No One is Here Except All of Us (15 page)

Solomon sat down next to his father and mimicked the folded hands. He had no top hat, nor did he have a fresh black suit. He crossed his feet at the ankles and tried to be very patient.

“I was just trying to play,” he said. Igor nodded, unclear what the boy was talking about. “Dad?” Solomon asked. “I liked playing, even though I got hurt. I had fun.” Igor smoothed his son’s hair and leaned his own head on that warm globe.

“You are delightful,” Igor said, and he began to doze happily off. Solomon stayed as still as he could while his father snored softly, head on head.

The crowd outside dwindled as the hours passed. Around the little house, there was the glow of a cluster of candles, shaded by the hands of the stranger and a few of our most faithful old ladies. And then a voice never before heard in the world called out.

“Hey,” said Solomon to wake his father, “it happened. Time to go meet the baby.”

He gently rubbed the sand out of his father’s eyes and took his hand.

Inside, the new eyes were wide open.

“You see the world, don’t you?” I asked the squirming boy. I was spread flat out on the bed in my nightclothes, sweaty. My veins felt like they were ringing.

Igor put his hand out and said, “I am your father.” The baby did not reach for him but I took the tiny hand and placed it in his larger one. Igor smiled and shook. He sat down at the bedside where he patted his new son and me alternately.

Solomon came to the foot of the bed, saying, “I bless you, I bless you, I bless you.”

“Come here,” I said to my first son. “Are you all right?” He nodded. He looked perfect except for the small hole in his forehead, which had, at the healer’s direction, been filled with cobwebs.

The stranger awoke
suddenly that night. In the corner of the moonlit barn she saw a dark shape. Immediately, her dream-heavy body was sure that the ghosts of the past had found her, and she prepared to be taken back to the old, burned-out world.

“All right, I’ll go,” she called. Her voice bounced from the hardwood of the walls. The shape jumped and scrambled. “Hello?” the stranger asked.

“What did you say?” the shape asked.

“I’ll come with you.”

“Oh, I was just checking for leaks,” the shape stammered.

“Leaks?” the stranger asked. Sleep softened, melted away, and the shape stood up from the place in the floorboards where the radio was hidden.

The jeweler came out from the corner and into the moonlight of the dusty window.

“I know about the hole in the floor,” she said quickly. “I know about the radio.”

“No. Oh, dear. Have you listened?” He fidgeted with the buttons of his jacket. He rubbed the back of his neck.

“No.”

“I am terrible. How could I have?” he asked. “I’m so sorry. I never meant you to know. No, no, no.” He punched himself in the temple. The stranger shook her head. Her outstretched hand was an invitation. Wordless, she opened the creaking barn door. The question of what she was doing appeared like a bubble. She popped it with an answer—loneliness. She knew the weight of knowing. Of feeling like the only one who knew, standing guard alone at the gate. Wind flapped the stranger’s white nightgown against her legs. They were an unlikely pair—she in her bedclothes kneeling in a patch of bloomless flower plants, digging—he, dressed for the day, his hair blown on end, crouched and waiting to see what she would unearth. Mudded, decomposed paper was born from the hole. Whatever words it had recorded were erased by the dirt and water.

“What is it?” the jeweler whispered, holding in his palm a handful of paper shreds, torn roots, earth.

“The mail,” the stranger told him. He pressed his thumb into the hand-warmed dirt.

“It never even occurred to me.” He trailed off.

“You wanted to believe.” The stranger picked bits of paper out, seeds from a lost species. She squeezed them together in a ball, tossed it back and forth between her hands.

“What did they say?” the jeweler asked.

“I wanted to believe, too. I never read them.” The stranger felt a sting for the single exception she had set sail, which she did not want to admit. The jeweler felt a sting, too: an orphan who finds himself full of questions about the past that have no answers in the living world. The other story was lost in the ground. The stranger placed the ball of paper back where it came from, then offered her empty, cupped palms, and the jeweler poured his burden in. She put the dark earth into the hole and began to fill it back up. The stranger patted the sealed wound. She scattered a few loose stones over it, and the jeweler thought how like a faraway graveyard it looked, the bodies of another place so distant their markers appeared no larger than pebbles.

