No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  We tried to sleep on the bed, all of us, but I could feel Solomon turning back and forth, awake. The stars were hidden behind a cover of gray—even though I knew the stars were there still, arranged and held, I could not believe it was true. There seemed to be another world over me, a flat gray place, just as hard and true as this one. A world where you could walk for months having no idea where you were, then walk some more.

  I woke up when Solomon started to jump around me. Dawn was a luminous bruise on the horizon, the rest of the sky dark. I felt the surface under me go soft and shifty. I felt the spring of his feet against it, their insistence on high and higher.

  I started to gather the baby into my arms, and at the first touch I understood that he was not going to wake up. He was cold, and he was still.

  “Stop,” I said, “stop jumping.”

  “We are boys,” he whispered to himself, “two boys. We are jumping.”

  I took the baby into my arms. In the dark, only his shining eyes were easy to see. I laid him on the bed. I listened for his breath. I listened for his heart. On the mattress, the grass-sprung mattress, here in this field after one harvest and before another, the baby’s little spirit was caught on the wind and carried absolutely everywhere.

  “This is my baby who is lost,” I kept whispering. I remember saying that so many times it turned into one word.

  I opened my dress to put the baby onto my long-dry breast. “What if this?” I said. “What if you are new?” Solomon opened his shirt too and tried to offer the breast that he had never had, not even for a moment of his short life.

  “What if this?” he echoed. We held the boy together against us while he did not drink. I wondered how long he had been waiting to slip away. How hard he had tried to hold on. “All right,” I whispered, further than I wished from forgiving him. “You chose to go.”

  “My brother who is lost. I bless him. May His great Name be exalted and sanctified in the world that He created as He willed.” The prayer split me, the way only the sight of blood makes a wound begin to sear with pain. Years from now, a thousand or more, I might be ready to dress in black and mourn. For as long as I could imagine, for the whole crooked duration of my life, I tasted the metallic desire for misery in my entire body.

  “I’m not ready for the prayer,” I whispered. I pressed the baby hard to my chest, and for a second I thought he might slip right inside. Rejoin.

  “We are supposed to say the prayer. That’s the prayer we say.”

  I covered my ears and wept. I had never wanted to hit my son before. “No one is listening, don’t you see?”

  The baby’s skin turned rubbery. His body became less and less. The heartless compass pointed away: always, farther and farther away. The sun rose to show us how beaten we were. The wind started to gather itself and throw our hair around, toss our spit and tears back at us, slapping our grief onto our skin. We have no use for this, the wind said of our tears, this is yours.

  When the light had us pink and orange and looking like we were on fire, Solomon said, “We have to put him someplace. He needs a home.”

  “And you? A home?”

  “Not yet,” he told me, faith hanging on to its overwhelming opposite.

  I carried my smallest boy away from the mattress. His legs were stiff and unmoving. We had no shovel with us in the field. We dug with our hands, cupping the clumps of dry dirt and moving them aside.

  We did not get very deep. The earth turned us away, dry and unbreakable. We hit it with rocks, trying to make a crack but only freed a little dust. It was a long time before a small boat floated there, in which the baby could drift away. We laid the baby down, tucked just below the surface of the world.

  “He never had a name,” Solomon said.

  “He never told us what he wanted to be called.”

  “Should we name him now? Should we call him Star or Wheat or Field?”

  “None of those would be enough.”

  So the baby went away the same as he had come: himself and nothing else. No name, no debts, no winnings. He had no road in front of him to walk, no food to find, no tears to lose, no mother and brother to pray for. He had only to sleep, and maybe dream, for as long as the earth kept turning.

  That was the last night we lived as three, and all through it Solomon and I stayed as still as we could, though we did not sleep. We wanted to move no more than our third companion, to be like him, for us all to be like each other, lying still, as is natural to do, under the dark heavens and the uncountable stars.

  THE BOOK OF HOME AND THE FUTURE, WHICH IS NOW

  It began with a far-off yelling, the sound of voices loud enough to pound the grass flat.

  Guns were shot.

  The far-off yelling became less far off.

  The villagers pulled in close to one another. Sleep still sat with them. One person, they did not know who, lit a lantern. All of them were mountainous piles with jagged faces. Someone else whispered to blow the lantern out, at least in the darkness they were invisible. The jagged faces went dark again but when everyone closed their eyes they could still see one another printed on the backs of their eyelids.

  The stranger said, “Yes, I remember this. I remember all of this.” People shushed her, pleaded with their silent eyes. The jeweler met her gaze. He wanted to say that he remembered too, except that he did not—he had never lost everything at once before. Still, he wanted the stranger to know he believed her, and he also wanted her to assure him someone new would be there to gather them out of the river just as she had been gathered. That forever, no matter how many times they were washed away, another world would always meet them a little farther downstream.

  “I remember my daughter. Her hair was scratchy on my shoulder. I remember my son’s laugh and how he curled his lip when he played,” the stranger said. Perl leaned closer to the stranger and reached her hand out, as if she was trying to tame a stray animal, quiet its yowling. The stranger shook her head. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You have been very kind to me. You saved my life, but I remember the old world. I remember it perfectly. I remember every single thing I lost, and how each one smelled.”

