“I can take Frances back to the asylum now,” Nils told Haldor, who had just reached the lobby door. “Thank you anyway for giving her a room.”
“Only a pleasure,” Haldor said. He opened the door and Olyana strode through it.
Nils walked slowly toward his car. Frances stood frozen in place. Yasha stood behind her. He couldn’t shout, Don’t go. He dragged his foot through the gravel, disrupting hundreds of tiny pebbles and hoping their noise reached Frances’s ears.
“My things are unpacked here,” Frances told Haldor.
Yasha had seen her room—how little she’d unpacked. A toothbrush. A few paintbrushes scattered over her second bed. The change of black clothes she currently wore. She had no reason to stay at the museum, unless he had become a reason.
Nils stopped walking.
“Go on without me,” she told him. “I’m here, and I’m half asleep already.”
“You have everything you need?” Nils asked.
“We will make her comfortable,” Haldor declared. He walked into the lobby and straight toward a supply closet.
Nils gave one glance to Yasha, and Yasha hid from it, turning his eyes down to see the line his foot had drawn in the dirt. Again, now, he heard Nils’s slow steps, this time moving farther off.
Sigbjørn detached the trailer from the truck and wheeled it back toward the shed. Passing Yasha, he stopped. He rested the trailer hitch in the gravel and placed both of his hands on Yasha’s shoulders.
“You were superfine tonight,” Sigbjørn said. “We will be seeing each other.”
“I don’t think we would have made it through the night without you,” Yasha told him.
“Only a pleasure,” Sigbjørn said. “Of course, very sad.” He bade them a hasty and serious goodnight, then wheeled the empty trailer away. Yasha tried to picture Sigbjørn’s grandmother, eighty-seven years old, likely named Gerta, or Blorg.
Nils’s car coughed and started.
“Hey, Frances,” Yasha said. “You want to get out of here or what?” He felt he was catching a ball that had been thrown to someone else, and now he had to run with it.
“Out of here where?” she said.
“The lobby,” Yasha said. “Yggdrasil.”
They linked arms, spontaneously and a little childishly, Yasha thought, and walked up toward the lobby. When they got to the door, Yasha unlinked his arm and held the door open for her. He extended his other arm fully out to the side, like a butler, and made a small bow. Frances giggled, and Yasha grew pale.
The tree of life stood there, bronze and reaching up all its branches. The four dwarves, each in his little shirt, were still glued to the ceiling. Yasha remembered what his mother had said about the dwarves holding up the sky—his mother, where was she? His head filled with a number of answers, most of which involved Haldor.
“What did you want to do here?” Frances said.
“Check out the dwarves,” Yasha said, which sounded like something only a moron would say, and which made Frances nod blankly. She turned away and looked through the window that showed the barn. The inspection would begin in a few hours. The flat, open calm her face had shown after the funeral had been replaced by strain and worry. This wasn’t his moment.
“I have to say goodnight to my mother,” he said.
“I understand,” said Frances, with a little disappointment in her voice, Yasha hoped.
They walked down the corridor. Yasha walked straight to the door of Room 20, not in fact knowing whether his mother would be inside, and Frances stopped in front of Room 18. The doors were several feet apart from each other, making it impossible even to hug.
“Goodnight,” Frances said. “Sleep well.” She opened her door and disappeared.
Yasha knocked on his mother’s door.
“Come in,” Olyana answered.
Yasha had not yet been inside his mother’s room. When he opened the door, he found her lying in a large bed. He walked closer and saw that she had pushed her twin beds together, one wire and one wood, of even heights, making a functional queen size. She lay covered by two overlapping blankets, each wide enough for only one half of the bed. She wore a nightgown, an elegant one, high-necked, cream-colored, and patterned with vines of small flowers. The gown was more dignified than Yasha considered his mother to be, though it was no more dignified than she considered herself to be, and he realized this as he came to the side of her bed.
“I miss Papa,” Yasha said, before he could stop himself.
“I do too.”
“You didn’t miss him for ten years.”
