No One is Here Except All of Us (20 page)

THE BOOK OF THE SEA AND THE SUN

W
hen Igor passed by, the headlines all but walked off the yellowed newspapers and forced him to read them. German troops occupy Hungary. USSR retakes Odessa. Allies invade Rome. Tens of thousands killed on the beaches of France. USSR retakes Minsk. U.S. takes Guam. USSR invades German-occupied Romania. Allies liberate Paris. Soviet troops capture Warsaw. No story appeared about a miniature world discovered in the crook of a wide river. Igor scolded himself for even considering that the newspapers might have meant something. “Stupid Igor, stupid brain,” he said to himself. “Never forget that this is all in your head.”

For Francesco,
there was only one fact of the war that truly scared him: Italy had joined the Allied forces. Technically, he suspected that his prisoner, captured for the now opposing side, ought to have been freed. But his island had been floating on the same deep blue sea for thousands upon thousands of years. It had not only seen empires rise and fall, but witnessed their relics dug up out of the soil and sold to museums. No one on the island labored under the delusion that politics meant anything. It did not matter to them if their sons switched sides, only if they came home alive. Their ability to continue living was the only real stake the island had ever had in this war. So far, no one had questioned the prisoner’s fate, and Francesco planned to enjoy the company as long as it lasted.

Igor and Francesco went to the sea each morning and swam. They dove under the water so their hair went flying back behind. They stood on rocks and jumped in, judging each other’s dives based on the lack of splash. They learned flips. When they got cold it was to the rocks with them, where the flat heat would leave red rounds on their backs. Even Igor turned a nice toasted brown. He shared bread crumbs with the yellow-legged gulls, who failed at their attempts to appear cold and ungrateful.

“It still isn’t raining,” Igor said.

“No, no rain today.”

“At home it was raining. It was flooding. I wonder if it stopped there, too.”

Whenever Igor mentioned anything about home, Francesco’s muscles tightened. He tried to change the subject, to draw Igor’s attention back to the spectacular glory of the island. “In the springtime, this whole hillside will be covered in tiny purple flowers,” he said. “It looks like a painting. You will love it so much.”

Francesco’s mother
had them for lunches. They ate all the things she could make. They were filled up with food in such large deposits that it made them stupid for the rest of the day. They looked around fogged and dreamy. So much bean soup and stewed tomatoes and roasted meat that the world seemed practically motionless.

Full and clean, Igor brought the only part of the newspaper he loved—the advertisements—into bed. Dark-eyed men squinted from underneath crisp straw fedoras.

“I would wear that hat,” Igor said.

“It would look great on you.”

In the evening
Igor and Francesco went to the square and played checkers with the other men, drank wine and flirted with the girls who strolled around and around, their arms hooked. The men ate things pulled from the sea and fried. They smoked the thin fingers of cigarettes. They talked halfheartedly about the war and who would win and which dictator was a bigger snake, and how much better it would be if their little island could secede and float peacefully away. Igor thought to himself that this was getting to be a very long dream. He looked forward to telling his family everything he had seen; he also hoped not to wake up just yet.

Igor shared his bread crusts with the pigeons, who gathered around him as dedicated as pilgrims. The girls came around, made a second of eye contact and then continued on. The checkers jumped one another and piled up. The wine stained everyone’s teeth red, and they all smiled bloody smiles. The men commented on the girls: which one had the nicest eyes, the nicest bosoms, the nicest whatever else. The sea licked and went back, tasted and went back. The pigeons begged for forgiveness and love, promised devotion for the rest of their humble lives.

“You think anyone is left?” one of the men asked Igor.

Francesco reached out and put his hand on the man’s shoulder, gripped it hard.

“Never mind,” the man said, his words a syrup of insincerity. “I’m sure everyone is just fine. I’m sure nothing bad has happened since you left.”

“Do you know something?” Igor asked the man.

“We’re perfectly safe here,” Francesco told him. Igor felt stung on his chest. It was a satisfying, hot, spreading pain. That’s how concerned I am for my family, he thought. His body was burning with it. His hand went to the hurt, and crushed a wasp. Igor was flooded with disappointment—he had not felt his heart’s big ache, but an ordinary, earthly bite.

