I nodded. “Touching,” I repeated obediently.
We had made it no farther than the first corner of the first street closest to our home, and still we were surrounded by so much that it was almost impossible to know where to begin.
“You haven’t said about the mountains or the horses,” Kayla prodded.
“The mountains are huge mounds of the earth. The earth is everything, the earth is the earth. The horses are what make us a living, because people, that’s us, we like to ride on the horses to get places. We go on the horses on the streets and end up somewhere new. I make the saddles so that it’s easier to ride. The saddle is made of leather, which is the skin of another animal. Not the skin of a horse, because that would be cruel, but the skin of a cow.”
“Where do people go on the horses?” Kayla asked.
“The mountains maybe, the sea. The sea is where the rivers go, the rivers are what feed the sea. The sea is hungry for the rivers. The people do not live in the sea. We like to visit it, to go inside, but cannot live there. It’s because of air. Air is what we breathe.” He breathed loudly to demonstrate. “Like that. That is breathing. We have to do it or we die. Dying is the end, maybe. It’s either the end or the beginning. It always happens, even if you are very good.”
“Hersh?” Kayla asked. “I think it’s too much. We don’t have to tell her the bad things yet.” But he kept on, he could not keep anything a secret anymore.
“When you die you do not breathe. When you do not breathe you die. If you were to jump into the river and swim for a very long time until you got tired, you would start to sink down, and when you could not keep your head up in the air anymore, you would take water into your body and that would be the end of the breathing. You would sink to the bottom. The bottom, the dirt, is the last place to go.”
I nodded at Hersh in understanding. “The bottom,” I said. This was something I felt I understood. It felt good to be given back the words with which to describe my world. Like being paid. I imagined all the conversations I would be able to have with my new words.
“Please stop,” Kayla begged.
“But flowers and trees grow out of the dirt. It’s what makes all other life possible. It’s the earth, the earth which is everything.”
As Hersh talked we all slumped lower. We did not stand straight, but felt the weight of all the words, of all the things, of the ways all the things were the same and different from all the other things. Nothing was safe. Nothing was free from a name or a place in the world. If we wanted to start naming, we would have to never stop.
“When you say Mother it means Kayla. When I say Mother it means a woman who is dead. She died but I did not die yet. I have to keep living, to take care of you. No one has a choice about this. We do not decide when we die.”
We slumped so low we had no choice but to sit on the side of the road, in a puddle under a willow tree. We leaned against one another. Kayla put her head on Hersh’s shoulder, I put my head in Kayla’s lap, Hersh leaned down to the ground. Kayla did not protest anymore, she just listened half-eared to the accounting. Hersh kept talking quietly, lost in the maze. And I kept exact track, trying to remember what I was allowed to know now.
“A choice is what your mother and I made when we had you. We asked for you. To ask is when you say please. To say is to use your mouth to make words. Words are what we say. We is all of us. We are all we.”
We lay back on the ground. We put our heads on the stones, the stones from the mountains, the mountains from the earth. The earth from the bottom. All of it soaked with rain, puddles tugging the fabric of our clothes.
“God is also what we all are. God is more than anything. More is more. Anything is God. There is no way to say God without saying Everything.”
The rain hit us on our skin. The stones rounded our backs. The calling of a dog was answered by the calling of another dog. We closed our eyes and Hersh and Kayla did not say words for a long time. They breathed. All that happened was everything.
“I give up,” Kayla said, closing her eyes. “There is too much.”
“We have time,” Hersh told her.
“We have nothing. We need help. Hire all the teachers you can so Lena knows how to protect herself against every awful thing in the world. This child will never grow up if we don’t.”
I closed my eyes and prepared for the next wave to cover me.
The Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It was made up of the barber, the greengrocer and the greengrocer’s wife—who had appointed herself an auditor because she insisted any accuracy in her husband’s work was due to luck, not diligence.
The Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It found that some people were coming up short. Without outsiders to sell his jewelry to, the jeweler was struggling. The banker’s piles of coins were smaller because money was not being saved up but constantly traded. Yet when the jeweler proposed he learn to help grow and harvest wheat instead of repair watches and set gems in gold, we hated the idea. What good was a little town without a friendly, nearsighted man from whom to purchase gifts to mark the moments of our lives? Women refused to imagine their days without that window display to dream over, and men had a hard time knowing how else they might express their ongoing devotion. While it was true that nothing new entered our village—no money, no clothes, no fruit—nothing left it, either. The plants offered new seeds, and evidently enough sunlight filtered through the clouds, because the plants kept growing. It would be sufficient for all of us, if we managed it right. We voted to pay everyone enough in bread, in meat, in milk, to continue to do the jobs they were put in our town to do. Instead of money, we traded goods. The banker’s job began to include keeping track of IOUs—for this pair of earrings made of rubies, which the greengrocer wanted for his wife, he would deliver a basketful of vegetables at the start of each week for three months. For the service of making sure everything was fair, the banker was given a little of what everyone else earned.
