No One is Here Except All of Us (30 page)

THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE, CLOSER, CLOSER

T
he buildings were giants and the trees were small. Our boat rolled into the muddy slip, the ghosts wrapped themselves around mussel-ringed pilings, mossy concrete and the soft, wet wood of the dock. They climbed onto shore and wiped themselves clean.

They rubbed the salt out of their eyes and shook their hair out.

All along the shore, men in beige grabbed ropes and yelled. In front of me was a city huge and prickling. It smelled of rotting wood. Edward and I tried to hold hands while people pushed down the gangplank, braying like horses. Our fingers slipped apart in slow motion, centimeter by centimeter, in the crush of bodies. I was mashed and had to tip my head up to the sky to find air. Had I died right then and there, the mob would have carried me without meaning to or wanting to.

I descended from that ship carrying nothing but the feathered makings of warmth and broken pieces of home. At the bottom of the gangplank, we were funneled into lines. A man sat me on a cold metal stool and stuck something into my ears without asking if he could. In my chest, the old fear pumped. “Name?” the man asked in my language.

“Natalya,” I started to say, but then shook my head. “I’m safe here?”

Prideful, full-chested, he said, “You are safe here.” I wanted to start my life with my good name. With this first stitch, I attached two new worlds together.

“Lena,” I said, and it was like shaking hands with an old friend.

After that, he was gentle and careful. I had offered him the position of my savior, offered this country whose name still felt jagged in my mouth the chance to rescue me.

I looked at the man’s blond hair, oiled into a sharp part. It was a mirror for the vain, bright lights hanging from the ceiling. At other stools, other dirty boat people. In front of them, other slick-headed men in gray wool trousers and shirts. Their belt buckles, the whole row of them, looked like a chain. Then the man stuck his tongue out and I stuck my tongue out. In went and out came the thermometers from under the tongues of the boat people, and numbers were added to the record books of the clean boys. He handed me my bag and motioned to the row of doors. Outside, everything waited.

“Welcome home.”

“I don’t know where I’m going. This is as far as anyone told me.”

He handed me a small map. “You’ll be fine. You have nice American eyes.” The man clicked the button on his flashlight, preparing to shine it into the ears of another lost soul, as if, diligent and practical, he would search in the least likely of places, in case what we all were looking for was hidden there.

Some streets smelled
like flowers because that was what was sold there, and some streets smelled like rotted flesh for no reason I could see. The map was meaningless no matter which direction I turned it. I put it in my pocket and walked. The streets were tightly cobbled, the sidewalks full of walkers. People, like a swarm, like an infestation. This must be where all the ghosts have come, I thought. Everyone who has ever lived—this is where God has decided to keep us.

“Excuse me, sweet cheeks,” said a man with a table full of oranges.

“Give me six of those,” a woman in a blue dress cooed.

“I’d give you six of anything you wanted,” he told her. “I’d give you twelve.”

Women wore skirts that left their legs out and men had small cases in their hands. Unquestionably, it was spring: trees were hot with blossoms and people carried their coats, kept putting their faces up to the sun, offering their appreciation to the earth for turning around again. I was bumped and stumbled over and my bag of feathers was almost knocked out of my hand.

“I’d like to show you,” a deep voice said.

A higher one giggled. “Marty is handsome five times over.”

“You want to put money on it?” grumbled one kid to another.

“Hey, lady, buy a paper?” a boy yelled. Above me on wooden tracks a train shook the earth and I ducked and covered my head. People walked on, unafraid. I felt a hand on my shoulder and I looked up to find Edward, tipping his brim. He was thatched by light coming through the tracks. I grabbed him in case he slipped away again. “It’s you,” I stammered. I wished I could lock our arms together.

“Follow me,” he said. “Let’s take you home.”

“Everyone keeps using that word.”

“Isn’t that the whole point?” Edward led me through the crowds of people waiting for cars to pass, over holes in the street that smelled like everything awful had died at once, and to a tall brick building no different from the others on the street. Why this one? I wanted to ask. It had a door, which the man knocked on. Hearing the sound of wings, I looked up to see pigeons dive off the roof, their feathers blue in the light.

A woman opened the door and let us in without asking who we were. The apartment was all beds, tightly made up and stacked. Two girls and a boy were flicking marbles toward a tipped-over cup. I suddenly felt dizzy. I thought I was looking at myself, on the second day of the world, before everything had changed. The shock flickered across my skin. “Who are those children?”

“Tra-la-la,” all the ghosts sang. “No one is here except all of us.”

The woman answered my question without concern. “These are Rosa and Isaac Stoneberg’s children. Rachel, Frida and Abe. Stand up and say hello,” she told the three.

“We’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” Frida said.

