No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  Aunt Kayla put her hand on Regina’s head and smoothed the light brown waves of hair. “Nice hair,” she said, as if starting a list, but she did not seem convinced by it yet. Hersh agreed. “Nice bluish eyes,” he added. They nodded together. I looked at her hair and her eyes, never having noticed either before. I felt sorry about this, that only now as she was leaving did I appreciate her.

  “Nice nose,” I said, wanting suddenly to complete the list of my sister, before it was too late. “Nice ears, nice legs, nice mouth, nice forehead, nice teeth,” I said.

  “I guess,” Hersh said, “I guess it’s time to go.” He put his two first fingers under his sister’s chin and lifted her face up. “Thank you,” he said. “Perl. Thank you forever. We will do everything that has ever been done well, only better.”

  Kayla scooted closer and closer to the big blue door, as if it might suddenly vanish and leave them with no exit, no way to complete the miracle.

  The whole knot of people moved outside to watch the departure. There were some magpies around and a few early flies out in the wet cold, but they were silent in this moment. A gust of wind shook water out of the trees, a cool mist. I watched my father kick a rock back and forth in the mud between his dingy leather boots. I watched my mother adjust her long black dress and Regina’s white lace collar. We took turns hugging her, and I licked my own chin and watched out of the corners of my eyes. I saw my mother sneak one glance, the girl turning from her daughter into her niece as she went, her old wool coat swishing, and waves of hair catching light. Black boots turning the mud.

  That night, my father rolled over to his wife. He put his hands on her bare head. He held them there, not polishing the surface, just holding.

  “Now we really are in a new world,” he said.

  “We have enough,” my mother said, which was not a statement but a prayer. She wondered whether she should write it down.

  “Oh, help!” our father suddenly cried, loud enough to wake Moishe and me. He picked up a cabbage from the floor and threw it as hard as he could against the far wall, where it splashed open. My mother beckoned all three of us. She held us against her chest, my father crying and my brother and I stunned cold. She whispered into our hair, “You are reasons to live. You are enough to survive for.” I grew older and heavier then, my mother’s love bigger than my own small body could hold. Her love would hang on to my ankles and wrists on every journey I would ever have to take, even if she was the one who sent me on it. My mother’s heart beat, oblivious to the upended universe around it. Everything goes on, it said. That is the best we can hope for.

  THE FIFTH DAY

  The stranger was welcomed into all of our homes. The butcher gave her the nicest pieces of herb-roasted chicken and the biggest squares of chocolate left in the universe. The banker’s wife made Igor wash the stranger’s socks every day in the river while the other children rubbed her feet with oil. She was very quiet, but always smiled at us when we offered her something.

  “I’m not God,” she kept telling us.

  “Of course not,” the banker’s wife said, “but here is a candied orange rind. And here is another glass of fresh milk. And Igor will give you his own pillow, which will bring you sweet dreams.”

  “I will?” asked Igor quietly.

  Even while we knew that she was a person like any of us and not God, or probably not God since none of us had any idea who God was or was not, she did suddenly seem important and useful. At least, we said, if we treat her well she will get the prayers right. A person who was upset might copy down a request for a new cow as a request for a new plow. A person who was angry might switch what one asked with what another asked, and old women would become pregnant with twin sons while young women died quick and easy deaths.

  “Do you want to trade off as recorders?” the stranger asked. But we liked having her do it and, now that we thought about it, it seemed risky to pray to each other, risky to air all our wishes to people who knew each other well, especially well, we admired, for having met only five days earlier.

  The healer told her, “You are better at it. You are brilliant. We are nothing more than weak little rats next to you.” She was homeless otherwise, childless. Everyone she knew was dead. Did she have a better option than to be our recorder? Should we feel bad about this? the healer wondered. But he decided that it was right—our stranger had come to us like an angel and we would go ahead and accept her as one.

  “I am just an emptiness,” she said.

  The jeweler told her, “You are a resting place.”

