The Sunlit Night

by Rebecca Dinerstein

  “Didn’t your mom pick you up for lunch? The one time? I heard all about your playdate.”

  Yasha wasn’t familiar with playdates. Playdates were for younger kids. Not seven-year-olds who had just come over from Russia and had no friends on hand. Yasha could only think about dates, real dates, the kind this man had been going on with his mother.

  “What’s she like?” Yasha asked.

  “Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “A barrel of monkeys,” Ian said. “You know, I thought she was a lunatic—my fingers nearly bled, first week of lessons.”

  Lessons, Yasha remembered. Everybody had been his mother’s student. His father had been. This man too, with his boots and his beard—his mother had probably taught this man how to grow his beard. His mother was everyone’s teacher.

  Ian kept talking. “Practice your octaves, practice your octaves,” he said. “I thought, I should give up. Then, of course, I couldn’t give her up.”

  Yasha thought: Have I given her up?

  “How did you get her to America?” Yasha asked. “It didn’t work with us, when we tried. The first time.”

  “I hate that,” Ian said, “I hate all of that. The whole story. I keep thinking she’s going to bail on me too, any minute. And I keep thinking that I’m a lout.”

  “You are a lout,” Yasha said. He didn’t know what lout meant. He hoped it was a kind of insect. Yasha tried to crack his own knuckles, but they made no sound.

  “What can anyone do?” Ian said. “I try to hang on to her.”

  “Hard work,” Yasha said.

  “It’s gone all right. So far. I’m grateful.” Ian looked at Yasha as if they were cousins or old friends. “Because when she’s there, it’s good. You know? And she keeps being there, so far.”

  Yasha pitied him in his innocence—Ian didn’t know who he was dealing with, hadn’t seen his mother at her worst. Yasha had never seen his mother at her best.

  “We’ll see how it goes in Switzerland, I guess,” Ian said. “I wish that you would join us.”

  “I can’t,” Yasha said. “Next best thing is to give me your keys.”

  Ian exhaled again. He reached into the back pocket of his rolled-up jeans and retrieved a key ring. It held three keys and a monogrammed pendant.

  “I didn’t think you’d come with us,” Ian said, holding the keys up, letting the pendant turn in the air. “Alyosha sticks.” His manner had lifted into something Yasha could identify as charming. He reminded Yasha of his mother. They made a powerful pair. “My upright bass will get your window seat,” Ian said.

  There was a second in which Yasha wanted to take the place that had been offered to him—wanted the window view, wanted the Alps coming into sight when the plane got low enough, a little more time with this strangely admirable man and the redheaded woman who wanted her son again.

  Ian placed the keys in Yasha’s hand and said, “Water my plants.”

  Olyana came out through the front entrance.

  “Where have the men gone?” she asked.

  “We’re here,” Ian said.

  “And?” she said. She looked at Yasha. She looked at Ian. “Ian is happy, I can see you have made him happy. You’re coming with me,” she said.

  “You’re going with him,” Yasha said. His mother hesitated. “You’re very right,” Yasha said. “No more leaving behind—” he didn’t want to say Mother, or Olyana; he looked at her wings, and said, “—Valkyrie. We’re not sneaking away from each other. It’s all out in the open this time. This time we’re both innocent.” Yasha could see the word appeal to her. At the back of her mind, scales were balancing. Their tilt had surely been an inconvenience to her, Yasha thought, all these years.

  Through the Ceremonial Hall windows, Yasha saw Gunn cleaning up the festival mess. She had collected all the teacups in a stack that rose six inches higher than her head. She bent down for one more cup.

  “I’ve been awful today,” Yasha said. He went in to see what he could do.

  • • •

  By the time I was packed and bound for California, the sun set in the evenings and stayed down all night. Yasha didn’t sleep in my room anymore. It happened wordlessly, the change, one day in the corridor. Yasha, his mother, Ian, and I left the Ceremonial Hall together after Haldor’s last staff dinner, walked past Yggdrasil to our rooms, and there they were—our three different doors: Room 16, Room 18, Room 20. I don’t know whether it was mere propriety that made Yasha say goodnight, nodding to his mother, then to Ian, then to me. Opening his door, going in, staying in. Propriety, or else it was the first move in his new direction—his middle path, straight through the emptiness his father had opened.

