The Sunlit Night (15 page)

Frances made runway hand signals, guiding the men backward and the casket onto the trailer. When it was in place, Haldor picked up the coil of rope and wound it around the casket four times, securing it to the trailer. Yasha and Frances climbed onto the bed of the pickup. They sat side by side on the sheepskin stack.

Daniil and Sigbjørn sat in the backseat while Haldor drove and Olyana sat passenger. The truck drove slowly, ceremoniously.

•    •    •

Vikingveien, the portion of the highway that ran past the museum, soon forked west into Eggumveien, which passed the fifty-odd houses that made up Eggum village and terminated in a sheep field. A narrow dirt road continued past the sheep, between six red fishing cabins, and out toward the northernmost tip of the peninsula, where a government-sponsored sculpture installation—a human head that seemed to turn upside down as one walked around it—stood mounted on a thin pedestal. Eggum Beach sprawled on, boulder by boulder, seemingly without end, to both the east and the west. North of Eggum lay the Norwegian Sea. At the far side of the Norwegian Sea lay the North Pole, and then the world started again on the other side.

Yasha and Frances sat on a wooden bench beside Eggum’s ruined German radar station. Yasha stared at a gyrating sixteen-legged spider, which split into two spiders who ran away from each other and met again on the underside of the bench.

“Ugh,” said Frances.

“Do they bite?”

“Don’t all bugs bite?”

Yasha smiled—they were both New Yorkers.

“Here, we have the cheeses!” Haldor shouted from the base of the radar station. “And buns, and butter, and coffee. So many cups as you like!” He had set up a plastic table, and Sigbjørn had covered it with a sheepskin. The skin was thick, with uneven clumps of wool, making the coffee cups wobble. The hairs below the thermos were already stained brown.

Daniil ate three buns. He looked starved, as if he had carried his ruined brother here on his shoulders. The Gregoriov family had never believed in reunions. Now they were all here. Here, in a way. Yasha imagined the brothers as boys. Daniil would have been taller. Vassily would have been faster. When he thought of his father, Yasha thought of a living, breathing, sneezing, baking man. They hadn’t yet brought the casket down from the silver trailer. Yasha imagined his father sneezing inside his coffin. There would be nowhere for the snot to go. It would gather on the inside of the wood. Yasha imagined Vassily sneezing, underground, forever.

“What time is it?” Yasha asked.

“Now it is nearly fifteen over twenty-three—”

“He means eleven fifteen,” said Sigbjørn.

“I apologize,” said Haldor. “The point is, forty-five minutes remain.”

It could not have possibly been eleven fifteen, Yasha thought. He looked up. Bright blue. He looked out. Never-ending sea. He looked right and left. Rocks.

“Is it going to get dark at some point?” Yasha asked.

“No,” said Haldor. “Did it get dark last night? No. Not all the way dark. Only a little bit pink. It will not get all the way dark tonight either, which is good, I think, for your father.”

“Dancing—” Olyana said, with a look of inspiration on her face. “There should be dancing, in the light,” she said.

She might have been fun to be married to, Yasha thought at the same time as he considered tackling her. Here she was, talking about dancing “in the light.” She really was detestable. She might at least have made Papa laugh. Or dance. Papa did dance occasionally. He had danced, if just with his shoulders, the night they closed the bakery.

Frances kept to herself, staring at the sand, but she was laughing quietly.

“If you danced, Mrs. Gregoriov,” Haldor said, “none of us would refuse to join you.”

Frances laughed harder.

“It can be that you are laughing too much tonight,” Sigbjørn said to her.

“It cannot be,” Yasha said.

“I’m so sorry, Yasha,” said Frances. “I’m not laughing. I’m doing the thing when your body gets confused about grief and just shakes a lot. You know? I’m not laughing. I’m shaking.”

Yasha wondered what other things her body did; he thought about gripping her small shoulders and moving her nearer to him.

“Shall we dig?” Haldor asked Sigbjørn. “Better to have the hole cleared, such that we fill it at midnight.”

