I wondered if we should gather each week and write the story of what had taken place.
“We write down everyone’s prayers,” the stranger said. “Someone listens.”
“We might miss some of the events,” the banker said.
“I vote that this world is about hopes more than events,” my mother breathed. And so it would be. We voted to build a comfortable chair and a desk for the recorder to sit at, and we agreed that one of us would be there to listen, quietly writing down every prayer each of us uttered. There would be no interruption, no answers or questions.
“And what if we pray when we are in our kitchens or walking in the snow?” we wondered.
“We should listen to one another even then. If you hear a prayer, write it down and take it to the temple. We can have a box to put them in.”
“I think we need all the languages,” I said, thinking of the Russian my father sometimes spoke, the German the butcher carried on in, the Spanish, the Yiddish, the Italian, the Romanian, the Hebrew. “If praying is how we keep track, we should have a lot of words to wish with.”
“As long as we forget where they came from,” the stranger said. I promised I already had.
“Do we need protections?” my brother asked. “Do we need a wall or a shield?”
“No,” I corrected. “We are the only thing that exists. Us and God.”
We were tired by the time it grew dark. It was our first day and we had done a lot. But we had not thought ahead to this moment when the sky turned purple and we were hungry and wanted sleep. Should we stay together in the healer’s house? Should we go back to the houses we had been born owning? Some decided to sleep outside in the drizzle, curled up in the bright cold. Others wanted to sleep better, to have a feather pillow and a wall keeping the bugs out. The ones who had been born with loves wanted to love. To make use of their skin and their fingers. To celebrate their good fortune at being alive in this historic moment, at being the first of our kind, at being warm and leggy and full of good ideas.
The jeweler invited the stranger to stay with him that night. As we walked out of the healer’s house, I took the stranger’s hand and stood on tiptoe to whisper into her ear. “Will you please help me to get it right?” Speaking to her felt like calling across a wide canyon to a faraway speck of a person. She squeezed my fingers twice, then released.
At his house, the jeweler cleared silver clippings and needle-nose pliers from his softest rug. He brought out a stack of moth-eaten blankets, which had not been draped over a sleeping body for years. They had once, in another world, belonged to his mother. She and his father had both died underneath them, and since then he had kept them hidden. Tonight they belonged to a deathless world, and they would not blanket the stranger in sadness, but simply blanket her in blankets. The jeweler felt a wave wash over his heart, foamy and soft. He felt soothed. Loneliness was hushed by the sound of water breaking across the shore. The stranger stretched out and rested her head on a pillow. In the dark, she looked to the jeweler like a cave he wanted to crawl into. Lightless, yes, but peaceful and cool.
My parents scurried us three children home and put us quickly to bed. In the scratchy, wooly dark I could smell my own breath. I felt perfectly alone, happily alone. I was proud. Nothing could shake this feeling—not even the image of the stranger, seated in the chair, braiding the blanket’s fringe, her gaze fallen to the surface of the unknown sea she drifted upon. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and smiled, because everyone was playing the game. Here we were in the first night on earth. In my cave, I could say that as a fact—the first night on earth—and this made me grin so wide I could practically hear it.
THE SECOND DAY
Our house was made of wood, the roof shingled. It had a big room with two beds—one for our parents and one for us. The floor was covered in worn rugs and the woodstove had a deep layer of ash. We had a table and a stack of pots, pans and bowls. We had a beautiful old box full of silverware that we never used because it was too nice. I did not own anything—everything I had was shared. The soft baby blanket we children had each used, the pencils and paper, the marbles, the scissors.
On the second morning of the world, my mother ladled cabbage into everyone’s bowls. My father kissed her on the forehead, and Moishe teased, “The most beautiful woman in the world.”
“How do you know what I’m going to say?” our father said, smiling. “It’s not the same world as before.”
“There is no before,” said Regina, joining in.
“The most beautiful woman in the new world,” I said, patting my mother on the knee.
“That’s right,” my father said.
“The luckiest woman. The most beautiful family,” my mother corrected. In the seconds of silence that followed, the room was electric with happiness. The most beautiful family could feel it pop on our tongues, in our ears.
My mother went out into the market with all the women who carried their baskets and their lists. They squeezed the tomatoes, smelled the melons, peeled the husks back from the corn to check for bugs. They eyed plucked, hanging chickens, passed the chocolate squares and peppermint sticks without a thought. Women left the shops with the tinking sound of a bell hung in the doorway. At home they took the pins out and let their children brush their hair, let us create messy braids.
My father had been born with the job of picking cabbages. In the field he worked, the muscles in his huge arms like raw chickens. His skin was dark and cracked as if ready to split open and reveal the slick pink pulsing and twitching beneath. As he worked that day, rainwater falling into his eyes, he told stories to himself about how good he was at his job. “Mister Vladimir,” he said to himself, “you have no idea how talented you are at farming cabbages. Truly, no one has ever known them as you do.”