  My room was dark. A new dark, as complete as the light had been. It made me shiver and sleep.

  The changing of the seasons couldn’t be helped. Yasha had found a way to help, to help that grave, and I felt my old uselessness creeping in with the sunsets, earlier every night. It was important to come closer to my father again, who needed to be surrounded; to my sister, who needed to be supported; to my mother, whose needs I never knew. I would go back to school, a graduate course in painting, and pay my hardest attention. I had failed to get all the sun’s information, hadn’t paid it the attention Nils had. I knew this summer’s endless day had kept a few secrets from me. Secrets about color, and veils, and how to make a thing glow. Secrets about the innumerable species of darkness.

  My sister had landed in California.

  Yasha was quiet on his side of the wall. I listened, and knew he was there, but could not hear him. I wanted to fill my hands with him. Pale night light bounced off the edge of my tiny sink.

  Who knows where the moon had been? I hadn’t seen it for months. Now it hung in my window. The wild boar had become invisible, being night-colored. Terrifying how black the fjordwater was then, the white sky receding, and the moon taking its place.

  CODA

  As it happened, Sarah asked our father one more time to give her away. As it always happened, in my parents’ mouse-sized apartment, what was said to one was heard by the other.

  “Is this how it will be? When we are separate entities?” my mother said to my father. “Our daughters will turn to you? To you, and not to me?” It was the reverse of the answer one is supposed to give the Wicked Child on Passover: “This is because of what the Lord did for me, for me and not for you, when he freed me from my bondage.” It was to be neither of them, my mother said to my sister, or both.

  That was how my father came to sit on the bride’s side, front row, with nobody else on the bench next to him. How my mother—in a gesture of defiance so total it defied her own wishes—sat with the groom’s family, beside Mrs. Glenny. Mrs. Glenny, in a large hat and sunglasses, was dressed for Easter. My mother was dressed in black. She attended on the condition that nobody—neither she nor my father—did anything “special.” It was left to me to give Sarah away.

  You could have expected that Sarah would be lovely: cap sleeves, ranunculus bouquet, lace gloves that ran up and over her elbows. You could not have expected the color her cheeks would turn that morning: a color I had come to associate with a particular distance of the sun from the horizon, a carmine color that meant both sunset and sunrise. As a bride, she looked particularly tall. It seemed the weight of her body had rearranged itself, and hung higher, making her shoulders heavy, her stomach light, her knees heavy, her feet light. She had my mother’s height and dark hair, my father’s blue eyes, and my arm to hold, walking over the footbridge and into the Glenny backyard.

  In gratitude for my parents’ attendance, Sarah had crafted a makeshift chuppah from the poles of Scott’s soccer goal. Scott wore a yarmulke. When my mother saw this, she pointed at it and said to Scott’s mother, “Your hat sure beats his.” Mrs. Glenny said, “Scott’s told us all about the Yamaha, Mirela. We couldn’t be more delighted.” My mother referred to yarmulkes as Yamahas for the next two years, until Scott left Sarah, and Sarah asked her to stop.


  But that day, Sarah and I thought that we had won. It was foggy, and cold, and the wind that came in off the San Francisco Bay blew through all of our hair—Scott’s wires, Sarah’s coiled braids, my thin curls, my father’s halo, my mother’s drapery. The only thing anybody could later say, and never deny, and never divorce, was that we were there; we came as we were asked. Yasha hadn’t come, but something else had been asked of him.

  Scott married Sarah at three in the afternoon on the patio of the Glenny house, on a September day in San Francisco that had been erroneously forecasted as sunny. The bride and groom looked anemic, gangly, both of them, although noticeably amazed at each other—at the ceremony, at the splendor they hadn’t seemed to expect. At their first dance, in the middle of the great white tent, Scott held my sister so tightly I thought she’d squeak. They weren’t right about each other, it turned out. It turned out they had been too young all along. But before the solution became divergence it was, for this evening, a very physical togetherness, in which Sarah and Scott clung to each other, and the party twirled on around them.

