The Hidden Light of Objects

by Mai Al-Nakib

  That first week, we try to talk about ourselves. Ghusoon goes first, unwrapping her life layer by layer. Married. Working. As happy as our mother would want her to be. A good man. A good job. No baby yet, but soon, in a year, maybe two. Me, Jinan, next. My slow writing life. Yasmine, still in school, almost done. Zaina’s three daughters unfolding their lives for her to see, fresh, clean, upbeat, leaving out the grime. But our father, a broken man, unable to voice his layers of sorrow. She listens and watches, her mask of serenity intact. She listens in absolute silence and we chitter like birds to fill the stillness where her voice should be. We are used to doing that. We have learned to speak to ourselves in her voice. We wonder if she still speaks that way, if she still sees the good in everything. “Luck will find you,” she always said. We wonder if ten years could come down to what we are sharing with her. Marriages. Jobs. Degrees. How can we demonstrate what it has taken to get to here? Every joy scalloped with sadness. How can we convey to her the years of deliberation before accepting any man, any job, before making any decision? Every opinion and thought already filtered through her. We figure, surely she must know.

  It is like having our mother back from the dead. When she was first taken, I would wake up every night in a panic, wanting to run through the streets to find her, to get her back, to erase this abomination that had blackened our already heavy lives. My heart pounding, I would probe the events of that day again, point by point, a sort of unholy equation that I couldn’t get to add up. She had woken at dawn. She had prayed. She had gone down into the kitchen to make herself coffee. She had taken her coffee into the living room. That’s where we had found her still warm cup. Something had made her go to the door. We would have heard the doorbell. We would have heard a knock. Something had made her leave her coffee on the table and go to the door. She wasn’t supposed to do that. It was too soon to feel safe enough, the streets a mess of retreating soldiers and loamy young heroes looking for glory with guns. It had only been a week since the liberation of Kuwait from Iraq, and it was a novelty to be able to open the front door. I figured my mother, restless after almost seven months stuck indoors, had wanted to exercise her newly regained right to step outside, to leave curtains undrawn, to fling open a window even. It had only been a week, but we had quickly recovered old habits. Curious how bodies slink back into their comforts, their ordinary pleasures. So my mother with her coffee and recovered freedom must have heard something, must have forgotten or pretended to forget the procedures that had kept us safe for seven months: doors bolted, curtains drawn, lights out, down into the basement shelter. Her blue and white robe was missing. Her leather sandals. Early March in her flimsy robe and sandals. This image seared me for a decade. She got those sandals in Greece. There is a black and white photograph, taken unawares, of her and my father stepping off a ferry on one of the islands. They paid for the photo when it was offered to them later because she looked gorgeous, her long brown hair, her white cotton shirt.

  When she was abducted my father put out photos of her in every corner of our house. Photos of her when they were first married, of her pregnant, of her at parties, at conference dinners with him. Photos of my mother feeding her beloved birds in the garden. The photos gave my father some solace, but they tortured me. It wasn’t that I wanted to forget her. I thought about her every day for ten years, not a day without thoughts of her. But I couldn’t, even after a decade, look at pictures of her without slipping into the abyss of guilt and regret. I tried to avoid looking at my father’s gallery, not needing pictures of her to remember every little thing. Her freesia smell, her butter skin, the small whisper of lines around her light brown eyes, and, as I got older, an insistent memory of her anxieties, the stresses of her own life she had always tried to keep from us. That first week of her return, as we sit huddled together in the living room, it is the island photo behind her back my eyes keep falling upon. It is easier to focus on that than on my mother in the flesh. A vision in a white shirt on an island in Greece, sandals that would disappear for ten years.

  During her second week back, my mother sleeps the sleep of the dead. We can’t wake her, hard as we try. She eats only once a day, when she gets up to use the bathroom. She doesn’t shower. She doesn’t speak a word. She is groggy, drugged by a boundless exhaustion, her head flopping around as she swallows cold broth, tea with as much sugar as we can spoon in. We are scared, unsure what to do, no one to ask for help. Where are the experts? We whisper to each other in her room, never leaving her alone for a second. Is it a slow suicide? Will she ever wake up? Will she ever want to speak again? Ghusoon mentions trauma and elective mutism. We can not picture our mother silent forever.

  I have only the faintest recollection of the first weeks back. I remember cradling my burlap sack between my feet. I remember refusing to allow Ghusoon to wash my blue and white robe, needing to maintain the smell of my captivity, at least for a while. I remember drowning in sleep and, when coming up for air, I remember thinking only of the nine others.

  Before she was taken our mother was loud, the center of every conversation. She would argue with strangers if she felt she had to, never shirking confrontation, but she would also talk intimately to women at the neighborhood fruit and vegetable stall, joke with people in supermarket checkout lines. Shopkeepers adored her, as did the local ice cream vendors on bicycles, for whom she had bought umbrellas and folding chairs, a small reprieve from the crushing heat. In our insular little country with its ten-foot-high concrete walls fortressing private homes, she was an open, generous oddity. People loved her for it, her wide laugh, her sparkling teeth. They felt privileged to be scolded by her, even more to be included in her easy charm. She elevated their lives for a second and they never forgot it. Anywhere else, she would have been a movie star. Even in Kuwait, in the late 1960s, she had been a glamorous host of some television show. We hadn’t heard about this till after she was taken, casually mentioned in one of the many newspaper articles about her abduction, the talk of the town for a while. We asked our father about it, and he confirmed the story. Our young mother, a television queen in her green Alfa Romeo Spider, her endless legs in a mini dress, her brown hair twirling in the wind. It was this Sophia Loren image of her that had compelled our father Karim, a fresh graduate from the University of Vienna medical school, to seek her out, to, as he put it, “Forge my destiny.” He knew the kind of life he wanted, and, with the confident certainty of someone who had learned German and Latin in a year, he went after it. So many things about Zaina we didn’t know, secrets hidden in other people’s pockets, in the objects that belonged to her.

  With the exception of her clothes, we didn’t have it in us to go through her belongings for the first five years or so. Our father asked us to move her clothes out of their room about six months after she disappeared because he couldn’t stop himself from slumping down in her closet, inhaling what was left of her smell. We all did that whenever we thought no one else was around. If for me pictures of her were the hardest residue to bear, for Yasmine it was our mother’s smell. For a year or so after our mother disappeared, the unmistakable smell of her clothes, of the inside of her purses, even of her shoes would make my baby sister weep. We would find her asleep on the floors of various closets, hidden under layers of our mother’s shawls and dresses, on a bed of her high heels. It was difficult to comfort her, to take her into our arms. She was inconsolable. Maybe she felt our touch as a kind of betrayal. She would allow only our father to carry her back to her small bed, her skinny arms dangling over his shoulders as he whispered things Ghusoon and I couldn’t hear.

  We worry that our mother feels left out, a foreigner in her own home. Unheimlich, our father says to us and to her, a familiarity made uncanny, a home no longer homey. We tried to keep the house exactly as it had been before she was lost to us. Not a thing out of place apart from her clothes, which we put back meticulously when we were informed she was going to be released. We had memorized the placement of every object in our parents’ r
oom, in her drawers, closets, cupboards, in the dining room, living room, her kitchen. Her Betty Crocker Cookbook. A string of old Kuwaiti pearls given to her by her mother. Her Clinique Nude lipstick. Monogrammed handkerchiefs. Hand-painted champagne flutes. Flower vases from Prague. Her father’s books that smelled of India. