The Sunlit Night

by Rebecca Dinerstein

  Yasha said, “Why did you buy those shoes?” This was not the first question he’d intended. He’d actually wanted to ask her about love. For the first time, she seemed capable of it, even filled with it. The speech she’d made to Haldor was the most generous expression of love Yasha had heard from her. He entertained the gross, exhilarating idea of his mother being a talented lover. Physically. He wanted to inherit some of her talent. He looked at his mother’s arms. They seemed to declare that they knew how to hold, how to be held, even if she had been holding someone other than him these ten years. Yasha thought: She has something to give back to me now.

  “The shoes were a gift,” she said.

  Yasha said, “What else does he pay for?”

  His mother said, “Oh.” She lifted her skirt up to her knees. “You wouldn’t believe. For one thing,” she said, “your father.”

  “He paid for my father?”

  “So generously.”

  His mother had a way of frightening him with the most pleasant words. In the parking lot, at the far side of the archery fields, Yasha saw the damaged red pickup hitched at an angle to Sigbjørn’s tractor. There was a black car parked beside the tractor.

  Why had Yasha wanted to bring Frances to the grave site? To hush his father’s Why nots. To tell him, Done, done, done. To show him Frances. He didn’t know if his father had been buried wearing his glasses. Probably not, Yasha thought. Surely his father’s sight had been restored to him. Surely that was a benefit of death.

  “To move a body across international borders,” his mother said, “terribly expensive. Far more expensive than these shoes. He didn’t flinch,” she said, her cheeks jumping, as they often did, up toward her eyes.

  Yasha had never considered this expense, and was profoundly embarrassed. Nobody had at any point asked him to pay. Why had they asked her new man? And why did her new man do it? Daniil had paid for Yasha’s plane tickets: Moscow, Stockholm, Oslo. Yasha had paid for his own train ticket north, exchanging the last Russian bills his father had given as pocket money for five hundred Norwegian kroner, using two hundred on the train ticket, twenty on a Coca-Cola, twenty on a Go’morgen yogurt when he woke up twelve hours later still on the train steadily approaching the Arctic, sixty on a cheese sandwich, and the last two hundred on the ferry from Bodø, across the cold fjord to Borg.

  Had his father died in Brooklyn, it would have meant more borders. His father’s body would have needed to cross an ocean, not to mention the dozen Western countries, on the way up to the top of the world, the place where Vassily wanted to die, or truer, the place where he wanted to live after he died. Mostly ice. Real peace, his father had said. Yasha looked at the red and white rings of the targets, mounted on easels just behind the place where he and his mother had stopped. This was not the top of the world. This was very close to it. This was the Viking Museum at Borg. This was the solution they had found. It had all been made so generously possible.

  “Why did he do it?” Yasha said.

  “Die?” his mother said.

  “Pay,” Yasha said. “Your friend.”

  “Ask him!” she said.

  She laughed. She looked wilder and merrier then than Yasha had ever seen her. She began to flatten her dress over her stomach. Yasha understood nothing other than that her dress was the same red as the bull’s-eye. Where was she looking? No longer at her slippers, or at him. Up, over the tops of the targets, toward the parking lot. Yasha looked in the same direction and saw a bearded man getting out of the black car. When he opened the driver’s-side door, it slammed into Sigbjørn’s tractor. The man closed the car’s door, gave the tractor a pat, and walked toward them. When he came onto the sand, he removed his boots. His jeans were already rolled up. With both boots in one hand, he ran between two targets and straight to Olyana, who engulfed him in open arms.

  When the embrace ended, Olyana said, “Here he is.”

  “Here who is?” Dostoyevsky said. He seized Olyana’s hand.

  Yasha took a step backward. Here who was? His first irrational thought: My father has sent a messenger. His second irrational thought: Septimos told this man where to find me. Third: It’s not him. Fourth: It is him. Fifth: I have no bread to sell him. The Dostoyevsky guy had a beard, and a straight nose, and combed hair. He had always worn leather boots, rolled-up jeans, with musical instruments hanging off his shoulder. He came on Fridays. He read from his paperbacks. He made Yasha furious. The reward for remembering this man was that in the memory, his father was standing at the adjacent register, and the dinging of the register buttons in the memory meant that his father’s fingers were moving, meant that his father still moved.

