No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  “Please,” was the only word Igor could say. The soldier sat down next to him. He began the job of untying the ropes around wrists and ankles without explaining why. Igor listened for the sound of explosions, of guns, of airplanes. Only the sea splashing the ship’s side sang back.

  “Can you understand me? I don’t know your language, but can you speak Russian?” the man asked in a rough accent. He paused. Igor nodded. “You are our prisoner,” the soldier said. “If you cooperate, we won’t hurt you.” He put his hand to his brow to shield the sun and his eyes turned a soft gray in the shade.

  The light felt like needles piercing Igor’s brain.

  It would not have mattered if Authority Himself had walked up, bespectacled and with a ream of evidence to support his case: Everywhere, atrocities and battles. Bombs dropped on the innocent by dozens of different kinds of men, all of them believing that that particular explosion was worthy, those deaths justified. Newspapers, military orders, radio broadcasts, blood-soaked uniforms and wailing widows would have confirmed the story. But Igor, a career sleeper, was sure he knew how to spot a dream.

  Someone on shore caught the giant rope a person on board had thrown to him. The ship rubbed against the wooden pilings like a neglected dog. A crowd gathered on the dock, sobbed for the boys who had survived the war so far and the boys who had not. Three mothers nearly suffocated, in pillowy bosoms, their returned sons. Mothers whose sons did not disembark collapsed on the ground and had to be carried home. The crowd asked about this prisoner the boys had brought, how dangerous he was, how deranged. By now, the soldiers had grown bored with their trophy. “Not dangerous at all,” they said. “He sleeps most of the time. He’s like a housecat. He might even be good luck. We didn’t break down once after we took him.”

  “Can I keep him?” a young man, the jailer, asked the soldiers.

  “He’s all yours,” the soldiers said, wanting to think about anything but the war.

  Igor’s dream took absurd turns of loveliness. He and his personal guard went for the tour. Igor was shown the taverna where he could have his wine, the market where he could buy his cheese and the bakery where he could buy his bread. All the people in town shook his hand, because he was their prisoner.

  The guard showed him which bench was best for watching the girls coming out of the place where they did the wash, which bench was nicest in the morning to drink your coffee. “I was thinking about it, and it’s likely that we’ve saved your life,” the guard said. “You are a very lucky man.”

  Here he was in the most foreign of foreign lands, a place filled with outlandish sunshine. A place with its own ocean. A place where there was a man in charge of one thing—making sure Igor was taken care of. And somehow Igor was supposed to believe that this was because of a devastating war? Because millions of people were dying? Because he was a prisoner of war?

  Igor decided to wait patiently to wake back up into his old, gray life. A person does not get lifted to salvation this easily.

  The guard showed Igor to the jail where he would sleep.

  “Will anyone else come?” Igor asked, looking at the six bunk beds.

  “No, not that we know of.”

  Igor had thought of a sure way to reveal the guard’s kind exterior as false, to stretch the membrane of the dream until it burst. “I hate to say, but is there a larger bed someplace?”

  “A larger bed?”

  “I love to sleep. It’s what I’m best at. Usually, and I hope I don’t sound ungrateful, I like more room so I can spread my legs out.”

  The guard looked at the cot. “I will see what I can do.”

  Igor felt a strange hum in his head, disbelief rumbling like the engines that brought him here.

  Within a day Igor was helping several men carry the bunks out and carry in the four-poster of a recently dead old woman. The guard borrowed blue sheets and white cotton blankets from his mother, which he and Igor tucked in around the mattress, snug. The pillow remained—a pillow is the same size no matter the bed it lives on.

  Each night, the guard came and locked Igor into the cell and each morning he came and released him. They went for their coffee and they sat on the rocks by the sea, where the guard taught Igor his spiking, giggling language.

  “Tell me again how I am here? Why I am here?”

  The guard told the story the same way it had been told to him.

