Ramona Ausubel - No One is Here Except All of Us

“It’s as decent a place to wait as any,” Igor said. “I am a very bad father and a very bad husband and probably very bad at lots of other things, too. No one has asked for me to come home. It’s true, right, that I have received no mail?”

“It’s a letter you’re waiting for? An invitation to come back?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know if anyone is alive. If my house is still standing.” Igor looked at his palms, which were cracked simply from being alive. “I guess I’m waiting for word that the world has itself figured out. That we’re through capturing. I would rather not go until I know it’s safe out there. Or until someone misses me so much they come for me.”

“You want to be safe. And loved.”

“And home. Is that so much to ask?”

“I can promise that I will do everything to protect you here. I’ll hire you, to work in the jail. We can swim at night,” Francesco said. “We’ll sleep the day away. I doubt you’ll get the same promise from anyone else.”

Igor looked at Francesco. “For a long time,” he said, “I was waiting for you to kill me. I thought you were biding your time until I was fat enough, like a goose. No matter how I added it up, there was no way the story ended without me being dead.”

“I suppose you will be dead in the end, as we all will, but only when there’s nothing else I can do to keep you alive.”

The world did not beg for Igor to put his armor on and head out to fight. He heard the sea swish and spit back out onto the shore. He heard the trees shake with wind and coax soft, thin blades of grass out of the dirt. There are enough of us fighting, the world seemed to say. Why don’t you stay home and sleep? Eat something tasty for the rest of us. Keep track of your dreams. Try to pay attention to the smell of thyme in the morning. Scratch the salt from your hair and watch it shine as it falls to the ground.

Igor said, “I think my job in the world is not to do anything. Nothing particularly good and nothing particularly bad. It’s not a very important job, and no one cares how well I do, but I’m not in it for recognition.”

“A job is a job,” Francesco said. “You know your talents.”

“What’s your job?” Igor asked.

“My job is to look after you and my mother. My job is to admire her soup and make sure you have what you need to sleep soundly.”

“We shouldn’t try to do more?”

Francesco thought about this. He thought about the men all over the world dropping bombs on one another, cocking a gun and firing — each one of these people thought they were doing the best thing. “I think we might be helping the world by not doing anything. We hurt no one. Maybe no one is helped, but at least no one is hurt.” He put his head underwater and slicked his hair back when he surfaced. “If I were a woman and you were a man. Or the other way around.” Francesco stumbled. “And if we fell in love and got married and had children…”

Igor looked at him with suspicion. “Okay,” he said, waiting for the rest.

“Then our children would say that if it hadn’t been for the war, they never would have existed. That family would be thanks to someone else’s fight. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Good things are born from bad things.”

“Our friendship is thanks to the war,” Igor said. “It’s kind of like a family. In a way, I guess.”

Francesco smiled brightly, took Igor’s hand and said, “One… two… three!” And they dove headfirst into the moon-flickered surface of the sea. Bombs of green light exploded around them. They laughed and kicked and dove. They met at the bottom, where they opened their eyes, everything completely black except for the stirred-up glow they made by moving. What was still was invisible; what moved was a light to follow, and within that: a warm hand, a warm leg, a prisoner or a protector, just there, in the darkness.

Even when I had to change trains, and a circle of soldiers surrounded me, and I easily handed over the same worn papers and gave them the answers to all their questions, I was not scared. Is this where I die? I thought, saying the names of someone else’s parents and the town where I was not born. Where will it be? Where is the place where I will die? And then it happened: one soldier took me by the arm, squeezed my flesh. He shook his head and led me away.

The soldier led me through the station. I noticed everything around me — this place perhaps the last I would see. Pigeons roosted in the high eaves. Their gurgled song was a constant echo. Sausage was for sale, newspapers, sweet cakes in small boxes. Men wore hats and coats, women wore hats and coats. Everyone watched me being taken away. There was something like relief in this scene — the answer to a question as long as my journey to the farmhouse, as long as my journey on the train, as long as my life. Where will the end come? The end will come here.

You, the life inside me, scrambling to put together the cells of guts and toenails and the follicles with which to grow the long shine of hair, could not have seen the soldiers and their boots. Could not see that behind their eyes were so many deaths that there was no sense in memorizing all of them. Just to name the names would have taken them all the nights of their lives.

The soldiers stopped at a stand in the middle of the station. The soldier paid for and received a roll of bread. He put it into a bag and handed it to me. My eyes were questions. You , he said. Bread . He wrapped his fingers around my wrist. The other words were lost in my shock, but the word bread kept landing, clear as a dropped coin. I nodded. Bread. For you.

The soldier put the package in my hand, led me to my platform, bowed his head and left. I could not find him in the crowd through my window, though I still felt the ring of fingers around my arm and wrist. I do not die here? I asked the bread, which revealed its soft white heart.

“I’m going to the New World,” I told the agent at the dock. He curled his lip and narrowed his eyes.

“America?” he asked.

“Is that its name?” I wondered aloud. “Was the new world always named that?”

“Is it just you?” the agent asked, already writing my name on the ticket. I did not know that I was lying to him when I said yes.

Inside, the tunnels of your ears became more precise. The one single tube began to make itself into an entire network of intestines. Bulbs of arms and legs began to blossom out. No bones yet. No increments of spine. Nothing hard, only soft parts first. Your veins reached out to other veins and opened their mouths to kiss each other.

My cabin was full of Russian women and their children. Hair was combed, clothes were put away in shelves, armpits were splashed with water. Everyone was talking so fast I had a hard time figuring out which words came out of which mouth.

“Maksim is the lowliest of scum,” one young woman said, trying to jam a pin into her blond hair.

“You’re lucky compared to me. My husband doesn’t even remember my name.”

“Mother, I want,” a little boy said.

“What’s that, Vovochka?”

“Find me an American with money and a straight nose and I’ll do all your laundry,” a teenage girl said, laughing.

“Candy. And where’s my water gun?” the little boy whined.

All at once, they noticed me. The room turned silent.

“Hi there, scaredy,” the first girl said to me. “You staying with us? You got your life rafts there?” I saw myself, hugging my bags to my chest. I felt dirty and despicable; pathetic, lonesome, lost. I was no one to nobody, alive without reason to be. I wanted to be invisible, to be air or water, anything but a human body and soul.