The Sunlit Night (12 page)

“I do not know the man, and I very much do not know how to bury him. But the museum has agreed to do it. It will only take a few hours. I must ask you both to join me at Eggum, at midnight, Saturday. I have promised a proper ceremony.”

“Eggum?” I asked. I imagined hot colors and holograms.

“According to the family’s request,” Haldor said. “The man has asked to be buried
at the top of the world
.”

“Eggum is not the top of the world,” Nils said. “There’s Svalbard.”

“Can’t dig through the ice on Svalbard. This is the closest they will get, and they know it.”

The two men switched to Norwegian, for more efficient arguing. I recognized the words for “no,” “sleep,” and “absurd.”

Haldor ended the escalating dispute by pointing at me, shouting, “Then she will!” and leaving the barn. In the moment the doors were open, I saw, walking between the museum’s archery targets, the boy. I followed Haldor out of the barn.

The boy walked aimlessly over the museum grounds, and when he reached a nearby hall, I saw him open a door I’d never opened. His appearances no longer charmed me. For somebody so good at keeping his business to himself, I thought, he had little business in there—I ran to catch the door as it closed behind him.

Inside, axes everywhere. Axes with decorative holes in their middles and with gold inlay. Axes with smooth-edged blades, others eroded, toothy. One ruby-encrusted axe, resting on blood-colored satin. He stood in the shadow of a royal axe display case, leaning against its pedestal.

“Are you lost?” I said. “Are your parents here with you?”

I’d later learn it was the worst thing I could say. At the time, he merely looked at me, said, “They are not,” and tilted his chin up.

“What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing here?”

“I am painting a barn,” I said flatly. “It’s an art project.”

Then, as thoughtlessly as he’d entered, he exited the Axe Hall and looked up the hill toward the barn. Nils had resumed his work on the exterior, reaching a paintbrush far above his head. He looked small against the high wall.

“People waste their lives in so many ways,” the boy said.

Before I could find an equally insulting retort, Haldor appeared, exclaiming, “I see you two have met!”

Now the boy looked me in the eye, and he looked alarmed. “What have you told her?” the boy asked, his voice suddenly childish.

“We will need her help with the ceremony,” Haldor said.

I stared into the boy’s black shirt, comprehending it. I was prepared to start over, to console him in any possible way, when the boy said, “I don’t need help.”

He looked at me the same way he had on the road—with the hollowed-out face of an empty person. I could see that he meant what he said.

Robert Mason hummed his curse in my ear: I didn’t—I couldn’t—help anyone.

“If he doesn’t need help,” I said to Haldor, “the Yellow Room does, and I’d prefer to—”

“Let me have a word with him,” Haldor said, and pulled the boy away. They walked past the barn to the lobby. Nils stopped painting, threw his brush down into the grass, and lit a cigarette. He walked toward the parking lot and took a seat on the hood of his car. He didn’t see me where I stood near the Axe Hall. I turned and walked down to the fjord.

•    •    •

It was high tide, and the water was clear and turquoise. A little way beyond the museum’s marked territory, I passed a woman who was swimming in her underwear. We nodded shyly at each other, and I walked on. When I got to a place where no one could see, I took my clothes off and swam naked in the fjordwater, which was warm after many days and nights of sun.

I could see through the clear water to the bottom. I found a large shell, but there was a creature alive inside, so I did not take it. Two long shells lay open, their mussel plucked out. I lifted these from the sand. Inside, celestial blues turned white at the bright point where the shells linked.

Spider threads stretched over my socks and underwear when I found them again on the rocks. I wrung the water from my hair and tried to find the spider. It had moved on to a nearby beer bottle. Earlier bathers had left some junk in the sand, but wonderfully, the paperback they’d discarded was in English. I found a concave boulder and crawled down into the hard dent to read.

Pan
’s back cover suggested that Edvarda would meet a tragic end. I turned to the last page, hoping for instructions on how bodies are buried in the Far North. I could not imagine Eggum accommodating the ceremony I understood a funeral to be—rectangular plot, bordered by other plots, rain the worst possible weather, the gatherers in dress shoes and black umbrellas. On Eggum the beach boulders would be larger than any casket and furthermore threaten to crush the dead. The wind could blow hard enough to remove the mourners’ tears from their cheeks. And there was no place for the dead on that shore. Everything that wasn’t rock had been taken or canceled by the sea.

I knew only one funeral by heart. My grandmother had died on Yom Kippur, the most sacred day of the year, in September 2001. We buried her in a Jewish cemetery, and given the burning towers I had just seen out my high school’s windows, I wasn’t sure the world would be around much longer, and I was afraid and missed her terribly.

In
Pan
, Hamsun’s Edvarda was carried to her funeral in a white boat.

I lay my bright body over the rock. I took care not to crush the twinned blue mussel shells. Sometimes the waves made a sound on the rocks like footsteps, and I would lift up and look over my shoulder to see who was coming. There was never anyone coming.

•    •    •

The flight to Russia had taken ten hours. When Vassily and Yasha landed at Domodedovo, they found Daniil waiting in short-term parking lot A. Yasha hadn’t seen his uncle in ten years and was pleased to discover he hadn’t much aged, only widened, the way a tree grows.

Daniil drove them through the suburbs of Vidnoye, Tsaritsyno, Danilovskiy—his namesake—and the Tagansky District, and finally entered central Moscow, where the first Gregoriov Bakery maintained moderate business on Arbat Street.

The bakery’s cashier welcomed the family with warm blini. Exhausted from travel, Vassily ate a pancake and walked around the corner to Daniil’s house, where he took a nap. In the evening, the men played cards and taught Yasha how to swallow vodka without clenching his throat. Vassily refused to drink and told Daniil about the defibrillator they’d soon insert. Yasha told Daniil how much stronger Papa would soon be. Daniil said the surgery was overdue. After Vassily won his third consecutive round, they cleared the tables and slept well.