The woman laughed. “She’s not a stranger. Well, she is, but she’s our stranger.” She tried to make sense. “This is Lena, who will be living here.”

I was dizzy. I was the stranger and this was my home. They had been waiting for me. Meat was cooking, and tea was placed in my hand.

“Edward says you escaped to Russia? You are lucky to have made it to safety.”

“I was safe?”

“Behind Soviet lines, I mean.”

“We were safe?” My vision tunneled. “Does that mean . . . Solomon, could I have kept him?”

“Three points!” yelled one of the girls.

“War is so complicated,” the woman said.

“It’s five dollars a month,” Edward told me, saying much more with those kind eyes. “Can you sew? There is work nearby.”

“I think I’m pregnant,” I said. The man and woman whispered back and forth and I did not try to listen in. The teacup in my hand was too hot to hold, but I held it anyway.

“Re-do,” claimed the boy. “That was a bad roll.”

“Nothing of the sort!” one of the girls argued.

“Abe, Abe, can’t get a . . . Nothing rhymes with Abe!” The other girl laughed.

“You can take some time when the baby is born, for free,” the woman said. Her voice and the pale light of her neck, the brown curl tucked behind her ear, were too familiar. Here, I thought, is where the blood fills our veins again, where our bodies resume their work, where our skin is warm to the touch. That part we took for an ending? In the next instant the girl walks out from the forest into a valley where everyone is alive—boundlessly, feverishly alive—and the earth is raucous with flowers and the day is not at all cold, and the wind picks up a gust full of apple blossoms—the petals every spring has offered up, exactly the same, identical—and the next thing the tree gives away will be red fruits with white hearts, seeds in the shape of a star.

Stars, indeed, I thought, because I was completely surrounded by white flashes, falling in the sky of that room. From my hand, the teacup fell and the sound of it breaking was muffled static. “Out of bounds,” the boy said. And the next thing I remember is waking up on the floor, Edward fanning me with his black hat, the woman whispering and my lap wet. “The baby,” I called, my voice too loud in my ears, my hand on the wet spot.

“Your tea spilled is all,” the woman said. “Did it burn you?”

They did not sit me up, ask me my name or rush me to a doctor. Maybe because they saw the way my sadness had spilled out over the edges of my cupped palms, maybe because they knew the stories that kept arriving with each new shipment of people from the old world, maybe because they remembered all the ways they too were tired—whatever the reason, the man and the woman wordlessly lay down on either side of me. We stared at the cracked ceiling, we ignored the three children asking what was wrong with us, and we wept.

THE BOOK OF THE BEGINNING, AGAIN

I
t was only women in the room—for the birth, the husbands and children were sent out into the canyons of streets where buildings were walls and even the outdoors was indoors.

On the floor, under my head, was the bag of feathers I had carried here from the temple. I was stretched over a sheet, and at my sides were many warm hands. The women had cloths wetted with warm water, chips of ice for me to suck, pieces of torn fabric for me to bite, and hands, just smooth uninterrupted skin, stroking my forehead and cheeks.

I howled until the room shook and our small glass mourning candles fell off the table. They were unlit and so rolled along, posing no threat, coming to rest on a shoe or the leg of a chair. We could not afford to buy enough candles to mourn all the dead. Instead, before bed each night in this new world we had gathered around the five glass cups, held a match into them where another flame was made, burning with the Reginas, Aarons, Adams and Esthers. The names smoked over us and hovered in the room. I had not heard those prayers since Solomon had said them over the tree bark we peeled off in paper sheets.

The unburning candles rolled and I howled. The women mopped me, dried me, mopped me again. A window was opened to the cold of winter, which whipped us until our skin was tight. A group of boys tossed their voices around on the street below like snowballs. They called each other names and laughed. Inside, we said prayers quietly. My new family laid their hands on my belly. “Beautiful baby, beautiful baby,” they said, “come on out into the world. Today is the day for you to be born. Beautiful American baby.”

“Do you remember the time the whole world was new?” I asked.

“That time is now,” the women said. “That time is always now.”

“Teach me the prayer,” I said. “Tell me what to say.”

Together we made the words, syllable by syllable. “Ba-ruch,” we said, “A-ta,” we said, “A-do-nay,” we said.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“Blessed are You, God, Lord of the Universe, Who has kept me alive, and sustained me, and made me arrive at this day.”

“Do I mean that?” I asked.

“Of course. It’s what we say,” they answered.

“But was it God who kept me alive? Was it not the farmer? The potato fields? The enemy soldier who gave me bread? Was it myself?”

“God is also what we all are. Anything is God. There is no way to say God without saying Everything.”

I howled again and someone closed the window. One woman rubbed my feet with oil and another rubbed my hands with milk. Someone spooned a little cooked cabbage into my mouth.

