“If—” he said loudly. We had arrived.
I turned to him, enjoyed the sight of his hair bouncing off the tops of his ears for a moment, saw him try to stop the truck, and saw him forget how. He looked at the keys, put his hand to them, and, in a moment of outright confusion, slammed his foot down on the gas. The truck accelerated into the pedestal. The sculpture dislodged and flew toward us as the pedestal fell away. The head dropped onto the hood of our truck and lodged in a small crater. The air bags inflated, throwing us back. Yasha’s hands still gripped the wheel.
The sculpture’s pedestal, which apparently extended deep into the sand, leaned only slightly toward the water. It had crumpled the truck’s bumper.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Are you?” asked Yasha.
We both leaned back, away from the bags. What frightened us? The exposed metal spike, sticking up out of the pedestal, once fastened to the base of the head like a spine. The condition of our own spines. Our red truck, crammed against the pedestal, its redness now part of the disaster. The smoke, not a campfire’s. The hissing the engine made. What soothed us? The hissing, and the airbags, which looked like clouds. The heat of the light on the beach. That we would eventually call somebody.
We fell asleep. This is the strangest part of the story when Yasha and I tell it. Sometimes we admit to the session in the cave that preceded it, which was the culmination of a great deal of nervous energy, and which had evidently relaxed and drained our bodies, once done. Sometimes Yasha will attribute it to the heavy lavvo poles he’d lifted the night before. I talk about my sister, and the sleeplessness her situation evoked in me those nights. It was really the wind that put us to sleep. It was really the sun on the beach, and our being so close to each other, and so stuck.
Sigbjørn opened my door, and I woke up. He looked at Yasha—Yasha was still asleep. Sigbjørn reached his arm over me and pinched Yasha’s nose closed. Yasha woke up and screamed.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“To make sure he breathes!” Sigbjørn said.
“He breathes!” I found myself saying.
“You bleed!” Sigbjørn said.
I looked down and believed him for a moment. The sauce was primary red, and the splotch shapes were sloppy, natural. I didn’t know how long we had been asleep. I remembered the crash, or rather, the crash reminded me about itself as I looked through the windshield. Yasha opened his door and stepped out of the truck to get away from Sigbjørn. I came to.
“It’s sauce,” I said to Sigbjørn, but he was lifting me, and the head sculpture, in his arms and out to his tractor. I looked back over Sigbjørn’s shoulder and saw Yasha close behind us. The truck remained, burrowing its nose into the pedestal.
“Pizza sauce,” I said, when the three of us were seated inside the tractor’s cabin.
Sigbjørn wasn’t listening. He gave me the marble head to hold, started driving, then began, “I was at the lavvos, and I thought, Yasha is good for nothing. Today is the festival, he knows the time, he knows we are waiting for him. I thought, He is surely kissing Frances.”
I said, “You thought that?”
“I told the chief I would go find Yasha,” Sigbjørn said.
Yasha was in the backseat, looking down.
“Nobody in Room Sixteen. Nobody in Room Eighteen. Nobody in Room Twenty. Kurt was in the kitchen, he had not seen you. Frida was cleaning the waffle iron, she had not seen you. Gunn had not seen you. When Gunn asked me where Frances was, then I knew, they are surely kissing.”
We were halfway back to the museum now, and I think they had added the whale meat to the fires, because the smoke from the lavvos was darker, and rising higher.
“So I kept driving up the road. Ah! I thought.” Sigbjørn pointed his finger up and hit a button that raised the tractor’s plow. “He is visiting his father. So I forgave you. I drove up to Eggum.” He lowered the plow with another button. “Then I saw the truck. Something was wrong. He is dead, I thought. So, now,” Sigbjørn said. He didn’t say more.
We pulled into the museum lot. Kurt was at the kitchen entrance, carrying the whale meat out one tray at a time and leaving the trays on the gravel. Sigbjørn stopped the tractor, got out, opened my door, picked me up again, and carried me over to Kurt.
