No One is Here Except All of Us (4 page)

THE SECOND DAY

O
ur house was made of wood, the roof shingled. It had a big room with two beds—one for our parents and one for us. The floor was covered in worn rugs and the woodstove had a deep layer of ash. We had a table and a stack of pots, pans and bowls. We had a beautiful old box full of silverware that we never used because it was too nice. I did not own anything—everything I had was shared. The soft baby blanket we children had each used, the pencils and paper, the marbles, the scissors.

On the second morning of the world, my mother ladled cabbage into everyone’s bowls. My father kissed her on the forehead, and Moishe teased, “The most beautiful woman in the world.”

“How do you know what I’m going to say?” our father said, smiling. “It’s not the same world as before.”

“There
is
no before,” said Regina, joining in.

“The most beautiful woman in the
new
world,” I said, patting my mother on the knee.

“That’s right,” my father said.

“The luckiest woman. The most beautiful family,” my mother corrected. In the seconds of silence that followed, the room was electric with happiness. The most beautiful family could feel it pop on our tongues, in our ears.

My mother went out into the market with all the women who carried their baskets and their lists. They squeezed the tomatoes, smelled the melons, peeled the husks back from the corn to check for bugs. They eyed plucked, hanging chickens, passed the chocolate squares and peppermint sticks without a thought. Women left the shops with the tinking sound of a bell hung in the doorway. At home they took the pins out and let their children brush their hair, let us create messy braids.

My father had been born with the job of picking cabbages. In the field he worked, the muscles in his huge arms like raw chickens. His skin was dark and cracked as if ready to split open and reveal the slick pink pulsing and twitching beneath. As he worked that day, rainwater falling into his eyes, he told stories to himself about how good he was at his job. “Mister Vladimir,” he said to himself, “you have no idea how talented you are at farming cabbages. Truly, no one has ever known them as you do.”

In his fantasy, if the money started rolling in, he thought he would buy himself a fine hat and a coal-black coat and the same for his three children. His fields would be so huge, so populated with cabbages, and he would build a house right in the middle of them, the rows radiating out from it. The cabbages would smile, knowing smiles, their rooty bodies lodged in the earth with only their brainless skulls to look around, appreciating what luck they had to grow in such a nice field, to be harvested by such strong hands. My father would nod back at them, thanking them for the compliment. “No, really,” he would reply, “I’m the lucky one. I couldn’t do it without you.”

As the men walked home at the end of the day, my father among them, they thought about the wives they had come into the world with, the long brown waves of hair, blond curls, the silk of it. In their minds, the hair would cover them completely. Impossible amounts of it falling from the heads of women, making seas and nests and beds. They snarled and snorted home, tugging at their own rough beards.

But my parents had a secret. My mother was glowingly, shiningly bald. Her hair had disappeared in a matter of a few weeks when she was a teenager and she had worn a wig every day since. It was not the fact that my father fell in love with her, but that he did not fall out again when he saw her uncovered head that made her trust him implicitly.

Because the world was new,
people were sizing themselves up, taking stock of what they had and what they lacked. Most families in Zalischik had just about enough, but we all assumed that the rest had more, and in some respects, we were right. Some had more money, some had more sex, and some had more babies. My mother had more cabbage. There were cabbages all over the house. There were cabbages in bowls on the table. There were cabbages in a bowl under my parents’ bed. There were cabbages on the shelves next to our basket of leftover balls of yarn and the box of pencils. There were cabbages in the washbasin that had to be taken out when someone needed to clean the dishes or wash her face. There were cabbages in the bassinet, since the house was babyless now. And of course there were always cabbages in the pot, cooking.

My mother stirred them at the end of the second day, her children and husband drawing each other on the floor and laughing. “I am not nearly that ugly!” my father said, laughing at Moishe’s picture. “Look at my nose and look at this man’s nose!” Regina and I could hardly breathe through our laughter. I drew our father with twice the nose my brother had drawn and presented it to my sister, who rolled backward and held her stomach. Our mother watched the show while she stirred, ladled and set dishes on the table.

