No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  “You have done enough,” I said. “Please stop trying to help me.”

  “We have to be grateful for what we can offer each other,” he said, deflating me. I punched his back and slammed my feet against his anklebones. I fought. I remember twisting beneath him, but he did not have to struggle hard. I was weak. I posed no threat to him. I was a source, that was all, a well for him to draw upon.

  The sticks cracked with every push and the leaves broke into a thousand crushed squares and none of the birds watched us. The moment was quick and over.

  “You don’t know what this does to me. I do not love you.”

  I did not have enough matter in me to hate him with.

  “I don’t mean any of this,” he said. “I have a family at home. A wife and a son,” he said. “I’m just trying to do what’s right.” I held my breath until my lungs prickled. I let out one long howl until my chest was sore and empty. The fake forest was mawkish around me. Greens too green, sky too crystalline to be possible. Not on a day like this. The poor rabbit burying his nose in the underbrush would surely starve by nightfall, finding nothing but pieces of wood someone had carved to look like seeds.

  A buzzing, rolling, mechanical city met us soon. This invention had outgrown its creator. Hammer together scraps of wood into the shape of legs and in the morning the body is up and walking. By midday, your tools are missing and the roads are battered by wheels. The farmer and I stood on the very edge of the road while people passed us in cars. The cars spit out gray smoke, hot and thick.

  The town was full of people, walking, driving, riding bicycles, yelling, wearing hats and carrying large leather bags, reading the newspaper, smoking and standing there with the sun in their eyes, waiting for whatever came next.

  “Where have I always been?” I asked. The farmer put his hand on my shoulder.

  “This is the world,” he said. “This is the regular, loud world.” The cars spit dust up at children poking their heads out of second-story windows. The children called to other children on the street, broke down in giggles. The scene unfolded in slow motion. A gray cat tore at a liver, which turned his face dark red. One of the children tripped over the cat and fell into a puddle and the liver rolled and the cat squawked and the other children’s faces burned up with laughter. No one laughed harder than the boy in the puddle, who was on his knees, holding his belly. His friends came to him, took him by the elbows and picked him up. These boys on this street had just lived one of the stories they would tell and tell, a story whose medicine would be strong enough to draw laughter for all the years of their lives. One of the boys kicked the liver back to the cat, who resumed his feasting.

  “So many people are still alive,” I said.

  “These people are different from yours. No one’s trying to kill these ones,” the farmer said. He led me slowly through the streets. The windows in the cars winked light at us. Small pieces of trash were ground into the sidewalk. A pair of dogs approached us, looked up with polished and hopeful eyes, waited to be saved. The farmer tossed them nothing and I had nothing to toss.

  “Your train,” the farmer said, gesturing.

  The machine was churning and soot-black. I studied its huge and numerous wheels, its doors and windows and platforms and chains. The farmer gave me a ticket for the Black Sea port city. He gave me the name of the office where I should buy passage on a ship to the New World—that’s what he called it.

  “I already lived in a new world,” I told him. “I’m not sure I can manage another.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “but this is a nice place where you’ll live your life out. Your entry papers are all set. Everything is prepared.” He was talking quickly, anxious to get to the part where I was gone and he was free to be the father he had dreamed of being. He said he did not know what had happened to me out there in the fields, or before, but that he was sure the world would make sense to me again soon. He wrote my name in his dirty arm with his fingernail: Natalya. I nodded. He added: Live. I nodded again. On the other arm he wrote: Sorry. I nodded a third time. I scratched two words back: Good Father. He smiled. His whole face rose up. He did not pay me the same compliment, and I was glad because I would not have deserved it.

