Solomon pushed close to me and said, “We are inside a house.”
“That’s right.” The farmer gave Solomon a warm smile.
“You let them in?” the woman asked.
Shame slipped her fingers around my neck and squeezed. My face felt hot. I wanted to apologize for bothering them and leave. Not back to the bruised world this time, but a day-to-day place, the decades ahead, Solomon’s future unfolding one unnotable hour at a time. I wanted that possibility to exist.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want to put you in danger. We should go,” I said.
“In danger?” the farmer’s wife said, and squinted.
I did not know the real stories, only the fear of what they might be. Only the banished, threadbare memories. Only the radio’s babble. “We shouldn’t have come.”
“Yes,” the farmer said, something between a grimace and a grin on his face. The owner of a gruesome tale, he cracked his knuckles while the audience waited.
“They will never manage it,” the farmer’s wife said. “It is not possible to do what they say they will do.” Someone, somewhere sharpened his dagger. He put his hands into long black gloves, unrolled a map of his expanding territory.
“Maybe.” The farmer shrugged. “So far, they are managing.”
“What do they say they will do?” Solomon asked.
“They say they will kill certain kinds of people,” he told us. “All of you. In the name of improvement.”
The farmer’s wife shushed him. “But you are safe here,” she said, opening the lid of the big silver pot and letting the smell saturate the room. “For now,” the farmer said. I saw that Solomon’s eyes were watering. The farmer’s wife spooned soup into bowls. “Sit down and eat. Eat as much as you can.” Chairs were beneath us, a floor, the table’s surface made itself available to our arms and our bowls. “Look at how skinny you are,” the farmer said. “You poor, poor boy.” He shook his head at me, scolding.
The soup was unbearably warm. It made me feel faint. The world slowed down. My heart was a throng of people, fists raised in the air. There was butter to put on the bread. Solomon was silent. He did nothing but deliver himself food. He delivered and delivered and delivered, sucking and chewing and sucking. The farmer could not take his eyes off my son, who was filling his little body with the man’s salvation. His wife trained her eyes on her own supper. No one spoke.
And then Solomon turned to his side and threw everything—absolutely everything—back up. The soup looked the same on the floor as it had in the bowl. I started to cry. I knelt down and began to scoop it into my shawl. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I kept saying, “he didn’t mean it.”
Solomon looked stunned. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I can eat it again.”
The wife came around the table and said, “No, stop right now. Do not save that.” The farmer blotted the corners of his mouth before placing his spoon carefully on the table. He had ceased to enjoy his supper.
I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We won’t waste it.” Solomon picked up his bowl again and began to eat. He ate even while he watched me try to gather the bits of potato together.
“Stop right away,” the wife said. “Please stop. There is more food. Please.” I lay down on the floor and cried. I shook myself out. I was stupid and useless at trying to stop myself.
“What should we do?” the farmer whispered. In the question was a story that did not end well—the dirty woman come in from the war, sick, dying, the whole house stinking like her rotting body, her rotting soul.
The farmer’s wife filled Solomon’s bowl with fresh soup. She brought warm water from the stove and cleaned the floor, took my shawl away. From the corner of my eye I saw her open the front door and throw it outside. Garbage.
“Eat,” she said to the boy, “try again. Your body didn’t know what to do.” Solomon ate slowly this time, smoothed the soup into his mouth and sucked it through his teeth. In each mouthful I heard the weeks I had allowed him to nearly starve. Solomon watched me but he kept eating.
I felt the farmer and his wife’s eyes on me. Is she insane? Is she sick? The boy is all right, handsome even, but what will we do with his mother?
Only after my son had eaten his second dinner, his eyes heavy and low, did the farmer kneel at my side, slip his arms under my back and lift. I could have stopped him, gone rigid, kicked. I could have made it clear that I was operating under my own power. But I let him take me from the floor in his arms, a body folded in on itself. I was soft, blind, compassless. My lids slipped open for a second and the farmer’s eyes were waiting for mine, full of light and lightning. They told me I had one chance to deny a series of facts: You are weak and confused, ill-equipped. You are potentially crazy. You are in danger and in need of charity. You belong to a dangerous tribe. Your life, as far as it still exists, is owed to my kindness. You will do what I want.
I shut my eyes again, and let my head roll back.
The farmer’s hands, one on my shoulder and the other on my leg, felt huge. I could already tell the tips of his fingers would leave bruises. But was this because he pushed them down hard? No, my own weight was to blame, crushing itself into those gentle pink pads. The farmer carried me to a bed made on the floor, where he lit and then blew out a candle. Solomon climbed in next to me. The wife pulled the wool up to the necks of her strangers. The journey from the floor near the table to the floor on the other side of the room was no more than a few paces, nothing like the hundreds of miles we had come. Yet in these last yards, a border had been crossed. The farmer had carried me like his innocent bride over the threshold. I listened to the fire spark and whine until it died and the coals left only the faintest halo of light for me to pray by.
