The Sunlit Night (13 page)

“Darling, I had no idea what you were saying when your uncle called about your father. I could hear you in the background. You were simply incomprehensible.
Ommot’s route, Ommot’s route
, and then gibberish.”

“I had to find a place near
the top of the world
,” Yasha said, as simply and slowly as he could, given the pace his pulse had assumed since the sight of her monstrous boots, “the way Papa wanted it, that we could get to by following Ommot’s hunting route, the way Papa wanted it, that would agree to host a funeral. You can imagine there weren’t too many options. This was the best I could find.”

“And it’s marvelous!” His mother swept her arm from the floor to the ceiling. “Isn’t it?”

Yasha didn’t know whether or not he’d gotten it right. He needed to ask his father. Daniil was now the closest to his father he could come.

“Where is he?” Yasha asked his uncle.

“In the parking lot.” Daniil opened the lobby door and ushered first Yasha then Olyana outside.

The casket was narrow and unpainted. Yasha wondered whether Daniil hadn’t hammered the wood together himself. It looked measured to his father’s shoulders, which had never been broad. It was tapered at the feet, not very deep, and looked like it would weigh nothing, like nobody was in there at all.

Haldor came marching toward them from the water. When he reached the mourners, he bent himself over, completely, at the hips, bowing to Olyana, who returned his bow with an aristocratic inclination of her head. She touched her hand to her heart.

Daniil reached his arm out toward the casket and declared, “Vassily Gregoriov.”

Yasha looked at the casket again, and his eyes teared up.

Haldor spun around and marched back to the museum. He came out again with a dolly that rolled unevenly over the gravel.

The wood of the dolly was darker and thicker than the casket’s. There was no equipment in the world, Yasha thought, that could have been built for this purpose, for the death of his particular Papa. Haldor freed a gravel pebble from the bearings of one of the wheels. Yasha thought: Nothing could make this easier.

Daniil and Haldor lifted the casket off the truck and placed it on the platform of the dolly.

“My brother wished to be buried at the top of the world,” Daniil said. Yasha heard his father’s accent in his uncle’s voice—two smart brothers, who knew English well, but rarely spoke it aloud. “There was a Laplander we knew as children,” Daniil said. “Our father’s hunting teacher. Came from these parts. One of the Sami. Let us shoot with his bows. He put an idea in Vassily’s head.”

“It is an idea I understand,” Haldor said. “The north is very attractive. It should have been a pleasure to meet Vassily Gregoriov.”

Olyana shivered in her black dress and ran her hands through her hair. She said, “His heart went out.” She made a vague hand gesture that looked to Yasha like a butterfly shooting out of her chest.

Haldor gave a brief account of his aunt Hilde, who’d had heart trouble as well, and who’d lived to the age of ninety-four, though not without several trips to the hospital at Bodø, to which they’d often had to take a night boat, and one time a twelve-person plane.

When Haldor finished they were quiet again.

“She was trying to divorce him when he died,” Yasha said to Haldor. Yasha’s eyes were blurred with crying, and he wanted to keep things straight. “I don’t even know whether he signed the papers,” Yasha said. “I was too
distracted
at the time.” He turned to Daniil. “Did he sign? Did he manage to sign before—”

“Yes,” Daniil said.

“So he’s a free man,” Yasha said, looking down at the wood. “There lies a free, dead man.”

“Please,” Haldor said. “We will take very good care of your father. Come inside. Eat. Rest. We have several hours until midnight.”

“Have your men done this before?” asked Olyana.

Yasha looked around for Haldor’s men. He didn’t see any.

“And why midnight?” she continued.

“It is our best hour,” Haldor said. He turned out toward the shore.

Yasha followed the chief’s stare. The surface of the fjord looked like a sheet of metal marking the planet’s edge.

Haldor led Olyana inside, telling her about the midnight sun. Daniil followed behind them, listening. Yasha approached the casket. It was low and steady. The wood had hardly been sanded, but it was even and flat. Yasha lay himself down over the top of it. He was taller than his father, and longer than his father’s casket. His dark brown dress shoes hung off the end, toes pointing to the ground. His head was turned to the right, cheek to the wood. He let his arms fall freely down along the casket’s sides and onto the ground, where his fingers could lodge in the gravel.

