No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  “We need to not have any more dead babies in our house again. Never. We need to not be the bringers of the first curse in the world. And my wife needs Igor to move along. The only one who can ensure those things is Lena.”

  “My daughter is the best girl in the village, is that what you’re saying? Because she was raised so well? Because she has such an outstanding mother?” The banker didn’t have a chance to agree before she said, “It’s a good arrangement. When?”

  “Right away. He’s ready. She’s ready?”

  “She could be ready.”

  “Wait, how old am I?” I asked.

  “Old,” Kayla told me, and she shook the banker’s hand.

  In the evening, while we all three forked beets into our mouths, Kayla said, “Exciting news. Lena’s getting married.” Hersh opened his mouth and he left it open. His long face was the side of a cliff with a gaping cave in the middle. I half expected leather bat wings to begin flapping out. When he looked at me, I shook my head. I had nothing.

  “You are making this up,” he said, knowing that he had made no agreement with any father of a son.

  “Nope.”

  “We can’t lose her,” he said.

  “We have to lose her, it’s our only chance.”

  “How did this happen? You didn’t even ask me?”

  Kayla shook her head and chewed her food. I tried to pay attention to the warm slide of a potato down my throat. I felt like a weed in the river, having no say which direction it was pulled. My throat closed up, my heart closed up, my fists closed up.

  “There was this nice story about how our daughter is some kind of sage, and how she is the only person who can turn a sad story into a happy one. The whole point is that the banker doesn’t want any more bad luck. No more dead babies, right? Plus, there aren’t very many worthy boys around, and plus, Lena is a woman now.”

  Kayla smiled then and squinched her eyes shut. When she spoke again, her voice was higher. “I get to be the mother of the bride.” She laughed, the last word stretched out into a long whine. “I get to plan a whole wedding!”

  Hersh poured a glass of vodka from the dusty bottle he kept hidden behind the special occasion teacups, went outside and sat down on the ground and called God’s name. Hersh said he hoped God was paying attention and not throwing curses and blessings around just to keep busy. “Look, can you just do what is right?” It was what he always asked for. Kayla, watching from the window, swore she saw God roll his eyes and take a big gulp of Hersh’s drink.

  “You have to ask him for something in particular,” she said to her husband through the open pane. She had always complained that Hersh did not know how to pray right. There were plenty of worthwhile requests: to come upon a store of gold coins, a fat cow, a spring in the forest that washed the years away. Why did Hersh always have to be so abstract, so trusting?

  “I want him to do what’s right,” he told her.

  “You have to tell the man what you need. Don’t give him some whatever-you-think-is-best crap,” Kayla scolded. “He’s busy, he needs you to do the research for him and recommend a course of action. Tell him your daughter ought to be blessed and that even if the boy is cursed could they at least even out? And could there be many new grandbabies very quickly?”

  “If he is God, he knows more than I do.”

  “Apparently he makes mistakes. That innocent baby. Oops,” she said.

  “I’m going to get married?” I interrupted from the chair where I had been frozen.

  “What happy news!” Kayla exclaimed.

  “Now?”

  “Soon.”

  “How old am I?” I asked for the second time.

  “You have grown a lot,” Kayla said. “You’re even older than when you asked that earlier.”

  Cold air swooped inside when Hersh opened the door, and disappeared just as quickly when he closed it. He stood over me. He put his hands on my head and came in close to whisper, “Everyone knows you’ll be okay—it’s me missing you that I’m worried about.”

  And for the second time in my life, I prepared to be passed on. The feeling I had was of hovering above my own life. As if I were the shed skin of an insect, and the body I used to hold had simply walked out. Even the word marriage sounded gravelly in my mouth. Mangled, half chewed. I understood nothing. But there were my hands, my fingers, and thank goodness for them, because they remembered, as always, how to do the next task. I went to my room and began to go through my things, fold and flatten, shake and stack, as if this small preparation would be enough. That was how my hands and I prayed that night. I touched everything in the room so that in the end my dirty fingerprints were on all of it. Proof that time had passed, evidence of my existence. I took out the note from my first mother to my old sister. This is how I love you, it said to her again, and again she was not there to see it. I am here, I prayed. I am real.

