For twenty years, they lived like forgotten people. They were a long way from any other villages, and farther still from any cities. The only way they knew they were alive was by repeating the stories again and again: the first man and the first woman, the great flood, the plague of frogs, the plague of blood, the plague of darkness. All the stories were stories of wandering, of being lost, of starting again. Meanwhile, the grandparents repaired the fallen-down walls, stopped up holes in the roofs, replaced missing street cobbles and stuffed all the mattresses with dried hay and horsehair.
My mother and father were born. My uncle and aunt. The banker, butcher, widow, greengrocer, future wives and husbands. They grew up, learned to tie their shoes, mend a curtain, harvest potatoes, tally the month’s ledger. They were taught all the languages everyone knew—the whole world on their tongues. They got married and had children of their own. Their parents began to grow weak and forgetful. On a sunny spring afternoon, my mother’s parents decided to go for a swim in the river, and their soft old bodies were not strong enough for the current, and they were carried away. A funeral was held in the cabbage field, and prayers were repeated. The healer told a story: Once, in the depths of despair, the prophet Ezekiel was carried to a field of old, dry bones, and Ezekiel spoke the name of the Lord, and the bones rose up, and skin covered them, and they were alive again. Always, another beginning.
Every few weeks, a man would come to deliver a piece of mail sent from a brother, sister or cousin in a faraway place. The letters contained news of births and deaths, pogroms and survivals, escapes and resettlings. Each spring and each fall, a few men would pack the cart with provisions to trade—lambs, turnips, cabbages, wool sweaters and socks knit by mothers and grandmothers, saddles hammered together—and set out into the world. Two weeks later, the cart would return with different provisions—sturdy canvas sacks, cotton pants for the men and cotton dresses for the women, wooden toys for the children, glass bottles for keeping milk, wooden buckets for storing butter, the sprout of an apple tree, ready to be planted, and a newspaper.
From this, the grandparents knew that a war began, raged, quieted. There were photographs of jagged shards of bombed-out buildings in Germany and tired Austro-Hungarian soldiers in Sarajevo. The grandparents recognized the places, having been to many of them. All the while, on their near-island, the days did not change. They kept repeating to themselves one word: forgotten. We remember the story, they thought, but let the story not remember us. Let us hide here until we are safe. And we had been, until now.
The healer cracked his knuckles and let his head hang heavy toward his chest. “No one in this room remembers learning to set fire to houses?” Regina asked.
We all shook our heads.
The old man who used to cut our hair wondered if perhaps we should start at the beginning and try to figure out where things went wrong: the same careful logic of hunting down a lost key. “This morning,” a teenage boy tried, “I woke up and nothing was different. I ate breakfast and watched a crow hop across the grass.”
“Yesterday morning,” the weaver’s mother said, “I arranged all the cups in the house by size and nested them perfectly in the cupboard.”
“Three weeks ago today I turned forty-one and I gave myself a pair of gold earrings to celebrate,” said the widow who lived at the edge of the village.
“I remember,” said the jeweler. “They looked pretty on you.”
“Last night, like every night, I dreamed I had a baby,” Aunt Kayla said.
“Last night, like every night, I dreamed you forgave me,” Hersh said under his breath.
The stranger swayed gently back and forth, a branch in the wind. I kept looking at her, waiting for her to say or do something. For a long time, all she did was listen.
We could remember many things about this year, and many about the year before, but no one could figure out the long ago.
“When we first arrived on the earth, did we like to swim right away?” I wondered. “Or did we have to learn to like to swim?”
We wished someone had made a drawing of that first human swimming. We wished someone had made a drawing of the scared ones, huddled on the shore. We must have been awkward and funny to watch, lumbering out in the dark, trying to find our way back to the holes where we slept. And it was only a guess that we slept in holes—it was possible we used to be better at climbing trees and maybe we had beautiful nests in all the crooks made out of tangles of our own hair.
“No,” the banker insisted, “God created man in His image and the garden was perfect and we were naked but we weren’t ashamed, and then there was the tree of knowledge and the snake, and the apple.”
“That’s just part of the story,” the widow said, licking her lips.
“We might have had wings first,” I said.
“We might have eaten nectar,” the banker’s wife said, smiling.
“We might have been able to talk to deer or eagles. We might have been much better at loving,” Uncle Hersh said.
“But what if we’ve always been the way we are? What if we have always been scared and mean and beautiful exactly like this?” I asked. “Good and evil, banishment.” The stranger’s cloudy eyes rested on my face. Their sorrow was so deep and wet and they chilled me.
We covered our faces and we cried.
“What else is going to float down that river?” my mother asked. Elsewhere, the rest of the world, unfolded like a giant map in front of us. All the other villages along the river, all the mountains, all the seas, all the cities. What had been blown up? What had been saved?
“I have a brother in America,” the jeweler said again. “Maybe we should go there. Run away.”