“I did,” she said, “but I went about my business.” To Yasha, the word business meant either bread or sex. “You will be fine without your father,” his mother said. She removed the barrettes from her hair and set them down on her table, alongside her watch and bracelet. “You were fine”—she smiled—“without me.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Now as to whether you’ll be fine without your girlfriend,” she went on, “harder to say. What will you do, my darling? Bring her home to Brooklyn? Where does she live?”
“She isn’t my girlfriend.”
“Heaven knows she won’t want to live over that bakery,” his mother said, fluffing the hair that had been flattened by her barrettes. “But for love, perhaps, as I did—imagine two generations of women, moving into bakeries for love!”
“She is not my girlfriend!”
His mother settled fully into the bed, pulling a duvet over her breasts. She looked regal, and powerless. “Very well,” she said, “she isn’t.”
It was an argument Yasha hadn’t really wanted to win.
“I don’t know why she isn’t,” he said.
“You’re a bit moth-eaten.”
“I’m what?”
“A bit of a shabby flop,” his mother said.
Yasha looked at the lacy collar that frothed around her long, thin neck and said, “You’re a bitch.”
His mother felt her forehead with the heel of her palm, as if taking her own temperature. “I heard you at the funeral, little man. You do not pity me. You needn’t use uglier words.” She turned away from him. “I must sleep. Chief Haldor was kind enough to come by and give me this tea.” She pointed to a mug that was still completely full. “He has things to say to us in the morning. Let us meet for breakfast at nine.”
It was probably three o’clock in the morning. The grass was full of sunshine. Yasha felt he’d been useless all night. He didn’t know how to make anyone tea. Tea tasted like soap. He hated tea, and he hated himself for hating tea. He had no idea what he would do come morning, unlike that miserable painter and his pretty apprentice, who had something big to do. He had led Frances back to the lobby and paid more attention to the ceiling than to her. On his mother’s bedside table, under the barrettes, the watch, and the bracelet, a form titled PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE lay flat, bearing his father’s signature.
“I can’t wait until you’re gone again,” Yasha said.
“I think I’ll stay a little while,” she said, “before we go back to logistics…” She waved a hand over the papers. “Take in the fjord country. What about your girlfriend, Yakov, is she taking off? Cut your hair,” she said. “It will give you a better chance with her.”
Yasha left the room. In the hallway, he could hear Kurt in kitchen, chopping, and Frida talking about a vacuum.
He walked a few steps down the hall and stopped at the door to Frances’s room. Frida’s vacuum started up in the kitchen. It made a howling sound that Yasha couldn’t bear. He had become terribly, terribly tired. He was a shabby flop. He pressed one palm against Frances’s door, then the other, then his forehead, making three dull thuds. A latch moved, and suddenly the door opened. Yasha fell forward into the room. He stood just over the threshold as Frances cleared her second bed of a dozen multicolored gel pens, a necklace bearing a figurine of a ballerina, a bundle of paintbrushes, and her socks, which had been set out to d
ry. Yasha saw the open expanse of the cleared bed, removed his shoes, and lay down.
• • •
The wild boar was awake and rubbing itself vigorously against one side of its pen. A new load of apples had been thrown in, reddening and brightening the ground. Yasha had one eye open. The other had not yet given up on sleep. A blanket covered his body, though he could see his feet sticking out at the far side. No shoes. It was true, then, the final image his consciousness was now offering up—that he had knocked, or in a way, fallen, on Frances’s door, and that he had taken his shoes off by the door, with a kind of diligence he could not this morning fathom, and gone to sleep on her second, bare bed. He rolled his one open eye, as slowly as possible, to the left.
Frances was there, in her bed. She too was covered entirely by a blanket, except for her shoulders, each marked by a thin gray strap. Yasha was perfectly awake now. So was Frances. She lay on her side, facing Yasha, her hair tied up in a bun. The room was about twelve feet wide.