  “Alyosha,” Dostoyevsky said. “It’s been ages.”

  Why was it possible for this man to speak, if his father could no longer open the cash drawer and charge him $2.50?

  “I always refused to tell him your real name,” his mother said, giggling. “He calls you Alyosha.”

  Yasha felt he could hear his own voice speaking from a distance. Doesn’t mean I am Alyosha, for fuck’s sake, it said. His father had laughed.

  His mother said, “Came home all the time with his sourdough and a book, saying he had read to you, saying you were taller every week, saying how well the bakery smelled. Saying what an idiot I had been to leave the two of you, saying he wasn’t worth the sacrifice. And I would say, Don’t you worry about my sacrifice.”

  I’m right here, Yasha thought. Your sacrifice.

  “We used to have the strangest arguments,” his mother said.

  “We never have any arguments,” the man said. He kissed Olyana on the lips. I’m right here, Yasha thought again. One of Olyana’s knees bent and her foot flicked up behind her, the way Yasha had only seen happen in cartoons, and her other leg sank deeper, with all her weight now on it, heel-first, into the sand. The slipper hung off her floating foot. Yasha grabbed it. He walked it up to the nearest target and punctured the bull’s-eye with the stiletto. The rest of the clear slipper hung out of the target like drool from an open mouth. When Yasha turned back toward his mother, the kiss had not yet ended.

  • • •

  I called my parents. Small car crash, I told them, no injury, just shock. They were upset. They were upset for their own reasons. My father had gotten hired to illustrate a report documenting the effect of cell-phone use on human thumbs, and he’d stabbed his own thumb with an X-Acto knife. The skin between the thumb and index finger, he informed me, was called the thenar space. It was this skin my father had punctured, and actually infected (his knife generally lay out on his desk uncovered, dusty, inky, covered in his shed hairs). It was now stitched up, but the infection needed monitoring. Thankfully, my mother said, they had Dr. Cordon.

  I asked him how he was feeling. He started saying something about “motherfucking fingernails.” If he had tried to distract himself, by way of injury, from his everyday distress—it hadn’t worked. I wondered what he would have to do to himself to succeed, to distract himself from the endless stream of clinical studies and cow’s-eye dissection kits that needed their materials illustrated. I hoped my mother would be around to stop him from doing it. I guessed she wouldn’t be, now. Our leaving each other had become dangerous—I had left them alone when I went north; they were leaving my sister alone to give herself away; they were leaving each other alone now to who knows what result. I wondered if my father would ever draw again. If I am lucky enough, I thought, someday to make a painting for the cover of a toy helicopter user’s manual, I will not be outraged, because the painting is the thing itself, the fulfilling thing. Illustrations had long since ceased fulfilling my father.

  His illustrations filled a corner of a page. He wanted something larger for himself, and why shouldn’t he? He wanted to make his own work. The difference between drawing and illustrating, he said, is that you draw for yourself and you illustrate for some schmo who can’t draw. He’d wanted to contribute something significant, something fine, to the profession. The professi
onals had made his work feel like marginalia. I looked at the blueberries Agnes had gifted me on her Princess Mette-Marit plate. My father could have drawn their blue guts exactly, could have drawn the difference between the berries’ skin and their flesh. He could have drawn consummate fingernails. But as the industry paid less attention to him, he had lost the joy in paying attention.

  “For a bunch of holier-than-thou orthopedists,” he was saying in conclusion.

  My mother looked intently at my father. Behind them, the apartment was emptier than ever. All my father’s drawings had been taken off the wall, and my mother’s vases no longer lined the countertops. Where had they moved these things? Where were they going, and how far from each other could it possibly be? They had lived in our tiny apartment for thirty years. They had no more obvious place to go, I thought, than I did. Than Yasha did, for that matter. All of us were reentering New York, our former home, as though we’d never lived there. My sister was the only one of us who knew where she was going. Who thought she did, at least.

  My father’s left hand and wrist were mittened in white bandages.