  Igor fainted the moment he saw me enter the room. His eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed, not onto the hard floor of his kitchen where we stood, not into the sharp corner of the table, but precisely and theatrically, into the arms of his mother. She looked at him, shock wrinkling her nose, trying to figure out how she came to be holding her grown son. He shuddered for a moment and then his eyelids opened to the world around him. Igor’s mouth widened into a gawky smile when he saw that I was still there—not dreamed but flesh—and he stood straight up, brushed his hands over his clean, pressed wool pants. To him, I looked like an exactly right young lady.

  Sweat burst from the foreheads of his parents, but not from Igor’s. He weakened in all the right places, and got strong in all the right places as well. This was the story he had been told his whole life. The story of becoming a man in his own town with a nice girl. There would be little Igors soon, and the butcher would sell him nice cuts of meat, and the baker would sell him the best loaves of bread, and his wife would be capable in the kitchen (and in the bedroom, praise God who art good to me, amen). Igor was being offered a door leading out of the tragic house where no one looked him in the eye anymore. His new life appeared just like that, detailed and populated, at his feet. He had done nothing other than come downstairs in the morning wearing the clothes his father had laid out, and there it was: his future, blessed, alive and, most important, now.

  The wedding was planned for a week hence, and everyone helped clean the barn for the big event. “What happens at a wedding?” the greengrocer asked while he washed windows.

  “Two people turn into one,” his wife said. “Sometimes it’s a loss and sometimes it’s a gain.”

  “In your case?” he asked. She shrugged and he pinched her on the back of the hand.

  “A wedding can be whatever we want,” the stranger said. “Any ideas?”

  “We should light candles,” the baker’s wife said.

  “We should throw soft things,” two of the banker’s youngest daughters suggested. “We should dance.”

  “We should break something,” Perl suggested.

  “Break something?” the stranger asked.

  “Yes. Because brokenness is the truth of life.” People squinted at her, drawing away. “It’s not a bad thing,” she said, defending herself. “There are more pieces to share.”

  “Should we read our prayers?” the stranger wondered. Like a lullaby, this quieted us. Long before we could hear the words, we were comforted by them. The jeweler, who appeared at all times near the stranger like an attendant, a maid-in-waiting, made it official by handing her a book and pen to record the decree.

  Some people brushed the sheep and some people culled dirty feathers from the hens. Some people hung garlands of flowers on rusted nails, and some took turns climbing our tallest ladder in order to clean the cobwebs and cement the tiles of our first complete constellation up on the ceiling: the Constellation of Hope, Lost and Gained, which had three stars—the star of Lena, the star of Igor and the star of the dead baby, all in a line.

  The villagers put on the nicest clothes th
ey had and men slapped their faces with alcohol and felt cleaner because of it. Everyone carried their own chairs from their own houses and set them up in rows. The barn smelled of earth and dust, of waiting. The low chatter of anticipation hovered like fog. Would today be beautiful and joyous? Would nothing disrupt the union we were trying, like magicians, to summon from thin air?

  The villagers placed gifts on a table near the horses. They talked about the beauty of this, the first marriage in the new world and the joys it would bring. They talked about the first baby, which was also the first death, and decided that our stranger was right—he had not been able to live because he was conceived before the world began. What was he supposed to do? He was the last breath of the old world, and now we were truly free. The next baby would be the real first baby.

  In the sunken eyes of the banker’s wife, Perl saw the bruises of loss; a mother, pecked at by a flock of justifications for her son’s death. Perl went to her, said, “It never goes away. You will always hurt.” The banker’s wife wanted to scream in the face of this woman who had come to further salt her tears. But then she looked at Perl and saw she too had a swollen heart. Waterlogged, soaked, engorged with loss and love.

