No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  At the first house I was raised in I stood in front of the door. I remembered the night I had tried to come home, and, of all the huge and complicated things that might have stood in my way, what had kept me out was a simple lock. I could not bear that again, so I left the big blue door out of it. I hung my clothes on the branches of an apple tree ravenous with white blossoms and climbed through the window where the water was ankle-deep and muddy. The smell was rich and dark. “No one is here? Was I right to leave when I did? Is anyone alive?” I called. My voice echoed off the water. I felt as if I were in an ancient cave.

  I waded to the counter where I had watched my first mother chop cabbages every day for the first eleven years of my life. I splashed to the far wall where the fireplace was a dark pit, then to the place where my first mother and my first father had slept, had made me, had made my sister and brother. This was the first time I had been in the house since I was traded away. I scoured the bottom for cabbages but found none, dragging up handfuls of mud. I pulled up a marble and a soaked handkerchief. I wiped my face on the cloth, which only left me dirtier.

  The second house I was raised in had fallen to one side and lost one of its walls. It held no pond inside—it was an empty skeleton. “No one is here?” I called, my skin cold but dried now by my clothes, my hair still dripping. “No one at all is anywhere? Anywhere here?” None of Kayla and Hersh’s beautiful things were displayed on the mantel. No soft Persian rugs were at my feet. The story of their lives was silent. I wanted to say something for them, some prayer, but I realized I hardly knew them. Bless Kayla and her desires. Bless Hersh and his attempts to fill them. May someone somewhere adopt you both.

  I went into houses I had never entered before. Everything had sunk into softened ground. All the windows were too low, some of the doors buried enough to be sealed shut.

  The barber’s was tiny and dark, all four walls tipped toward each other, a single pair of scissors, shining as if just polished, hanging from a nail on the wall. To the people who had lived there, no place would have mattered more.

  Outside, the square was more beautiful than I remembered. Even destroyed, the windows had careful scrolls framing them, the roofs were pointed and red tiled, the doorways arched. The greengrocer’s was painted yellow, the butcher’s was pale blue, the jeweler’s little sliver of a shop was pink with white trim. This place was new to me, and yet completely familiar. It was as if I, a girl, were meeting myself as an old woman. The same body, the same place. Except.

  The widow’s house was a graveyard of jars. I kicked them around so that something in the world would talk to me. They clattered but made no sense. Yet something revealed itself: I saw a small piece of yellow paper lying on the ground with a tack stuck in it. The ink had run, but I could still read the words. Dear Ones, We did not know what to do but hide when the soldiers arrived. There was a lot of shouting, then running toward the river and gunshots, then quiet. We waited for weeks, but none of you came home. We will not forget to include you in our story, which in spite of everything has a happy ending: we have been swept up by handsome Russian giants. If anyone is alive, write to us in Krasnograd. Love, Regina and Zelda. And there it was: my sister was saved. It was almost as good as being saved myself—my shadow had made it. Good news tasted like food to me. I folded the letter up and held it tightly. What else would I find? I said, “Thank you,” out loud to the roomful of jars, listening to me like a hundred ears.

  The barn, I discovered, was where all our belongings had gone. I had to jump from desk to dresser to table to saddle horse. The room was a swimming pool stacked with towers of belongings. It smelled like mold and rotting wood and urine. I looked up and saw, complete but for one shattered bullet wound, the summer sky. Around me toys, mittens, boots and chair legs floated. Stacks of dish towels, hammers, worn wool coats, boxes of rusted jewelry, and rolling pins would have to wait a long time for this town to come alive, to need tools again. The piano, which had arrived along with our stranger, washed up on the shores of the old world, did not stand upright—it kneeled with its broken smile in the water.

  I looked for but did not find a body to carry out and put in the ground. I did find the bones of some chickens, gathered nicely in the highest shelf of empty nests. I imagined them, wings folded, waiting to be saved.

