No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  Curled up on the salt-sprayed deck, my head on the bag of feathers, I dreamed of the dictator’s wedding.

  There were no balloons. No ribbons. There were no flags for miles along the road and no procession of shining cars. The dictator wore his green suit, of course and as always. His bride wore a green dress and green shoes and a green hat. Did she call up and order this from a shop in the city where she was born? Did she tell them it was for her wedding? Did she put her right arm up even though the person on the other end of the phone would never have known if she did?

  At the moment of their nuptials, our earth was heavy over them. Many feet of ground between the wedding and any daylight. Ants and ant holes. Worms and wormholes. Gophers, rabbits, snakes, spiders and the green backs of beetles. Rainwater did its best to make it down inside their cave and drown them there.

  In the cave, the dictator had had a floor installed. There were pastel-colored telephones and beds for sleeping with fresh goose feathers to fill them. The tapestry from his former living room was hung now over the wall, moist with groundwater. Ants made their way along its silken strands.

  “You have been true to me all this time,” he said to his bride. “This, finally, is your reward.”

  “I have followed along behind.”

  “Exactly right.”

  On all sides, deep and shallow, the dictator and his bride heard the four-leggeds hunkered down, feeding their bald babies, licking the blood off.

  There were two other men in the room, officials. One was the witness and one was the officiant. The dictator had not known either of them long. They had been called upon only recently, as the land got smaller and the only breathable air was underground.

  “Everything is going great,” the men lied. “We are sure of it. How could it go any other way?”

  The dictator combed his fingers through his mustache. His companion looked down at the brought-down wood floor. She did not say to him that this was no wedding: her mother was not there with a hat on. Her sister had no new dress. Her father would not give her a new silver knife with which to divide the vegetables along their spines.

  “We are supposed to be getting married,” she said. “I have been following along.”

  “The lady is right,” he said. “Tell us what to do.”

  “Stand near each other. Stand so you’re touching,” the official told them.

  They moved shoulder to shoulder but the dictator took a step away when his head came up shorter than her head.

  “Friends,” the official began, “we are gathered here today to witness the union of this man and this woman in the eyes of all that is pure.”

  The walls crumbled slightly under the feet of living things inside them. Powder fell in soft piles. The hundreds of feet came closer.

  “The earth is cleaner now than it was. The world is new and better. We move ahead cleansed,” the officiant continued.

  Centipedes, millipedes and carpenter ants devoured the sandy ground. Their legs needled and pinned the path.

  “Do you take this woman to be your wedded wife until the day that you die?”

  “I will do that.”

  “And do you take this man?”

  “I will.”

  “For the rest of your life?”

  “For the rest.”

  The walls simmered with the bodies of the living things.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the official said. “Kiss.”

  The dictator leaned down and scratched his new wife’s cheek with his lips. “Is that what you wanted?” he asked. “Are you satisfied?”

  “Do you love me?”

  “You’re a pure woman.”

  Champagne was enjoyed out of crystal flutes. The bubbles stung the faces of the celebrants when they sipped. By the time the toasts had been toasted, the floor was dotted with insects. The four humans stomped as many dead as they could but the supply was quickly renewed by the bountiful, plentiful earth.

  The new wife lay naked all night long, waiting. Her skin was cold. He did not press against her. He did not spank her in the midst. He did not kiss her with his open and dripping mouth. He did not collapse and whisper a few words into her ear. He slept right through the night, though the creatures made the turn from floor to bedposts and found the two large bodies under the covers. The dictator’s wife was walked upon by tiny feet, pricked by them on her pale skin, but she did not scream because she did not want to disturb her fair, sleeping husband.

  And in the morning, when the officials came back with the news that the enemy was closing in, that the space of their territory had become very slight, the dictator handed his wife a terrible, beautiful pill and took one for himself. “Thank you very much,” he said to the official. “We will be in our room.”

  “Cheers,” the wife said, ever hopeful, while she tapped his pill with her own.