“The English and Americans are turning ships away. We’re too late,” the healer told him. On our map, the light of those faraway countries was snuffed out, leaving two great big, dark holes.
“We could go to Warsaw,” the butcher said. The healer drew an X over each eye with his fingertip. Poland turned dark.
“France has sometimes been friendly. Or Turkey?”
The healer’s eyes looked as if they were sinking into his head. As if they were too tired to stay afloat any longer. “We would have to cross all those other borders.” Romania fell into shadow, Bulgaria, Hungary. Elsewhere might not exist after all.
The widow rolled her eyes. “Don’t you get it?” she asked. “We are dead men. We are through.”
“We are in the precise center of this continent,” my father whispered. “We are marooned.”
“And we are the plague,” the healer said, his eyes closed. Our tiny peninsula, a pinhead on the big map, was soon the only lit spot. Everything, everywhere, everyone else—extinguished.
“Should we build a wall? A barricade?” the greengrocer wondered.
“With what? Mud and cabbage?” his wife mocked.
I was in a room full of grown-ups who had no idea what to do. None of them. We were completely lost and helpless and my heartbeat turned irregular and I had to close my eyes and concentrate on breathing.
Just then, the stranger’s voice came clear and strong, “We start over.”
“We already tried. We can’t remember how we got where we are,” Igor reminded her.
“That’s not what she means,” I said, surprised to understand exactly. “She means, once upon a time, tomorrow was the first day of the world. The very, very first. The earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” My heart continued to flutter like a bird caught in a chimney.
And the stranger looked up at me and her gaze was so sharp that everything else in the room came to a perfect stop. She took my hand and held it for a long moment. The feel of her palm was like worn leather, thick and sturdy. “Land is limited—the space around us occupied, but no one can limit belief,” she said. The stranger looked around the room. “We need a story,” she told the villagers, but she was looking at me. “When there is nothing left to do, and there is nowhere else to go, the world begin
s again.”
“No one exists but us and God?” I added tentatively. “Everything is still to come?”
She let her eyelids fall shut and nodded. I could see her eyelashes darken as she began to cry.
The moon that night was a cut in the sky and our slippery eyes reflected it. Could we put our hands out and hold back the rush of time? All the things we had invented—the wheeled, the wound-up, the pulleyed—now irrelevant? The others peered at the stranger in her battered body. They listened for the shriek of thieves at our door, for wild, sharp-toothed animals. They listened for the raving river but could not even hear it slither past.
What they did was so simple: they nodded. The stranger and I nodded back.
Before this blistered world caught up with us, we nodded. Before the wreckage of a hundred broken cities landed on our banks, before we were swept away to some faraway sea, before the sky filled with silver wings and everything below turned to fire, before the tiny candle flame of our home, the last flickering light on the map was put out, we nodded. Desperation to believe joined the terror still thrumming in our chests. If we wanted to survive in this story, we had to tell it that way. We swallowed hard and waited for a reaction from the heavens. At that exact moment, while the rain turned all the leaves outside into tiny drums, made landfall and twisted its way to the river, while the animals huddled in the barn, while the slender moon stood as a reminder of light amidst its opposite, right then, nothing happened. The earth did not shake us off.
We were alone there, floating on a sea of black emptiness—all the chapters unwritten.
“The beginning of the perfect world,” I said.
“The beginning,” the stranger repeated. “The world that is beautiful. Let there be chickens. Let there be trees. Let there be us. Let there be safe places to stay the night.”
“Let there be rest for older brothers,” Igor said.
“Let there be love,” the jeweler said.
“Be fruitful and multiply,” Kayla said, smiling.
“And what of the things I remember?” my mother asked.
“You don’t,” the stranger said with her eyes closed and seeping. “There are no such things as dead children. No such thing as burned up.” Those girls with their pockets full of eggs were not dead, had not lived, had never been born, had never grown inside of the stranger’s body. She had never been a mother.
“It’s the night before the world begins,” I said. “Everything is getting ready. Everything is waiting to be alive.”
We lay down on our sides. We listened to what had not begun.
We did not see the rain flood our cemetery and dig the bones of our ancestors up. We did not see their ghosts climb into our trees, onto our roofs, into our beds. Nor did we hear the ghosts of the stranger’s children begin to leak out of their bodies and into the mountain air full with the sharp pepper of wet pine needles. We did not hear the squeal of the radio in the airplane as the pilot made his way home. We did not see the person on the other end of the radio draw up notes about the flight, the tested bomb. We did not hear our river slip across thousands of miles—through cities feverish with lost wars, and villages trying to stay quiet and unnoticed; through fields of sunflowers, fields of wheat, apple and plum orchards; alongside vegetable gardens, pastures, train tracks and front doors where mothers dangled the feet of their perfect new babies in the river, both of them smiling because the water was cold, while fire in the house promised heat. Until the river finally met, with a desperate, gleeful rush, the ocean.