On the morning of their second day, Vassily felt it was time to focus. While Yasha was in the kitchen, curing an unprecedented hangover with buttered bread, Vassily brought Daniil upstairs to have a talk about “the woman.” They sat in Daniil’s small accounting office, which had once been Vassily and Olyana’s bedroom.

Vassily asked his brother whether he’d heard anything from Olyana. Daniil had been dreading the conversation, but took the question as a sign that Vassily was prepared. In one flustered monologue, Daniil relieved himself of the facts: Olyana was in New York, she lived with a musician, and here were the papers she’d sent along in the mail. He handed the paper-clipped stack to Vassily. Vassily stared at the cover page of the divorce agreement for a long time before he began to read.

Daniil excused himself and returned to the bakery. Vassily took a walk around the house. Her belongings were gone from their old bedroom’s closets, except for a black-lacquer jewelry box that contained a few bracelets and her wedding band. Vassily returned to the office, sat, and signed on the numerous lines. Gone was gone; he felt no need to refuse the bureaucracy. The difference between losing her and freeing her was not so great.

Vassily and Yasha went for a walk that afternoon, and though Vassily intended to tell Yasha, he found he couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud. The weather was mild for midsummer, and they walked without talking much at all, sharing the peace that was most familiar to them.

When they returned to Daniil’s house, Vassily climbed the stairs, entered the kitchen, and suffered a cardiac failure. Yasha wailed for help, and Daniil ran in, only to witness Vassily’s collapse, which would prove irreversible.

After the ambulance, after the hospital, after the long ride home and the unsleepable night, after the dawn that had no right to break, after the inedible breakfast, after his body had begun to reject its own agony and the convulsions stilled, Yasha remembered his father’s instructions. On the back of a bakery receipt, he wrote:

    
Ommot’s route

    
Lapland

    
Top of the world

    
Real peace

Yasha gave the short list to his uncle, and Daniil recognized Vassily’s fantasies instantly. The imagery stemmed from their childhood, their long-dead hunting teacher. Daniil told Yasha these ideas were whims, but Yasha was inconsolably serious, and began researching funeral homes in the Far North. Yasha said that his father had spoken this wish back at home, and on the plane to Moscow, and in the airport, and before bed his final night. He refused to ignore what he’d been so plainly told. He had, on the other hand, been willing to ignore his mother’s wishes, and common sense, in making this pointless trip. Yasha admitted that his mother lived in New York. Daniil admitted that he knew. Yasha said his mother had wanted a divorce. Daniil said he’d given Vassily her divorce papers.

Having confused each other with their overlapping revelations, neither man knew whom to blame for what. They followed Vassily’s wishes. Daniil called Olyana at the number she’d provided. A man picked up. Daniil could not find a way to address him, and instead said only, “Olyana Gregoriov,” which succeeded in bringing her to the phone. By that time, Yasha had contacted the Viking Museum of Borg, Norway, and reached an agreement with its chief. Daniil gave Olyana directions from New York via Oslo to Bodø, saying he’d meet her there with the body. Olyana called the sons of the men who’d once helped her leave Russia, now asking for their help in the cross-border transportation of human remains.

Yasha traveled ahead, alone, to coordinate the ceremony. He took two planes, a boat, and a bus. The museum gave him a room, and a revised quote for the funeral expenses. It fell just within Daniil’s stipulated limit. The island where his father would be buried had one main highway, and Yasha walked it aimlessly, stunned by the sparse population, the perpetual light, the one enormous restaurant where he ate all his meals, and the staggering mountains around it.

Vassily’s embalmed body was flown out of Russia and over Lapland.

•    •    •

Olyana arrived in a long black dress, her hands in calfskin gloves, her feet in platform boots. For luggage she carried only a shoulder bag, which the receptionist carried into Room 20. While a bed was made up for her, she stood in the middle of the museum lobby’s pentagonal floor, arms straight and neck long, as if to invite predators. It was Saturday afternoon. The Viking Museum was open and full of visitors. Nobody came near her for ten minutes, until Yasha entered the room.

“I begged you,” he said. He stood opposite her, recovering from a long sleep and a longer anger.

“
Yakov
,” she said, sounding relieved to find him alive.

“I begged you to leave him alone,” Yasha said.

“I begged you to tell him yourself.”

“I told you he couldn’t bear it.”

His mother removed one glove, then the other. “The news would have hit him more gently,” she said, “coming from his son.”

“His son refused,” Yasha said.

The men’s bathroom door opened, and Daniil appeared.

“So you tried his brother.” Yasha turned to his uncle. “And you did it,” he said to Daniil, having failed to say it in Moscow. “You did exactly what she asked. She told you to make Papa sign, and you made him. You didn’t even hesitate, did you?”

Daniil paused. “I
did
hesitate.”

“He could have lived a little longer,” Yasha said. He looked at his mother, whose short red hair was pulled back in purple barrettes. “Married to you on paper,” he said, “what would it have hurt you?”

“I did it,” Daniil said. He held his black cap in his hands, the way Yasha’s mother held her gloves, and they both appeared to be holding dead dolls. “You are right, Yakov,” his uncle said, “I gave him the papers. I did.”

“It was the best thing to do,” Olyana said.

“Explain to me how killing him was the best thing to do!” Yasha shouted.

The girl and the barn-painter entered the lobby, raised their eyebrows at Yasha’s shouting, turned left, and walked down the hall toward the guest rooms. They carried a couple of bags into Room 18 and closed the door.

“What a funny little house,” Olyana said.

“It’s a museum,” Yasha said. “And what do you care? It was Papa’s idea.”