The Sunlit Night

by Rebecca Dinerstein

  • • •

  “Please come,” I said into the microphone.

  “We’re not coming,” my mother said.

  “Not a chance!” bellowed my father.

  “You are breaking Sarah’s heart,” I said, knowing very well that broken hearts didn’t scare them. Hard to say whether my parents considered their own hearts long since shattered, or whether they believed that people were more durable than all that.

  “And she is breaking mine,” my mother said, surprising me by taking up the expression.

  I said, “I’m still going.”

  “And now you are breaking mine,” my mother said.

  “And you are breaking mine,” I said.

  “Enough of this,” said my father.

  There was a pause in the conversation, and I heard a knock at my door.

  “Come in!” my mother shouted.

  I went and opened the door. Yasha stood there, with sand all over his pants and in his hair and, oddly, in his eyebrows.

  “What have you been doing?” I asked.

  “Poles. How do you like the room?”

  I thanked him for talking to Haldor. I would have kissed him right then, had my parents not been watching.

  “Gregoriov!” my father called out. “Come in.”

  “We haven’t seen you since the funeral,” my mother said.

  “It went well.” Yasha walked up to the screen. “Frances helped.”

  “Oh did she?” said my father. “With what?”

  “The blessing,” said Yasha.

  My mother looked incredulous.

  “I said the Mourner’s Kaddish,” I told her. “Yasha’s mother wanted someone to say it.”

  My mother took her glasses off, folded the arms in, and placed them down on her table. She leaned close to the camera, so that I could see the blood vessels in her eyes. I had never seen her look so tired. “A Jewish funeral,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was thinking of her mother’s, years ago, or her own, years from now, or about my sister’s wedding.

  The next thing my mother said was, “Marry our daughter.”

  I saw Yasha’s chest inch backward, as if his lungs alone were trying to leave the room. He looked at me, then at the sand on the floor, and then his head fell to the side and he looked into the camera at a slant. He bunched his lips and his eyebrows semi-indignantly, as if someone had played a joke on him but he hadn’t gotten it.

  My mother must have been joking, but she was smiling the way she smiled when she was deathly serious, and she had begun waving her glasses around like a wand, very excited, with every word.

  “She’s just about your age, what are you, nineteen?” my mother said.

  “Seventeen,” said Yasha, “and I thought Frances was twenty-one.”

  “Sarah,” my mother said, “Sarah.” I gaped at the screen. “Sarah is twenty, and in some deranged rush, you see, to get married. So you see, she might as well marry you, if she’s going to do it—I’d prefer that, I’d prefer your mother, sounds like, to Scott’s, I’ll tell you one thing,” my mother said, now aiming the glasses directly at Yasha, “Scott Glenny’s mother would never ask anybody to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish. I’ll tell you that right now.”

  Even my father looked embarrassed. He looked most like Harpo Marx when he was embarrassed—like Harpo caught with oranges down his pants. I loved it when my family’s severity broke. It never happened to more than one of us at a time. When my parents yelled hideous things at each other, Sarah laughed. When Sarah touched the cow in the replica Corot hanging on our living room wall, my father slapped her hand, then my mother stroked it. When my mother told Yasha to marry Sarah, my father blushed and rubbed his ear.

  “I understand if you want to leave,” I said to Yasha. “You probably want to leave.”

  “Why should he?” said my mother.

  “I have to call our landlord,” Yasha managed to say into the camera. “He’s been taking care of my cat.”

  “By all means,” said my father. “Good to see you, Gregoriov.”

  “You can use my computer,” I said.

  “Not yet,” said my mother. “We haven’t gotten anywhere.”

  “I’m going to use the phone in the kitchen,” Yasha said. He was already at my door. “Nice sack,” he said, taking in my outfit from a distance.

  “Think about it,” my mother shouted, putting her glasses back on. “Will you?”

  Yasha left. I bent down to the floor, partly to get away from the webcam, partly to clean up the sand. It was sunny, and each little grain was visible against my green floor. I wondered why the color green signified envy. I had never been jealous of my sister before: not when she French-kissed before I had ever held hands, not when she officially became Scott Glenny’s girlfriend before I had ever called anyone my boyfriend, not when she got engaged the same day Robert dumped me. I was jealous now. My mother’s ridiculous suggestion made the floor seem particularly green.