“Yasha crashed her,” Sigbjørn said. He deposited me into Kurt’s meat-stained arms.
“Where is Yasha?” Kurt said.
“With me. He can walk. I take him to his mother, and you put Frances to bed. She bleeds.”
Kurt looked at my sack.
“It’s sauce,” Kurt and I both said.
“Put her to bed,” Sigbjørn repeated.
My door was unlocked, as I’d left it for Yasha, and when Kurt turned the knob his forearm twisted the skin on my neck. He put me down on my bed, and then stepped back, not pulling down the covers or removing the marble head from my hands.
“The meat is burning,” Kurt said.
“Let me get out of this sack,” I said, and remembered the cave, bashfully, and thought perhaps I should keep the sack on and stop flinging it everywhere. “I’ll be out in just a minute. I can serve the honey mead,” I said.
“You are not hurt?” Kurt said.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“It will be a long day,” Kurt said.
“It will be a long month,” I said. August, giving way without mercy to a sad September wedding. This month: birthdays, the first month in which Vassily would not live, a month for going home. A long month, a long way home.
Kurt centered his black chef’s cap and thumped it down over his head until it stopped right above his eyebrows. He left.
He left me holding the head like a hot water bottle over my abdomen.
“Kurt!” I shouted after him.
He leaned back into the room.
“Send Haldor here, if he has a minute. He should know what to do with this.”
Kurt looked at the head sculpture and made a puh! sound, which must have meant something in German. “Ja,” he said. At least this always meant “Yes.”
“Thank you.”
He closed the door. I sank into my pillow and wondered at what age a child would weigh this much—what kind of baby this marble head could have been. It pressed uncomfortably into my stomach. I kept holding it. What had we been saying, just before the crash? I thought myself back into the passenger seat. “If,” Yasha was saying.
If.
If I take over the bakery, and need an assistant, would you assist?
I would.
If I have never had sex before—had he ever had sex before?—and we went to the cave again, would you—
Would I? Yasha had not yet told me which day in August would be his eighteenth birthday. Nor had he asked any of the questions that I now imagined him asking:
If we both go back to New York, will we be going back together? If your sister gets married, will you want to get married? If I am younger than you for the rest of my life, will you get older, and older, and older? If Nils was too old, am I too young? If you came to the Arctic to be alone, why did you take your sack off?
I stood up, placed the marble head on my pillow, and took my sack off. I opened my window and threw the sack as far as I could. It landed a foot outside the wild boar’s pen. The boar waddled toward it, sniffing. It must have smelled like tomatoes. A tomato would have fit right in among the boar’s red apples. I wondered if the boar would taste the difference, taste the salt—if the tomato would taste more like grass, the apples tasting more like water. I wondered if the boar knew that apples are sweet. He stuck his snout out under the bottom rung of the fence. The sack looked like an anthill in the grass.
There was a loud knock at my door; I was naked.
“It is only the chief,” Haldor said, the knob already turning.
I wrapped myself in a white towel. Haldor was wearing his white tunic, and we looked like weird versions of each other, standing a foot apart, on the right side of
my room. It was only then that I realized the beds had moved. Haldor realized it right away.
“Big-bed lady,” he said. I laughed so hard I snorted. “Olyana has done it in the same way,” Haldor said. “The ladies, they like the big beds.”
“And you?”
“Certainly,” Haldor said, “my bed is a different subject. Special made for the chief, so, superlarge. I have two ravens painted on my headboard.” He smiled and said, “What has happened to you?”
I was a little bit high off the bed jokes, and the open window, and imagining Yasha—I hoped it had been Yasha—pushing his bed against mine, so I said, “We were down with the goat, and Gunn was walking around over us, and we climbed out when she left, and Yasha wanted to go to see his father, and when we got there, he couldn’t stop the truck.”
I expected Haldor to say something about the truck, or the grave, but he said, “My goat?”
“Your goat?” I said.
