No One is Here Except All of Us (27 page)

I tasted the dead and I tasted the living.

THE BOOK OF THE LOCKED-AWAY HEAVENS

W
hen a warship appeared on the horizon, Francesco brought more paper but no more envelopes. Igor said, “Aren’t we going swimming?”

“We’re staying here.”

“How long to ride even a slow, crippled horse to my home?”

“We’re staying here.”

“I’m talking about the mail. What is the slowest possible time?”

“Nothing leaves this room from now on. You are a prisoner of war and I am your guard. Those are the only orders I have ever been given.”

“No reason to be defensive,” Igor said. “It’s just that I was planning to go swimming.”

Francesco punched Igor once, hard, in the face. It was a terrible, exhilarating feeling. His fist came back bloody with heroism. “No one asked what you wanted.”

The islanders tracked
the warship as it came ever closer. Francesco paced, practicing for the arrival. He would play the just and righteous guard, carrying out his duties with a firm but fair hand. No one had given him orders to empty his prison.

Igor spent the wait writing furiously in a notebook whose pages he did not tear out and send away. It was a manual to his sons on how to live, as best he could tell them.

Open your eyes to wake up. It is possible to be awake with your eyes closed, but you will not be able to see anything around you.

When you are given bread, try to enjoy it right away. Bread right away is better than bread later.

If you can’t remember the stars’ shapes, make more up. Sometimes you have to make your own heavens.

If you have children, which I hope you do, do not get taken prisoner so that you cannot see them when they are five, six, eight. Do not fall asleep in the barn and get taken away in a car, even if the island is warm and beautiful where you are going. If your children are boys, name them for kings. If your children are girls, name them for mothers.

You must already know everything I know. What can I teach you? I know how to eat and I know how to play checkers. This is a game played on the diagonal. One of us will win.

Do whatever your mother tells you to. She is probably right. She will be thinking of what will be best. If you see me again, I will try to tell you what is best, too. I hope your mother and I will agree. We will try to. You should try to agree with people, too.

Solomon used to know some of the prayers. Do you still know them? I know the sound of them, but not the words. Try practicing them so you do not forget. Roll them around in your mouth. This is one thing that I do with your names so that you feel close to me all the time. Your names, Lena, Solomon and Beautiful Baby, are in my mouth. Your names go down my throat when I swallow. I carry you everywhere.

“What have I missed?” Igor asked through the bars.

“Cooking. Cleaning up. Walking. Serving of tea. Staying dry in the rain,” Francesco said.

“Help me remember.”

Dear Igor, Francesco thought, I can survive anything with you.

In the afternoon, the huge warship docked, and a hundred men disembarked.

“Are you with Mussolini or the Allies?” the biggest man yelled in badly accented Italian. The old man who ran the taverna shrugged and told them, “We’re for whoever you are. We just want to live.”

“Good. We need supplies.”

The soldiers took food from people’s cellars and medicine from their cupboards. They gathered rope from people’s boats and shoes from their closets. They came to the jail where Francesco was sitting at his desk with his feet up looking as much in control as he could. Igor was cowering in the corner of the cell. Three soldiers came to the prison door and said in unison, “Is that it? One prisoner?” Francesco, so consumed with his duty to Igor, had forgotten to think of his jail as deficient.

A prayer slipped out of Igor’s mouth. It was the first time he had prayed since his arrival on the island and the long-lost taste of those words was dusty and sweet.

One soldier came to the bars, studied Igor. “Wait, are you Jewish?” he asked softly. Igor looked up at him. He did not know the answer to this question. Once, in another place and time, he had been a Jew in a world full of Jews. “Why are you still holding this man?” the soldier asked Francesco. “You should have freed him long ago.”

“What?” Francesco and Igor both asked at the same time. Francesco squeezed his fist, but this did not stop the feeling that everything he loved was slipping away. And for the prisoner, freedom was a sharp word. Free to go where? Igor thought.

The soldier kicked the bars of the cage, making it rattle. “Italy has joined the Allies, or hadn’t you heard?” he mocked. He moved into the light and Igor could read the name embroidered on his uniform: Weinberg. “Do it now!” the soldier yelled, and Francesco took the key from around his neck and unlocked the door. Igor stood up, came to the opening. Igor watched Francesco’s shaking hands turn the key over and over.

