No One is Here Except All of Us (24 page)

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VI
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THE BOOK OF THE INDOORS

I
said to Solomon, “Can I carry you?”

“I’m too big,” he told me, sorry for it.

“Just to that turn in the road,” I promised. I bent down and scooped him up, carried him beyond the bend where, on either side of us, flat fields of grass aspired to be endless. My throat was hard and dry. He did not point out the distance we had come or the difference between his own weight and the weight of a baby. He willed himself lighter, as I had asked the little one to do. “Be a baby,” he whispered.

“Be a baby,” I whispered back, not to him, but to myself, both of us wanting to start over again, new and unknowing.

In the tall grass: a white farmhouse with a barn next to it. Not a temple, just a barn. This time, instead of passing by in the trees, hidden, I began to walk toward its wide brown door. It was due west—every rule broken at once.

“We are hiding,” Solomon reminded me. “We should wait until night to sneak into the barn.”

“We are going inside,” I said. “Today we are going inside.”

Solomon’s voice cracked—a clean fissure down the middle—when he asked if there might be food inside. When I had turned off the road, I thought I would walk to the barn, and we might steal some eggs, sleep in the hay. When the word “food” fell out of Solomon’s mouth, he looked at me, startled, apologetic for having admitted a deficit, as if this made him a traitor to our little army. In an instant, I adjusted my aim to the door of the farmhouse. Before us was a path, marked for human feet by white stones laid in lines. It was meant to be followed, but not by us.

“But what if it isn’t safe? What if they hate us? Should I run? Should I hide?”

There was a silver knocker in the shape of a fist. I shut out Solomon’s river of questions, held that hand and asked to be let inside. A man answered, looked at us and closed the door back to a crack. I flinched away from the smack I might receive. “What are you?” he asked in Russian.

“This is my son, I’m his mother,” I said, trying to make sense. The man looked Solomon up and down, studying his every inch. He kneeled down and took Solomon’s arm, measuring it with the bracelet of his fingers.

“What are you doing still alive?” he asked. There wasn’t answer for that question, so I said nothing. “Are you lost?”

Certainly we were not found, I thought. We had no idea where we were, but neither did we have any idea where we wanted to be. Must a lost person have a destination in mind? I gave no answer to the farmer’s question. He looked at me and he must have seen something hopeless because the man opened the door into a kitchen with a heavy table and chairs, pots hanging on nails on the wall, an enamel washbasin and a cutting board with the orange fingers of carrots waiting to be sliced. There were walls, high and flat, made of wood. There was a floor, low and flat. A pile of folded clothes, all bright white, sat on the table, clean and waiting to be put away. On the black stove was a big silver pot, steam escaping. The smell made even my marrow ache. A woman stood over the carrots with her hand on her hip, looking at the broken people entering her life.

Solomon pushed close to me and said, “We are inside a house.”

“That’s right.” The farmer gave Solomon a warm smile.

“You let them in?” the woman asked.

Shame slipped her fingers around my neck and squeezed. My face felt hot. I wanted to apologize for bothering them and leave. Not back to the bruised world this time, but a day-to-day place, the decades ahead, Solomon’s future unfolding one unnotable hour at a time. I wanted that possibility to exist.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to put you in danger. We should go,” I said.

“In danger?” the farmer’s wife said, and squinted.

I did not know the real stories, only the fear of what they might be. Only the banished, threadbare memories. Only the radio’s babble. “We shouldn’t have come.”

“Yes,” the farmer said, something between a grimace and a grin on his face. The owner of a gruesome tale, he cracked his knuckles while the audience waited.

“They will never manage it,” the farmer’s wife said. “It is not possible to do what they say they will do.” Someone, somewhere sharpened his dagger. He put his hands into long black gloves, unrolled a map of his expanding territory.

“Maybe.” The farmer shrugged. “So far, they are managing.”

“What do they say they will do?” Solomon asked.

“They say they will kill certain kinds of people,” he told us. “All of you. In the name of improvement.”