Haldor’s cheeks grew as red as his beard, and for the first time it was easy to imagine him as a little boy. A large-bellied little boy, blushing.
“I made a goat,” Haldor said. “I was not thinking anybody would see it.”
I felt such affection for the chief just then, I wanted to try to wrap my arms around him—I knew I would not get all the way around, but I wanted to try to move his belt of teeth out of the way, lean my ear to his tunic, and hear his heart pound. He was three times as large as my father, who tended to look smaller and smaller as his hair grew outward. My father had more hair than body, just as my mother had more eyes than body. They both only barely existed. If I had ever hugged them together simultaneously, which I never had, and wanted to try, and imagined trying at my sister’s wedding, if only they would come, they might have begun to add up to Haldor.
“What … what did you think? About the goat,” Haldor said.
I felt I had said too much, and didn’t know what to answer. After an uncomfortable pause, I said, “I loved it. I think they should sell replicas in the Viking Shop. I would buy one and take it home with me.”
“Maybe Olyana would like it.”
“You are glad in her,” I said.
Haldor sat down on the side of my big bed, the side that had previously been Yasha’s.
“I am glad in Yasha,” I said. I had not said anything like this to anyone. My sister and I talked exclusively about the wedding. My parents never talked about love, the way they never talked about pop music, drugs, or sports.
“Uff da,” Haldor said. I sat beside him. Haldor nodded his head up and down for a little while. “I hope it goes better with you,” he said. “I hope you take Yasha home with you.” A bird on my windowsill made a cry that sounded like a bell. I felt very awake. “I hope you take Olyana home with you also,” he said. “She does not want to stay here with me.”
What was this web, and who had woven it? Haldor, Yasha, his mother, his father, my mother, my father, my sister, Sigbjørn, the bird on my windowsill, the boar in its pen, Kurt, Frida, the baby, the head, the truck, and I were no longer unrelated. I looked over the gull’s head and up toward the highest clouds, and the planet occurred to me as an eyeball, and this arctic island its iris, staring up at the other sky, the black sky, the cosmos. Haldor and I stared at the floor, out the window, in turns. We had become elements of the same web, and this relationship allowed for silence, and for a few moments of mutual understanding. We sat still for fear that if we shook, shook the way we wanted to, we would wreck the filaments connecting us to the others. We depended on our web as much as we wanted out of it. We were trying to move each other around. We were trying to stay still. We were trying to be here and elsewhere at once. We were trying to be alone in love.
“Brown cheese takes a long time to go bad,” Haldor said.
“I won’t eat your goat anyway,” I said.
“Thank you,” said Haldor.
I pulled my legs up onto the bed and turned to face him. “I am afraid of going home without Yasha,” I said.
“And I am fearing staying here without Olyana, but what can I do? I can make more goats. Go down under the tree and call myself a troll. Sometimes I am feeling so much like a troll, I found that room under the tree and thought, I can use some time alone here, in the dark.” He looked at his hands. “I get so tired of the sun,” Haldor said. Then, “You are going to California, yes?”
“Yes, California,” I said. “The wedding. It’s going to be ugly.”
Haldor looked up from his fingers, which he had been studying, bending them one at a time at the knuckle.
“Not my sister, not the flowers. My sister is beautiful.” The chief put his hand on his knee and nodded and seemed to believe me. “The day itself will be ugly. My parents will not be there. I will be there, but that won’t help much. I don’t help anyone. Yasha knows how to help.”
“What?”
“Yasha buried his father,” I said, “and is trying to forgive his mother, and trying to learn how to drive a car. I will have to do all of those things eventually.”
“I did not know that he does not drive,” Haldor said. “Certainly I would not be giving him the truck. You neither? And your father,” he said, “is he sick?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I said.
“And your mother, is she bad?”
“No. My mother is very good. She is so good,” I said. “She provides and provides and provides. She forgets to provide for herself. I don’t know where she finds pleasure. I wish she would be pleased by my sister.” I knew Haldor didn’t follow this. “She finds pleasure in apples,” I admitted. “My mother loves apples.”
