We waited, itchy, for everything around us to erupt in flames. For the surface of the earth to shatter. For the airplane to come back and drop an ending on our peninsula. The sky did not clear to let us see whether smoke was rising from the other side of the mountains. The rain put out any fires. Silence, that fat hand, slapped away all my questions.
People started to shout. The banker’s eleven children yelled questions at each other, at their mother, who was awake but did not stand up from her chair. The word war popped like bubbles on my father’s tongue. The word death came after. Forgiveness was begged for. The sky was pummeled with apologies and the ground was pummeled with rain. I thought about everything a person could drop from up high: pigs, logs, bricks. A letter stating YOU ARE DEAD. I knew the word bomb, but I had never seen one go off. My mother was silent, except for the grip of her fingers around mine. My hand fit completely, like a seed, inside hers. It must have been the very same sky as before, but it looked emptied out, lightless.
The barrier between the kitchen and sitting room fell. Men and women mixed, husbands and wives held each other. Children tried to insert themselves into the embrace.
The river rose, rain crashed down, and the sound of all that water jumbled our words. We heard glove when someone said love. We heard yarn for harm and bread for God. We were like a windstorm, whipping ourselves dizzy, going nowhere.
There was no point in guessing how many minutes or days before another propeller cut our sky into billowing blue shreds. We began, first in our feet, then in our legs—those rootless stumps—in our sloshing guts and our clamoring hearts, to feel we were being abandoned on this island. The sinking island. Why were we not running downstream with all the rainwater? Why were we standing here, dumb as flags stuck into the earth, when everything that could escape was escaping?
The healer sat down on the floor. He opened the book and began again, his voice loud and sure.
And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” And God said: “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.”
The healer’s voice turned scratchy and he started to cough. I could not tell the meaning of the tears that streamed down his face. My father handed him a worn handkerchief, and the healer wiped his face.
I closed the door and went to the threshold between the kitchen and the sitting room. “Please keep reading,” I said. He forced the words out.
And God created the great sea monsters, and every living creature that crawls, with which the waters swarmed, according to their kind, and every winged fowl, according to its kind, and God saw that it was good.
And the Lord God formed from the earth every beast of the field and every fowl of the heavens, and He brought it to man to see what he would call it, and whatever the man called each living thing, that was its name.
My father considered me. His brown eyes were gray in the light. His beard was wiry and ragged-looking, his hands stubby. We all stood still. We watched the mountains where smoke still did not rise, where the silver flyer did not circle back. The blast already seemed like a dream, meaningless and impossible.
Wheat blew against the ground in surrender. The sky flattened, the cottonwoods slapped leaves against leaves. The rain kept coming and we kept watching it come. The froth-white river tumbled all of her stones.
And a mist ascended from the earth and watered the entire surface of the ground.
After hours of waiting for the airplane to return, after the rain quieted to a soft dust, under the palm of a cool pink sky, our river sounded like our river again and we crept out to see what the world looked like now that it was coming apart. The air was thick with the scent of soaked sheep. Our feet stuck in the mud, our clothes caught on blown branches. We stood in the wind-combed wheat above the river. The mountains where the explosion had taken place looked no different from how they ever had. The sky was the sky, vast and prickling with light.
The riverbanks were alive with slapping fish. Beached and afraid, they curled up like question marks. “Something to save,” I said, grateful, and I began to gather the fish in my skirt. I walked carefully, the mud slippery and deep, my skinny white legs browning, my socks falling down, until I threw open my bundle in one shining, silver delivery. Back in the water, the fish flicked their tails and disappeared. Everyone joined in, filling dresses and pants pockets and arms with slipping, flapping fish. The fish, stronger than they looked, swam out of our hands and made us laugh. We chased them, saying, “We won’t hurt you. We’re trying to take you home.”