  “Bite, then swallow,” he told her.

  But after the stuff spilled out over their tongues, and before it worked to end their lives, the dictator took a gun out of his belt and put it to his head, giving his new wife the opportunity to watch him die. She fell over him and watched his blood roll down into a river in which the bugs swam. In the time it took her to die, the river had reached the wall and begun to soak into it, the wall was reddened and rich. What was alive inside rejoiced.

  The officials wrapped the two bodies in a cloth, carried them through the tunnels and out into the spinning world where spring tulips lost one waxy petal at a time. The dictator and his new bride were tossed into a hole, where they became inseparable, indistinguishable in death—bones were bones, insides were slippery and rich—and the tiniest of creatures began to eat.

  THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE, CLOSER, CLOSER

  The buildings were giants and the trees were small. Our boat rolled into the muddy slip, the ghosts wrapped themselves around mussel-ringed pilings, mossy concrete and the soft, wet wood of the dock. They climbed onto shore and wiped themselves clean.

  They rubbed the salt out of their eyes and shook their hair out.

  All along the shore, men in beige grabbed ropes and yelled. In front of me was a city huge and prickling. It smelled of rotting wood. Edward and I tried to hold hands while people pushed down the gangplank, braying like horses. Our fingers slipped apart in slow motion, centimeter by centimeter, in the crush of bodies. I was mashed and had to tip my head up to the sky to find air. Had I died right then and there, the mob would have carried me without meaning to or wanting to.

  I descended from that ship carrying nothing but the feathered makings of warmth and broken pieces of home. At the bottom of the gangplank, we were funneled into lines. A man sat me on a cold metal stool and stuck something into my ears without asking if he could. In my chest, the old fear pumped. “Name?” the man asked in my language.

  “Natalya,” I started to say, but then shook my head. “I’m safe here?”

  Prideful, full-chested, he said, “You are safe here.” I wanted to start my life with my good name. With this first stitch, I attached two new worlds together.

  “Lena,” I said, and it was like shaking hands with an old friend.

  After that, he was gentle and careful. I had offered him the position of my savior, offered this country whose name still felt jagged in my mouth the chance to rescue me.

  I looked at the man’s blond hair, oiled into a sharp part. It was a mirror for the vain, bright lights hanging from the ceiling. At other stools, other dirty boat people. In front of them, other slick-headed men in gray wool trousers and shirts. Their belt buckles, the whole row of them, looked like a chain. Then the man stuck his tongue out and I stuck my tongue out. In went and out came the thermometers from under the tongues of the boat people, and numbers were added to the record books of the clean boys. He handed me my bag and motioned to the row of doors. Outside, everything waited.

  “Welcome home.”

  “I don’t know where I’m going. This is as far as anyone told me.”

  He handed
me a small map. “You’ll be fine. You have nice American eyes.” The man clicked the button on his flashlight, preparing to shine it into the ears of another lost soul, as if, diligent and practical, he would search in the least likely of places, in case what we all were looking for was hidden there.

  Some streets smelled like flowers because that was what was sold there, and some streets smelled like rotted flesh for no reason I could see. The map was meaningless no matter which direction I turned it. I put it in my pocket and walked. The streets were tightly cobbled, the sidewalks full of walkers. People, like a swarm, like an infestation. This must be where all the ghosts have come, I thought. Everyone who has ever lived—this is where God has decided to keep us.

  “Excuse me, sweet cheeks,” said a man with a table full of oranges.

  “Give me six of those,” a woman in a blue dress cooed.

  “I’d give you six of anything you wanted,” he told her. “I’d give you twelve.”

  Women wore skirts that left their legs out and men had small cases in their hands. Unquestionably, it was spring: trees were hot with blossoms and people carried their coats, kept putting their faces up to the sun, offering their appreciation to the earth for turning around again. I was bumped and stumbled over and my bag of feathers was almost knocked out of my hand.

  “I’d like to show you,” a deep voice said.