“He’s been good to me. Please don’t hurt him,” Igor said.

Weinberg turned to Francesco and said, “I’m watching you.” The soldiers began to leave.

“Excuse me,” Igor said, “free to go where?”

The soldier’s gaze fell to the floor. “I wouldn’t go home, I wouldn’t go looking for my family, if I were you.” The soldier looked out the open door where the day was bright and windless. “You’ll find a new life. Bless you.”

THE BOOK OF THE MOVING WORLD

I
looked out at the spinning grass, knitting itself into a blur next to me, the early spring trees behind standing defined. I thought of the number of steps it would take to make this same journey. The number of times I would swing my arms. Out there I would be able to close my eyes for a few strokes without tripping, I would be able to memorize the ground and move over it blind. Outside, the number of gusts, rustles and shrieking birds. The number of beetles making a slow track across the path. All the bees roving for sweet juices. The clouds sometimes a single drift. Inside the train, everything was constant. The movement was not in added-up single steps but one long thrust forward. So decisive, so sure.

When the conductor came to check my ticket, I said, “I need to go home.”

“I don’t know where that is,” he said carefully.

“I don’t either.”

“Which direction?”

“I don’t know where I am.”

“You’re in Russia. You are headed southeast toward Odessa.”

“I’m in a country?” I asked. This idea seeming unthinkable.

“Where else?”

“The grass. The fields. The mountains.”

“Do you know where you want to go?” the conductor asked.

“I want to go home.”

He tore a corner off my ticket and shook his head. “Tell me if you can get a better idea than that.” Outside it started to rain. The windows became foggy. The trees looked weighed down and ashamed, the same as me.

The train had
a car to eat in where they made cups of coffee for anyone who asked. They dropped leaves of tea into baskets. At each table two or three men relaxed, feet crossed, cups steaming. They were enjoying their journey. I wanted to ask them where they were going and where they had been. What they had survived. Which side they were on. They looked like men whose wives were preparing, at this moment, for their arrival. Pinning long hair, ironing dresses, wrestling sons into clean shirts.

I sat alone at a table and let the relaxed men relax. “Sir,” I said to the white-coated waiter, trying to sound like someone else, someone sane, someone with one name, one family, one story. “Do you know where a village called Zalischik is?”

He shook his head, not understanding me. Why did nothing I said make sense to anyone?

“Home,” I said.

He said, “We have tea, we have coffee, we have cake.”

“All right,” I said, pressing a gold coin between my fingers. “I’ll have those things, if that’s all you can offer.” Perhaps home was simply gone—a concept done away with.

I dipped my finger in the coffee and then touched it to my lips. “Do I like coffee?” I whispered to the stranger of myself. I dipped my finger in the tea and then touched it to my lips. “Is tea better?” I ate the cake quickly. I knew I liked cake. I sucked the cubes of sugar the waiter brought. I felt the coffee, milky brown, and the tea, clear and precise, roll down my throat and land warm. I watched the surface shake rhythmically with the rocking train. The objects in front of me seemed solid and real, it was the ones not in front of me that kept shifting.

The waiter came back to take my empty cups away. “Would you like to look at a map?” he asked. “I could bring you a map.”

“A map?” I asked.

“Maps are supposed to have all the places.”

“Thank you, yes, please, yes.” I had made sense to him and he to me. I wanted to shake his hand, but I stopped myself. I brushed the crumbs off the table and into my hand. I shook them into my mouth. The waiter spread the map out on my table.

“This is where we are,” he said, pointing to a line with little crosses over it. “Train tracks.” He moved his finger along the line.

“This is everything?” I asked.

The map showed so many names. Smolensk. Kursk. Stalingrad. The names were pasted to the earth. The mountains were jagged lines, the rivers were curling blue.

“Has all this always been here?”

“The names have changed. Things move around, I’m sure. But for our purposes, I’d say so.”

“Even in the beginning of the world?” He looked at me blankly.

“There’s a list on the back,” the waiter said, “arranged by spelling.” And there it was, right between Zalim and Zalizyki. In real life it had been a small island with the river curled around it. On the map it was the same.

