I didn’t hear back from Yasha until the end of November. His father’s grave had withstood its second major storm, and Yasha was half confident that it would remain stable. This, alongside Septimos’s death, he wrote, marked the end of an era. The era was his life so far. He hadn’t heard a peep from his mother, and that was fine. Haldor had left on his Baltic cruise, and Yasha was living with Sigbjørn and Sigbjørn’s grandmother. He had starting eating and liking fish for the first time, the way Sigbjørn’s grandmother prepared it, with butter. The bread Sigbjørn’s grandmother baked was as fresh when it came out of the oven as his father’s had been. It is bread’s nature to be warm, he wrote. I got his letter a few days before Thanksgiving, and when I called my mother to pass along Yasha’s regards, she was shredding apples for applesauce. I asked her what the applesauce was for. She said Thanksgiving. She shared the applesauce with my father, my father put ketchup on it, and that was all they ate. My mother had begun to decorate the apartment again from scratch. I visited them for the holidays and found three sketches of my mother’s face tacked to the bathroom wall.
When the sun stopped rising in Eggum, Yasha said he was ready to leave. He said the sky turned purple at eleven in the morning, pink at noon, purple at one, then black for twenty-one hours. He said the mountains turned the same colors as the sky. He said the fjords never froze. He said the Icelandic ponies stayed out all winter and their manes grew over their eyes. He said the storm winds were so strong, they made the trees shake so humanly, he’d had a long dream, filling the dark hours, in which all trees walked away. He said the blue that settled over the fields before the black was the most erotic color he’d ever seen. He said he’d been drinking goat milk. He said that one morning when the sky was purple he’d seen a bit of grass through the snow, that some of the snow had melted, that he wanted to get out before the next storm, that it all depended on the boats—when they ran, how rough the fjord was on any particular night. He said he was leaving everything where it was and coming back to everything. He said he was taking nothing with him. It would be eighteen hours down from the Arctic, he said, then due west.
NOTES
Yasha hears an excerpt from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002).
Haldor reads from I. A. Blackwells’s 1906 translation of The Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson and from Jean I. Young’s 1954 translation of The Prose Edda.
Olyana reads aloud Jesse L. Byock’s description of the Yggdrasil tree, as found in The Prose Edda (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005), page xxvii.
Nils and Frances listen to Oliver Stallybrass’s translation of Knut Hamsun’s Victoria (Toronto: Hushion House, 1994).
The Viking Museum, as portrayed in this book, is a fictitious institution and is not meant to resemble the LOFOTR Viking Museum of Lofoten. I extend deep thanks to LOFOTR for its inspiring example, and to Lofoten Golf Links for teaching me how to build a lavvo.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am joyfully indebted to Jenni Ferrari-Adler; Lea Beresford, George Gibson, Nancy Miller, Cristina Gilbert, Marie Coolman, Theresa Collier, Lily Yengle, Gleni Bartels, Laura Keefe, Derek Stordahl, Patti Ratchford, Alona Fryman, Megan Ernst, Alexandra Pringle, Alexa von Hirschberg, Kathleen Farrar, Lynsey Sutherland, Madeleine Feeny, and all of Bloomsbury; Sally Wofford-Girand, Sam Fox, and all of Union Literary; the extraordinary writers, faculty, staff, and director of the NYU M.F.A. program; the Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellowship; the Yale English department; the New York State Summer Writers Institute; the National Library of Norway; Kunstkvarteret Lofoten; Reidar Nedrebø and Anne Grete Honerød of Baroniet Rosendal; Christian Kjelstrup and all of Aschehoug Forlag; Jon Gray; Louise Glück; Jessica Strand; Alice Quinn; Mark Strand; Graham Duncan; Lill-Anita and Bjørn-Erik Svendsen; Eric Bulson and Mika Efros; Julie Buntin and Julia Pierpont; Aaron Parks; Noah Warren; Laura Bennett; Rachel Brotman; Lizzie Fulton; Liz Fusco; Annie Galvin; Meggie Green; Halley Gross; Ingrid Schibsted Jacobsen; Signe Kårstad; Diana Mellon; Cassie Mitchell; Annette Orre; Rachel Rose; Alexandra Schwartz; Ingeborg Sommerfeldt; Alex Trow; Zach Bjork; my loving family: Lia and Jim, Jon and Becky, Max, Michael, Bob and Marti, Lea and Bruce, Shmuel and Lee, Eitan, Goldie, and my heroic late grandparents.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
REBECCA DINERSTEIN is the author of Lofoten (Aschehoug, 2012), a bilingual English–Norwegian collection of poems. She received her B.A. from Yale and her M.F.A. in fiction from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She lives in Brooklyn.
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First published 2015
© Rebecca Dinerstein, 2015
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-112-2 / ePub: 978-1-63286-113-9
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Dinerstein, Rebecca.
The sunlit night / Rebecca Dinerstein. — First U.S. edition.
pages; cm
ISBN: 978-1-63286-112-2 (hardcover) / 978-1-63286-113-9 (ePub)
1. Young adults—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.I469S86 2015
813’.6—dc23
2014037448
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