No One is Here Except All of Us (21 page)

THE BOOK OF THE SEA AND THE NIGHT

E
ventually some of the girls came to watch the checkers game, even drank the wine. They were named things like Mariza and Mila and Francesca. They tossed their hair.

“You have so much hair,” Igor said to Carolina, sitting next to him.

She looked at him with her head aslant. Igor felt something related to delight. He touched her hair and she bent her head to let him. “Nice,” he said, not thinking of anything else to call it. “Very nice.” The men laughed at him.

“You can touch it all you want,” Carolina whispered into his ear.

“Very nice,” Igor repeated.

“I can wrap you up in it,” she whispered.

“Okay.” He smiled.

“You can kiss it,” she said.

But when he kissed, the hair disappeared from under his lips and was replaced with other lips. The two pairs of lips adored each other. They matched and they knew it. Everyone around clapped and cheered but Igor pulled away. He could not believe how different those lips were from his wife’s, lips he could absolutely not kiss now, so impossible was that kiss that it made his stomach hurt. He could not describe the difference, like trying to explain the scent of apple blossoms against the scent of lilacs. “I have a wife,” Igor said. The men laughed. “I was only planning to kiss the hair.”

“Okay,” Carolina said, offering the side of her head. “Have it your way.”

Later, standing in the doorstep of the jail under a yellow bug-fluttered light, Francesco said, “You’re not in charge of your fate. Your wife cannot be upset.”

“My
wife
,” Igor said.

“It is not for you to decide. Here on the island, when someone wants to love you, what choice do you have?”

“If I sent a letter, would my wife get it?”

“A letter, to your wife?”

“I want that. I think I should tell her that I am all right. Alive. What if she marries someone else?”

“Not possible.” Francesco knew all about the German soldiers, the emptied-out villages, the bodies smashed into train cars, cells.

“How long have I been here?”

Francesco tried to count on his fingers but gave up. “You have been here for many weeks,” he finally answered. “Many.”

“That’s many weeklong chances for her to forget me. She does not know that I’m alive.”

“Is
she
even alive?” Francesco asked. He realized his coldness right away. “She’s fine, I know she is.”

“She could not be?” Igor asked back, betraying his shock.

“They are fine, maybe they really are.”

“We have no idea. We do not know if we are alive,” he fumbled.

“I am alive and you are alive,” Francesco said. “We know that much. Carolina is alive.” The bugs crashed and crashed into the light, so certain they had found something worth finding, if only they could get closer to it.

“Stay here tonight with me,” Igor said. “It seems I have lost everything.”

Francesco was light-headed. “Yes, please,” he said.

“Did you hear me? How big is my firstborn?”

Francesco put his hand out at hip level. “Maybe like this?” He was still thinking of sleeping the night away with Igor by his side.

Igor went into the cage, where he washed his face in the small sink at the wall. Francesco closed the gate and locked the two of them inside. He curled up on his side of Igor’s bed. “I’m sorry we took you away,” he said. “But thank you, too.” Francesco had gone from doing his duty to imprisoning someone for his own benefit. He did not pray for guidance, only forgiveness.

Igor began a letter.

Dear L,

Things are pretty good with me. How are you? I hope you are well. I am being held captive in a town by the sea by a nice man named Francesco who is also my friend. Maybe someday he will come and get you too and you can live in my jail with me. It is actually very nice. I have a comfortable bed and a sink and toilet and they give me money to buy food. I am allowed out during the day. Francesco and I swim and I like to drink coffee in the square. I am learning the language.

Solomon must be big. And even the baby must be big. Do you remember me? Do you? Are you alive? Are you going to marry someone else? If you wanted to come and live here I am sure they would take you prisoner, too. There are girls here but you are my wife. Today, one of them told me she’d wrap me up in her hair, but instead I am here, writing to you. Do you even appreciate this? I have a bed from an old woman, a big old bed. I am getting to be a fast swimmer. I did not know how to swim before, any more than to hold on to the reeds in the river when we used to go together. Are you still lucky? Do you look the same? I have a new suit. Francesco and me like to lie on the warm rocks by the sea. Do you know what the sea looks like? It is very beautiful and I think you would like to go into it. I would like to show you how to swim along the shore. We could eat cheese after and walk in the sun. Do you want to see me again? Do you want me to be your husband? Does Solomon like to practice arithmetic? Is the baby as high as your knee, as high as your hip? Which of them looks more like me? Which of them looks more like you? Which of them remembers my name? Are all of our parents alive? Do you sleep alone in the bed? How are the constellations coming? Is the whole sky there now, over everyone? I would like to sleep there again. Please tell me you are alive. Please tell Solomon and the baby that I am their father. Please send a letter saying they know. I almost remember who you are.

