No One is Here Except All of Us (26 page)

In Solomon’s palm, the compass warmed and the note softened.
Solomon
, it said,
Milk, Wheat, Baby, Farmer, Home, Stars, Stars. You survive this. I know for a fact. Mother, Remember.

“What are you looking at?” the farmer’s wife asked.

“A note,” he said.

“It’s too dark to read anything. We’re standing outside in total blackness.”

“I know what it says,” he told her.

“I’m ready to go inside,” she prodded.

“Wheat, wheat, mud,” he said.

“What?”

“Stars, stars, stars.”

“I do not know how to talk to you.”

“Mother,” he said.

“That’s me,” she pleaded.

“Mother, mother,” he said.

“Me, me,” she answered.

“No. Only one you.”

They did not go inside at all that night. They did not go inside but instead made themselves warm by huddling together on the ground. Solomon kept hearing me make my way. He heard me kick rocks and swing my arms. He heard the sound of my suitcase brushing up against my leg. Both of them listened to the breathing earth.

THE BOOK OF SKELETONS

T
he farmer and I walked silently; even our feet whispered with the ground. I was the one leading us, and we were not going to the train yet. The farmer was confused, fidgety. The woman he had bargained so easily with, who had gone limp in his very arms, now demanded to be followed. I could not feel the specifics of my own body—my hair caught in the button of my dress, my feet tired, my face cold. My brain felt like a beehive. All I knew was that I was walking away from my only known relative and I was doing it as a favor. The only gift I could give my son was the absence of myself.

“Are you angry?” the farmer asked, suddenly.

“What?”

“You haven’t spoken to me since we left.”

“Angry?” As if I could know, as if it could change anything. “You don’t care how I feel.” I said this as fact. Not something I was sorry about, or something I wished to change.

“But I have been very nice to you. I have been nicer than you probably deserve,” the farmer said. His clear eyes told me he meant this. I looked away. The farmer’s voice sounded higher to me. It was the voice of a boy with a question he could not figure out how to ask. He told me I was making his wife happy. I was generous. The choice I had made was the only sensible one.

“My son will not die because he is related to me. That’s a gift and you’re the ones who gave it to us. I’ll spend my life being grateful for that. I’ll spend my life trying to forgive it.”

Fear, that dependable dog, would not be fed out of my hand anymore. Everything worth losing had already been lost.

I remembered the way back, remembered the line of pines at the edge of the field, the vein of granite, the small hill and the dip on the other side. We walked in tight circles, looking for what was left. I did not panic. I knew my boy would have waited for me to kiss him goodbye.

“I don’t think you should come over here,” the farmer said through the wind.

“My son is there,” I said.

“It’s not a good way to see him.”

I came and stood over the pile. “His bones,” I said.

The farmer was not looking at the bones. He saw matted old muscles, dry, chewed sinew. He saw rot. He saw a body feasted on by birds and worms.

The farmer fell to the ground. “He could have been my son.”

I picked up a long, thin bone. “He
was
my son,” I said. He was my baby, my real, true boy, and this was my chance to touch him one last time.

I went to the mattress and jumped. I jumped and I held the long leg bone. “You are my love,” I said to the bone. The mattress made sucking sounds as the grass that grew there was squashed under my feet. I said, “I absolutely remember who you are.”

“How can this happen? How can we go on? There is so much to lose,” the farmer said. And lose it you will, I thought. The process of living is to surrender what, for a few glimmering days or years, you have been allowed to hold. But there is no such place as gone. The next thought I had hit me hard: I hoped the baby died with a patched-up heart. Please, I thought. Let us be broken together. Years from now, when Solomon’s heart finally breaks and all the beautiful rivers of hope and sorrow have canyons to run in, he will be my son again. In some sea, under a fury of stars, far away from any named place, my sons and I will collide.

“How can we leave the baby?” the farmer asked.

“That is
my
baby,
my
son,” I said.

“But from now on, I love him. He is my son’s brother.” God, in his endless generosity, had found yet another thing for me to share.

I looked up at the heavens. The stars began and continued. The moon made a lazy attempt to exist. The story of my life, of the whole world, was encoded in those lights. They were the only things that had never left me. I gathered strength because my job as a mother was not over.

