The Sunlit Night (17 page)

Under an ordinary sky, blue and recognizable as morning, they started to pack the truck. They had forgotten to use the blankets, though the blankets would have made the rocks more comfortable, and the pile lay folded on the bed of the truck. The only sheepskin that remained above ground was the coffee-stained one from under the refreshments; the thermoses were mostly empty now and the plastic tables cleared, ready to be collapsed. They had less to bring back, Yasha knew, than they’d carried out to the beach. The trailer lay empty, still hitched to the pickup truck.

Haldor again took the driver’s seat, Olyana the passenger’s. Daniil sat alone in the backseat. Yasha and Frances sat out on the bed of the pickup, with only the one stained sheepskin beneath them. The two shovels rattled across the floor as the truck moved, slamming into their feet. Sigbjørn sat on the empty utility trailer, facing Frances and Yasha. It was perverse, Yasha thought, for Sigbjørn to sit in the casket’s place. Besides, he didn’t know what sort of hand-holding he would have dared had Sigbjørn not been there, but he couldn’t do any of it now.

“My grandmother,” Sigbjørn said, apropos of nothing, “is waiting at home for me. I wonder if she soon will die.”

It hadn’t occurred to Yasha that Sigbjørn had a home outside the Viking Museum, much less a grandmother.

“How old is she?” asked Frances.

“Eighty-seven.”

“How old are you?” asked Yasha.

“Thirty-one,” said Sigbjørn. “And you?”

“Twenty-one,” Frances said.

“Seventeen,” Yasha said, simultaneously. Hearing Frances’s answer, he added, “I’m turning eighteen in August.”

“I’m turning twenty-two in August.”

They drove very slowly up the hill and out of the parking lot, the German radar station blinking apathetically behind them. Yasha turned back one more time toward the beach. It looked like a beach. It did not look like a cemetery. It was what Papa wanted, Yasha told himself, and not not beautiful—

“How old is your mother?” Sigbjørn asked.

“I have no idea,” Yasha said, dazed. “Fifty?”

Sigbjørn went quiet.

“What did your mother mean when she talked about going off to Russia?” Frances asked Yasha.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Yasha said.

“All right,” Frances said. Yasha recognized the flash of disappointment in her face and didn’t know how to fix it. “In other news,” she said, “I guess we might share the same birthday?”

“We might,” Yasha said.

They passed the head sculpture, the fishing cabins, and the sheep. The dirt road gave way to Eggumveien, and the truck picked up speed. Haldor was speaking to Olyana as he drove, but Yasha couldn’t hear what he said. They would soon be back at the museum, and then what? Would they leave in the morning? It hadn’t been possible to think of anything after Saturday, and now it was Sunday. The party would be dispersed. The world seemed open to them, and Yasha wanted to stay put.

“Well, what’s yours?” Frances said.

“We could just find out,” Yasha said, trying to buy time. “Every day in August, it will either be both of our birthdays or not.”

“It’s only July.”

“Your barn gets inspected in a few hours. Then where will you go? I’m not going anywhere,” Yasha said, with so much conviction he surprised himself.

Frances was surprised too; she leaned back slightly and rested her head on the back of the truck’s cabin. Yasha didn’t dare face her. He waited.

“I don’t know,” she said eventually. “I have to be at a wedding in September.”

“I’m going to work for the Viking Museum,” Yasha went on, too anxious to ask whose wedding she meant. “They must have something for me to do here, and who knows where my mother is going?”

Frances did not seem prepared to engage in the details. She was still leaning back, out of Yasha’s peripheral vision. She did not reply.

Yasha said, “I’m done with high school.” He didn’t know if that had been a smart thing to say to a girl who was almost twenty-two. “I’d rather stay here than go back to my father’s bakery without my father.” Frances said nothing.

Sigbjørn said, “If my grandmother died, I would not want to dig for her. That would hurt all of me. Arms and heart. Better to burn her. Or ask someone else to dig.
Ja
, ask someone else to dig.”

