Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

It had not been a decision she had weighed. The stranger did not deliberate. From the first day of the world, when she had sneaked off to patrol the borders, and every day after, whether mail came or mail did not, the stranger understood that she would peek behind the curtain once. Because she was human? Because she was flawed? Because she was strong enough to know something about the truth? None of these. Because, she thought, one of the letters was going to matter. She would need to know the contents to keep order in the new world. Which one, she hoped, was going to be clear when she held it.

On a wet, rotting log, with the help of the trustworthy moon, the stranger split the seal.

Dear Mordecai,

I have not heard from you for a long time. We are worried about you. Why don’t you come to stay with us until you get on your feet? We could send you some money for passage. People say Antonescu is as bad as Hitler. The Americans think we will win the war, but I don’t know. I wish you would not wait to find out. Esther sends her love. The boys are doing well in school. We bought a new icebox. Please, brother, come to where it is safe. Please answer, no matter what. I’m going crazy not knowing if you’re all right.

Yours truly, Isaac

Her first thought was: Wrong letter. She stuffed it back into the envelope and pressed the flap, but it did not seal. She realized that she had expected the letter to be for her. That Mordecai Glassman was only the name on the front, but inside she would find clear instructions for her personal care of the village. Straight from the mouth of God. The stranger did not know who Mordecai was. Of course she knew him, because she knew everyone in the village, knew everything they hoped for and worried about and every prayer they had uttered. But she did not know their names. She addressed them by the jobs they did.

The stranger could suddenly feel this brother, this Isaac, come out from inside a curtain’s great folds and stand on what felt now like a darkened stage. How big our creation had seemed before, how entire, only one small opening to keep shut, one river to dredge for trespassing objects — a watch that reappears mangled on the sand, the leg of a faraway, unknowable chair. Now it was a wooden platform, a puppet theater, with every seat empty. Isaac was real, somewhere. He thought about his brother, the potential children with their running noses and flattened hair. The door our village had built, opened and walked through only existed for us — to the rest of the world the only likely explanation for our silence was that we were dead. Not re-created, not wrapped in the whisps of clouds summoned from the sky just for us, but shot, drowned, worm-eaten, dismembered. Extinguished, just as we thought they had been. Mordecai, whoever he was — baker, butcher, jeweler — may not have been one of a hundred-and-some small gods, stirring the pot of the world. He may have been nothing bigger than a faraway someone’s brother, the whole of their love for each other passed back and forth on thin sheets of paper. A man, two men, fifty men. Their bodies breaking down, bending a little closer to the beckoning ground with each swoop of the sun.

“Is that true?” the stranger asked a God who was official on the books but had never bothered to assure her he was listening. “Are we nothing but heel skin and blisters? Traveling a straight line to the end of our lives?” She flipped a black rock with a belt of white quartz in her hand. Tossed it one palm to the other. God was mute. What if that’s the flaw? she wondered. He’s up there on his glorious perch, eagle-eyed and all-knowing, unable to communicate but for his doughy fists shaken at the air, while we knock into the furniture, throw rocks through the windows, punch each other in the stomach, leave our new babies untended on the edge of the ravine.

Rather than feel pity for this helpless, voiceless God, the stranger hated him just then. If he could not solve his problem, how were the stupid, mush-brained ants on the ground supposed to solve theirs? As she grimaced and sighed, the stranger was folding the letter from faraway Isaac. She made one pointed end, and then another; she made a flat bottom, a space inside for a tiny person to sit. A boat. “Pray we will,” she said. “Because you never know. But still.” She put her fingertips in the hull of the small craft. “This might be utterly stupid,” the stranger said to her shut-lipped God, “and maybe that’s our specialty, us humans, but I made a promise to these people. We made a promise, we made a world, together. I am going to serve them. If it’s an angel they want me to be, I’ll look as winged as I can.”

The Germans are everywhere , the child’s chiming voice sang. Americans say we will win the war, but I don’t know. Come to where it’s safe.

“What would we do? Pack up everything in the world and start walking?” the stranger asked the darkness. “Mordecai’s brother surely will not house us all, wherever he lives.” The sky was feverish with stars by now. “We are in the middle of a project. We are trying to do the right thing. What if the safest place we can be is on our river-wrapped island?” She sharpened all the boat’s creases. “Have your wars,” she said. “We’ll stay here and be peaceful.” To bury this letter like the unread others would have felt like an attempt to deny it, like a counterargument. The letter did not feel dangerous to the stranger. It was just a misplacement, a stray. Sometimes a fish gets stranded on the riverbank, but with luck, someone is there to toss it back into its right place.

The stranger knelt by the water and placed Isaac and Mordecai’s boat on the fluttering surface. The boat nodded at her, Yes yes yes , then shook its head, Never mind . “Conviction. That’s the hardest part,” the stranger agreed with the boat. But in a minute, the vessel found its steadiness, and it used the light of the risen moon to stay traceable as it sailed straight out of the known world. Just like that, slipping through the gauze, and ceasing to exist. If there ever was an Isaac, he had brought his hat to his heart and bowed for the empty seats; he had exited stage left and fallen into the darkness.

The barn by lamplight that night was the same as the barn by lamplight every other night. The letter had changed nothing. The idea that it ever could have seemed stupid to the stranger. It was as meaningless as our village’s bones will be, unearthed a million years after we finally fall to rest. The stranger still planned to keep guard, to bury the mail, to throw intrepid debris back into the river, but she was glad to let the curtain fall back over the stage, to believe that ours was the only world, despite any evidence to the contrary. In that little paper ship, the stranger had sent all the questions we might have asked away. In its wake: quiet, for a thousand days.

Truth belongs to the place where it lives, like a plant, she thought. That the mountains are spiny with beech trees does not make the valley’s foot-soft grasses jealous. That one world is at war does nothing to interrupt the patient churning of peaceful years someplace far away.

In my new life, Kayla, wanting the sweet candy of progress, prodded me by pointing to herself and saying the word Mother over and over. In front of Hersh and Kayla were the ravaged remains of a lamb’s leg. In front of me was a bowl of mashed peas — food for a toothless little girl. I looked at the peas and realized that I no longer found them strange. Stupid human, I thought, stupid animal. Don’t you see how awful this is? But I had simply done what we all do every day: gotten used to how things were. I watched Kayla chirping, “Mother, mother, mother,” and knew that whenever I was ready I could parrot the word back, perfect and crisp. I liked knowing this. It was a treasure I could hoard, and hoard I did until my new aunt began to give up on me.