Read Online The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein - Free Book Online Page A

thought. To be free to be free to be free.
    Who had been free, all these years? Yasha watched four more cars whoosh under the footbridge. Hadn’t everybody? She had stayed in Russia, to be free. They had come to Brooklyn, to be free. They had opened a business, made some money, been free. She had met another man, in her freedom—“Who is he?” Yasha asked.
    “An American, Yakov, just like you. Good lord, I could call you Jacob!” She laughed, and he could see her ribs stretch out her dress. “He has an awful lot of money and could have done whatever he wanted, and what he wanted, bless him, was Russia!” The yellow material of her dress was elastic and became paler when it stretched. “He came to me asking for lessons. What could I teach him? He plays like a dream, my student.”
    “Papa was your student,” Yasha said. This fact had always started the story, the story of how his mother and father met, which Yasha had sometimes asked his father to tell him at bedtime, before he stopped asking about his mother altogether.
    “Teachers, and students—” she said, resting her hand across her collarbone.
    Yasha took a step into the park, turned around, and looked back at her, carrying her large bag, carrying the hideous photograph, which lay illuminated in Yasha’s vision as if by an X-ray. He looked at her hands, the nails cut short, the fingers long, and could not remember how her skin felt—could not remember if she had often held him. He could only recall her hands touching her piano; her playing on certain weekends four-hand duets with his father, who had never been a fine pianist. His father, her first student, replaced by a second student, a finer pianist, a wealthier man, no doubt a childless man, no doubt a man who asked nothing of her, no doubt a man who bought her all these colorful dresses, no doubt a paradise.
    “When we’re married we’ll live here in New York, with you, I hope.”
    “We are leaving New York,” Yasha told his mother as simply and loudly as he could. “To look for you, in fact.” The perversity of his family’s many overlapping errors, and his singular power to make things right, or more wrong, made Yasha giddy. “Papa bought tickets to Moscow. He thinks he’s going to find you there. He wants—”
    “How absurd,” his mother said. “Listen. You must tell your father, tell him, Mama is here, she is terribly happy, she has made a new life for herself, and the best thing to do—the only civilized thing—is to let the woman go. Just like that. Then you give him these.” She retrieved a manila folder of papers from her bag. “And see that he signs. He will sign if you ask him, Yasha.”
    “He will die if I ask him,” Yasha said. “But you’re right, he would die faster and harder if the news came directly from you.” His mother stood clutching the thin stack of divorce papers, a stack no thicker than a bialy. “We are leaving on Thursday,” Yasha said. “We are going to conquer Moscow , Papa keeps saying, and have a great time while we do it. Papa hasn’t gotten out of the bakery since … well, actually since we moved in, but we’re going all-out this time. He calls it Gregoriov’s Last Great Adventure. If you want to break his heart, you can wait until we’re back and they’ve implanted his defibrillator. Maybe with that thing in his chest you won’t ruin him completely.”
    “By that time the police will be after me.” Yasha could think of a million reasons to arrest her, but she provided one that hadn’t occurred to him. “They’ll kick me out of this country,” she said. “You must understand—no divorce, no marriage, no residence permit, for an alien like me,” she said.
    “They won’t find you so fast,” Yasha said. “You’re very hard to find.” Yasha thought of his father in the bathroom, talking into the telephone, asking her to come. He thought of a faceless man who must have been in the room with her during those calls, kissing her