  The island boys had fought a losing battle far in the north. Their side had sustained hundreds of thousands of casualties, and three of the island boys, just three, walked out on their own feet. For months, they hid in a fallen-down building and gathered parts to fix their car so they could get home. They had no radio, no idea what was going on anywhere. They could not get their heads back after so much death. Finally, the motor turned over and they drove for two days without sleeping, without speaking. At the foot of a mountain range, exhausted and filled with the rabid, manic combination of the elation and guilt of survivors, they bought two jugs of vodka from a band of Gypsies, and that night, as they made camp, the boys emptied them.

  Drunker and drunker, they replayed the deaths of their friends, the rotted bodies they had seen, the enemies they had drained of blood. We must deserve something, they said. A little honor. A small trophy. Somewhere in that stupor, it made sense to go looking for one.

  Morning slipped in too early and revealed a man tied to a tree, blindfolded, with blood dripping down his face. The soldiers remembered only vaguely how he had come to be there and disagreed about what to do with him. It was the war itself that made the best case: life is disposable, nearly meaningless. Every day, thousands more are extinguished, captured, maimed. Everyone on this continent is marked for death. How much could it hurt to take a single little prisoner?

  Sometimes it happens that two very different stories, two distant lives, come crashing together. Once, there was a sleepy man who had lived in a brand-new world until he was reeled out like a caught fish. And once, very, very far away, on a scrubby island floating in the black-blue sea, there lived a lonely young jailer who had no prisoners, had never locked the door on a murderer, an adulteress, even a petty thief.

  All through the winter and spring, the summer and fall, the jailer had swept and paced the cell. He had washed the walls, which were already clean. He had polished the stone floor. All through the winter and spring, the summer and fall, the other island boys had inched closer to the night they would seek a reward. All through the winter and spring, the summer and fall, Igor had practiced being sound asleep.

  Perhaps Igor and the jailer’s fate was an answer from God. Perhaps the entire architecture of the war was built to land a single body in a single cell. Or perhaps fate is nothing more than an accident—two ships lost in the dark, running aground on the same windward beach.

  Igor thought about what the scene of his capture had looked like: the villagers cementing stars in place, the room turning slowly into the heavens, no talking, only the scrape of tile. Enter soldiers, exit soldiers, Igor, just awake, in tow.

  “Was I asleep in the story?”

  The guard squinted at him.

  “All right, then,” Igor said, deciding he liked his portrayal better in the soldiers’ version of the story. “But if I am supposed to be your enemy, then will you kill me?”

  “No, certainly not. Maybe a life sentence with no possibility of parole. You are useless to me dead.” Even the guard’s eyebrows were thin and unthreatening. “Anyway, why would you want to leave?” He gestured around them at the thyme-dry hills and the blue and bluer sea.

  “I have a family. I have a home.” Igor thought for a moment. “When you say there is a war, do you mean a real war? Horror and all that? Death?”

  “You haven’t seen the pictures? Hitler, Churchill? Mussolini? Stalin?” Igor was quiet. He rolled his sleeve up and examined the rope burns on his wrist. They stung at his own touch. “I knew your village was far away, but I didn’t know it was that far away.”

  “It doesn’t l
ook like war here,” Igor said, and put his face up to the dry, warm day.

  “Of course. This is the best place on earth,” the guard said.

  “I have a new baby boy. And a wife, and a bigger son.”

  The wind brushed a little of the heat off their bare arms. The guard looked ashamed. Small beads of sweat popped and trickled down his forehead, which made Igor inexplicably sad. “That’s a nice breeze,” Igor said, surprised by his sudden desire to be kind.

  “Is there anything you aren’t satisfied with? About your experience? It must have been a bumpy ride.”

  “I am asleep,” Igor reassured himself. “I am asleep and I am dreaming.”

  In the afternoon they ate a large lunch at the guard’s mother’s house. She fed them bean soup, pasta, baked chicken and a custardy dessert. She told Igor, “If you can tell me you eat better at home you can go back. You will be freed.”

  “Mother,” the guard scolded, “he is our prisoner, you can’t go freeing him.”

