The waves rolling in asked: Why did you come here?
I had come to get out of the city, and away from the family to whom I belonged. I had found a country covered in sour blueberries, foxes, rocks, and one-lane roads that were drawn in the same shape as the shoreline. I had met Nils, Yasha, his mother, a few make-believe Vikings. I didn’t belong to any of them, and they didn’t belong to me. I looked out the window for Yasha again.
The waves rolling out said: Nothing here is yours to keep.
I imagined Yasha staying at the Viking Museum indefinitely, and my going home without him, and calling the museum, and Sigbjørn answering, and Haldor answering, and Yasha never coming to the phone. Yasha becoming another unreturned message. My phone sat blankly on the windowsill, its black screen reflecting the clouds. Yasha would be back at the lavvos by now. I went over to my second bed where he had once slept, near to me but not near enough, and found one of my necklaces tied up in the sheets. I put it on. I told the dangling ballerina: I will not lose Yasha. Maybe his mother had lost him, maybe his father had lost him, Brooklyn had lost him—not me. It wasn’t a matter of somebody keeping him. It was a matter of my wanting him, wanting his face near my face.
A few curly hairs made the shape of an otter on his pillowcase. Yasha was human, a creature. Nils was harmony itself. Toward Nils, I felt different sort of longing. More like how one feels toward stars. Wanting their shine, their comfort in the dark, knowing full well how far they are—I picked up my phone to write another message. I wanted it to say Please. There was no such word. The only way to say it was:
(Be) Vær
(so) så
(kind.) snill.
• • •
Yasha kicked the tree sculpture as hard as he could, hoping to put a dent in it. Two weeks had passed since Frances had moved into the museum, but he’d failed to come any closer. Frances helped Kurt serve breakfast first thing in the morning; Yasha built lavvos in the afternoon; feasts and reenactments stretched through the evenings; they never came home at the same time. He’d spent nights with his ear to the wall between them, listening out for her, but she’d grown so quiet—she hadn’t been completely well. Her parents’ calls kept her busy, and miserable, and she seemed changed by Nils’s absence. Sometimes, when her eyes rested on him one second too long, he could swear she wanted something from him, could swear she wanted him, but the outright invitation he required never came.
More difficult than overcoming his own nervousness was overcoming hers: she still looked at him with condolence in her eyes, attending to his comfort and speaking to him gently, when he wanted to be vigorously ungentle with her. He didn’t know how to convince her that he was fully available, that he was more man than mourner.
The bronze of the tree trunk looked only shinier as Yasha’s sneakers brushed dust from its bark finish, kick by kick. The four dwarves on the ceiling looked down at him, and Yasha wanted them to come down and fight him already, wanted to rip their little shirts from their bellies. The one thing Yasha could dent was the diagram, which was mounted on a thin piece of apparently pliable wire. He kicked the midpoint of the wire, and the whole plaque tipped over. Yasha saw himself and his mother reading the diagram’s text aloud, his mother shouting about the universe. They would now have to turn their heads sideways to read from it. Yasha looked to the receptionist’s desk. She hadn’t yet returned from lunch.
He backed away from the tree. The receptionist was named Gunn, and she made him uncomfortable with her “Hei hei!” greeting and her constantly open mouth. When she came back, the two of them would have to walk to a supply closet, get a hammer, and straighten the thing. He sat down in one of the lobby’s guest chairs and let his head fall back to the wall. One of his ears touched something cold. The low chair and the cold ear made Yasha think of getting a haircut. He wanted somebody to be rubbing his head, and dunking it into cold water. He turned to see what the cold was and saw a doorknob.
Maybe it was a coat hanger. The chair was flush against the wall; there wouldn’t be a door behind it. He faced out again. The knob became less cold the longer his ear lay against it. He rubbed his own head, imagining the clipping sound of tiny scissors. Yefim’s Barbershop had always played Simon & Garfunkel, and Yefim’s hands had been strong enough to squeeze his head until the blood flow stopped and restarted. Yasha heard a “Hei hei” in the Ceremonial Hall and Gunn’s plates clanking into the industrial dishwasher. He opened his eyes and saw the Yggdrasil diagram looking at him sideways, like a dog. He stood up and heard Haldor’s voice speaking to Gunn. If Haldor came with her, Yasha started to think—the knob was unmistakably a doorknob. Moreover, a seam now appeared lightly dipped into the surface of the wall, and there, three feet apart from each other: two hinges.
