No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  As we worked, the butcher suddenly burst out, “The world was supposed to be designed to work perfectly. We made it exactly how we wanted it, and now it’s malfunctioning right under our noses!” The butcher’s face was splotchy and sweating.

  Kayla threw her plaster spade onto the floor. “He’s right,” she said. “We wanted a new place, a quiet and safe and clean place. What was so difficult about that? Have we not earned it, have we not given up absolutely everything we had to make it possible?”

  The stranger bit her lip. “It’s not going to be easy. You are doing your best, but you have to be patient.”

  “But are you doing your best?” Kayla sniffed. Depending on how you looked at it, the stranger had either given up or gained more than anyone else. At first I had thought of her like a blown-egg shell, delicate and empty, but then I came to see that she was not breakable like that. She withstood storms, bowed in the wind. She was a weathervane, twisting in gusts and in breezes. I did not know if I admired her, or wanted to send her spinning in circles.

  “Why did you bring that forbidden object into our barn?” the widow asked.

  “She didn’t. I did,” the jeweler said.

  The widow sulked in the corner with the goats, scraping their food around with her spade. The goats and the woman were a temperamental match. Regina ground a dry pile of anonymous poop into the floor with her boot.

  The stranger praised the beautiful starry night we had created. She praised our efforts to make a bright place in darkness. “You have done so much,” she said.

  The stranger had tried so hard to keep us from all the confusion, the unfairness, the sadness. “You are a mother, too,” I said, remembering it as the words left my mouth. Her eyes fell closed, sails losing their wind. “I mean to say that you are our mother,” but her dead children had already been invoked.

  “You won’t be surprised by this, but I’m tired,” Igor said. He sat down cross-legged and held his head.

  While our minds bit and spit, our hands were busy cementing pieces of broken plates to the wall of the barn, and our sky grew around us, each neighborhood of stars, each tile, a dream of peace and silence. Our hands believed in heaven even while our minds panned for catastrophes. Our hands were first to forgive.

  “It was belief in, not against, something—that made the world new,” the stranger said, reminding herself as much as anyone. She suggested we go around and say the names of the constellations we were working on—the sheep, the goat—to each of which we had given a meaning: the horse, which oversees the birth of babies; the pine tree, which keeps watch over men who can’t sleep; the potato, which looks after those who fear being alone. The frog, which must have some purpose, and the chicken, which pecks the frog.

  We told the stories of our lives and made stars for each of the parts: a star for the day we saw our wives first; a star for the first day we held our mother’s hand for her sake and not our own; a star for the day the rain came under the doors and each man in each house thought he was going to be the hero, that when he went to his window he would find the rest of the buildings gone, having floated away, and only his own turned into a boat.

  The greengrocer’s wife opened several jars of fruit canned many summers ago. We ate it by the light of our lanterns, the apricots sweet and slippery on our tongues.

  While we licked the juice off our fingers, people suggested many honorable names for my baby. Saul and David. Strong-sounding names like Gregor and Ivan and Radu. I did not like any of these. I said I already had one king, and two only meant fights. I said strong was fine, but I wanted better than that. So they suggested beautiful names like Florian for flower and Aster for star. But I told them to be patient—surely he would tell us his name when he was ready. “Call him whatever you like, he will still be himself,” I said. The villagers looked to Igor in case he was more logical, but he had ceded all authority to me by falling asleep at my feet.

  Every family I had ever been part of was in that room. It made my skin itch. The Lena I was when I was six in a houseful of cabbages and the Lena I was when I was growing at the rate of a year every few weeks with Kayla and Hersh and the Lena I was when I became a mother were people who might not have easily understood each other.

  Time outside crashed away, beating the earth and emptying the sky.

