And inside? Inside me? The stew was a tiny form. The form nested, warm, and the form was you. You got right to work growing a heart. But I still did not know you were there. I sat, I watched the world speed past, and both our hearts rumbled away inside, clanging their cages.
You made yourself a hole of a mouth in order to say later, “What is that there, what kind of tree? The one with the shaking leaves?” You made tunnels for ears so that I could tell you, “Cottonwoods. There must be a river.” I ate bread and we were both fed by it.
What mattered was not that around the train there were low green hills with yellow flowers cupped and shaking. What mattered was not that we clanked over bridges with rivers tumbling underneath, which I could almost hear. What mattered was not that there were church steeples or brick towns or even far-off mountains ahead. Instead, it was the miles behind that counted. There was a river now between my home and me. There was a brick town and a church steeple. There was a man riding a bicycle, a field full of unbloomed sunflowers. There were so many blades of sharp grass and tracks of dry dirt and puddles and trunks of decapitated trees between us. Cities erupted from the plains and craned their necks to see the growing distance between here, now here, now here and home. Even this field, even this stream, even that fallen-down wall that does not keep sheep in were between me and home. Even the sheep who jumped over it. Even the ants crawling crazy circles over the dirt, carrying it down into their rooms, standing on one another’s polished backs.
Everything was between. And yet, something else kept being ahead.
THE BOOK OF LOVES
Because the night was clean and they were hidden inside it, Igor and Francesco sneaked out to the night-dark sea—past shut-up windows where the sleep of war-frightened people was being slept, past the animals whose job it was to die in time for dinner and to give milk not for their own babies but for someone else’s. Igor and Francesco took their clothes off, every last scrap of the made world, and lowered themselves into the cool brine. Their bodies were surrounded by halos of glowing phosphorus. The sound of stones rolling over one another’s backs at the bottom and the sound of wind shucking the surface of the sea. Igor put his head under. Francesco watched the halo of his friend below him, then looked at the real, perfect stars overhead. Each single dot was entirely distinct, alone against the black question of the sky.
“Am I really free?” Igor asked.
“You are really free.”
Igor thought about the possibilities for this. He could go in search of his family, who everyone seemed to believe must be dead. Dead—it was too big a word. But when he looked around him, he could not fathom where in that dark night I could be or how, no matter his care or diligence, we would ever happen to meet on a road, in a square, under a tree. Just because a man sets out does not mean he finds. Igor thought about trying to learn to love Carolina, trying to replace my features, glue new memories over the old ones. He could be a father again. He thought about the births of his two sons, meeting those achingly small bodies for the first time, shaking their hands and promising to protect them. Had he managed to do that, to protect? Probably not, not from here, this far away. He could not bear to leave another pair of children in the early morning, their entire bitter lives waiting at the door, snarling. He and Francesco could move into Francesco’s mother’s house and eat themselves fat, eat until they had to be rolled out into their graves. Or he could stay where he was, his own bed and his own sink and his own window. Bars to keep him in and bars to keep everything else out. His own personal guard. He kicked his legs in the cool water, watched them light up.
“It’s as decent a place to wait as any,” Igor said. “I am a very bad father and a very bad husband and probably very bad at lots of other things, too. No one has asked for me to come home. It’s true, right, that I have received no mail?”
“It’s a letter you’re waiting for? An invitation to come back?”
“I suppose so. I don’t know if anyone is alive. If my house is still standing.” Igor looked at his palms, which were cracked simply from being alive. “I guess I’m waiting for word that the world has itself figured out. That we’re through capturing. I would rather not go until I know it’s safe out there. Or until someone misses me so much they come for me.”
“You want to be safe. And loved.”
“And home. Is that so much to ask?”
“I can promise that I will do everything to protect you here. I’ll hire you, to work in the jail. We can swim at night,” Francesco said. “We’ll sleep the day away. I doubt you’ll get the same promise from anyone else.”
Igor looked at Francesco. “For a long time,” he said, “I was waiting for you to kill me. I thought you were biding your time until I was fat enough, like a goose. No matter how I added it up, there was no way the story ended without me being dead.”
“I suppose you will be dead in the end, as we all will, but only when there’s nothing else I can do to keep you alive.”
The world did not beg for Igor to put his armor on and head out to fight. He heard the sea swish and spit back out onto the shore. He heard the trees shake with wind and coax soft, thin blades of grass out of the dirt. There are enough of us fighting, the world seemed to say. Why don’t you stay home and sleep? Eat something tasty for the rest of us. Keep track of your dreams. Try to pay attention to the smell of thyme in the morning. Scratch the salt from your hair and watch it shine as it falls to the ground.
Igor said, “I think my job in the world is not to do anything. Nothing particularly good and nothing particularly bad. It’s not a very important job, and no one cares how well I do, but I’m not in it for recognition.”
“A job is a job,” Francesco said. “You know your talents.”
“What’s your job?” Igor asked.
“My job is to look after you and my mother. My job is to admire her soup and make sure you have what you need to sleep soundly.”