The door was the same width as the chair. He pulled the chair away from the wall, stepped behind it, and pushed the door open. Inside, there was only a staircase. Going down. Yasha closed the door behind him, and real darkness enveloped him for the first time in several weeks. No daylight cracking in between the futile window curtains. No sunrise or sunset, and none of the dawny, dusky thing the sky was always doing. Haldor and Gunn came into the lobby. Yasha stood silently behind the door, behind the chair. They were speaking in agitated Norwegian. Gunn’s chipper footsteps rushed back into the Ceremonial Hall. Yasha couldn’t hear Haldor anymore and took the first step down the stairs. The step didn’t make any noise. He dropped his other leg down to the second step. No problem. He climbed down to the bottom, where a room opened up.
His mother had been right: there was a goat under the tree after all. Here it was. But she couldn’t have known about this one. Yasha found himself standing directly under Yggdrasil, centered between its three roots, which had always seemed cut off by the lobby floor, but which extended, in the shape of long icicles, down another three or four feet into this basement. Where the roots ended, there stood a modest wooden table. It looked almost exactly like the bedside table in Yasha’s room. It was covered with a sack, the kind Frances wore. The table had been placed under the shortest of the three roots, and on top of the table Yasha saw a model house, and on top of the house, a goat. The house was made of popsicle sticks and pebbles. The goat, though Yasha was not sure, looked like it was made of brown cheese.
“Mrs. Gregoriov,” Haldor’s voice said, suddenly audible. Yasha looked around, expecting to find his mother or Haldor down in the cave with him, or at least a walkie-talkie, some kind of source for Haldor’s voice. There was no radio, and he sensed their weight directly above his head.
“Chief Haldor,” his mother said. He hadn’t spoken to his mother all day, perhaps not since the day before, and her voice, which had never become fully familiar to him after the long absence, and which was always so mellow and slick, leaked down to him. It wasn’t coming through the floor. It was more directed, more funneled.
“There is something I have wanted to say,” Haldor said, and Yasha saw that the metal roots were hollow and cut open at their tips. Open tubes. Haldor’s voice moved down them efficiently, making Yasha think of piss moving down a drain. It fell right into his ears. “Do I get permission to say it?” Haldor said.
“My dear man,” his mother said, “are you not the chief?”
“The blacksmith calls me chief,” Haldor said. “Not you, necessarily.”
Yasha didn’t know where Haldor was going with this, but none of the possibilities were attractive, and he couldn’t stop listening. This room he had crawled into was only slightly larger than the tree’s circumference. He had no way out, unless he wanted to climb up the stairs and out from behind the chair and enter himself into the middle of their conversation—something he supposed he might have to do any minute, if it became necessary to interfere. Surely his mother could defend herself. Surely his mother could defend herself?
“Chief Haldor,” she said, “go ahead.”
“I am happy in you, Olyana,” Haldor said. “I am glad in you.”
Yasha and his mothe
r were quiet, and he felt they were deciphering this statement together, one mind split by the floor. It was a romantic thing to say, though these were the words of a child. It offered something large, without asking for anything. His mother, generally quick at the draw, had not yet replied. Yasha raced to formulate an answer, though he had no means of feeding a line to his mother—if he spoke into the open roots, would his voice shoot out of the branches?
Haldor said, “It can be that it goes too fast to ask for you. You are still sorry, surely, on your husband.”
Yasha put his eye to the longest root. He could not see anything. He wanted to see what face she had made. He wanted to see how sorry.
His mother said, “Vassily has only just left us, yes … by the grace of your very good service.”
Haldor grunted.
“Still,” she said, lengthening the l’s at the end of the word, “I left Vassily years ago. Vassily and my son.”