  At the party, my father drank. My mother drank absolutely nothing. Neither sat down and neither danced—they wandered around the dance floor apologizing to guests for stepping on their feet and nodding at Sarah’s girlfriends. “Do you want this?” my father went around asking the girls. “Is this what you want for yourself?”

  I sat down on the floor when my father started clinking his glass. There wasn’t enough time to find a chair, and I wanted to be low to the ground. His smile and even the butter knife he used to clink his glass seemed unspeakably dangerous. He stood in the middle of the dance floor. My mother stood at the far right of the tent, near the band. Scott and Sarah sat at the bridal table, having just begun their dinners. My father threw his hands in the air.

  “We’re so picky!” he began. “Picky picky picky.” He began to sing. “‘Pick-a-little-talk-a-little-pick-a-little-talk-a-little-cheep-cheep-cheep-talk-a-lot-pick-a-little-more.’”

  It was the housewives’ song from The Music Man. It was Sarah’s old favorite. There was an unused trumpet on the floor of the band stage, and my mother rested her hand on it, as if to keep herself from falling down. Had she too wound up on the floor, I could have crawled over and joined her. She stayed upright, clutching the trumpet.

  “My name is Saul,” he said, “I’m Sarah’s father.” He pointed at Sarah with his knife. “My daughter is making a decision,” my father said, spreading his arms out on the last word. He turned around in a slow circle, to see who all was listening, and everyone was listening. When he faced the bride and groom again he said, “Would I pick what she is picking? I would not! No, sir, I would not!” A friend of Scott’s who didn’t know my father, and who was in a great mood, cheered, “Me neither!” Someone put a hand over his mouth. “You pick the love you want,” my father went on seamlessly. “You pick. The love. You want. Okay. I picked—”

  This was where I thought it would break down. Again, the familiar sensation of my father’s hair growing while we watched, away from his head in every direction—he was marvelous, and even holding the glass of rosé I knew was his tenth, he was precise.

  “I. Picked. Wrong. Didn’t I?” Both my mother and my sister were crying. I was enthralled.

  “I am the angriest person I know. Also the most entertaining. Wouldn’t you say?” The young man whose mouth was still covered clapped his hands in appreciation. “Thank you,” my father said. “Now. In case you don’t know my work—and believe me, you don’t know my work—I spend my days drawing swollen submaxillary glands so that tenth-grade biology students can learn the diff—” This was the one word he slurred. Difference. “The diffrenz between mucus and saliva.” He looked hard into the eyes of the guy who had cheered for him and said, “You have never seen wrists like the wrists I drew for the pamphlet on carpal tunnel syndrome.” This quieted even that guy. “Do I love this work? Actually, yes. At least I did, in the beginning. I knew what I loved and I picked it, for better or worse.”

  There was a pause, and a few people drank from their glasses.

  He said, “Sarah is picking her love. Aren’t you?” Sarah was still holding the fork she had raised to her mouth just before my father started speaking. Her eyes and his eyes said Blue Blue Blue Blue to each other. “And I congratulate her. For the picking itself. Because that is hard to do. Few people ever do it. The most of us,” he said, “something picks us. Or we pick nothing. Take what we get. My Sarah said, ‘Daddy’—no, she never calls me Daddy—she said, ‘Dad, I pick him.’ And we said no. And she picked him anyway. And she got him.” When I think of this speech, it’s this line that most makes me wish that Sarah and Scott had kept each other. This part about Sarah wanting him, and getting him.

  “The next job, Sarah,” my father said, “is to remember down the line that nobody picked this but you.” For the first time since clinking the glass, he lowered his knife. “What you’ll have, what you’ll lack—all your fault. Your misery? Your fault. Your happiness? Up to you. The only thing that ever made me less scared of my misery was my wife. There she is, by the band.” My father gestured. My mother did not wave to the crowd now looking at her; she held on to the trumpet. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve lost track of things.”