  “Your sister is beautiful,” my mother said, when I stood up. “And I love her. I love her more than I can bear.”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s not sick, or pregnant—”

  “She’s not what?” said my father.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s happy.”

  “I’m so unhappy, I could combust,” my mother said under her breath.

  “Come to the wedding,” I said. “It’s the only thing you can do. You’ll see her, she’ll look more beautiful than you’ve ever seen her before. You’ll see them together. Really see them. Take your glasses off and look at them. They’re good.” I wanted to say: They’re better than you. They’re choosing to stick together. They’re better than you at love. Instead, I said, “Come with me.”

  “That was some lousy hell of a locker-room pep talk,” my father said.

  “Go find that Gregoriov boy and tell him I meant it,” my mother said. “There’s some way out. Who knows? It might not be him, it might be him, cute curly-haired Russian, who knows? In any case, I haven’t given up.”

  “I have,” I said. “Bye.” I started looking for the button to hang up.

  “Come home,” my father said. Then he realized his mistake. He looked around at the apartment, full of boxes. I knew we were both thinking of something he’d once said: There won’t be a house for you anyway.

  • • •

  Frida sat in the kitchen, breast-feeding her baby girl. Yasha came in and stopped short. Frida’s enormous breast was hoisted up over her shirt’s low neckline. It looked like the breast was about to rip the shirt. Her baby had blond hair, short and white just like Frida’s. They were really something together. Frida, Mini-Frida. Breast, shirt, mouth, tiny baby hands. Yasha hadn’t yet been discovered. Frida had her eyes closed, and could have been sleeping were it not for her nose, which flinched and flinched until she sneezed. Her eyes opened.

  “I forgot your name,” Frida said. “Hello.”

  “Yakov Vassiliovich Gregoriov,” Yasha said. “Pardon me.”

  Yasha had forgotten why he’d come in, and Frida didn’t ask him. The baby slurped, very audibly in the otherwise silent room, and Yasha listened, and watched, staring in the direction of Frida’s nipple, which the baby’s cheeks concealed. He had forgotten himself completely.

  Kurt came in the back entrance and said, “Lunchtime!”

  Yasha jumped and said, “Fine, so, yes, well, right, the phone.”

  “The phone?” said Frida. The baby went on. “It is on the wall.”

  Kurt pointed to the wall between two industrial refrigerators. Yasha retreated into the nook with relief. He dialed Mr. Dobson’s number. The rings were long and there were many of them.

  Mr. Dobson had just woken up. It was seven o’clock in the morning in Brooklyn, and did Yasha realize he was calling so early? And good morning, Gregoriov, and was Russia full of those, what are they, samovars? The whole boulevard wasn’t right without its Gregoriovs, Mr. Dobson said. Yasha pressed the receiver hard against his ear
and listened behind Dobson’s voice for the sounds of a possible cat. He heard a television. Gregoriov, Mr. Dobson said, samovars?

  Yasha wished he had written a script. There was a great deal of information to deliver, likely to be followed by questions he’d have to answer, and he hadn’t adequately prepared. Frances’s parents had startled him, rushed him out into the kitchen. Frida’s breast had startled him. Kurt’s Lunchtime! had startled him, rushed him right to the phone. It was seven o’clock in New York. Frances’s parents were evidently early risers. Mr. Dobson was also awake and on the line.

  “Hello,” Yasha said. “It’s just Yasha. My father isn’t here anymore.”

  “Where has the grump gone,” Dobson began, “hunting rabbits?” Dobson’s voice was rough in the phone, not fully awake, and Yasha was only half listening, half watching the baby’s boneless jaw pump milk down her miniature throat. Frida was humming. Kurt was wiping down the stovetop. “Gregoriov,” Dobson said, “where is the old grump? Can’t go on with these empty shop windows forever,” he said, and Yasha saw again the bakery windows, full of Danishes, full of light, full of the unusually visible sea wind, and the sea out there, not this arctic sea, the American Atlantic: larger, dirtier, hotter. “Said it was a vacation,” Dobson said, “so, hello, enough. Time’s up.”