From a distance, a set of hips came toward him, filling his hip-level vision. He stayed still. In comparison to the rough wood under his cheek, and the horror below the wood, the moving figure that now approached him seemed an emblem of the living world, sent to reclaim him. She stopped directly before him, the fly of her jeans parallel to his mouth. He felt his arm reach up, without consciously moving it. He felt her hand accept his. She lifted him with one hand held and the other guiding his back, turning him toward the lobby. On their way inside they passed the painter, who was walking to the barn. He looked unstrung, as though he’d either just rolled out of bed or hadn’t slept for days.

“Be right there,” she said.

“
Please
,” the painter said.

She led Yasha to the row of guest rooms, and Yasha pointed to Room 16. They stood outside the door for a moment.

“What’s his name?” Yasha asked, nodding up toward the barn.

“Nils,” she said. She grimaced. He recognized her expression from the last time they’d spoken. The receptionist walked past them now; the girl’s arm was still around Yasha’s back, and Yasha wasn’t embarrassed. He wanted the girl to look at him kindly again.

“What’s your name?” Yasha asked.

“Frances,” she said.

She didn’t seem to have any interest in him—she didn’t crowd him the way Alexa had, nor was she running away, his mother’s signature trick. He had nothing in particular to say to her, but he wanted to keep her attention—her level, undemanding attention. He wanted to simply say
Please
, as Nils had.

“I have to go,” Frances said. She went.

Yasha found her stunningly reliable.

•    •    •

It was dark inside Room 16. Yasha considered what might have happened had Frances stepped inside with him. When he parted the thick, sun-blocking curtains, every corner was blasted with a brightness he hadn’t anticipated. The walls were orange, the floor red, the ceiling blue. It felt like being inside the guts of an animal.

The room had two twin-sized beds against opposite walls. One bed frame was made of metal, the other of wood. Yasha sat on the wooden bed, still unmade from the night before. His hands looked freakishly white against his jeans, and the light in his eyes made the room fade, and his cheeks sweat, and his mouth dry. He yawned, swallowing and loosening his jaw.

As the light settled in his room, the colors mellowed slightly. Yasha focused on what lay outside. From his bed it seemed nothing but water, but standing up at the window he could see the shore that came first. Flat white sand. The water looked tropical and freezing. It was cleaner than Manhattan Beach—no cigarettes, no tubby Russians, no babies, no person of any kind, and no trash. A wild boar ate in its pen, on a small patch of grass between the beach and the museum.

Yasha yanked open the room’s rickety window. The air that came in felt like it had never touched anything before touching him right now, like it came directly from the place where air is made. He was glad to be up here. He wasn’t exactly glad to be at the Viking Museum. Vikings would always mean death to him now, just as they had to lots of people, he supposed. But he understood why his father had wanted to come up here. It was good here: far, high. He wondered why his father had never come up here while he was alive.

Things his father had done in his life: collected frogs, repaired radios, learned English, learned French, learned how to make bread, learned how to play the piano, married his piano teacher, moved to Brooklyn, opened the Gregoriov Bakery, painted the name Gregoriov over their awning in big blue letters.

Things his father had loved: the awning, a bialy in autumn, roller skates, his wife, the baby his wife gave him, the patronymic system that injected his own name into his son’s name, binding them forever, the Atlantic Ocean, fishes, the place he came from, the place he moved to, the whole planet, flour, yeast, salt, the subway named B.

Yasha wanted to schmear cream cheese on a bialy for his father. He wanted to serve it to him. The loss was spread unevenly over the day: he had been able to wake up this morning, and he was up on his feet, at least, thanks to Frances. Now that he was alone, the absence drew its invisible weapons. His gut-colored room was full of violence. He lay down, his head hanging off the side of the bed. All he could see was the red floor. The window, still open, let in a breeze that smelled of horse and pasture and lulled Yasha with its oxygen. The red of the floor disappeared and returned. It alternated with brown. When the light moved across the floor, his eyelids changed in color.