“That’s the place I’m from. That is home,” I said, and my finger covered it completely. The river was squashed. “Show me again where we are now. And show me where we came from.”

The waiter pointed and pointed. “The train stops nearby. You could walk there.” I was still thinking about the journey my sons and I had made over all this land. I began at the place where the river curled and walked my fingers over the in-between. “That’s what happened,” I said. I could say this, and the map acted as proof. To start the world over, upturn everything we knew, had I hammered and nailed and rallied and campaigned? No. I had spoken it. Told a story. Still, when I looked at the map—the lines, the differing greens, the tiny etchings of rivers—I could not see what had really happened.

By the time the long white light of the afternoon had tired itself out and lay splattered orange on each rain-wet surface, I was on my way home. Riding in a warm cave inside me, unknown to me then, was the stew of a person. Nothing sensible yet. No specifics. Not even in miniature. But if left alone, the being would do the dance it had to do. Its body would freight in the needed supplies. The blood would stay thick and protective. Divisions and additions.

What I could feel were the wheels of the train heating up the tracks, and the distance closing in between my home and myself.

The first to greet me
were our sheep, which floated dead on top of a lake that used to be their pen. The wool was beaded with water. The eyes of the sheep were rotted-out pits—anything could have made its way inside. The smell caught in my throat and made me gag.

Our streets were soaked with mud and our stones were turned on their sides, making the path unsmooth. It was no longer a street but a pile of jagged rocks. The windows in all our houses were smashed and vacant, eaten away like the sheep’s eyes. Everything was blinded. Was this a real place?

“You are the house where I had my babies,” I said at my own rotted door. When I pulled it open I was flooded by water. Free now, the water spread wide. I walked through the slush of the house, which was empty. No pots remained in the kitchen. No pillows remained on the beds. No books. No spoons. No people. “No one is here?” I asked the soggy house. No table, no rocking chair, no poker to stir the coals in the fire. Someone had moved us out. The water had made boats of the few items left inside: one broken chair floated, one wooden bowl floated. My sons’ mattress remained, draped like a dead animal over the sink. It was green with mold.

Water had driven in and my house had dutifully held it. Fill it with rugs and chairs, fill it with children and baking bread, fill it with cabbage. Fill it with all the water in the world.

My walls were a crawl of mold, turned bright green, eaten down by moss. “How long has it been like this?” I asked the ghosts I could not see. “When did you go?”

If the ghosts tried to answer, their mouths were useless. I wished they would try to rustle my clothes, cool my skin or warm it, put their hands in my hair. Did they want to tell me they waited as long as they could? That they had taken care of my mothers and fathers and grandparents and siblings? Had they tried to remember me even after I left? They were empty wind by then. They were sucking mud at my feet. They were flaking bark on the trunks of fallen-down trees. Crushed rocks, clods of dirt, dried water, blown air.

At the first house
I was raised in I stood in front of the door. I remembered the night I had tried to come home, and, of all the huge and complicated things that might have stood in my way, what had kept me out was a simple lock. I could not bear that again, so I left the big blue door out of it. I hung my clothes on the branches of an apple tree ravenous with white blossoms and climbed through the window where the water was ankle-deep and muddy. The smell was rich and dark. “No one is here? Was I right to leave when I did? Is anyone alive?” I called. My voice echoed off the water. I felt as if I were in an ancient cave.

I waded to the counter where I had watched my first mother chop cabbages every day for the first eleven years of my life. I splashed to the far wall where the fireplace was a dark pit, then to the place where my first mother and my first father had slept, had made me, had made my sister and brother. This was the first time I had been in the house since I was traded away. I scoured the bottom for cabbages but found none, dragging up handfuls of mud. I pulled up a marble and a soaked handkerchief. I wiped my face on the cloth, which only left me dirtier.

The second house
I was raised in had fallen to one side and lost one of its walls. It held no pond inside—it was an empty skeleton. “No one is here?” I called, my skin cold but dried now by my clothes, my hair still dripping. “No one at all is anywhere? Anywhere here?” None of Kayla and Hersh’s beautiful things were displayed on the mantel. No soft Persian rugs were at my feet. The story of their lives was silent. I wanted to say something for them, some prayer, but I realized I hardly knew them. Bless Kayla and her desires. Bless Hersh and his attempts to fill them. May someone somewhere adopt you both.