Waking from a nap,
Igor said to Francesco, “Did the soldiers mention anything about where I was?” Francesco opened his eyes and looked at his friend, propped up on his elbow. Francesco shook his head.

“I was in the temple. We were putting the constellations up all over, the entire night sky. They didn’t mention that? It was the most beautiful thing.”

“What was the purpose?”

“It was the beginning of the world. We were making the heavens for ourselves. Do you remember the beginning of the world?”

“The Garden of Eden?” Francesco asked.

“No, that was just a story.” Igor drew the shape of a star on his palm. “It was the best sleep I have ever had in that barn.”

“And you are a connoisseur.” What Francesco had stolen from Igor—home and family—pulled at his ankles. To love Igor, he had to hurt him. He had to take Igor’s past away to make a place for himself. What a miserable organ the heart was. Francesco said, “When I was young, my brothers were already grown. They pretended to be nice to me, because girls liked boys with cute little brothers, but after they got what they wanted with the girls, they’d be back to throwing sticks at me.”

“When I got married and my son was born, I felt so exhausted, just the idea of it put me flat on my back. I could hardly stand up. Life is so huge, so impossible-seeming.”

“I don’t feel lonely now,” Francesco said. Igor still felt tired.

Igor tried to walk the streets of our home in his mind. He tried to make the turns from one street onto the next. What was that shop there? What was the name of the woman who hulked around, always grumpy? And the petite girl who sewed all the men’s pants? He walked the route to the river, despite the fact that it had been me who most often made the journey there, with my wash and our babies. He walked from his father’s house to his own house over and over, trying to get the number of steps right. Did I never work? he wondered, and panning through his memory it seemed to him that he hardly had. Where did we get the money to survive? Had I nothing to do with that? he wondered.

Igor did not tell Francesco that his family appeared to him, his parents, his wife, his children, all. Why did he omit this? Because Igor did not want Francesco to feel guilty for taking him away? Perhaps even guilty enough to return him to that wet, gray place?

THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE BEHIND AND THE DISTANCE AHEAD

T
he beautiful baby grew and shrank at the same time. His bones insisted on lengthening. They extended themselves out in every direction, but on top of them the flesh thinned, leaving the shape of his optimistic skeleton exposed.

Solomon did not grow any new inches. His body had nothing to hold on to. I felt my rivers dry up when the boys went to drink from them.

“We have to keep moving,” I said, “we have to find something to eat.”

Solomon and I took turns holding the baby. The earth was either dry and dusty or wet and sucking—all the puddles thick with tadpoles. We took roads sometimes if the compass pointed that way, but worried that we would be seen. We took paths through the woods where pine needles made a thick perfume. We followed streams, valleys, ridges. We had come to and crossed the first mountain range. We had descended and snaked the valley. Always, there was a new landscape through which to draw a path. Always, the tiny red arrow. Never did we know where we were. Dirt stuck to our legs, to our hair, buried itself in the pores of our skin. It attached itself to us as if we could save it, take it somewhere better. When we came to a river we held on to reeds and floated in it, tried to be at home. When we came to a forest, we ate the bark of the trees and the meat of the grass and sometimes the bodies of rabbits caught and discarded by birds. Some rabbits were undressed, skinless and small. We passed farmhouses hidden behind groves of trees, farmhouses with doors to keep the cold out and windows to let the light in. Life busied itself inside, knowing nothing of the mother and sons tangled together under an abandoned appleless apple tree.

Solomon made fires, but only in nighttime to keep the giveaway smoke out of the air. Warming ourselves, I asked, “What do you think they are doing at home?”

“Sitting in the barn,” Solomon said, rocking the baby on his lap. He was as dutiful as a father.

“You are only four years old,” I said to him, which I meant as an apology. He squinted at me. To Solomon, this is what it felt like to be a little boy. A stolen father, a long escape, the outcome still unknown.

I wanted to ask if everyone’s throats were slit open. I wanted to ask if they had their own kitchen knives in their chests. I wanted to ask if they had all been led to the river and drowned together. I had a small wish for one of these stories to be true, the smallest wish, only for the sake of knowing I had not picked my children out of the rich earth for nothing.