In his fantasy, if the money started rolling in, he thought he would buy himself a fine hat and a coal-black coat and the same for his three children. His fields would be so huge, so populated with cabbages, and he would build a house right in the middle of them, the rows radiating out from it. The cabbages would smile, knowing smiles, their rooty bodies lodged in the earth with only their brainless skulls to look around, appreciating what luck they had to grow in such a nice field, to be harvested by such strong hands. My father would nod back at them, thanking them for the compliment. “No, really,” he would reply, “I’m the lucky one. I couldn’t do it without you.”
As the men walked home at the end of the day, my father among them, they thought about the wives they had come into the world with, the long brown waves of hair, blond curls, the silk of it. In their minds, the hair would cover them completely. Impossible amounts of it falling from the heads of women, making seas and nests and beds. They snarled and snorted home, tugging at their own rough beards.
But my parents had a secret. My mother was glowingly, shiningly bald. Her hair had disappeared in a matter of a few weeks when she was a teenager and she had worn a wig every day since. It was not the fact that my father fell in love with her, but that he did not fall out again when he saw her uncovered head that made her trust him implicitly.
Because the world was new, people were sizing themselves up, taking stock of what they had and what they lacked. Most families in Zalischik had just about enough, but we all assumed that the rest had more, and in some respects, we were right. Some had more money, some had more sex, and some had more babies. My mother had more cabbage. There were cabbages all over the house. There were cabbages in bowls on the table. There were cabbages in a bowl under my parents’ bed. There were cabbages on the shelves next to our basket of leftover balls of yarn and the box of pencils. There were cabbages in the washbasin that had to be taken out when someone needed to clean the dishes or wash her face. There were cabbages in the bassinet, since the house was babyless now. And of course there were always cabbages in the pot, cooking.
My mother stirred them at the end of the second day, her children and husband drawing each other on the floor and laughing. “
I am not nearly that ugly!” my father said, laughing at Moishe’s picture. “Look at my nose and look at this man’s nose!” Regina and I could hardly breathe through our laughter. I drew our father with twice the nose my brother had drawn and presented it to my sister, who rolled backward and held her stomach. Our mother watched the show while she stirred, ladled and set dishes on the table.
“Supper,” she said, plinking the edge of a bowl with a spoon.
“Somebody say a prayer,” our father instructed, while he spread my napkin over my legs. He took out a slip of paper to write down the prayer, which would be folded into a square and deposited in the box.
“Bless Dad’s nose, bless the soup, bless the family, bless the world,” I said.
“Amen,” the rest of them echoed, and we dipped our spoons.
In the light of morning, the jeweler asked, “Tea?” and the stranger said, “I don’t know.” The stranger wanted to offer her thanks, but could not find the strength. “Thank you for coming to stay with me,” the jeweler said. “I have been alone a long time.” The stranger managed to meet his eye for a second before it began to hurt, like looking into a bright light. The jeweler squirmed as he tried to think of something to talk about. With no history, conversations were harder to start. “It’s raining,” he finally said, as if she had not been aware.
“I’m sorry,” she told him.
“For what?” he asked, but she continued to stare into the distance. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” Please be happy, he thought, but he had no way to explain, even to himself, his affection for her, for the peculiar presence of her. He did not understand the stranger at all, but that seemed to have no bearing on his feelings. “You are like a shell,” he said. “A seashell. Hollow but beautiful.”
“Hollow.” She nodded. He steeped the tea, pulled the basket of dripping leaves from the cup and put it in the washbasin. He stirred in sugar and cream and handed the steaming cup to the stranger. To his surprise, she reached out, took it from him, wrapped her hands around it. Gratitude filled them both silently up.
For the rest of the day they sat not far from each other, gazing out the window at the light shifting almost imperceptibly. The jeweler added logs to the woodstove and prepared things to eat: buttered bread, canned apples, slices of cheese. He boiled and poured water, washed the cups when they were empty. “I like beets,” the jeweler said, wanting to talk. The stranger did not look at him, but he felt her absorb this fact. “I think they are perfect,” he continued, because he wanted her to know him even while he could not think of anything important to say. “This cushion,” he said, holding up a stained yellow thing, “means nothing to me. I don’t know where it came from. I wouldn’t miss it if it were gone.” The stranger listened, he knew she did, whether or not she acknowledged it. While the jeweler talked, they sat there and let themselves be objects on which dust might settle, air might brush past, light could play.
That night, the stranger did not sleep. She could feel her veins fighting to keep blood moving despite there being no apparent reason to do so. The pumping in her chest was a labor, a wheeze. What dark room had she washed up into? What lost place was this that had, at the sight of her, reset the clocks and begun anew? The first day she had felt like a ghost, like a dead person. As night wore on and dawn seeped into the room, she saw the endless days ahead lined up, waiting to be lived in. None of them would let her politely decline to attend, claiming illness or devastation. She could not avoid being alive for one rotation here and there. She had watched her husband’s face catch on fire and seen her children led out into the woods where a thousand gunshots rang out. Why did I survive it? she wondered. It was so simple—she had hidden behind the woodshed. She peeked out, dumbstruck, the scene before her impossible to believe.
