The Sunlit Night (25 page)

Haldor sat down on the side of my big bed, the side that had previously been Yasha’s.

“I am glad in Yasha,” I said. I had not said anything like this to anyone. My sister and I talked exclusively about the wedding. My parents never talked about love, the way they never talked about pop music, drugs, or sports.

“Uff da,”
Haldor said. I sat beside him. Haldor nodded his head up and down for a little while. “I hope it goes better with you,” he said. “I hope you take Yasha home with you.” A bird on my windowsill made a cry that sounded like a bell. I felt very awake. “I hope you take Olyana home with you also,” he said. “She does not want to stay here with me.”

What was this web, and who had woven it? Haldor, Yasha, his mother, his father, my mother, my father, my sister, Sigbjørn, the bird on my windowsill, the boar in its pen, Kurt, Frida, the baby, the head, the truck, and I were no longer unrelated. I looked over the gull’s head and up toward the highest clouds, and the planet occurred to me as an eyeball, and this arctic island its iris, staring up at the other sky, the black sky, the cosmos. Haldor and I stared at the floor, out the window, in turns. We had become elements of the same web, and this relationship allowed for silence, and for a few moments of mutual understanding. We sat still for fear that if we shook, shook the way we wanted to, we would wreck the filaments connecting us to the others. We depended on our web as much as we wanted out of it. We were trying to move each other around. We were trying to stay still. We were trying to be here and elsewhere at once. We were trying to be alone in love.

“Brown cheese takes a long time to go bad,” Haldor said.

“I won’t eat your goat anyway,” I said.

“Thank you,” said Haldor.

I pulled my legs up onto the bed and turned to face him. “I am afraid of going home without Yasha,” I said.

“And I am fearing staying here without Olyana, but what can I do? I can make more goats. Go down under the tree and call myself a troll. Sometimes I am feeling so much like a troll, I found that room under the tree and thought, I can use some time alone here, in the dark.” He looked at his hands. “I get so tired of the sun,” Haldor said. Then, “You are going to California, yes?”

“Yes, California,” I said. “The wedding. It’s going to be ugly.”

Haldor looked up from his fingers, which he had been studying, bending them one at a time at the knuckle.

“Not my sister, not the flowers. My sister is beautiful.” The chief put his hand on his knee and nodded and seemed to believe me. “The day itself will be ugly. My parents will not be there. I will be there, but that won’t help much. I don’t help anyone. Yasha knows how to help.”

“What?”

“Yasha buried his father,” I said, “and is trying to forgive his mother, and trying to learn how to drive a car. I will have to do all of those things eventually.”

“I did not know that he does not drive,” Haldor said. “Certainly I would not be giving him the truck. You neither? And your father,” he said, “is he sick?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” I said.

“And your mother, is she bad?”

“No. My mother is very good. She is so good,” I said. “She provides and provides and provides. She forgets to provide for herself. I don’t know where she finds pleasure. I wish she would be pleased by my sister.” I knew Haldor didn’t follow this. “She finds pleasure in apples,” I admitted. “My mother loves apples.”

Haldor looked out my window to the pen, where the boar was, as if on cue, eating the apples that had been thrown to him, one bright red hemisphere perched in his mouth, making him look slaughtered and served for Christmas. I wondered if the boar still had his private parts, whether they had been cut from him—whether there was a sow, somewhere on this island, with whom he could save himself. The apple disappeared down his throat.

“I have never left Borg,” Haldor said. “I thought, Here is a woman who puts fire in this place I have always been, maybe this is a place for her also. So I asked her and she said,
I love Ian Strom.
”

“Ian Strom?”

“Ian Strom.”

“The man who lives in Tribeca,” I said. These were the things Yasha had said at the funeral, I dimly recalled, in the confusion before the Mourner’s Kaddish.

“What is Tribeca?” Haldor said.

