The Sunlit Night (27 page)

I gathered the stomped berries in a bucket, as if restoring them, as if calling Nils back. No magic happened, and I knew I would feed the stomped berries to the boar. I thought about Yasha’s back, and how I’d flattened my hands over it the whole gray morning. How warm he was.

Which algebra would be solved, I wondered, if he came to my sister’s wedding? Without his mother, without my mother. Without his father, without my father. Yasha could give my sister away. And I could sit in the front row, weeping, pretending my hair was as long as my mother’s, pretending my legs were as long as my mother’s, pretending Yasha was my husband, and my sister our beloved child. For a moment there seemed no other way for the wedding to go on. I had a thought that Nils was sick somewhere. I looked at Yasha and practiced asking him to come with me. Just then Yasha and Sigbjørn walked past me, heading toward the smithy.

•    •    •

“What do you think of Tribeca?” Sigbjørn asked Yasha.

“Ian?”

“You approve?” Sigbjørn said.

Yasha wasn’t sure. He dug a line with his foot in the smithy’s gravel floor. He put both his feet on the right side of the line, and thought: He knew my father; he paid for my father’s body; he knows my mother better than I do; he came here; he is here. He put his feet on the left side, and thought: He has a beard; he is not my father; he likes the sound of his own voice; he likes the look of his own shoes; he likes my mother; and screw him.

“I don’t know,” Yasha said.

“Lots of loving,” Sigbjørn said. Yasha looked up. “Everybody is coming here this summer to love. Not me,” Sigbjørn said. “Frances comes, I am interested in her, she is interested in you,” Sigbjørn said. “Your mother comes, I am interested in her, I think she is interested in Haldor, really she likes Tribeca. Now Tribeca is here and I will have to watch them making kisses. The summer is almost over,” he said. “You know what happens to me? Goodbye, ladies. Hello, my grandmother. Superfine.”

To change the subject, Yasha said, “So you start with two pieces of iron?”

Sigbjørn laughed.
“Ja,”
he said, “clumps.” He reached away and when his arm returned, his hand opened, showing two silver nuggets. Yasha imagined them changing shape in the fire. Sigbjørn stopped pumping, took one nugget in each hand, and then slammed them together. “Kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss,” Sigbjørn said, twisting each nugget separately, pressing them against each other with force.

Frances walked in. She was carrying two buckets, one full of berries, one full of trash. Her knees were dirty.

“Sky and sea,” Sigbjørn said, “look who it is.”

Yasha stood up.

“Who was that man with your mother?” Frances asked.

“Ian Strom,” Yasha said. “Her boyfriend.”

“Ian Strom,” Frances said. She put the buckets down and sat on the stool where Yasha had been.

“Wasn’t me with your mother!” Sigbjørn said. “The answer is never me.” The nuggets were no longer kissing, and he clutched one of them in his tongs. He plunged the tongs into the depth of the coal pile. The iron as it melted made a sound like wind blowing. A few lumps of coals cracked in half from their own heat.

“What does that mean?” Frances said.

“Do you think I ever know what my mother means?” Yasha said.

“Right,” said Frances. “Do you know how long he’s staying?”

“No.”

“Do you know how long you’re staying?”

“Why?”

“Because I was wondering—”

“Hey, lovemakers!” Sigbjørn said. “What is this, a smithy or a hotel?”

Frances stood up. “I’d like to invite you to my sister’s wedding,” she said. “September, in California, you can use my father’s plane ticket. He stabbed himself in the hand. He wasn’t going anyway. That’s all. Sorry, Sigbjørn. I mean it, Yasha.” He had never seen her so nervous. “I don’t know how to go if you don’t come. So. Before you go off with your mother and her friend, consider coming with me.” She left the smithy and turned right; a moment later she crossed back and went left. Her head hung low on her neck, as if the buckets were pulling it down.

Yasha expected Sigbjørn to make a joke. Instead, he handed Yasha a hammer. Sigbjørn withdrew the combined nuggets—the iron had assumed the exact red of the coals—placed the glowing clump on an anvil. “Go!” Sigbjørn said. Yasha swung the hammer down onto the iron as hard as he could. If Frances hadn’t left, he thought, she might have heard these bangs as some kind of answer. They sounded more decisive than anything in Yasha’s mind.