  “My father passed away two weeks ago, Mr. Dobson,” Yasha said. “Time is up.”

  Mr. Dobson’s silence on the other end of the line gave Yasha a moment to watch Kurt rotate all the sausages. He looked at Yasha while he flipped them. Kurt had been participating in the phone call by way of a sympathetic pout, until Agnes came into the kitchen right then through the back entrance and stood behind Kurt and squeezed him around the waist. At least this man wouldn’t compete with him for Frances, Yasha saw. Agnes lodged her head into the space between Kurt’s shoulder blades. Her head faced left, where Frida was lifting the baby’s bangs, tying the hair up until the baby looked like a spouting whale. The pink sides of the sausages went down, the charred sides faced up, and the steam and the smell made the baby squirm. In the corner of the grill, a pile of onions caramelized. Even in the silence, Yasha could not hear his cat.

  Mr. Dobson was sorry. He couldn’t believe—Vassily Gregoriov. Yasha could not quite stand Dobson’s real and audible sadness. It intensified his own pain, pulled it up to the surface of his skin where the hurt became especially active, making sweat or tears drip out. Mr. Dobson had never been emotional. He had been brash and cheerful, and had shouted and sung, and even the one time his father had handed Dobson a challah fresh out of the oven and the crust had been hot, and Dobson’s index finger and thumb had burned, Dobson hadn’t minded any more than a loud shout and then it was over. He had been forgiving, friendly. Good riddens. Dobson couldn’t say that anymore. Hadn’t it come true? “I can’t believe it,” Mr. Dobson said, “that man.”

  “I need you to submit an obituary,” Yasha said. “I want it in the Russian papers, and the Times. It can be short. It just needs to say that he lived, and we loved him, and he died.”

  “Yasha,” Mr. Dobson said. “Yes,” he said. “But—”

  “I’m in Norway,” Yasha said. “I don’t know when I’m coming home—it depends on this girl.”

  Mr. Dobson said he didn’t know a thing about girls, and he didn’t know a thing about the New York Times.

  “Ten words,” Yasha said. “Send it over. They’ve got to have an obit department, no? Mail it in. Ten words. Vassily Gregoriov, beloved father, lived in Russia and Brooklyn, died in Russia, buried at the top of the world. I guess that’s twenty words. Could be fifty if you add a few, Mr. Dobson,” Yasha said. “You can mention the bread. I want it in the papers next week.”

  “I can do it,” Mr. Dobson said. “Who will pay for it?”

  “I will,” Yasha said. Kurt had turned off the heat and was leaning against the edge of the counter, watching Yasha talk. Frida watched, and Agnes watched while she scrubbed a pair of crusty horseshoes. The baby reached for Frida’s breast with both of her hands. Yasha reached into his pocket and felt a heavy coin worth twenty Norwegian kroner.

  “One more thing,” Yasha said. “I’m going to need my cat back.”

  “He’s been living inside the bakery,” Dobson said. “I can’t get him to stay out. He sleeps up on the shelves. He’s licked the floors clean. He doesn’t eat the food I leave out for him. He drinks the water. He comes in and out of my house. Sleeps in the bakery. Meows like a living hell. He’s lost weight. That red string’s still around his neck.”

  “Take the string off—you want to choke him? Take the string off, and bolt up the cat flap on the bakery door. It’s not good for him to be in there,” Yasha said. “My father threw out all the food. Tell him my father died,” Yasha said. “Okay? Make him a bed in your living room. He likes to sleep on butcher paper.”

  “What about the bakery?” Mr. Dobson wanted to know.

  The nook where Yasha stood was about two feet wide. He held the phone up with his shoulder and reached his hands out to the sides. Each hand touched a refrigerator. He couldn’t imagine ever needing a whole room again, ever filling a whole empty room. Couldn’t he live in this gap, two feet wide by seven feet tall, in the shadow for most of the day, coming out into the lit kitchen once an hour for something to eat?

