No One is Here Except All of Us (19 page)

When they had eaten the last of their desserts, the guard’s mother told them to go sleep in her bed. “I’ll do the dishes,” she said. “You have a nap.”

Igor nodded enthusiastically at this idea, but the guard said, “No, thanks, Mother, we have to get him back to jail.”

“I really am tired,” Igor said when they got outside.

The guard looked puzzled. “What else would we do with our afternoon? This country is nothing without its nap. We’ll sleep in the jail. That woman makes me crazy.”

“I had a mother.” Igor remembered, quite suddenly. “A lot of us had the same one. We were eleven, plus one who died when he was a baby. She cooked nothing but beef. She loved beef.” He remembered being utterly devoted to her, following her around without acknowledgment. After he was married, he could not recall his mother ever having come to visit him and his family, not one single time. She had avoided him in the market and averted her eyes in temple. As if he were disgusting to her, as if she could see through his skin and bones to the hairy, blistered soul within.

“Did she make you feel like swimming out to sea and never coming back?” the guard asked.

The two men walked the path through the dusky green olive grove. The ground was raised raucous with rocks and branches. A lot of chickens wandered around, aimless and pecking. Goats clanged their bells without meaning to, tearing the grass from its roots. There were no sounds of voices. No bubble of laughing washerwomen, no scramble of children, no gruff of men smoking in the plaza. Just chickens and goats and the rustle of horses’ manes in the wind.

“Everyone is asleep?” Igor asked.

“Certainly,” the guard replied.

“This place is incredible. If only my family was here with me.”

The guard opened the jail door to let Igor in first. “Home sweet home,” he said. The guard opened the gate into the barred cage and Igor flopped onto the bed. “May I join you?” the guard asked.

“Please, guard, make yourself at home.”

“Maybe you should stop calling me guard and start calling me Francesco,” the guard said. “Since you’re staying around awhile.” Francesco went to one side of the bed and Igor to the other.

As he was falling asleep, Francesco asked Igor, not unlike a marriage proposal, to be his friend. Igor was not sure how to answer. Francesco gave him a pat on the back and, lying as hard as he had ever lied, he said, “I didn’t realize how lonely I’d been.”

As he drifted off, Igor saw my face and the faces of our boys. The angle of our noses, the smell of our hair, the way we moved. The deeper that Igor fell, my face, Solomon’s and the new baby’s faces, turned to mist. We hovered still, cloudlike, around him, but we had no hands he could hold, no ears he could speak to.
I almost remember you
, he thought, but then he did not again. He caught his family in whiffs, as faint and drifting as the scent of a flower. Home had been taken away as easily as it had been invented. A new place lapped at Igor’s feet.

THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE AHEAD

I
n the pink of dawn, the border was clogged with blackberry thorns and brush. I wrapped my shawl around the baby and tied him to my chest. As if diving into water, I held my breath. We had to tear the branches apart, untangle their talons, duck and overstep, and still we emerged with bleeding arms. I had thorns stuck in my dress. The baby had a scratch across his little cheek and he grimaced at me when I peeked into his cocoon. We walked out of the village, just like that, out of the world. We did not fall off a cliff, nor were we swept into the sky by a tremendous gust of wind. The earth went on as if we had not crossed any border.

The old road was shabby and overgrown but obvious. We were going one foot, then the other into the past. Or was it the future? Had the lands outside our borders zipped ahead of us or slipped behind? What assembled itself along our path offered little evidence either way. Short, soft-needled pines, weeds, a bloomless crocus. Endless rolls of wheat, planted by knobbled human hands. A thousand worlds’ worth of sky, and the singular sun coming to give us our turn at daytime. Light poured over fields and the way ahead of us was open and long.

The compass pointed us toward the mountains. I had no idea which direction was safest and which was most dangerous, but it felt better to follow something than not to. All I could do was go on. We came into a dense birch forest, thousands of white fingers of trees reaching out of the ground. A stream ran through the trees, and the rocks were mossy. Sticks stuck on the rocks, then came loose and twirled as they floated away. Solomon climbed into one of the birches, stood like a new branch.