  “One more thing we won’t need to explain at the wedding,” my mother said, pointing at the gauze. “And a good thing too. Imagine the questions.”

  “Did you stab yourself because your daughter is throwing away her life? No! I stabbed myself because thirty years later my best audience is nine-year-old schoolchildren. Not to mention my own nine-year-old marrying herself off like a child courtesan—”

  “Dad,” I said to cut him off, “have you told Sarah about your hand?”

  “Sarah doesn’t speak to us,” my mother said.

  “I sometimes wonder why I do,” I said.

  “Don’t you turn against us now,” she said. “Who’s going to schlep these boxes?” She pointed behind her. There were the vases: in a box labeled Vases with my mother’s porcelain handwriting. “We’re both counting on you for the heavy lifting, in case you didn’t know. You can take turns. One day my boxes, one day his. I’ll tip, your father won’t.”

  It was strange how they still said us and we and both. The walls behind them had never looked whiter, and my father’s enormous yellow hair looked like a halo painted onto a canvas. My mother’s skin was the same white as the walls, her eyes especially dark by contrast. My mother and father both looked younger, as if the blank walls brightened their faces, reflecting light into lines where shadows had built up over time.

  Kurt came back to my room as I was looking at them. He needed help with the festival’s honey mead.

  “Are you well enough?” Kurt asked.

  “Of course.” I turned back to the computer. “I have to go.”

  My father waved his white paw.

  I spent the evening serving honey mead to three French brothers. One was twenty-six, one was twenty, and one was nine. They stuck around after the official activities had ended and sat with us in the staff lavvo well into the night. The littlest didn’t speak English and spent the night grinning shyly at his brothers. With perfect grace they paid no special attention to any of us, neglected none of us, wrestled their littlest brother, and roasted their dinners. Even Sigbjørn was moved by their elegance: he offered them all his beers, and when they didn’t drink any, Sigbjørn followed their example and put the cans away.

  A dog ran laps around the bonfire. Every couple of laps, Sigbjørn would catch the dog by its collar and hold it still a moment. The dog would look up, examining his captor, and Sigbjørn would say, “Jo.” It was my favorite Norwegian word. It was pronounced you. It meant “But yes,” or, “Yes, even though you say no,” or, “Yes after all.” Sigbjørn squeezed the dog’s jaws shut with one hand, scratched its ears with the other, and moaned his long “Joooo.” Youuuu. The dog, looking up, said, I am not a dog, and Sigbjørn answered again and again, But yes, you are. Yes after all.

  The dog sat by Sigbjørn for the rest of the night. I spoke my high school French to the little boy and taught him how to make his hands into a flute and how to put his feet in ballet positions. I had two weeks until I had to go home. My flight would depart on my birthday. The French brothers said they were staying on the island for some time. I could have asked to see them again. Their presence would have been soothing. But I wanted to be light like them and pass in and out lightly, so I said goodnight knowing I would not see them again.

  Sigbjørn offered to drive them home. The oldest said they’d set up camp on Utakleiv Beach. Sigbjørn told them they’d chosen well—the winds would be moderate overnight, and they’d wake to a great view. He lifted the sleeping youngest brother and led the others to the tractor. Yasha promised to put out the fire. I promised to clean up the trash and stack the benches.

  They left. We stood still and listened to the tractor driving off until we could no longer hear it. I looked at Yasha and I did not want to pass lightly. I did not want any more light.

  • • •

  To be free, Yasha thought, to be free to be free to be free. He kissed her. The fire had weakened, but a few logs still hissed. Yasha stepped away from her and saw Sigbjørn’s empty cooling bucket; he picked it up, took Frances’s hand, and walked out onto the beach to fill it. All the red and orange had left the sky and it was almost dark—the blue-gray felt luxurious. Frances took off her shoes and walked into the water. It was hilariously cold. Yasha bent over and made imprints of his palms in the wet sand. A wave came and filled them. Frances kissed him. Here was his relief, his rest.

