The Sunlit Night (14 page)

Frances was saying, “Their children will not be assholes.”

“How do you know?” a man shouted.

“Like father, like son!” a woman shouted.

There was a silence. Yasha knocked on her door.

“One second!” he heard, and shuffling.
“Ett øyeblikk!”

When she opened the door, she was wearing yellow short-shorts. He couldn’t look at them, but he couldn’t look too hard at her shirt either. He was pretty sure it had flowers on it. He looked down. Her legs were tan and smooth.

“Sorry,” Frances said, “I didn’t think I was needed until ten.”

“You aren’t needed,” Yasha said. He regretted saying that. “I wanted to thank you for before,” he said. “I’m interrupting.”

“Ongoing family crisis,” she said. “Is there anything you—” she hurried to tighten the drawstring of her shorts. “Anything you need?”

Behind her, Yasha could see her laptop open on a little desk by the window and a tiny man and woman on the computer screen. The woman waved slightly. He waved back. The woman waved more vigorously.

“Who’s your friend?” came from the laptop’s speakers.

“This is Yasha,” Frances said, turning away from Yasha, leaving the door open and walking back to the desk by the window.

“Yasha, Yasha, Yasha,” said the man.

“Are you the dad?” Yasha said.

“I’m the dad.”

Yasha nodded. “My dad just died.”

The man and the woman stopped bobbing around.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “We’ve just been hearing about the funeral your family has planned. How extraordinary it will be.”

“I only told them about his wish,” Frances said, “the top-of-the-world one.”

“He makes dying sound good,” the dad said.

“Saul,”
said the mom.

Yasha took in Frances’s room. Like his own, hers had two separate twin beds. The bed she slept on was made, the other had paintbrushes and necklaces scattered across it. One change of black clothes lay neatly folded in her open closet, and the window curtains were drawn to the side, revealing her head-on view of the wild boar’s pen. Her toenails were painted orange.

“My parents needed to talk to me before the ceremony begins,” she said.

“Where do your parents live?” Yasha asked. He didn’t know why he’d entered her room, but having been admitted, he wanted to stay.

“New York,” her parents answered in unison.

Yasha sat in Frances’s desk chair. “I used to live there.”

“In the city?” the dad said.

“In Brooklyn,” Yasha said. “The Gregoriov Bakery.”

“Your family?”

“My father and I,” Yasha said. He looked at Frances. “I didn’t know you were from New York.”

“Born and raised,” said the dad. “Now, you, I think you were born somewhere else.”

“
Saul.
”

“I mean, just maybe! Were you born somewhere else?”

“Please don’t interrogate him, Dad,” said Frances.

“Russia,” said Yasha.

“See!” cried the dad.

“I’m sorry,” said Frances.

“It’s no problem,” Yasha said. “I didn’t need anything.” Squatting to speak into the microphone, he said, “It was nice to meet you both.” Frances looked embarrassed. He liked having embarrassed her; he hadn’t thought he was capable. He left.

Her dad’s voice, audible from within the room, restarted the conversation with, “Well, he…”

Yasha walked back down the hall, toward the door that led out to the parking lot, to see if the casket was still there.

“Who lives in that room?” Yasha’s mother called to him. She was standing in the lobby, looking at the Yggdrasil tree sculpture.

“No one,” Yasha said. “A girl—”

“Yakov,” his mother said, “you didn’t tell me you’d taken a lover.”

“Jesus Christ,” Yasha said.

“We don’t use that expression. Look at this,” she said, forgetting his lover. “It says it’s a tree of life!”

Yasha approached her with caution.

“And there’s a goat!” she said.

He looked up at the enormous metal sculpture. There wasn’t any goat. There was, as far as he could see, one bronze tree trunk, anchored in three places to the floor of the lobby, with many branches extending up toward the lobby’s low, domed ceiling. He noticed, for the first time, four wooden dwarves, which had been glued to the ceiling, evenly spaced around the tree. Each dwarf wore a shirt with a different letter:
N, S, V
, and
Ø.