“Do you see those stars there? Those are the dog stars,” I said. “Solomon found them.”

The farmer puzzled at the shape, tried to make a dog of it. “What else?” he asked. He could not hide his relief that I was speaking to him kindly.

“That one is a cart. Over here is a fish.” He studied the sky.

“I can’t find anything,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter if you see it or not. It’s there.”

“I have taken your son,” he said.

“I am letting you borrow him,” I answered.

“What will you have?” he asked. Everything that ever blew into my arms had blown back out again. But snow turned to blossoms. Beneath the apple tree, the shawl I survived under now warmed the rotted core of a fallen piece of a fruit, coaxing a green shoot.

“Your promise that you will be very kind to my son.”

“I promise.”

“Is there anything you need to know about being a father?”

The farmer thought about it. He said, “I don’t know anything about being a father.”

“Do you know what to do when Solomon gets sick?”

“No. But we’re calling him Johan. He is a Christian now.”

I took a sharp gasp. A new pain: a lost bit of healthy flesh, stabbed. Just keep being the mother, I said to myself. Let my arms grow so long I can wipe his tears from the other side of the earth. “When Johan, your son, gets sick, a cool cloth is the most important thing. And water to drink. But he’s going to tell you he’s dying even when he isn’t. If it’s winter, give him packed snow to suck on. If it’s summer, find him a place in the shade.”

“But what if he
is
dying?”

“You’ll have to learn the difference between when he’s dying and when he isn’t.”

“Is there anything more I can give you?” the farmer asked.

I listened to whatever made sound: the squish of the mattress, wet and unwell. The sound of the crying insects. The sound of my son’s bones rattling. The sound of the man and the heat of the man traveling across the baby’s leftovers.

“I have my life,” I said finally. Even this—life—felt weightless. Some invisible string must have kept me tethered. When I found it, I planned to cut it and let myself float away.

“I could give you more life,” he said. “Not because I love you.”

“I have more life than I need for just myself,” I said.

The farmer pulled up my dress. He did not smooth his hand over me, not even a gentle stroke. He did not come to me with any warm part of him, but one. I closed my eyes to the covered world. Nothing tried to be seen in that darkness, everything was happy to hide from me. I did not move my body away, or turn my head or say words that would have changed what happened. The farmer’s body was a body and my body was another body and the bones of my dead son rested against us both. The farmer wrestled himself in. His beard was full of dew, bright seeds, which dropped onto my face. His movements were simple and unadorned.

A flock of ravens crossed over the farmer and me but we saw nothing of the birds. The birds were the same as the sky that night. There was a sound of flying, but only for a second, and then a sound of calling back to the ones behind. The followers answered back,
Yes
, they said.
We are all here together.

“For the baby,” the farmer said, when he had climbed back down and moved the scattered bones from under him.

The ravens went on. The ravens crossed over whatever was below but did not stop to rest there. Did not stop to acknowledge the world laid low around them.

From then on,
the road was new to me. It took only hours this time, the walk an actual, measurable distance instead of an endless journey away. I kept trying to count the steps, knowing that there would be a final one, a total number. The place I walked through was a perfect reenactment of a real world. These bushes looked exactly like real bushes. All the details had been thought of—birds of different colors and size, needles spilling out from the skirts of pine trees. Only the air was wrong. It was thin and tinny, cheaply made. Too bad, I thought, they almost got it right.

In the afternoon the farmer said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” I answered.

“
Should
I be sorry for what I did?” the farmer asked, wanting me, instead of being angry, to tell him how grateful I was.

“Life is not replaceable,” I told him. The proof was all around me: the made-up bluebird drinking from a puddle of newly melted snow, as if something that precious could be real. The real bird, mangy and cold, was hidden away somewhere.

The farmer’s voice went up, “Forgive the approximation. Life is life. I tried my hardest.”

I did not answer.

“No!” the farmer suddenly yelled. “Say thank you! Tell me thank you for saving your son! I’m doing
everything
I can
think
to do for you,” he growled. “You have our money and our passport and I’m even trying to give you a companion. I’m trying to make you a family.”

He pushed me into the tall trees along the road.

“You have done enough,” I said. “Please stop trying to help me.”

