The Sunlit Night (24 page)

“Is … this … a closet?” she said.

“No!” Yasha said. He found the first step and started climbing down. Frances placed a hand on his shoulder and descended hesitantly.

Weak light dripped out of the open root tips, illuminating the palace and the goat. The goat stood in the same position, head thrown back, sucking on the shortest of the three roots. Nothing poured from the root into the goat’s mouth, nothing except a bit of light, but the goat wore her contented expression, a happiness confirmed by her lifted tail. Yasha turned around to Frances. Her lips were parted, as if about to speak.

She looked at the sack that was covering the table, and then at her own. She touched the sack on the table. The palace teetered. She withdrew her hand, looked at Yasha, and clutched vaguely at her own uniform. Frances lifted her arms and dragged the sack up with them. She pulled it over her head. Underneath, she wore a black bra. She unfastened the bra. The darkness of the staircase behind her made her look like an apparition.

Apparitions: Frances’s skin, the goat’s open mouth, Frida’s baby’s open mouth, sucking, the gleaming grill top, the goat sucking on the root, Frances’s outline. Yasha took one step forward, and bent his knees. His knees found the floor. He opened his mouth, and let one breast fill it. He placed one hand on each side of her waist. She rested her hands on his head. He felt the weight of her breast push his tongue down. He breathed in through his nose. She leaned forward, and he drew away from her, until his mouth was collected again, kissing her nipple. He stood.

When they kissed, Frances stood on her toes. She kept her hands around Yasha’s head. He kept his hands around her waist. They kissed with their lips only touching, until their mouths fell open.

•    •    •

I threw my sauce-covered sack back on and we rushed out of the basement, just before Gunn returned. Yasha led us straight to the truck—we tore out of the parking lot and down Vikingveien. Neither of us felt prepared to speak. Yasha drove faster, as if to shorten the period of silence. He was grinning. We drove down the road toward Vassily’s grave.

All five lavvos stood evenly spaced on the sand, each housing its own campfire. Yasha rolled down the windows, and thin smoke, having traveled the length of the shore, came in on the breeze. It smelled like wood and salt water. I leaned back on the headrest. As our speed increased, the air came in harder through the open windows. Yasha brushed something from his eye. I had just kissed that eye, I thought. Then Eggum came into view.

There was the head sculpture on its pedestal, looking especially bald from the pale spot the sun made on top. I think it was the head that made Yasha start speaking. He turned to me as we approached the radar station.

“Where are you going when you go home?” he asked.

“Good question,” I said. “I don’t know. Parents are moving, Sarah is moving. There’s a painting program I want to do in the city, but I don’t know where I’ll stay. I think I have nine hundred left in my checking account. I’ll use up a good portion on the trains back down.” I pictured farms whizzing past the train windows. “You know,” I said, “I have no idea.”

“If—” he said loudly. We had arrived.

I turned to him, enjoyed the sight of his hair bouncing off the tops of his ears for a moment, saw him try to stop the truck, and saw him forget how. He looked at the keys, put his hand to them, and, in a moment of outright confusion, slammed his foot down on the gas. The truck accelerated into the pedestal. The sculpture dislodged and flew toward us as the pedestal fell away. The head dropped onto the hood of our truck and lodged in a small crater. The air bags inflated, throwing us back. Yasha’s hands still gripped the wheel.

The sculpture’s pedestal, which apparently extended deep into the sand, leaned only slightly toward the water. It had crumpled the truck’s bumper.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Are you?” asked Yasha.

We both leaned back, away from the bags. What frightened us? The exposed metal spike, sticking up out of the pedestal, once fastened to the base of the head like a spine. The condition of our own spines. Our red truck, crammed against the pedestal, its redness now part of the disaster. The smoke, not a campfire’s. The hissing the engine made. What soothed us? The hissing, and the airbags, which looked like clouds. The heat of the light on the beach. That we would eventually call somebody.