“We shouldn’t try to do more?”
Francesco thought about this. He thought about the men all over the world dropping bombs on one another, cocking a gun and firing—each one of these people thought they were doing the best thing. “I think we might be helping the world by not doing anything. We hurt no one. Maybe no one is helped, but at least no one is hurt.” He put his head underwater and slicked his hair back when he surfaced. “If I were a woman and you were a man. Or the other way around.” Francesco stumbled. “And if we fell in love and got married and had children . . .”
Igor looked at him with suspicion. “Okay,” he said, waiting for the rest.
“Then our children would say that if it hadn’t been for the war, they never would have existed. That family would be thanks to someone else’s fight. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Good things are born from bad things.”
“Our friendship is thanks to the war,” Igor said. “It’s kind of like a family. In a way, I guess.”
Francesco smiled brightly, took Igor’s hand and said, “One . . . two . . . three!” And they dove headfirst into the moon-flickered surface of the sea. Bombs of green light exploded around them. They laughed and kicked and dove. They met at the bottom, where they opened their eyes, everything completely black except for the stirred-up glow they made by moving. What was still was invisible; what moved was a light to follow, and within that: a warm hand, a warm leg, a prisoner or a protector, just there, in the darkness.
THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE, AWAY, AWAY
Even when I had to change trains, and a circle of soldiers surrounded me, and I easily handed over the same worn papers and gave them the answers to all their questions, I was not scared. Is this where I die? I thought, saying the names of someone else’s parents and the town where I was not born. Where will it be? Where is the place where I will die? And then it happened: one soldier took me by the arm, squeezed my flesh. He shook his head and led me away.
The soldier led me through the station. I noticed everything around me—this place perhaps the last I would se
e. Pigeons roosted in the high eaves. Their gurgled song was a constant echo. Sausage was for sale, newspapers, sweet cakes in small boxes. Men wore hats and coats, women wore hats and coats. Everyone watched me being taken away. There was something like relief in this scene—the answer to a question as long as my journey to the farmhouse, as long as my journey on the train, as long as my life. Where will the end come? The end will come here.
You, the life inside me, scrambling to put together the cells of guts and toenails and the follicles with which to grow the long shine of hair, could not have seen the soldiers and their boots. Could not see that behind their eyes were so many deaths that there was no sense in memorizing all of them. Just to name the names would have taken them all the nights of their lives.
The soldiers stopped at a stand in the middle of the station. The soldier paid for and received a roll of bread. He put it into a bag and handed it to me. My eyes were questions. You, he said. Bread. He wrapped his fingers around my wrist. The other words were lost in my shock, but the word bread kept landing, clear as a dropped coin. I nodded. Bread. For you.
The soldier put the package in my hand, led me to my platform, bowed his head and left. I could not find him in the crowd through my window, though I still felt the ring of fingers around my arm and wrist. I do not die here? I asked the bread, which revealed its soft white heart.
“I’m going to the New World,” I told the agent at the dock. He curled his lip and narrowed his eyes.
“America?” he asked.
“Is that its name?” I wondered aloud. “Was the new world always named that?”
“Is it just you?” the agent asked, already writing my name on the ticket. I did not know that I was lying to him when I said yes.
Inside, the tunnels of your ears became more precise. The one single tube began to make itself into an entire network of intestines. Bulbs of arms and legs began to blossom out. No bones yet. No increments of spine. Nothing hard, only soft parts first. Your veins reached out to other veins and opened their mouths to kiss each other.
My cabin was full of Russian women and their children. Hair was combed, clothes were put away in shelves, armpits were splashed with water. Everyone was talking so fast I had a hard time figuring out which words came out of which mouth.
“Maksim is the lowliest of scum,” one young woman said, trying to jam a pin into her blond hair.
“You’re lucky compared to me. My husband doesn’t even remember my name.”
“Mother, I want,” a little boy said.
“What’s that, Vovochka?”
“Find me an American with money and a straight nose and I’ll do all your laundry,” a teenage girl said, laughing.
“Candy. And where’s my water gun?” the little boy whined.
All at once, they noticed me. The room turned silent.
“Hi there, scaredy,” the first girl said to me. “You staying with us? You got your life rafts there?” I saw myself, hugging my bags to my chest. I felt dirty and despicable; pathetic, lonesome, lost. I was no one to nobody, alive without reason to be. I wanted to be invisible, to be air or water, anything but a human body and soul.
I said, “A mistake,” and walked away fast. I felt like I was going crazy, caught in a crawl of biting ants. Down the length of the hallway, each bunk bursting with men or women, kids crashing into each other and laughing hard. “Where are my slippers?” a woman shrieked.
“You expect me to keep track of those disgusting old things?” a man bellowed.
“Superhero!” a little boy screamed, and ran in front of me, his arms out. The air felt sticky at the same time that it was cold. I ran up the metal stairs where the wind, the salty wind, blew my hair. I drank it in. Everything around me was either gray or blue. It was cold outside. I was cold inside. I was tired.