Sincerely, I

In the morning,
as Francesco was going to get his pastry and coffee, a small boat pulled up to the dock, and out of it came two soldiers, older and full-cheeked, no one Francesco knew. They wore Italian uniforms, and as they approached, they drew their hats down to their hearts. Francesco thought, They have come to take my friend. Solemnly, he met them on the wooden-planked dock. “There have been some losses,” the older of the two men said. “Giuseppe Carbone.” The face coalesced in Francesco’s mind. A younger boy, thorny and uneven, commanding a game of tag on the beach. “And Bianco,” the man said.

“But that’s me,” Francesco objected, instinct prompting him to check his own hands to see that he was alive.

“Luca Bianco.” Francesco’s oldest brother, so confident the air swirled around him, drawing everyone nearer, so much what the world had dreamed a son could be.

“He can’t die,” Francesco said, sure of this. Like that part of the contract had been renegotiated, this man too good for the world to lose.

“We’re very sorry for your loss,” the younger of the two soldiers said. “It was an ambush, in Rome. They were both brave.”

The soldiers saluted, and then they turned around and left.

For a moment, the tears in Francesco’s eyes were made of relief and thanks. Francesco had been granted a pardon. No one wanted to take Igor from him, not yet. And then, Francesco saw Luca’s shadow collapse at his feet. He, the ever-disappointing son, would have to walk this news to his mother’s doorstep, he would have to be the one to throw her heaving to the floor with it. Francesco sat down on the dock and put his head in his hands, and for a long time, nothing breathed. God was benevolent and he was cruel.

THE BOOK OF THE DISTANCE AND THE FUTURE, WHICH IS NOW

T
he mountains, deep green and fully alive, were high around my bony children and me. We did not ascend or descend, but walked straight across the low valley of this revolving earth. On the coldest nights we slept in barns, if we found them, with the pigs and goats. The animals did not seem to feel heroic, sharing their house with refugees. They moaned and grunted and grudgingly allowed us a little corner. We whispered about our own barn and how well we had made it into a place to pray. We sneaked eggs and animal feed, chewed on the same hay the pigs slept on, but as soon as the idea of light peeked through the cracks in the walls, we left to let the new day shake us, tackle us, wring us out.

On a clear and blue afternoon in which the branches on the trees were naked but not shy for it, we came to a spectacular and strange thing—a mattress in the middle of a cleared field. The grass was dry and cut short, whatever it had been grown for gone into cooking pots and bellies. But there was this old and moldy thing, a thing once slept on by people, loved on by people. It had grass growing through it. It was a nest for new baby grasses. For this family, who had survived on whatever was found, this seemed like a gift. Solomon, slow, weak and broken-in, did not lie down but began to jump.

He was a beautiful, enthusiastic jumper. He used his whole body to propel himself upward. When he came down, the springs of his legs sent him up again. The good ground, hanging on to his ankles, did not stand a chance against all that sky.

I held the baby on my lap so we could be bounced by Solomon’s jumping. The baby laughed, a sharp and definite laugh. Maybe his first. “How long since we laughed?” I asked. We tried to keep quiet, because we never knew who was going to steal us away just for existing, but in this moment it was not easy. In this moment Solomon’s muscles began to ache from his laughter. I collapsed in my own joy, watched my son go up and down, his hair bouncing, his arms flapping, flightless.

“What are you?” I called to Solomon.

“A boy!” Solomon called back.

“No, you are jumping!” I laughed.

“I am both!” Solomon shrieked, dizzy.

I lay down in the grass beside the mattress. I put my head on a rock and covered my eyes with my hands. The sun was lost light. The sound of my shrieking and laughing boy was unmuffled. I listened to every beat of it, every landing and takeoff, every collapse and resolution to continue. Solomon slowed down, said, “I see the stars,” then collapsed on the mattress in dry heaves. He had nothing to vomit up.

My hand ran the ridge of Solomon’s spine. It hurt to cry—I had no water to spare, but my eyes had waited long enough. Solomon tried to stand, but it was too much. His legs were soft and bendy. Beaten, he lay down and wept. I told him the story of the very day we were in—once upon a time we were a family who came upon an amazing mattress in a field just like every other field and how the older brother had jumped so high he saw the stars while his mother and brother listened to the sound of his laughter with the sun on their faces.