While Sigbjørn cooled the iron, he asked Yasha, “What shall you tell her?”

Yasha had always understood the association of sex and marriage in the historical, even biblical tradition. Still, he had not expected the one to lead so quickly to the other. It’s not my wedding, he told himself. It’s not Frances’s wedding. All the same, the image of Frances’s sister, who in his mind was identical to Frances, puffed up in a wedding dress, walking down an aisle, confused him.

“She sounded like she wanted you,” Sigbjørn said.

That was the heart of it. She sounded like she wanted him. He could not have performed so badly the night before, after all. And it would not be Frances in the white dress. It would be Frances in a pink dress, or a blue dress, any kind of dress in the world, and he would wear a tie to match. Sigbjørn lay the new bar of iron out on a leather sheet. Yasha came close to him and peered over his shoulder.

“I would like to learn what you do with iron,” Yasha said.

“I would like to learn what you do with girls,” Sigbjørn said.

Yasha remembered the breast-sucking he had done the day before. “What do I …” Yasha fished, “do with them?”

“I don’t know,” Sigbjørn said. “You make them love you so easy.” He inspected Yasha’s hammering. “Run and tell her you’re coming,” he said. “I have to fix your bad work.” Sigbjørn got the fire going again. Yasha walked out of the smithy humiliated, triumphant, in a kind of trance.

On the beach, the birds were out fishing. The wind came from the direction of the museum and struck Yasha in the face. He liked to feel the wind catch on his chest before it blew past. Yasha studied a gull and imagined the gull’s wide wings growing out from under his own shoulder blades—one wing stretching up toward the archery targets, one stretching out toward the water.

As he walked, the wings he’d grown caught more and more of the wind. In his mind they were grotesque and fringed—long white feathers formed a wall behind him, from his head to the sand. He could almost feel their tips dragging, getting dirtier, slowing him down. He knew these were not flying wings. His wings were the kind that beasts like griffins and sphinxes grew when they became royal, signifying majesty and decadence, never enough to lift their animal weight. He walked slowly, and let his wings drag in the sand.

When he reached the parking lot, the wings drew up and collected behind him, then dissipated. Only his body again. Gunn was on the phone. The Ceremonial Hall had not been cleaned—that was his job. First, Frances. He walked down the hallway past his own room and toward hers. When he arrived, the door to Room 20 opened and his mother stepped into the hall. She had put on her Valkyrie costume, and her wings, Yasha saw, were sturdily set on her back, clean, finer than his had been. “Come in,” she said, “how did you know we were waiting?”

She put her hand to the small of his back and led him into the room, where Ian sat on the foot of her pushed-together bed. The wrong double bed. The wrong room. The wrong man. The wrong woman.

“Alyosha, birthday boy,” Ian said, as his mother closed the door behind them.

•    •    •

I was on my bed being very nervous. I had made a fool of myself, and I had no more paint. I needed at least to paint while I waited for Yasha’s answer. To make one more painting before going home. Nils’s work had been so bright; the new season called for different colors, now that the night had become visible again. Blacks and blues. Haldor, in telling me that he was tired of the sun, then asking me about California, had made the connection I had long ago assumed: California was taking the sun back from Norway. Everything seemed to depend on everything else. I heard footsteps in the hall that stopped in front of my room. I sat up and brushed my hair off my face. I heard Olyana’s voice. I heard her door close.

•    •    •

“We have a present for you,” his mother said.

“It’s a country,” said Ian.

“Can we talk about this in a few minutes?” Yasha said. “I have to make a stop next door.”

His mother turned to Ian. “He has a girlfriend.”

“Atta boy,” said Ian.

“Excuse me?” said Yasha. His mother came around and sat on the bed beside Ian, crumpling the lower tips of her wings. Yasha took a step away from them, toward the door. “You and I don’t make sense outside the Gregoriov Bakery,” Yasha said, looking at Ian’s beard. “If I don’t have any bread to sell you, I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Easy, Alyosha,” Ian said.

