Authors: Rebecca Dinerstein
“I need you to submit an obituary,” Yasha said. “I want it in the Russian papers, and the
Times
. It can be short. It just needs to say that he lived, and we loved him, and he died.”
“Yasha,” Mr. Dobson said. “Yes,” he said. “But—”
“I’m in Norway,” Yasha said. “I don’t know when I’m coming home—it depends on this girl.”
Mr. Dobson said he didn’t know a thing about girls, and he didn’t know a thing about the
New York Times
.
“Ten words,” Yasha said. “Send it over. They’ve got to have an obit department, no? Mail it in. Ten words. Vassily Gregoriov, beloved father, lived in Russia and Brooklyn, died in Russia, buried at the top of the world. I guess that’s twenty words. Could be fifty if you add a few, Mr. Dobson,” Yasha said. “You can mention the bread. I want it in the papers next week.”
“I can do it,” Mr. Dobson said. “Who will pay for it?”
“I will,” Yasha said. Kurt had turned off the heat and was leaning against the edge of the counter, watching Yasha talk. Frida watched, and Agnes watched while she scrubbed a pair of crusty horseshoes. The baby reached for Frida’s breast with both of her hands. Yasha reached into his pocket and felt a heavy coin worth twenty Norwegian kroner.
“One more thing,” Yasha said. “I’m going to need my cat back.”
“He’s been living inside the bakery,” Dobson said. “I can’t get him to stay out. He sleeps up on the shelves. He’s licked the floors clean. He doesn’t eat the food I leave out for him. He drinks the water. He comes in and out of my house. Sleeps in the bakery. Meows like a living hell. He’s lost weight. That red string’s still around his neck.”
“Take the string off—you want to choke him? Take the string off, and bolt up the cat flap on the bakery door. It’s not good for him to be in there,” Yasha said. “My father threw out all the food. Tell him my father died,” Yasha said. “Okay? Make him a bed in your living room. He likes to sleep on butcher paper.”
“What about the bakery?” Mr. Dobson wanted to know.
The nook where Yasha stood was about two feet wide. He held the phone up with his shoulder and reached his hands out to the sides. Each hand touched a refrigerator. He couldn’t imagine ever needing a whole room again, ever filling a whole empty room. Couldn’t he live in this gap, two feet wide by seven feet tall, in the shadow for most of the day, coming out into the lit kitchen once an hour for something to eat?
“Have to rent the bakery out,” Dobson said. “No offense meant to the dearly departed.”
“When?” said Yasha.
“First of January. End of a five-year lease. Been in the Gregoriov name for what, ten years exactly? First of January, I have to turn it over. First of the eleventh year.”
Kurt opened the leftmost refrigerator and retrieved a large salmon.
“I would have liked it to be yours a lot longer,” Mr. Dobson said. “I would have liked it to be his. I’m upset.”
“I’ll clean things up,” Yasha said. “Send in the fifty words, please, Mr. Dobson. Bolt up the cat door. Take that string off his neck.”
Mr. Dobson said, “Okay, Gregoriov.”
Yasha returned the phone to its cradle on the wall and stepped out into the kitchen. Frida’s shirt lay flat across her chest. Her baby was asleep in a bassinet. Frida handed chopped bits of carrot to Kurt and Agnes, who arranged them around the decapitated salmon on a serving platter. Yasha left the kitchen—everybody watched him go, except the sleeping baby—and walked out through the Ceremonial Hall.
Olyana sat playing the hall’s baby grand, crooning “Kalinka” in angelic, falsetto Russian. The day’s worth of visitors, over whom she’d proclaimed either death or victory, stood watching, bewitched, heeding the Russian as if it were the secret, original language of the Valkyries.
• • •
I sent a message to Nils. I used the most English-like words.
(Are) Er
(you) du
(there?) der?
I said it to myself: Er du der? Er du der? while I waited for my phone to beep with his reply. I sat on my bed. I hadn’t been able to reach Nils for days. I’d sent a message every morning, and, unlike the days at the asylum when I could hear his phone beep, hear him shuffle to it, hear him sit down to thumb in each letter, and receive a reply in a moment—I’d heard nothing at all. I wondered if both my English and my Norwegian had become incomprehensible.