Yasha had something to add to this conversation. Along the lines of: Correct. That is what you did. Yasha bent down and smelled what was definitely the stale brown cheese that made up the body of the goat figurine; he smelled the metal of the tree roots. He understood that the small amount of light that illuminated this cave, as opposed to the deep black staircase, came in through the root tips along with the sound. There must have been a hole in the trunk somewhere, if not in each of the branches. What had this basement been built for? It seemed designed for storage, but had been remodeled into something less practical, more wonderful. He wanted to show Frances this cave. He wanted to spend the rest of the summer with Frances in this cave.
“Your son is a good youth,” Haldor said. “He continues to love you.”
Wrong! Yasha very nearly shouted into the longest root.
“And I continue to love the man I love,” his mother said.
“Olyana,” Haldor said quietly.
“He is the one I will not leave, my dear chief,” Olyana said. Yasha could hear the smile in her voice, and was certain that she had lifted her hand to her collarbone and was resting her fingers there, the way women like his mother did when they were feeling absolutely sure about something. “You heard my son at the funeral. The man I love lives in Tribeca. His name is Ian Strom.”
“Ja vel,” Haldor said.
She said, “I have loved him for ten years.”
Yasha stared at the model of Valhalla and saw a model bakery, its tiny cut-out windows facing a crowded, ocean-bleached boulevard. The cruller twist and the everything bagel made their pathetic “10” in the bakery window display. Mr. Dobson, the schoolchildren, and Dostoyevsky were all there, all miniature, walking in and out of Valhalla’s many doors. There was Yasha, there was his father, inside the popsicle stick palace, rolling dough at the crack of dawn. They had gone on putting their babkas in the window the whole time she had been so in love. She had loved somebody, anybody, for those ten years.
“So it is,” Haldor said.
“So it is,” said his mother. She laughed lightly and shifted her weight. The ceiling over Yasha sighed as she moved.
She is the real chief, Yasha thought. Poor Haldor. The lobby had gone quiet, and Yasha put his ear to a root. Haldor’s heavy steps moved, not toward the Ceremonial Hall but out of the museum. He heard the beach-side door open and shut. His mother’s boots sounded down the hall, harder to hear, toward her room. A moment later, Gunn, who had likely been hiding behind the waffle table the whole time, scurried in and took back her desk. Yasha knew he would terrify her, climbing out of the wall.
He took a good look at the cheese goat. It was hand-carved, and someone had put a great deal of care into it. The goat had circles for eyes, oval nostrils, and an open mouth that sucked on one of the metal roots. Its hair had been carved as thin lines into the cheese, its tail was short and lifted with the pleasure of the sucking, and its hooves were smoother than its legs. What this was—who it was by—who it was for, Yasha couldn’t say. But it had received the maker’s full attention. The goat stood, as the plaque had said it would, on the roof of Valhalla. The model Valhalla, on the other hand, was empty inside. It really could have been a model of the Gregoriov Bakery. There should have been a miniature cat inside, curled up and sleeping alone in the dark. It made no sense, a brown cheese goat and an empty palace. It made no sense, a cat sleeping in an empty bakery.
Yasha dreaded his exit. He could hear Gunn getting to work again. There was no good way to explain himself, and what was worse, if Gunn had any inclination toward tattling, Haldor would be in the lobby in a minute, demanding to know how much Yasha had heard. Yasha looked again at the small myth on the table, and left it for the unlit staircase. He put one foot on the bottom step. He had missed this kind of darkness. If he and Frances were ever in a place this dark, he thought, wouldn’t their bodies lose their outlines and combine automatically—mouths, hands, chest against chest? He climbed the staircase as quietly as he could, which, thanks to the sturdiness of the iron steps, was quietly enough. Yasha stood behind the door, behind the chair, which he had left a few inches out of place. “Hei hei,” he heard Gunn say into the phone. “Hei hei,” Yasha whispered back.
• • •
I couldn’t find Yasha on the beach. I had seen Sigbjørn having a cigarette, and a family from Sweden, all four of them wearing Swedish-flag baseball caps. I saw Haldor out by the water, looking uncharacteristically glum. The two old lavvos were visible at the end of the shore, and the three new ones hadn’t yet been built. It was almost two o’clock. Yasha might have eaten slowly today, I thought, might be lingering at the lunch buffet. I decided to head out toward the lavvos, camp out under one of the built tents, and wait for him, if he wasn’t in the Ceremonial Hall.