“Bye,” Yasha said, and he opened the door.

“We are moving to Zurich,” his mother said behind him. Yasha closed the door again.

“And we’ve bought you a ticket,” Ian said. “Window seat. First class. Whole shebang.”

When Yasha turned back around, Ian was holding out the ticket. At once, Yasha was seven years old. He was going to America. Or was he seventeen? Going to Russia? Was he standing by his crib or by the oven? Where was everyone always taking him?

His mother stood and snuck toward him while he was remembering. All at once, her hands fell onto his shoulders. When Yasha looked up, he looked into her face.

“This time I keep you,” she said. She spoke directly to him, not to the whole room, not to an audience. “This time, when you fly away, it is not away from me.”

He could see a centimeter of gray at the roots of her hair, before the red began. She had been younger in Russia, the first time he said goodbye to her. They had both gotten a lot older.

“Yakov,” Olyana said, “do you hear? Not away from me.”

“What’s in Zurich?”

“A music school,” Ian said. “I’m the new children’s educator.”

“Why Zurich?”

“They wanted me,” said Ian.

Yasha heard Frances’s sink turn on from the other side of the wall. The sound was interrupted by what must have been her hands—he could imagine it, the way she washed her face, so much like a rabbit. They wanted me, Yasha thought.

“And I wanted him,” his mother said, “and I wanted you too. So forgive me. I want a lot.”

“It’s really you,” Ian said. “You will make this make sense. I have been telling Olyana for a long time—you are what is missing. We know it.”

Yasha thought: My father is what is missing. Frances’s faucet turned off. He wanted to catch her before she left her room. What if I am going to Zurich, he thought. What about California? What if, for once, I am not going anywhere?

Ian’s things were scattered over his mother’s bedside table. Yasha grabbed a car key by its big plastic fob. “Let me think about it,” he said, and left the room. The hallway was shockingly quiet.
“Frances,”
he yelled. Frances came right out. “Let’s go,” he said.

The key opened the door to the black car parked beside Sigbjørn’s tractor.

“Can you do this?” Frances said.

“Aren’t I doing it?” said Yasha.

“Go ahead,” said Frances, buckling up.

•    •    •

“Go ahead,” I said.
Why a seat belt?
I heard Agnes’s voice shouting as I buckled myself in.
Are you scared?
I heard the engine start. I saw Yasha look down, get the pedals straight. We drove the first five kilometers in silence. We were approaching Skjerpvatnet Lake.

“I’m not going to Switzerland,” was the first thing Yasha said.

“The wedding is in California,” I said.

“I’m not going to California,” Yasha said.

It hit me three times: Yasha’s refusal, becoming my parents’ refusal, becoming my sister’s departure. “Where are you going?” I said.

“Nowhere. I’m staying. I’m not going anywhere this time.”

We were driving at 138 kilometers per hour down the E10 highway. I looked out the window. Purple
geitrams
grew down the side of the road.

“I don’t understand,” I said, touching my seat belt with both hands.

“I keep getting on planes,” Yasha said. “Hurry, to America. Hurry, to Russia. Hurry, to the end of the earth. Each time, I leave my mother.”

“I thought your mother left you.”

“We all left each other,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant. “But if I leave here, I leave my father,” he said to the steering wheel. “So I can’t be done here. Papa isn’t done.”

“No,” I said vaguely, in agreement.

“No Zurich. No San Francisco,” Yasha said. He was unraveling. He mumbled, “Opposite directions.”

“What does Switzerland have to do with this?”

Yasha didn’t answer. When we had passed the lake, he said, “Sigbjørn says I know how to make a girl love me.” I looked at him. “I don’t know if I do. I mean, I don’t know if you do. Sigbjørn doesn’t know that I love you,” he said—he looked at me a moment too long, the car drifted, a car behind us honked, and he looked straight ahead again. His profile looked like Caravaggio’s
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
. I wanted to be the basket he carried. He said, “I have to stay here.”