As we worked, the banks stopped glimmering with the jewels of trout, but the river receded to offer other treasures. I picked up the spout of a teapot, filled with silt. The front half of a piano smiled with its teeth punched out. The butcher found a gentlemen’s wool hat with a ribbon around it. From the muck we pulled two bowls, one jewelry box full of mud, a doll with no legs, a matted sweater, some cut logs, a hand-drawn map of the summer constellations smudged but readable, and a woman. A woman—hair, teeth, feet, fingers all. And she was alive.
THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD
The healer’s living room walls were painted bright yellow, and the windows were trimmed with blue. He had a huge bookshelf reaching all the way to the ceiling. I could read the titles: Engravings from Specimens of Morbid Parts, The Medical and Surgical History of the War, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity Intended for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians, The Science of Life; Or, Self-Preservation.
Today was no longer a day of rest. God was going to have to forgive us because it was not our fault. The healer boiled several pots of water for tea over the woodstove. The damp wood whined. The healer took everything out of his cupboards—some stale cake, half a loaf of bread, a honeycomb, a jar of last summer’s apples. We dried the woman from the river, the wet and battered stranger, with thread-worn rags. “What happened?” we kept asking, and she kept shaking her head.
“Who are you?” my mother asked while she cleaned the mud out from between the woman’s toes, wrapped her in blankets. Igor served her real tea in a toy teacup, which she drank in doll-size sips. No one said the word prophet, but everyone thought it.
She said, “The plums fell behind me and broke open bloody.”
Wind howled in the trees. It was something alive, something hungry. We drew closer still, felt each other’s warm skin as she whispered, “The living taken by their necks like puppies, and yelping that way, too.”
“By water?” we asked. “By the terrible river?”
“The river saved me. I couldn’t run anymore. My feet were bleeding. The river carried me away. The river made me into a stranger.”
“Now you are safe. Now you are our stranger,” I said. She began to cry.
“The soldiers were allowed to do whatever they wanted to us for twenty-four hours,” she said. “A reward for them, a punishment for us. They cut off my mother’s breasts and my sister’s ears. They lit my husband’s beard on fire.”
We leaned on each other in our huddle. Night’s gluttonous arms gathered everything living, everything dead. Outside, the gawking houses and the grabbing trees. Every wall could easily become a window, every roof a wide-open path to God.
The stranger stopped speaking. Her breathing changed and then she howled like a lost dog. Her voice became full and enormous, rattling off the walls. We were rattled, not only by the stranger’s howl, but also by the desperate seas of her eyes, the map of cuts all over her arms and chest. The flood of her voice was like the flood of water, sudden and determined, sweeping up everything in its path.
“Do you need to be hidden?” I asked.
“What’s left to hide from?” the stranger asked back.
In the silence of that moment, our hearts kept us alive without asking if they should.
“Everyone is gone?” I asked.
“Everyone,”
the stranger said.
“Everyone’s children?” Igor asked, focusing on his crop of siblings.
An old woman said, “I want to lie down,” and another old woman offered her lap and brushed her fingers through the threads of hair, warm and tangled.
We lit a few lanterns because we had lost all the light from outside.
Someone pushed a cup of soup toward the stranger, tapped the rim with the spoon to say, Is this something we can offer you?
The stranger took a small sip of soup from the bowl and then passed it along. We each put our lips to it so that they got a little coating of the hot liquid on them and then passed, wanting it to come back around to her still full. “Thank you,” we said, “it’s delicious.” And we were happy when it did come to her and she took full bites this time, filling the spoon and then pulling it clean from her mouth.
The moment we were in was a hinge—the past swung on one side, the future on the other. Everything that had ever happened led us here, from the very first day onward.
Ours was a migrating people even in the beginning. The first man and the first woman, set out into the unknown world. Fields were tilled and lambs were born. Begets were begotten, and begotten again. A tribe of luthiers, a tribe of forgers. Winemakers, plowers, sons and daughters.
