No One is Here Except All of Us (17 page)

“No. I knew I could learn to. I wanted to.” She paused. “I have been working very hard to protect it by keeping everything out.” She told me about the mail, the odd bits she threw back into the river. She was trying to calm me, to say that the only threat was our own disbelief. I was not reassured.

“It’s all a lie then,” I said. “And we are idiots.”

“No,” she pleaded. “It’s just a day, another day, after hundreds of others before. Nothing has changed.”

“I don’t know what to do.” My boys appeared in my mind, ungrown, their faces sticky, questions on their lips. I was sure I would not have the answer they needed.

“Just as we have been doing. Waking, sleeping, loving, praying.”

“Except the story doesn’t make any sense. What happens without the story?”

She was quiet. The metallic scent of love was on her skin. “There is always a story. No matter what we do, it can’t help but unfold.”

“I’m afraid,” I said.

“Yes,” she told me.

We watched sparrows flutter up, leaves quaking when the birds lit again on the branches. Even those small bodies were enough to set the trees shivering.

That night,
the ghosts dragged the old world into our dreams. They whirred like huge fans, blowing all our good work around until it hardly made sense anymore. The butcher dreamed of giant metal birds. The baker dreamed of black huffing trains that rolled through the valleys, full of grain and passengers. The banker’s wife dreamed of speaking to her sister through wires stretched across the mountains. All of us dreamed of villages bursting into flame, of running, the sound of boots hitting the earth behind us.

“Are you doing okay?” I asked the ghosts, who had once been people—grandparents and uncles—I knew and loved.

“We’re dead, if that’s what you mean,” they answered. We asked questions we had always wondered about—the chicken farmer wanted to know which child was his mother’s favorite, and the butcher asked his grandmother what it felt like to die and the butcher’s wife asked her sister what year it had been that the trees were so full of apples their limbs broke. The ghosts shrugged us off.

“We thought you were starting over,” they said. “We thought you were done with that old boring world we made.”

We tried to explain. “Your world was starting to erode.”

“Sure,” they said. “We understand. We don’t mind that we did it all for nothing.”

All the ghosts wanted to do was bicker. “The new world,” they scoffed, while they noted the holes in the baker’s socks and the spiky slept-on hair of the banker’s children. “Doesn’t look like anything’s changed to us.” The ghost mothers sat at the bottoms of their living children’s beds and cleaned their nails. “Are you going to do those dishes in the morning, or is that unnecessary now in the new world?” they asked while their offspring tossed in their sleep.

“At least we realized when it was time for a new beginning,” we whispered. The ghosts were silent and, we were certain, smug. “Stop acting like you know something!” we said. We felt them smile down at us. “Ugh!” we cried.

The stranger waited for her own ghosts to arrive. Her children, a hundred times over. Each version of themselves—three days old, two years, three and a half, six. She imagined them all standing over her, their porcelain skin broken only by the flush in their cheeks. They would be peaceful-looking, a kind of patience fallen around their shoulders like a shawl. “Hello,” they might say. “Hello Goodbye. Hello Goodbye.” They did not come, those ghosts. Were they angry for being invented out of the world? Did they want to help their mother survive, which was the hardest job of all? Much harder than dying? While the rest of the village was haunted and nagged, the stranger was left alone, stirred into the dark batter of night.

But the dream every single one of us had, and the one that broke our hearts, was not about death or destruction or anything momentous. It was this: a normal day, no new world, no new rules, just an unremarkable day. Nothing floated down the river. We drank some tea with our bread. Birds were singing, but we did not notice. Time was a river we were carried upon and neither the spring nor the mouth was visible. We had no reason to appreciate every single second of the day—we had no reason to do anything but sit and breathe.

In that dream, the world did not require us to turn it.