  Standing on the pedestal that used to live in the square and had been host to the long-dead war hero, now missing, I reached up and dragged my hand along the constellated wall. “Solomon would have known your name,” I said to the stars. One white tile was loose so I pulled it off and put it into my small bag. “This is the Solomon star,” I said. “Whatever it was called before, now it’s called Solomon.” I had nothing, and since I did not know what I needed, I decided to take whatever was being offered.

  At the top of a stack of books I found the soft underfeathers of chickens and geese, gathered in an old sack. They even smelled soft. I tied a knot at the top of the sack and put it into my bag.

  And there was one more thing tacked to a floating island of wood. It was a letter, and the letter was addressed to Lena, My Wife, Zalischik.

  “Do not joke with me,” I said to the room and I listened for its reply. “Is this another letter for me?” The room echoed and dropped water down. I took the letter with my name on it. On the back was written: Igor, Jail, Sardinia, Italy. Inside, one piece of paper.

  Dear L,

  I am alive, did you know? I am getting to be a very, very fast swimmer. I can swim from the big rock all the way to the sandy beach in a matter of seconds. I learned how to make lasagna. Do you know what that is? My friend Francesco taught it to me, actually his mother did. How are my sons? Are you alive? What is the weather like where you are? Remember the time we climbed to the top of the apple tree and fell asleep in the branches? I hope you are alive.

  Love, I

  “This letter is for me,” I said, holding it up. “Am I alive?

  “This letter is for me!” I yelled as loud as I could, loud enough that my throat hurt. “Nobody is here! The Beautiful Baby is dead! Solomon is saved! I went northeast! The world is full of trains! Have I been gone a hundred years? Igor has become a very, very fast swimmer!”

  I looked at the letter again, tore my name off—Dear L—and shredded it into a fine snow. “You left me completely alone!” I screamed to Igor. “Our boys are gone. What am I doing here? Why am I not dead?” I threw the snow of my name up into the air. “What am I going to do now?”

  I listened, but heard no one answer. I put the bag of feathers down on a dry shelf and waved the muddy handkerchief and the letter in surrender. I tossed some chicken bones up like confetti and they splashed down, a sad, sinking music.

  On the back of the note with a pencil that floated beneath a desk, I wrote:

  Dear I,

  Why is everyone always leaving each other? I almost remember who you are, but I don’t remember who I am. Do you?

  Love, L

  “Take me away! I’m yours!” I yelled. “I’m ready to die here!” The temple’s dumb eyes stared past me, did not acknowledge me or wink in camaraderie. The trees outside did not wave their branches.

  Even though it might have been a relief to see a group of men in tall black boots come out of the fields and take me away, they did not. No one arrested me or shot me in the chest or dragged me away by my feet. No one whispered in my ear or brushed my hair. No one told me to be careful since I was going to be a mother for the third time. No one sat down nearby and opened a newspaper. No one ate an apricot and spit the pit at my feet. No one blew his nose or scratched his cheek or sighed. In a world filled with millions of people, I was left absolutely alone.

  I looked at the pool around me. “Will I be a very fast swimmer like my husband?” I asked it. “Is that what I’m supposed to find out?”

  The surface was a shimmering thing. Above: air; objects that used to matter; the stars; the new world. Below: mud, rot; everything buried, everything lost.

  I reached my arms up
over my head and stood tall. I pictured myself a champion diver on a very tall board with the entire ocean around me. I imagined myself in a bathing suit and a cap. I filled the shore with cheerers. Each man had a hat he was waving. Each woman had a handkerchief. Each child, a banner with my name on it. It was not water I would dive into. It was another world—someplace I had never been. I believed, and that was a feeling I had forgotten. The flutter of wings in my chest.

  The surface of the world was permeable—a line meant to be broken. All I had to do was jump through.

  My arms made a sweep and my toes pushed off the edge of the pedestal and my dive was in motion. I cut through the air like a huge bird, the noises and the colors disappeared around me as if it were all one great arc of sky.

