No One is Here Except All of Us (28 page)

I looked at the letter again, tore my name off—
Dear L
—and shredded it into a fine snow. “You left me completely alone!” I screamed to Igor. “Our boys are gone. What am I doing here? Why am I not dead?” I threw the snow of my name up into the air. “What am I going to do now?”

I listened, but heard no one answer. I put the bag of feathers down on a dry shelf and waved the muddy handkerchief and the letter in surrender. I tossed some chicken bones up like confetti and they splashed down, a sad, sinking music.

On the back of the note with a pencil that floated beneath a desk, I wrote:

Dear I,

Why is everyone always leaving each other? I almost remember who you are, but I don’t remember who I am. Do you?

Love, L

“Take me away! I’m yours!” I yelled. “I’m ready to die here!” The temple’s dumb eyes stared past me, did not acknowledge me or wink in camaraderie. The trees outside did not wave their branches.

Even though it might have been a relief to see a group of men in tall black boots come out of the fields and take me away, they did not. No one arrested me or shot me in the chest or dragged me away by my feet. No one whispered in my ear or brushed my hair. No one told me to be careful since I was going to be a mother for the third time. No one sat down nearby and opened a newspaper. No one ate an apricot and spit the pit at my feet. No one blew his nose or scratched his cheek or sighed. In a world filled with millions of people, I was left absolutely alone.

I looked at the pool around me. “Will I be a very fast swimmer like my husband?” I asked it. “Is that what I’m supposed to find out?”

The surface was a shimmering thing. Above: air; objects that used to matter; the stars; the new world. Below: mud, rot; everything buried, everything lost.

I reached my arms up over my head and stood tall. I pictured myself a champion diver on a very tall board with the entire ocean around me. I imagined myself in a bathing suit and a cap. I filled the shore with cheerers. Each man had a hat he was waving. Each woman had a handkerchief. Each child, a banner with my name on it. It was not water I would dive into. It was another world—someplace I had never been. I believed, and that was a feeling I had forgotten. The flutter of wings in my chest.

The surface of the world was permeable—a line meant to be broken. All I had to do was jump through.

My arms made a sweep and my toes pushed off the edge of the pedestal and my dive was in motion. I cut through the air like a huge bird, the noises and the colors disappeared around me as if it were all one great arc of sky.

The lake took me in, clothes and all. The water was enough. It took my head and belly—my bones—gently down, all our prayers, turned now to water. I sunk down to the bottom of the lake and let all the air out of my lungs. I sat there as long as I could, as heavy as I could, and listened. It felt like the moment before I was born, and I did not want to rush it. I was beneath, below, under, beyond. The water held me completely, tight. It got into my ears and nose, between my toes and fingers. There were almost no sounds: only the pop of bubbles that escaped my nose and floated to the surface. Only the water sealing my ears. I opened my mouth and let the dirty water in. I felt my hair lift up and float. In front of me, my hands were hardly visible, just ghosts. “I am alone beneath the earth,” I said into the water, which muted my words and carried them up as air.

I heard the sound of my heart, as always. When my lungs prickled, I had a choice: breathe water, or breathe air. I let my mouth flood, but could not make myself take the water deeper. I pushed myself up, and filled my chest.

The pool sang when I wrung my hair out onto the surface, returning what I had taken.

•
VII
•

THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE, AWAY

T
he miles back to the train were marked by water dripped from my hair and clothes. I left trails on the path and shivered with cold. I had my two small bags—one with my papers, a chip of the Solomon star, a muddy handkerchief that might have belonged to my first mother and a letter from my husband who was having a fun time down south. I wanted not to be angry with him, to feel only the relief of a wife who discovers her husband is safe and happy, and I did feel that, but there I was in my wracked body, in my empty village, alone. If I could have summoned him back at that instant, had someone to walk those miles to the train with me, I would have forgiven him all the comfort of his months away.

In the second bag were goose feathers, packed tight but even still, weighing very little. My feet made pools in the mud and all along my path were the twisted bodies of worms. Rain had drawn them out and then left them stranded. Some were balled up, some were stretched so long and thin they looked like the beginnings of snakes. Some were in the shape of letters. An S, a P, an O. I tried to read their message as I walked but found nothing but random deformations.