Still, he couldn’t see any goat.

“Where?” Yasha said.

“‘The goat stands on the roof of Valhalla and eats its leaves,’” Olyana read from a plaque, bending down to the height of the pedestal. She looked very funny to Yasha, so short. Her whole body was collected, a clump, under her long black dress. When she stood to full height again, he could see that she had always been taller than his father. She was almost as tall as Yasha. On the plaque, where she pointed, a diagram showed the complete system of Yggdrasil.

The sculpture replica was incomplete. There was no miniature Valhalla under the tree, only a metal floor molded to look like grass. Yasha put both his hands on the trunk.

“Don’t touch,” Olyana said. “It says don’t touch. Don’t touch the tree of life. Well, can you imagine!” she said, smiling. “Four dwarves are responsible for holding up the sky.”

“Where do you think Papa is?” Yasha asked, not smiling, still touching the tree. “With the dwarves in the sky or down with the goat? I think he’s under the goat. In the big hall.”

“Yasha. You think your father is in Valhalla?”

“I do.”

“Well.” She ran her hands through her hair. The corners of her mouth, which were giddy by nature, fell.

“‘Valhalla,’” she read from the plaque. “‘The hall of the slain. At Valhalla, dead warriors drink mead from the udders of the goat called Heiðrún. But there is never so big a crowd in Valhalla that they don’t get enough pork from the boar called Sæhrímnir. He is boiled every day, and comes alive every evening.’ Well. Your father was no warrior, Yasha,” she said.

“And he didn’t like to eat red meat. But where do you think
you’ll
go?” Yasha said. He pointed to the diagram, tapping at three different places. “Asgard? Valhalla? Niflheim?”

“Stop that, dear.” Olyana said.

“No, really. Where do you think?” Yasha bent down the way she had. He sensed that somehow he was gaining on her. “See, if you go up with the dwarves, you have to deal with the wolves who are chasing the sun, and if you go down under the tree’s roots”—he kicked the trunk and lost his balance, then got it back—“there’s a crazy hedgehog down there, chewing at the roots, pretty rough, and below the hedgehog there’s a serpent, and you—”

Olyana read aloud over Yasha’s talking. She bent down next to him, at the level of the plaque, their shoulders touching. “‘THIS COSMIC PILLAR,’” she read, “‘at the centre of the world is described as a giant ash tree’”—she swept one arm in a rainbow motion—“‘binding together the disparate parts of the universe.’”

Yasha went quiet and let her big voice bounce off the lobby walls. He looked at the tree. Here it was, binding together the disparate parts of the universe.

“Don’t worry,” Yasha said, standing up. “Papa isn’t with the goat. I don’t know where he is, you don’t know where he is. That’s okay. It’s good where he is. He has lots of flour and ovens there, and when
you
die, you won’t have anything because you don’t love anything.”

Olyana was still crouching when she looked up at her son. She was red now, not only in her hair, but in her cheeks and neck. As she blushed, her eyes darkened.

Yasha turned away from his mother and found Haldor’s great belly waiting directly behind him. They were standing nose to nose.

“We are prepared,” Haldor said to Yasha, “and at your service,” he continued, bowing to Olyana. Yasha wondered how Haldor could have arrived so soundlessly.

“Yes, my son was just telling me something terribly interesting,” Olyana said, running her hand through her hair and then reaching it out to Haldor, who held it. “About Valhalla.”

“Valhalla!” Haldor said, helping her up. “I didn’t know it was familiar to you.”

The three of them turned back to the tree. Its bulging roots sank into the lobby floor, as if continuing into the underworld.

“You would have made a fine Valkyrie, Mrs. Gregoriov,” Haldor said. “They were tall women, like you, with wings.”

“I would have made a fine goat,” Yasha said.

“No, no,” Haldor said, shaking a finger, “at Valhalla it is a very special goat. Very special goat, Hei#thrún. Mead comes out of her … her …”

“Nipples?” Olyana said.

“Ja,”
said Haldor.

