No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

  Igor touched my hand. “Do you like chocolate?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Me too. Do you like hot milk?”

  “I’ve never had it.”

  “Never?”

  I shook my head. “Do you like cabbage?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” he answered, which made me feel safer. “Do you know what we are supposed to do now?” he asked.

  “We are supposed to be married. You are the husband and I am the wife.” He laid a sheet down over the rug, laid himself down, and asked me to join him. I sat there, and it felt like a strange picnic. Igor pulled me to him. We were side by side, and close.

  “How old are you?” I asked while Igor touched the smooth ridge of my arm.

  “I’m fifteen,” Igor said. “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “You don’t know?”

  “First I was nearly twelve, then I was someone’s new little baby, then I was married.” My voice sounded very far away. A speck in the huge silence of the night.

  “You can be my age if you want,” he whispered. He put his palm out to me, open, as if it contained the thing I needed to be grown. I lowered my face into that cup and lapped.

  “Thank you,” I said, and kissed him on the forehead, as if he were my child, while I tried to hide my tears of relief. He kissed me on the forehead as if I were his child too, as if we were each other’s. “I would like that very much,” I said. In the morning we would open many wedding gifts, but this was the only one I would remember.

  “We could even have the same birthday, if you want, so it’s easier to keep track.”

  And as a new couple with our matching ages and matching birthdays, Igor and I kissed badly and wetly and sweetly all over our young faces to the call of an owl outside asking the question again and again, “Who? Who?” to which we tried the answer, “Us, Us.”

  • IV •

  THE BOOK OF SLEEP

  I do not wonder so much why we were left alone as long as we were. Why our village was skipped by marching Romanian soldiers with orders to send all the Jews and Gypsies to the other side of the border for the Germans to deal with. What aches in every part of my body is that we did not hear their cries, the lives ending. Death by machine gun, death by starvation, death by sadness. Along we went, our lives day to day, morning to night. A million mothers, a million fathers, a million sons and daughters screamed at once, and all we heard was the good wind shake the trees out.

  The villagers gathered under umbrellas in that clean, glassy air outside my door and waited to meet the first baby, the real first baby, in the whole world. Dawn sprawled out across the sky, a woman waking up. Inside, I howled and the healer let a slow river of encouragement wash me down. Pacing from oak tree to rain barrel, Igor beat a nervous path in front of the house. He looked determined to get where he was going, which was nowhere. His father stood in his way, but Igor made a detour and persevered. The stranger coaxed him quiet, saying, “The baby will find his place. Trust him.”

  “And Lena?”

  “She is finding her place, too.”

  Up and back and back and up he marched, the soggy grass under his feet trampled. The villagers watched Igor clear a path, counting off his wait for fatherhood. This made Perl dizzy, so she approached Igor, the husband of her daughter-niece, with a big bag of birdseed. She reached inside and flung the handful out to show him. From the oak tree, two ravens came to investigate the seeds. Their black was almost blue, their eyes like polished amber. Perl tossed another handful and the ravens pecked the ground. Igor looked at Perl, his own eyes big and hollow. “She’s going to be fine,” Perl said.

  “What have I done to her?” he asked. In his hand, the seeds were smooth and light. They made a very faint splash on the ground and floated on the surface of a puddle. A sparrow ate what Igor offered. Squirrels, their claws ticking, climbed down from the tree.

  In the hours while I worked to introduce the baby to the world outside my body, Igor drew all the creatures to him. Jays, magpies, starlings and sparrows. Woodpeckers, wrens and swallows. Pigeons. He was surrounded, an island in a sea of feathers. They flapped at each other, fought for his kind attention, followed the arc of his arm. Birds stood on Igor’s shoes, they brushed him with their wings. They beat the air back, dove, squawked. The man disappeared inside the flock. Igor had become a seed-giving tree, a nest. Through the wings, the villagers could see Igor’s smile.

  Nothing winged tried to carry me away. I was vaguely aware of the wet cloths Kayla swept over my forehead, saying, “Oh, dear, oh dear,” unable to hide her surprise at the pain I was in. Water dripped down my cheeks, or was it sweat, or blood, or rain? I could not remember if I was indoors or out, if I was held by loam and shaded by tall pines, or a child in my first home, weak with fever.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “You are home. You are having my grandchild,” Kayla said, impatiently. In the next wave of pain I wondered if she was talking about me—was I myself about to be born?

  The weeks and months that had passed since Igor and I were married floated past me like clouds. The first morning: boiling two eggs, browning two pieces of bread, Igor talking about his mother. He hummed the song she used to sing him before she had moved on to the next baby and left him songless.

  The day Igor came home from working at the bank and looked like he was bursting: “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “I had a whole day, and I want you to know about it. I missed you.”

  “Tell me,” I said, and, beginning from the moment he opened his eyes until the moment he walked in the door, he did. There was no climax, no event to speak of, but he had lived it, and I had not.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Igor said, “that I can’t be in your head and you can’t be in mine.” He asked me to tell him what it had felt like to split the potatoes with my knife. What it had smelled like when they had first begun to soften.