We fell asleep. This is the strangest part of the story when Yasha and I tell it. Sometimes we admit to the session in the cave that preceded it, which was the culmination of a great deal of nervous energy, and which had evidently relaxed and drained our bodies, once done. Sometimes Yasha will attribute it to the heavy lavvo poles he’d lifted the night before. I talk about my sister, and the sleeplessness her situation evoked in me those nights. It was really the wind that put us to sleep. It was really the sun on the beach, and our being so close to each other, and so stuck.

Sigbjørn opened my door, and I woke up. He looked at Yasha—Yasha was still asleep. Sigbjørn reached his arm over me and pinched Yasha’s nose closed. Yasha woke up and screamed.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“To make sure he breathes!” Sigbjørn said.

“He breathes!” I found myself saying.

“You bleed!” Sigbjørn said.

I looked down and believed him for a moment. The sauce was primary red, and the splotch shapes were sloppy, natural. I didn’t know how long we had been asleep. I remembered the crash, or rather, the crash reminded me about itself as I looked through the windshield. Yasha opened his door and stepped out of the truck to get away from Sigbjørn. I came to.

“It’s sauce,” I said to Sigbjørn, but he was lifting me, and the head sculpture, in his arms and out to his tractor. I looked back over Sigbjørn’s shoulder and saw Yasha close behind us. The truck remained, burrowing its nose into the pedestal.

“Pizza sauce,” I said, when the three of us were seated inside the tractor’s cabin.

Sigbjørn wasn’t listening. He gave me the marble head to hold, started driving, then began, “I was at the lavvos, and I thought, Yasha is good for nothing. Today is the festival, he knows the time, he knows we are waiting for him. I thought, He is surely kissing Frances.”

I said, “You thought that?”

“I told the chief I would go find Yasha,” Sigbjørn said.

Yasha was in the backseat, looking down.

“Nobody in Room Sixteen. Nobody in Room Eighteen. Nobody in Room Twenty. Kurt was in the kitchen, he had not seen you. Frida was cleaning the waffle iron, she had not seen you. Gunn had not seen you. When Gunn asked me where Frances was, then I knew, they are surely kissing.”

We were halfway back to the museum now, and I think they had added the whale meat to the fires, because the smoke from the lavvos was darker, and rising higher.

“So I kept driving up the road. Ah! I thought.” Sigbjørn pointed his finger up and hit a button that raised the tractor’s plow. “He is visiting his father. So I forgave you. I drove up to Eggum.” He lowered the plow with another button. “Then I saw the truck. Something was wrong. He is dead, I thought. So, now,” Sigbjørn said. He didn’t say more.

We pulled into the museum lot. Kurt was at the kitchen entrance, carrying the whale meat out one tray at a time and leaving the trays on the gravel. Sigbjørn stopped the tractor, got out, opened my door, picked me up again, and carried me over to Kurt.

“Yasha crashed her,” Sigbjørn said. He deposited me into Kurt’s meat-stained arms.

“Where is Yasha?” Kurt said.

“With me. He can walk. I take him to his mother, and you put Frances to bed. She bleeds.”

Kurt looked at my sack.

“It’s sauce,” Kurt and I both said.

“Put her to bed,” Sigbjørn repeated.

My door was unlocked, as I’d left it for Yasha, and when Kurt turned the knob his forearm twisted the skin on my neck. He put me down on my bed, and then stepped back, not pulling down the covers or removing the marble head from my hands.

“The meat is burning,” Kurt said.

“Let me get out of this sack,” I said, and remembered the cave, bashfully, and thought perhaps I should keep the sack on and stop flinging it everywhere. “I’ll be out in just a minute. I can serve the honey mead,” I said.

“You are not hurt?” Kurt said.

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“It will be a long day,” Kurt said.

“It will be a long month,” I said. August, giving way without mercy to a sad September wedding. This month: birthdays, the first month in which Vassily would not live, a month for going home. A long month, a long way home.

