No One is Here Except All of Us (14 page)

The more he slept, the more Igor talked of it as a job: his purpose was to rest for all of us. To absorb the sounds and smells of what occurred around him—not to participate, simply to take it in—and spin the threads into whispy, drifting dreams. He still went to work at the bank for a few hours in the morning, but that was a duty, not a purpose. Igor’s true calling was to sleep off the pressures of existence, the unknowable meaning of life, like a hangover he was trying to lose.

He slept through the afternoons, the wind knocking gently at the windows. He opened his eyes for a few moments, drank a glass of water, scratched his back against the doorframe like a bear, wrapped himself in a blanket, tucked a pillow between his legs. He waved away the birds that lit on the windowsill.

“I am that baby’s father,” he said, reaching out toward Solomon. “I can’t believe it. I’m going back to bed.” I did not mind his being around, but I didn’t mind his not being around, either. For me, the quiet house felt like a sigh of relief. No one was asking me to be their baby. My job was as simple as chopping vegetables, starting the fire, washing the floor, sorting the socks and sitting at the table with my son. I did not know how old I really was, but it did not matter so much anymore. I was a mother and a wife, and that was all anyone needed to know.

I liked having someone in the house, an appreciative mouth to feed, and when Igor’s eyes fluttered open and he came to me, I was happy to listen to the dreams he had had, that parallel life he was living in which he could jump from the tops of trees and take flight.

“Do you remember,” he yawned, “the time when we built a boat out of reeds and sailed to the other side of the river and ate cheese?”

“I think you dreamed that,” I said.

“No, I remember it. You were there. You wore a yellow dress.”

“All right, I’ll remember,” I agreed. “Was that the same time that Solomon was a bear cub and he kept scratching us by accident and we had to very carefully trim his claws with a knife in his sleep?”

“That was another time. But I remember that, too. I’m glad he’s a boy again.” The tone of his voice changed. “Remember the time my mother did not run away every time she saw me approaching? Remember the time I was her son?”

“I remember that,” I said, wrapping my fingers in a bracelet around his wrist.

Kayla entered first,
knocked second. Stomped her muddy boots on the mat. “Are you unwell?” she asked. “You didn’t answer.”

“I’m very, very well,” I said, and I let out a small howl.

“We thought you had stopped that,” Kayla said.

“I hadn’t.” I took a sip of cold, dusty-tasting water and did not look her in the eye. I did not not love her. I understood that she had to invent being a mother just as I had to invent being a baby. I knew that she loved the person she imagined me to be, and maybe even, a little bit, the person I actually was. Still, the quieter the little room was, the more I could hear the sound, like the faint ringing of a tuning fork, of my own, real mind.

“Here are the potatoes, and here is the chicken. Here is some extra money. When are you coming to our house for supper?” Kayla asked.

“Not for a while.” I pointed to the baby. “I don’t want to disrupt him.”

“It’s just a few doors away,” she whined.

“And yet,” I said, smiling. “It feels very far.” Kayla scrubbed ferociously at a potato. She had not realized that by finding me a husband and releasing me to the course of events, she would lose her grip on my life.

“You are still my daughter,” she scolded. “I’m still taking care of you.”

I said, “As you know, being a mother is the most important thing. The baby won’t survive without me.”

“Just you wait,” she huffed. “Before you know it, he’ll be gone.”

Solomon sucked and spit and sucked and spit. Milk ran down my chest, my belly. I dipped my finger in and tasted. “Me and you,” I said, squeezing my son.

“What did you say?” Kayla asked.

“I was talking to Solomon,” I said.

“He’s just a baby, he doesn’t know anything yet.”

“He knows what he knows.”

When Kayla left, I checked on my husband, disguised as a worm in his blanket, and whispered to him, “Remember the time all the trees sprouted cakes and we lay in the sun on our backs eating them and nobody had to worry about whether there would be enough later on?” His eyelids flickered.

I took my baby outside. “This is the street,” I said, “which we use to get places. Right now I feel the round stones under my feet. When you walk you’ll know what I mean. What’s falling is called rain. Sometimes it’s heavy and sometimes it’s light, but it hardly ever stops completely. It’s what makes the plants and the trees grow, so we can be grateful. Your real grandfather is a cabbage farmer. I’ll cook them for you so you know the smell. Your other grandfather makes saddles to ride horses. Your third grandfather keeps other people’s money safe. They will all love you, and you don’t have to do anything special for them. Just do what you do.”

And what was I supposed to do? I had no job in the village. Maybe I had helped tell our story once, but the need for that had disappeared—the story was telling itself now. I was Solomon’s mother, and maybe that was enough. My husband had completely stopped showing up for work at the bank. Igor’s father still dropped his weekly pay off at our doorstep, though it was unearned. I picked it up and poured the coins into the bread jar at the back of our cupboard. Igor never asked where I got the money to buy flour or eggs and I did not explain it to him. He was tired enough without the weight of taking charity. If the banker stopped paying his son for nothing, I was not sure what we would do. Still, in the history of this world, no one had gone hungry. No one had withered away. I surveyed the land around me and saw plenty. “All we need is enough,” I said to Solomon. “No more.”