THE BOOK OF THE SECOND FLOOD

W
e were drenched, soaked, full of dirty water. As if the radio had made a hole in the roof of the world, and everything we had kept out for a time flooded back, a torrent. The streets were puddles. The puddles were ponds, the river was a gnash of toothy froth. And in the tall grass: frogs. As if they had been seeded there, as if the wheat had dropped these four-leggeds. The frogs were a thick, slimy lather over everything, and their song was so loud we could not hear one another’s words.

The chickens proved themselves tireless hunters of frogs. Soon the barn was empty of those slippery things and we took refuge there, gathering each evening to construct the heavens. The sky grew to cover everything we could reach while standing on chairs, and then, bit by bit, the places a ladder could take us.

As we worked, the butcher suddenly burst out, “The world was supposed to be designed to work perfectly. We made it
exactly how we wanted it,
and now it’s malfunctioning right under our noses!” The butcher’s face was splotchy and sweating.

Kayla threw her plaster spade onto the floor. “He’s right,” she said. “We wanted a new place, a quiet and safe and clean place. What was so difficult about that? Have we not earned it, have we not given up absolutely everything we had to make it possible?”

The stranger bit her lip. “It’s not going to be easy. You are doing your best, but you have to be patient.”

“But are you doing your best?” Kayla sniffed. Depending on how you looked at it, the stranger had either given up or gained more than anyone else. At first I had thought of her like a blown-egg shell, delicate and empty, but then I came to see that she was not breakable like that. She withstood storms, bowed in the wind. She was a weathervane, twisting in gusts and in breezes. I did not know if I admired her, or wanted to send her spinning in circles.

“Why did you bring that forbidden object into our barn?” the widow asked.

“She didn’t. I did,” the jeweler said.

The widow sulked in the corner with the goats, scraping their food around with her spade. The goats and the woman were a temperamental match. Regina ground a dry pile of anonymous poop into the floor with her boot.

The stranger praised the beautiful starry night we had created. She praised our efforts to make a bright place in darkness. “You have done so much,” she said.

The stranger had tried so hard to keep us from all the confusion, the unfairness, the sadness. “You are a mother, too,” I said, remembering it as the words left my mouth. Her eyes fell closed, sails losing their wind. “I mean to say that you are our mother,” but her dead children had already been invoked.

“You won’t be surprised by this, but I’m tired,” Igor said. He sat down cross-legged and held his head.

While our minds bit and spit, our hands were busy cementing pieces of broken plates to the wall of the barn, and our sky grew around us, each neighborhood of stars, each tile, a dream of peace and silence. Our hands believed in heaven even while our minds panned for catastrophes. Our hands were first to forgive.

“It was belief in, not against, something—that made the world new,” the stranger said, reminding herself as much as anyone. She suggested we go around and say the names of the constellations we were working on—the sheep, the goat—to each of which we had given a meaning: the horse, which oversees the birth of babies; the pine tree, which keeps watch over men who can’t sleep; the potato, which looks after those who fear being alone. The frog, which must have
some
purpose, and the chicken, which pecks the frog.

We told the stories of our lives and made stars for each of the parts: a star for the day we saw our wives first; a star for the first day we held our mother’s hand for her sake and not our own; a star for the day the rain came under the doors and each man in each house thought he was going to be the hero, that when he went to his window he would find the rest of the buildings gone, having floated away, and only his own turned into a boat.

The greengrocer’s wife opened several jars of fruit canned many summers ago. We ate it by the light of our lanterns, the apricots sweet and slippery on our tongues.

While we licked the juice off our fingers, people suggested many honorable names for my baby. Saul and David. Strong-sounding names like Gregor and Ivan and Radu. I did not like any of these. I said I already had one king, and two only meant fights. I said strong was fine, but I wanted better than that. So they suggested beautiful names like Florian for
flower
and Aster for
star
. But I told them to be patient—surely he would tell us his name when he was ready. “Call him whatever you like, he will still be himself,” I said. The villagers looked to Igor in case he was more logical, but he had ceded all authority to me by falling asleep at my feet.