In the next days, Solomon learned how to stack wood, churn butter and dig up only those potatoes whose bushes had begun to wither. I was given socks to mend by the farmer’s wife. Her face looked like it was made of dough that had risen. Her lips puffed out around her teeth when she smiled, and enclosed them like a well-packed crate of eggs when she stopped. The farmer did not like to talk, at least not to me. He surveyed me and measured my son, like a banker wondering over an investment. His eyes were milky and his beard thin. “He’s nothing like what I would have expected. He’s a natural outdoorsman,” the farmer said, bragging like a father. I could not think of something to glory about that would make sense to someone who had lived on the solid earth all along. My son is a natural constellation maker, a natural escaper, a natural mourner.
I ate and slept and our hosts knew by watching that these acts were as much as I could bear. Meanwhile, my son got himself back. It happened so fast. His legs were legs again, rejoined by the hopeful wrap of muscle. His hands were not a web of bone anymore. His feet. His toes. His spine—all of them were covered by a thin layer of new flesh. I still felt weak and wrung-out. My body did not build itself back up so quickly. I stared at myself in the mirror hanging beside the washbasin. “You’re me,” I said to it. “Hello.” I waved and the person waved back. “I almost remember you. Remember me?” The woman repeated it with me, not waiting until I was done with the question to ask it back.
“Remember me?”
“Remember me?”
“Remember me?”
I watched my son out the window with the farmer, gathering, separating, hulling and seeding barley. They sat on stumps and worked. They walked and worked. They came inside, put their feet up and talked about the work that was done. They scrubbed the potatoes and they brought eggs inside, fed the chickens. There were some early apples, small and bumpy. Solomon liked to suck on them and let the sour juice sting his mouth.
As the weeks passed, my jealousy bubbled over. I imagined that Solomon and I were alone in a field somewhere, telling each other the story of what once was. His skeleton arms, his skeleton legs mine alone to hold on to, to provide just enough for, to love. I had taught him to be adaptable, to put his hands up and catch, like a tree, whatever moisture blew past. And I had kn
ocked on this door. All Solomon had done was not say no. I missed him now in this foreign house. I missed being alone with him.
The farmer’s wife had Solomon help bake the bread. She had him churning and boiling. She gave him candies to suck on and bread to eat between meals. He liked what he was asked to do—he liked working for the sake of something.
Each time the farmer saw me, disappointment scribbled over his eyes. He seemed to be patiently waiting for the day when I would quietly and respectfully disappear. I moved less and less. The farmer ignored me more and more. The farmer’s wife gave me things to chop, which took me all day. Three potatoes were hours of work, slicing them in half was enough. Cutting their starchy bodies, cutting them again. The farmer’s wife worked quickly, gathering everything together and cooking it.
“We used to be three,” I said, my knife resting at the edge of the board.
“Your husband?”
“If you count him we used to be four.”
“Your husband and who else?”
“The baby. He was Solomon’s little brother.”
“Your son?”
The farmer’s wife came and put her hand on my head. She brushed the hair that fell there. “Did they kill them, your husband and your baby?”
“My son fell asleep and did not wake up again.” Out the window: everything else. It looked like home to me sometimes, the big emptiness of it, the unknown.
“And your husband?”
I explained Igor’s kidnapping, how he was the only one taken and no one knew why or what it meant. Chosen like an egg out of a basket.
“Was that the end of it?”
“We left that night. I have no idea if our village has been burned up or if it’s the same as always. No one knows where I am. Even I don’t know where I am.”
“That is . . .” the farmer’s wife began, but she never told me what.
A few days later, the farmer came home from a trip to town with a newspaper curled under his arm. I saw it and the air fell out of my body. That there might be a fact, a truth about where I was and whether I had been in danger at all. Whether I had lost my son for a reason. Whether I had starved us all for a reason. Whether the winter would come again and trees would hang themselves over me while the stones made pits of my back.
The farmer did not open the newspaper up. He put down a brick of cheese, a wreath of garlic, some meat wrapped in paper, blood seeping through.
“You have a newspaper,” I said.
The farmer did not answer me.
“You bought a newspaper in town,” I said.
The farmer did not answer me.
“Does that newspaper tell us how we might die?” I asked.
The farmer looked at me. His eyes were sorrowful holes in his head. His cheeks were hot red from walking and the wind had mangled his hair. He smoothed it down. “Not how I will die,” he said, finally. For a second, punishment flashed in his eyes. My punishment. Truth shining like a weapon in his hands.
“You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to,” the farmer’s wife told me.
“I thought you might feel better knowing,” he said, his words hot enough to burn.
He put it down, opened it flat. The picture was of a temple, exploded. A symbol like a bent cross was laid over the rubble, a flag. I imagined that he had written this paper especially for me. If I wanted to develop a theory of a crumbling world, he was going to prove it. Watch what thoughts your imagination conjures up, the farmer and his newspaper seemed to scold.
“It’s possible it will end soon,” the farmer’s wife said.
“End,” I repeated.
Solomon came in from outside, from running or rolling or building. He was alive and warm and his skin was washed with wind.
“Everything is fine,” I told him, taking the newspaper away. He smiled and nodded.