  “I hope Igor doesn’t ruin everything,” the banker’s wife said.

  Perl had known Igor only as a kind, gentle herding dog for the flock of siblings following behind. She had a hard time imagining him ruining anything. “He’s going to be a friend to Lena. And a fine husband,” she added, though the idea still sounded like a dress-up game. The banker’s wife hid her face when tears started to pour.

  “I’m afraid I will lose the baby again when the wound heals over,” the banker’s wife managed.

  “It never does. It never heals.”

  “Swear it,” the banker’s wife said.

  The villagers took their seats. The stranger stood between the animals and the people, under a heavy quilt stretched tight across its corners by four long wooden poles. Both audiences, furry and bald, waited. The healer sat at the piano and pressed his fingers on the keys, which only breathed. We imagined a solemn, lifting song for me to walk by. Kayla had cinched me into a tight corset, which made the tiny breasts I had look much bigger than they were, while my waist was squeezed into a channel just wide enough for the blood to flow through. Kayla had also sewn me a long white skirt and white blouse with a lacy collar, which she buttoned all the way up, her hot breath leaving a film of wet on my neck. “Yes,” Kayla had said, a gust of wind blowing across my legs while she fluffed my skirt. I felt twenty-five years older than I was, or might have been. “You really look like a bride.” I was a convincing doll.

  Igor, skinny and awkward, his voice high and creaky but kind, his eyes alight with the turns his life had taken, wore a black suit, a new top hat, glasses and a cane. He only looked ten years older than he was. He and I stood in front of our stranger, keeping as still as we could, and did not smile. Above us was the canopy, a symbol of our home together, where we were meant to share all the nights of our lives.

  “We are gathered to celebrate a new family,” our stranger said. “A new family in a new world. We are here to celebrate life, which persists in spite of everything. We are here to celebrate the joining of Lena and Igor, the saddlemaker’s daughter and the banker’s son, who are really everyone’s children. We wish all our prayers on them.” She asked us to take each other’s hands. Igor’s were warm and bony. He gripped my fingers so tightly the blood took leave. The villagers took hold of one another. Our stranger began to read from the Book of Prayers, half singing, half swaying. Here, for the first time, we were hearing the history of our world. We had deposited, but never withdrawn, our prayers. Around us, dust drifted downward in the yellow window-light, horses were quiet and attentive, hens puttered, bats and swallows kept to the eaves.

  “We pray for everything we can think to pray for. We pray, of course, for food, and if we have enough we pray that it will always be so. The washed potatoes boiling in a pot are prayed over. The cabbages, severed and pickled, are prayed on. We pray for the lives we know to go on. We pray that everyone has a job to do. We pray that our mothers will live forever. We pray that our fathers will stand up strong until the day when they lie down and rest. We pray that we are smarter than our brothers and that our brothers are kinder than we are. We pray that when we go to count the money hidden under the floorboards it will have grown. We pray that the rain does not wash us away. We pray that the sun will one day heat us again.”

  Perl’s glowing head was the brightest spot in the temple-barn. She put her palm up to me and I smiled for her. I wanted to tell her I forgave her, except I was not sure if I did. Vlad cried into his sleeve, left it shimmering with the tracks from his nose. Regina, who had only grown larger since having been traded in for being too large, sat, certain that she would never be the one under that wedding canopy. By the time anyone asked her to marry, she would be taller than the roof, her legs would be trees, her arms would be trees, her head would be who knows what. She was prepared to outgrow everything.

