Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

“But I am nothing. I am a space, a hole.”

“And yet, you manage to fill me to bursting. I overflow.”

The stranger ran her hand over her arm, her legs, feeling for more than she thought existed. In her chest, something very much alive was pounding.

“You are so good to me,” she said.

The jeweler’s shaking fingers turned the dial.

The radio sounded like a whimper at first, and then a man’s words formed in the air of the barn. The language came rumbling through the stranger like an old train down overgrown tracks. “Do you understand English?” the jeweler asked. “Do you need me to translate?” She was surprised that she did understand. Her father had taught the language to her. So surreal was it to hear another man speak these words that it took a moment for their meaning to sink in.

This is the BBC Home and Forces program. This is Bruce Bellfridge. Here’s some excellent news, which has come during the past hour from a communiqué from Cairo. It says the Axis powers in the western desert after twelve days of ceaseless land and air attacks are now in full retreat. It’s known that the enemy’s losses are extraordinary.

The sound changed and became crackly. Another man’s voice came through the radio.

I’m lying in a cornfield. I can see many men around me taking shelter behind the banks, wearing their steel helmets while the terrific barrage goes on around us. The shells are whistling overhead. Now just listen to them.

There was a sound of pops, shots and then the crackly noise went away and the first man’s voice came back.

We’re interrupting this program to bring you a news flash. This is a news flash from the BBC in London. American forces have crossed the Rhine at a point north of Cologne and established a bridgehead on the far side. And that’s the end of this news flash from the BBC in London.

Voices were replaced by a violin, rising, falling, the notes so sharp they could have cut skin. The stranger and the jeweler were absorbed. The names of places, rivers, were not supposed to mean anything, but the jeweler and the stranger remembered them like part of a dream, almost as a taste or smell more than a fact. They drew closer together.

The stranger asked the jeweler what the man had meant. Who was fighting? Where? But the jeweler did not know. They waited for the man’s voice to come back. The violin played on. “Who are the men speaking?” the stranger asked.

The jeweler knew only one thing: He had not been so close to another body for this long since he was a child.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The strains of the violin formed, crested, fell.

They waited all night for more, but none came. In the short fits of sleep the stranger found, she dreamed of swimming in an ocean whose tides kept washing her back to shore, even as she swam farther and farther out. And the jeweler? What did he dream? He did not, because he did not sleep. He lay awake all night, not because he was worried about a great fight, but because he was feeling the soft heat of the stranger’s body while music filled the big, dusty room.

In the morning, the stranger felt upside down. The world we had left behind was no clearer or more understandable than this one. Here, stars were populating the barn, people were going about their business and history only had to manage a few years of complexity. In the old world the names of hundreds of generals, borders of a thousand countries, territories, pacts, and everyone who had ever been were all trying to crowd onto the same little globe. It was impossible, she felt in a rush — too big to be real. Instead of what she would have expected, the new facts presented overwhelming evidence that the old world was the make-believe one.

“I have a wedding to perform today,” she said, glad to have work to do.

The jeweler set off for the day feeling surprisingly light and free. No film of dishonesty or sneakiness was on his skin. The radio was not a danger but a prop, like a warm fire around which to gather, an excuse to allow two people’s knees to touch.

The stranger went to wash in the river, but she never entered the water, because on the bank she found a man’s shirt, which had come down the river so full of rotten leaves it looked as if the man was still in it. Out loud she said, “This might have been my husband’s shirt. This might have been my father’s shirt.” She shook the leaves out onto the muddy bank. She looked around her. Green and sure, the mountains were the same as always on the river’s opposite bank. Every tree grew slowly and patiently toward the sky. The stranger slapped herself on the face, as surprised as if someone else had done it. “But it could also be no one’s shirt,” her own voice reminded her. “It could mean nothing at all.” The stranger dug a hole and buried the shirt. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” the voice in her own mouth told her. The mud went soft and shaky when she patted it. She wanted no one else to know. She believed the story. No — the story was true, indisputable.

That afternoon, the man who used to be my brother stood under the canopy, his sweet, chosen bride next to him. “We pray for this family, this new family,” the stranger said. “We pray for everything you have in store, but better, if you can.” She did not meet the jeweler’s eye.

“We pray for this glorious sun to shine on!” the butcher hollered, to a blaze of cheers. This moment was transposed on top of my own wedding, and they felt like the same instant. Time was a dazzling lie, a magician with a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age, at the same time. All the days of all our lives were today.

For the second time, Regina sat in the barn while the wedding taking place was not hers. She felt again that her limbs were enormous and as old and dry as thick-barked pine. But at her side, her friend was bigger still. The widow blew her nose into a piece of burlap that once held mustard seeds, but Regina knew that if anyone had asked, the widow would have insisted she was not crying; it was only a bit of dust, caught in her nose. Handing the rings over, the jeweler said his private prayer again — May love be mine someday.

Perl and Vlad felt a rustle in their branches as their son took flight.

“Love,” the stranger said, “is the single absolutely true thing in the world. It cannot be argued away, it cannot be crushed, it cannot be killed.”

Everyone around me hooted and I looked up to see Moishe’s shined shoe come down on a glass wrapped in a napkin that I recognized from my first childhood. I clapped and shifted my new baby into one arm so that I could put my other hand out into the aisle to try and touch the blessed pair as they passed, running as fast as they could into their good lives.

The villagers, wine-drunk and tired from dancing, drifted home. I fell asleep with my family warm around me. Moishe felt like mine again, just a little bit mine, now that we were both part of new families. I could imagine our lives becoming more and more similar as we went on, until we were two ancient bodies, deaf and blind, crooked and weak, remembering only the brightest flashes of our lives.

At home, Kayla spread butter, thick as her jealousy of the mother-of-the-bride, on a piece of brown bread. Hersh ate his butter with a spoon, and sprinkled a little sugar on top. In the space of a few years he had a baby, a teenager, a bride, and two grandchildren. He loved that his life tomorrow would not be transformed — the new world had made him grateful every time the milestone took place behind someone else’s door. Kayla wanted every celebration to be hers. Hersh leaned his head on her shoulder and in the joy and sadness of their momentousless home, they put their heads on the table and fell asleep.