“Are we looking for Father?” Solomon asked.

“We’re staying safe,” I told him. “It’s better to be alone and quiet. We can be quiet, right?” We lay down under a huge tree whose branches cut the sky up. Fallen leaves under us crushed themselves soft. The tree smelled full and sweet and dropped only a few jeweled raindrops down to us, one at a time.

We listened to the sound of water hitting leaves. We could see only the gray of mist around us. We were wrapped in it, clothed. I took in the rich smells of leaves decomposing, of wet bark and turned dirt. The baby was warm on my chest. What does it feel like, I asked myself, to be away? Even though my back was against the earth, I felt as if I were floating above.

“Come to me,” I said to Solomon, who was drawing the shape of a house in the loam with his finger. “Let me have you.” Solomon put his face to my chest. He listened to what transpired inside, the gathering and sending out of blood. He listened to his brother taking liquid into his mouth.

“Can I taste it?” Solomon asked.

“What?”

“The milk.”

The baby’s suckling sounds matched the rolling of water over waxy leaves.

“You can if you want to. Do you?”

“Please.” I pulled away the shawl I was wearing, pulled myself out from inside of it.

“What do I do?” he asked me.

“Just suck a little, it will come.” Solomon’s mouth was warm, now both breasts held in the soft of my children’s lips. I felt the milk leave me. I knew that I was allowing one brother to steal food from the other, but I wanted to be enough for both of them. I felt Solomon stop for a moment, then start again. He laughed and drank. He was gentler than the baby was, more persuasive. I put my head back against the tree. I tried to feel its roots under me, the net of them holding everything up. I watched the leaves shake in the wind and the rain, the rain, which was slowing, which was quieting, which was loosening its hold on us. Solomon fell asleep and so did his brother. I held them to me, felt them against my skin. The breath turned wet and cold. They were heavy but I did not put them down.

At this moment, what was real mated with what was dreamed. I want to be able to say exactly where we walked and how we survived out there, for how long. We went north, unless we came to a wide river, or it looked like a town might be ahead, in which case we went east. In my palm, the compass was warm. Facts about how much food the body needs and my memory of what we found to eat do not match up. And time? As if time had ever made sense to me? What followed was one long night.

In the morning
Solomon went out into the wheat and gathered stalks of it, brought it back to me. Together we opened the shells to pull impossibly small bodies of meat. We did not eat them one by one, but saved them in a pile, waited until we had enough, so when we ate it actually felt like eating. We chewed every bite until it was nothing. We worked and our fingers were striped with cuts. Today this was enough.

In the afternoon we tried to sleep. The baby talked noise into the canopy of whatever trees we found. Oak, maple, pine, beech. He seemed happy. He was with his mother and his brother, and his father still loved him someplace, of course.

In the evening we peeled sheets of bark off the tree and soaked them in caught water. Once soft, we ate the bark, dark tasting and sponged.

“We are doing fine,” I whispered into the dark.

“I know,” Solomon said.

“We are doing fine,” I said again.

“I know,” he repeated.

“We are doing fine,” we said together.

I laid the baby, asleep now and wrapped in a blanket, on the leafed ground.

“Let’s look at the stars,” I told Solomon, and we walked out into a treeless place, out into the tall whispers of grass. We tipped our heads back and tried to find ourselves on that map. “Which ones do you know?” I asked.

“I don’t recognize these,” he said. “These stars are different.”

Above us, the stars of another season rolled along. What was slapped here was unrecognizable, the work of a different God.

“Let’s name them then,” I said. “Let’s get to know them.”

“But they aren’t our stars. Our stars are the ones on the barn.”

“These are ours too now. This is our temple.”

We traced a horse constellation, a river, a house. We traced a tree and a leaf. “There’s a rabbit whose job it is to look after the birds,” Solomon said, and I nodded though I did not see.

“What about this one as a man holding a sack?” I asked.

“No, not that. It’s a woman holding a sack.”

“All right, a woman. Where is she going?”

“She’s going home,” he said. “God will take care of her there.”