Nobody spoke.

“We go the way to Eggum,” Haldor said.

•    •    •

It was undeniably Saturday, and closer by the minute to midnight. Yasha couldn’t stop the time, now that it had come. They were all doing what they were supposed to be doing. Everybody was doing so much that Yasha had nothing to do. Frances was filling the bed of a pickup truck with blankets. Nils had excused himself from the funeral. The inspection of his life’s work, he’d apologized, would begin first thing in the morning. He needed to prepare, and to sleep. Frances, he’d said, would unfortunately have to go directly from the midnight funeral to the early inspection.

Yasha helped her with the last blanket. Next were the sheepskins; they piled those on together. Frances filled a crate with thermos bottles, and Yasha packed the collapsible plastic tables. The deck was almost full. Haldor threw a great mass of rope on top of the sheepskins. Yasha loaded one red-handled and one yellow-handled shovel onto the pickup.

A young man pulled a utility trailer into the parking lot. He smiled at Frances, and then stopped smiling when he saw Yasha.

“Your father will ride here,” he said.

“Who are you?” Yasha asked.

“Sigbjørn. The blacksmith.”

Yasha examined the trailer. It was silver, and it hadn’t been cleaned.

“Yakov Vassiliovich Gregoriov.” Yasha shook Sigbjørn’s hand. He took off his thin green sweater and wiped down the surface where the casket would rest. He clumped the sweater into a ball and rubbed out the dirty corners.

“Superfine,” said the blacksmith.

When the trailer was clean enough, Yasha tossed the sweater aside. Frances and Sigbjørn hitched the trailer to the back of the pickup truck. Haldor wheeled the casket out on its dolly, from a back door marked
PRIVAT
.

“Come now,” Haldor said to the men.

Uncle Daniil, Chief Haldor, Sigbjørn the blacksmith, and Yasha gathered around the casket. The sun was still high but falling slightly behind Daniil, casting Daniil’s hat-wearing shadow onto the wood. The shadow fell upside down over the casket—Daniil’s head at Vassily’s feet. Yasha studied his uncle’s face. His uncle looked down at the casket, unaware of being watched. Yasha examined him: there was Vassily’s nose (bulbous), Vassily’s hairline (surprisingly unreceded), Vassily’s ears (small). Daniil did not have Vassily’s eyes. Yasha’s eyes had never resembled his father’s either. His father’s eyes had been water-colored.

Yasha wanted to open the casket. Fast, once.

“Daniil—” he said.

“Yes?”

“Can we open it?”

“Open it?”

“Open it.”

“No, I don’t think we can open it.”

“No?”

“You see,” Daniil said, “well, it is not hard to pick the nails, I only hammered them. But Yasha,” he said, “Yasha. You want to do it? He is resting. He looks sick inside.”

Everyone looked at the casket.

“I haven’t seen him in six days,” Yasha said.

“I haven’t seen him in ten years,” said Olyana.

“My father died in 1999,” Haldor said.

Daniil rubbed his face, took off his cap. “He is resting.”

Yasha looked at the casket again: still sunlit. He thought about the sunlight passing through the wood, through his father’s eyelids and into the green of each eye. They would become brilliant, some days, when the ocean light came in through the bakery windows and slapped his father straight in the face. Those were moments when his father’s face was so bright, Yasha could see every nose hair in perfect clarity, and the lake-like green of his eyes. The bakery, which was otherwise a dimly lit place, darkened their color into something more leaf-like on cloudier days.

Everyone was waiting for Yasha to respond. Yasha turned to his mother, who was checking that her earring was still in place. Ten feet behind her, sitting on the back bumper of the truck, Frances was staring at Yasha almost tearfully, making Yasha feel suddenly proud. This was his father, his father’s funeral they were all attending.

“Don’t open it,” Yasha said. “He’s resting.”

“Then we heave it up,” said Sigbjørn.

“Yes,” said Daniil.

All four men bent their knees and extended their arms. The casket sat between them, shivering on the dolly.