“Stop talking to me,” I said to the worms. “I’m not listening.”

I stood under the yellow lights of the station platform, holding everything I had not lost, while a herd of moths crashed again and again into the lightbulbs. Banging their heads against something so promising.

I was asked
six times in the first hour for my papers, which I gave easily, looking out the window, thinking,
Do I die here? Is this the end?

“Natalya Volkov,” I told them each time. “My sister is sick in Odessa. I’ll be with her when she dies.”

“Tell me your husband’s name. Tell me the names of your children.”

“Volkov. Johan. I have no children.”

The train stopped and hissed. People walked through the corridor, spoke words muffled by the walls. In my compartment, I sat up with the bag of feathers behind my head and the bag of treasures on my lap. Outside my window: the sea, tall snowy mountains, a lake filled with geese.

I thought about getting out at the goose lake and staying there to collect all of their softest feathers. It would be an agreeable life, my feet dangling in what would surely be clean and cool water, with a goose on my lap, gently pulling the down from its belly. I would sing to the goose, if the goose wanted. I would smooth its top feathers down and clean any dried muck off its beak. When it waddled away it would be happier. I would stuff pillows for everyone. People would come from all towns nearby to buy my feathers. They would send them to their relatives, who, far away in some new world, would rejoice at the packages. Who would tear open their old pillows and pour the rough old down out their windows onto the streets, where the people below would be covered. Snowbound.

An old woman snapped the door to my compartment open. She carried two bags and a cane that she did not walk with but held at the ready like a well-used weapon. Her face was an oiled hide. She said, “Don’t talk to me while I eat,” and unpacked a piece of chicken, a piece of bread and an ironed napkin. I nodded. The world slipped past. She reminded me of my old music teacher, the widow, and I wondered what this woman could teach me before our paths divided. Games of chance? Fistfighting?

“What are you looking at?” she asked. I apologized and turned away. She slathered at the mouth while she chewed. Her hair, I was surprised to notice, was impeccably twisted into a complicated, youthful brown chignon. It was shiny. Her hair could have been going to a fancy party, if only the rest of her would leave it alone. It occurred to me that this woman had probably been alive all along—all that time when I was living in an infant world, inventing rules to live by, she had been tearing meat off bones and wiping the grease from her leathery face with a starched white napkin. She might have been beautiful. She might have had children and grandchildren. Her memory of the last few decades would be absolutely different from mine. Unrecognizable.

Her eyes tunneled into mine, trying to root me out. “You want to know what I think?” She paused, sucking at her chicken bone. “God is a spineless pansy. Bless him.” The woman shook her napkin out. Grease had made it almost transparent. With it she polished her cane. I could not figure out what to do with my hands. I scratched my cheek, rolled my sleeve and made a fist within the space of a few seconds. The woman glared at me, angry that I appeared to be a worthless pupil. Still, she continued, “I know he exists, because—look around. Only God could think of a place as deranged and gorgeous as this. But the problem is that he won’t tell us yes or no. He’s very impressionable. We say, Everyone has to wear a fancy hat and pray on Sunday and he says, All right, let’s see it. We say, No one can eat meat from a pig and he says, Good idea. Someone else says, Everyone has to eat meat from a pig and he says, Fine with me. Someone says, Let’s kill everyone with brown hair and he says, Sure, why don’t you try it out.”

The woman examined the sheen of her cane. The handle bore the shape of a rabbit’s head, long ears pointed back. It looked like it was sniffing the air for a predator. I waited for her to give me some kind of answer. Tell me what to believe in. “God just likes a good story,” she grunted, and then her head fell forward and she went to sleep. Her cane rolled back and forth.

The woman snored. Her cane fell onto the floor and I picked it up to pet the rabbit. I could practically feel it tremble at my strange touch. “I won’t hurt you or try to be your friend,” I said, placing it back on the woman’s lap. The rabbit rolled, looked at me, looked away.