  I remembered the night we took our clothes off and tried various configurations: I felt bald and blind in the dark, but our bodies, still equipped with the full memory of our species, guided us through. I had expected this to feel very grown-up, maybe even a test of whether I was such a person. It did not. It felt like being ageless, just a slippery combination of limbs and instincts, neither young nor old. We laughed after, for hardly any reason at all.

  One afternoon, thunder cracking outside: at the table, I laid napkins, spoons and bowls for Kayla and Hersh, Igor and myself. We lit a candle, we said an old prayer. The conversation was simple—the everyday of our lives. They were at my table, and they could not change the rules here. Kayla did not and could not ask me to sit on her lap. Even her suggestion that next time I add more marjoram to the soup was met with a scold from Hersh. “I think it’s just wonderful,” he said. “It’s your own recipe.”

  Later: I got up the courage to ask my real parents and my siblings over. We stood in the threshold, dumb. Words were useless to us.

  “How are you?” we asked one another.

  “Well, thank you.”

  “The weather,” we started, but had nothing more to say about it. It was the saddest room in the world. These were not my parents or my siblings now, and any other friendship felt pitifully inadequate. We pulled our chairs close together, our knees touching. We closed our eyes, and we sat like that while the rain gained speed and lost it, the wind gusted and hushed. It was not enough, not nearly. When they left, we promised, in the friendly way guests and hosts always do, to visit again soon, but all of us knew in our hearts we were too weak to withstand another moment like that, pretending to be a family when we no longer were. It was better to love one another from a safe distance than to cantilever ourselves out over the chasm, always barely failing to touch fingertips.

  Each day I had visited the stranger in the barn. She had two chairs set up back-to-back, and several thick volumes to record our prayers. The chair she sat in was big and soft, while the one
for the visitor was a straight, ladder-backed chair, because we had decided a person praying should not be too comfortable. He should not want to settle in and take a nap, but should sit straight and remain serious. A prayer, in our minds, was like the turn of a wrench or the pounding of a nail—it fastened, sturdily, our lives together. I remembered looking at the constellations around me. We had covered all the easy parts—from the floor to the height of our shoulders. The background colors were everything from light blue to black, and sometimes had shocks of red or deep brown. The stars were always white, though some had the soft pink-flowered pattern of another world’s wedding china. The Constellation of Hope, Lost and Gained, was the only one on the ceiling. It was the fixed point in our universe, our guide. Looking up at it, I prayed for everyone I loved. I prayed for food and sleep and patience, all around. When I stood up to go, the stranger always said the same thing: You are you. Each time, it felt a little bit more true.

  Late at night: I woke up and was pummeled with the feeling that everything was fine. With the feeling that I was a person in my own bed, in my own home. I was so shocked by this that I lay there until daybreak, only trying to memorize the sensation.

  Igor opened his eyes. “How old are we now?” he asked.

  “Older,” I said.

  “Have I deserted you?” he asked.

  “You have always been right here,” I told him. “You have been steady.”

  “I suddenly got scared that you were alone and I was far away.” He reached out to me, rubbed his hand over my body. He turned me dark and infinite. He pressed the stars of his own constellation onto me: here and here and here and here. I let the rest of me go away into darkness and only those spots, those pins of light, remain and shine holes into him. Drill him through with my brilliance. We connected the stars with lines, drew a map of our heavens.

  Inside me, the dust of a new planet began to gather.

  For the next forty weeks, everything made me cry, whether it was beautiful or sad, grand or meaningless. A pile of beets, a swarm of ants covering a dead bird, the falling sun turning our whole village gold—I stood there in awe, facing all of it with a pair of salt-wet eyes.

  The light the day of the baby’s birth was white, and the villagers shaded their eyes against it. They shifted on their feet, passed hunks of cheese, made a few laps around the usual topics of conversation: When would the rain stop? How much caraway makes the perfect sauerkraut? How long before the sky was complete in the barn? How much lazier were men than women? Meanwhile, my husband was giving the world’s birds the feast of their lives. They might have picked him up in their beaks, carried him to a high, avian throne. I would have told my baby the story again and again that his father was a bird king who had been taken to the top of the highest tree and, flightless, would remain there to live the lonely life of the worshipped.

  But as the seeds ran out, the birds began to depart. Igor was filled with fear that there would be nothing left of him, that he would find himself a picked-clean skeleton. Back to the tree went the ravens and woodpeckers, back to the square went the pigeons. Igor examined his arms and legs and found them uneaten. But he could still feel the points of the birds’ feet and hear their feathers against one another, against the wind.

  And just then, from inside: the cry of a brand-new life. Into my arms the healer placed a creature small and slippery. It was complete, I marveled. And I was complete—neither of us had to be undone for the other to exist. “A boy,” Kayla said. “Isn’t that amazing? A boy!” She threw the door open, spread the news.

  Igor smelled like birds when he kneeled at my bedside, his eyes pooling. His hair was wild from clawings and his black wool coat was streaked with the tears of droppings.

