Valhalla it is a very special goat. Very special goat, Hei#thrún. Mead comes out of her … her …”
“Nipples?” Olyana said.
“Ja,” said Haldor.
Nobody spoke.
“We go the way to Eggum,” Haldor said.
• • •
It was undeniably Saturday, and closer by the minute to midnight. Yasha couldn’t stop the time, now that it had come. They were all doing what they were supposed to be doing. Everybody was doing so much that Yasha had nothing to do. Frances was filling the bed of a pickup truck with blankets. Nils had excused himself from the funeral. The inspection of his life’s work, he’d apologized, would begin first thing in the morning. He needed to prepare, and to sleep. Frances, he’d said, would unfortunately have to go directly from the midnight funeral to the early inspection.
Yasha helped her with the last blanket. Next were the sheepskins; they piled those on together. Frances filled a crate with thermos bottles, and Yasha packed the collapsible plastic tables. The deck was almost full. Haldor threw a great mass of rope on top of the sheepskins. Yasha loaded one red-handled and one yellow-handled shovel onto the pickup.
A young man pulled a utility trailer into the parking lot. He smiled at Frances, and then stopped smiling when he saw Yasha.
“Your father will ride here,” he said.
“Who are you?” Yasha asked.
“Sigbjørn. The blacksmith.”
Yasha examined the trailer. It was silver, and it hadn’t been cleaned.
“Yakov Vassiliovich Gregoriov.” Yasha shook Sigbjørn’s hand. He took off his thin green sweater and wiped down the surface where the casket would rest. He clumped the sweater into a ball and rubbed out the dirty corners.
The Sunlit Night Page 10