  The farmer waited alone on the platform. I watched two women run to each other and exclaim utter delight with their arms wrapped around each other. One handed the other a round box, which popped open to reveal a light purple hat with a small robin perched on its brim. The hatted woman looked at me and I looked at her. We observed each other, probably misunderstanding everything. To her, the farmer could have been my brother, missing me already, the next visit years away. We could have been lovers whose parents had forbidden our union. We could have been a mother and a father, doing all the heroic and vicious things we knew to protect the child we each claimed. The train cried and began to drag itself out of the station. Every single person on the platform, absolutely all of them, waved. They had practiced, and they performed beautifully. The farmer waved, looked at the ground and then waved again. I wept into my cupped palms, where a pool collected, salty and warm, which I lapped up like the gray cat.

  I tasted the dead and I tasted the living.

  THE BOOK OF THE LOCKED-AWAY HEAVENS

  When a warship appeared on the horizon, Francesco brought more paper but no more envelopes. Igor said, “Aren’t we going swimming?”

  “We’re staying here.”

  “How long to ride even a slow, crippled horse to my home?”

  “We’re staying here.”

  “I’m talking about the mail. What is the slowest possible time?”

  “Nothing leaves this room from now on. You are a prisoner of war and I am your guard. Those are the only orders I have ever been given.”

  “No reason to be defensive,” Igor said. “It’s just that I was planning to go swimming.”

  Francesco punched Igor once, hard, in the face. It was a terrible, exhilarating feeling. His fist came back bloody with heroism. “No one asked what you wanted.”

  The islanders tracked the warship as it came ever closer. Francesco paced, practicing for the arrival. He would play the just and righteous guard, carrying out his duties with a firm but fair hand. No one had given him orders to empty his prison.

  Igor spent the wait writing furiously in a notebook whose pages he did not tear out and send away. It was a manual to his sons on how to live, as best he could tell them.

  Open your eyes to wake up. It is possible to be awake with your eyes closed, but you will not be able to see anything around you.

  When you are given bread, try to enjoy it right away. Bread right away is better than bread later.

  If you can’t remember the stars’ shapes, make more up. Sometimes you have to make your own heavens.

  If you have children, which I hope you do, do not get taken prisoner so that you cannot see them when they are five, six, eight. Do not fall asleep in the barn and get taken away in a car, even if the island is warm and beautiful where you are going. If your children are boys, name them for kings. If your children are girls, name them for mothers.

  You must already know everything I know. What can I teach you? I know how to eat and I know how to play checkers. This is a game played on the diagonal. One of us will win.

  Do whatever your mother tells you to. She is probably right. She will be thinking of what will be best. If you see me again, I will try to tell you what is best, too. I hope your mother and I will agree. We will try to. You should try to agree with people, too.

  Solomon used to know some of the prayers. Do you still know them? I know the sound of them, but not the words. Try practicing them so you do not forget. Roll them around in your mouth. This is one thing that I do with your names so that you feel close to me all the time. Your names, Lena, Solomon and Beautiful Baby, are in my mouth. Your names go down my throat when I swallow. I carry you everywhere.

  “What have I missed?” Igor asked through the bars.

>   “Cooking. Cleaning up. Walking. Serving of tea. Staying dry in the rain,” Francesco said.

  “Help me remember.”

  Dear Igor, Francesco thought, I can survive anything with you.

  In the afternoon, the huge warship docked, and a hundred men disembarked.

  “Are you with Mussolini or the Allies?” the biggest man yelled in badly accented Italian. The old man who ran the taverna shrugged and told them, “We’re for whoever you are. We just want to live.”

  “Good. We need supplies.”

  The soldiers took food from people’s cellars and medicine from their cupboards. They gathered rope from people’s boats and shoes from their closets. They came to the jail where Francesco was sitting at his desk with his feet up looking as much in control as he could. Igor was cowering in the corner of the cell. Three soldiers came to the prison door and said in unison, “Is that it? One prisoner?” Francesco, so consumed with his duty to Igor, had forgotten to think of his jail as deficient.

  A prayer slipped out of Igor’s mouth. It was the first time he had prayed since his arrival on the island and the long-lost taste of those words was dusty and sweet.