  The lake took me in, clothes and all. The water was enough. It took my head and belly—my bones—gently down, all our prayers, turned now to water. I sunk down to the bottom of the lake and let all the air out of my lungs. I sat there as long as I could, as heavy as I could, and listened. It felt like the moment before I was born, and I did not want to rush it. I was beneath, below, under, beyond. The water held me completely, tight. It got into my ears and nose, between my toes and fingers. There were almost no sounds: only the pop of bubbles that escaped my nose and floated to the surface. Only the water sealing my ears. I opened my mouth and let the dirty water in. I felt my hair lift up and float. In front of me, my hands were hardly visible, just ghosts. “I am alone beneath the earth,” I said into the water, which muted my words and carried them up as air.

  I heard the sound of my heart, as always. When my lungs prickled, I had a choice: breathe water, or breathe air. I let my mouth flood, but could not make myself take the water deeper. I pushed myself up, and filled my chest.

  The pool sang when I wrung my hair out onto the surface, returning what I had taken.

  • VII •

  THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE, AWAY

  The miles back to the train were marked by water dripped from my hair and clothes. I left trails on the path and shivered with cold. I had my two small bags—one with my papers, a chip of the Solomon star, a muddy handkerchief that might have belonged to my first mother and a letter from my husband who was having a fun time down south. I wanted not to be angry with him, to feel only the relief of a wife who discovers her husband is safe and happy, and I did feel that, but there I was in my wracked body, in my empty village, alone. If I could have summoned him back at that instant, had someone to walk those miles to the train with me, I would have forgiven him all the comfort of his months away.

  In the second bag were goose feathers, packed tight but even still, weighing very little. My feet made pools in the mud and all along my path were the twisted bodies of worms. Rain had drawn them out and then left them stranded. Some were balled up, some were stretched so long and thin they looked like the beginnings of snakes. Some were in the shape of letters. An S, a P, an O. I tried to read their message as I walked but found nothing but random deformations.

  “Stop talking to me,” I said to the worms. “I’m not listening.”

  I stood under the yellow lights of the station platform, holding everything I had not lost, while a herd of moths crashed again and again into the lightbulbs. Banging their heads against something so promising.

  I was asked six times in the first hour for my papers, which I gave easily, looking out the window, thinking, Do I die here? Is this the end?

  “Natalya Volkov,” I told them each time. “My sister is sick in Odessa. I’ll be with her when she dies.”

  “Tell me your husband’s name. Tell me the names of your children.”

  “Volkov. Johan. I have no children.”

  The train stopped and hissed. People walked through the corridor, spoke words muffled by the walls. In my compartment, I sat up with the bag of feathers behind my head and the bag of treasures on my lap. Outside my window: the sea, tall snowy mountains, a lake filled with geese.

  I thought about getting out at the goose lake and staying there to collect all of their softest feathers. It would be an agreeable life, my feet dangling in what would surely be clean and cool water, with a goose on my lap, gently pulling the down from its belly. I would sing to the goose, if the goose wanted. I would smooth its top feathers down and clean any dried muck off its beak. When it waddled away it would be happier. I would stuff pillows for everyone. People would come from all towns nearby to buy my feathers. They would send them to their relatives, who, far away in some new world, would rejoice at the packages. Who would tear open their old pillows and pour the rough old down out their windows onto the streets, where the people below would be covered. Snowbound.

  An old woman snapped the door to my compartment open. She carried two bags and a cane that she did not walk with but held at the ready like a well-used weapon. Her face was an oiled hide. She said, “Don’t talk to me while I eat,” and unpacked a piece of chicken, a piece of bread and an ironed napkin. I nodded. The world slipped past. She reminded me of my old music teacher, the widow, and I wondered what this woman could teach me before our paths divided. Games of chance? Fistfighting?