“Supper,” she said, plinking the edge of a bowl with a spoon.

“Somebody say a prayer,” our father instructed, while he spread my napkin over my legs. He took out a slip of paper to write down the prayer, which would be folded into a square and deposited in the box.

“Bless Dad’s nose, bless the soup, bless the family, bless the world,” I said.

“Amen,” the rest of them echoed, and we dipped our spoons.

In the light of morning
, the jeweler asked, “Tea?” and the stranger said, “I don’t know.” The stranger wanted to offer her thanks, but could not find the strength. “Thank you for coming to stay with me,” the jeweler said. “I have been alone a long time.” The stranger managed to meet his eye for a second before it began to hurt, like looking into a bright light. The jeweler squirmed as he tried to think of something to talk about. With no history, conversations were harder to start. “It’s raining,” he finally said, as if she had not been aware.

“I’m sorry,” she told him.

“For what?” he asked, but she continued to stare into the distance. “You have nothing to be sorry for.” Please be happy, he thought, but he had no way to explain, even to himself, his affection for her, for the peculiar presence of her. He did not understand the stranger at all, but that seemed to have no bearing on his feelings. “You are like a shell,” he said. “A seashell. Hollow but beautiful.”

“Hollow.” She nodded. He steeped the tea, pulled the basket of dripping leaves from the cup and put it in the washbasin. He stirred in sugar and cream and handed the steaming cup to the stranger. To his surprise, she reached out, took it from him, wrapped her hands around it. Gratitude filled them both silently up.

For the rest of the day they sat not far from each other, gazing out the window at the light shifting almost imperceptibly. The jeweler added logs to the woodstove and prepared things to eat: buttered bread, canned apples, slices of cheese. He boiled and poured water, washed the cups when they were empty. “I like beets,” the jeweler said, wanting to talk. The stranger did not look at him, but he felt her absorb this fact. “I think they are perfect,” he continued, because he wanted her to know him even while he could not think of anything important to say. “This cushion,” he said, holding up a stained yellow thing, “means nothing to me. I don’t know where it came from. I wouldn’t miss it if it were gone.” The stranger listened, he knew she did, whether or not she acknowledged it. While the jeweler talked, they sat there and let themselves be objects on which dust might settle, air might brush past, light could play.

That night, the stranger did not sleep. She could feel her veins fighting to keep blood moving despite there being no apparent reason to do so. The pumping in her chest was a labor, a wheeze. What dark room had she washed up into? What lost place was this that had, at the sight of her, reset the clocks and begun anew? The first day she had felt like a ghost, like a dead person. As night wore on and dawn seeped into the room, she saw the endless days ahead lined up, waiting to be lived in. None of them would let her politely decline to attend, claiming illness or devastation. She could not avoid being alive for one rotation here and there. She had watched her husband’s face catch on fire and seen her children led out into the woods where a thousand gunshots rang out. Why did I survive it? she wondered. It was so simple—she had hidden behind the woodshed. She peeked out, dumbstruck, the scene before her impossible to believe.

There had been so many chances for her to die that day, but she alone was to see what the future held. Still, alive was not what she felt. Scooped out, maybe. Like a woman whose innards have been removed, unwound and lain down as a bed for her. When the jeweler, not knowing she was awake, tiptoed outside sleepily in the baby-pink dawn light of the third day of the world, she thought of tucking his form into the empty space of her body, giving him a warm nest there, letting what she was missing become a place for another person to rest.
I pray for
, she said, but could not name what was missing to a God she had not met.
I pray
, she said, and it was true.

When the jeweler returned and lifted the envelope of blankets on his bed to climb inside, she said, “Thank you for being nearby.” The jeweler, shocked to hear her voice, came over and, crouching at her side, cupped his hand over her shoulder and took a turn being speechless. It hardly mattered, because she understood what he meant: emptiness could be so dense as to develop its own gravity. A planet forming out of the whirling dust of a void. Two planets, orbiting.