In the dark of a room that did not exist yet, a yellow room with a swinging pendulum of a gas lantern in the center of the ceiling, with the red coals of a fire slowly going out and rain sheeting the windows, a room that was absolutely quiet and shielded from even whispers of life outside—hunting, searching life, all the world’s armies fading into the distance—my village and I curled up on the floor. We had refused to give up hope, and though we all knew that no incarnation of the world had ever been safe for us, no matter how beautifully God had tried to build it, we allowed ourselves to believe in this one. Perhaps, we hoped, at the last possible moment, we had made something perfect.
I began to speak. 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.” We held hands, we hummed, we listened, we prayed. Some people put their lips together. We let the spit from our mouths dry in crusts on the curve of shoulders. It did not matter whose shoulder or whose mouth. We were a pile of unborn babies together, rolling in the knots of one another’s limbs, being kissed and caught and found. And let the lights in the firmament of heaven give light upon the earth.
And we hoped that it would be good.
THE FIRST DAY
The sun broke through the clouds and rolled up over us like it knew the whole plan. Rain continued and an arc of color spread across our sky. We voted to keep living in the houses we had already built and to keep being married to the people we were married to. There were those who protested this, who proposed we gather in the square and pair off anew, tallest to shortest. There were those who thought it would be better to put the stupid with the smart to even things out and those who thought we should try to put the smart with the smart and hope for true genius.
“But I love my wife,” my father said.
“How do you know? Today is the first day—you have never seen her before today. What if you hate her by tonight?” the banker asked.
My father regarded my mother’s mossy brown eyes. “I have a feeling,” he said. “A very strong feeling.” He winked.
The chicken farmer argued that we woke up in the morning and this is how it was—we were born into the world in pairs. This convinced us. Only two people decided otherwise: with a nod, the barber’s wife and the sheep shearer’s wife traded husbands. They patted on the back the ones they had come with, and said, “Nothing personal, sweetness, it’s just better this way.” Those two wives shook hands with each other as they traded positions, stood now with men they hoped to love better, longer. The men were wide-eyed, a little heartbroken to be abandoned this way and a little thrilled to be taken up by new, unexplored bosoms. The stranger’s eyelids fell closed. I wished I knew whether she wanted to be assigned a mate or permitted to be alone. I caught the jeweler watching her, but she did not look up.
“What about God?” my brother Moishe asked. “Is he the same?”
I thought about God’s view down onto the stranger’s village, the Romanian soldiers unsheathing their knives and reloading their guns. Had he seen all of that? Had he always known that he would not stop it?
We glanced around, quiet, listening.
“We just arrived here, right? The world just started,” Igor said. “Maybe he told us exactly what to do.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” my brother said, and my father patted him on the head. I began to wonder if God would be angry with us for doing away with his creation and starting again. I suggested we write a letter in explanation and ask for his blessing.
Dear God,
We did not start again because it wasn’t beautiful before. The world we make will be much smaller and less glorious than the one you made. Ours will have none of the strange, wild animals—no elephants or tigers, no parrots or blue frogs. It will have none of the exotic spices, no sea, no lakes. We are content to accept this small circle of land as our entire universe, so long as we are safe here.
I was worried that we weren’t offering anything. “What would God want from us, to prove our love?” I asked. The butcher suggested sacrificing a goat, the banker suggested charity. I thought maybe God was simply lonely, by himself for all eternity at the top of the sky. “Maybe he just wants to be told a good story,” I said. And that is what we promised to give him.
If we were going to have God, then we were going to need a temple for Him. The greatest temple ever built. The shape of that place, the glory of it, kept us talking for hours.
So that the room would be flooded with the very first light of day, huge windows would face east. And others west, because the day’s end is sometimes even more spectacular than its beginning. My sister wanted to have a small pool to throw things into. The healer wanted to have a hole in the roof to leave a way in for the dead. The two oldest men wanted to cover the floor in soft feathers so we could pray lying down. Igor suggested there be someone to watch the children.
The second thing God did after inventing the earth was to invent the heavens. We had made the earth, and now we would make the sky. We would paint constellations on the ceiling of the temple, white against a background of blackest blue. The temple rose high above us, a misty vision so sparkling and grand we felt drunk. How could our God not fall in love with us?
“It sounds handsome,” my mother said. “Gold and all that. But the world started again because we wanted a safer place. A more deliberate place. How do we make sure we don’t forget that? How will we keep track of the story? Wasn’t that going to be our big offering?”
Several people sulked—they were having fun sculpting great ivory balustrades and now they had to deal with the microscopic machinery of meaning. The mist of the temple dispersed and the room became quiet.
The chicken farmer figured we could write down the things we did each day. The jeweler pointed out that we might end up with a very complete accounting of the minutiae without ever knowing what happened in any bigger sense. Laundry would be on record but not faith. The stranger was braiding the fringe from the blanket around her shoulders. She looked up from this task and gave the slightest nod to the jeweler, whose face turned red.
Igor thought we should interview one another.
No One Is Here Except All of Us Page 3