“I know,” he said, “everything is great.”
Silently, we set to work making and then serving dinner. I ate a piece of bread. The farmer asked Solomon what he had done in the afternoon and Solomon told him about the house he had built for a beetle out of sticks. He told about the windows and the door, the bug-sized trees he had planted around it. The soft grass bed and the hidden shelter behind it. He hoped to make a pond for the bug to swim in once it got warm enough, he said. If he made it nice enough, more bugs might come. Pretty soon a whole family, a whole village would be his to take care of.
In the dark, Solomon wrapped his leg around my leg. He hit me without knowing it or meaning it. He slept so soundly now, as soundly as his father ever had. He did not wake from a nightmare or from hunger or cold. Solomon was somewhere far away from me, his sleep a thick, safe net around him. I put my hand on his cheek and whispered, “Hello,” but he did not flicker. I felt like a firefly, dimming. Soon, I would be too dark to see anymore; the night and my small body the same color.
Next door, the farmer and his wife imagined it was themselves in bed with the boy. I was incidental in my own life—I could be explained right out.
“She doesn’t realize that she isn’t behind enemy lines anymore,” the farmer whispered. “She thinks she is still in grave danger.”
The farmer’s wife needed a crutch of justification to lean on. “It could always change, though. The Germans could suddenly take control, and then she would be right.”
“We could name him,” the farmer whispered.
“He could be named for you,” his wife said, thinking it charming before guilt burned her face.
“He could be ours. Saved from a terrible fate. Saved from his own life.”
The farmer’s wife let the story lull her. She let righteousness rinse away shame. She let saving overshadow stealing. She closed her puffy eyelids over her puffy eyes and untied the strings of the day.
“We will take him to meet my mother and father,” he went on. “He will eat whatever he is given, he will be a very appreciative eater. We will baptize him. He will love roasted pork the best. He’ll want to get a pet later. He’ll want to get his own duckling, at least, and I’ll buy him three or four. It will be his job to collect the eggs every morning. He will carry them in a basket so carefully, never breaking any of them. He’ll pet the chickens. He’ll fluff their hay.”
The farmer’s wife was asleep completely, gone from the world. Crickets scratched their song out and the leaves of the trees rubbed against each other. There was no moon, no cool light. The farmer spoke into the complete darkness.
“Whatever is bad, he will resist it. He will know what is right.”
He kept himself up all night, trying to keep track of everything that would be. “I don’t want to forget this,” he said to himself, “there is a lot to remember. I treasure it already.”
When the orange beams of morning streaked the window, the farmer came to where Solomon and I were sleeping. He picked Solomon up and took him to the bed where his wife was snoring. “This is your home now,” he whispered to the boy, who did not awaken. “This is the part where we save you.”
Then he got into bed with me. I came awake to his fingers petting my head the same way his wife had earlier. His fingers were like snakes nesting on my scalp. They twisted through my hair. “He is going to be happy with us, we will keep him safe,” the farmer said. I heard the words but I did not open my eyes. “He is safer here than anywhere.”
I listened. Wind kicked up outside. It squeezed itself between the cracks of the house and wailed in pain.
“You can tell me about him later,” the farmer said. “Before you go.”
“Where am I going?” I felt myself dimming.
“The farmer can’t have two wives. You’ll give us all away.”
“Where am I going?” I asked again. Any heat I might have generated cooled to embers.
“Home, maybe. A new home, maybe. We have money—you don’t have to worry. You can take my wife’s papers as if you were her. You will be my wife from now on, and she will be you. I will make all the arrangements.”
&nbs
p; “But she will stay and I will go,” I said.
The farmer tried to add up the numbers to get another answer. A piece of my hair caught in his wedding ring and pulled. “What else?” he asked. “You stay and she goes? No. Certainly no.”
“I will not be anyone, then,” I said into the coming daylight. Even my body’s weight lessened.
“Exactly, it will be perfect.” The daylight invaded, making the handles on the chest of drawers stand up and the cracks and canyons in the floorboards fill with shadow.
“Where will I go?” I asked.
“Where do you want to go?” the farmer asked back. “As long as you leave, it doesn’t matter to me where.” I could see in his milky eyes he meant that as a kindness—all I had to do was name a peaceful, warm place and he would buy me the ticket. That Solomon was my place, he had not considered. There was frustration in his face, childlike frustration at my blindness to the logic he saw so clearly accumulated.
“I don’t know if I can live without him.”
“Wouldn’t you rather live without him than have him die? He will live and you will live. It’s the only way.”
“Where will I go?” My fingers bent and straightened. Fisted, spread wide. Is this what dying feels like? I wondered.
“We have said enough,” the farmer whispered into my ear. What began to rattle in my chest had not been named before—I was not laughing and my eyes were dry. I shook as soundlessly as an empty jar. If this were my moment for a crushing rebuttal, what came out of my mouth was as disappointing as a dry heave. The snakes of the farmer’s fingers retreated and, disgusted with me but pleased with himself, he left me alone on his floor.
No One Is Here Except All of Us Page 24