“What if God is busy doing something else and forgets?” He did not take notice of my faithless question. Little believer, unbending. “What does she have in the sack?” I asked.

“It’s her children in there, asleep. They were tired of walking.”

“How far do they have?”

“Not far. They are almost there.”

I tried to point out a row of stars that reminded me of an arrow but Solomon did not answer me. I tried to show him one that looked like a face but he did not answer.

“Are you asleep?” I asked him.

“Of course not. Where did we come from?”

“We came from our village, Zalischik. We lived in a house near a well. We had two sturdy pots, three stable chairs, a woodstove, beds, more families than we could have hoped for.”

“What else?”

“We had your father. He will be back. We will be back.”

“Tell me about everything,” Solomon said.

“There was a river where the mud was thick and dark. Willows lived at its edges. In winter it was quiet and cold, in summer it was loud and cold. You had to walk through a field of wheat like this and a field of cabbage to get there. Your grandfather Vlad worked in the cabbage field. He was a very fast picker. He loved us.”

“Remember the time Father and I discovered a cave on the bank of the river and it was filled with magic foods that replaced themselves whenever we ate one?”

“Sure, I will remember that.”

“I want to nurse,” he said, “just a little bit.”

I opened my dress up, brought him close. I knew the milk would quiet if I did not eat enough, but I let him suck it away, let him drink what belonged to his brother. He drank me down. I felt the mechanism of his swallow against me. I felt the warmth of his cheek against me. I felt a drop of milk slipper down along the curve of my breast and fall off.

“Remember the time we forgave each other for everything?” I asked. Against my chest, Solomon nodded yes.

The birds had
no idea that it was time to be quiet. They exploded the mornings with their music. They had so much to ask for. I, awake before my boys, waited while a sparrow hopped along, pecking. I waited until it crossed in front of me, but when I went to grab it, it flew. Its wings had it high and safe above me.

Already, time was losing us. It felt as if we had never had a home and also as if we had left it only in the last moments. It felt as if each sleep lasted weeks, leaving us with colder and colder mornings. Our feet wept with blisters and the corners of our eyes were scabbed with dirt. Our bones, tucked under threadbare blankets of muscle, rattled and shook. Above my sons and me, the stars slid along and the moon returned a new shape each night, and no one came looking for us. No one caught us or saved us. The days did not count themselves off but circled, dizzy and lost. It made sense to keep track of time only if there was a known end to the journey, which there was not. We might have been on day twelve of twelve thousand, or day thirty of one million. I let go of the idea of time, of progress, of beginnings and endings, and tried to pay attention only to one fact: We were alive, we were alive, we were alive. We were alive, and the little red needle kept pointing us onward.

Not one drop of rain fell from the sky. The earth and the sky and the trees and the stones and the path were dead dry.

THE BOOK OF HOME

T
here was a kind of stillness in the days after my family and I were gone. The villagers washed the dishes in warm water and fed the animals scraped-off leftovers.

Clouds poured forth and fear curdled all other emotions, but there was bread because the baker made it, there was water because the wives drew it up from wells, and there was meat because the animals were still killable—the animals were drained of blood if someone drained them. There were many things for the villagers to be grateful for.

Now no one
liked to be outside in the day’s revealing light. The street felt as exposed as a sliced-open wound. The man who captured Igor became a giant. The villagers imagined that I was lost now in a hot, dry desert, my flesh burning away. Who knew what was next for the people, what curses remained? Just to press tiles on the ceiling—to eat something each day, to keep track of the dangers and hopes—was almost more than they could bear. They hated to leave the barn.

Both sets of my parents recounted my birth and childhood, two separate stories. Perl remembered that it was a bright morning when I was born and I had opened my eyes to look around. Kayla remembered that it was a wet, shimmering evening and I had cried so hard my throat must have been torn up.

“Has she told herself into a better story?” they kept asking.

The banker’s children reminded the others about their brother Igor and the villagers remembered him, too. “He was an amazing sleeper,” an old man said. No one denied this.