There had been so many chances for her to die that day, but she alone was to see what the future held. Still, alive was not what she felt. Scooped out, maybe. Like a woman whose innards have been removed, unwound and lain down as a bed for her. When the jeweler, not knowing she was awake, tiptoed outside sleepily in the baby-pink dawn light of the third day of the world, she thought of tucking his form into the empty space of her body, giving him a warm nest there, letting what she was missing become a place for another person to rest. I pray for, she said, but could not name what was missing to a God she had not met. I pray, she said, and it was true.
When the jeweler returned and lifted the envelope of blankets on his bed to climb inside, she said, “Thank you for being nearby.” The jeweler, shocked to hear her voice, came over and, crouching at her side, cupped his hand over her shoulder and took a turn being speechless. It hardly mattered, because she understood what he meant: emptiness could be so dense as to develop its own gravity. A planet forming out of the whirling dust of a void. Two planets, orbiting.
THE THIRD DAY
On the third morning of the world, my uncle Hersh, the saddlemaker, knocked on our big blue door. We children were lying on the floor by the window reading a book I had sneaked from one world to the other. Our father was out in the fields, gathering globes, and our mother put her knife down next to the ribboned green leaves.
Uncle Hersh shook his wet coat out and laid it across the back of a chair. “I have to say something right away before I lose my nerve. You have some children and we have none.”
“You want some tea?” my mother asked. “You want some cabbage?”
She set him up at the table with a steaming bowl.
“I’m sorry. I’m terribly, horribly sorry and I haven’t even said anything yet.” He closed his eyes. The next words were spit out, like bitter grapeseeds. “Kayla wants a child, now that the world is starting over.”
“She always wanted a child,” my mother said.
“But now it’s the beginning,” Hersh told her. “Right now. She believes. Everything is ahead of us—who will Kayla and I send out into the new world? Who will carry our memories on for us when we die? How will I survive another lifetime of disappointing my wife?” He spoke quickly, the sentences memorized and practiced.
Years that did not matter now, that did not even exist, had been filled with fruitless trying. Hersh was strong and smelled of leather and oil, and had money stashed in all the cracks in his walls. He had big feet and big hands and the eyebrows of a man three times his age. His teeth were a strong fence. But at night, under the covers, he was useless.
At first my aunt and uncle had meant it when they took their clothes off and lay with nothing between them. Kayla had fixed her hair in a bun pinned with part of a turtle’s shell and she managed to meet his eyes and she prayed and she liked how it felt. He loved how it felt and he was excited, very excited, to see what he would produce. He thought for sure there would be quadruplets right away, if not quintuplets or sextuplets and whatever came after that. It seemed impossible that thousands of babies would not come storming from his wife’s body. “I’m sorry, my sweet,” he practiced saying, “to put you through all that birth-giving. I cannot help it.”
After the first months with no babies, Hersh had begun to feel confused. Where could they be? Kayla displayed no promising lump. He considered returning her to her parents. “This wife is not working,” he would say.
Kayla’s baby-hunger was a heat source, cooking her from the inside. After many baby-empty years, Kayla’s mind had corroded from unfulfilled desire. My uncle got up in the mornings, kissed her, told her she was his darling, and went to work. He hammered and nailed and molded. He tanned the leather and cut the leather and sewed the leather with smaller strips of leather. There was nothing else for him to do. My aunt spent her entire day lying on the very unsoft wood floor of their large kitchen. The black stove smirked at her, the table legs and the chairs turned away. Her sewing box, bursting with pins, appeared like an open, laughing mouth. She saw no reason to stand up. She looked like a splayed-out star, her head resting on a stack of worn-out cookbooks.
She stared at the heavens, which she had to imagine beyond the
low ceiling. She knew where all the spiders lived, and watched them string shimmering threads from beam to beam. She clicked her tongue. She saw babies sitting on all available surfaces. Babies on clouds, babies lolling about on the face of the sun, singed and singing. Kayla saw babies on her kitchen table, babies on the chairs, babies under the floorboards, the walls filled with them, stacked up on top of one another, standing on one another’s shoulders. Her house was a house made of them, her own body was a body made of them, her legs were three babies each, her belly was four babies.
Then the world began again. Nothing had ever happened before. No failed attempts, no hopeful week or two followed by a terrible spot of blood. That first night, when my aunt and uncle lay down on their horsehair mattress, between the sheet and the quilt Kayla’s mother had made for her girl when she was married, they cried into each other’s skin. “We have another chance now,” she said. “Maybe in the new world it will be possible.” But Hersh was sure that several days later he would hold her again while she disappeared with sorrow, her empty womb shaking like a rattle. They made love anyway and he let her believe in it. The smile she gave him was so crisp and pure, so unmuddied by sadness and disappointment that Hersh started to cry. “Yes,” Kayla said, “I can feel it, too. We’re going to have a baby.” All Hersh wished for was to have his wife back.
He said, “Walk outside with me and look at the world.” The two of them went shoeless to the doorstep. Their toes were blind and fragile on the stones. Around Hersh and Kayla, the trees were shooting buds out of all their pointed ends.
“You will always be enough for me,” Hersh told his wife, but she waved him off.
“There is more to hope for.” He rubbed his eyes and tried to make the word hope not mean despair. Hope, he said to himself, wiggling it with his tongue like a loose tooth.
No One Is Here Except All of Us Page 4