No One is Here Except All of Us (18 page)

I said to the woman who was once my mother and might have been so again, “Please do not forget us.” Her hat was stuck to her head with rainwater.

She said, “I know it doesn’t always make sense, how you go about loving someone. Sometimes loving someone means gathering them back, sometimes it means sending them away
.
” She had already forgiven me for breaking her heart. “Include us in your story and we will include you in ours. That is the job of a family.”

“Take care of Igor, if he comes back,” I said. She turned away from me. Neither of us said goodbye.

And then, the world froze over, the rain turned to snow and the fields at dawn were crisp and shimmering, and the frogs were flat, dry disks—their toes spread open, their eye sockets empty caverns and their mouths frozen silent.

•
V
•

THE BOOK OF THE SEA

I
gor’s head throbbed at the same time that it felt cottony and slow. What dream is this? he wondered, as he opened his eyes. Latches clicked, gravel crunched under the boots of the men who would likely slit Igor’s throat. All at once there were voices everywhere. Men and women talking to each other, the high-pitched plea of a little girl begging for something sweet. The language was a singsongy jumble. He was pulled through the door, led up a creaking walk and seated on a bench. Salty wind teased at Igor’s hair. Birds called mournfully overhead. The sound of water everywhere, sloshing and churning, bubbling up. A man leaned in close to Igor, ruffled his hair and said, “Almost home.” Russian was a language Igor did understand.

Igor waited to be shot from behind. He waited to be kicked into whatever body of water was below, to sink to the bottom. He waited to see God, the whole hulking bright light of him. The word
alone
knocked around his brain. For hours, no one came, no one killed him, no one set him free. The voices were far away and chirping. The craft he was on rolled up and down, tossed back and forth. Igor was sick, and the smell of it taunted him.

Igor tried to make sense. Where and why and who. Scenes from his journey rose like bubbles: The snap of a latch and Igor was pushed onto a cold seat. He was blindfolded and his legs were tied, trussed like a broiler hen. An engine came to life. An engine? he thought, and in that rumble Igor became a traitor, the world he helped make turning to foam. He begged; the soldiers laughed, and then one of them knocked him hard on the head with the butt of his rifle. Igor had felt everything go soft around him as they began to move. The direction they went was away.

He remembered waking up with his back against a tree and an argument going on around him. He tried to plead but his brain was mushy. In the tall trees a hundred feet above Igor wind had been caught; not even the wind was free to go. He could not stay awake for more than a few minutes at a time.

He remembered being back in the automobile, bumping farther along, the three men laughing and chattering like schoolboys. When they stopped moving, the scent of urine came at Igor. He needed to pee too, which made him furious. His body had dumbly continued its machinations. Then a man came up close to Igor, close enough that the smell of him, which was stale alcohol and burning wood, saturated everything. The soldier leaned in and placed his hands under Igor’s arms as if he was picking up a baby. He stood his prisoner up, feet on the ground outside, and gently unzipped Igor’s pants, held him. It was the sort of kindness that made a person feel ill. They were there for a long time, the soldier kicking rocks, before Igor’s muscles relaxed and let go the liquid. In the car, he cried.

There had been nights on the ground and days driving. In this dream, there was an endless supply of land to cover. Away, away, away they went.

Footfalls again,
this time toward Igor. And then light, a flood of it. He saw stars, though it was daytime. Here was an entire ocean, a thing he had never seen. It became bluer the farther out he looked. His vision widened to take in the scene. He was on a passenger ferry. There were huge curls of rope like dredged-up sea serpents, salt-eaten wooden benches and churning smokestacks. Scattered around the deck were men and women in the middle of a regular day. There were soldiers, too, uniforms and weapons marking them. The language they spoke was long lost, like a song remembered somewhere in the body’s hidden cells. He could not understand the words but the tune began to make sense. Italian, Igor thought. From Italy. He almost laughed because it seemed so silly, this sudden insistence on the existence of Italy. Of all things, that was what had fought its way back in?

Igor’s attention came back to his own body. He was tied to a bench by his wrists and ankles. He couldn’t see anyone else tied up and no one seemed to want to look him in the eye. He felt dirty and sorry and foggy. A soldier, seeing that he was awake, came and stood over Igor. The man was small and he looked tired.