“May it be that You will provide food for Your servant, this child, with plentiful milk sufficient for her needs, and make us aware of the appropriate time to nurse her, and make us sleep lightly so that if she cries out our ears should hear her immediately,” the women said.

“May You never ask me to give this baby away,” I begged, between pain. And again, “May You never ask me to give this baby away.”

Into the cold room
came this slippery girl. You tossed your fists around and made as much noise as you could. You looked baked, stewed, boiled, but in fact, you were healthy and very alive.

Two younger women brought me a basin to wash you in. The older women all put their hands together on a pair of sharp scissors and cut the cord that connected us. You were cleaned and dried. I was cleaned and dried. Someone gathered the sheets from the floor and wrapped them into a ball. The woman who worked at the greengrocer’s downstairs dug a hole in the frozen earth of the window flower-box, planted the birth matter there.

It was when I put you to my breast that you went silent, and I cried. I felt less like I had given birth to this creature than you had been dropped from the sky into this room, and my entire journey, every turn I made in the fields and forests, every instant I spent looking at the sun-blistered skies, every sleep, mistake—all of it was timed precisely so that I would be in this room here in this city when you, this wrinkled pink girl, fell from the sky, my arms perfectly aligned to catch you. And all the questions about what was lost and what was found, the beginnings and the endings, my doubt following me like a shadow, all of that was silent. “So here you are,” I said. “May I always have enough for you. May you be awake before you are asleep. May the fields never take you. May the dead keep their hands to themselves. May the stars be stars.”

I called to two young women who were planting, “Bring a little dirt over to me.” I took the soil from their cupped hands and rubbed it on my forehead and yours. I named you right away, easily and certainly: Chaya, which meant
life
in a language that might not have mattered anymore.

“Does the dirt mean something?” the women asked.

“It might mean protection,” I told them. “We used to think so.”

No one ever asked me who the father of the child was. Instead of a name they said, Father of Lena’s Baby, Father of Chaya, Father of Life, when we lit the candles. The lost names hardly mattered anymore. It would have taken years to say what was gone—the only thing small enough to describe was that which remained.

To celebrate the birth
of the baby, Edward came over with dozens of new candles for mourning.

“Look what you found,” he said to me, his finger in your tight grip.

“Look what found me,” I corrected. Wicks caught and danced. It was a treat to get to mourn well, to get to say the prayers by the light of many fires. Around me, all these new people were very familiar. They said, “Out of the desert, we walked. Through the split sea, we walked. Across the oceans, across the mountains, we walked. By the rain and the rivers, we were carried.” That is how, in a new city, in a new country, in a new world, I was surrounded by my family.

You fell asleep under a blanket of chants. You were alive, each second that I checked, you were alive again. Again, you lived. Even still, you were alive. Edward said good-night and asked me if I would like chicken or beef next time he came. “You are a good friend,” I told him.

“And you are a good stranger,” he said.

It was by the light of the dead, after the rest of the house had gone to sleep, that I wrote my letters. There were enough candles to generate real heat, and I pushed my sleeves up while I worked.

On the Solomon star
I wrote in tiny, careful letters:

Dear Igor,

I am alive. I think you may be alive, too. Once, long ago, I was your wife. Remember the time we dove to the bottom of the river and the monster had us for tea? Remember the time we tried on gray-haired wigs and pretended to be old? Remember the time we were children, and then we were married, and then we became parents together?

I have a daughter, and if you wanted to be her father I would like that. She is just born. She is alive. Solomon is someone new. The beautiful baby did not survive. I am so sorry, Igor. Since you were taken away, everything in the world has happened and I don’t know what to say first. I am here. What else is there to say but I am here.

Love, Lena

On a small piece of paper I wrote:

Dear S,

I am alive. You have a sister. You are always my son. Your brother is always my son. The farmer and the farmer’s wife are also your parents. I am alive. Your sister is an American girl. I don’t know if I saved you or destroyed you. Nothing makes sense, but I remember you anyway. I wish I could wrap my arms around your head and smell your hair. If you are safe, then everything was worth it.

Love, Lena, Mother

On another:

Dear Regina,

May your life be huge. May you never be able to contain the bigness of it.

Love, your sister

Then I unfolded the handkerchief, which had been carefully washed and pressed. On it I wrote:

Dear Everyone,

I think you might be here with me. I think we might be together again. I have a baby. She came to me a strange way, but she is beautiful. At the end of all that death: life.

Love, Lena

On a piece of bright white paper, I began a letter for you—the story of the world before you existed.