Inside, the stranger lit a dozen candles by the side of her bed. Their light made the barn walls come alive with stars. She patted the spot on the bed next to her, which relaxed under the jeweler’s weight. The stranger felt her children, her husband, her own village reach out to her. Their memory filled her up—the empty space in her chest felt clogged and she coughed to clear it. She waited for a second before she asked the question she knew could unravel her life—all our lives. “What’s left of the old world?” The jeweler took her two hands into his. He held them to his chest and shook his head. His face was white, but the face of the moon outside the window was whiter still. She put her head on his shoulder and cried the names of everyone she had loved before into his shirt. Regret for allowing this sadness rolled through her chest. All the work, all the fierce belief, all the help the world had offered by sealing this land off, by keeping the sky clear of airplanes, by trusting the villagers in their invention—the stranger’s tears were a thousand promises broken.

“I don’t know if the other world is there,” the jeweler whispered. “I haven’t listened yet. I was so lonely at night I couldn’t stand it anymore. I just wanted some music.”

“You don’t know if there are terrible things?” He could not tell the stranger if there were or not. The soft moon and candlelight in the barn was so full of dust it was almost solid. The stranger swept her hand through it and watched the tiny particles fly away. She blew her nose into the handkerchief the jeweler offered to her. Sorrow sprouted leaves in the jeweler’s chest. Now that his secret was shared and he saw what it could do to another person, he regretted having saved this object.

“I should never have come back for it. I should never have saved it.”

“What if I want to listen?” she asked. He did not answer. His chest filled until it was tight, and he held that breath to make time stop.

“Why?” he asked finally.

“I could give you reasons. Because it might be the truth. Because it might not mean anything. Because I can protect us better if I know what’s coming. To test what we’ve made.” She paused. “Or none of those. Because here it is. Curiosity. Look at those dials, waiting to be turned.”

The jeweler did not try to convince her that he had truly only been wishing for music, that he was entirely unprepared for the possibility of news. “Can I say no?”

She shook her head. “Please don’t.”

In the darkest part of the night, when the owls and the wolves were the only animals looking for food, the stranger and the jeweler made a small nest of blankets and they turned on the dial that brought one world into another, that made a window in the wall the villagers had worked so hard to build. Before the sounds made any sense yet, the jeweler turned the radio off again. “I have something to say first,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “I love you. I have always loved you.”

“But I am nothing. I am a space, a hole.”

“And yet, you manage to fill me to bursting. I overflow.”

The stranger ran her hand over her arm, her legs, feeling for more than she thought existed. In her chest, something very much alive was pounding.

“You are so good to me,” she said.

The jeweler’s shaking fingers turned the dial.

The radio sounded like a whimper at first, and then a man’s words formed in the air of the barn. The language came rumbling through the stranger like an old train down overgrown tracks. “Do you understand English?” the jeweler asked. “Do you need me to translate?” She was surprised that she did understand. Her father had taught the language to her. So surreal was it to hear another man speak these words that it took a moment for their meaning to sink in.

This is the BBC Home and Forces program. This is Bruce Bellfridge. Here’s some excellent news, which has come during the past hour from a communiqué from Cairo. It says the Axis powers in the western desert after twelve days of ceaseless land and air attacks are now in full retreat. It’s known that the enemy’s losses are extraordinary.

The sound changed and became crackly. Another man’s voice came through the radio.

I’m lying in a cornfield. I can see many men around me taking shelter behind the banks, wearing their steel helmets while the terrific barrage goes on around us. The shells are whistling overhead. Now just listen to them.

There was a sound of pops, shots and then the crackly noise went away and the first man’s voice came back
.

We’re interrupting this program to bring you a news flash. This is a news flash from the BBC in London. American forces have crossed the Rhine at a point north of Cologne and established a bridgehead on the far side. And that’s the end of this news flash from the BBC in London.