  “Have to rent the bakery out,” Dobson said. “No offense meant to the dearly departed.”

  “When?” said Yasha.

  “First of January. End of a five-year lease. Been in the Gregoriov name for what, ten years exactly? First of January, I have to turn it over. First of the eleventh year.”

  Kurt opened the leftmost refrigerator and retrieved a large salmon.

  “I would have liked it to be yours a lot longer,” Mr. Dobson said. “I would have liked it to be his. I’m upset.”

  “I’ll clean things up,” Yasha said. “Send in the fifty words, please, Mr. Dobson. Bolt up the cat door. Take that string off his neck.”

  Mr. Dobson said, “Okay, Gregoriov.”

  Yasha returned the phone to its cradle on the wall and stepped out into the kitchen. Frida’s shirt lay flat across her chest. Her baby was asleep in a bassinet. Frida handed chopped bits of carrot to Kurt and Agnes, who arranged them around the decapitated salmon on a serving platter. Yasha left the kitchen—everybody watched him go, except the sleeping baby—and walked out through the Ceremonial Hall.

  Olyana sat playing the hall’s baby grand, crooning “Kalinka” in angelic, falsetto Russian. The day’s worth of visitors, over whom she’d proclaimed either death or victory, stood watching, bewitched, heeding the Russian as if it were the secret, original language of the Valkyries.

  • • •

  I sent a message to Nils. I used the most English-like words.

  (Are) Er

  (you) du

  (there?) der?

  I said it to myself: Er du der? Er du der? while I waited for my phone to beep with his reply. I sat on my bed. I hadn’t been able to reach Nils for days. I’d sent a message every morning, and, unlike the days at the asylum when I could hear his phone beep, hear him shuffle to it, hear him sit down to thumb in each letter, and receive a reply in a moment—I’d heard nothing at all. I wondered if both my English and my Norwegian had become incomprehensible.

  My first message had said:

  (No) Ingen

  (sheep) sauer

  (here.) her.

  (Only) Bare

  (pig.) gris.

  I didn’t know the word for boar. I missed the sheep from the colony’s parking lot and their loud bells. They had been friends to me in a way the wild boar wasn’t. The wild boar wasn’t a friend to anyone. There was nobody at the Viking Museum, not even Yasha, whose harmony resembled Nils’s. It seemed Nils had never lost anything—had never needed anything, had spent his life studying one color. That was all, and enough. I missed Nils’s fish dinners, his green cans of beer, his brown shoes. I wanted to ask Nils whether sheep or pigs lived in the forest that surr
ounded his house. He’d said the forest was called Huppasskogen. He’d said it was superlarge, that it went all the way around the peninsula where he lived, and protected the farmland from the fjord, which was called Lyngen. Lyngenfjord.

  When he didn’t reply, I blamed my Norwegian. I wrote my second message in English:

  Did you make it home?

  Hearing nothing in response to the English either, I tried again.

  (I) Jeg

  (am) er

  (supertired.) kjempetrøtt.

  (Time) Tid

  (for) for

  (wine) vin

  (and) og

  (brown cheese.) brunost.

  Nothing. So that morning I wrote Er du der. Er du der er du der er du der? My phone lay silent. I had assumed, I think, that when someone as unlikely as Nils came into one’s life, he stayed. That he’d appear in conjunction with the high moments: baby born, here is Uncle Nils. Who is Nils? This is Nils. We met a long time ago, in the Far North. A Friday night, some autumn: I am going to “The Color Yellow,” Nils’s first exhibit in the Norwegian National Gallery. This is the painting he began in the artist colony. Bringing my baby along to see the Oslofjord. Letters would be written and delivered to him wherever he lived, and delivered to me wherever I lived, wherever that would be. We would know each other, remember each other, anywhere.

  The only thing I knew about Nils at this moment was his phone number. If he didn’t answer, I had lost him. I could not find his house, unnumbered as it was, no address, no town name, at the foot of the Huppasskogen. I imagined Yasha driving me there to look for it in the red pickup. I looked out my window for a sign of Yasha anywhere. Only the wild boar, and the beach. I was more frightened then than I had been since arriving in Norway.