Dear Chaya,

I am sitting with you on my lap, by the window. There are ice crystals on the glass. If I put my ear close enough I can almost hear them cracking and growing. It
’
s not snowing now, but it has been all morning. Even though you have only been alive a few days, your story, our story, started a long time ago. Ours is a story I know, both the parts I saw with my eyes and the parts I did not. This kind of knowing comes from somewhere in my bones, somewhere in my heart. Someday, your children will ask what happened, and you will tell a new version, and this way, the story will keep living. Truth is not in facts. The truth is in the telling. . . . You started crying tonight and would not stop. I pressed you to my chest and I hummed, but you still cried so hard your face turned red and swollen. I started to cry, too. I knew what you meant, the world so dark at night and only the cool moonlight to help us see. We both cried for half an hour, and during this time, no new stars appeared in the sky. But then, as if the bell had rung on your hour of grief, you stopped all at once, and you started to smile right away. You pulled at the buttons on my blouse like they were sweet blackberries. You sucked your knuckles. Your world presented you yet again with bounty, yours to enjoy. I marveled at this—the distance between sadness and joy so short.

Now you are asleep in your basket. You are wearing a hat the same color gray as the sky today. You could be dreaming about anything, just anything.

Mother

I stuffed a few feathers into the envelopes. On one, the very exact address the farmer had given me. On another, the name of my town and the name of the country. On the third,
Igor, Jail, Sardinia, Italy
. On the fourth I wrote,
Krasnograd
. Beautiful sister, beautiful city. On the fifth I wrote no address. I just pressed the paper to your heart.

Solomon was twice
his old size, and his name, like his new father’s, was Johan. He chopped enough wood to keep two families warm. He washed his face in nearly boiling water and ran back and forth across the fields, tearing a path. He kissed his parents good-night and good-morning. At the arrival of the letter he read the words and said, “I remember everything.”

Johan opened a drawer where he kept his brother’s remains, brought to him by the farmer, who returned without me from the train, saying, “If you swear to love me, I will allow you the memory of your old life.”

With string and nails, Johan built his brother back. He came out short and there were small bones that he did not know what to do with, so he put these in a pouch and hung it around the wrist of the puppet. The baby’s skull was never found, but instead of leaving him headless, Johan attached the small skull of a bird he had discovered one morning on the floor in the kitchen. The puppet hung from strings in the light of the late morning. His beak was yellow and his skeleton was bright white. When he was moved, everything clanged and rattled.

Johan made him dance. He made him jump.

He took the note I had written to him when I left, the note he tucked into the cave of his hand and held there until it got warm and soft, the note he had read so many times each word felt like a part of his own body.

Solomon
, it said,
Milk, Wheat, Baby, Farmer, Home, Stars, Stars. You survive this. I know for a fact. Mother, Remember.
Johan added some new words.
I am all right. I am alive. I do not remember the prayers but I pray them anyway. Mother, mother. Solomon.

He tucked the note into the pouch.
“Beautiful Baby,” Johan said. “You have an American sister. I have more parents. I know how to multiply one number by another. I have so many stories to tell you.”

He went to the farmer and said, “I have a new sister in America.”

“Just now?”

“Just now.”

The farmer counted the months back in his head. “I have a new daughter in America.” He grinned.

“You do?” Johan asked, uncertain.

“She’s alive?”

“She’s alive.”

“Good Father,” the farmer said.

Johan and his father walked outside to chop wood. Here, the puddles left by rain, which put mud on boots. Here, a patch of snow shaded by enough heavy brush to have missed any sunlight. The trees were unburdened by greenery, just smooth, naked arms, no waxed leaves to hang in one another’s eyes. The wheat was shaved, making the distances visible. Everything, even the farthest-off places, existed. The view ahead was endless.

The dutiful postman
arrived at the thorny place where the stranger used to wait. Her stump was empty and there were no boot prints in the sloppy ground. The thorny bushes had been cut away and a road led onto the spit of land. Here was a line the postman had not crossed in years, a barrier that had kept two elements from meeting. What fizz, what explosion might occur now that they were mixed? Curiosity mashed around in his chest, and duty allowed him to follow it without admitting his reason.

There was disappointment as the postman watched houses—plainly built of wood and stone—arrange themselves as a village. He realized now he had expected something stranger. Caves, tree houses, a village in miniature. This place did not seem like a secret worth keeping—it was the same as all the other towns he delivered mail to, only sunken. And just as in hundreds of other villages, the end had come. The postman could see the doors hanging from their hinges, the windows smashed in. At one house, he peeked through the broken pane at an empty room. Moved out of, evacuated. The smell of mold made him gag, and he found the same thing in other houses. Like the secret the village’s mysterious people had been keeping was that they could disappear. Close their eyes, tuck their chins and be gone. Everything they had ever touched, any evidence that they had walked or slept, vanished. Maybe, he thought, they had been ghosts all along.