“Don’t you remember how wonderful?” I asked.

He repeated just the last word, but it collapsed on his tongue.

The sun stopped being worth shading ourselves from. The cut field was a pincushion of interrupted growth. The baby fell asleep on the bed, and Solomon lay next to him. I went to find food and came back with a rabbit, a baby, already dead but undiscovered by birds. I skinned it, put it on a small fire and waited for the smell to wake my baby up.

We tried to sleep on the bed, all of us, but I could feel Solomon turning back and forth, awake. The stars were hidden behind a cover of gray—even though I knew the stars were there still, arranged and held, I could not believe it was true. There seemed to be another world over me, a flat gray place, just as hard and true as this one. A world where you could walk for months having no idea where you were, then walk some more.

I woke up when Solomon started to jump around me. Dawn was a luminous bruise on the horizon, the rest of the sky dark. I felt the surface under me go soft and shifty. I felt the spring of his feet against it, their insistence on high and higher.

I started to gather the baby into my arms, and at the first touch I understood that he was not going to wake up. He was cold, and he was still.

“Stop,” I said, “stop jumping.”

“We are boys,” he whispered to himself, “two boys. We are jumping.”

I took the baby into my arms. In the dark, only his shining eyes were easy to see. I laid him on the bed. I listened for his breath. I listened for his heart. On the mattress, the grass-sprung mattress, here in this field after one harvest and before another, the baby’s little spirit was caught on the wind and carried absolutely everywhere.

“This is my baby who is lost,” I kept whispering. I remember saying that so many times it turned into one word.

I opened my dress to put the baby onto my long-dry breast. “What if this?” I said. “What if you are new?” Solomon opened his shirt too and tried to offer the breast that he had never had, not even for a moment of his short life.

“What if this?” he echoed. We held the boy together against us while he did not drink. I wondered how long he had been waiting to slip away. How hard he had tried to hold on. “All right,” I whispered, further than I wished from forgiving him. “You chose to go.”

“My brother who is lost. I bless him. May His great Name be exalted and sanctified in the world that He created as He willed.” The prayer split me, the way only the sight of blood makes a wound begin to sear with pain. Years from now, a thousand or more, I might be ready to dress in black and mourn. For as long as I could imagine, for the whole crooked duration of my life, I tasted the metallic desire for misery in my entire body.

“I’m not ready for the prayer,” I whispered. I pressed the baby hard to my chest, and for a second I thought he might slip right inside. Rejoin.

“We are supposed to say the prayer. That’s the prayer we say.”

I covered my ears and wept. I had never wanted to hit my son before. “No one is listening, don’t you see?”

The baby’s skin turned rubbery. His body became less and less. The heartless compass pointed away: always, farther and farther away. The sun rose to show us how beaten we were. The wind started to gather itself and throw our hair around, toss our spit and tears back at us, slapping our grief onto our skin.
We have no use for this
, the wind said of our tears,
this is yours
.

When the light had us pink and orange and looking like we were on fire, Solomon said, “We have to put him someplace. He needs a home.”

“And you? A home?”

“Not yet,” he told me, faith hanging on to its overwhelming opposite.

I carried my smallest boy away from the mattress. His legs were stiff and unmoving. We had no shovel with us in the field. We dug with our hands, cupping the clumps of dry dirt and moving them aside.

We did not get very deep. The earth turned us away, dry and unbreakable. We hit it with rocks, trying to make a crack but only freed a little dust. It was a long time before a small boat floated there, in which the baby could drift away. We laid the baby down, tucked just below the surface of the world.

“He never had a name,” Solomon said.

“He never told us what he wanted to be called.”

“Should we name him now? Should we call him Star or Wheat or Field?”

“None of those would be enough.”

So the baby went away the same as he had come: himself and nothing else. No name, no debts, no winnings. He had no road in front of him to walk, no food to find, no tears to lose, no mother and brother to pray for. He had only to sleep, and maybe dream, for as long as the earth kept turning.

That was the last night we lived as three, and all through it Solomon and I stayed as still as we could, though we did not sleep. We wanted to move no more than our third companion, to be like him, for us all to be like each other, lying still, as is natural to do, under the dark heavens and the uncountable stars.