The next thing I knew, my son would be running around and I would be pregnant again. I would cry every time I cut Solomon’s soft brown hair, those beautiful silks dead on the floor. His legs would become too long for each pair of pants. Solomon’s arms would soon wallow at his sides, and his feet and hands would become knuckled and workable. He would turn one, two, three. He would learn to walk. Then he would learn to talk. He would learn to read and to write and I would find notes on scraps of paper.
My name is Solomon. I like to eat fruit. My father is asleep. I love my mother. I am tall.
Though he would be precocious, he would learn everything in the right order, and even while his mother would sometimes wish she could have another day with him as a baby, she—I—would never, ever ask. I would watch him stack boxes, chew carrots and make friends with ants. I would watch him chase a ball and bury a stone. “Today it was a monsoon. Tomorrow there will be a shower,” he would sing. “Drizzle, deluge, cloudburst.”

For what would seem like a very brief moment, he was still my baby. I looked down at Solomon, his eyes open to whatever we passed. “These are the fields where we grow our food. This is wheat for bread.” Explaining the world to my son, I noticed things I had not before. Our houses were creeping with moss, greening from the ground up. The window trim was no longer the brown of wood but bright emerald. The houses appeared to be sinking slowly into the soft earth. Birds bathed in the mud puddles, which were everywhere. “These are the paths between the stalks we walk to get to the river. This is the river. I’m going to put you in it, let the water wash you clean. Are you ready?” I said, unwrapping him. “I’m coming in with you.” And I unwrapped myself too, my coat and dress and shoes, and we waded in together, Solomon pressed to me, until I dipped us down so that his tiny, complete body was as wet as mine and our skin was pushed by the rushing current and the reeds scraping on the shore cried out to us and the moon was white in the gray sky, and the river was a different gray, and I watched it slide off around the curve where it hugged the village and disappeared into another place and time.

Solomon did not cry. The river made all the sound we needed.

THE BOOK OF LOVE AND SECRETS

T
hree years passed under us. Three sweet, regular years. The tiled stars had spread out over the walls of the barn, white constellations against blue and black sky; they made us feel at home and safe. These days, we had many things to celebrate. My once-brother had fallen in love with the tailor’s delicate daughter, and they were to be married, Solomon would celebrate his fourth birthday soon, and I was due to give birth to my second baby. The heavens joined in the festivities by offering the best weather we could ever remember. It was a moment of mercy, of joy. It was also a farewell party, though we did not know it at the time.

This sun was full, complete, not just the clouded-over orb we had grown used to. We emerged with trepidation, carrying our umbrellas out of habit. We shed coats. We closed our eyes. We were made warm. I took Solomon to the greengrocer, where I picked carrots, a beet, a handful of pearl onions. The greengrocer put my basket down by the wooden cash drawer, where a slim stack of greasy bills looked deceased, coffined. Wordlessly, he reached out and patted my huge belly, then he placed his hand on my heart and closed his eyes. I started to step back, but he hushed and pressed. “I’m counting,” he said, his eyes unopened. “We haven’t measured you in a long time.”

“Sixty-five beats per minute,” the greengrocer finally said. “Very nice, excellent. You are just as you should be.” His statement surprised me by being true. Out of the muck, something green had sprouted. I paid quickly, the bell clinked, the door closed and I went around to the back of the shop, where I leaned against the mud wall and cried.

“What’s wrong?” Solomon asked.

“That’s the thing—nothing is wrong.” I was fine, I was big. I was just as I should be. If only it could have lasted longer.

On an evening
full of the last gray light of a halfhearted sun, the stranger found herself alone in the barn with no prayers to record. She decided to sweep the floors and wash the windows with vinegar. She did not reach out the back window and prune the apple tree, because she liked the sound the leaves made when the wind pulled them across the pane. Where the wall and floor met, she found a dried-up lily of the valley. The stranger put it behind her ear. She admired the stars our village had made so far. She felt a kind of lightness—almost faith—when she looked at them. A universe was being constructed, even though there had been too many losses to write them out of the story. It was not the purity of this world that the stranger loved—it was how hard everyone had worked to believe in it.

In the corner still reserved for animals, the stranger swept under the sheep, who bleated and mewled. She put the scuffled-out hay back in the chickens’ nests. The chickens pecked at it. The stranger picked up a bowlful of feed and swept where it had been. The floorboard moved under her broom. She pressed it back into place but the other end came up. She pulled at that other end, and it opened like the top of a box. Underneath there was a dark hole and the scent of cold earth. She kneeled, pressed her hand to the dirt. She lowered her arm in, deeper and deeper until she touched a square object. The stranger pulled her empty hand back out quickly and looked at it, questioning, as if it might be able to tell her what it had found. The hand was mute.