“What else have we forgotten?” Solomon asked.

“When I was young I wrote a list of everything I knew,” I told him and this made him feel better. He wanted another of the lists but since we had no paper we had to try and remember it.

“River, rain, leaves, bark, dress, scarf, sun, dirt, mud, mother, son, son,” I started.

“Father, house, temple, stars, stars, stars,” Solomon continued. “God,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“God,” he said again. He started to talk about the weeks before we left, a time that seemed as if it belonged to other people. He tried to remember the prayers, blessed a loaf of bread he did not have, a glass of wine he did not have, a candle he did not have, a day of rest he did not have.

“I used to know how to pray,” Solomon remembered.

“You still do. Bless the path,” I said, “ahead of us.” Solomon put the name of God all over the path, paved it with that name, so that every place we put our feet would be soft with it.

“Bless the wheat,” I said, and he blessed it, hung prayers from all its blowing leaves.

“Bless us,” I told him and he put his hands on the baby’s head, his hands on his mother’s head, which I bent to meet him.

“I can’t remember anything else,” he said.

“Horse, street, lamb, baby, day, night, day.”

“Wheat,” he said, looking around him at the dark fields, “wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat.”

Each night Solomon slept a little less. At first he woke up suddenly from terrible dreams, but soon sleep was such a thin membrane that all it took to break it was a gust of wind, an animal crackling in the branches, his empty stomach.

We dried the tears rolling out of our blistered feet. I chewed leaves and grass to make a paste for our cuts. I licked the bruises on Solomon’s knees like a mother cat, clearing in this way the rotten dirt that seemed to be growing out of his skin.

We soaked more bark of trees in rainwater caught and saved.

We relieved rabbits of their skin, roasted them. We dug roots from the musky ground and ate them whether they looked familiar or not.

We stole potatoes if we found them, carrying as many as we could in my shawl. The baby sucked on his fingers, which were chapped and pitted things. His length increased alone.

With a spine of mountains blue in the distance ahead and a low roll of hills gray with cold behind, the compass pointed us into a pine forest, where we came upon the carcass of a horse. Everything was gone from it, eaten by another animal. It was a sheet of skin and the eyes, yet we knew it unmistakably as a horse. We tore the skin up with rocks, put it over a fire. It did not break up in our mouths. The skin was leather, it was fur, and we ate it.

The baby waved his arms and I praised him.

When we tried to sleep hidden in the heavy brush of the forest, a thick but sharp layer of pine needles to hold us, Solomon rubbed my back. He hushed me the way I should have hushed him.

“You should sleep,” I said.

He told me, “You’re doing great, we’re doing great. We had meat today. The baby is still the baby.” He drew pictures on my back with his finger. “What’s this?” he asked. I shrugged and he said, “Guess.”

I said, “A mouse?”

“No, it’s me.”

“Do it again,” I told him.

“How old am I?” Solomon asked.

“You’re big. You’re growing,” I said. “How old am I?”

“You are all the way grown.”

All through the lit parts and the darkened parts, I asked myself, “Where am I?” I asked myself, “Where should I be?” I wondered if our village was safe, warm, completely normal, and only I was lost and battered. Or maybe everyone was sliced through and the whole village was full only of ghosts. Was Igor home now? Was Igor dead? Were the blankets still stretched tight over our beds, waiting patiently to be dreamed in?

The air started
to ache with cold and I knew we had to find a place to be warm. Solomon put a sharp rock in his pocket and stood up to go. He tried to carry the baby but he was heavy. I tried to carry the baby but he was heavy. Solomon took him, held him close, the baby put his hand to Solomon’s chest, felt for a breast.

“No,” Solomon said, “I’m not your mother.” The baby started to cry.

“You can’t cry,” I said, kneeling on the ground, my face to his. “You cannot cry. It is
impossible
. Do you understand me?” The baby stopped mid-phrase, he did not finish even one more shriek. “Close your eyes and be light,” I told him. “See if you can make yourself weigh nothing at all.”