Out the people went, fruitful, multiplying as they were told. The earth felt the padding of human feet. The tribes divided, God visited in dreams, in deserts, promised land to the ones he had grown to like. Men erected stones as markers, sacrificed calves. All the while, they told the story back: In the beginning there was a beautiful garden, and we were cast out of it, and we began again.
Twice we built huge, beautiful temples to recognize God and everything he had given us. Twice, they were destroyed.
The second temple, like the first, contained a chamber of knives, a chamber of oils and wines, a chamber of lepers, a chamber of wood. The gates were named for Music, Light, Sacrifice, Women, Water and Flames. The structure was made of white marble, rimmed with gold, and it stood for hundreds of years, and our people lived in the valley beneath. It would not be true to call that time peaceful, but from a distance, from this far away, we had allowed ourselves to dream of those days, because the next thing that happened was, an army appeared on the horizon, a swarm of men, sunlight glinting from their helmets, and we did not win the battle. We began to walk away in a million different directions: some went into the olive-green hills, some climbed over the mountains, some crossed the seas. Dunes collapsed under our feet. We slept in the bellies of creaky ships, disembarked onto unknown soil. All the while, we told the stories back, and they kept us alive as a people. Our bodies might have survived without them, but not our hearts.
We began again and again, across the face of the earth.
On a remote island there lived a powerful king with a hundred and fifty thousand subjects armed with sharp spears. The king rode a leopard and his men rode fearsome steeds that feasted on cooked mutton and drank only wine. These men were our great-great-great-great-grandparents. As they brushed their horses’ oil-black manes the king told a story: Once, God tested the faith of our Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his eldest son, and because that man took his boy to the top of the mountain and raised a knife over his neck, God knows that we are true.
In the city of Mecca, our great-great-greats settled down. They refused to eat meat and filled their plates instead with peas, butter, sugar and fruits. They lived in roofless houses and wore silk robes bedecked in long strands of pearls. While they stirred a spiced stew, the mothers told a story: Once, to a faithful man, God said, “Among man, only you are worthy of my creation. Build yourself a very good boat. Use cypress wood and sap, and take two of every living creature with you.” After days and days and days, rain and rain and rain, after weeks and weeks and weeks of floating: a dove with an olive branch in her beak. And the man stepped onto the land, and every toothy, beaked, trunked, whiskered creature with them, and the world, the whole world, was new.
In Ethiopia, the Jews received a strange gift. How it arrived, we do not know—the old men said it was a many-sailed ship; the old women said it traveled inside the belly of a whale; the bachelors believed a griffin carried it over the sea; the whores swore it was the fat hand of God himself. In any case, onto the desert walked a savage who had no head; his eyes and mouth were set in his breast. He wore forty clear sapphires. With him came a note from a place called Calicut.
Dear Brothers, We are on the other side of the ocean, but we have not forgotten you. We are always your family. The paper was embossed with an elephant and a tiger.
The Jews of Ethiopia sent a rowboat with six messengers, two spotted goats, a Torah scroll, the paw of a lion and a letter: Dear Brothers, Thank you for the headless savage. He is the most beautiful we have ever seen. We do not know you, but we love you. With the savage chained up beside them, those who stayed told a story: Once, we were slaves in Pharaoh’s land, but we escaped. The sea parted, the commandments were given, and we began again on the other side of the desert.
The rowboat bobbled along for weeks until, nearing a foreign shore, a storm ground the craft to splinters and our great-greats were washed to shore by the waves, their Torah scroll destroyed. Over time, they forgot all the prayers but one, which they repeated on every occasion. At weddings they said, “The Lord is One.” At circumcisions, “The Lord is One.” They cut the orange in half, broke a coconut or two. They killed a rooster and said, “The Lord is One.”
In the Caucasus Mountains, high above the Caspian Sea, our great-grandmothers went to the well wearing veils and cloaks in colors as bright as flowers. They carried water jugs on their heads and smoked long pipes. The older women belonged to a special league of mourners. Families of the dead hired the women to fall down in misery, pound their fists on the frozen earth, wail until all ears, including God’s, rang with the sound of what was lost. In the dark, after their tears had salted everything, they said, “Once, after a lifetime of childlessness, Sarah became pregnant at ninety years old, and what did she do? She laughed.”