Yasha stood up and stumbled across the moving bed of the truck. He stepped over the shovels, pushed both his hands down on one of the side walls, and jumped out of the truck, onto the road. His legs were long and shortened the fall. He only had to shake his ankles out for a moment before starting to walk. Then he followed the truck at its donkey pace, head down and hands in his pockets.

Sigbjørn turned around in the trailer to face him. Frances leaned against the side where he’d jumped.

Yasha slowed his pace to create more distance between himself and the truck. There was only a short way left to drive, and he was inexpressibly thankful to be walking it alone, without Frances’s silence or Sigbjørn’s mumbo jumbo. The night had been impossibly long.

•    •    •

Nils stood in the parking lot. Beside him stood a short blond woman. Haldor parked the truck and opened the passenger-side door for Olyana. He and Nils patted each other’s backs. The woman shook hands with Olyana, who, to Yasha’s relief, hadn’t noticed his jump. His mother was shivering. Yasha had almost caught up with the group when Frances bounded past him and threw her arms around Nils.

Yasha ran after her, but could not join the embrace. When they finally separated, Nils began a hurried, whispered account of his trouble sleeping and his decision to check the barn once more. Yasha stood slightly too close to the two of them, trying to catch Frances’s eye.

“I am Yasha’s mother,” Olyana told the blond woman.

“Frida,” the woman replied. “The sous chef.”

“Our head chef, Kurt, is already preparing breakfast,” Haldor said. “Frida prepared the refreshments for tonight’s funeral.”

Everyone remembered that there had been a funeral. Olyana’s shivers were intensifying. Haldor lifted Yasha’s discarded sweater from the gravel, shook out the trailer’s dust, and wrapped it around Olyana’s shoulders.

“Let me take you inside, Olyana,” Haldor said, and led her toward the museum.

“Let me clear out those trays,” said Frida, and she rushed over to the truck. Daniil followed her, offering to carry the thermoses.

“You ought to get some rest,” Frances told Nils.

“That’s right,” Yasha said, too eagerly. Nils turned to Yasha, arched his eyebrows, then turned back to Frances and said she was probably right.

“I can take Frances back to the asylum now,” Nils told Haldor, who had just reached the lobby door. “Thank you anyway for giving her a room.”

“Only a pleasure,” Haldor said. He opened the door and Olyana strode through it.

Nils walked slowly toward his car. Frances stood frozen in place. Yasha stood behind her. He couldn’t shout, Don’t go. He dragged his foot through the gravel, disrupting hundreds of tiny pebbles and hoping their noise reached Frances’s ears.

“My things are unpacked here,” Frances told Haldor.

Yasha had seen her room—how little she’d unpacked. A toothbrush. A few paintbrushes scattered over her second bed. The change of black clothes she currently wore. She had no reason to stay at the museum, unless he had become a reason.

Nils stopped walking.

“Go on without me,” she told him. “I’m here, and I’m half asleep already.”

“You have everything you need?” Nils asked.

“We will make her comfortable,” Haldor declared. He walked into the lobby and straight toward a supply closet.

Nils gave one glance to Yasha, and Yasha hid from it, turning his eyes down to see the line his foot had drawn in the dirt. Again, now, he heard Nils’s slow steps, this time moving farther off.

Sigbjørn detached the trailer from the truck and wheeled it back toward the shed. Passing Yasha, he stopped. He rested the trailer hitch in the gravel and placed both of his hands on Yasha’s shoulders.

“You were superfine tonight,” Sigbjørn said. “We will be seeing each other.”

“I don’t think we would have made it through the night without you,” Yasha told him.

“Only a pleasure,” Sigbjørn said. “Of course, very sad.” He bade them a hasty and serious goodnight, then wheeled the empty trailer away. Yasha tried to picture Sigbjørn’s grandmother, eighty-seven years old, likely named Gerta, or Blorg.

Nils’s car coughed and started.

“Hey, Frances,” Yasha said. “You want to get out of here or what?” He felt he was catching a ball that had been thrown to someone else, and now he had to run with it.

“Out of here where?” she said.