  Frances stacked the benches in pairs, and picked bits of tinfoil from the ground around the bonfire. Yasha put out the fire and found Frances’s hand in the dark. Walking down the road toward the museum, they watched how still the fjord kept and how fast the sky moved. Here was the living world. Yasha felt the air sink through him as he breathed.

  In her room, the beds lay pushed together. Yasha smiled sheepishly. Frances turned off the lights. He removed her shoes, her necklace. She removed his glasses. They undressed.

  Yasha opened his eyes and saw a streak of green across Frances’s floor—a stripe of light coming in between the curtains. There were famous versions of this morning in a boy’s life. Yasha had imagined eagles landing on his shoulders and invisible fountains erupting from under the fields. He had not imagined his mother in a floor-length gown playing the Cheburashka birthday song. She played loudly enough to wake up the whole museum. Yasha walked into the Ceremonial Hall. His mother sat erect on the piano bench, her fingers curled over the keys like talons.

  “Our little man has arrived,” she said. She played a two-note drumroll with her left hand. Ian clapped his hands beside the piano.

  “Good morning, Yasha,” Frida said, holding out a fresh waffle topped with a baseball-sized dollop of sour cream.

  Our little mourning man, Yasha thought. These were the right words. Incredible, he thought, to be no longer merely his: his son Yasha, the Gregoriov boy, his assistant, his window display maker, his boy, his company, his substitute wife. He had not been our anything before. If he tried, he could remember living in the same Russian house as his mother and father; even then, he had never been called our son. He was his modest father’s son, and his flaming mother’s son. They hadn’t shared him. They had each claimed him separately, and wholly.

  Now I belong to many people, Yasha thought with immense satisfaction, as his mother picked out high notes with her pinkie finger and nobody rushed him to answer.

  Kurt left to feed the leftover whale meat to the boar. Haldor went out to start taking down the five lavvos, pole by pole. The festival was over and left in its wake traces of grease on the archery targets, firecracker husks in the grass, and stomped blueberries all along the path from the smithy to the boats. Frances had been assigned to clean the berries and cardboard pieces out from the gravel pathways and the fields. Haldor had assigned Yasha the cleaning of the Ceremonial Hall, the easiest task.

  Frances came into the hall. She wore an orange shirt, yellow shorts, and red sheakers. Her hair sat on the
top of her head in the same baseball-sized clump as the sour cream. Yasha beamed at her with his teeth showing.

  Frances squinted, and nodded questioningly, and Yasha nodded back with utter confidence.

  “Just checking,” Frances said, and she turned around and walked back to her room.

  “Give me that waffle,” Yasha said to Frida.

  “Anything you want,” Frida said.

  “Anything I want,” said Yasha.

  “Ja byl kogda-to strannojj,” sang his mother, with feeling.

  Sigbjørn was sitting at a window-side table, having his own breakfast. Kurt had prepared a sausage he claimed would cure any hangover. “Hey, birthday,” Sigbjørn called out. “What was that about?” He bucked his chin toward Frances’s room. “What happened last night?”

  “I guess she thought it might have been a dream,” Yasha said. He took the seat across from Sigbjørn, and unwrapped a knife and fork from within a rolled-up paper napkin. The napkin, once unfolded and placed in his lap, read GRATULERER MED DAGEN.

  “Granule med dragon?” Yasha said.

  “Congratulations with the day,” Sigbjørn said. “What dream?”

  Yasha wondered if Kurt had set the whole Ceremonial Hall with birthday napkins. He saw Frances leave her room again and go outside to begin her work. Not since his last Friday in Brighton Beach, a couple of hours before his mother had appeared, the last ordinary hours of his life, when he’d come home to his father, full of pizza, singing American songs—not since then had Yasha felt the sum of energy around him collect so obviously in his favor.

  • • •

  I was on my hands and knees flinging ants into the bushes, cleaning up the blueberries, thinking about virginity. It was one of the things—they seemed to be accumulating—that didn’t come back. Three things had vanished, had fallen off this upper edge of the world: Vassily, in his beach grave; Nils, in his forest; and then this thing I had taken from Yasha, in our double bed, in Room 18. He would have to go on without it. I hoped I had taken it kindly. I hoped he didn’t want it back.