In Spain, the queen said to our great-grandparents, “Please, open businesses and lend money.” And then, a little while later, she said, “Look at you with your bills and coins. You are dirty, and I want you out.” So our great-grandparents changed their hair, hid their candelabra in the closet and nailed crosses to the wall, though their beliefs had not changed. They became Señor Henríquez, Señora Estrada. They drew maps, joined voyages across the world, traded for Inca gold and Amazon women. Sometimes they were safe and sometimes they were rounded up and killed. Sometimes they were in the king’s care and sometimes they were at the end of his dagger. They prayed, they worked, they escaped.
Someone said, “You are dirty and strange and I want you out,” and our people crossed the river. There they were told, “Your kind are not welcome here,” and they switchbacked the mountains. At the top of the highest peak, the locals crossed their arms and shook their heads and our great-great-grandparents continued on.
For hundreds of years: a little peace, the weeks marked with ritual, with work. Babies born, circumcised, feasts eaten, an extra place setting at the table for the prophet, weddings conducted, temples lit with lamps. Great-greats became greats became grandparents. They said, “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
And then an accusation in Bucharest, another in Sofia—Jews Sacrifice Christian Child for Ritual Purposes—and the mobs tore doors down, emptied the houses of valuables and killed the leaders, burned those who retreated into the synagogue. The survivors packed up again, went deeper into the mountains, settled down, marked the weeks. Life was like a parenthesis between catastrophes. Each time, they had to decide which to rebuild first—the temple or the cemetery. The stories of terror came from every direction. Cossacks in the north, our citizenship revoked in the south. The cities were not safe, the towns were worse. One ruler expelled all the Jews across the Danube, but when the Ottoman
s on the other side turned them back, the ruler said, “Oh, just drown them,” and that is exactly what his men did.
And so, the little group, our heavy-headed and tired grandparents, the few to survive the latest pogrom, walked with their pairs of goats, sheep, dogs and horses for forty-one days from the town of Iasi through Bukovina. The grandparents brought languages and coins from all the places everyone had lived—Spanish pesetas, Italian lire, Austro-Hungarian kronen, Polish zlotys, pieces of Ottoman silver, Yugoslavian copper, ancient Syrian gold and new Russian paper. They had German curse words, Polish love songs, English poems, Hebrew prayers and Yiddish scoldings. They had wandered and traded, wandered and traded, and they had been filled up with words.
They passed hamlets and hovels, Gypsy encampments and many roads that would have taken them back to the city. The rolling hills were bright green and dotted with yellow wildflowers and green pines, brooks and meadows. Even in pain and heartbreak, the grandparents commented on the beauty. For the last six days, descending the far side of the Carpathian Mountains, they saw no one. They passed through the scar of an old forest fire. In front of the grandparents twisted the muddy Dniester River, and in the oxbow below they saw the first village in nearly a week. It would have been an island if not for the road just wide enough for a cart at the opposite end.
The grandparents crossed an old bridge, two by two. The instant the last of them had crossed—goat herder and two goats—the bridge sagged below the surface and snapped in the middle. They were here to stay. There was a small wooden sign, and in white paint the name of the village: Zalischik. And on this almost-island, there were empty, falling-down stone houses. It was a leftover place, a forgotten place, and the grandparents looked at it and thought, Forgotten, yes, let us be forgotten. Let us be alone. They saw fallow fields and plenty of water for irrigating, an old granary and a deep well. The emptiers had already completed their mission here—the Jews and Gypsies had been expelled, taken care of. The map marked with an X, done. The circle of land was theirs to settle, a new world. They put their heads down, turned the earth, and began to plant seeds there.
No One Is Here Except All of Us Page 2