  Kayla’s crying was that of an actress, all gasps and whimpers. Hersh offered her his handkerchief, but she had brought her own, a brown lace square so delicate it looked like it would melt with her tears. She remembered the days when I was a baby in her arms. She tried to remember the moment of my birth, the first look I had given her, but she could not. Her time as a mother seemed so short, but she guessed it was always that way. Was it not just last month that those fingers were no thicker than string beans? She looked up at me, at the girl, who really was still a girl, and hoped that I was going to be enough. Hersh knew I would be enough—it was himself and his wife he worried about. It was going to be back to the two of them in the house, and he hoped that Kayla would not take up residence on the floor again, and he would not have to buy anyone else’s children from them. That he would get a saddle or two made every month, and that the rain would one day go and snow would cover them, melt away and cover them back up again.

  And me? What did I feel? Thinking of that day, it is as if I were not there. As if someone told me what happened later. I must have made each required movement, passing through the wheels that turned me from a girl to a wife. If there was a transformation, I did not witness it. Still, I was no more afraid of one made-up version of my life than another. I was already far away from anything that had ever been true, and somewhere in this was a surprising sense of peace. I had nothing left to lose.

  “I have a question,” Igor said. The stranger looked surprised. “Can you promise that there will be more good than bad in the world, overall? Can we make a rule that I will be happy?”

  The stranger studied this boy, this nearly husband. He was standing on the very border between his childhood and his adulthood. She saw Igor as a boy at the window looking out at freshly fallen snow—all the broken branches and thornbushes covered up with sparkling, pure white. “I promise that I will help you try. But it’s your story to tell.” He smiled at me with satisfaction. He was negotiating for both of us.

  The stranger resumed her prayer. “We pray that the grandmothers will not die suffering and punish us as ghosts, demanding the sweets we have baked and asking for the only soft bed in the house and scolding us for the things we have left undone. We pray for Lena and Igor and their life together, and for all of our new lives. We pray for the river to stay holy and for any snazzy trick you feel like throwing us: a terrific growing season, a man whose body is made of gold, a girl who bears children weekly. We pray for whatever you have in store, but better, if you can.”

  The jeweler handed Igor two gold rings, engraved with vines twisted together. In his head he said his own prayer—May love be mine too someday.

  “Do we know about rings?” Igor whispered.

  “Definitely,” the jeweler said. “We know about forever, and they are the same thing.” Igor slid one onto my finger, and I slipped the other onto his.

  Igor smashed a perfectly good wineglass under his foot and we
put our dry lips together for a very short second. Later, the shards of glass would be pressed to the wall in a constellation invisible except when hit by the sun.

  The village toasted and celebrated, dancing, singing and wishing for beautiful things under our very own sky. It felt like we might be safe from unhappiness here in the barn. We almost believed it was possible the rain had stopped. The healer sat at the piano, and though it was mute, you never would have known it from his exuberant playing.

  Our dream of a dry world had not come true, but we tried not to be too disappointed. In the glimmering dark, their bellies full of food and their heads full of prayers, the village sent Igor and me to our new house to make good on our new marriage. The house had always been there, but no one had lived in it. Vlad had quietly fixed it up, working for a few hours each day, imagining my face while he replaced rotten beams, plastered holes and sanded the floor. He had offered it as a found object, not a made one. To Hersh and Kayla he said, “Maybe Lena and Igor could live in that little house between the two big oaks and the cabbage field?”

  “Isn’t it a wreck?” Hersh had asked.

  “It’s in surprisingly good shape,” Vlad had told him.

  It was a clean, dry, square room with a stove and a wash bin. I looked around at the little place. Someone had lain a woven rug down, and there was a rocking chair. This was the second time since the world began that I was going to sleep as part of a new family. Without asking if he should, Igor made me a cup of tea. I wondered if he knew that, as the wife, I was supposed to be the boiler of water. But he was a boy with a mother who knew how to ask for what she wanted. If I was smart, I might be able to make a few requests, rather than dancing only the steps I was taught. We sat on the floor because neither of us wanted to take the one chair. We looked out at the rain. The dancing feet, the applause, our own celebration, was too far away for us to hear. The world was empty of any sounds but our own.