“Please,” was the only word Igor could say. The soldier sat down next to him. He began the job of untying the ropes around wrists and ankles without explaining why. Igor listened for the sound of explosions, of guns, of airplanes. Only the sea splashing the ship’s side sang back.

“Can you understand me? I don’t know your language, but can you speak Russian?” the man asked in a rough accent. He paused. Igor nodded. “You are our prisoner,” the soldier said. “If you cooperate, we won’t hurt you.” He put his hand to his brow to shield the sun and his eyes turned a soft gray in the shade.

The light felt like needles piercing Igor’s brain.

It would not have mattered if Authority Himself had walked up, bespectacled and with a ream of evidence to support his case: Everywhere, atrocities and battles. Bombs dropped on the innocent by dozens of different kinds of men, all of them believing that that particular explosion was worthy, those deaths justified. Newspapers, military orders, radio broadcasts, blood-soaked uniforms and wailing widows would have confirmed the story. But Igor, a career sleeper, was sure he knew how to spot a dream.

Someone on shore caught the giant rope a person on board had thrown to him. The ship rubbed against the wooden pilings like a neglected dog. A crowd gathered on the dock, sobbed for the boys who had survived the war so far and the boys who had not. Three mothers nearly suffocated, in pillowy bosoms, their returned sons. Mothers whose sons did not disembark collapsed on the ground and had to be carried home. The crowd asked about this prisoner the boys had brought, how dangerous he was, how deranged. By now, the soldiers had grown bored with their trophy. “Not dangerous at all,” they said. “He sleeps most of the time. He’s like a housecat. He might even be good luck. We didn’t break down once after we took him.”

“Can I keep him?” a young man, the jailer, asked the soldiers.

“He’s all yours,” the soldiers said, wanting to think about anything but the war.

Igor’s dream took
absurd turns of loveliness. He and his personal guard went for the tour. Igor was shown the taverna where he could have his wine, the market where he could buy his cheese and the bakery where he could buy his bread. All the people in town shook his hand, because he was their prisoner.

The guard showed him which bench was best for watching the girls coming out of the place where they did the wash, which bench was nicest in the morning to drink your coffee. “I was thinking about it, and it’s likely that we’ve saved your life,” the guard said. “You are a very lucky man.”

Here he was in the most foreign of foreign lands, a place filled with outlandish sunshine. A place with its own ocean. A place where there was a man in charge of one thing—making sure Igor was taken care of. And somehow Igor was supposed to believe that this was because of a devastating war? Because millions of people were dying? Because he was a prisoner of war?

Igor decided to wait patiently to wake back up into his old, gray life. A person does not get lifted to salvation this easily.

The guard showed Igor to the jail where he would sleep.

“Will anyone else come?” Igor asked, looking at the six bunk beds.

“No, not that we know of.”

Igor had thought of a sure way to reveal the guard’s kind exterior as false, to stretch the membrane of the dream until it burst. “I hate to say, but is there a larger bed someplace?”

“A larger bed?”

“I love to sleep. It’s what I’m best at. Usually, and I hope I don’t sound ungrateful, I like more room so I can spread my legs out.”

The guard looked at the cot. “I will see what I can do.”

Igor felt a strange hum in his head, disbelief rumbling like the engines that brought him here.

Within a day Igor was helping several men carry the bunks out and carry in the four-poster of a recently dead old woman. The guard borrowed blue sheets and white cotton blankets from his mother, which he and Igor tucked in around the mattress, snug. The pillow remained—a pillow is the same size no matter the bed it lives on.

Each night, the guard came and locked Igor into the cell and each morning he came and released him. They went for their coffee and they sat on the rocks by the sea, where the guard taught Igor his spiking, giggling language.

“Tell me again how I am here? Why I am here?”

The guard told the story the same way it had been told to him.

The island boys had fought a losing battle far in the north. Their side had sustained hundreds of thousands of casualties, and three of the island boys, just three, walked out on their own feet. For months, they hid in a fallen-down building and gathered parts to fix their car so they could get home. They had no radio, no idea what was going on anywhere. They could not get their heads back after so much death. Finally, the motor turned over and they drove for two days without sleeping, without speaking. At the foot of a mountain range, exhausted and filled with the rabid, manic combination of the elation and guilt of survivors, they bought two jugs of vodka from a band of Gypsies, and that night, as they made camp, the boys emptied them.