My first message had said:
(No) Ingen
(sheep) sauer
(here.) her.
(Only) Bare
(pig.) gris.
I didn’t know the word for
boar
. I missed the sheep from the colony’s parking lot and their loud bells. They had been friends to me in a way the wild boar wasn’t. The wild boar wasn’t a friend to anyone. There was nobody at the Viking Museum, not even Yasha, whose harmony resembled Nils’s. It seemed Nils had never lost anything—had never needed anything, had spent his life studying one color. That was all, and enough. I missed Nils’s fish dinners, his green cans of beer, his brown shoes. I wanted to ask Nils whether sheep or pigs lived in the forest that surrounded his house. He’d said the forest was called Huppasskogen. He’d said it was superlarge, that it went all the way around the peninsula where he lived, and protected the farmland from the fjord, which was called Lyngen. Lyngenfjord.
When he didn’t reply, I blamed my Norwegian. I wrote my second message in English:
Did you make it home?
Hearing nothing in response to the English either, I tried again.
(I) Jeg
(am) er
(supertired.) kjempetrøtt.
(Time) Tid
(for) for
(wine) vin
(and) og
(brown cheese.) brunost.
Nothing. So that morning I wrote Er du der. Er du der er du der er du der? My phone lay silent. I had assumed, I think, that when someone as unlikely as Nils came into one’s life, he stayed. That he’d appear in conjunction with the high moments: baby born, here is Uncle Nils. Who is Nils? This is Nils. We met a long time ago, in the Far North. A Friday night, some autumn: I am going to “The Color Yellow,” Nils’s first exhibit in the Norwegian National Gallery. This is the painting he began in the artist colony. Bringing my baby along to see the Oslofjord. Letters would be written and delivered to him wherever he lived, and delivered to me wherever I lived, wherever that would be. We would know each other, remember each other, anywhere.
The only thing I knew about Nils at this moment was his phone number. If he didn’t answer, I had lost him. I could not find his house, unnumbered as it was, no address, no town name, at the foot of the Huppasskogen. I imagined Yasha driving me there to look for it in the red pickup. I looked out my window for a sign of Yasha anywhere. Only the wild boar, and the beach. I was more frightened then than I had been since arriving in Norway.
The waves rolling in asked: Why did you come here?
I had come to get out of the city, and away from the family to whom I belonged. I had found a country covered in sour blueberries, foxes, rocks, and one-lane roads that were drawn in the same shape as the shoreline. I had met Nils, Yasha, his mother, a few make-believe Vikings. I didn’t belong to any of them, and they didn’t belong to me. I looked out the window for Yasha again.
The waves rolling out said: Nothing here is yours to keep.
I imagined Yasha staying at the Viking Museum indefinitely, and my going home without him, and calling the museum, and Sigbjørn answering, and Haldor answering, and Yasha never coming to the phone. Yasha becoming another unreturned message. My phone sat blankly on the windowsill, its black screen reflecting the clouds. Yasha would be back at the lavvos by now. I went over to my second bed where he had once slept, near to me but not near enough, and found one of my necklaces tied up in the sheets. I put it on. I told the dangling ballerina: I will not lose Yasha. Maybe his mother had lost him, maybe his father had lost him, Brooklyn had lost him—not me. It wasn’t a matter of somebody keeping him. It was a matter of my wanting him, wanting his face near my face.
A few curly hairs made the shape of an otter on his pillowcase. Yasha was human, a creature. Nils was harmony itself. Toward Nils, I felt different sort of longing. More like how one feels toward stars. Wanting their shine, their comfort in the dark, knowing full well how far they are—I picked up my phone to write another message. I wanted it to say
Please
. There was no such word. The only way to say it was:
(Be) Vær
(so) så
(kind.) snill.
