The Sunlit Night (19 page)

“Don’t go yet,” Yasha said.

Daniil closed the trunk.

“I have left the shop to the mouses,” Daniil said. “The customers will think I am also dead.” There was still one Gregoriov Bakery open in the world, the original, where his father had started his business, wooed his mother, perfected the egg glazing on challah braids. “Come to Moscow sometime,” Daniil said. “It will never be so sad again.”

Yasha agreed. The only promise anybody could make him now was this: he would never lose his father again. It was a vaguely hopeful thought, but the immediate effect was devastating. “Eventually,” Yasha said.

Daniil pressed his large, open palm over the top of Yasha’s head, and then pulled Yasha into him, his arms closing easily around the boy’s back. Yasha pressed his face into his uncle’s chest, craving contact with the only other living Gregoriov. Daniil released him and got in the cab. The driver pulled out of the lot, leaving Yasha with a view of the barn, outside which Nils, Frances, and the four inspection officers stood talking.

Yasha walked into the lobby so he would be there when she returned. He leaned an elbow against the trunk of the tree sculpture and turned toward the open hall. Beside the buffet table, his mother stood on a three-foot raised platform, surrounded by women wearing upturned sacks. They were pinning wings onto her back. One woman measured the length of her shoulder blades, another straightened her feathers. His mother’s head reached almost to the hall’s molded ceiling. Her back was turned to him, casting a shadow that spilled out of the hall and nearly up to his feet. She was colossal.

The lobby window revealed the figure of Frances, running in from the barn. An attendant pierced the skin of Olyana’s neck with a pin. Yasha turned at the sound of his mother’s shriek, and Frances rushed into her room. In the quiet after the shriek, Frances’s door slammed. Yasha followed her down the corridor and knocked. No answer. She was inside. He could hear her. She was crying. He knocked harder. She wouldn’t answer. She was crying hard. “Frances,” Yasha said into the keyhole. She only cried. He stood with his hand on the knob. There was a flurry of sound in the hall and Olyana, her wings in place, stepped down, to the cheers of the women, and began to move in his direction.

•    •    •

On Sunday, July 8, the Yellow Room passed its inspection, and my parents RSVP’d “No” to my sister’s wedding. It was a last stand, they wrote, in an email I received after the KORO officers had gone. They couldn’t prevent the marriage, but they could refuse to participate. If Sarah wanted to ruin her youth by getting married too soon, to an idiot, and not even a Jewish idiot, then let her, they said. The word
youth
dizzied me. Little did they know, I thought, about the seventeen-year-old boy who had spent the night in my room. He was about to turn eighteen, I assured myself. I tried calling Sarah. She wouldn’t pick up, and her voicemail was full. Yasha knocked on my door while I dialed her number, both of us relentless. Eventually a text message arrived: I’ll call you back when I stop crying.

So I cried along with her. The KORO approval had put Nils in high demand: a welcoming panel waited for him in Bodø, and he intended to spend the rest of the summer at his home studio, assembling a full exhibit of paintings for the Tromsø hospital. In rooting for the Yellow Room, I hadn’t anticipated the consequences of victory. Nils planned to abandon our asylum in a matter of days. It was no place to live alone. Yasha intended to stay out the summer, and he stood at my door, wanting to know what was wrong, wanting to know what I’d decided. I wanted to stay with him, that much I’d known since the moment after the Mourner’s Kaddish, but I no longer knew how, my apprenticeship abruptly over. After a while he gave up knocking, and when I came out, he’d gone to feed the ponies. I didn’t see him for a week. Nils and I had packing to do in Leknes.

On Nils’s last night at the asylum, his room was fully packed. I’d never seen his bedroom door open before. I’d had a feeling it was messy inside. It was open now, and the room bare, the hallway full of boxes. Across the hall from his room was the bathroom he used, full of toilet paper. Nils pooped after all. Out the window of his bathroom, I could hear the sheep poking around for weeds in the parking lot, the bells on their collars jingling.

