The Sunlit Night (28 page)

I found I couldn’t look at him any longer, so I turned to the window. Signs for Leknes started popping up. I wanted to get out of the car; I knew the asylum wasn’t far, and I knew if I walked along the highway, on the other side of the
geitrams
, I could make it there without getting hit.

“Let me out,” I said.

“No way,” said Yasha. “Did you hear me? I said I love you. All I’m saying is I can’t follow you home.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Completely.” I didn’t know what I was saying. “Let me out,” I tried again.

The asylum, in all its seven shades of blue, with its open lot where only Nils had ever parked, where sheep now chewed the weeds at the side of the building, flew toward and then fell away behind our car.

“We passed it,” I said.

“We’re almost there,” Yasha said, turning in toward Leknes center.

The grocery store’s parking lot was full. I couldn’t understand where any of these people lived. Yasha and I had not been nearly so alone on this island as it had always seemed. It felt, once again, like we were climbing out from under Yggdrasil. Our lovemaking had its place, which was nontransferable, nonassociative, not an answer to other questions.

When the car was parked, Yasha said, “I have to stay here through the winter.”

I still didn’t know where
here
was. The museum would close in September.

“I don’t know where I’ll live,” Yasha said, apparently having the same thought. “It doesn’t matter. Somewhere close enough to Eggum. I’ve heard about the winter storms,” Yasha said, turning to me with the eyes of a very young person. “I want to make sure the grave makes it. The beach was my father’s idea. It wasn’t, I don’t think, a good one,” he said.

What could I say? I told him I loved him. I told him I wanted to go to the supermarket.

I was crying when I asked the REMA 1000 cashier for paint. Of course they didn’t have paint. I really just wanted to see their dear milk aisle, beer aisle, bread aisle, toilet paper.

“Har du maling?”
I asked.

Å male.
To paint. The same as:
Å male.
To purr.

Maling
. Paint.
Maling
. Purring.

The cashier said,
“Hva?”

I was thinking about cats by then.

I said all I knew how to say: A cat named Rambo rescued another cat at a farm last evening near Tangstad.

•    •    •

Ian was waiting for Yasha in the parking lot when the car rolled in. Frances got out and excused herself.

“Is that her?” Ian said.

“Your keys,” said Yasha. “Thank you.” Yasha dropped the car keys into Ian’s open palm.

“You scared us,” Ian said.

“My mother doesn’t get scared,” Yasha said. “Sorry for scaring you.”

“Yasha,” Ian said. “What is that short for?”

“You can call me the Subharmonic Thundergrowl of the West,” Yasha said, “and I have a favor to ask.” Ian laughed. “Go to Zurich without me,” Yasha said. He leaned toward Ian, who was no longer laughing, and spoke quietly. “I used to like the way your guitars sounded when they slammed into the bakery door. You must be talented. They’ll love you over there.” He started walking Ian toward the museum door. “But I don’t want the ticket. Thanks anyway. I want Tribeca,” Yasha said. Ian didn’t respond. Yasha put it more formally. “Please give me the keys to your Tribeca apartment,” he said, “for while you are in Zurich.”

Ian let out a long breath and starting cracking his right hand’s knuckles. Yasha waited while he cracked the left hand. “Wanted to have you over to that apartment a million times.” Ian put his hands back in his pockets. “Had spare pillows for you,” he said, “You know, in case you ever wanted to come over and crash after school. Not far from your school, my place. Your mother would never let me—”

“How do you know where I went to school?”

“Didn’t your mom pick you up for lunch? The one time? I heard all about your playdate.”

Yasha wasn’t familiar with playdates. Playdates were for younger kids. Not seven-year-olds who had just come over from Russia and had no friends on hand. Yasha could only think about dates, real dates, the kind this man had been going on with his mother.

“What’s she like?” Yasha asked.

“Who?”

“My mother.”

“A barrel of monkeys,” Ian said. “You know, I thought she was a lunatic—my fingers nearly bled, first week of lessons.”