Kurt centered his black chef’s cap and thumped it down over his head until it stopped right above his eyebrows. He left.

He left me holding the head like a hot water bottle over my abdomen.

“Kurt!” I shouted after him.

He leaned back into the room.

“Send Haldor here, if he has a minute. He should know what to do with this.”

Kurt looked at the head sculpture and made a
puh!
sound, which must have meant something in German.
“Ja,”
he said. At least this always meant “Yes.”

“Thank you.”

He closed the door. I sank into my pillow and wondered at what age a child would weigh this much—what kind of baby this marble head could have been. It pressed uncomfortably into my stomach. I kept holding it. What had we been saying, just before the crash? I thought myself back into the passenger seat. “If,” Yasha was saying.

If.

If I take over the bakery, and need an assistant, would you assist?

I would.

If I have never had sex before—had he ever had sex before?—and we went to the cave again, would you—

Would I? Yasha had not yet told me which day in August would be his eighteenth birthday. Nor had he asked any of the questions that I now imagined him asking:

If we both go back to New York, will we be going back together? If your sister gets married, will you want to get married? If I am younger than you for the rest of my life, will you get older, and older, and older? If Nils was too old, am I too young? If you came to the Arctic to be alone, why did you take your sack off?

I stood up, placed the marble head on my pillow, and took my sack off. I opened my window and threw the sack as far as I could. It landed a foot outside the wild boar’s pen. The boar waddled toward it, sniffing. It must have smelled like tomatoes. A tomato would have fit right in among the boar’s red apples. I wondered if the boar would taste the difference, taste the salt—if the tomato would taste more like grass, the apples tasting more like water. I wondered if the boar knew that apples are sweet. He stuck his snout out under the bottom rung of the fence. The sack looked like an anthill in the grass.

There was a loud knock at my door; I was naked.

“It is only the chief,” Haldor said, the knob already turning.

I wrapped myself in a white towel. Haldor was wearing his white tunic, and we looked like weird versions of each other, standing a foot apart, on the right side of my room. It was only then that I realized the beds had moved. Haldor realized it right away.

“Big-bed lady,” he said. I laughed so hard I snorted. “Olyana has done it in the same way,” Haldor said. “The ladies, they like the big beds.”

“And you?”

“Certainly,” Haldor said, “my bed is a different subject. Special made for the chief, so, superlarge. I have two ravens painted on my headboard.” He smiled and said, “What has happened to you?”

I was a little bit high off the bed jokes, and the open window, and imagining Yasha—I hoped it had been Yasha—pushing his bed against mine, so I said, “We were down with the goat, and Gunn was walking around over us, and we climbed out when she left, and Yasha wanted to go to see his father, and when we got there, he couldn’t stop the truck.”

I expected Haldor to say something about the truck, or the grave, but he said, “My goat?”

“Your goat?” I said.

Haldor’s cheeks grew as red as his beard, and for the first time it was easy to imagine him as a little boy. A large-bellied little boy, blushing.

“I made a goat,” Haldor said. “I was not thinking anybody would see it.”

I felt such affection for the chief just then, I wanted to try to wrap my arms around him—I knew I would not get all the way around, but I wanted to try to move his belt of teeth out of the way, lean my ear to his tunic, and hear his heart pound. He was three times as large as my father, who tended to look smaller and smaller as his hair grew outward. My father had more hair than body, just as my mother had more eyes than body. They both only barely existed. If I had ever hugged them together simultaneously, which I never had, and wanted to try, and imagined trying at my sister’s wedding, if only they would come, they might have begun to add up to Haldor.

“What … what did you think? About the goat,” Haldor said.

I felt I had said too much, and didn’t know what to answer. After an uncomfortable pause, I said, “I loved it. I think they should sell replicas in the Viking Shop. I would buy one and take it home with me.”

“Maybe Olyana would like it.”

“You are glad in her,” I said.