Yasha looked up and saw tears falling down his mother’s face. There, Yasha thought. There, it’s occurred to her.

“Mrs. Gregoriov,” said Haldor, “I have upset you, and I will never forgive myself for it.”

“You have not upset me, dear chief,” she said. “The hole upset me. Digging the hole. That we dig for Vassily.”

Yasha was upset about the hole as well. He was also upset about the rocks, and how they might roll over in a storm and damage the casket, even once it was underground, and about all the waves, and the tide, and about the last time he’d stood in the basement with his father, the night it had flooded, and his father had rolled his pants up, and Yasha hadn’t even touched his father’s calves, even though they were right there and covered in hair, hadn’t celebrated them at all. He mourned that he hadn’t sat down in the floodwater and hugged himself around his father’s leg while it was a leg, while his father stood on it, and now Papa was lying down, and would be lying down forever, and he had lain down over his father’s casket. He wondered whether Frances had thought him pathetic for doing so, and whether fruits grew faster on trees when she laughed, and whether she liked him, because he actually liked her so much, and because he was ashamed to like anyone when today was Saturday, and the one person who had loved him all his life was, in the end, no bigger than a hole.

“He was my brother,” Daniil said.

Yasha wondered whether his mother would have the courage to say, “He was my husband.” If she said that, she would also have to say, “And my new boyfriend’s name is Ian.”

Olyana said nothing. She was smoothing her black dress down against her stomach over and over, with alternating hands. She was thin, almost concave. Her arms were covered in prominent goose bumps.

Haldor and Sigbjørn started to dig. Before sitting down, Yasha checked under the bench for spiders but didn’t find any. The wind picked up, blowing the hairs of the sheepskin into the cheese on the platter. When Haldor shoveled sand over his shoulder, it spread through the air. Some of the sand landed on Yasha’s raisin bun. He ate it, and then ground the grains between his teeth until they disappeared.

•    •    •

At ten minutes to midnight, Haldor shouted,
“Klar!”

“It means ‘ready’!” Sigbjørn shouted, somewhat frantic.

“Ready,” repeated Frances, hopping up and clearing the coffee cups.

“What are we to do?” his mother asked.

“It is a question many have wondered,” Haldor said, “since the beginning, and so they wrote the sagas, to give some answers. Because none of us know.”

Yasha did not find this helpful.

“Who will lift the casket off the trailer?” Yasha asked.

“This funeral may feel to you like Ragnarök, the End of the World,” Haldor said, “but I can assure you, Mrs. Gregoriov—”

“My name is Olyana.”

“Olyana!” Haldor’s face seemed to expand for a moment, and then contract again: “I can assure you that the world begins again after the End of the World. Two people survive, and their children fill the new world. So says the great saga, the Edda, in its very first section, called
Gylfaginning
, which means, ‘The Fooling of Gylfi.’ If you have read the fifty-second chapter of
Gylfaginning
, the chapter called, ‘After Ragnarök,’ you see there, it is not the end. We bury your husband tonight under the midnight sun to show it is not the end—to show there is light, even in a time of darkness.”

This was better, Yasha thought. This was something. Some way to make sense of the sunlight. It was five to midnight. The sky was the same pale blue as Frances’s coffee cup. Yasha craved some sense.

His mother surprised him with her practicality just then, asking, “But what are we to do, now, with the casket?”

Sigbjørn stepped forward, out from behind Haldor, who had concealed him completely, and said, “The casket is light. I can move it.”

“I can help,” said Daniil.

“Superfine,” Sigbjørn said.

“What will I do?” Yasha asked. He straightened his back to its full height, dropped his shoulders, leaned his chest forward, pulled his arms back, tilted his chin slightly up and to the side, and placed one hand in his pocket.

Frances started to laugh again.

Yasha took her hand, silently congratulated himself, and walked her to the hole. They had cleared quite a bit of sand, and the hole was far deeper than the casket was tall, offering some protection from the boulders and the wind. It looked comfortable. As if in response to Yasha’s thought, Sigbjørn began to line the inside of the hole with sheepskins. The grave was built into an inverse animal, all the wool facing in. The space was insulated from the damp sand, and from the North Pole, which was perpetually ending the earth out there in the water. Everything our skin keeps out must stay out, Yasha thought, far from Papa, who will lose his skin, over time. The image of his father’s skeleton blinded Yasha with its clarity and whiteness. Sigbjørn and Daniil went off to retrieve the casket.