  “What became of you?” Kayla asked, using the same cloth she had mopped my forehead with to clean Igor’s sleeves.

  “You look like how I feel,” I said. Igor brought his face to his son and took a long whiff. This made me laugh. “How does he smell?” I asked.

  “Warm,” Igor said. “Extremely warm.”

  The boy cried wildly, throwing himself completely into the sadness of being alive. “Cry all you want,” I whispered to him. “You have been born into this new, strange place.” But he did not keep it up. He learned in a few days that the milk was warm and sweet and the touch of his mother’s hand on his head was as soft as anything, and each pair of hands was safe.

  When I put my son to my breast, and when I felt that there would be warm liquid for him to drink, I closed my eyes and I did not need to open them for a long time. Whatever else was there—the chair holding my back, a table, the rugs and windows, a jar full of spoons, onion skin like a piece of stained glass in the sunlight, and outside, birds and the shadows of birds, oak trees and their pinky-brown lost leaves, the approaching night—it did not need to exist in order for me to go on feeding the one I had made.

  Igor sat in another chair, thumbing the hem of the tablecloth.

  “I will show you everything,” I said to the baby. “Don’t worry.”

  Igor jolted his head up and stared at his son—his son! This person in my arms who would absolutely not exist without he himself. Igor examined his own fingers and his own arms and found them bald and inadequate. “Do you know how to be a mother?” he asked.

  “I hope so,” I said. “I have never known how to be what I was, but the next thing always came anyway.”

  “But this baby has nothing without us. He’s completely helpless without us. He would die in a matter of hours without us. You hope you know how to be a mother?”

  “I have been someone’s child, twice,” I said. “I just have to do the other side of the job this time.”

  Igor put his head in his hands. “I have no, no, no idea what I am doing. The last baby I knew died under the weight of his own father,” he said into the sweaty trunks of his wrists. “He is ours. I am the father.” I gathered the baby and sat on the floor at my husband’s feet. “Oh, dear,” Igor kept saying.

  “Let’s say the world is beautiful and safe,” I began. “Let’s say that the new world we are all making together is a fair one, and that everything turns out all right. Let’s believe that you are a good father and I am a good mother, and this baby is a healthy boy who will live long enough to tell the story again and again that he was the first baby in a brand-new world where there was always enough food, always enough warmth and always enough love.”

  Igor pulled the blanket away from his sleeping son’s cheek and poked it very gently. “He looks happy,” he said.

  “He is.” I smiled. The baby was warm on my shoulder. He was perfect, absolutely perfect, right then.

  Igor said, “I am the father. That makes me feel very, very tired.”

  I patted my thigh. “You want to put your head on my lap?” Igor found his own place on my leg. I felt like a tree with two birds nesting.

  “Let’s name the baby for the son of a king,” Igor said. I asked if there had ever been such a person. “Well,” he said, “in the story of another world, at least. Maybe it will come true in this one.”

  “That you will be a king?” I asked. Igor blushed.

  “Solomon,” he said, “both the son of a king and a king himself.”

  “Go to sleep,” I whispered. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Igor talked more and more about being tired. Not the tired of a long day’s work or the tired of an uphill climb or even the tired of too many hours in the sun. He was tired from the idea of his own fatherhood—the simple fact that he had passed himself on to another, entirely separate being. He had been an older brother for a long time, but this was something very different. His whole life hit him at once. He had been witness to his parents’ elation and grief, and somehow because of this, he had been married off. Now he was himself a father with a son. He kept himself awake to eat, to stretch, to rearrange the blankets, and then he went back to sleep, saying, “Just a few more minutes.”

  The more he slept, the more Igor talked of it
as a job: his purpose was to rest for all of us. To absorb the sounds and smells of what occurred around him—not to participate, simply to take it in—and spin the threads into whispy, drifting dreams. He still went to work at the bank for a few hours in the morning, but that was a duty, not a purpose. Igor’s true calling was to sleep off the pressures of existence, the unknowable meaning of life, like a hangover he was trying to lose.

  He slept through the afternoons, the wind knocking gently at the windows. He opened his eyes for a few moments, drank a glass of water, scratched his back against the doorframe like a bear, wrapped himself in a blanket, tucked a pillow between his legs. He waved away the birds that lit on the windowsill.

  “I am that baby’s father,” he said, reaching out toward Solomon. “I can’t believe it. I’m going back to bed.” I did not mind his being around, but I didn’t mind his not being around, either. For me, the quiet house felt like a sigh of relief. No one was asking me to be their baby. My job was as simple as chopping vegetables, starting the fire, washing the floor, sorting the socks and sitting at the table with my son. I did not know how old I really was, but it did not matter so much anymore. I was a mother and a wife, and that was all anyone needed to know.

  I liked having someone in the house, an appreciative mouth to feed, and when Igor’s eyes fluttered open and he came to me, I was happy to listen to the dreams he had had, that parallel life he was living in which he could jump from the tops of trees and take flight.

  “Do you remember,” he yawned, “the time when we built a boat out of reeds and sailed to the other side of the river and ate cheese?”