He was going back home, to the even farther north. His house lay in the northernmost part of the Norwegian mainland, not far from the Finnish area known as Lapland. Nils had been secretive about his relation to the Sami, Norway’s indigenous reindeer herders. He was either of Sami origin himself or had a special interest in them—he’d started to study the Sami language some years ago—but he’d never made it clear. I wished he could have spoken to Yasha about them; for all I knew, Nils had known Ommot. In either case, where Nils lived, at the real top of everything, not far from the North Cape, the Gulf Stream that surrounded the Lofoten Islands was too far off to warm his town, and it was dark in the winter, and cold, and he’d lived there a long time.

In the kitchen, his boxes lay surrounded by stacks of old
Lofotposten
and the last of his red wine. Wanting to hold on to something, I grabbed the refrigerator’s handle. I pulled the door open: Nils had removed his fish mustards. I had plenty of brown cheese left.

The midnight sun’s purest season was ending, on its way toward the equal Polar night. The sun would now dip under the horizon for an hour, during which the sky would turn impossibly brighter than it was before, and then rise again slightly east of where we had seen it last. We knew it couldn’t have fallen far, and the sea suggested from its depths a hidden basket, sun-sized, from which the sunrise would soon begin. The world felt smaller, the star larger. The sky felt less and less like a sky, more like the inside of a brilliant hot air balloon.

I joined him at the kitchen table, bringing the brown cheese and a slicer. Nils opened the CD deck of his baby-blue boom box. From his backpack, slung on the floor between a box and a bubble-wrapped painting, he pulled out the 1995 audiobook recording of Hamsun’s
Victoria
, read aloud in English by Knut Norgaard. This was the hour the sun failed. The field outside the window was dusky enough, for the first time, to see the reflection of both our heads in the glass.

“‘Victoria,’” Knut wailed, “‘Victoria!’”

Our wine shook in our glasses.

“‘If she knew that he was hers utterly, every second of his life! He would be her servant and slave and sweep a path before her with his shoulders. And he would kiss her delicate shoes and pull her carriage and stock her stove with firewood on cold days, stock her stove with firewood tipped with gold, ah Victoria!’”

When I looked to Nils, wanting to tell him that I loved this, I was astonished to find him crying. Was he crying? Nils cried, and the whole planet grew quietly darker. Knut’s wailing kept coming out of the boom box. Where had the sun gone? Its colors still lined the horizon. I knew Nils was capable of leaving behind colors. I pictured streaks of acrylic paint.

I didn’t know if somebody would be there waiting when Nils got home. He’d mentioned his old mother and father, a sister who had children, and his house near Lapland where the pipes often troubled him with their freezing. He wore no ring, and mentioned no wife, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask. We’d eaten dinners together, just the two of us at a small table, and perhaps he hadn’t lived that way with a woman, I thought, or not for a long time. We’d spent ages in his little brown car, the Norwegian radio hosts making him laugh, the wild animals by the roadside delighting me as I looked out, understanding nothing. It had been an idyll, and he was upset either by the memory of it, or in anticipation of his faraway winter.

Knut went on. Victoria and Johannes had their unfulfilled romance. Nils and I had our fulfilled unromance. I saw my profile in the window reflection; it was the same as my sister’s. I pictured her standing in Mrs. Glenny’s garden, holding her new husband’s hand. My father was standing behind them, shouting something unintelligible. My sister’s face wore a stern, stubborn, unrevealing expression. What kind of fulfillment, what kind of romance, was hers?

Victoria
proved to be a short novel, but by the time Knut was done reading, the sun was moving up from the horizon again and Nils was calm. I was not; I sat ripping up the cardboard of the empty box of wine.

We began making promises to each other—small, obvious things to say: I will write you; I will come back here one day when you come back; maybe it will be summer again, we’ll go driving; in the meantime I will visit the Hirschsprungske in Copenhagen, the Frick in New York, and send a postcard, your favorite Turner, your favorite Krøyer, the one with the man and his wife and their dog in moonlight on the beach. Other artists, he said, had noticed great light before us.