The farmer’s wife shushed him. “But you are safe here,” she said, opening the lid of the big silver pot and letting the smell saturate the room. “For now,” the farmer said. I saw that Solomon’s eyes were watering. The farmer’s wife spooned soup into bowls. “Sit down and eat. Eat as much as you can.” Chairs were beneath us, a floor, the table’s surface made itself available to our arms and our bowls. “Look at how skinny you are,” the farmer said. “You poor, poor boy.” He shook his head at me, scolding.

The soup was unbearably warm. It made me feel faint. The world slowed down. My heart was a throng of people, fists raised in the air. There was butter to put on the bread. Solomon was silent. He did nothing but deliver himself food. He delivered and delivered and delivered, sucking and chewing and sucking. The farmer could not take his eyes off my son, who was filling his little body with the man’s salvation. His wife trained her eyes on her own supper. No one spoke.

And then Solomon turned to his side and threw everything—absolutely everything—back up. The soup looked the same on the floor as it had in the bowl. I started to cry. I knelt down and began to scoop it into my shawl. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” I kept saying, “he didn’t mean it.”

Solomon looked stunned. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I can eat it again.”

The wife came around the table and said, “No, stop right now. Do not save that.” The farmer blotted the corners of his mouth before placing his spoon carefully on the table. He had ceased to enjoy his supper.

I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We won’t waste it.” Solomon picked up his bowl again and began to eat. He ate even while he watched me try to gather the bits of potato together.

“Stop right away,” the wife said. “Please stop. There is more food. Please.” I lay down on the floor and cried. I shook myself out. I was stupid and useless at trying to stop myself.

“What should we do?” the farmer whispered. In the question was a story that did not end well—the dirty woman come in from the war, sick, dying, the whole house stinking like her rotting body, her rotting soul.

The farmer’s wife filled Solomon’s bowl with fresh soup. She brought warm water from the stove and cleaned the floor, took my shawl away. From the corner of my eye I saw her open the front door and throw it outside. Garbage.

“Eat,” she said to the boy, “try again. Your body didn’t know what to do.” Solomon ate slowly this time, smoothed the soup into his mouth and sucked it through his teeth. In each mouthful I heard the weeks I had allowed him to nearly starve. Solomon watched me but he kept eating.

I felt the farmer and his wife’s eyes on me. Is she insane? Is she sick? The boy is all right, handsome even, but what will we do with his mother?

Only after my son had eaten his second dinner, his eyes heavy and low, did the farmer kneel at my side, slip his arms under my back and lift. I could have stopped him, gone rigid, kicked. I could have made it clear that I was operating under my own power. But I let him take me from the floor in his arms, a body folded in on itself. I was soft, blind, compassless. My lids slipped open for a second and the farmer’s eyes were waiting for mine, full of light and lightning. They told me I had one chance to deny a series of facts: You are weak and confused, ill-equipped. You are potentially crazy. You are in danger and in need of charity. You belong to a dangerous tribe. Your life, as far as it still exists, is owed to my kindness. You will do what I want.

I shut my eyes again, and let my head roll back.

The farmer’s hands, one on my shoulder and the other on my leg, felt huge. I could already tell the tips of his fingers would leave bruises. But was this because he pushed them down hard? No, my own weight was to blame, crushing itself into those gentle pink pads. The farmer carried me to a bed made on the floor, where he lit and then blew out a candle. Solomon climbed in next to me. The wife pulled the wool up to the necks of her strangers. The journey from the floor near the table to the floor on the other side of the room was no more than a few paces, nothing like the hundreds of miles we had come. Yet in these last yards, a border had been crossed. The farmer had carried me like his innocent bride over the threshold. I listened to the fire spark and whine until it died and the coals left only the faintest halo of light for me to pray by.

In the next days,
Solomon learned how to stack wood, churn butter and dig up only those potatoes whose bushes had begun to wither. I was given socks to mend by the farmer’s wife. Her face looked like it was made of dough that had risen. Her lips puffed out around her teeth when she smiled, and enclosed them like a well-packed crate of eggs when she stopped. The farmer did not like to talk, at least not to me. He surveyed me and measured my son, like a banker wondering over an investment. His eyes were milky and his beard thin. “He’s nothing like what I would have expected. He’s a natural outdoorsman,” the farmer said, bragging like a father. I could not think of something to glory about that would make sense to someone who had lived on the solid earth all along. My son is a natural constellation maker, a natural escaper, a natural mourner.