THE THIRD DAY

O
n the third morning of the world, my uncle Hersh, the saddlemaker, knocked on our big blue door. We children were lying on the floor by the window reading a book I had sneaked from one world to the other. Our father was out in the fields, gathering globes, and our mother put her knife down next to the ribboned green leaves.

Uncle Hersh shook his wet coat out and laid it across the back of a chair. “I have to say something right away before I lose my nerve. You have some children and we have none.”

“You want some tea?” my mother asked. “You want some cabbage?”

She set him up at the table with a steaming bowl.

“I’m sorry. I’m terribly, horribly sorry and I haven’t even said anything yet.” He closed his eyes. The next words were spit out, like bitter grapeseeds. “Kayla wants a child, now that the world is starting over.”

“She always wanted a child,” my mother said.

“But now it’s the beginning,” Hersh told her. “Right now. She believes. Everything is ahead of us—who will Kayla and I send out into the new world? Who will carry our memories on for us when we die? How will I survive another lifetime of disappointing my wife?” He spoke quickly, the sentences memorized and practiced.

Years that did not matter now, that did not even exist, had been filled with fruitless trying. Hersh was strong and smelled of leather and oil, and had money stashed in all the cracks in his walls. He had big feet and big hands and the eyebrows of a man three times his age. His teeth were a strong fence. But at night, under the covers, he was useless.

At first my aunt and uncle had meant it when they took their clothes off and lay with nothing between them. Kayla had fixed her hair in a bun pinned with part of a turtle’s shell and she managed to meet his eyes and she prayed and she liked how it felt. He loved how it felt and he was excited, very excited, to see what he would produce. He thought for sure there would be quadruplets right away, if not quintuplets or sextuplets and whatever came after that. It seemed impossible that thousands of babies would not come storming from his wife’s body. “I’m sorry, my sweet,” he practiced saying, “to put you through all that birth-giving. I cannot help it.”

After the first months with no babies, Hersh had begun to feel confused. Where could they be? Kayla displayed no promising lump. He considered returning her to her parents. “This wife is not working,” he would say.

Kayla’s baby-hunger was a heat source, cooking her from the inside. After many baby-empty years, Kayla’s mind had corroded from unfulfilled desire. My uncle got up in the mornings, kissed her, told her she was his darling, and went to work. He hammered and nailed and molded. He tanned the leather and cut the leather and sewed the leather with smaller strips of leather. There was nothing else for him to do. My aunt spent her entire day lying on the very unsoft wood floor of their large kitchen. The black stove smirked at her, the table legs and the chairs turned away. Her sewing box, bursting with pins, appeared like an open, laughing mouth. She saw no reason to stand up. She looked like a splayed-out star, her head resting on a stack of worn-out cookbooks.

She stared at the heavens, which she had to imagine beyond the low ceiling. She knew where all the spiders lived, and watched them string shimmering threads from beam to beam. She clicked her tongue. She saw babies sitting on all available surfaces. Babies on clouds, babies lolling about on the face of the sun, singed and singing. Kayla saw babies on her kitchen table, babies on the chairs, babies under the floorboards, the walls filled with them, stacked up on top of one another, standing on one another’s shoulders. Her house was a house made of them, her own body was a body made of them, her legs were three babies each, her belly was four babies.

Then the world began again. Nothing had ever happened before. No failed attempts, no hopeful week or two followed by a terrible spot of blood. That first night, when my aunt and uncle lay down on their horsehair mattress, between the sheet and the quilt Kayla’s mother had made for her girl when she was married, they cried into each other’s skin. “We have another chance now,” she said. “Maybe in the new world it will be possible.” But Hersh was sure that several days later he would hold her again while she disappeared with sorrow, her empty womb shaking like a rattle. They made love anyway and he let her believe in it. The smile she gave him was so crisp and pure, so unmuddied by sadness and disappointment that Hersh started to cry. “Yes,” Kayla said, “I can feel it, too. We’re going to have a baby.” All Hersh wished for was to have his wife back.