  A higher one giggled. “Marty is handsome five times over.”

  “You want to put money on it?” grumbled one kid to another.

  “Hey, lady, buy a paper?” a boy yelled. Above me on wooden tracks a train shook the earth and I ducked and covered my head. People walked on, unafraid. I felt a hand on my shoulder and I looked up to find Edward, tipping his brim. He was thatched by light coming through the tracks. I grabbed him in case he slipped away again. “It’s you,” I stammered. I wished I could lock our arms together.

  “Follow me,” he said. “Let’s take you home.”

  “Everyone keeps using that word.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point?” Edward led me through the crowds of people waiting for cars to pass, over holes in the street that smelled like everything awful had died at once, and to a tall brick building no different from the others on the street. Why this one? I wanted to ask. It had a door, which the man knocked on. Hearing the sound of wings, I looked up to see pigeons dive off the roof, their feathers blue in the light.

  A woman opened the door and let us in without asking who we were. The apartment was all beds, tightly made up and stacked. Two girls and a boy were flicking marbles toward a tipped-over cup. I suddenly felt dizzy. I thought I was looking at myself, on the second day of the world, before everything had changed. The shock flickered across my skin. “Who are those children?”

  “Tra-la-la,” all the ghosts sang. “No one is here except all of us.”

  The woman answered my question without concern. “These are Rosa and Isaac Stoneberg’s children. Rachel, Frida and Abe. Stand up and say hello,” she told the three.

  “We’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” Frida said.

  The woman laughed. “She’s not a stranger. Well, she is, but she’s our stranger.” She tried to make sense. “This is Lena, who will be living here.”

  I was dizzy. I was the stranger and this was my home. They had been waiting for me. Meat was cooking, and tea was placed in my hand.

  “Edward says you escaped to Russia? You are lucky to have made it to safety.”

  “I was safe?”

  “Behind Soviet lines, I mean.”

  “We were safe?” My vision tunneled. “Does that mean . . . Solomon, could I have kept him?”

  “Three points!” yelled one of the girls.

  “War is so complicated,” the woman said.

  “It’s five dollars a month,” Edward told me, saying much more with those kind eyes. “Can you sew? There is work nearby.”

  “I think I’m pregnant,” I said. The man and woman whispered back and forth and I did not try to listen in. The teacup in my hand was too hot to hold, but I held it anyway.

  “Re-do,” claimed the boy. “That was a bad roll.”

  “Nothing of the sort!” one of the girls argued.

  “Abe, Abe, can’t get a . . . Nothing rhymes with Abe!” The other girl laughed.

  “You can take some time when the baby is born, for free,” the woman said. Her voice and the pale light of her neck, the brown curl tucked behind her ear, were too familiar. Here, I thought, is where the blood fills our veins again, where our bodies resume their work, where our skin is warm to the touch. That part we took for an ending? In the next instant the girl walks out from the forest into a valley where everyone is alive—boundlessly, feverishly alive—and the earth is raucous with flowers and the day is not at all cold, and the wind picks up a gust full of apple blossoms—the petals every spring has offered up, exactly the same, identical—and the next thing the tree gives away will be red fruits with white hearts, seeds in the shape of a star.

  Stars, indeed, I thought, because I was completely surrounded by white flashes, falling in the sky of that room. From my hand, the teacup fell and the sound of it breaking was muffled static. “Out of bounds,” the boy said. And the next thing I remember is waking up on the floor, Edward fanning me with his black hat, the woman whispering and my lap wet. “The baby,” I called, my voice too loud in my ears, my hand on the wet spot.

  “Your tea spilled is all,” the woman said. “Did it burn you?”

  They did not sit me up, ask me my name or rush me to a doctor. Maybe because they saw the way my sadness had spilled out over the edges of my cupped palms, maybe because they knew the stories that kept arriving with each new shipment of people from the old world, maybe because they remembered all the ways they too were tired—whatever the reason, the man and the woman wordlessly lay down on either side of me. We stared at the cracked ceiling, we ignored the three children asking what was wrong with us, and we wept.