  The far-off yelling was close yelling. The guns were close guns. Boots broke whatever they came across. The people heard every snap. They watched the stranger nod at each sound. This was a symphony she had heard before.

  “What happens next?” the banker asked her.

  “Everything happens next,” the stranger said, and she clamped her eyelids shut.

  Windows turned to water splashing back on itself. Doors slammed against walls. Unfamiliar voices shouted in the abandoned houses, Come out, you filthy creatures. Where are you? The moment has arrived.

  And if the people could have seen the cavities of one another’s eyes? Would they have been so afraid that they would have fallen to the ground in piles of loose bones? Fear seemed hot enough to melt them.

  Perl reached for her family—my family—took Vlad and Moishe and the tailor’s daughter close, their arms tangled together, holding firm. Regina and the widow were not in the room with everyone else—the only time Perl saw them anymore was through a prism of mustard jars. Perl ached to touch her daughters, but hoped hard that we were hidden someplace, and safe.

  “Is this the end?” Moishe asked. He was old enough to be able to see both ahead and behind himself now, the clearing he had come through and the forest grown suddenly wild at his feet. His question was posed slowly, deliberately—a child trying to sound unafraid, as he supposed an adult would. Perl wanted to tell him how scared she was, how scared he was allowed to be.

  “Stay close to me,” Vlad said. “Just do not go away from me.”

  “If we get separated, send a letter here with your whereabouts,” Perl whispered. Vlad’s eyes were swarming with fear. Perl felt stung, as if by bees, when he looked at her. “Never ending,” she said, and pointed to her heart. The flutter of terrified wings did not calm in Vlad’s eyes. He squeezed her so tightly that both hands n
umbed and neither could tell which fingers stemmed from which palm. Vlad hummed very faintly through his nose, making a river of sound just big enough for his family to drift on. Moishe added his own soft hum, and Perl and the tailor’s daughter held on and on.

  The banker’s wife saw the same ugliness of her heart after the baby’s death reflected in everyone else. Fear had eaten their eyes, it had caved their cheeks in. This was a strange comfort to her.

  The stranger said, “Most of us are going to die, but not everyone. We will begin again, as many times as we need to. The end is the same thing as the beginning. Exactly the same. Lena will tell our story.”

  “How will she know it?” Kayla asked.

  “She will know,” the stranger said, sure. The jeweler memorized his lover’s words, wished the words were solid, were coins or pebbles he could squeeze in his fist. She opened her empty hands and said, “Thank you for being my family. It has been an honor. I remember who all of you are.”

  The greengrocer thought about the census he and the rest of the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It had so carefully written over months and years. What do we have now? he asked himself. If we die, every single one of us? The story, he thought, remained. Once told, it does not ever go completely away. It has no throat to slit. The greengrocer wanted to tell this theory to his wife, who was crying silently next to him, but when their eyes met he thought she might already know.

  Kayla and Hersh quietly slipped out the door. Those inside could see them break through the trees but did not watch, averted their eyes, drawing no attention to the escape. Others did not try to join them and they did not throw the lines of their voices after Kayla and Hersh and reel them back into the struggle. The village simply let them disappear. Would they climb into a tree and nest there, a pair of unusually large crows?

  Perl, Vlad, Moishe and the tailor’s daughter were so close together they felt fused. If one of their hearts had stopped it would not have mattered because the others would have pumped for that body, too.

  The people heard two voices outside, just there, and then a tap on the window. The single bullet hole in the wall went dark. The villagers heard the men outside laugh.

  For several seconds they heard the exact and complete sound of nothing.

  Then the door opened and the moonlight was slapped down on the villagers, their bodies returned to being mountains and their faces returned to being jagged and no matter what they did, they did not become planks of wooden floor.

  “Everyone’s together!” the men shouted. “How kind of you, to have gathered for us. You must have been waiting.” They were very tall and stood so straight as to look like statues. They wore pale green from helmet to boot, and the guns in their hands were shiny and animated, alive-looking. Nothing felt real. Yet now that the moment had arrived, it seemed inevitable. Almost a relief. When is it over? It is over now.

  The children did not break first. The children kept their silence the longest. It was the fathers who went right away, trying to wrap their two pathetic arms around everything they loved. The arms seemed so short, so thin. Why were the arms not twice their length?

  The sound in the room was of the fathers struggling to hold.

  The mothers went next. When one began to cry loud enough to be heard, the room cracked. The children and the grandmothers and the uncles and the cousins. They cried because they cried. They cried because across the room and next to them, there was the sound of begging.

  One of the men in uniform approached Perl. “This one is already bald, no lice on this one.” He slapped the shiny skin of her scalp.

  The other man in uniform laughed. “Are you trying to steal from us?” he asked her. Perl looked hard at the floor. “Are you trying to steal from us?” the guard repeated.

  No, she shook her head.

  “Are you bald and dumb?”

  Perl shook her head and the first man smacked it. “We wanted your hair,” he told her. “Didn’t you think we might want that?”

  “What will you do to apologize?”

  “She will shave the heads of the others,” the first man said. “She will get their dirty lice all over her.”