They buried him under devastating sunshine. Brilliant light gleaming off the shovels and the casket’s brass nails. Brilliant light on the hair of the mourners and the pistils of the wreath flowers and the spotted backs of the things living in the nearest woods. Birds in the sky were black, in silhouette, before the sun. Light covered the water, making the water a sky, making the sky a body of water.

They lowered the casket on two ropes. One band of pink light lined the horizon. The blond wood caught the pink in its grains and released, from Papa, Yasha thought, a blush.

“We gather at the top of the world,” Haldor began, “to bury Vassily Gregoriov.”

“Vassily Andreovich Gregoriov,” said Daniil, “may it please our resting father.”

Haldor was not a priest. He was, by trade, a tour guide. The rocks rising from the shallowest water had grown as black as the birds, backlit, and were predators to Haldor’s improvised ceremony. Farther up, where the shore ended, the wartime radar station blinked its old red bulb. The shoreline was cluttered with mountains, each mountain transforming, where it met the sea, from rock into water. Waves rushed up toward the mourners but did not reach them. They stopped some way down the shore, split into foam by the boulders.

Haldor pulled a small book from inside his tunic, opened it, and said to Daniil, “Your brother,” and said to Olyana, “your husband,” and said to Yasha, “your father, Vassily Andreovich Gregoriov, asked to be given, after death, to the top of the world. Why did he do this?” Yasha saw Haldor’s eyes move to a slip of paper taped to his book’s inside cover. He had prepared a speech. “It is, it must be, for the same reasons that the All-Father, Odin, journeyed north in the time of the gods. It was to greet the powers that dwell here, the guards who look after the edge of the earth.” Haldor faced the mourners. “Fortunately,” he said, “the world begins again, on the other side, for example, with Canada.”

Frances laughed, then Sigbjørn laughed, then Yasha laughed, then Olyana laughed.

“What, Canada?” Haldor asked meekly.

“Go on, Haldor,” Yasha said.

“I did not mean it to be a joke,” Haldor said. “I was only thinking about the land on the other side of the pole, those countries. I thought of Canada first, though, to myself, I wonder why Canada is not spelled with a K. The meaning was to say that the top of the world and the end of the world are not the same”—he drew a breath—“and that Vassily’s ending is another one of these endings that can mean beginnings after.” He was sweating under his eyes.

“Bravo,” Olyana whispered with aggressive sincerity.

“We read from the fifty-third chapter of
Gylfaginning
,” Haldor said, gathering confidence. “It is called, ‘The High One Describes the Rebirth of the World.’ It is my favorite chapter.”

Sigbjørn bowed his head. Yasha noticed the military shortness of the blacksmith’s hair and the perfect sphere of his head, hovering moonlike over the hole. Haldor’s little book looked tiny in his large hands. In his “chief” posture, he stood with his feet apart and his chest high. Haldor was no priest, but he was righteous. He had the once-removed righteousness of an actor playing the President.

“‘There will arise out of the sea,’” Haldor read, “‘another earth most lovely and verdant, with pleasant fields where the grain shall grow unsown. Vidar and Vali shall survive; neither the flood nor Surtur’s fire shall harm them. They shall dwell on the plain of Ida, where Asgard formerly stood.’”

In Yasha’s imagination, the plain of Ida looked like the museum’s lobby: a place with a great tree at its center. He didn’t mind much, one way or another, how these worlds looked; it was soothing to hear all the vowels in their names, pronounced slowly and openly by Haldor’s big mouth, in a foreign accent, each word washed by the wind. Ida might look a lot like Eggum, Yasha thought, turning briefly back toward the sculpture of the human head, the signature of this strangest possible place. He wanted to ask: Isn’t this strange? Papa, isn’t this strange?