  And then, just like that, the seal of quiet broke and we heard a series of huge crashes outside the barn. We heard knocking on doors of the houses nearby. We went quiet. I wished I had more hands, enough to hold my boys and Igor, who slept soundly by my side. We all opened our eyes wider, as if we might be able to see through the walls. A group of three men in uniform threw the heavy doors open and looked around. For a long moment, the soldiers scanned the room, face by face, a black pistol in each of their hands. They looked in my direction and began to laugh, which was a language we understood.

  The soldiers, dressed in torn green uniforms, spread out across the room, stumbling, pinching women’s cheeks and whispering greasy words. They smelled like someone was trying to preserve them in alcohol. Husbands raised their hands to slap the men away but the open mouths of guns talked them down. The biggest of the soldiers walked straight toward me, though he did not meet my eye. My heart crashed into my chest. Solomon cowered in a ball behind my back. I hoped I was big enough to hide him. The soldier kneeled in front of me and tucked a fallen lock of hair behind my ear. His breath was wretched. His eye sockets were deep pits and he smelled like alcohol, dirty hair and marsh water. At the slime of his touch, I reached up to wipe my face. “Brutta,” he cursed.

  The soldier turned to Igor who, incredibly, slept on. “Prezioso,” he said, the word slithering out of his mouth like a snake hatching. He slid his big arms around Igor and picked him up. I screamed, put the baby, his cry like a saw, on the floor and tried to wrestle Igor back. The soldiers just laughed. The thought that Igor was going to wake up in some horrible man’s arms was like sharp glass being dragged through my chest. The big soldier, my husband in his arms like a child, spat at the floor by my feet and stumbled right through the door. The two smaller soldiers squeezed in a last assault. One punched the baker in the neck, kicked over the stranger’s stack of prayer books. The other knocked Vlad’s hat off his head. Then he fired a single bullet through the wall.

  I started to run after them but the barber blocked my path. “That’s my husband,” I said, my voice full of hills and valleys. The barber made the shape of a pistol with his fingers because this was enough to quiet any fight he might have had in him. “Where are they taking him?” I asked.

  The barber shook his head. “We don’t know who they are,” he said. “We don’t know anything.”

  “That’s Igor,” I kept saying.

  I looked to the stranger, because she was supposed to be the one who understood the horrors we were here to avoid. She shook her head and put a hand on her chest.

  “They were from Italy!” Kayla announced. “I remember that language! Hersh had a grandmother who was from that seaside country, she was a silk trader, nice stuff that silk. Maybe we are related to that man!” She kept chattering, nervous and hysterical. I saw a flash of Igor wrapped up in a fabric so soft he might never wake up again.

  “Where are they taking my husband?” I asked no one. All the no ones shook their heads. Solomon cried and was tackled by a pile of women, where he was met with so much comfort, so much soft singing, so many shushing bosoms, that his cries were snuffed out.

  “We’re sure he will be returned,” everyone said, not at all sure.

  “No one is going to help him?” I cried. “No one, no one?” My eyes ran around the room, but nobody stood up. We had become a fearful people, living on an island where we forgot how to defend ourselves. I had known the ache of a growing family—of adding mothers and fathers, husbands and sons; now the first subtraction bit me with jagged teeth.

  I gathered my babies in my arms. The stranger followed me out under the eaves, beyond which waterfalls of rain were sheet
ing. “You are you. You still are,” she yelled over the downpour. At that moment, I was not comforted by the idea. I might happily have fallen out of my life and into someone else’s. I did not respond or turn to the stranger. She grabbed me hard on the shoulder. “Now say it to me,” she said. Solomon looked up at her and wrinkled his brow.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Tell me that I am myself. Tell me that I still am.” I had grown used to the stranger existing as an empty case. We all had. The city where she used to live, burned and tortured, returned to the world. Grass had grown over it. The children, the husband, the friends, walked that rubble as ghosts. They remembered the woman who was the opposite of a stranger to them. She was the opposite of a stranger to me too now. She was as familiar to me as my own reflection, showing me my own existence each time I questioned it. Until now, I had not considered that I might have the privilege of doing the same for her. “You still are,” I told her, and she closed her eyes.