Lessons, Yasha remembered. Everybody had been his mother’s student. His father had been. This man too, with his boots and his beard—his mother had probably taught this man how to grow his beard. His mother was everyone’s teacher.

Ian kept talking.
“Practice your octaves, practice your octaves,”
he said. “I thought, I should give up. Then, of course, I couldn’t give her up.”

Yasha thought: Have I given her up?

“How did you get her to America?” Yasha asked. “It didn’t work with us, when we tried. The first time.”

“I hate that,” Ian said, “I hate all of that. The whole story. I keep thinking she’s going to bail on me too, any minute. And I keep thinking that I’m a lout.”

“You are a lout,” Yasha said. He didn’t know what
lout
meant. He hoped it was a kind of insect. Yasha tried to crack his own knuckles, but they made no sound.

“What can anyone do?” Ian said. “I try to hang on to her.”

“Hard work,” Yasha said.

“It’s gone all right. So far. I’m grateful.” Ian looked at Yasha as if they were cousins or old friends. “Because when she’s there, it’s good. You know? And she keeps being there, so far.”

Yasha pitied him in his innocence—Ian didn’t know who he was dealing with, hadn’t seen his mother at her worst. Yasha had never seen his mother at her best.

“We’ll see how it goes in Switzerland, I guess,” Ian said. “I wish that you would join us.”

“I can’t,” Yasha said. “Next best thing is to give me your keys.”

Ian exhaled again. He reached into the back pocket of his rolled-up jeans and retrieved a key ring. It held three keys and a monogrammed pendant.

“I didn’t think you’d come with us,” Ian said, holding the keys up, letting the pendant turn in the air. “Alyosha sticks.” His manner had lifted into something Yasha could identify as charming. He reminded Yasha of his mother. They made a powerful pair. “My upright bass will get your window seat,” Ian said.

There was a second in which Yasha wanted to take the place that had been offered to him—wanted the window view, wanted the Alps coming into sight when the plane got low enough, a little more time with this strangely admirable man and the redheaded woman who wanted her son again.

Ian placed the keys in Yasha’s hand and said, “Water my plants.”

Olyana came out through the front entrance.

“Where have the men gone?” she asked.

“We’re here,” Ian said.

“And?” she said. She looked at Yasha. She looked at Ian. “Ian is happy, I can see you have made him happy. You’re coming with me,” she said.

“You’re going with him,” Yasha said. His mother hesitated. “You’re very right,” Yasha said. “No more leaving behind—” he didn’t want to say
Mother
, or
Olyana
; he looked at her wings, and said, “—Valkyrie. We’re not sneaking away from each other. It’s all out in the open this time. This time we’re both innocent.” Yasha could see the word appeal to her. At the back of her mind, scales were balancing. Their tilt had surely been an inconvenience to her, Yasha thought, all these years.

Through the Ceremonial Hall windows, Yasha saw Gunn cleaning up the festival mess. She had collected all the teacups in a stack that rose six inches higher than her head. She bent down for one more cup.

“I’ve been awful today,” Yasha said. He went in to see what he could do.

•    •    •

By the time I was packed and bound for California, the sun set in the evenings and stayed down all night. Yasha didn’t sleep in my room anymore. It happened wordlessly, the change, one day in the corridor. Yasha, his mother, Ian, and I left the Ceremonial Hall together after Haldor’s last staff dinner, walked past Yggdrasil to our rooms, and there they were—our three different doors: Room 16, Room 18, Room 20. I don’t know whether it was mere propriety that made Yasha say goodnight, nodding to his mother, then to Ian, then to me. Opening his door, going in, staying in. Propriety, or else it was the first move in his new direction—his middle path, straight through the emptiness his father had opened.

My room was dark. A new dark, as complete as the light had been. It made me shiver and sleep.