  One soldier came to the bars, studied Igor. “Wait, are you Jewish?” he asked softly. Igor looked up at him. He did not know the answer to this question. Once, in another place and time, he had been a Jew in a world full of Jews. “Why are you still holding this man?” the soldier asked Francesco. “You should have freed him long ago.”

  “What?” Francesco and Igor both asked at the same time. Francesco squeezed his fist, but this did not stop the feeling that everything he loved was slipping away. And for the prisoner, freedom was a sharp word. Free to go where? Igor thought.

  The soldier kicked the bars of the cage, making it rattle. “Italy has joined the Allies, or hadn’t you heard?” he mocked. He moved into the light and Igor could read the name embroidered on his uniform: Weinberg. “Do it now!” the soldier yelled, and Francesco took the key from around his neck and unlocked the door. Igor stood up, came to the opening. Igor watched Francesco’s shaking hands turn the key over and over.

  “He’s been good to me. Please don’t hurt him,” Igor said.

  Weinberg turned to Francesco and said, “I’m watching you.” The soldiers began to leave.

  “Excuse me,” Igor said, “free to go where?”

  The soldier’s gaze fell to the floor. “I wouldn’t go home, I wouldn’t go looking for my family, if I were you.” The soldier looked out the open door where the day was bright and windless. “You’ll find a new life. Bless you.”

  THE BOOK OF THE MOVING WORLD

  I looked out at the spinning grass, knitting itself into a blur next to me, the early spring trees behind standing defined. I thought of the number of steps it would take to make this same journey. The number of times I would swing my arms. Out there I would be able to close my eyes for a few strokes without tripping, I would be able to memorize the ground and move over it blind. Outside, the number of gusts, rustles and shrieking birds. The number of beetles making a slow track across the path. All the bees roving for sweet juices. The clouds sometimes a single drift. Inside the train, everything was constant. The movement was not in added-up single steps but one long thrust forward. So decisive, so sure.

  When the conductor came to check my ticket, I said, “I need to go home.”

  “I don’t know where that is,” he said carefully.

  “I don’t either.”

  “Which direction?”

  “I don’t know where I am.”

  “You’re in Russia. You are headed southeast toward Odessa.”

  “I’m in a country?” I asked. This idea seeming unthinkable.

  “Where else?”

  “The grass. The fields. The mountains.”

  “Do you know where you want to go?” the conductor asked.

  “I want to go home.”

  He tore a corner off my ticket and shook his head. “Tell me if you can get a better idea than that.” Outside it started to rain. The windows became foggy. The trees looked weighed down and ashamed, the same as me.

  The train had a car to eat in where they made cups of coffee for anyone who asked. They dropped leaves of tea into baskets. At each table two or three men relaxed, feet crossed, cups steaming. They were enjoying their journey. I wanted to ask them where they were going and where they had been. What they had survived. Which side they were on. They looked like men whose wives were preparing, at this moment, for their arrival. Pinning long hair, ironing dresses, wrestling sons into clean shirts.

  I sat alone at a table and let the relaxed men relax. “Sir,” I said to the white-coated waiter, trying to sound like someone else, someone sane, someone with one name, one family, one story. “Do you know where a village called Zalischik is?”

  He shook his head, not understanding me. Why did nothing I said make sense to anyone?

  “Home,” I said.

  He said, “We have tea, we have coffee, we have cake.”

  “All right,” I said, pressing a gold coin between my fingers. “I’ll have those things, if that’s all you can offer.” Perhaps home was simply gone—a concept done away with.

  I dipped my finger in the coffee and then touched it to my lips. “Do I like coffee?” I whispered to the stranger of myself. I dipped my finger in the tea and then touched it to my lips. “Is tea better?” I ate the cake quickly. I knew I liked cake. I sucked the cubes of sugar the waiter brought. I felt the coffee, milky brown, and the tea, clear and precise, roll down my throat and land warm. I watched the surface shake rhythmically with the rocking train. The objects in front of me seemed solid and real, it was the ones not in front of me that kept shifting.