I ate and slept and our hosts knew by watching that these acts were as much as I could bear. Meanwhile, my son got himself back. It happened so fast. His legs were legs again, rejoined by the hopeful wrap of muscle. His hands were not a web of bone anymore. His feet. His toes. His spine—all of them were covered by a thin layer of new flesh. I still felt weak and wrung-out. My body did not build itself back up so quickly. I stared at myself in the mirror hanging beside the washbasin. “You’re me,” I said to it. “Hello.” I waved and the person waved back. “I almost remember you. Remember me?” The woman repeated it with me, not waiting until I was done with the question to ask it back.

“Remember me?”

“Remember me?”

“Remember me?”

I watched my son out the window with the farmer, gathering, separating, hulling and seeding barley. They sat on stumps and worked. They walked and worked. They came inside, put their feet up and talked about the work that was done. They scrubbed the potatoes and they brought eggs inside, fed the chickens. There were some early apples, small and bumpy. Solomon liked to suck on them and let the sour juice sting his mouth.

As the weeks passed, my jealousy bubbled over. I imagined that Solomon and I were alone in a field somewhere, telling each other the story of what once was. His skeleton arms, his skeleton legs mine alone to hold on to, to provide just enough for, to love. I had taught him to be adaptable, to put his hands up and catch, like a tree, whatever moisture blew past. And I had knocked on this door. All Solomon had done was not say no. I missed him now in this foreign house. I missed being alone with him.

The farmer’s wife had Solomon help bake the bread. She had him churning and boiling. She gave him candies to suck on and bread to eat between meals. He liked what he was asked to do—he liked working for the sake of something.

Each time the farmer saw me, disappointment scribbled over his eyes. He seemed to be patiently waiting for the day when I would quietly and respectfully disappear. I moved less and less. The farmer ignored me more and more. The farmer’s wife gave me things to chop, which took me all day. Three potatoes were hours of work, slicing them in half was enough. Cutting their starchy bodies, cutting them again. The farmer’s wife worked quickly, gathering everything together and cooking it.

“We used to be three,” I said, my knife resting at the edge of the board.

“Your husband?”

“If you count him we used to be four.”

“Your husband and who else?”

“The baby. He was Solomon’s little brother.”

“Your son?”

The farmer’s wife came and put her hand on my head. She brushed the hair that fell there. “Did they kill them, your husband and your baby?”

“My son fell asleep and did not wake up again.” Out the window: everything else. It looked like home to me sometimes, the big emptiness of it, the unknown.

“And your husband?”

I explained Igor’s kidnapping, how he was the only one taken and no one knew why or what it meant. Chosen like an egg out of a basket.

“Was that the end of it?”

“We left that night. I have no idea if our village has been burned up or if it’s the same as always. No one knows where I am. Even I don’t know where I am.”

“That is . . .” the farmer’s wife began, but she never told me what.

A few days later,
the farmer came home from a trip to town with a newspaper curled under his arm. I saw it and the air fell out of my body. That there might be a fact, a truth about where I was and whether I had been in danger at all. Whether I had lost my son for a reason. Whether I had starved us all for a reason. Whether the winter would come again and trees would hang themselves over me while the stones made pits of my back.

The farmer did not open the newspaper up. He put down a brick of cheese, a wreath of garlic, some meat wrapped in paper, blood seeping through.

“You have a newspaper,” I said.

The farmer did not answer me.

“You bought a newspaper in town,” I said.

The farmer did not answer me.

“Does that newspaper tell us how we might die?” I asked.

The farmer looked at me. His eyes were sorrowful holes in his head. His cheeks were hot red from walking and the wind had mangled his hair. He smoothed it down. “Not how I will die,” he said, finally. For a second, punishment flashed in his eyes. My punishment. Truth shining like a weapon in his hands.

“You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to,” the farmer’s wife told me.