In my mind, the image of West Broadway replaced the image of the funeral. Mothers wheeled ergonomic strollers past renovated warehouses, safe from the nearby rush of West Side Highway traffic, cooled by the breeze off the Hudson River. I said, “It’s a place where people live.”

He said, “Would you say this is a place where people live?”

I went to the window and could see the beach, all the way back to the white horizon. A child was running up and down the shore, flying a whale-shaped kite. The sky was blue and clear enough to turn the whale’s flying into swimming. The shore was wide and bright enough to make the child look like a piece of candy.

“We should all live here,” I said.

“You should all go back to where you came from,” Haldor said. He stood up and straightened his belt of teeth so it made a diagonal across his chest. He looked at the marble head on my pillow, seized it, and went to the door. “So will I.”

When Haldor walked out the door, I didn’t know where he was going. It seemed he might walk straight over the sea to the North Pole itself, or back into the first Viking age, or home to his two-raven bed. The head had looked less strange in his arms than in mine, or it looked in safer hands, and I pictured him walking to Eggum and jamming the metal spine back up the head’s neck. I wondered for a moment if he had carved the head himself, before or after his goat. My painting of the ox outside the asylum lay on its side at the foot of my bed. What did we want from these animals? Why did we re-create them? To bring them, and their innocence, and their meat, and their company, into our web?

Haldor’s goodbye had shone some light on my way out: I had to go home—I knew this—and if I could follow his instructions and take Yasha home with me, back to the place where he too was from, then we could make New York a place where people lived again. My sister would marry and move away. My parents would divorce and move apart. The north would fade further and further into itself, into our memory of it. New York City would be left to us. Yet, Yasha wasn’t really from New York, not originally. Besides a left-behind cat I knew Yasha loved, the city had no immediate claim on him, nor did I.

•    •    •

Olyana had tested the rotation of Yasha’s wrists, knees, and ankles. She assured Sigbjørn they were not broken. She touched Yasha’s neck and Yasha flicked her hand away.

“I’m fine,” Yasha said.

“Little man,” said Olyana. “You very nearly ruined the surprise. Do me a kindness, if you’re
fine
—follow me.”

She took one step foward, and Yasha noticed her shoes. They were clear hard plastic, the shape of Dorothy’s red slippers, but completely transparent, showing her unpainted toenails. Olyana hooked her arm around Yasha’s elbow, which he had not offered her. He could not imagine where she found things like these slippers, how she paid for them, why she packed them, why she wore them, today or ever. He stood up straight, in an effort to gain any height over her. In her heels, she matched him to the inch. Yasha felt so related to her he could hardly stand it.

“My good Gunn,” his mother said as they passed reception.

Yasha looked at the doorknob behind the guest chair. Gunn bowed her head ceremoniously to Yasha and his mother as they passed, while the British family perused the festival’s activity schedule. His mother did not leave the lobby until Yasha pushed the door open for her. Olyana walked through, retaking Yasha’s elbow when they’d both come out onto the sand. They walked toward the archery targets. Olyana had to pull her clear heel out of the sand each time she stepped.

Yasha said, “Why did you buy those shoes?” This was not the first question he’d intended. He’d actually wanted to ask her about love. For the first time, she seemed capable of it, even filled with it. The speech she’d made to Haldor was the most generous expression of love Yasha had heard from her. He entertained the gross, exhilarating idea of his mother being a talented lover. Physically. He wanted to inherit some of her talent. He looked at his mother’s arms. They seemed to declare that they knew how to hold, how to be held, even if she had been holding someone other than him these ten years. Yasha thought: She has something to give back to me now.

“The shoes were a gift,” she said.

Yasha said, “What else does he pay for?”

His mother said, “Oh.” She lifted her skirt up to her knees. “You wouldn’t believe. For one thing,” she said, “your father.”

“He paid for my father?”

“So generously.”

His mother had a way of frightening him with the most pleasant words. In the parking lot, at the far side of the archery fields, Yasha saw the damaged red pickup hitched at an angle to Sigbjørn’s tractor. There was a black car parked beside the tractor.