Drunker and drunker, they replayed the deaths of their friends, the rotted bodies they had seen, the enemies they had drained of blood. We must deserve something, they said. A little honor. A small trophy. Somewhere in that stupor, it made sense to go looking for one.

Morning slipped in too early and revealed a man tied to a tree, blindfolded, with blood dripping down his face. The soldiers remembered only vaguely how he had come to be there and disagreed about what to do with him. It was the war itself that made the best case: life is disposable, nearly meaningless. Every day, thousands more are extinguished, captured, maimed. Everyone on this continent is marked for death. How much could it hurt to take a single little prisoner?

Sometimes it happens
that two very different stories, two distant lives, come crashing together. Once, there was a sleepy man who had lived in a brand-new world until he was reeled out like a caught fish. And once, very, very far away, on a scrubby island floating in the black-blue sea, there lived a lonely young jailer who had no prisoners, had never locked the door on a murderer, an adulteress, even a petty thief.

All through the winter and spring, the summer and fall, the jailer had swept and paced the cell. He had washed the walls, which were already clean. He had polished the stone floor. All through the winter and spring, the summer and fall, the other island boys had inched closer to the night they would seek a reward. All through the winter and spring, the summer and fall, Igor had practiced being sound asleep.

Perhaps Igor and the jailer’s fate was an answer from God. Perhaps the entire architecture of the war was built to land a single body in a single cell. Or perhaps fate is nothing more than an accident—two ships lost in the dark, running aground on the same windward beach.

Igor thought about
what the scene of his capture had looked like: the villagers cementing stars in place, the room turning slowly into the heavens, no talking, only the scrape of tile. Enter soldiers, exit soldiers, Igor, just awake, in tow.

“Was I asleep in the story?”

The guard squinted at him.

“All right, then,” Igor said, deciding he liked his portrayal better in the soldiers’ version of the story. “But if I am supposed to be your enemy, then will you kill me?”

“No, certainly not. Maybe a life sentence with no possibility of parole. You are useless to me dead.” Even the guard’s eyebrows were thin and unthreatening. “Anyway, why would you want to leave?” He gestured around them at the thyme-dry hills and the blue and bluer sea.

“I have a family. I have a home.” Igor thought for a moment. “When you say there is a war, do you mean a real war? Horror and all that? Death?”

“You haven’t seen the pictures? Hitler, Churchill? Mussolini? Stalin?” Igor was quiet. He rolled his sleeve up and examined the rope burns on his wrist. They stung at his own touch. “I knew your village was far away, but I didn’t know it was that far away.”

“It doesn’t look like war here,” Igor said, and put his face up to the dry, warm day.

“Of course. This is the best place on earth,” the guard said.

“I have a new baby boy. And a wife, and a bigger son.”

The wind brushed a little of the heat off their bare arms. The guard looked ashamed. Small beads of sweat popped and trickled down his forehead, which made Igor inexplicably sad. “That’s a nice breeze,” Igor said, surprised by his sudden desire to be kind.

“Is there anything you aren’t satisfied with? About your experience? It must have been a bumpy ride.”

“I am asleep,” Igor reassured himself. “I am asleep and I am dreaming.”

In the afternoon
they ate a large lunch at the guard’s mother’s house. She fed them bean soup, pasta, baked chicken and a custardy dessert. She told Igor, “If you can tell me you eat better at home you can go back. You will be freed.”

“Mother,” the guard scolded, “he is our prisoner, you can’t go freeing him.”

“He won’t go anywhere, because there is no way he eats better at home,” she assured her son.

They both looked at Igor, whose chest was covered in crumbs, a trail of fallen soup leading the way to his lap. He shook his head. “It would be a lie,” he confessed, spooning another bite into his hole of a mouth. “I have never eaten such a meal.”

“Then he stays,” the guard’s mother said. “I told you.” To Igor, she said, “This is what I can do with wartime rations. Just imagine my table in better times.”

The guard’s mother told Igor that her son was all right but a little bit of a sissy. She told him that his guarding of Igor was the best thing he had done so far. She told him how his brothers all lived in big cities where they fought for important things—the holiest of churches, the most beautiful of paintings, the most important politicians—but not this one. This one guarded a jail with no one in it. “You can’t leave us,” the mother said. “You’re the only thing that makes my son here not look like a total idiot.”