Once they had catalogued and remedied shortfalls, the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It set to work on a map. They paced the edges of our village, feet one in front of the other, toe to heel in a jagged circle. Their finding was that it took 10,034 of the barber’s feet to circle the village. That number tickled us. A total, an exact and complete measure of the space we occupied. We asked the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It to measure more. The banker was found to have the biggest house but the smallest windows. The chicken farmer had the smallest house but the tallest door.
When they had measured everything big and logged it, the jeweler, whose whole life had been lived based on miniature objects, begged them to find a way of measuring things that were small. They devised two new lengths of measurement: the length of the barber’s left first finger, and the full moon of his thumbnail. The Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It grew tired of being chased with unmeasured brooms, butter dishes, baby shoes. They voted among themselves on a rule to measure things only at the start of each month when the moon was new. The rest of the time they would draw a map of the village and keep an inventory of all our belongings. At the end of one week of counting they showed us the first list.
Zalischik, Population: 102
Baby Shoes: 53 (26 pairs, 1 single)
Spoons: 478
Forks: 498
Full-Grown Trees: 190
Vegetable Gardens: 49
Houses: 22
Barns: 1
Doors: 61
Windows: 208
Wedding Dresses: 25
Strangers: 1
Horses: 2
Chickens: 50
Cows: 41
Sheep: 179
Goats: 137
Rivers: 1
Precious Gems: 32
Fake Gems: 299
Shovels: 109
Once the physical things were counted, we wanted a census of the rest of our lives. After some time, the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It marched out of th
e back of the greengrocer’s store where they met, and posted a new list on the statue of the long-dead war hero in the middle of the town square. The greengrocer’s wife said, “The list is too long to post. Here are your top ten. No further items will be added at this time.” We crowded around to read it.
Overbearing Mothers-in-Law: 11
Regrets in Matters of Love: 1,987
Regrets in the Matters of Money: 200
Secret Crushes: 6
Overdue Apologies: 712
Objects Believed to Be Lucky, but Not Proven to Be So: 353
Objects Proven to Be Lucky: 3
Refutes to That Proof: 4
Concerns of Being Forgotten: 102
Recurring Dreams of an Explicit Nature, Treasured but Never Told: 42
At Kayla’s insistence, time sped up. Over the next months, I learned to crawl over the knotted wood floor and then to walk. Hersh and Kayla set themselves up on chairs at opposite ends of the kitchen and sent me back and forth like a ball. I wobbled a little for them. They gasped and giggled and grabbed at me. They took me into their arms when I made it, triumphant, and kissed me on each swath of skin. I was spoon-fed potatoes, mashed carefully, chunkless. I was never again given my aunt’s dry breast. At the end of each day I said my small prayer for the right thing to happen, and I told my real mother and father, “This is how I love you.” I was marching in the right direction, back toward my true self. I knew I would not get all the way there—even at eleven and a half, I would still be living in the wrong house—but progress was progress.
I learned to eat with a fork. I learned to tie a shoe. I learned the difference between a palomino and a cricket. I learned to write my name and the word love. I learned to take my napkin from the table and unwrap it on my lap. The music teacher was rehired. The barber’s sister was hired to teach me how to walk with several books stacked on my head, because my mother had heard this was important. The house was a flood of learning and teaching. If there was a thing that you could learn to do, I had a teacher for it. Kayla wanted me to learn languages, even when Hersh reminded her that other languages might have come from other places, and there were no such things. “I don’t care where they came from or didn’t,” Kayla said. “People know words, and I want Lena to know them, too.” I already had a lot of Russian and Polish, and so it was that the jeweler began to teach me English, the butcher drew flash cards for me in German, Hersh taught me the fundamentals of Italian, and the sheep shearer set out to make me understand French.
Kayla sat at the table every morning with a list of all the lessons she needed to teach me about love and loss and God and potatoes and churning butter and crushing pepper and washing decent linens and better linens. Lessons about making lace, covering a wound, throwing a ball and untangling a knot. I needed to know how to pray well, how to sit straight, how to write a heartfelt condolence letter and a gracious invitation. I had to become proficient at keeping clean, mending a dress, buttering my bread like a lady and knowing which cuts of meat were which.
Kayla filled hundreds of sheets of paper this way, papers that gathered in the house like snow, dusting everything at first and then getting swept into corners or under the furniture, where they sat in banks waiting their turn. Kayla scolded herself for time lost coddling and swooning when she should have been teaching. Hersh tried to remind her how much she loved being the mother of a baby, how sweet those days had been. He did not say how hard he had worked to make such sweetness possible, and how much he himself had loved it, too.
True to the original deal, every few weeks was a year of my life: I was four, I was eight, I was ten again. We had little birthday parties, Kayla’s and Hersh’s faces aglow with time’s miraculous passage.
But it did not stop as Hersh had planned.
Kayla rushed me along, right past myself. I was eleven, and then I was twelve. I was thirteen. I was suddenly meant to be complete. At night I peered into the oval-shaped mirror that hung above my dresser. I saw my face, which was pinkish, surrounded by dark brown curly hair. I looked unremarkable to myself. Like a person, a girl, no one in particular. Day by day, I checked for differences, and to my surprise, they started showing up. The same freckles on my forehead, but a different shape to my jaw. The same inward slant to my front teeth, but a new pitch in my voice. I climbed on a chair and took the mirror down, its cool frame in my hands, and passed it down my body so I could see what my chest looked like, my belly, my legs. I found the long, straight line of a girl was curving a bit, rounding at the hips. Strands of hair had begun to appear. My nipples peered tentatively out, bigger and softer than before.