The stranger closed her eyes and lowered her arm in again, this time waiting for the shape she knew she would find. She wrapped her fingers around it and pulled it slowly out. In the light, it became a radio. Speakers, dials and an antenna. It was not dirty, as it should have been if it were buried long ago. Her fingers grazed the dials, but did not turn them. “Do I?” she asked herself. The loss of her old, real life began to thrum in her temples, in her chest. She remembered the letter she had read, and how meager it had seemed. The old world’s failed attempt to matter. Here it was again, ready to make another plea.

Never forgotten, but never remembered completely either, the truth of what once was began to bubble up. The stranger remembered the smell of her husband’s neck after he had worked all day. She remembered the shoes by the door, and the heat of her daughter’s forehead when she had been sick in bed. She remembered the day everything exploded in flames. Belief, the way the villagers worked to hold up the misty walls of the reborn world, was what made the stranger love them. Still, she wondered what would happen if she put her arm through one of those walls; if she opened her hand to another world, what might she find? Quickly, she put the radio in the hole and laid the board back down. She waited for someone to bring her a prayer. The forbidden world stirred.

All of us
migrated to the square, where we sat or stood, faces up, adoring the warmth. We could not believe how wonderful it felt or how big the world seemed—our entire village was flooded with light. We had had moments of sun over the years, glimpses, sometimes even whole afternoons, but this was something different. We were utterly saturated.

Solomon was pale from sitting in the dark all day. His skin looked so thin it might tear. With his face to the sky, he began to thank God for the sun, but I stopped him. “God hears you in your own head. He knows you’re thinking of him.”

“I have to thank him for each thing,” Solomon said.

Igor and Solomon had been spending whole afternoons in the temple, making little groups of blue progress. After a new space of sky had been made, Igor would let the sound of the prayers and the color of the artificial night lay him down and rest him. Solomon would keep working and kept listening, memorizing the incantations. There were prayers by now that we always sang the same way.
Blessed are you who made us, blessed are we who praise you
. Solomon had made a list of the blessings he could give and the blessings he could receive. When he and his father came home in the evening, he had prayed over everything he could: the bread, the water, the soup, the chairs, the table, the beds, the windows, the lights outside and the lights inside. Igor would fall right to sleep, but I would stay awake listening to my son chant to himself for a long time, the room breathing with his prayer.
I bless this moment and this moment and this moment.

We sat quietly while Solomon said words in his head and I tried to let the warmth soak through to my second baby, who should have come days before. I watched a group of boys playing at the other end of the square. I knew Solomon did not play like that, did not tumble and build the way the others did. Had I made my little four-year-old into an adult before his time, even though all I wanted was for him to be exactly his own age, every day of his life? Had I kept him to myself, and now he only knew how to be like me?

“Do you know those boys?” I asked.

“I know who they are,” he said.

“Go play with them,” I said, giving Solomon a push. He shook his head, uneasy with people his own size. “Go,” I said, and watched him walk carefully across the sea of shining stones, polished under the feet of endless walkers. I looked the other way, tried to give my son a little privacy in which to make new friends.

I noticed Regina and the widow talking by the statue. I felt a rush of affection for the girl who used to be my sister. Regina and I had each experienced the other’s alternate life. I wanted things to work out for her, not only because I loved her, but because it was the same as their working out for another version of me. The story was like a comforting , worn-in old fairy tale, and all I had to do to keep it alive was tell it to myself. I had rag-doll versions of us to play with and hold.

Regina had remained unmarried.
She thought of herself as another species, like the unwanted child of a forest-dwelling giant dropped off at the cabbage picker’s doorstep in what must have been a huge basket. To the rest of us, she did not look especially large. But Regina’s reflection in the mirror was balloonish. Like someone had stuck a straw up her nose and inflated all her features. The day Moishe first brought the tailor’s daughter home, that elf of a girl, Regina had left the room without saying hello. Her brother, with whom she had felt a clear and wordless understanding of life, with whom she had survived the loss of a sister, the beginning of the world and the aches of growing, had stood in front of her and said, “I want your opposite.”

Regina had left the house with a satchel of clean underwear over her shoulder. She had gotten as far as the center of the village before losing her nerve. She sat there, hating her brother, hating his bride, the sausages of her fingers clenched in a fist with nothing but her satchel to punch. The underwear inside took more of a beating than they deserved.

“Bad news?” someone said. Regina thought, Great, now the statue is talking. Best of luck to crazy me. Off I go. “This world is shit,” the voice said. Regina turned around to find the widow leaning against the statue.

“I don’t want to learn to howl,” Regina said.