It was nearly two in the morning and the parking lot was full of newly risen sun. Nils told me he would take care of himself. He would be driving for thirteen hours. I told him I wanted to stay in Norway a little longer, see if I could help Yasha recover from the funeral, until the sun went down, really down, and stopped coming up again. Then I’d go looking for it way out West at the wedding, in California, which was one answer for where the sun went. I promised him a postcard from San Francisco that he didn’t seem to want. He wanted to get going. He made a padded nest for his paintings in the backseat of his car and took one more look at the colony’s blue facade. I said goodbye. My arms were at my sides and he hugged me over them, such that I couldn’t hug him back. It was good enough, I guess, because he left.

•    •    •

Yasha had learned that the gas pedal was the smaller one, which was strange. He had learned which position the seat should click into in order for his legs to fit. He resented having to keep his foot on the gas pedal the whole time. It should have been pump on, pump off. And nobody needed this many mirrors. There were never any cars to his right or left, never any cars behind him. He hadn’t lied—Haldor had said:
Can you take these wooden poles to the beach?
Not:
Yasha, do you know how to drive?

So what if his father had never owned a car? So what if he had always relied on the B train? The Viking Museum relied on its trucks, its tractors. Haldor could drive them, Sigbjørn could drive them, and Yasha was doing his best. This glimmering Mazda was the largest vehicle the Viking road could support, and as he drove, Yasha feared the whole thing might topple into the fjordwater, poles and all. So far, all right.

The road began at the museum’s parking lot and ran up along the water toward the stables, past the
lavvo
s where they stood on the beach, each lavvo a twenty-foot teepee. Yasha stocked the lavvos with firewood and pig meat, with sheepskins to cover the benches in preparation for a feast—“Odin’s Victory Feast,” if the guests paid one thousand kroner; “An Evening with Baldur,” for five hundred; “Frigg’s Potato Patties” for children’s birthday parties. On off days, he took the sheepskins away, cleared the burned-up coals, swept the bread crumbs out from under the feast tables.

This work somehow resembled the work he’d always known. As before, he looked out on a beach as he worked, which made the air salty and the light unpredictable. As before, there were chunks of crust to be cleaned from the floors. But no cat. Yasha wanted his cat; he felt certain the cat would be valuable to him up here, biting Haldor when he came too close to his mother, luring Frances with its pointy ears, sleeping on his chest at night. He wondered whether Mr. Dobson had taken Sam in, whether he’d given him a new name. Yasha had some business to do with Mr. Dobson. An obituary for his father. A report on his cat. An expiration date for the Gregoriov Bakery’s lease.

It had been a week since he’d seen Frances. He’d missed his chance to kiss her after the funeral. Now his father’s voice filled his head each night, through his sleep, for the past few nights, asking: Why not? Why not? Why not?

Yasha began unloading the poles. They were three times Yasha’s height and thick as lampposts, and each lavvo required nine of them to stand. They filled the bed of the pickup and stuck out the back as he drove. It did not make the driving easier. When unloaded, they revealed the spot where he and Frances had sat on the sheepskins the night of the funeral. The museum would have to build three more lavvos for the first of August, for the whale meat festival, more special and more expensive than even a Victory Feast. There would be a fire, and the meat, and dancing and horn-blowing on the beach. Sigbjørn and Haldor had promised to help him build the extra lavvos later. It was hardly a job for one man.

One man, Yasha thought. The word
man
now always made him think of his mother. She said it so often,
little man, little man
, and she was the only person who said it to him. She had herself escaped human gender altogether, evolving so quickly and so successfully into a Valkyrie. She wandered the museum lobby in costume, looming behind visitors and reciting her lines: “‘I am sent by Odin to this battle, and I choose which man gains victory, and lo, which man will die!’” He’d seen her frighten adult men. Yasha still had no use for the word
man
, which he couldn’t apply to himself (a few days short of his eighteenth birthday) or to his father (was a dead man still a man?), nor had he any use for the word
woman
, which he could only think of applying to Frances, but which seemed to call attention to her age, and his age, and her maturity, and his immaturity, and her body, and his hands.