  The dust of morning light started to get into the house, and my remaining family members and I woke up to see ourselves surrounded by scattered green heads. Our own eyes were red, our numbers diminished, with only four days of life under our belts. My parents were visibly heavy with the weight of a lost daughter. My mother stood up, rubbed her eyes, opened the curtains and felt the emptiness double, triple, grow hungry. Life, the day ahead, the chores, the stove, the firewood, looked exactly the same as they had before Regina left. The world did not respect my mother’s situation enough to transform itself in recognition of this day. She watched her husband eat some cabbage soup and put his boots on. He kissed her on the forehead before he left for the day. There was nothing to say.

  Moishe and I washed our faces with harsh lemon-smelling soap that made my skin feel shrunken. Everyone was whole except our mother, whose bald head was shining against the daylight. My brother and I looked for the wig together, picking up quilts and peering into shoes, while our mother sat at the table, a polished crystal ball. I found the wig, looking like something dead under a pile of cabbages near the basket of dirty clothes. I picked it up, combed through it with my fingers. My mother did not put it on, but tucked it in the crook of her arm as though it were an animal. “No more secrets,” she said, stroking it absentmindedly for a moment, then stood up and settled it on one of the cabbages on the counter. The cabbage, all dressed up with no place to go, stared blindly out at the room.

  At the door, a knock. I opened it, shrieked when Regina was on the other side. Regina with her suitcase. Regina with her nicest dress and her white lace collar, soggy now with rainwater. Maybe we would be whole again. Behind her were Aunt Kayla and Uncle Hersh. My mother, still in her nightgown, straightened her spine. Her head picked up the light from all directions.

  “My daughter,” she said, taking Regina’s hand and kneading it like bread.

  “She is not what we had in mind,” Uncle Hersh said quickly, looking to his wife for approval, his voice shaky and uncertain.

  “Your daughter?” my mother asked.

  “Your daughter,” Kayla corrected. “She’s too big. Her feet, her hands. Too big. We hadn’t remembered how big she was. It is not a good match for us,” she said sternly. “We want to be a different kind of parents.” Kayla stepped forward and took my hand. “Young Lena,” she said. “My Lena. Smallest of all, Lena.” Kayla examined my fingers, their puffy knuckles, their delicate reach. She put my palm up against her own. She smiled at her husband. “Look at what a difference there is. She is so much smaller.”

  I felt like an open window through which anything might blow. Regina looked at the hands attached to her wrists as if for the first time. These hands were big enough to make her unlovable, but big enough to save her, too.

  My mother closed her eyes and took the suitcase from the floor. She handed it to me. “You have everything you need,” she told me. “You are my reason to live. You are everyone’s reason to live. Look how many people you can save.” My heart went on and on inside the empty cavern of my body. There is no way this is actually happening. This cannot be, my brain yowled.

  Hersh looked at my mother with his red, unslept eyes. “You have no idea,” he said, but she stopped him.

  “Just go,” she said. “Take my daughter. Your daughter. Our daughter.”

  I thought for the first time in my life about my body—what was inside, what was outside, what was strong and wha
t was weak. I did not know whether my good knees were thanks to my father. I did not know that I had my mother’s strong stomach and dry skin. My thick ankles were Vlad’s, and my sinewy calves Perl’s. My long, thin back came from my maternal grandmother, who died young and in love and unexpectedly from a disease no one could name. My collarbone, like my great-great-great-grandfather’s, was weapon sharp. A line of great-aunts and great-uncles had passed along the blond fuzz now dusting my face like early snow, and the radiating red cheeks beneath were thanks to a fiery streak always present on my father’s side, in the women especially. I was not old enough to tell whether I would carry myself heavy and low like my mother or high and light like my father.