“Me either. But I do want a drink. Come on.” The widow took Regina’s hand and, miracle of miracles, in that truly giant palm, Regina’s fist looked delicate, demure, ladylike. Regina could have hugged her right there, pressing her face into those abundant breasts.

The widow’s house had an earthen floor and a baby bassinet full of empty jars. “I’m an inventor now,” she said to Regina. “I have invented something wonderful.”

“Not enough money in singing?”

“No one in this town has any talent. It’s a waste of my time on earth.” Everything smelled like vinegar. Burlap sacks of mustard seed lined the walls and a vat of brown sauce bubbled on the woodstove. Garlic skins hovered like spirits. The widow put her big finger into the pot and offered the gleaming sauce to Regina. “Can I trust you? With my secret?” Regina opened her lips and licked.

“Ouch, that’s hot.” She sucked air in to cool her tongue.

“Tasty?”

“Sour. Hot. Delicious.”

“I’m calling it mustard,” the widow said. “After the seed. In the future, it will be in every house on earth.”

“We haven’t already invented that?” Regina asked, trying to be gentle. “Are you sure you made it up?”

“Ha! It’s so good you can’t believe it ever didn’t exist.”

Regina decided it did not hurt anyone for the widow to credit herself with this invention.

“Yes,” the older woman said, drinking, “yes, yes.” Regina had had wine before but never this, and it felt like she had released a small, burning snake down her throat. She coughed. There was a narrow bed Regina could not believe her new friend fit into. She imagined the widow’s bedtime routine: washing her face, putting on her nightgown, tying her legs in a knot.

“Were you ever married?” Regina asked, knowing a widow must have once been a wife.

“I was married for about five minutes when I was eighteen. In the naked part afterward, his heart stopped.” Regina had a rare feeling of appreciation for her own lot. The widow refilled their glasses from a foggy, corked bottle. What was there to say? “This world, like I said, is shit.” She looked at the girl next to her, her uneven hair, her unfitting clothes. “You’re not so bad,” she said. “You’ll be fine. Love is not the only road to happiness. I’ll show you around the mustard business.”

In the sunshiny square,
Solomon reached the boys and the boys said, “Get out of here, you’re cursed.”

Solomon prayed over them, saying, “I bless you, God bless you, I bless you.”

And the boys said, “Your grandfather is a murderer.”

Solomon said, “I bless you, I bless you, I bless you.”

“Prove that you’re not cursed,” the boys said, pointing at the highest branch of the tree.

Solomon put his foot in a crook between branches.

“Your father is the brother of a dead baby!”

“Your grandparents are murderers!”

Solomon went branch by branch into the sky. His little body outdid itself. The branches became shaky. They shook with the wind. They snapped back. The boys quieted below and watched with their arms folded together. It might have taken him five minutes or ten to make it to the top. No one was even aware of time, only watching and waiting.

Solomon turned around and waved from the top. He looked down, triumphant. I opened my eyes just for a second to see if Solomon was playing with the other children, and I saw him up in the weakest branches of the tree. I screamed his name, and everyone’s eyes opened to look at me, then at him. Solomon waved to me, waved to celebrate. He waved until his feet slipped out of their crooks.

He did not fall all the way down. He just tipped over and was wedged into a space between the branches.

Other people were much faster than I was in getting there. My legs felt dream-heavy and I snapped at them to move faster. It felt as though the space between my son and me kept stretching and each step took two to cross. By the time I arrived the new baby wanted out, and Solomon had a thin trickle of blood headed down his face.

“Are you . . . ?” I tried to ask.

“As long as you are.” He was completely unhurt, except for a twig that had stuck into his forehead. At the healer’s orders, and all at once, the village split into two groups. One carried me above their heads to my house, like a war hero. The others helped Solomon out of the tree. He was carried home in the arms of the quiet man whose name many people could not remember.

My people stood in a clump outside the house in the sun listening to the sounds of birth—my wailing, the gentle words of the healer, and my wailing again.

“Is Solomon all right?” I kept asking, and the healer told me again and again that he was perfectly fine.

“He is excited to meet his little brother or sister,” he said.

Igor came running through the front door, his arms flying at his sides. “Another baby?” he yelled, as if this were the first he had heard of it. He tripped on his way over the threshold, falling onto his knees, then nervously turned to wave. “I’m fine!” he yelled to the well-wishers. “Another baby!” And he closed the heavy door.

Igor did not come to my bedside. He went into the closet, took out his best suit, black and pristine, and he put it on. He polished his shoes. Igor put on a sharp hat. He wanted the baby to believe that his father was a strong and capable man, a strong and capable father. The outfit, he seemed to believe, would be the first indication. He sat down on a chair outside the room where I could see his back and the rim of the hat. He held his hands on his lap. I like to imagine he was thinking of ways to impress the baby right away, prove that it had been worth the journey.