Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

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?”

“I think you dreamed that,” I said.

“No, I remember it. You were there. You wore a yellow dress.”

“All right, I’ll remember,” I agreed. “Was that the same time that Solomon was a bear cub and he kept scratching us by accident and we had to very carefully trim his claws with a knife in his sleep?”

“That was another time. But I remember that, too. I’m glad he’s a boy again.” The tone of his voice changed. “Remember the time my mother did not run away every time she saw me approaching? Remember the time I was her son?”

“I remember that,” I said, wrapping my fingers in a bracelet around his wrist.

Kayla entered first, knocked second. Stomped her muddy boots on the mat. “Are you unwell?” she asked. “You didn’t answer.”

“I’m very, very well,” I said, and I let out a small howl.

“We thought you had stopped that,” Kayla said.

“I hadn’t.” I took a sip of cold, dusty-tasting water and did not look her in the eye. I did not not love her. I understood that she had to invent being a mother just as I had to invent being a baby. I knew that she loved the person she imagined me to be, and maybe even, a little bit, the person I actually was. Still, the quieter the little room was, the more I could hear the sound, like the faint ringing of a tuning fork, of my own, real mind.

“Here are the potatoes, and here is the chicken. Here is some extra money. When are you coming to our house for supper?” Kayla asked.

“Not for a while.” I pointed to the baby. “I don’t want to disrupt him.”

“It’s just a few doors away,” she whined.

“And yet,” I said, smiling. “It feels very far.” Kayla scrubbed ferociously at a potato. She had not realized that by finding me a husband and releasing me to the course of events, she would lose her grip on my life.

“You are still my daughter,” she scolded. “I’m still taking care of you.”

I said, “As you know, being a mother is the most important thing. The baby won’t survive without me.”

“Just you wait,” she huffed. “Before you know it, he’ll be gone.”

Solomon sucked and spit and sucked and spit. Milk ran down my chest, my belly. I dipped my finger in and tasted. “Me and you,” I said, squeezing my son.

“What did you say?” Kayla asked.

“I was talking to Solomon,” I said.

“He’s just a baby, he doesn’t know anything yet.”

“He knows what he knows.”

When Kayla left, I checked on my husband, disguised as a worm in his blanket, and whispered to him, “Remember the time all the trees sprouted cakes and we lay in the sun on our backs eating them and nobody had to worry about whether there would be enough later on?” His eyelids flickered.

I took my baby outside. “This is the street,” I said, “which we use to get places. Right now I feel the round stones under my feet. When you walk you’ll know what I mean. What’s falling is called rain. Sometimes it’s heavy and sometimes it’s light, but it hardly ever stops completely. It’s what makes the plants and the trees grow, so we can be grateful. Your real grandfather is a cabbage farmer. I’ll cook them for you so you know the smell. Your other grandfather makes saddles to ride horses. Your third grandfather keeps other people’s money safe. They will all love you, and you don’t have to do anything special for them. Just do what you do.”

And what was I supposed to do? I had no job in the village. Maybe I had helped tell our story once, but the need for that had disappeared — the story was telling itself now. I was Solomon’s mother, and maybe that was enough. My husband had completely stopped showing up for work at the bank. Igor’s father still dropped his weekly pay off at our doorstep, though it was unearned. I picked it up and poured the coins into the bread jar at the back of our cupboard. Igor never asked where I got the money to buy flour or eggs and I did not explain it to him. He was tired enough without the weight of taking charity. If the banker stopped paying his son for nothing, I was not sure what we would do. Still, in the history of this world, no one had gone hungry. No one had withered away. I surveyed the land around me and saw plenty. “All we need is enough,” I said to Solomon. “No more.”

The next thing I knew, my son would be running around and I would be pregnant again. I would cry every time I cut Solomon’s soft brown hair, those beautiful silks dead on the floor. His legs would become too long for each pair of pants. Solomon’s arms would soon wallow at his sides, and his feet and hands would become knuckled and workable. He would turn one, two, three. He would learn to walk. Then he would learn to talk. He would learn to read and to write and I would find notes on scraps of paper. My name is Solomon. I like to eat fruit. My father is asleep. I love my mother. I am tall. Though he would be precocious, he would learn everything in the right order, and even while his mother would sometimes wish she could have another day with him as a baby, she — I—would never, ever ask. I would watch him stack boxes, chew carrots and make friends with ants. I would watch him chase a ball and bury a stone. “Today it was a monsoon. Tomorrow there will be a shower,” he would sing. “Drizzle, deluge, cloudburst.”