Together with me, as the fabric of my seat, the planks of the floor, the tracks beneath and the hot, rolling wheels, was the fact of each beautiful, terrible thing. I could still feel everyone I had ever loved—the misery of their absence and joy of their lives on either side of a scale, each trying to tip it. Past the mountains a city no longer stood. A snaking river filled with blood. Yet the grass was as green as it could be, and the water as blue and the sky as clean and smokeless. Above good or bad, our God must have admired contrast.

The stations and their names were a scramble of letters. With only the occasional station light filling our compartment, we rocked through the dark. The old woman snorted awake, smoothed her hair. She searched for something in her coat pocket, scratched a match to life. Her face in the firelight was jagged and disturbed. With her free hand she tried to unlace her shoe. The match burned down, the woman yelped quietly, blew it out and lit another.

“So?” I asked.

“So?” She struggled with a knot.

“What do we do?” I took the match from her so she could use both hands.

“Thank you,” she conceded. She spread her toes like a fan, rolled her ankles. “Try to be kind, try to have fun. Enjoy more chicken. That’s it. On we go into the night.”

Two scrub-cheeked young soldiers
woke me in the morning. The old woman was gone. Had someone met her at the train station? I wondered. Had she simply disappeared into the darkness? What kitchen table or graveyard had she been journeying to? “Good morning,” I said, and the soldiers studied my papers.

In the next station we had time to get out and stretch. I ate a long roll of bread. I went outside and stood on the marble steps. I could see the tops of huge buildings over the trees. Their rounded and pointed heads reflected the sun. They shot the sun back in stabs, which sliced the sky. A policeman came up to me and asked for my papers. I did as I always did: answered all the questions, tried to look Russian.
Do I die here?
I asked myself.
Is this where I die?
But the guard gave the papers back and went on. There were birds on the steps, big black birds dropping and picking up scraps. Their eyes were yellow and sharp. I tossed them part of my bread and they tore it, hopped toward me, stared at me. I saluted them but the blackbirds stood still at my feet, waiting for more of my kindness.

And inside? Inside me? The stew was a tiny form. The form nested, warm, and the form was you. You got right to work growing a heart. But I still did not know you were there. I sat, I watched the world speed past, and both our hearts rumbled away inside, clanging their cages.

You made yourself a hole of a mouth in order to say later, “What is that there, what kind of tree? The one with the shaking leaves?” You made tunnels for ears so that I could tell you, “Cottonwoods. There must be a river.” I ate bread and we were both fed by it.

What mattered was not that around the train there were low green hills with yellow flowers cupped and shaking. What mattered was not that we clanked over bridges with rivers tumbling underneath, which I could almost hear. What mattered was not that there were church steeples or brick towns or even far-off mountains ahead. Instead, it was the miles behind that counted. There was a river now between my home and me. There was a brick town and a church steeple. There was a man riding a bicycle, a field full of unbloomed sunflowers. There were so many blades of sharp grass and tracks of dry dirt and puddles and trunks of decapitated trees between us. Cities erupted from the plains and craned their necks to see the growing distance between here, now here, now here and home. Even this field, even this stream, even that fallen-down wall that does not keep sheep in were between me and home. Even the sheep who jumped over it. Even the ants crawling crazy circles over the dirt, carrying it down into their rooms, standing on one another’s polished backs.

Everything was between. And yet, something else kept being ahead.

THE BOOK OF LOVES

B
ecause the night was clean and they were hidden inside it, Igor and Francesco sneaked out to the night-dark sea—past shut-up windows where the sleep of war-frightened people was being slept, past the animals whose job it was to die in time for dinner and to give milk not for their own babies but for someone else’s. Igor and Francesco took their clothes off, every last scrap of the made world, and lowered themselves into the cool brine. Their bodies were surrounded by halos of glowing phosphorus. The sound of stones rolling over one another’s backs at the bottom and the sound of wind shucking the surface of the sea. Igor put his head under. Francesco watched the halo of his friend below him, then looked at the real, perfect stars overhead. Each single dot was entirely distinct, alone against the black question of the sky.

“Am I really free?” Igor asked.

“You are really free.”