He said, “Walk outside with me and look at the world.” The two of them went shoeless to the doorstep. Their toes were blind and fragile on the stones. Around Hersh and Kayla, the trees were shooting buds out of all their pointed ends.

“You will always be enough for me,” Hersh told his wife, but she waved him off.

“There is more to hope for.” He rubbed his eyes and tried to make the word
hope
not mean despair.
Hope
, he said to himself, wiggling it with his tongue like a loose tooth.

In our kitchen,
Uncle Hersh’s hands trembled.

“Will you be helping out in the new temple?” my mother asked.

“Kayla really believes,” Hersh told her. “I think I can save her. I think she’ll be herself again.” Hersh had found some courage, some trust in his reason for coming. His voice was full of determination.

“Have you made a saddle yet in the new world?”

“All those years felt like drowning. It felt like watching my wife sink to the bottom of the sea.”

“You want some more tea?” my mother asked, polishing the handle of the teapot with her thumb.

“I’m sorry. I wish I could do this myself. You have no idea.”

My siblings and I did not speak or move. Our eyes met for tiny seconds before we looked away again, not wanting to see our own scared faces reflected back.

Hersh paused. “I don’t want you to think about it, I just want you to say yes.”

“You want to buy one of my children?” My mother’s face was flat and still.

“We can become parents, which you will still be. She will be happy.”

“It’s a she you want?”

“I wouldn’t ask for your son. She can learn to cook everything. She can be taught to read and to write.”

My mother explained that her children were not babies and already knew those things, even little Lena knew those things. “She’s small for her age, but she’s smart for her age, too.” From across the room, hearing her say my name made me itch. Moishe, Regina and I had stopped turning the pages of the book we had been reading—an encyclopedia of dog breeds. We had been on the Australian shepherd page. The animal was frozen, staring at us with one blue eye, one brown.

“I’m going to beg you every single day for the rest of time. The entire world is yet to come and we’ll never be part of it. Kayla will die and I’ll die and that will be all. Do you understand?” He began to cry. “It will never matter that we existed.”

“Help,” my mother said.

“We all have the right to love something more than ourselves,” Hersh said quietly. “We all have the right to die of sorrow when something happens to our babies.”

“You want my daughter so you can lose her?” my mother asked.

“I want your daughter so I can keep from losing her. So I can break my fingers if it helps her. So I can bury my face in her hair when I sing to her. So my wife does not turn to dust. Give us hope. Perl, my sister, give us something to pray for.”

My mother looked at the heads rolling everywhere in the house. Two cabbages were resting against the big blue door, like dogs waiting to go out. I could tell that our mother’s own head was thick, filled up with mud. The mud wrapped its big, suffocating arms around every logical thought.

“Come back tomorrow,” my mother said.

I ran out the door
and down the street. My feet smacked the puddles hard. I thought about running away forever, except that the whole point was to be home. I spotted my father in the square near the statue of the long-dead war hero with a bunch of other rain-wet men. I wrapped my arms around my father’s leg. He looked at me in confusion, but then patted my head and said hello. He did not know that a deal was under way to sell one of his children. The men, having finished their lunches but unready to return to work, were arguing over the fate of a typewriter. Around us, people walked from shop to shop, carrying baskets and bags of supplies. There were weak fingers of light coming through the spaces between buildings. The baker held the old black typewriter, tapping the
S
key with his ring finger. Should this be part of the new world? Should it be thrown to the bottom of the river, as the butcher suggested? Should it be stomped to bits and sprinkled over the tomato gardens? Should it be encased in glass and viewed as a museum object—evidence of an unknown time? Or should it be what the barber said it was—a clacking record keeper, inherited and benign?

People snarled, angry about the disagreement. “A lot of fuss over a few buttons,” the barber said.

“How are we supposed to know
what
to do?” the jeweler cried.

“Starting over is starting over,” the butcher spat as he stamped a boot-shaped puddle into the mud.