  “He won’t go anywhere, because there is no way he eats better at home,” she assured her son.

  They both looked at Igor, whose chest was covered in crumbs, a trail of fallen soup leading the way to his lap. He shook his head. “It would be a lie,” he confessed, spooning another bite into his hole of a mouth. “I have never eaten such a meal.”

  “Then he stays,” the guard’s mother said. “I told you.” To Igor, she said, “This is what I can do with wartime rations. Just imagine my table in better times.”

  The guard’s mother told Igor that her son was all right but a little bit of a sissy. She told him that his guarding of Igor was the best thing he had done so far. She told him how his brothers all lived in big cities where they fought for important things—the holiest of churches, the most beautiful of paintings, the most important politicians—but not this one. This one guarded a jail with no one in it. “You can’t leave us,” the mother said. “You’re the only thing that makes my son here not look like a total idiot.”

  When they had eaten the last of their desserts, the guard’s mother told them to go sleep in her bed. “I’ll do the dishes,” she said. “You have a nap.”

  Igor nodded enthusiastically at this idea, but the guard said, “No, thanks, Mother, we have to get him back to jail.”

  “I really am tired,” Igor said when they got outside.

  The guard looked puzzled. “What else would we do with our afternoon? This country is nothing without its nap. We’ll sleep in the jail. That woman makes me crazy.”

  “I had a mother.” Igor remembered, quite suddenly. “A lot of us had the same one. We were eleven, plus one who died when he was a baby. She cooked nothing but beef. She loved beef.” He remembered being utterly devoted to her, following her around without acknowledgment. After he was married, he could not recall his mother ever having come to visit him and his family, not one single time. She had avoided him in the market and averted her eyes in temple. As if he were disgusting to her, as if she could see through his skin and bones to the hairy, blistered soul within.

  “Did she make you feel like swimming out to sea and never coming back?” the guard asked.

  The two men walked the path through the dusky green olive grove. The ground was raised raucous with rocks and branches. A lot of chickens wandered around, aimless and pecking. Goats clanged their bells without meaning to, tearing the grass from its roots. There were no sounds of voices. No bubble of laughing washerwomen, no scramble of children, no gruff of men smoking in the plaza. Just chickens and goats and the rustle of horses’ manes in the wind.

  “Everyone is asleep?” Igor asked.

  “Certainly,” the guard replied.

  “This place is incredible. If only my family was here with me.”

  The guard opened the jail door to let Igor in first. “Home sweet home,” he said. The guard opened the gate into the barred cage and Igor flopped onto the bed. “May I join you?” the guard asked.

  “Please, guard, make yourself at home.”

  “Maybe you should stop calling me guard and start calling me Francesco,” the guard said. “Since you’re staying around awhile.” Francesco went to one side of the bed and Igor to the other.

  As he was falling asleep, Francesco asked Igor, not unlike a marriage proposal, to be his friend. Igor was not sure how to answer. Francesco gave him a pat on the back and, lying as hard as he had ever lied, he said, “I didn’t realize how lonely I’d been.”

  As he drifted off, Igor saw my face and the faces of our boys. The angle of our noses, the smell of our hair, the way we moved. The deeper that Igor fell, my face, Solomon’s and the new baby’s faces, turned to mist. We hovered still, cloudlike, around him, but we had no hands he could hold, no ears he could speak to. I almost remember you, he thought, but then he did not again. He caught his family in whiffs, as faint and drifting as the scent of a flower. Home had been taken away as easily as it had been invented. A new place lapped at Igor’s feet.

  THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE AHEAD

  In the pink of dawn, the border was clogged with blackberry thorns and brush. I wrapped my shawl around the baby and tied him to my chest. As if diving into water, I held my breath. We had to tear the branches apart, untangle their talons, duck and overstep, and still we emerged with bleeding arms. I had thorns stuck in my dress. The baby had a scratch across his little cheek and he grimaced at me when I peeked into his cocoon. We walked out of the village, just like that, out of the world. We did not fall off a cliff, nor were we swept into the sky by a tremendous gust of wind. The earth went on as if we had not crossed any border.