  “What are you looking at?” she asked. I apologized and turned away. She slathered at the mouth while she chewed. Her hair, I was surprised to notice, was impeccably twisted into a complicated, youthful brown chignon. It was shiny. Her hair could have been going to a fancy party, if only the rest of her would leave it alone. It occurred to me that this woman had probably been alive all along—all that time when I was living in an infant world, inventing rules to live by, she had been tearing meat off bones and wiping the grease from her leathery face with a starched white napkin. She might have been beautiful. She might have had children and grandchildren. Her memory of the last few decades would be absolutely different from mine. Unrecognizable.

  Her eyes tunneled into mine, trying to root me out. “You want to know what I think?” She paused, sucking at her chicken bone. “God is a spineless pansy. Bless him.” The woman shook her napkin out. Grease had made it almost transparent. With it she polished her cane. I could not figure out what to do with my hands. I scratched my cheek, rolled my sleeve and made a fist within the space of a few seconds. The woman glared at me, angry that I appeared to be a worthless pupil. Still, she continued, “I know he exists, because—look around. Only God could think of a place as deranged and gorgeous as this. But the problem is that he won’t tell us yes or no. He’s very impressionable. We say, Everyone has to wear a fancy hat and pray on Sunday and he says, All right, let’s see it. We say, No one can eat meat from a pig and he says, Good idea. Someone else says, Everyone has to eat meat from a pig and he says, Fine with me. Someone says, Let’s kill everyone with brown hair and he says, Sure, why don’t you try it out.”

  The woman examined the sheen of her cane. The handle bore the shape of a rabbit’s head, long ears pointed back. It looked like it was sniffing the air for a predator. I waited for her to give me some kind of answer. Tell me what to believe in. “God just likes a good story,” she grunted, and then her head fell forward and she went to sleep. Her cane rolled back and forth.

  The woman snored. Her cane fell onto the floor and I picked it up to pet the rabbit. I could practically feel it tremble at my strange touch. “I won’t hurt you or try to be your friend,” I said, placing it back on the woman’s lap. The rabbit rolled, looked at me, looked away.

  Together with me, as the fabric of my seat, the planks of the floor, the tracks beneath and the hot, rolling wheels, was the fact of each beautiful, terrible thing. I could still feel everyone I had ever loved—the misery of their absence and joy of their lives on either side of a scale, each trying to tip it. Past the mountains a city no longer stood. A snaking river filled with blood. Yet the grass was as green as it could be, and the water as blue and the sky as clean and smokeless. Above good or bad, our God must have admired contrast.

  The stations and their names were a scramble of letters. With only the occasional station light fil
ling our compartment, we rocked through the dark. The old woman snorted awake, smoothed her hair. She searched for something in her coat pocket, scratched a match to life. Her face in the firelight was jagged and disturbed. With her free hand she tried to unlace her shoe. The match burned down, the woman yelped quietly, blew it out and lit another.

  “So?” I asked.

  “So?” She struggled with a knot.

  “What do we do?” I took the match from her so she could use both hands.

  “Thank you,” she conceded. She spread her toes like a fan, rolled her ankles. “Try to be kind, try to have fun. Enjoy more chicken. That’s it. On we go into the night.”

  Two scrub-cheeked young soldiers woke me in the morning. The old woman was gone. Had someone met her at the train station? I wondered. Had she simply disappeared into the darkness? What kitchen table or graveyard had she been journeying to? “Good morning,” I said, and the soldiers studied my papers.

  In the next station we had time to get out and stretch. I ate a long roll of bread. I went outside and stood on the marble steps. I could see the tops of huge buildings over the trees. Their rounded and pointed heads reflected the sun. They shot the sun back in stabs, which sliced the sky. A policeman came up to me and asked for my papers. I did as I always did: answered all the questions, tried to look Russian. Do I die here? I asked myself. Is this where I die? But the guard gave the papers back and went on. There were birds on the steps, big black birds dropping and picking up scraps. Their eyes were yellow and sharp. I tossed them part of my bread and they tore it, hopped toward me, stared at me. I saluted them but the blackbirds stood still at my feet, waiting for more of my kindness.