  The waiter came back to take my empty cups away. “Would you like to look at a map?” he asked. “I could bring you a map.”

  “A map?” I asked.

  “Maps are supposed to have all the places.”

  “Thank you, yes, please, yes.” I had made sense to him and he to me. I wanted to shake his hand, but I stopped myself. I brushed the crumbs off the table and into my hand. I shook them into my mouth. The waiter spread the map out on my table.

  “This is where we are,” he said, pointing to a line with little crosses over it. “Train tracks.” He moved his finger along the line.

  “This is everything?” I asked.

  The map showed so many names. Smolensk. Kursk. Stalingrad. The names were pasted to the earth. The mountains were jagged lines, the rivers were curling blue.

  “Has all this always been here?”

  “The names have changed. Things move around, I’m sure. But for our purposes, I’d say so.”

  “Even in the beginning of the world?” He looked at me blankly.

  “There’s a list on the back,” the waiter said, “arranged by spelling.” And there it was, right between Zalim and Zalizyki. In real life it had been a small island with the river curled around it. On the map it was the same.

  “That’s the place I’m from. That is home,” I said, and my finger covered it completely. The river was squashed. “Show me again where we are now. And show me where we came from.”

  The waiter pointed and pointed. “The train stops nearby. You could walk there.” I was still thinking about the journey my sons and I had made over all this land. I began at the place where the river curled and walked my fingers over the in-between. “That’s what happened,” I said. I could say this, and the map acted as proof. To start the world over, upturn everything we knew, had I hammered and nailed and rallied and campaigned? No. I had spoken it. Told a story. Still, when I looked at the map—the lines, the differing greens, the tiny etchings of rivers—I could not see what had really happened.

  By the time the long white light of the afternoon had tired itself out and lay splattered orange on each rain-wet surface, I was on my way home. Riding in a warm cave inside me, unknown to me then, was the stew of a person. Nothing sensible yet. No specifics. Not even i
n miniature. But if left alone, the being would do the dance it had to do. Its body would freight in the needed supplies. The blood would stay thick and protective. Divisions and additions.

  What I could feel were the wheels of the train heating up the tracks, and the distance closing in between my home and myself.

  The first to greet me were our sheep, which floated dead on top of a lake that used to be their pen. The wool was beaded with water. The eyes of the sheep were rotted-out pits—anything could have made its way inside. The smell caught in my throat and made me gag.

  Our streets were soaked with mud and our stones were turned on their sides, making the path unsmooth. It was no longer a street but a pile of jagged rocks. The windows in all our houses were smashed and vacant, eaten away like the sheep’s eyes. Everything was blinded. Was this a real place?

  “You are the house where I had my babies,” I said at my own rotted door. When I pulled it open I was flooded by water. Free now, the water spread wide. I walked through the slush of the house, which was empty. No pots remained in the kitchen. No pillows remained on the beds. No books. No spoons. No people. “No one is here?” I asked the soggy house. No table, no rocking chair, no poker to stir the coals in the fire. Someone had moved us out. The water had made boats of the few items left inside: one broken chair floated, one wooden bowl floated. My sons’ mattress remained, draped like a dead animal over the sink. It was green with mold.

  Water had driven in and my house had dutifully held it. Fill it with rugs and chairs, fill it with children and baking bread, fill it with cabbage. Fill it with all the water in the world.

  My walls were a crawl of mold, turned bright green, eaten down by moss. “How long has it been like this?” I asked the ghosts I could not see. “When did you go?”

  If the ghosts tried to answer, their mouths were useless. I wished they would try to rustle my clothes, cool my skin or warm it, put their hands in my hair. Did they want to tell me they waited as long as they could? That they had taken care of my mothers and fathers and grandparents and siblings? Had they tried to remember me even after I left? They were empty wind by then. They were sucking mud at my feet. They were flaking bark on the trunks of fallen-down trees. Crushed rocks, clods of dirt, dried water, blown air.