That night, I spit all over the bed again. I rubbed it in. “I am alive here,” I said to myself. “I know what I know.” I tried to smell myself on the pillow—my hair had been there, I could tell. There were strands left, long brown snakes reclining. “Bullfight, rain, horse, saddle, hunger, hair, life,” I said to myself, trying to hold all of it. But it wasn’t those things I worried about forgetting—those things were presented to me each day, a list of activities and lessons and facts about the world. What I could feel slipping off me was my original life. Even while I aged at impossible speeds, the years piling up around me day by day, I could feel myself getting smaller, getting thinner, losing words, losing the memory of my real house and my real family and the smell of cabbage in the kitchen. “Cabbage,” I said, “cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, cabbage.”
I wrote the word down on my list, underlined it. “My house smells like cabbage. My house is one room. My mother is not my mother. My father is not my father. Is this how I love them? Am I alive in this place?” It was getting easier and easier to think of them as Perl and Vlad, the way everyone else did. For this I pinched myself hard on the arm until my nails left two moons.
Mine was an instant decision. I did not think about what would happen after, or how long before someone dragged me back. I was going home. I would sleep the night in my old bed with my old family around, and I did not care what happened next. I put my shoes on and slipped out the back door. I pressed my fists to my eyes for a minute, and when they came away the shimmer of darkness moved aside to reveal a milky, moonlit path toward home. My nightgown fluttered. It was not raining at that moment but the town had its misty coat on. I felt wonderful, walking alone in the right direction.
My cheeks filled with blood when I saw the house, and then the door. The door with its brass handle, wet under my hand. But when I turned it, my hand only slipped. The door was locked. I repeated it to myself in disbelief. “The door is locked.” Had one of my parents always slid that latch, keeping me and the others safe inside? Now I was one of the people being kept out. I put my ear against the wood but I could not hear my family inside. I did not knock. I had wanted to appear there, to slip back in unnoticed. Not to be asked inside like a guest. I lay down on the stoop and listened to the breeze flip a dead leaf over and over across the ground. It was a treeless leaf, an orphan, caught on an instant breeze. Something invisible carried it. I kissed the brass doorknob on the big blue door, and I stood up to go.
I was truly no longer the cabbage picker’s youngest daughter. They had locked the door behind me. In order to grow, to become the Lena that my new parents invented, I ate my way through the stale heels of bread and dry bits of cake under the bed, left over from my days as a hungry baby. I even ate the ants, who feasted despite imminent danger. I felt them walking the hills of my tongue, trudging through the wet cave. I stopped chewing and paid attention to their needle-feet. I swallowed them whole. I thought of them in my stomach, continuing to eat, the food prechewed for them, readily enjoyable. I ate the food until it pushed out against me. I ate the food until it hurt. I closed my eyes, full of bread and ants. From outside came the sound of dogs howling to track each other in the dark, calling out the difference between one dog’s home and the other’s. Inside the room, exhausted, I tried to stretch out the hours of peaceful night before the sun threw light down on me again, woke me up into another day
of growing.
The next morning, I sneaked out early and went on two missions. First, I visited the stranger. “Do I survive this?”
“Yes,” she answered, firmly.
“How?”
“You just do.” I told her it was a disappointing answer, but thank you anyway, and I left her alone. I found the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It doing their dawn mapping in the bakery. I pulled them outside into an abandoned shed. “Quickly,” I said. The shed still held a few rusted old spades. Mice and bugs must have happily lived in the walls, but they did not skitter or scratch. The wood smelled rich and ripe, full of the sweet butter of near-collapse.
“Measure me,” I demanded, knowing that the next new moon, the next measuring day, was weeks away.
“Okay, okay, no need to be rude,” the greengrocer said. This was a dutiful committee and they began at the bottom. Toes, feet, ankle to knee, knee to hip, hip to shoulder.
“That looked like more than one and a half fingers to me,” the greengrocer’s wife nagged. The barber inchwormed his finger along my forearm again.
“It’s exactly one and a half,” the greengrocer said.
“I wouldn’t say exactly.” The greengrocer’s wife scrunched her nose.
I asked, “Am I bigger than before? Am I smaller than before?”
“It’s the first time we’ve measured you,” the baker said. “How old are you?” I shook my head. “Sure, kid, you’re bigger. You’re growing, just like you should be.”
The greengrocer’s wife whispered into my ear, “Let me know if you need help with how to fasten a brassiere. We also sell other items.”
My heart fluttered its wings, but did not manage to escape my chest. It was contained in the prison of my body. “Am I supposed to be older or younger?” I asked the greengrocer. “Am I supposed to be thinner or fatter? Am I supposed to remember or forget?” He put his hand on my cheek.
No One Is Here Except All of Us Page 10