  Grandma Elka, Grandpa Sig, Aunt Rose, Aunt Esther and my mother’s twin uncles Noah and Noah (who were told apart by their beards if not their names) were enshrined in my body. They did not spare their pointy elbows, deep belly buttons, pink skin, doughy earlobes, hard noses, flat feet, long second toes or propensity to go wandering until the sun slipped out of view; they gave me everything they had. All the ghosts gathered around me. “You have us,” I heard them say. “You are us. We are your blood, your muscles, your bones.”

  In the doorway, Perl looked into my eyes, eyes a color never before seen in our family—a crisp weedy green my body had invented just for me. “You will always be you,” my mother said.

  Any legacy I pass down is mostly imagined, because on that day in the gurgling newness of the world, I began again for the second time that week. Would I grow like a seedpod sprung open a mile from my home? Or did everything owe itself to what had been, even if it hadn’t?

  The anger I felt dammed itself up when I looked at Regina. I had been complicit when she was the one given away. I had not hidden her in the forest or built a basket of reeds in which she might float away. I had loved her and wished her well, but I had let her go all the same. Now that it was my turn, I knew there was no one in the world to drag me back home. There was no little sister to trade me in for. I had invented a world—now all that was left was surviving it.

  I refused to walk, and Hersh picked me up in his arms and carried me through the rain, which washed me down so that when we arrived at the door and Hersh stamped the mud from his polished black boots I was a new girl in a new life, dripping my old self onto the rug.

  THE SIXTH DAY

  In the syrup of late night, on the sixth day of the world, the butcher, banker and the barber’s wife made their way out to the stranger’s post with lanterns to ask for things they had forgotten to ask for in daylight. It would be nice to stop the dead old world from trying to sneak into this one. Good to look ahead to winter and hope for enough snow to wet the fields but not enough to chill our bones. When they got there, our stranger was gone. Her striped blanket was sagging and wet, the four sticks supporting it leaning into each other. Her chair was still footed to the cobblestones, but now the only thing in it was a pool of rainwater, milky with moonlight.

  They finally found her lying on her side on the jeweler’s floor, the jeweler watching her from the other side of the room while she drew a picture of two children with the charcoal of a burned log. The faces looked back at her, bloodless and wrong, and she tried to make them righter by fuzzing the lines, and in this way they slowly disappeared into black dust blown across the floor by our stranger’s breath.

  The small group of seekers knocked on the door. They said, “Where were you? We need you.” They shook their umbrellas out onto the jeweler’s floor.

  “I was here,” she told them. “I am here.”

  Their prayers had turned to complaints. They began to list the strange ailments they had developed, revealing that, in spite of a new world, all the old anxiety had stayed alive and well. “I have terrible leg cramps. Could a demon be living in there?” the barber’s wife asked.

  “Every night I get a fever for exactly one hour,” the banker said.

  “Everything looks blue to me. Everything looks like dusk,” said the butcher.

  “I can’t remember my own name sometimes. I can’t remember who I am,” the barber’s wife added.

  The stranger listened. She had no way to heal these people. She suggested, as kindly as possible, that maybe in the morning they could consult the healer.

  “But we still have to pray. I’m serious about not being able to find you. I think you need to stay put,” the banker said.

  “If you don’t mind,” others added.

  “We’ll bring blankets for you. We’ll pray for many warm blankets for you. In fact, we promise that every prayer we say for ourselves will also be a prayer for you.”

  The jeweler wanted to tape their mouths shut. He wanted to roll them down a mountainside. He wanted to light them on fire. Before he could even perform the meager task of opening his mouth to object, the stranger was being led outside, preparing to give herself completely over.

  In my new room there was a reddish wood dresser and a bed made up tight with a pink-and-green-flowered blanket. There was a silver music box on the dresser and a wicker basket for dirty clothes. There were six wooden hangers on a rod, waiting to display the shells of dresses and coats. My aunt and uncle sat on the bed next to me, the girl who used to be the youngest daughter of the cabbage picker but was now the only daughter of the saddlemaker.