The sun was high. It could have been ten in the morning, or noon, or eight at night. It could have been midnight. No, it wasn’t midnight yet. Frances would be with him again at midnight. He would be with Papa again at midnight. Yasha pulled his head back onto the bed and pressed his face into the mattress.

•    •    •

Yasha slept for several hours, then woke up with a start, stood up, and left his room. He followed the smell of bread down the hallway, past a large metal sculpture of a tree, past the receptionist in the lobby, and straight ahead through the open double doors of the Ceremonial Hall. It was seven in the evening. Soon they would need to gather the necessary tools and drive the casket to Eggum, but the museum staff was dispersed—the Ceremonial Hall was empty. Then came the sound of boots stomping down the hallway.

“You haven’t eaten, my darling,” his mother said. “You’re starving.”

“I ate,” Yasha said. He hadn’t, and he was starving.

“What did you eat? This?” She surveyed the buffet platters: the bread was unsliced, the tea was red, the eggs were runny, and everything was pickled. She reached out and touched a piece of fish. It shook under her touch, and she drew her hand away.

“Herring,” she said. “My father’s favorite. I always hated the way it wiggles.”

Yasha couldn’t remember Russian herring. He could barely remember Brooklyn bagels. He saw a block of brown matter on a silver platter, and a cheese slicer with a handle in the shape of a bearded man. He gripped the man’s face and shaved off the top of the block. It tasted like nuts, caramel, and potatoes. It looked like solid peanut butter. A note lying before it on the table, in angular, rune-like handwriting, read,
BROWN CHEESE
.

“My darling,” his mother said while he was looking down at the cheese. “Here we are, aren’t we? Here we are.” She flapped her hands in the air, indicating the general space of the hall.

He did have a kind of urge toward her—to hold those hands, or let them hold him, for once, because it was Saturday, and they both knew what that meant. But he didn’t reach out to her, and his mother put her breakfast together. She sawed two slices of bread from the loaf. On the side of her plate she added a packet of mayonnaise she mistook for butter. Yasha stuffed a thin, heart-shaped waffle into his mouth.

Haldor had changed into a white tunic. He entered the hall now, looking clean and capable; his beard looked extra red. He bowed with his whole body again, deeply, to Yasha’s mother.

“It is a dark day,” he said.

Olyana nodded. Yasha looked out the Ceremonial Hall’s windows. The sun was as bright as it had been for the past thirty-six hours. The fjord was calm. The wild boar was sleeping.

“The darkest days are made of a weather we cannot help but admire,” Olyana said. She set her full plate down on the buffet table and picked up one of her slices of bread.

“Your English is very fine, Mrs. Gregoriov,” said Haldor.

“Chief Haldor”—Olyana curtsied—“my father was a wealthy man. If you can consider any Russian rich.” Nobody laughed, so she went on. “We had—we had so many pleasures. I grew up with tutors, you can imagine, and extra rooms, and herring in the morning. It wasn’t for me, such luxuries,” she said. “I married a baker.”

She held the bread up as evidence. She chewed. Haldor spoke about the darkness of Russian bread compared to the darkness of Norwegian bread. The Norwegian bread, even at its darkest, was lighter than Russia’s black bread. Yasha didn’t know what they were talking about, or why they were talking. He asked to go back to his room. As he walked away, he heard Haldor begin to speak about sunberries.

•    •    •

There was no such thing as sunberries. There was no such thing as chitchatting about imaginary fruit on the day of your husband’s funeral. Yasha grabbed the doorknob to his room. Through the door of the room next to his, he heard Frances speaking. The museum had given her Room 18 for the night, to spare her the trip back to Leknes. All this meant to Yasha was that Frances would be separated from her teacher and their strange yellow barn. She would be sleeping one wall away from him. Somebody answered her—a few people, but none of them sounded like Nils. He stepped over to her door and listened.