Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

Next door, the farmer and his wife imagined it was themselves in bed with the boy. I was incidental in my own life — I could be explained right out.

“She doesn’t realize that she isn’t behind enemy lines anymore,” the farmer whispered. “She thinks she is still in grave danger.”

The farmer’s wife needed a crutch of justification to lean on. “It could always change, though. The Germans could suddenly take control, and then she would be right.”

“We could name him,” the farmer whispered.

“He could be named for you,” his wife said, thinking it charming before guilt burned her face.

“He could be ours. Saved from a terrible fate. Saved from his own life.”

The farmer’s wife let the story lull her. She let righteousness rinse away shame. She let saving overshadow stealing. She closed her puffy eyelids over her puffy eyes and untied the strings of the day.

“We will take him to meet my mother and father,” he went on. “He will eat whatever he is given, he will be a very appreciative eater. We will baptize him. He will love roasted pork the best. He’ll want to get a pet later. He’ll want to get his own duckling, at least, and I’ll buy him three or four. It will be his job to collect the eggs every morning. He will carry them in a basket so carefully, never breaking any of them. He’ll pet the chickens. He’ll fluff their hay.”

The farmer’s wife was asleep completely, gone from the world. Crickets scratched their song out and the leaves of the trees rubbed against each other. There was no moon, no cool light. The farmer spoke into the complete darkness.

“Whatever is bad, he will resist it. He will know what is right.”

He kept himself up all night, trying to keep track of everything that would be. “I don’t want to forget this,” he said to himself, “there is a lot to remember. I treasure it already.”

When the orange beams of morning streaked the window, the farmer came to where Solomon and I were sleeping. He picked Solomon up and took him to the bed where his wife was snoring. “This is your home now,” he whispered to the boy, who did not awaken. “This is the part where we save you.”

Then he got into bed with me. I came awake to his fingers petting my head the same way his wife had earlier. His fingers were like snakes nesting on my scalp. They twisted through my hair. “He is going to be happy with us, we will keep him safe,” the farmer said. I heard the words but I did not open my eyes. “He is safer here than anywhere.”

I listened. Wind kicked up outside. It squeezed itself between the cracks of the house and wailed in pain.

“You can tell me about him later,” the farmer said. “Before you go.”

“Where am I going?” I felt myself dimming.

“The farmer can’t have two wives. You’ll give us all away.”

“Where am I going?” I asked again. Any heat I might have generated cooled to embers.

“Home, maybe. A new home, maybe. We have money — you don’t have to worry. You can take my wife’s papers as if you were her. You will be my wife from now on, and she will be you. I will make all the arrangements.”

“But she will stay and I will go,” I said.

The farmer tried to add up the numbers to get another answer. A piece of my hair caught in his wedding ring and pulled. “What else?” he asked. “You stay and she goes? No. Certainly no.”

“I will not be anyone, then,” I said into the coming daylight. Even my body’s weight lessened.

“Exactly, it will be perfect.” The daylight invaded, making the handles on the chest of drawers stand up and the cracks and canyons in the floorboards fill with shadow.

“Where will I go?” I asked.

“Where do you want to go?” the farmer asked back. “As long as you leave, it doesn’t matter to me where.” I could see in his milky eyes he meant that as a kindness — all I had to do was name a peaceful, warm place and he would buy me the ticket. That Solomon was my place, he had not considered. There was frustration in his face, childlike frustration at my blindness to the logic he saw so clearly accumulated.

“I don’t know if I can live without him.”

“Wouldn’t you rather live without him than have him die? He will live and you will live. It’s the only way.”

“Where will I go?” My fingers bent and straightened. Fisted, spread wide. Is this what dying feels like? I wondered.

“We have said enough,” the farmer whispered into my ear. What began to rattle in my chest had not been named before — I was not laughing and my eyes were dry. I shook as soundlessly as an empty jar. If this were my moment for a crushing rebuttal, what came out of my mouth was as disappointing as a dry heave. The snakes of the farmer’s fingers retreated and, disgusted with me but pleased with himself, he left me alone on his floor.

Here, Solomon would live and live and live. I did not say yes, but I did not say no. The question: How long does it take to not be me anymore? The answer: A few days. I watched the farmer add items to a small pile near my bed. He went out each day to work on the details of my departure. His wife no longer looked me in the eye. She bent her big head, let her neck fold in on itself. She served me as if I were a wolf who might bite her if she withheld the soup bones.

At night the wind kicked up and screamed. It was a language that made sense to me. Howling, whimpering. Solomon was my son, but for how many more nights I did not know. When I turned away from him he put his face into my back where his breath out was hot, his breath in, cold. I took the compass out and watched that sure little arrow point, as if it were just that easy. I shook it as hard as I could, but it bobbed dumbly back into place. The wind blew and blew, clattering the windowpanes, knocking the rakes and shovels over. And then the windows blew open and snow flew inside. I turned onto my back to see giant white flakes whirl into the house. I was not cold, I noticed, and I thought it was because I had changed from a warm-blooded animal to a snake. Flurries of snow gathered around our bed and I did not get up to close the windows. I hoped we would be buried, hidden. Blanked out. Erased. On the back of this storm, may we be carried away.

Morning quieted the wind. I sat up to discover that what last night had been a snowstorm, today was apple blossoms blown off the tree. Pinkish, slightly bruised. They were banked against Solomon’s still sleeping back, and in his hair. Like a baby born out of the stamen of a flower, he was pink himself. Spring’s own child, bursting with new life, nothing but warm days ahead. At the other end of the room, the farmer was fastening the buckles on a suitcase.

My first mother, that cabbage picker’s wife, that hairless crystal ball, that ghost, put her hand out to this lost daughter. We are the clan of women who love their dearests by giving them away. We are the same mother. The metronome of my heart, working to be whoever each person needed me to be — daughter, daughter, mother, mother — now came to center. Absolutely still. My children were not mine. In the same instant I passed my boy on, my mother took me back. As if the difference in our hearts — mine managing to stay whole and hers broken — had separated us. The instant when the earth’s continents, drifted asunder, vast oceans between them, remember they are made of the same stone. Hardened lava, granite. And then, with tremendous force, mountains are thrown up when two plates crash back together.

When we are born, we do not belong to any tribe. We earn membership over our lives — the clan of the first people in the world, of adopted children, of heavy sleepers, of foreigners, of cabbage lovers, of lost mothers.

The four of us stood in the sunshine and said little. The new parents repeated to Solomon everything. His life was being saved. He would have his mother’s love with him and plus his new mother’s love with him — double. He would have a father now, and always the old father wherever he was would love him, too. He could hardly escape his fortune, so much bounty. The bready face of the farmer’s wife looked toasted. Any baker would have been proud of that honey brown, egged and glistening.