Voices were replaced by a violin, rising, falling, the notes so sharp they could have cut skin. The stranger and the jeweler were absorbed. The names of places, rivers, were not supposed to mean anything, but the jeweler and the stranger remembered them like part of a dream, almost as a taste or smell more than a fact. They drew closer together.

The stranger asked the jeweler what the man had meant. Who was fighting? Where? But the jeweler did not know. They waited for the man’s voice to come back. The violin played on. “Who are the men speaking?” the stranger asked.

The jeweler knew only one thing: He had not been so close to another body for this long since he was a child.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The strains of the violin formed, crested, fell.

They waited all night for more, but none came. In the short fits of sleep the stranger found, she dreamed of swimming in an ocean whose tides kept washing her back to shore, even as she swam farther and farther out. And the jeweler? What did he dream? He did not, because he did not sleep. He lay awake all night, not because he was worried about a great fight, but because he was feeling the soft heat of the stranger’s body while music filled the big, dusty room.

In the morning,
the stranger felt upside down. The world we had left behind was no clearer or more understandable than this one. Here, stars were populating the barn, people were going about their business and history only had to manage a few years of complexity. In the old world the names of hundreds of generals, borders of a thousand countries, territories, pacts, and everyone who had ever been were all trying to crowd onto the same little globe. It was impossible, she felt in a rush—too big to be real. Instead of what she would have expected, the new facts presented overwhelming evidence that the old world was the make-believe one.

“I have a wedding to perform today,” she said, glad to have work to do.

The jeweler set off for the day feeling surprisingly light and free. No film of dishonesty or sneakiness was on his skin. The radio was not a danger but a prop, like a warm fire around which to gather, an excuse to allow two people’s knees to touch.

The stranger went to wash in the river, but she never entered the water, because on the bank she found a man’s shirt, which had come down the river so full of rotten leaves it looked as if the man was still in it. Out loud she said, “This might have been my husband’s shirt. This might have been my father’s shirt.” She shook the leaves out onto the muddy bank. She looked around her. Green and sure, the mountains were the same as always on the river’s opposite bank. Every tree grew slowly and patiently toward the sky. The stranger slapped herself on the face, as surprised as if someone else had done it. “But it could also be no one’s shirt,” her own voice reminded her. “It could mean nothing at all.” The stranger dug a hole and buried the shirt. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” the voice in her own mouth told her. The mud went soft and shaky when she patted it. She wanted no one else to know. She believed the story. No—the story was true, indisputable.

That afternoon,
the man who used to be my brother stood under the canopy, his sweet, chosen bride next to him. “We pray for this family, this new family,” the stranger said. “We pray for everything you have in store, but better, if you can.” She did not meet the jeweler’s eye.

“We pray for this glorious sun to shine on!” the butcher hollered, to a blaze of cheers. This moment was transposed on top of my own wedding, and they felt like the same instant. Time was a dazzling lie, a magician with a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age, at the same time. All the days of all our lives were today.

For the second time, Regina sat in the barn while the wedding taking place was not hers. She felt again that her limbs were enormous and as old and dry as thick-barked pine. But at her side, her friend was bigger still. The widow blew her nose into a piece of burlap that once held mustard seeds, but Regina knew that if anyone had asked, the widow would have insisted she was not crying; it was only a bit of dust, caught in her nose. Handing the rings over, the jeweler said his private prayer again—May love be mine someday.

Perl and Vlad felt a rustle in their branches as their son took flight.

“Love,” the stranger said, “is the single absolutely true thing in the world. It cannot be argued away, it cannot be crushed, it cannot be killed.”

Everyone around me hooted and I looked up to see Moishe’s shined shoe come down on a glass wrapped in a napkin that I recognized from my first childhood. I clapped and shifted my new baby into one arm so that I could put my other hand out into the aisle to try and touch the blessed pair as they passed, running as fast as they could into their good lives.