  “You have to survive to tell what happens,” the stranger said. “That’s your job now.”

  I ran home through a torrent with my babies in my arms. Solomon said nothing. His eyelashes were studded with tears or rain. The wetted stones underfoot reflected a sluggish moon. My heels clicked and echoed—my path was no secret. From each corner, each crack between shops, I expected, almost hoped for, a pair of long arms, reaching for us. “Where are you?” I asked my husband. “Be here,” I pleaded. “Be home.”

  At my door, our door, I could not turn the knob unless I put one of my children down, which I would not do. Solomon untucked his little hand from his coat pocket. He tried to reach the knob, but his arm was too short. “Put me closer,” he said. I leaned us down, the knob turned, the door opened. Igor was not inside. Somehow, that felt like the final answer. His not being in the house was the same thing as his being gone from existence. Off the face of the earth.

  My heartbeat was incomplete, an unanswered question rising again and again in my chest. I understood how precious the last years had been, how still the surface of my life had become. Now the world was rotted and full of holes. Igor had been plucked as easily as an apple. Solomon and the new baby were even smaller, even more grabbable, and I knew that I myself could be traded. Igor’s space was open, and any man might decide he wanted to fill it, to save me, to do me the favor. War was a sick dog, teeth bared, the rope around his neck unraveling. A need began to rise up in me, and that need was to run.

  Suddenly, someone tapped on my window. I jumped up to open it before I thought to be afraid. “Igor?” I asked. But it was not him. Fear knocked me across the head as the figure there reached bony fingers up to push its hood away. I slammed the window closed, but the latch was slippery and I could not get it in my grip. The figure tapped again. The window creaked open.

  The hood fell away and the face came into the light. It was my real mother. My heart would not still—I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling. Perl drew her face close to mine and said, “Sometimes you think you’ve lost something but you’ve only shared it.”

  “You scared me,” I panted. She put her hand on her heart. “But sometimes you really have lost it,” I whispered back.

  “You’ll see,” she said. Her hand, when she touched mine, was cracked and rough. She had not held it since I was a child, since I was her child. Her fingers were warm, in spite of the cold outside, and strong. I was still tremoring.

  “Are we dying?” I asked Perl. She did not answer me. “Is the war coming? Is it here?” She did not answer again. “Why did you give me away?” I asked. “Why did you lock the door so I couldn’t come home?” I could have stood there asking questions without running out until the flood carried us all away.

  “I never stopped being your mother.”

  Together, we felt the weight of our small tribe lessen. We felt subtraction. “There is so much more to lose,” I said.

  Perl reached into her pocket and took out a forbidden old object: a silver compass with a black face and a bright red needle. “I am always going to be in one of these directions,” she said. “No matter how big the map is, I’m on it somewhere.” As soon as she placed the compass in my hand, I realized the process of my leaving had already begun. Away. Our village was found, it was known and it was mapped. The only way to protect my children was to make us disappear. A person who does not exist cannot be tracked and she cannot be traded.

  “Come with me,” I said to her. “All of you.”

  “It’s better if you are few.”

  “I can’t rescue Igor,” I said, praying for forgiveness. “If I found him, there would be nothing I could do. My children, they are mine to save.”

  We both wanted to say we were sure Igor was going to be fine, he was going to come back, something was looking out for him, but neither of us had the strength to lie right then.

  Away, away. My brain started clacking out a list: sweaters, bread, water, socks. Elsewhere, that forbidden place, trickled closer. I looked at the compass. No matter which way I turned it, the needle righted itself. I decided to follow it—something that steady should not be taken for granted.

  I said to the woman who was once my mother and might have been so again, “Please do not forget us.” Her hat was stuck to her head with rainwater.

  She said, “I know it doesn’t always make sense, how you go about loving someone. Sometimes loving someone means gathering them back, sometimes it means sending them away.” She had already forgiven me for breaking her heart. “Include us in your story and we will include you in ours. That is the job of a family.”

