No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  Here, Solomon would live and live and live. I did not say yes, but I did not say no. The question: How long does it take to not be me anymore? The answer: A few days. I watched the farmer add items to a small pile near my bed. He went out each day to work on the details of my departure. His wife no longer looked me in the eye. She bent her big head, let her neck fold in on itself. She served me as if I were a wolf who might bite her if she withheld the soup bones.

  At night the wind kicked up and screamed. It was a language that made sense to me. Howling, whimpering. Solomon was my son, but for how many more nights I did not know. When I turned away from him he put his face into my back where his breath out was hot, his breath in, cold. I took the compass out and watched that sure little arrow point, as if it were just that easy. I shook it as hard as I could, but it bobbed dumbly back into place. The wind blew and blew, clattering the windowpanes, knocking the rakes and shovels over. And then the windows blew open and snow flew inside. I turned onto my back to see giant white flakes whirl into the house. I was not cold, I noticed, and I thought it was because I had changed from a warm-blooded animal to a snake. Flurries of snow gathered around our bed and I did not get up to close the windows. I hoped we would be buried, hidden. Blanked out. Erased. On the back of this storm, may we be carried away.

  Morning quieted the wind. I sat up to discover that what last night had been a snowstorm, today was apple blossoms blown off the tree. Pinkish, slightly bruised. They were banked against Solomon’s still sleeping back, and in his hair. Like a baby born out of the stamen of a flower, he was pink himself. Spring’s own child, bursting with new life, nothing but warm days ahead. At the other end of the room, the farmer was fastening the buckles on a suitcase.

  My first mother, that cabbage picker’s wife, that hairless crystal ball, that ghost, put her hand out to this lost daughter. We are the clan of women who love their dearests by giving them away. We are the same mother. The metronome of my heart, working to be whoever each person needed me to be—daughter, daughter, mother, mother—now came to center. Absolutely still. My children were not mine. In the same instant I passed my boy on, my mother took me back. As if the difference in our hearts—mine managing to stay whole and hers broken—had separated us. The instant when the earth’s continents, drifted asunder, vast oceans between them, remember they are made of the same stone. Hardened lava, granite. And then, with tremendous force, mountains are thrown up when two plates crash back together.

  When we are born, we do not belong to any tribe. We earn membership over our lives—the clan of the first people in the world, of adopted children, of heavy sleepers, of foreigners, of cabbage lovers, of lost mothers.

  The four of us stood in the sunshine and said little. The new parents repeated to Solomon everything. His life was being saved. He would have his mother’s love with him and plus his new mother’s love with him—double. He would have a father now, and always the old father wherever he was would love him, too. He could hardly escape his fortune, so much bounty. The bready face of the farmer’s wife looked toasted. Any baker would have been proud of that honey brown, egged and glistening.

  “And you’ll be near your brother,” the farmer’s wife told him.

  “My brother is dead,” Solomon said.

  “Don’t fight with your mother,” the farmer said.

  “I’m not,” Solomon said, looking at me. “My mother hasn’t said anything.”

  “Your other mother. Your new mother. Don’t fight with her.”

  Solomon moved closer to me. “This is just a story. I will always be your mother,” I said. “In this chapter Natalya is your mother. Nothing is changing except what we say.”

  “Everything is changing,” he corrected. “Where I live.”

  “Which is also where your brother lives,” the farmer added.

  “My brother does not live,” Solomon said.

  I nodded for him. “He would miss you if you left,” I said, smiling the most honest smile I could invent.

  “You’re leaving,” he said. “Don’t.”

  “I’m leaving because I have to. There can’t be two wives. But there can be a son.”

  I thought he might break down and scream. I thought he might grab on to me and swear that he would never let go for the rest of his life. He did not. He had learned something about survival. He had grown up, I knew that much, because he looked into my eyes and said, “You’ll look after yourself for me.” I could not speak, but I drew a smile on my face as a promise.

  “You’ll look after yourself for me,” I finally managed, the croak of an afraid but obedient girl.

  The farmer nodded. Done, his nod said: All said, all set. “We have thought of everything,” he said out loud. “You have your papers and you’ll be Natalya. You have your extra clothes and your money. You have your memories. We have our lunch and our dinner.”

  “I have all of those things,” I confirmed. “Wait,” I said, taking the papers out of their leather envelope and unfolding them. “How old am I?”

  “Twenty years old,” the farmer’s wife said.

  I looked for a birth date. “Nineteen twenty-five,” I said, “June sixth. Twenty years old.” That number did not seem big enough to hold even part of what I was carrying.

  Solomon’s eyes started to soften up and fill with water. “I’m not leaving you,” he said.

  “No, I’m leaving you,” I told him. “You are not doing anything wrong.”

  “Where will you go?” Solomon asked, suddenly realizing he did not know which direction to picture his mother walking in. Would I be in the high, snowy mountains? Would I huddle in the wheat and make myself flat and easy to overlook? I took the compass out of my pocket and gave it to him. “I will always be in one of these directions. No matter how big the map is, I’m somewhere on it.”