Igor thought about the possibilities for this. He could go in search of his family, who everyone seemed to believe must be dead. Dead—it was too big a word. But when he looked around him, he could not fathom where in that dark night I could be or how, no matter his care or diligence, we would ever happen to meet on a road, in a square, under a tree. Just because a man sets out does not mean he finds. Igor thought about trying to learn to love Carolina, trying to replace my features, glue new memories over the old ones. He could be a father again. He thought about the births of his two sons, meeting those achingly small bodies for the first time, shaking their hands and promising to protect them. Had he managed to do that, to protect? Probably not, not from here, this far away. He could not bear to leave another pair of children in the early morning, their entire bitter lives waiting at the door, snarling. He and Francesco could move into Francesco’s mother’s house and eat themselves fat, eat until they had to be rolled out into their graves. Or he could stay where he was, his own bed and his own sink and his own window. Bars to keep him in and bars to keep everything else out. His own personal guard. He kicked his legs in the cool water, watched them light up.

“It’s as decent a place to wait as any,” Igor said. “I am a very bad father and a very bad husband and probably very bad at lots of other things, too. No one has asked for me to come home. It’s true, right, that I have received no mail?”

“It’s a letter you’re waiting for? An invitation to come back?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know if anyone is alive. If my house is still standing.” Igor looked at his palms, which were cracked simply from being alive. “I guess I’m waiting for word that the world has itself figured out. That we’re through capturing. I would rather not go until I know it’s safe out there. Or until someone misses me so much they come for me.”

“You want to be safe. And loved.”

“And home. Is that so much to ask?”

“I can promise that I will do everything to protect you here. I’ll hire you, to work in the jail. We can swim at night,” Francesco said. “We’ll sleep the day away. I doubt you’ll get the same promise from anyone else.”

Igor looked at Francesco. “For a long time,” he said, “I was waiting for you to kill me. I thought you were biding your time until I was fat enough, like a goose. No matter how I added it up, there was no way the story ended without me being dead.”

“I suppose you will be dead in the end, as we all will, but only when there’s nothing else I can do to keep you alive.”

The world did not beg for Igor to put his armor on and head out to fight. He heard the sea swish and spit back out onto the shore. He heard the trees shake with wind and coax soft, thin blades of grass out of the dirt.
There are enough of us fighting,
the world seemed to say.
Why don’t you stay home and sleep? Eat something tasty for the rest of us. Keep track of your dreams. Try to pay attention to the smell of thyme in the morning. Scratch the salt from your hair and watch it shine as it falls to the ground.

Igor said, “I think my job in the world is not to do anything. Nothing particularly good and nothing particularly bad. It’s not a very important job, and no one cares how well I do, but I’m not in it for recognition.”

“A job is a job,” Francesco said. “You know your talents.”

“What’s your job?” Igor asked.

“My job is to look after you and my mother. My job is to admire her soup and make sure you have what you need to sleep soundly.”

“We shouldn’t try to do more?”

Francesco thought about this. He thought about the men all over the world dropping bombs on one another, cocking a gun and firing—each one of these people thought they were doing the best thing. “I think we might be helping the world by
not
doing anything. We hurt no one. Maybe no one is helped, but at least no one is hurt.” He put his head underwater and slicked his hair back when he surfaced. “If I were a woman and you were a man. Or the other way around.” Francesco stumbled. “And if we fell in love and got married and had children . . .”

Igor looked at him with suspicion. “Okay,” he said, waiting for the rest.

“Then our children would say that if it hadn’t been for the war, they never would have existed. That family would be thanks to someone else’s fight. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Good things are born from bad things.”

“Our friendship is thanks to the war,” Igor said. “It’s kind of like a family. In a way, I guess.”

Francesco smiled brightly, took Igor’s hand and said, “One . . . two . . . three!” And they dove headfirst into the moon-flickered surface of the sea. Bombs of green light exploded around them. They laughed and kicked and dove. They met at the bottom, where they opened their eyes, everything completely black except for the stirred-up glow they made by moving. What was still was invisible; what moved was a light to follow, and within that: a warm hand, a warm leg, a prisoner or a protector, just there, in the darkness.