The wives touched the arms of their husbands and tried to tell them in this way that they were watching. Sunlight through that single bullet hole in the wall of the barn drew a bright, dusty line across the room. The villagers ducked to cross it, as if it might be sharp enough to slice them.

The baker recruited
hands for kneading. In the bakery, the air was yeasty and alive. Did they discuss what they imagined was coming? Did they wonder if it would be better to run or to stay? When they kneaded the bread, and their hands were warmed by the motion of pressing and rolling and the dough was warmed by their hands, were they trying to remember what it was their grandmothers looked like long ago, before any of these people were alive? Before this world existed?

Vlad took a wheelbarrow and some men with him to where the cabbages were still growing, paler and softer. He wanted to pile up whatever there was and watch over it.

The villagers said their prayers in their heads, a tiny orchestra, but did not let them get out. Nothing crumbled because of the people’s prayers.

The stranger’s life was the same as before, except now the jeweler slept next to her, and into each other’s ears in the dark of night, they laughed and they whispered and they pinched. When they were together, their bodies were entirely uncrushable, even by fear, that most invisible—and heaviest—of weights.

The weather grew colder
and still everyone waited for the terrible end. Fat arms of vines scrawled out of the ground and choked trees. They wound themselves into windows like thieves. And then there was the sinking. At first it was dismissible. People felt a little taller than they had, that was all. They had to stoop farther to get through the door. When Vlad smacked his head on the lintel, he knew the house was outshrinking him. Some houses declined faster than others. Some slumped on one side, others descended evenly, like ships whose hulls were heavy with bilgewater.

Buttery morning light brought the stranger out of the barn to find the two best milk cows lying dead on the ground. She examined them and found no wounds. This was not the work of a fox. They were facing each other, as if a pact had been made, as if they had decided to go together to a better place. The stranger petted each on the head. “I understand,” she whispered, wishing she could give the cows her blessing but knowing how much the villagers needed them. “I’m sorry to do this,” she told them as she kneeled down, milk bucket in hand, and pulled at the cool udders until they were empty. She prayed for forgiveness for draining these corpses dry. When she announced the loss to the others, fear of shortage swept through like a sandstorm. Everyone looked at the flock of goats, who backed away, bleated. They were doing what they could. They had no more to give. No one did.

Instinct told them to condense, to stay close. Without discussion, all the villagers left their capsizing homes and moved into the barn. People brought their favorite sweaters and best pots. They went for their wrenches and fur shawls. Then for their meat tenderizers, their butter churns and, of course, the sacks of coins buried under the rosebushes. They rationed flour, butter, eggs. Everyone wore two words on their lips: Not Enough.

The villagers remembered sitting down with their children and eating supper, watching the fire in the stove tongue the air dry, discussing one thing or another and even playing a game of marbles on the floor before the husband and wife stood together over their young ones and sang a song to put them away. Their old lives had gone on so regularly it made them feel sick.

And frost started to form and the earth got its crust of ice. In preparation for the moment when everyone might freeze to death in one solid mass, as now seemed likely, and wanting nothing of their lives left behind, the villagers ventured out to take even the things they had always wished to get rid of. The whole drawerful of broken things—cups, eyeglasses, dolls waiting to be fixed whose eyes rolled around in their sockets, floppy and loose. The constellations on the walls became blocked by towers of objects. No one wanted to let go of anything they used to touch back when touching it meant nothing.

And the stranger and the jeweler held each other close. They learned—ever so quietly—every ridge, every slope of each other’s bodies. The fact of one ankle held between two calves, four arms like a lock keeping everything good inside. He wanted her to be anything and everything she possibly could be. The biggest wallop of desperation, the brightest sweep of joy. If the stranger were burning hot, the jeweler would have become a lick of fire. If she were freezing cold, he would have become the spear of an icicle. If she was a swamp, he would be algae, growing over the entire surface of her.

If the people had been put out to sea, would their odd cargo have sustained them? On their lost ark of a world, floating alone, unpulled by the moon, unwarmed by the sun, the people waited to be dragged up onto some dry shore, some island where flowering trees might drop petals into their salty hair, and not long after, globes of waxy fruit.