  And that was it. He left the dance floor and took a seat at an empty table, where nobody came to comfort him, and the trumpet player eventually lifted the trumpet out from under my mother’s hand, and the band started to play, relatively quietly, until the party was in swing again.

  To Scott’s credit, he comforted my sister through her hysteria for the better part of two hours. My mother composed herself—even took a seat at my father’s table. They didn’t speak, but they sat together. I kissed my sister’s head and left the tent for a short walk.

  • • •

  Stretched out along the house’s corridor wall, the gifts looked like fish in an aquarium. Most of the wrapping was silver, gold, or light blue. The ribbons were voluminous—they looked like foam. One of the gifts was perfectly spherical. They were so intensely silent, these objects, I half expected they would release a burst of song when opened, following my father’s example. The spherical gift was silver. The cube was gold. A set of three white-wrapped gifts was tied up with a turquoise ribbon. Beside it lay a padded envelope. I looked at the envelope because by comparison it was so unattractive.

  The envelope hadn’t been wrapped and the shipment label was peeling off. Written into the recipient box was my name and the address of the Glenny house. Written into the return address box was 480 Leonard Street, New York, NY 10013. The postage stamp was fifty-six kroner.

  Seeing as the package was addressed to me, I opened it. When I try to remember what I was thinking as I opened it, I can only recall feeling surrounded by silver and gold fish, and the sound of my father singing Cheep cheep cheep. The envelope contained a key ring. On the ring hung three Mul-T-Lock keys and a silver medallion. The medallion was embossed with IS.

  IS.

  Is, I thought. Is. It is. Is what?

  It is it.

  There are photographs from the rest of the party in which I am dancing. In all the photographs, I am holding the envelope. You can see the corner of it behind my sister’s arm in the picture where we have our arms around each other. You can see it in my left hand in the picture where my father and I are drinking glasses of water. As far as I remember, nobody asked me about it. Everyone had, by that point, lost track of things.

  When I got back to New York and moved into the apartment at 480 Leonard Street, my parents didn’t give it much thought. They had gotten used to my being out of the house, and my graduate program had started, and for all they knew I was living in a dorm. They hadn’t yet vacated their apartment. It was completely empty, and they were living in it that way, with some thrill, it seemed, as if they were squatting.

  The apartment above the Gregoriov Bakery needed to be emptied. The phone at Ian’s apartment rang o
ne day with a Mr. Dobson, who had gotten the number from a Yasha Gregoriov, who wanted to know if I could please pack up his and his father’s belongings.

  When I arrived at Brighton Beach that morning at the end of September, Mr. Dobson greeted me at the bakery door. He had two things to tell me. Bad news first, he said: Yasha’s cat had been run over. It was the first time the cat had left the bakery in two weeks, and he hadn’t eaten in as long—he walked through the cat door onto Oriental Boulevard, and stood weakly in the center of the road. “All my fault,” Mr. Dobson said. He hadn’t closed the cat door as Yasha asked. The good news was that as of January, the Gregoriov Bakery would reopen as the Ladisov Bakery, and that the Ladisov family would keep all the old ovens. I walked upstairs and saw the two rooms in which Yasha had grown into himself. A sweet, dusty place. At the center of everything I’d come to learn about Yasha, these two rooms would remain empty, a blueprint of what I’d missed: his first life, watching bread rise, with his father. I packed their things into two thick garbage bags I found in the lower level. The bags sat on either side of me as I rode the B train over the Manhattan Bridge.

  In October, Sarah and Scott had their first big fight. Sarah was so startled, she took a red-eye one Thursday night and spent a few days on Leonard Street with me. We talked through it—I was of the opinion that the relationship was salvageable at that point—and when silence fell and we both reached for our phones, I thought of my father’s thumb assignment. He’d turned it down. He told me he was now working on something else. He wouldn’t say what. I wrote a letter to the Viking Museum, addressed to Yasha, saying his cat had died. I painted Sarah in the nude. That painting has since gotten Sarah a few dates, but we’ll see where they lead. I heard that Robert was still in Japan. I heard that he was reporting directly to the Secretary of State.