  The old road was shabby and overgrown but obvious. We were going one foot, then the other into the past. Or was it the future? Had the lands outside our borders zipped ahead of us or slipped behind? What assembled itself along our path offered little evidence either way. Short, soft-needled pines, weeds, a bloomless crocus. Endless rolls of wheat, planted by knobbled human hands. A thousand worlds’ worth of sky, and the singular sun coming to give us our turn at daytime. Light poured over fields and the way ahead of us was open and long.

  The compass pointed us toward the mountains. I had no idea which direction was safest and which was most dangerous, but it felt better to follow something than not to. All I could do was go on. We came into a dense birch forest, thousands of white fingers of trees reaching out of the ground. A stream ran through the trees, and the rocks were mossy. Sticks stuck on the rocks, then came loose and twirled as they floated away. Solomon climbed into one of the birches, stood like a new branch.

  “Are we looking for Father?” Solomon asked.

  “We’re staying safe,” I told him. “It’s better to be alone and quiet. We can be quiet, right?” We lay down under a huge tree whose branches cut the sky up. Fallen leaves under us crushed themselves soft. The tree smelled full and sweet and dropped only a few jeweled raindrops down to us, one at a time.

  We listened to the sound of water hitting leaves. We could see only the gray of mist around us. We were wrapped in it, clothed. I took in the rich smells of leaves decomposing, of wet bark and turned dirt. The baby was warm on my chest. What does it feel like, I asked myself, to be away? Even though my back was against the earth, I felt as if I were floating above.

  “Come to me,” I said to Solomon, who was drawing the shape of a house in the loam with his finger. “Let me have you.” Solomon put his face to my chest. He listened to what transpired inside, the gathering and sending out of blood. He listened to his brother taking liquid into his mouth.

  “Can I taste it?” Solomon asked.

  “What?”

  “The milk.”

  The baby’s suckling sounds matched the rolling of water over waxy leaves.

  “You can if you want to. Do you?”

  “Please.” I pulled away the shawl I was wearing, pulled myself out from inside of it.

  “What do I do?” he asked me.

  “Just suck a little, it will come.” Solomon’s mo
uth was warm, now both breasts held in the soft of my children’s lips. I felt the milk leave me. I knew that I was allowing one brother to steal food from the other, but I wanted to be enough for both of them. I felt Solomon stop for a moment, then start again. He laughed and drank. He was gentler than the baby was, more persuasive. I put my head back against the tree. I tried to feel its roots under me, the net of them holding everything up. I watched the leaves shake in the wind and the rain, the rain, which was slowing, which was quieting, which was loosening its hold on us. Solomon fell asleep and so did his brother. I held them to me, felt them against my skin. The breath turned wet and cold. They were heavy but I did not put them down.

  At this moment, what was real mated with what was dreamed. I want to be able to say exactly where we walked and how we survived out there, for how long. We went north, unless we came to a wide river, or it looked like a town might be ahead, in which case we went east. In my palm, the compass was warm. Facts about how much food the body needs and my memory of what we found to eat do not match up. And time? As if time had ever made sense to me? What followed was one long night.

  In the morning Solomon went out into the wheat and gathered stalks of it, brought it back to me. Together we opened the shells to pull impossibly small bodies of meat. We did not eat them one by one, but saved them in a pile, waited until we had enough, so when we ate it actually felt like eating. We chewed every bite until it was nothing. We worked and our fingers were striped with cuts. Today this was enough.

  In the afternoon we tried to sleep. The baby talked noise into the canopy of whatever trees we found. Oak, maple, pine, beech. He seemed happy. He was with his mother and his brother, and his father still loved him someplace, of course.

  In the evening we peeled sheets of bark off the tree and soaked them in caught water. Once soft, we ate the bark, dark tasting and sponged.

  “We are doing fine,” I whispered into the dark.