I went into houses
I had never entered before. Everything had sunk into softened ground. All the windows were too low, some of the doors buried enough to be sealed shut.

The barber’s was tiny and dark, all four walls tipped toward each other, a single pair of scissors, shining as if just polished, hanging from a nail on the wall. To the people who had lived there, no place would have mattered more.

Outside, the square was more beautiful than I remembered. Even destroyed, the windows had careful scrolls framing them, the roofs were pointed and red tiled, the doorways arched. The greengrocer’s was painted yellow, the butcher’s was pale blue, the jeweler’s little sliver of a shop was pink with white trim. This place was new to me, and yet completely familiar. It was as if I, a girl, were meeting myself as an old woman. The same body, the same place. Except.

The widow’s house was a graveyard of jars. I kicked them around so that something in the world would talk to me. They clattered but made no sense. Yet something revealed itself: I saw a small piece of yellow paper lying on the ground with a tack stuck in it. The ink had run, but I could still read the words.
Dear Ones, We did not know what to do but hide when the soldiers arrived. There was a lot of shouting, then running toward the river and gunshots, then quiet. We waited for weeks, but none of you came home. We will not forget to include you in our story, which in spite of everything has a happy ending: we have been swept up by handsome Russian giants. If anyone is alive, write to us in
Krasnograd. Love, Regina and Zelda
. And there it was: my sister was saved. It was almost as good as being saved myself—my shadow had made it. Good news tasted like food to me. I folded the letter up and held it tightly. What else would I find? I said, “Thank you,” out loud to the roomful of jars, listening to me like a hundred ears.

The barn,
I
discovered, was where all our belongings had gone. I had to jump from desk to dresser to table to saddle horse. The room was a swimming pool stacked with towers of belongings. It smelled like mold and rotting wood and urine. I looked up and saw, complete but for one shattered bullet wound, the summer sky. Around me toys, mittens, boots and chair legs floated. Stacks of dish towels, hammers, worn wool coats, boxes of rusted jewelry, and rolling pins would have to wait a long time for this town to come alive, to need tools again. The piano, which had arrived along with our stranger, washed up on the shores of the old world, did not stand upright—it kneeled with its broken smile in the water.

I looked for but did not find a body to carry out and put in the ground. I did find the bones of some chickens, gathered nicely in the highest shelf of empty nests. I imagined them, wings folded, waiting to be saved.

Standing on the pedestal that used to live in the square and had been host to the long-dead war hero, now missing, I reached up and dragged my hand along the constellated wall. “Solomon would have known your name,” I said to the stars. One white tile was loose so I pulled it off and put it into my small bag. “This is the Solomon star,” I said. “Whatever it was called before, now it’s called Solomon.” I had nothing, and since I did not know what I needed, I decided to take whatever was being offered.

At the top of a stack of books I found the soft underfeathers of chickens and geese, gathered in an old sack. They even smelled soft. I tied a knot at the top of the sack and put it into my bag.

And there was one more thing tacked to a floating island of wood. It was a letter, and the letter was addressed to
Lena, My Wife, Zalischik
.

“Do not joke with me,” I said to the room and I listened for its reply. “Is this another letter for me?” The room echoed and dropped water down. I took the letter with my name on it. On the back was written: Igor, Jail, Sardinia, Italy. Inside, one piece of paper.

Dear L,

I am alive, did you know? I am getting to be a very, very fast swimmer. I can swim from the big rock all the way to the sandy beach in a matter of seconds. I learned how to make lasagna. Do you know what that is? My friend Francesco taught it to me, actually his mother did. How are my sons? Are you alive? What is the weather like where you are? Remember the time we climbed to the top of the apple tree and fell asleep in the branches? I hope you are alive.

Love, I

“This letter is for me,” I said, holding it up. “Am I alive?

“This letter is for me!” I yelled as loud as I could, loud enough that my throat hurt. “Nobody is here! The Beautiful Baby is dead! Solomon is saved! I went northeast! The world is full of trains! Have I been gone a hundred years? Igor has become a very, very fast swimmer!”