Haldor looked out my window to the pen, where the boar was, as if on cue, eating the apples that had been thrown to him, one bright red hemisphere perched in his mouth, making him look slaughtered and served for Christmas. I wondered if the boar still had his private parts, whether they had been cut from him—whether there was a sow, somewhere on this island, with whom he could save himself. The apple disappeared down his throat.
“I have never left Borg,” Haldor said. “I thought, Here is a woman who puts fire in this place I have always been, maybe this is a place for her also. So I asked her and she said, I love Ian Strom.”
“Ian Strom?”
“Ian Strom.”
“The man who lives in Tribeca,” I said. These were the things Yasha had said at the funeral, I dimly recalled, in the confusion before the Mourner’s Kaddish.
“What is Tribeca?” Haldor said.
In my mind, the image of West Broadway replaced the image of the funeral. Mothers wheeled ergonomic strollers past renovated warehouses, safe from the nearby rush of West Side Highway traffic, cooled by the breeze off the Hudson River. I said, “It’s a place where people live.”
He said, “Would you say this is a place where people live?”
I went to the window and could see the beach, all the way back to the white horizon. A child was running up and down the shore, flying a whale-shaped kite. The sky was blue and clear enough to turn the whale’s flying into swimming. The shore was wide and bright enough to make the child look like a piece of candy.
“We should all live here,” I said.
“You should all go back to where you came from,” Haldor said. He stood up and straightened his belt of teeth so it made a diagonal across his chest. He looked at the marble head on my pillow, seized it, and went to the door. “So will I.”
When Haldor walked out the door, I didn’t know where he was going. It seemed he might walk straight over the sea to the North Pole itself, or back into the first Viking age, or home to his two-raven bed. The head had looked less strange in his arms than in mine, or it looked in safer hands, and I pictured him walking to Eggum and jamming the metal spine back up the head’s neck. I wondered for a moment if he had carved the head himself, before or after his goat. My painting of the ox outside the asylum lay on its side at the foot of my bed. What did we want from these animals? Why did we re-create them? T
o bring them, and their innocence, and their meat, and their company, into our web?
Haldor’s goodbye had shone some light on my way out: I had to go home—I knew this—and if I could follow his instructions and take Yasha home with me, back to the place where he too was from, then we could make New York a place where people lived again. My sister would marry and move away. My parents would divorce and move apart. The north would fade further and further into itself, into our memory of it. New York City would be left to us. Yet, Yasha wasn’t really from New York, not originally. Besides a left-behind cat I knew Yasha loved, the city had no immediate claim on him, nor did I.
• • •
Olyana had tested the rotation of Yasha’s wrists, knees, and ankles. She assured Sigbjørn they were not broken. She touched Yasha’s neck and Yasha flicked her hand away.
“I’m fine,” Yasha said.
“Little man,” said Olyana. “You very nearly ruined the surprise. Do me a kindness, if you’re fine—follow me.”
She took one step foward, and Yasha noticed her shoes. They were clear hard plastic, the shape of Dorothy’s red slippers, but completely transparent, showing her unpainted toenails. Olyana hooked her arm around Yasha’s elbow, which he had not offered her. He could not imagine where she found things like these slippers, how she paid for them, why she packed them, why she wore them, today or ever. He stood up straight, in an effort to gain any height over her. In her heels, she matched him to the inch. Yasha felt so related to her he could hardly stand it.
“My good Gunn,” his mother said as they passed reception.
Yasha looked at the doorknob behind the guest chair. Gunn bowed her head ceremoniously to Yasha and his mother as they passed, while the British family perused the festival’s activity schedule. His mother did not leave the lobby until Yasha pushed the door open for her. Olyana walked through, retaking Yasha’s elbow when they’d both come out onto the sand. They walked toward the archery targets. Olyana had to pull her clear heel out of the sand each time she stepped.
The Sunlit Night Page 18