  “Don’t ask her when she will be back,” the farmer scolded, though Solomon had not said the dangerous thing.

  “What is your name?” the farmer’s wife asked.

  “My name is Natalya Volkov.”

  “Go on, Natalya. The world waits for you.” She gave me a pat on the head.

  I put a piece of paper in Solomon’s hand. He did not open it right away but let it warm in his palm.

  “You are my love,” I whispered in his ear.

  “We are our love,” he whispered back.

  The farmer shepherded me down to the path. I imagined Solomon watching each of our footsteps, each of the impressions we left in the dirt. The cloud we kicked up hung in the air before falling back down. He watched until we went around the corner and he could hear us more than see us. He listened then, trying to amplify the sound of his mother’s body crossing over the earth.

  “Time to go inside,” the farmer’s wife said.

  “I’m listening to her go,” he replied.

  “You can’t hear her. She’s gone.”

  “I’m listening.”

  The farmer’s wife stood there beside him until the sun changed the color of the grass. Every so often she prodded him, “Now we can go inside.”

  My son continued to stand there when the night was smeared everywhere. There was a sliver of a moon, a cut in the solid black, and three stars, which would disappear when he looked too hard at them.

  “I see you, stars,” he said to them. “Why don’t you go on inside?” he suggested to the farmer’s wife.

  “I’m not going to leave you. I’m your mother.” So they stood together and the farmer’s wife tried to hear but heard nothing and Solomon tried to hear and heard something and the stars pecked their way out, breaking the darkness everywhere. Solomon did not point out the now familiar formations.

  They did not go inside again and again. A hundred times over they stayed exactly where they were.

  In Solomon’s palm, the compass warmed and the note softened. Solomon, it said, Milk, Wheat, Baby, Farmer, Home, Stars, Stars. You survive this. I know for a fact. Mother, Remember.

  “What are you looking at?” t
he farmer’s wife asked.

  “A note,” he said.

  “It’s too dark to read anything. We’re standing outside in total blackness.”

  “I know what it says,” he told her.

  “I’m ready to go inside,” she prodded.

  “Wheat, wheat, mud,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Stars, stars, stars.”

  “I do not know how to talk to you.”

  “Mother,” he said.

  “That’s me,” she pleaded.

  “Mother, mother,” he said.

  “Me, me,” she answered.

  “No. Only one you.”

  They did not go inside at all that night. They did not go inside but instead made themselves warm by huddling together on the ground. Solomon kept hearing me make my way. He heard me kick rocks and swing my arms. He heard the sound of my suitcase brushing up against my leg. Both of them listened to the breathing earth.

  THE BOOK OF SKELETONS

  The farmer and I walked silently; even our feet whispered with the ground. I was the one leading us, and we were not going to the train yet. The farmer was confused, fidgety. The woman he had bargained so easily with, who had gone limp in his very arms, now demanded to be followed. I could not feel the specifics of my own body—my hair caught in the button of my dress, my feet tired, my face cold. My brain felt like a beehive. All I knew was that I was walking away from my only known relative and I was doing it as a favor. The only gift I could give my son was the absence of myself.

  “Are you angry?” the farmer asked, suddenly.

  “What?”

  “You haven’t spoken to me since we left.”

  “Angry?” As if I could know, as if it could change anything. “You don’t care how I feel.” I said this as fact. Not something I was sorry about, or something I wished to change.

  “But I have been very nice to you. I have been nicer than you probably deserve,” the farmer said. His clear eyes told me he meant this. I looked away. The farmer’s voice sounded higher to me. It was the voice of a boy with a question he could not figure out how to ask. He told me I was making his wife happy. I was generous. The choice I had made was the only sensible one.

  “My son will not die because he is related to me. That’s a gift and you’re the ones who gave it to us. I’ll spend my life being grateful for that. I’ll spend my life trying to forgive it.”

  Fear, that dependable dog, would not be fed out of my hand anymore. Everything worth losing had already been lost.

  I remembered the way back, remembered the line of pines at the edge of the field, the vein of granite, the small hill and the dip on the other side. We walked in tight circles, looking for what was left. I did not panic. I knew my boy would have waited for me to kiss him goodbye.

  “I don’t think you should come over here,” the farmer said through the wind.

  “My son is there,” I said.

  “It’s not a good way to see him.”

  I came and stood over the pile. “His bones,” I said.

  The farmer was not looking at the bones. He saw matted old muscles, dry, chewed sinew. He saw rot. He saw a body feasted on by birds and worms.

  The farmer fell to the ground. “He could have been my son.”

  I picked up a long, thin bone. “He was my son,” I said. He was my baby, my real, true boy, and this was my chance to touch him one last time.

  I went to the mattress and jumped. I jumped and I held the long leg bone. “You are my love,” I said to the bone. The mattress made sucking sounds as the grass that grew there was squashed under my feet. I said, “I absolutely remember who you are.”