• • •
Yasha kicked the tree sculpture as hard as he could, hoping to put a dent in it. Two weeks had passed since Frances had moved into the museum, but he’d failed to come any closer. Frances helped Kurt serve breakfast first thing in the morning; Yasha built lavvos in the afternoon; feasts and reenactments stretched through the evenings; they never came home at the same time. He’d spent nights with his ear to the wall between them, listening out for her, but she’d grown so quiet—she hadn’t been completely well. Her parents’ calls kept her busy, and miserable, and she seemed changed by Nils’s absence. Sometimes, when her eyes rested on him one second too long, he could swear she wanted something from him, could swear she wanted
him
, but the outright invitation he required never came.
More difficult than overcoming his own nervousness was overcoming hers: she still looked at him with condolence in her eyes, attending to his comfort and speaking to him gently, when he wanted to be vigorously ungentle with her. He didn’t know how to convince her that he was fully available, that he was more man than mourner.
The bronze of the tree trunk looked only shinier as Yasha’s sneakers brushed dust from its bark finish, kick by kick. The four dwarves on the ceiling looked down at him, and Yasha wanted them to come down and fight him already, wanted to rip their little shirts from their bellies. The one thing Yasha could dent was the diagram, which was mounted on a thin piece of apparently pliable wire. He kicked the midpoint of the wire, and the whole plaque tipped over. Yasha saw himself and his mother reading the diagram’s text aloud, his mother shouting about the universe. They would now have to turn their heads sideways to read from it. Yasha looked to the receptionist’s desk. She hadn’t yet returned from lunch.
He backed away from the tree. The receptionist was named Gunn, and she made him uncomfortable with her
“Hei hei!”
greeting and her constantly open mouth. When she came back, the two of them would have to walk to a supply closet, get a hammer, and straighten the thing. He sat down in one of the lobby’s guest chairs and let his head fall back to the wall. One of his ears touched something cold. The low chair and the cold ear made Yasha think of getting a haircut. He wanted somebody to be rubbing his head, and dunking it into cold water. He turned to see what the cold was and saw a doorknob.
Maybe it was a coat hanger. The chair was flush against the wall; there wouldn’t be a door behind it. He faced out again. The knob became less cold the longer his ear lay against it. He rubbed his own head, imagining the clipping sound of tiny scissors. Yefim’s Barbershop had always played Simon & Garfunkel, and Yefim’s hands had been strong enough to squeeze his head until the blood flow stopped and restarted. Yasha heard a
“Hei hei”
in the Ceremonial Hall and Gunn’s plates clanking into the industrial dishwasher. He opened his eyes and saw the Yggdrasil diagram looking at him sideways, like a dog. He stood up and heard Haldor’s voice speaking to Gunn. If Haldor came with her, Yasha started to think—the knob was unmistakably a doorknob. Moreover, a seam now appeared lightly dipped into the surface of the wall, and there, three feet apart from each other: two hinges.
The door was the same width as the chair. He pulled the chair away from the wall, stepped behind it, and pushed the door open. Inside, there was only a staircase. Going down. Yasha closed the door behind him, and real darkness enveloped him for the first time in several weeks. No daylight cracking in between the futile window curtains. No sunrise or sunset, and none of the dawny, dusky thing the sky was always doing. Haldor and Gunn came into the lobby. Yasha stood silently behind the door, behind the chair. They were speaking in agitated Norwegian. Gunn’s chipper footsteps rushed back into the Ceremonial Hall. Yasha couldn’t hear Haldor anymore and took the first step down the stairs. The step didn’t make any noise. He dropped his other leg down to the second step. No problem. He climbed down to the bottom, where a room opened up.
His mother had been right: there was a goat under the tree after all. Here it was. But she couldn’t have known about this one. Yasha found himself standing directly under Yggdrasil, centered between its three roots, which had always seemed cut off by the lobby floor, but which extended, in the shape of long icicles, down another three or four feet into this basement. Where the roots ended, there stood a modest wooden table. It looked almost exactly like the bedside table in Yasha’s room. It was covered with a sack, the kind Frances wore. The table had been placed under the shortest of the three roots, and on top of the table Yasha saw a model house, and on top of the house, a goat. The house was made of popsicle sticks and pebbles. The goat, though Yasha was not sure, looked like it was made of brown cheese.