Every family I had ever been part of was in that room. It made my skin itch. The Lena I was when I was six in a houseful of cabbages and the Lena I was when I was growing at the rate of a year every few weeks with Kayla and Hersh and the Lena I was when I became a mother were people who might not have easily understood each other.

Time outside crashed away, beating the earth and emptying the sky.

And then, just like that, the seal of quiet broke and we heard a series of huge crashes outside the barn. We heard knocking on doors of the houses nearby. We went quiet. I wished I had more hands, enough to hold my boys and Igor, who slept soundly by my side. We all opened our eyes wider, as if we might be able to see through the walls. A group of three men in uniform threw the heavy doors open and looked around. For a long moment, the soldiers scanned the room, face by face, a black pistol in each of their hands. They looked in my direction and began to laugh, which was a language we understood.

The soldiers, dressed in torn green uniforms, spread out across the room, stumbling, pinching women’s cheeks and whispering greasy words. They smelled like someone was trying to preserve them in alcohol. Husbands raised their hands to slap the men away but the open mouths of guns talked them down. The biggest of the soldiers walked straight toward me, though he did not meet my eye. My heart crashed into my chest. Solomon cowered in a ball behind my back. I hoped I was big enough to hide him. The soldier kneeled in front of me and tucked a fallen lock of hair behind my ear. His breath was wretched. His eye sockets were deep pits and he smelled like alcohol, dirty hair and marsh water. At the slime of his touch, I reached up to wipe my face.
“Brutta,”
he cursed.

The soldier turned to Igor who, incredibly, slept on.
“Prezioso,”
he said, the word slithering out of his mouth like a snake hatching. He slid his big arms around Igor and picked him up. I screamed, put the baby, his cry like a saw, on the floor and tried to wrestle Igor back. The soldiers just laughed. The thought that Igor was going to wake up in some horrible man’s arms was like sharp glass being dragged through my chest. The big soldier, my husband in his arms like a child, spat at the floor by my feet and stumbled right through the door. The two smaller soldiers squeezed in a last assault. One punched the baker in the neck, kicked over the stranger’s stack of prayer books. The other knocked Vlad’s hat off his head. Then he fired a single bullet through the wall.

I started to run after them but the barber blocked my path. “That’s my husband,” I said, my voice full of hills and valleys. The barber made the shape of a pistol with his fingers because this was enough to quiet any fight he might have had in him. “Where are they taking him?” I asked.

The barber shook his head. “We don’t know who they are,” he said. “We don’t know anything.”

“That’s Igor,” I kept saying.

I looked to the stranger, because she was supposed to be the one who understood the horrors we were here to avoid. She shook her head and put a hand on her chest.

“They were from Italy!” Kayla announced. “I remember that language! Hersh had a grandmother who was from that seaside country, she was a silk trader, nice stuff that silk. Maybe we are related to that man!” She kept chattering, nervous and hysterical. I saw a flash of Igor wrapped up in a fabric so soft he might never wake up again.

“Where are they taking my husband?” I asked no one. All the no ones shook their heads. Solomon cried and was tackled by a pile of women, where he was met with so much comfort, so much soft singing, so many shushing bosoms, that his cries were snuffed out.

“We’re sure he will be returned,” everyone said, not at all sure.

“No one is going to help him?” I cried. “No one, no one?” My eyes ran around the room, but nobody stood up. We had become a fearful people, living on an island where we forgot how to defend ourselves. I had known the ache of a growing family—of adding mothers and fathers, husbands and sons; now the first subtraction bit me with jagged teeth.

I gathered my babies in my arms. The stranger followed me out under the eaves, beyond which waterfalls of rain were sheeting. “You are you. You still are,” she yelled over the downpour. At that moment, I was not comforted by the idea. I might happily have fallen out of my life and into someone else’s. I did not respond or turn to the stranger. She grabbed me hard on the shoulder. “Now say it to me,” she said. Solomon looked up at her and wrinkled his brow.

“What?” I asked.