“The lobby,” Yasha said. “Yggdrasil.”

They linked arms, spontaneously and a little childishly, Yasha thought, and walked up toward the lobby. When they got to the door, Yasha unlinked his arm and held the door open for her. He extended his other arm fully out to the side, like a butler, and made a small bow. Frances giggled, and Yasha grew pale.

The tree of life stood there, bronze and reaching up all its branches. The four dwarves, each in his little shirt, were still glued to the ceiling. Yasha remembered what his mother had said about the dwarves holding up the sky—his mother, where was she? His head filled with a number of answers, most of which involved Haldor.

“What did you want to do here?” Frances said.

“Check out the dwarves,” Yasha said, which sounded like something only a moron would say, and which made Frances nod blankly. She turned away and looked through the window that showed the barn. The inspection would begin in a few hours. The flat, open calm her face had shown after the funeral had been replaced by strain and worry. This wasn’t his moment.

“I have to say goodnight to my mother,” he said.

“I understand,” said Frances, with a little disappointment in her voice, Yasha hoped.

They walked down the corridor. Yasha walked straight to the door of Room 20, not in fact knowing whether his mother would be inside, and Frances stopped in front of Room 18. The doors were several feet apart from each other, making it impossible even to hug.

“Goodnight,” Frances said. “Sleep well.” She opened her door and disappeared.

Yasha knocked on his mother’s door.

“Come in,” Olyana answered.

Yasha had not yet been inside his mother’s room. When he opened the door, he found her lying in a large bed. He walked closer and saw that she had pushed her twin beds together, one wire and one wood, of even heights, making a functional queen size. She lay covered by two overlapping blankets, each wide enough for only one half of the bed. She wore a nightgown, an elegant one, high-necked, cream-colored, and patterned with vines of small flowers. The gown was more dignified than Yasha considered his mother to be, though it was no more dignified than she considered herself to be, and he realized this as he came to the side of her bed.

“I miss Papa,” Yasha said, before he could stop himself.

“I do too.”

“You didn’t miss him for ten years.”

“I did,” she said, “but I went about my business.” To Yasha, the word
business
meant either bread or sex. “You will be fine without your father,” his mother said. She removed the barrettes from her hair and set them down on her table, alongside her watch and bracelet. “You were fine”—she smiled—“without me.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Now as to whether you’ll be fine without your girlfriend,” she went on, “harder to say. What will you do, my darling? Bring her home to Brooklyn? Where does she live?”

“She isn’t my girlfriend.”

“Heaven knows she won’t want to live over that bakery,” his mother said, fluffing the hair that had been flattened by her barrettes. “But for love, perhaps, as I did—imagine two generations of women, moving into bakeries for love!”

“She is not my girlfriend!”

His mother settled fully into the bed, pulling a duvet over her breasts. She looked regal, and powerless. “Very well,” she said, “she isn’t.”

It was an argument Yasha hadn’t really wanted to win.

“I don’t know why she isn’t,” he said.

“You’re a bit moth-eaten.”

“I’m what?”

“A bit of a shabby flop,” his mother said.

Yasha looked at the lacy collar that frothed around her long, thin neck and said, “You’re a bitch.”

His mother felt her forehead with the heel of her palm, as if taking her own temperature. “I heard you at the funeral, little man. You do not pity me. You needn’t use uglier words.” She turned away from him. “I must sleep. Chief Haldor was kind enough to come by and give me this tea.” She pointed to a mug that was still completely full. “He has things to say to us in the morning. Let us meet for breakfast at nine.”

It was probably three o’clock in the morning. The grass was full of sunshine. Yasha felt he’d been useless all night. He didn’t know how to make anyone tea. Tea tasted like soap. He hated tea, and he hated himself for hating tea. He had no idea what he would do come morning, unlike that miserable painter and his pretty apprentice, who had something big to do. He had led Frances back to the lobby and paid more attention to the ceiling than to her. On his mother’s bedside table, under the barrettes, the watch, and the bracelet, a form titled
PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE
lay flat, bearing his father’s signature.