To speak would require a significant movement of the lungs, parts of his body buried deep under the covers and practically nonexistent; the realm of what existed had drastically contracted, in the last forty seconds, to Frances’s face and shoulders, his own feet, and the wild boar. He had no idea what Frances was thinking. The width of the room felt engineered for the special purpose of reminding Yasha that he would never, in all his life, touch the gray-strapped shoulders of the girl across from him. He imagined his married life taking place in the black-and-white bedroom set of I Love Lucy, the beds always separated, her hair always in a bun.
Yasha wanted to cross the room and join her in her faraway bed, something he should have tried last night, with the pretense of being too tired to think, if only it had been a pretense and he had been able to think at all. He’d chosen the wrong bed. The right room, at least, he told himself, and wanted so badly to stand up just then, but couldn’t, because of his pants. That would pass soon. As he was checking the contour of the sheets over his crotch, Frances pushed back her covers, shattering the room’s stillness. It hadn’t been a bra. She was wearing a gray tank top, and the yellow short-shorts. “Morning, Yasha,” she said, as she walked to the small sink at the foot of her bed.
Yasha imagined a HELLO! MY NAME IS name tag that read MOURNING YASHA and knew he would be wearing it for a long time.
She ran her toothbrush under the faucet. “You were really tired,” she said. “Sleep well?”
There she was, brushing her teeth in front of him, an intimacy that flattered him tremendously. He turned away from her shorts, in the hopes of eventually standing up. The blinking clock radio on her night table read 9:09.
“We have to go to breakfast,” Yasha said.
“Weckfeth?” She spat her toothpaste into the sink. “News to me. What have I missed?”
Yasha wanted to answer that question at length, starting with his mother’s breakfast plans and progressing in time through his crusty childhood and his interest in building origami cubes out of MetroCards, but it was 9:10 now, and she was in pajamas, and he was still wearing his funeral clothes.
“I’m going to change,” he said, and stood up. It wasn’t too bad down there. He didn’t need to tuck it under his belt. Even better, she hadn’t seen him check. She was still bent down over the sink, rinsing her mouth out with cupped handfuls. She looked like a rabbit. He didn’t want to leave.
“I’ll be back in a minute, in a different shirt,” he said. “I’ll pick you up,” he was pleased to say. “We’ll go together. Breakfast in the Ceremonial Hall, with my mother and Haldor. He has many things to say to us.”
“If I’m not in the barn in about five minutes, Nils will weep,” Frances said. She wiped her mouth with a towel and buttoned a collared shirt over her tank top, hiding the straps Yasha loved. “The officers arrived an hour ago.”
“I forgot about the inspection.”
“Turn around, would you?”
Yasha obeyed and presently heard the unmistakable sound of her shorts falling to the floor. A moment later, when he was permitted to turn, he found her fully dressed.
“Let’s go,” she said, leading him to the door.
Yasha wanted to go with her. To go anywhere, shamelessly. Instead, he stood still as she walked off toward the exit, toward the barn, where Nils stood waiting.
“We should stay,” Yasha called.
“Why not?” Frances answered over her shoulder. “We’ve got nowhere to go.” She tucked her shirt into her pants and rebundled her hair at the top of her head. Yasha wished her luck, then wished himself the same.
• • •
Haldor wore his Sunday clothes at the breakfast table: a black tunic with white accents that made him look vaguely like a minister. Olyana wore a silk blouse with enormous sleeves. She and Haldor sat across from each other at a table neatly set for three.
“You may stay until and no later than the first of September,” Haldor said, as soon as Yasha sat down. Haldor held his knife in one hand and his fork in the other, sharp ends up.
“How did you know I wanted to stay?” Yasha said, hearing his own voice sound miserably young.
“Why only the first of September?” his mother added right away.
“Yakov,” Haldor said, “your mother and I have spoken.”
Your mother and I! Papa himself had never used the phrase. Papa himself—it had only been nine hours since they’d buried him. Papa’s self could not have decomposed yet, not entirely. Yasha took up Haldor’s position: fork in one hand, knife in one hand, sharp ends up.