The changing of the seasons couldn’t be helped. Yasha had found a way to help, to help that grave, and I felt my old uselessness creeping in with the sunsets, earlier every night. It was important to come closer to my father again, who needed to be surrounded; to my sister, who needed to be supported; to my mother, whose needs I never knew. I would go back to school, a graduate course in painting, and pay my hardest attention. I had failed to get all the sun’s information, hadn’t paid it the attention Nils had. I knew this summer’s endless day had kept a few secrets from me. Secrets about color, and veils, and how to make a thing glow. Secrets about the innumerable species of darkness.

My sister had landed in California.

Yasha was quiet on his side of the wall. I listened, and knew he was there, but could not hear him. I wanted to fill my hands with him. Pale night light bounced off the edge of my tiny sink.

Who knows where the moon had been? I hadn’t seen it for months. Now it hung in my window. The wild boar had become invisible, being night-colored. Terrifying how black the fjordwater was then, the white sky receding, and the moon taking its place.

As it happened, Sarah asked our father one more time to give her away. As it always happened, in my parents’ mouse-sized apartment, what was said to one was heard by the other.

“Is this how it will be? When we are
separate entities
?” my mother said to my father. “Our daughters will turn to you? To you, and not to me?” It was the reverse of the answer one is supposed to give the Wicked Child on Passover: “This is because of what the Lord did for me, for me and not for you, when he freed me from my bondage.” It was to be neither of them, my mother said to my sister, or both.

That was how my father came to sit on the bride’s side, front row, with nobody else on the bench next to him. How my mother—in a gesture of defiance so total it defied her own wishes—sat with the groom’s family, beside Mrs. Glenny. Mrs. Glenny, in a large hat and sunglasses, was dressed for Easter. My mother was dressed in black. She attended on the condition that nobody—neither she nor my father—did anything “special.” It was left to me to give Sarah away.

You could have expected that Sarah would be lovely: cap sleeves, ranunculus bouquet, lace gloves that ran up and over her elbows. You could not have expected the color her cheeks would turn that morning: a color I had come to associate with a particular distance of the sun from the horizon, a carmine color that meant both sunset and sunrise. As a bride, she looked particularly tall. It seemed the weight of her body had rearranged itself, and hung higher, making her shoulders heavy, her stomach light, her knees heavy, her feet light. She had my mother’s height and dark hair, my father’s blue eyes, and my arm to hold, walking over the footbridge and into the Glenny backyard.

In gratitude for my parents’ attendance, Sarah had crafted a makeshift chuppah from the poles of Scott’s soccer goal. Scott wore a yarmulke. When my mother saw this, she pointed at it and said to Scott’s mother, “Your hat sure beats his.” Mrs. Glenny said, “Scott’s told us all about the Yamaha, Mirela. We couldn’t be more delighted.” My mother referred to yarmulkes as Yamahas for the next two years, until Scott left Sarah, and Sarah asked her to stop.

But that day, Sarah and I thought that we had won. It was foggy, and cold, and the wind that came in off the San Francisco Bay blew through all of our hair—Scott’s wires, Sarah’s coiled braids, my thin curls, my father’s halo, my mother’s drapery. The only thing anybody could later say, and never deny, and never divorce, was that we were there; we came as we were asked. Yasha hadn’t come, but something else had been asked of him.

Scott married Sarah at three in the afternoon on the patio of the Glenny house, on a September day in San Francisco that had been erroneously forecasted as sunny. The bride and groom looked anemic, gangly, both of them, although noticeably amazed at each other—at the ceremony, at the splendor they hadn’t seemed to expect. At their first dance, in the middle of the great white tent, Scott held my sister so tightly I thought she’d squeak. They weren’t right about each other, it turned out. It turned out they had been too young all along. But before the solution became divergence it was, for this evening, a very physical togetherness, in which Sarah and Scott clung to each other, and the party twirled on around them.

At the party, my father drank. My mother drank absolutely nothing. Neither sat down and neither danced—they wandered around the dance floor apologizing to guests for stepping on their feet and nodding at Sarah’s girlfriends. “Do you want this?” my father went around asking the girls. “Is this what you want for yourself?”