“We have to be grateful for what we can offer each other,” he said, deflating me. I punched his back and slammed my feet against his anklebones. I fought. I remember twisting beneath him, but he did not have to struggle hard. I was weak. I posed no threat to him. I was a source, that was all, a well for him to draw upon.

The sticks cracked with every push and the leaves broke into a thousand crushed squares and none of the birds watched us. The moment was quick and over.

“You don’t know what this does to me. I do not love you.”

I did not have enough matter in me to hate him with.

“I don’t mean any of this,” he said. “I have a family at home. A wife and a son,” he said. “I’m just trying to do what’s right.” I held my breath until my lungs prickled. I let out one long howl until my chest was sore and empty. The fake forest was mawkish around me. Greens too green, sky too crystalline to be possible. Not on a day like this. The poor rabbit burying his nose in the underbrush would surely starve by nightfall, finding nothing but pieces of wood someone had carved to look like seeds.

A buzzing, rolling,
mechanical city met us soon. This invention had outgrown its creator. Hammer together scraps of wood into the shape of legs and in the morning the body is up and walking. By midday, your tools are missing and the roads are battered by wheels. The farmer and I stood on the very edge of the road while people passed us in cars. The cars spit out gray smoke, hot and thick.

The town was full of people, walking, driving, riding bicycles, yelling, wearing hats and carrying large leather bags, reading the newspaper, smoking and standing there with the sun in their eyes, waiting for whatever came next.

“Where have I always been?” I asked. The farmer put his hand on my shoulder.

“This is the world,” he said. “This is the regular, loud world.” The cars spit dust up at children poking their heads out of second-story windows. The children called to other children on the street, broke down in giggles. The scene unfolded in slow motion. A gray cat tore at a liver, which turned his face dark red. One of the children tripped over the cat and fell into a puddle and the liver rolled and the cat squawked and the other children’s faces burned up with laughter. No one laughed harder than the boy in the puddle, who was on his knees, holding his belly. His friends came to him, took him by the elbows and picked him up. These boys on this street had just lived one of the stories they would tell and tell, a story whose medicine would be strong enough to draw laughter for all the years of their lives. One of the boys kicked the liver back to the cat, who resumed his feasting.

“So many people are still alive,” I said.

“These people are different from yours. No one’s trying to kill these ones,” the farmer said. He led me slowly through the streets. The windows in the cars winked light at us. Small pieces of trash were ground into the sidewalk. A pair of dogs approached us, looked up with polished and hopeful eyes, waited to be saved. The farmer tossed them nothing and I had nothing to toss.

“Your train,” the farmer said, gesturing.

The machine was churning and soot-black. I studied its huge and numerous wheels, its doors and windows and platforms and chains. The farmer gave me a ticket for the Black Sea port city. He gave me the name of the office where I should buy passage on a ship to the New World—that’s what he called it.

“I already lived in a new world,” I told him. “I’m not sure I can manage another.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “but this is a nice place where you’ll live your life out. Your entry papers are all set. Everything is prepared.” He was talking quickly, anxious to get to the part where I was gone and he was free to be the father he had dreamed of being. He said he did not know what had happened to me out there in the fields, or before, but that he was sure the world would make sense to me again soon. He wrote my name in his dirty arm with his fingernail:
Natalya
. I nodded. He added:
Live
. I nodded again. On the other arm he wrote:
Sorry
. I nodded a third time. I scratched two words back:
Good
Father
. He smiled. His whole face rose up. He did not pay me the same compliment, and I was glad because I would not have deserved it.

The farmer waited alone on the platform. I watched two women run to each other and exclaim utter delight with their arms wrapped around each other. One handed the other a round box, which popped open to reveal a light purple hat with a small robin perched on its brim. The hatted woman looked at me and I looked at her. We observed each other, probably misunderstanding everything. To her, the farmer could have been my brother, missing me already, the next visit years away. We could have been lovers whose parents had forbidden our union. We could have been a mother and a father, doing all the heroic and vicious things we knew to protect the child we each claimed. The train cried and began to drag itself out of the station. Every single person on the platform, absolutely all of them, waved. They had practiced, and they performed beautifully. The farmer waved, looked at the ground and then waved again. I wept into my cupped palms, where a pool collected, salty and warm, which I lapped up like the gray cat.