  “Take care of Igor, if he comes back,” I said. She turned away from me. Neither of us said goodbye.

  And then, the world froze over, the rain turned to snow and the fields at dawn were crisp and shimmering, and the frogs were flat, dry disks—their toes spread open, their eye sockets empty caverns and their mouths frozen silent.

  • V •

  THE BOOK OF THE SEA

  Igor’s head throbbed at the same time that it felt cottony and slow. What dream is this? he wondered, as he opened his eyes. Latches clicked, gravel crunched under the boots of the men who would likely slit Igor’s throat. All at once there were voices everywhere. Men and women talking to each other, the high-pitched plea of a little girl begging for something sweet. The language was a singsongy jumble. He was pulled through the door, led up a creaking walk and seated on a bench. Salty wind teased at Igor’s hair. Birds called mournfully overhead. The sound of water everywhere, sloshing and churning, bubbling up. A man leaned in close to Igor, ruffled his hair and said, “Almost home.” Russian was a language Igor did understand.

  Igor waited to be shot from behind. He waited to be kicked into whatever body of water was below, to sink to the bottom. He waited to see God, the whole hulking bright light of him. The word alone knocked around his brain. For hours, no one came, no one killed him, no one set him free. The voices were far away and chirping. The craft he was on rolled up and down, tossed back and forth. Igor was sick, and the smell of it taunted him.

  Igor tried to make sense. Where and why and who. Scenes from his journey rose like bubbles: The snap of a latch and Igor was pushed onto a cold seat. He was blindfolded and his legs were tied, trussed like a broiler hen. An engine came to life. An engine? he thought, and in that rumble Igor became a traitor, the world he helped make turning to foam. He begged; the soldiers laughed, and then one of them knocked him hard on the head with the butt of his rifle. Igor had felt everything go soft around him as they began to move. The direction they went was away.

  He remembered waking up with his back against a tree and an argument going on around him. He tried to plead but his brain was mushy. In the tall trees a hundred feet above Igor wind had been caught; not even the wind was free to go. He could not stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time.

  He remembered being back in the automobile, bumping farther along, the three men laughing and chattering like schoolboys. When they stop
ped moving, the scent of urine came at Igor. He needed to pee too, which made him furious. His body had dumbly continued its machinations. Then a man came up close to Igor, close enough that the smell of him, which was stale alcohol and burning wood, saturated everything. The soldier leaned in and placed his hands under Igor’s arms as if he was picking up a baby. He stood his prisoner up, feet on the ground outside, and gently unzipped Igor’s pants, held him. It was the sort of kindness that made a person feel ill. They were there for a long time, the soldier kicking rocks, before Igor’s muscles relaxed and let go the liquid. In the car, he cried.

  There had been nights on the ground and days driving. In this dream, there was an endless supply of land to cover. Away, away, away they went.

  Footfalls again, this time toward Igor. And then light, a flood of it. He saw stars, though it was daytime. Here was an entire ocean, a thing he had never seen. It became bluer the farther out he looked. His vision widened to take in the scene. He was on a passenger ferry. There were huge curls of rope like dredged-up sea serpents, salt-eaten wooden benches and churning smokestacks. Scattered around the deck were men and women in the middle of a regular day. There were soldiers, too, uniforms and weapons marking them. The language they spoke was long lost, like a song remembered somewhere in the body’s hidden cells. He could not understand the words but the tune began to make sense. Italian, Igor thought. From Italy. He almost laughed because it seemed so silly, this sudden insistence on the existence of Italy. Of all things, that was what had fought its way back in?

  Igor’s attention came back to his own body. He was tied to a bench by his wrists and ankles. He couldn’t see anyone else tied up and no one seemed to want to look him in the eye. He felt dirty and sorry and foggy. A soldier, seeing that he was awake, came and stood over Igor. The man was small and he looked tired.