On the bench nearby a man in a black hat was sitting with a radio on his lap. When he saw me, recognition flashed across his face. As if he had been waiting for me to fly through the door. The man’s eyes were filled with sadness. He put his hand out to me. The hand was a beggar, destitute and hungry. “Sit, please. I can’t listen alone,” he said in English. English, I thought. The same language as the radio. That language that brought it all back. He did not ask me who I was—our names, the facts, had nothing to do with this moment. The hum in my body settled, the women and children downstairs in the bowels of the ship hushed up. I sat at his side, my parcels on my lap. Our shoulders touched. The radio filled my ears.
Here, on over an acre of land lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which except perhaps by a convulsive movement or a convulsive sigh from a living skeleton too weak to move. The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated people with nothing to do and no hope of life. There was no privacy, nor did men and women ask it any longer. Women stood and squatted stock naked in the dust trying to wash themselves and to catch the lice on their bodies. Babies have been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live. A mother, driven mad, screamed at the British sentry to give her milk for her child. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
I was floating above myself. I tried to find my body. My feet were resting on wooden planks hammered down with dowels and beneath those were cabins where people prepared to sleep, dream, stand up to go to the bathroom and have a sip of water because their mouths were dry. Girls were in love with boys. Boys were mean to girls. Children wanted sweets, toys. I felt so lonely it almost seemed unbelievable that I myself was there. That emptiness should not be possible in a living body.
“It’s over,” the man in the black hat said. “Hitler is dead. The camps are being liberated.”
“I don’t know what those things are,” I admitted. He studied me, the clear state of disrepair, of despair.
“You are safe, that’s all you need to know. You survived.”
The man in the black hat opened a newspaper with a picture of a man with a square of a mustache. The headline read: HITLER AND HIS BRIDE KILL THEMSELVES. “He married his mistress at midnight and they were dead by afternoon. You can read it.” I put my hand around Solomon’s star in my pocket. I do not die there? I asked. Do I die at sea? Is it a matter of a cleaner, better world? Though you had no bones yet, you sloshed and rocked inside me. You sent waves out until I had to run and throw up over the side of the ship. The froth swallowed it; I could not even see what I had lost.
The man in the black hat came over and offered me a hand and a handkerchief. “Would you like to sit down?” he asked, his accent flat and songless.
“Do I die here?” I asked him.
“It’s seasickness,” he said. “It’s perfectly normal.”
“Is it a better world now that we are all dead?”
He patted my face with the little white cloth. “No one here is dead. You have made it.”
“I had four parents. I thought it would be enough to last.” I started to cry into the cloth, I cried until the thing was limp and useless. I tore my throat with air. My feet were weak with loss—so were my knees, my earlobes, my fingernails. My hair and dry, stretched skin cried. The tiny bones in my hands cried. The sea of my belly was a storm. You must have felt dizzy, washing back and forth, but your new heart did not stop pumping. We are alive, you said, we are alive, we are alive, we are alive, we are alive.
The man put his hand on my head awkwardly and patted it. “We are going to be all right,” he said. “We are on our way home.”
“Do you know me?” I asked.
“I know you now.” The man in the black hat smiled. “And it’s a pleasure. My name is Edward.”
“Are you one of my people?” I felt as if I knew him, as if he belonged to me and always had. And why wouldn’t he? Here we were in the endlessness and God had not offered a good explanation. I was alive with hands, a mouth—this story was mine to tell. I imagined the villagers running away, leaping into the river, gathered by the loving arms of the wat
er, washed to sea, transformed. I began, “And the people turned into the boards, nails, the passengers. In the ship’s depths they became fires great enough to push this whole floating city across the world. They became the entire, unbreakable ocean.”
Edward was not afraid of me, of where I had come from. Somehow, I seemed to make perfect sense to him. In those clear eyes I saw a place to rest, a small, safe corner. Yes, you are one of my people, I thought. Of course you are. We began to move. The ship rocked on the sea, the sea which counted all the blues as its own, the sea which rolled over itself and sprayed across the bow, landing white and thick on itself.
The motion of the sea felt the same as the motion inside. Everything swam and floated. “Who are you?” I asked my middle.
I looked out and memorized the shoreline, the shape of the way back. I did not have to try hard to memorize the shape of the water because it was so flat, so deep, so endless. Against it the land looked tiny and harmless—a miniature, floating island.
Edward and I spent the whole journey together, yet I hardly remember speaking to each other. We shared food, watched each other’s things when one wanted to stand up and go for a walk. We made a small bed on deck and slept under a cloudy sky. “Good night, new friend,” Edward said each night. I do not know if I slept peacefully or wildly. If I snored or howled. In the morning, Edward handed me tea and we took our place on the bench, where before us the sea was vast and generous—she hid her treasures and her misery; only the tumbled waves were ours to see, only the surface. Ahead of us: This sea, another. The great big ocean. For weeks, our whole world was blue.
THE BOOK OF EXPLANATIONS AND ENDINGS
No One Is Here Except All of Us Page 28