He wasn’t in the Ceremonial Hall. Nobody was. Kurt’s salmon platter lay almost untouched on the banquet table, and behind the kitchen door I could hear Frida singing her eerie Icelandic lullaby that always made me think of lava. A slow day. Gunn was at her desk, helping a caller book a room for the whale meat festival. I wanted to ask her if she’d seen Yasha. Gunn and I had hardly ever spoken. I left the hall and took a seat in her guest chair—another place Yasha might have been, but wasn’t. The chair slid back until it hit the wall. Gunn looked up from her call.
“Unnskyld,” she said to the caller. “Can I help you, Frances?”
“I can wait,” I said. She went back to the call. The room was nonsmoking, she said, and the beds were separate, but could be pushed together.
“Frances,” the wall said. “Make Gunn move.”
I sat up straight.
There was no question that the voice was Yasha’s. There were plenty of other questions. I stood, took a good hard look at the wall, saw nothing, and approached Gunn’s desk, grinning nervously. She held up the “one minute” finger. I rested my elbow casually against her countertop. I resisted looking back at the wall. I didn’t know what to tell Gunn. “Hei hei,” she said, and hung up.
“It’s tea time, Gunn,” I said. Rightfully, she didn’t know what I meant. “Let’s have a cup of tea,” I said, “before they clear out the hall.”
Gunn’s mouth, which had been hanging open, closed and smiled.
“Is that all you wanted?” she said.
I no longer needed her help in finding Yasha, and Yasha apparently had new needs of his own, so I said, “Isn’t tea a good thing to want?”
Gunn picked up a mug from her desk and turned it upside down.
“Tomt,” she said, which sounded like tomb, and meant “empty.” I hadn’t thought of checking Vassily’s grave while looking for Yasha. I hadn’t thought of his being inside the wall either. Go find that Gregoriov boy, my mother’s voice rang in my head. I wondered if Yasha had been spending any time at Eggum, driving out to the grave in the truck. Gunn stood up and tied a sweater around her shoulders. She was blushing. I wondered if anybody, guest or employee, man or woman, had asked Gunn to tea before. She had a severe face and a squeaky voice and she breathed with her mouth open. I had n
ever seen Kurt or Haldor be friendly toward her. She sat at her desk professionally, ate her lunch professionally, and went home at five o’clock.
We crossed the threshold into the Ceremonial Hall and while Gunn refilled her cup, I took one look back toward the lobby. The chair was moving forward. Then I saw Yasha dart out from behind it, take a moment’s cover behind Yggdrasil’s trunk, and run out through the museum’s beach door.
“Earl Grey,” Gunn said with delight.
“The best,” I said, and took the tea bag she offered me. We both added milk, and Gunn emptied half of a packet of honey into her cup, the other half into mine. We each stirred with our own Thor’s-hammer-handled spoons. Her phone rang. She made a guttural sound and tossed her spoon into the clearing bucket, nodded her head to me, and sipped her tea down. It didn’t spill as she ran to the desk.
“Hei hei,” she said, slightly breathless. I caught up with her, nodded the way she had, and took my cup onto the beach. Yasha was right there. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the sand. He stood up when he saw me.
“There is something I need to show you,” he said, with an earnestness I hadn’t heard in his voice since the I love you very much he had said to his father’s casket. “But I can’t go back there right now,” Yasha said, looking at Gunn through the lobby’s back windows.
“Lucy,” I said, “you’ve got some ’splaining to do.”
“You watch I Love Lucy?” Yasha said.
“The best.”
“Don’t our beds remind you of theirs?”
I laughed. I thought about our beds, specifically his, and the necklace I’d found in his sheets. I was wearing it now, the ballerina dangling in the break of my collarbone. She kicked around in the wind, repeating back to me what I had told her this morning: I will not lose Yasha.
The Sunlit Night Page 16