“Frances also wants to stay,” Yasha told Haldor. “I can only stay if she stays with me.” Olyana smacked the back of Yasha’s hand approvingly. His knife jiggled. He wanted to tell her that she had nothing to do with it, but he wasn’t sure that was true.
“Everyone can stay,” Haldor said, “until I leave for a twelve-night cruise of the Baltic capitals,” he said. “The ship departs from the Oslofjord on the first of September, which is also the day we close the Viking Museum for the autumn. Of course,” he said, “this is not a co-in …” He turned to Olyana. “Co-in …”
“Coincidence,” said Olyana.
Haldor smiled and waved his fork in the air, saying, “Olyana and her English.” He started over. “This is not a coincidence, as it is I who plans the calendars.”
Kurt appeared beside their table, bearing a tray full of meat.
“Certainly you are ready for your breakfast, Yakov, after last night’s labors. Kurt!” Haldor said. “Deal out the sausages.”
Kurt served Haldor first, filling his plate with four sausages that were four different shades of brown. He served three to Olyana, and two to Yasha.
Yasha was about to demand that Kurt fill his plate properly, when Haldor said, “Your mother will be joining the museum staff, in the position of Acting Valkyrie.” Olyana’s eyes flashed with pride. “We need her for battlefield reenactments. Yakov, you can choose jobs one by one. The same for Frances. I will pay you both by the day. We will need help with the Icelandic horses—they are very short and hungry—and the kitchen, and the cleaning, and sometimes the boat.”
“We aren’t quite ready to leave this marvelous place, are we, little man?” Olyana asked.
Yasha chewed slowly and absently. Behind Haldor, out the window, at the top of the hill, a line of four inspectors filed into the barn. He couldn’t see Frances or Nils. He imagined them welcoming the officers, both terrified. Nils no longer seemed puny to Yasha, nor did the barn seem inconsequential. Nils had something to show for himself, and he had Frances at his side.
“I didn’t think you all would want to stay here,” Haldor said.
Yasha and his mother said simultaneously, “I do.”
Kurt, who was still standing beside the table, said, “Orange juice?” To which Haldor bellowed, “Ja!”
There were questions, accusations, building up in Yasha’s mind, and he was thinking of when to spring them. Questions about Manhattan, and Bro
oklyn, and the fall. Questions about who would visit Eggum regularly, after September, to check that the grave was intact, if they could find it out on the beach. Questions about Icelandic horses. Questions about Frances and Nils.
Haldor seemed content. He was done with his meat, and his belly brushed the edge of the table. He stretched his arms out at his sides, as if to hold both Yasha’s and Olyana’s hands. Yasha’s fingers reflexively bunched into a fist. But Haldor only let his arms drop and said, after a yawn, “I am so glad you both can stay.”
Olyana said, “I am sure Vassily is happy to have us here a little longer.”
“Excuse me,” Yasha said. He stood up, pushed his chair in under the table, folded his napkin neatly in half, and slammed it onto the table. He walked out of the Ceremonial Hall, through the lobby, past Yggdrasil, and out the museum’s back door.
• • •
Yasha had not yet explored the full grounds of the museum. The hours preceding the funeral had been filled with sleep and food. A complete Norse arena lay just outside his room. Families had come out for the museum’s activities. He walked down the beach toward giant archery targets. A ten-year-old girl was aiming a child-sized bow and pulling back, with all her strength, a magnificent arrow.
Yasha stopped a good distance away, so as not to distract from her shot. She let the arrow go—it flew up for a moment before plunging into the dirt, well short of the target. A slightly older boy came trotting up behind her, teasing her from atop a shaggy pony. A woman arrived at the far side of the shooting fields to greet her children. She was standing at the foot of a trail that stretched behind her, and as she rushed to the now crying girl, Yasha ran past them to the opening where the woman had stood. He lacked a sense of direction, a map. He wanted to know where everything was. He followed the trail along its short curve to a hut. The hut had no front door, its whole front gaped open, and smoke bloomed from it in spurts.
“Superfine, Yasha,” Sigbjørn said. “Good morning.”
The Sunlit Night Page 13