  “How can this happen? How can we go on? There is so much to lose,” the farmer said. And lose it you will, I thought. The process of living is to surrender what, for a few glimmering days or years, you have been allowed to hold. But there is no such place as gone. The next thought I had hit me hard: I hoped the baby died with a patched-up heart. Please, I thought. Let us be broken together. Years from now, when Solomon’s heart finally breaks and all the beautiful rivers of hope and sorrow have canyons to run in, he will be my son again. In some sea, under a fury of stars, far away from any named place, my sons and I will collide.

  “How can we leave the baby?” the farmer asked.

  “That is my baby, my son,” I said.

  “But from now on, I love him. He is my son’s brother.” God, in his endless generosity, had found yet another thing for me to share.

  I looked up at the heavens. The stars began and continued. The moon made a lazy attempt to exist. The story of my life, of the whole world, was encoded in those lights. They were the only things that had never left me. I gathered strength because my job as a mother was not over.

  “Do you see those stars there? Those are the dog stars,” I said. “Solomon found them.”

  The farmer puzzled at the shape, tried to make a dog of it. “What else?” he asked. He could not hide his relief that I was speaking to him kindly.

  “That one is a cart. Over here is a fish.” He studied the sky.

  “I can’t find anything,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter if you see it or not. It’s there.”

  “I have taken your son,” he said.

  “I am letting you borrow him,” I answered.

  “What will you have?” he asked. Everything that ever blew into my arms had blown back out again. But snow turned to blossoms. Beneath the apple tree, the shawl I survived under now warmed the rotted core of a fallen piece of a fruit, coaxing a green shoot.

  “Your promise that you will be very kind to my son.”

  “I promise.”

  “Is there anything you need to know about being a father?”

  The farmer thought about it. He said, “I don’t know anything about being a father.”

  “Do you know what to do when Solomon gets sick?”

  “No. But we’re calling him Johan. He is a Christian now.”

  I took a sharp gasp. A new pain: a lost bit of healthy flesh, stabbed. Just keep being the mother, I said to myself. Let my arms grow so long I can wipe his tears from the other side of the earth. “When Johan, your son, gets sick, a cool cloth is the most important thing. And water to drink. But he’s going to tell you he’s dying even when he isn’t. If it’s winter, give him packed snow to suck on. If it’s summer, find him a place in the shade.”

  “But what if he is dying?”

  “You’ll have to learn the difference between when he’s dying and when he isn’t.”

  “Is there anything more I can give you?” the farmer asked.

  I listened to whatever made sound: the squish of the mattress, wet and unwell. The sound of the crying insects. The sound of my son’s bones rattling. The sound of the man and the heat of the man traveling across the baby’s leftovers.

  “I have my life,” I said finally. Even this—life—felt weightless. Some invisible string must have kept me tethered. When I found it, I planned to cut it and let myself float away.

  “I could give you more life,” he said. “Not because I love you.”

  “I have more life than I need for just myself,” I said.

  The farmer pulled up my dress. He did not smooth his hand over me, not even a gentle stroke. He did not come to me with any warm part of him, but one. I closed my eyes to the covered world. Nothing tried to be seen in that darkness, everything was happy to hide from me. I did not move my body away, or turn my head or say words that would have changed what happened. The farmer’s body was a body and my body was another body and the bones of my dead son rested against us both. The farmer wrestled himself in. His beard was full of dew, bright seeds, which dropped onto my face. His movements were simple and unadorned.

  A flock of ravens crossed over the farmer and me but we saw nothing of the birds. The birds were the same as the sky that night. There was a sound of flying, but only for a second, and then a sound of calling back to the ones behind. The followers answered
back, Yes, they said. We are all here together.

  “For the baby,” the farmer said, when he had climbed back down and moved the scattered bones from under him.

  The ravens went on. The ravens crossed over whatever was below but did not stop to rest there. Did not stop to acknowledge the world laid low around them.

  From then on, the road was new to me. It took only hours this time, the walk an actual, measurable distance instead of an endless journey away. I kept trying to count the steps, knowing that there would be a final one, a total number. The place I walked through was a perfect reenactment of a real world. These bushes looked exactly like real bushes. All the details had been thought of—birds of different colors and size, needles spilling out from the skirts of pine trees. Only the air was wrong. It was thin and tinny, cheaply made. Too bad, I thought, they almost got it right.

  In the afternoon the farmer said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Should I be sorry for what I did?” the farmer asked, wanting me, instead of being angry, to tell him how grateful I was.

  “Life is not replaceable,” I told him. The proof was all around me: the made-up bluebird drinking from a puddle of newly melted snow, as if something that precious could be real. The real bird, mangy and cold, was hidden away somewhere.

  The farmer’s voice went up, “Forgive the approximation. Life is life. I tried my hardest.”

  I did not answer.

  “No!” the farmer suddenly yelled. “Say thank you! Tell me thank you for saving your son! I’m doing everything I can think to do for you,” he growled. “You have our money and our passport and I’m even trying to give you a companion. I’m trying to make you a family.”

  He pushed me into the tall trees along the road.