  The people did all the possible things to do. They fought back. They were hit on their heads with the butts of guns. They hid behind shelves. They were dragged by their hair back out. They stood up, put their hands over their heads and waited to be shown the way. People put themselves in front of the ones they loved, saying, Take me, take me.

  Stacks of things began to fall, and my people heard only the sound of them crashing down. The pots rang when they hit the floor. The books, the silverware, the saddles—all of it tumbled. The people were swallowed. The soldiers kicked the piles, listening for the yelp of a person underneath. The sound of their voices, once shrill and stabbing, became like the hiss of a fire—behind, around, but not central. The prayers in the villagers’ own heads were rumbling and thunderous. A silent cacophony. They all prayed the same prayer.

  Please exist. We want to believe in You.

  People had stopped asking for particulars. No requests for safety, no more hopes of a hole in the floor to hold them, no more wishes to replace one person with the other. They only said, as many times as they could: We are here. We want to trust You. We are here. Please exist. You will certainly watch us today. Won’t You? We are here.

  The village began to come apart under its own hope. People felt as if their arms would snap off, their heads would roll and rest with the cabbages, their hearts would stick to the floor. When the butcher was taken by one man who held his wrists together, no one could believe that even now the butcher’s arms did not come gently off. We trust You. We trust You. Still, the shoulders hung on. All the knobbed ends of all the bones stayed cupped in their sockets.

  The stranger said to no one in particular, “My daughter had long fingers and short toes. Her ears were like shells. Her brother followed her around asking her opinion on everything, and her father trusted her with his tools. I used to like to watch the crows hop across the woodpile. I can smell that wood right now. But I also remember the way the cabbage picker’s wife’s fingers felt as they cleaned the mud from between my toes on the day I washed up on this shore. I remember the taste of toasted bread in the jeweler’s house, and the smell of the butcher’s roasts. I remember the long, peaceful rainstorm of all our days since the beginning of the world. I remember, I remember, I remember.” She smiled, a wide and honest smile. The banker’s wife looked at her in confusion. “No,” said the stranger. “It is a privilege to remember. I am not afraid of it anymore. Absolutely everything is true.”

  As the stranger’s words attached our two worlds back together, Perl saw a flash of my face at age five, before she could have imagined giving me away. She saw my uneven teeth, none of them yet fallen out. She saw the game I was inventing—a pencil-drawn maze that began in the cabbage field and ended at our big blue door, where the family was waiting with sloppy smiles on. Wherever you are, my mother said to me in her head, I hope you are home. I hope I am still yours. And for Regina she found two words clacking together: alive and love.

  The first man in uniform dumped a basket of cabbages out onto the floor. “They love these things,” he said to one of the other men. “They should be grateful that we’ll dump their ashes over a cabbage field.” The man in uniform drew his fingers under my mother’s chin. “You’ll make excellent fertilizer.”

  The men began to shoot at the ceiling and the chips of sky fell down on them, sharp rain, and the villagers put themselves in lines and waited their turn to follow the men out the door.

  They went two by two, not cabbage pickers or tailor’s daughters or weavers or bankers or the wives of bankers or the strangers anymore. Vlad and Perl and Moishe? Just bodies among bodies, just animals, rattling out of their temple into the captured world.

  The villagers were one body, each of them losing individual characteristics, their minds beginning to melt into a note of utter fear and utter h
ope, which were one feeling and not two as they might have believed before.

  Outside, the rain had gathered its strength and pelted them all. The old stars, too far away to be shot down by bullets, greeted the line of people. “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night. And let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years,” the jeweler said.

  “And by them, may we find our way,” the stranger whispered. Each person was given a new star, too. Their upper arms were wrapped with yellow bands, and on each band: one star. The soldiers had not tied the villagers’ hands together, expecting fear would be enough to bind the people.

  The water was running away, it was beckoning. It was as if the sky, practicing all this time, was finally ready to wash the people to safety, to carry them. And the water prevailed upon the earth, and it bore them and lifted them up. The stranger took her lover’s hand and began to run. The others did not have to be told to follow. As if commanded by a single voice, which echoed at once in everyone’s heads: We are the stars, we are the heavens, let us spread out across the darkness. They ran and the water ran with them, everything moving together. Some people died quickly, from the hundreds of bullets fired at their backs. Some of them were injured, some captured. Perl felt the heat of her husband’s hand in hers, their fingers making a knot. In the other hand, Moishe’s palm was sweating and slippery. She felt like one part of a bigger body. Her arm and Vlad’s arm—her arm and Moishe’s—could not be prized apart. The blood flowed between them, the life they had shared. Perl became less and less herself and more and more everyone, everything, as she ran. Her heart thundered so loudly she knew the beating she heard was not hers alone. The people’s names did not matter—the difference between the banker’s body and the butcher’s body meant nothing now. Survival was not an individual pursuit, but a collective one. They were all of us. The air was thick with ghosts—every life lived on that land, every life lived in that story. Through the wheat, through the empty cabbage field, through the rain, across arteries they had made for themselves on the earth, the sound of their heart was one drum, all the chambers in all the chests, commanding, Let there be morning and evening, another day.