Why had Yasha wanted to bring Frances to the grave site? To hush his father’s Why nots. To tell him, Done, done, done. To show him Frances. He didn’t know if his father had been buried wearing his glasses. Probably not, Yasha thought. Surely his father’s sight had been restored to him. Surely that was a benefit of death.

“To move a body across international borders,” his mother said, “terribly expensive. Far more expensive than these shoes. He didn’t flinch,” she said, her cheeks jumping, as they often did, up toward her eyes.

Yasha had never considered this expense, and was profoundly embarrassed. Nobody had at any point asked him to pay. Why had they asked her new man? And why did her new man do it? Daniil had paid for Yasha’s plane tickets: Moscow, Stockholm, Oslo. Yasha had paid for his own train ticket north, exchanging the last Russian bills his father had given as pocket money for five hundred Norwegian kroner, using two hundred on the train ticket, twenty on a Coca-Cola, twenty on a
Go’morgen
yogurt when he woke up twelve hours later still on the train steadily approaching the Arctic, sixty on a cheese sandwich, and the last two hundred on the ferry from Bodø, across the cold fjord to Borg.

Had his father died in Brooklyn, it would have meant more borders. His father’s body would have needed to cross an ocean, not to mention the dozen Western countries, on the way up to the top of the world, the place where Vassily wanted to die, or truer, the place where he wanted to live after he died. Mostly ice. Real peace, his father had said. Yasha looked at the red and white rings of the targets, mounted on easels just behind the place where he and his mother had stopped. This was not the top of the world. This was very close to it. This was the Viking Museum at Borg. This was the solution they had found. It had all been made so generously possible.

“Why did he do it?” Yasha said.

“Die?” his mother said.

“Pay,” Yasha said. “Your friend.”

“Ask him!” she said.

She laughed. She looked wilder and merrier then than Yasha had ever seen her. She began to flatten her dress over her stomach. Yasha understood nothing other than that her dress was the same red as the bull’s-eye. Where was she looking? No longer at her slippers, or at him. Up, over the tops of the targets, toward the parking lot. Yasha looked in the same direction and saw a bearded man getting out of the black car. When he opened the driver’s-side door, it slammed into Sigbjørn’s tractor. The man closed the car’s door, gave the tractor a pat, and walked toward them. When he came onto the sand, he removed his boots. His jeans were already rolled up. With both boots in one hand, he ran between two targets and straight to Olyana, who engulfed him in open arms.

When the embrace ended, Olyana said, “Here he is.”

“Here who is?” Dostoyevsky said. He seized Olyana’s hand.

Yasha took a step backward. Here who was? His first irrational thought: My father has sent a messenger. His second irrational thought: Septimos told this man where to find me. Third: It’s not him. Fourth: It is him. Fifth: I have no bread to sell him. The Dostoyevsky guy had a beard, and a straight nose, and combed hair. He had always worn leather boots, rolled-up jeans, with musical instruments hanging off his shoulder. He came on Fridays. He read from his paperbacks. He made Yasha furious. The reward for remembering this man was that in the memory, his father was standing at the adjacent register, and the dinging of the register buttons in the memory meant that his father’s fingers were moving, meant that his father still moved.

“Alyosha,” Dostoyevsky said. “It’s been ages.”

Why was it possible for this man to speak, if his father could no longer open the cash drawer and charge him $2.50?

“I always refused to tell him your real name,” his mother said, giggling. “He calls you Alyosha.”

Yasha felt he could hear his own voice speaking from a distance.
Doesn’t mean I am Alyosha, for fuck’s sake
, it said. His father had laughed.

His mother said, “Came home all the time with his sourdough and a book, saying he had read to you, saying you were taller every week, saying how well the bakery smelled. Saying what an idiot I had been to leave the two of you, saying he wasn’t worth the sacrifice. And I would say, Don’t you worry about my sacrifice.”

I’m right here, Yasha thought. Your sacrifice.