“Tell me that I am myself. Tell me that I still am.” I had grown used to the stranger existing as an empty case. We all had. The city where she used to live, burned and tortured, returned to the world. Grass had grown over it. The children, the husband, the friends, walked that rubble as ghosts. They remembered the woman who was the opposite of a stranger to them. She was the opposite of a stranger to me too now. She was as familiar to me as my own reflection, showing me my own existence each time I questioned it. Until now, I had not considered that I might have the privilege of doing the same for her. “You still are,” I told her, and she closed her eyes.

“You have to survive to tell what happens,” the stranger said. “That’s your job now.”

I ran home
through a torrent with my babies in my arms. Solomon said nothing. His eyelashes were studded with tears or rain. The wetted stones underfoot reflected a sluggish moon. My heels clicked and echoed—my path was no secret. From each corner, each crack between shops, I expected, almost hoped for, a pair of long arms, reaching for us. “Where are you?” I asked my husband. “Be here,” I pleaded. “Be home.”

At my door, our door, I could not turn the knob unless I put one of my children down, which I would not do. Solomon untucked his little hand from his coat pocket. He tried to reach the knob, but his arm was too short. “Put me closer,” he said. I leaned us down, the knob turned, the door opened. Igor was not inside. Somehow, that felt like the final answer. His not being in the house was the same thing as his being gone from existence. Off the face of the earth.

My heartbeat was incomplete, an unanswered question rising again and again in my chest. I understood how precious the last years had been, how still the surface of my life had become. Now the world was rotted and full of holes. Igor had been plucked as easily as an apple. Solomon and the new baby were even smaller, even more grabbable, and I knew that I myself could be traded. Igor’s space was open, and any man might decide he wanted to fill it, to save me, to do me the favor. War was a sick dog, teeth bared, the rope around his neck unraveling. A need began to rise up in me, and that need was to run.

Suddenly, someone tapped on my window. I jumped up to open it before I thought to be afraid. “Igor?” I asked. But it was not him. Fear knocked me across the head as the figure there reached bony fingers up to push its hood away. I slammed the window closed, but the latch was slippery and I could not get it in my grip. The figure tapped again. The window creaked open.

The hood fell away and the face came into the light. It was my real mother. My heart would not still—I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling. Perl drew her face close to mine and said, “Sometimes you think you’ve lost something but you’ve only shared it.
”

“You scared me,” I panted. She put her hand on her heart. “But sometimes you really have lost it,” I whispered back.

“You’ll see,” she said. Her hand, when she touched mine, was cracked and rough. She had not held it since I was a child, since I was her child. Her fingers were warm, in spite of the cold outside, and strong. I was still tremoring.

“Are we dying?” I asked Perl. She did not answer me. “Is the war coming? Is it here?” She did not answer again. “Why did you give me away?” I asked. “Why did you lock the door so I couldn’t come home?” I could have stood there asking questions without running out until the flood carried us all away.

“I never stopped being your mother.”

Together, we felt the weight of our small tribe lessen. We felt subtraction. “There is so much more to lose,” I said.

Perl reached into her pocket and took out a forbidden old object: a silver compass with a black face and a bright red needle. “I am always going to be in one of these directions,” she said. “No matter how big the map is, I’m on it somewhere.” As soon as she placed the compass in my hand, I realized the process of my leaving had already begun. Away. Our village was found, it was known and it was mapped. The only way to protect my children was to make us disappear. A person who does not exist cannot be tracked and she cannot be traded.

“Come with me,” I said to her. “All of you.”

“It’s better if you are few.”

“I can’t rescue Igor,” I said, praying for forgiveness. “If I found him, there would be nothing I could do. My children, they are mine to save.”

We both wanted to say we were sure Igor was going to be fine, he was going to come back, something was looking out for him, but neither of us had the strength to lie right then.

Away, away. My brain started clacking out a list: sweaters, bread, water, socks. Elsewhere, that forbidden place, trickled closer. I looked at the compass. No matter which way I turned it, the needle righted itself. I decided to follow it—something that steady should not be taken for granted.