  “So,” Kayla said, “you live here now. This is your bed, and that is your dresser. You can put your things in it. And on it. That is your music box. It plays music.” I opened it and it plinked a song I had never heard before. This day was many things, but real was not one of them.

  “It’s a song about bullfighting,” Hersh told me.

  “Bullfighting?” I asked. This was not happening. It could not be.

  “A man fights a bull, with a cape,” he tried. “Like this,” and he held up by imaginary corners a cape, which he dodged and waved.

  “Stop doing that,” Kayla told him. “That is not a good place to start.”

  “We were dancing,” he said. I stood completely still.

  “You can unpack in peace,” Kayla said. “We leave you to it.”

  I opened the suitcase, a square leather thing with two sturdy brass buckles, and took out the dresses folded inside. One was yellow checks and the other was a solid, faded blue. The dresses belonged to my sister and were too big for me. I remembered seeing her wear them many times—while digging for earthworms, teaching Moishe and me a song, helping my mother carry full bags home from the shops. Underneath them was a note: Dear Regina, This is how I love you. You will know that someday if you do not know it now. I will always miss you.—Your Perl. Between the two words in the signature there was a large space where the word Mother might have been, or the word Aunt, but instead the space was inhabited by a clean, bright hole. I put the note in the bottom of the drawer, the bottom of the drawer it had been in that morning when it had spoken to the correct child. The dresses had been unpacked yesterday by Regina, put away just as they were being put away now, and then carefully folded back up again. “She was just here,” I whispered to myself. “My sister was just in this room.” That was a fact; my own presence here was much harder to believe.

  I walked over to the bed, pulled the covers back and kneeled on the floor. I put my face to the bed and tried to smell my sister there on the rough cotton sheets. Tried to smell her sleep the night before, what must have been an uneasy sleep. I tried to smell her dreams. Was she happy to be here? Was she glad she would get to be an opera star? In the morning, when she was told she was not the desired one, was she sorry? The bed smelled clean, undreamed in. Kayla was hardly gone a minute when she returned to fetch me. “Come out and be my daughter,” she said.

  I sat down in between my aunt and uncle on a hard red velvet couch. They placed a crystal bowl full of candy on my lap, brightly colored packages piled high. Kayla touched my hair, examined my scalp, ringed my ankle with her fingers.

  Kayla noted that her new daughter would have to be fattened up. She said, “Life gets better f
rom here.” I noted that my aunt did not need fattening at all, that her ankles came over her short leather shoes like bread over the top of its pan. I noticed how her wedding ring divided her finger into two distinct provinces. Hersh, on the other hand, was rangy. Everything about him was tall—even his earlobes looked stretched. His forehead was an expanse and his chin looked curious and adventuresome, as if it might wander off his face into the great, unknown mountains.

  Hersh asked me where they should start and I shook my head.

  “Well, do you want to know about your grandparents? Do you want to know about your great-grandparents? Do you want to know about when I was a boy?”

  “And what about me?” said Kayla. “I have a lot to tell you, too.”

  “So, tell,” I said, carefully unwrapping a yellow candy and rolling it in my mouth. I remember vividly how much each motion of my hand mattered to me that day. I could reach, I could pick up, I could unwrap. The rest of the world was dizzy, but these things were known. I sucked the candy hard, and a sharp edge cut my tongue. The taste of lemon mixed with the taste of blood.

  Hersh started to tell me about his parents, who were silk traders from the sea. He was excited and proud to show my ancestry off to me, but I reminded him that those had always been my grandparents. Hersh looked disappointed. Here he had given me a gift and I said I already had the same thing in another color. I tried again. “Thank you,” I said politely with a small nod. How was I the one trying to offer comfort? I looked at the room with all its upholstered furniture and oil paintings. The woodstove had a ceramic horse standing stately and ready to gallop atop it. The rug at my feet was soft and richly colored with a repeating pattern of square deer. Everything in the room looked important and breakable.

  “Your father is in the saddle business, did you know?” Kayla asked.

  “My father?”