“Is it better to give the next generations the opportunity to invent new things, or is it better to provide them with the tools that were here when we arrived?” my father asked.

Igor said, “We’ll take whatever we can get.”

The typewriter was only one of the items in question. People disagreed about cash registers and hammers. If we threw out our hair ribbons, should we keep our shoelaces? What about our buttons and watches? “We have not gone
back
in time,” the baker said, “we have gone somewhere in time that no one has ever
been
. A brand-new place. Those watches cannot keep track of this place any better than a hairbrush could. We need to get rid of the watches.” He put the typewriter down on the ground, took his black felted-wool hat off and shook the rain out of it.

The barber agreed. “He’s right. This hat is a new world hat now, just as my eyes are new world eyes. But time roots us to the old world—time must never have existed before. Everything depends on that.”

All the glass faces stared back from a wheelbarrow in the middle of the square, ticking down hours that we denied even existed. The watch killers followed the cart past the butcher shop, the bakery, the bank, the candy store, six houses, four wet dogs, a row of white rosebushes, to the path through the cabbage field toward the river. The river garbled, and the rain tickled our foreheads and the backs of our hands as the men tossed our watches one at a time into the rocky blue. The past and the impending future were buried together like a pair of stillborn twins. The typewriter went in too, but not before the barber could kneel on the bank of the river and type the word
goodbye
. The watch chains made snaky chimes as they hit the water. We did not see a single watch or clock stop ticking; we did not see those faces crack and fill with liquid.

On shore, all we saw was a time-empty cart with a big wooden wheel. No markers of what approached or what had been. No counting up or counting down. Igor looked worried, aware of the vast emptiness ahead of him, the land of the uninvented. The jeweler’s eyes were panes of glass, easy to see through. In his mind was a man with a row of glinting needle-tipped tools and a pocket watch, its chest open and its metal heart revealed. The man, who had once been the jeweler’s father, was a lost ghost now and all of time silent at the bottom of the river. “Well, that’s one thing done,” said the jeweler, chewing his knuckles and hoping that he could support himself with wedding rings and child-size lockets alone. And what was to ensure that those would not be cast out? “Let there be wedding rings and child-size lockets,” the jeweler muttered. He remembered the small radio, which had kept him company for thousands of evenings since his parents died and his brother had gone off to seek his fortune. Now those people had been banished from existence, the past no longer a place. He was sure that radio too would be eliminated, but not if no one knew of it. The jeweler planned to hide it under the rotting floorboards of the old barn, where it would be safe.

I gazed out at the unchanged river and hoped we remembered to save more than we gave away. Already, cash registers and horse plows were named as traitors. Bicycles would be blacklisted, non-blank books. Anything with a wheel or a switch would soon sink to the bottom of the river, where the mud would hold it prisoner, shut it up.

The group looked up at the cloud-hidden sun, which had sunk to the side a little, making short shadows at our feet—small gray versions of ourselves who accompanied us back to town and shivered every time we crossed the mottled light of elm trees.

Living in the new world
would not turn out to be that different from living in the old one. We had to survive with only the food we could grow and make ourselves, and the clothes we could knit or sew from fabric we already had. If a dish broke, there was no replacing it. But we found that it was not difficult. We had plenty of stuff. There were many bags of flour in everyone’s cellars, the cows and goats gave enough milk for us all to drink and make cheese with. As long as they kept reproducing, we could slaughter an animal every few weeks without diminishing the herd. Instead of trading with other villages, we traded with one another. Someone always had more forks than he needed, but not enough butter. One woman was always willing to offer a big bowl of soup and a loaf of bread if another woman would watch the children for a few hours. There was not enough chocolate, but we had a lot of sugar to make cakes. Beyond any accounting, we had the feeling of abundance—our world brimmed over.

What disappeared completely, no leftovers, no crumbs, was news. For us, there was no outside world.

My mother served
bowls of cabbage soup that evening. She put out the spoons. We children sucked and slurped, the whole room full of the sounds of our mouths, trying to create too much noise to talk over.