  THE BOOK OF THE BEGINNING, AGAIN

  I t was only women in the room—for the birth, the husbands and children were sent out into the canyons of streets where buildings were walls and even the outdoors was indoors.

  On the floor, under my head, was the bag of feathers I had carried here from the temple. I was stretched over a sheet, and at my sides were many warm hands. The women had cloths wetted with warm water, chips of ice for me to suck, pieces of torn fabric for me to bite, and hands, just smooth uninterrupted skin, stroking my forehead and cheeks.

  I howled until the room shook and our small glass mourning candles fell off the table. They were unlit and so rolled along, posing no threat, coming to rest on a shoe or the leg of a chair. We could not afford to buy enough candles to mourn all the dead. Instead, before bed each night in this new world we had gathered around the five glass cups, held a match into them where another flame was made, burning with the Reginas, Aarons, Adams and Esthers. The names smoked over us and hovered in the room. I had not heard those prayers since Solomon had said them over the tree bark we peeled off in paper sheets.

  The unburning candles rolled and I howled. The women mopped me, dried me, mopped me again. A window was opened to the cold of winter, which whipped us until our skin was tight. A group of boys tossed their voices around on the street below like snowballs. They called each other names and laughed. Inside, we said prayers quietly. My new family laid their hands on my belly. “Beautiful baby, beautiful baby,” they said, “come on out into the world. Today is the day for you to be born. Beautiful American baby.”

  “Do you remember the time the whole world was new?” I asked.

  “That time is now,” the women said. “That time is always now.”

  “Teach me the prayer,” I said. “Tell me what to say.”

  Together we made the words, syllable by syllable. “Ba-ruch,” we said, “A-ta,” we said, “A-do-nay,” we said.

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “Blessed are You, God, Lord of
the Universe, Who has kept me alive, and sustained me, and made me arrive at this day.”

  “Do I mean that?” I asked.

  “Of course. It’s what we say,” they answered.

  “But was it God who kept me alive? Was it not the farmer? The potato fields? The enemy soldier who gave me bread? Was it myself?”

  “God is also what we all are. Anything is God. There is no way to say God without saying Everything.”

  I howled again and someone closed the window. One woman rubbed my feet with oil and another rubbed my hands with milk. Someone spooned a little cooked cabbage into my mouth.

  “May it be that You will provide food for Your servant, this child, with plentiful milk sufficient for her needs, and make us aware of the appropriate time to nurse her, and make us sleep lightly so that if she cries out our ears should hear her immediately,” the women said.

  “May You never ask me to give this baby away,” I begged, between pain. And again, “May You never ask me to give this baby away.”

  Into the cold room came this slippery girl. You tossed your fists around and made as much noise as you could. You looked baked, stewed, boiled, but in fact, you were healthy and very alive.

  Two younger women brought me a basin to wash you in. The older women all put their hands together on a pair of sharp scissors and cut the cord that connected us. You were cleaned and dried. I was cleaned and dried. Someone gathered the sheets from the floor and wrapped them into a ball. The woman who worked at the greengrocer’s downstairs dug a hole in the frozen earth of the window flower-box, planted the birth matter there.

  It was when I put you to my breast that you went silent, and I cried. I felt less like I had given birth to this creature than you had been dropped from the sky into this room, and my entire journey, every turn I made in the fields and forests, every instant I spent looking at the sun-blistered skies, every sleep, mistake—all of it was timed precisely so that I would be in this room here in this city when you, this wrinkled pink girl, fell from the sky, my arms perfectly aligned to catch you. And all the questions about what was lost and what was found, the beginnings and the endings, my doubt following me like a shadow, all of that was silent. “So here you are,” I said. “May I always have enough for you. May you be awake before you are asleep. May the fields never take you. May the dead keep their hands to themselves. May the stars be stars.”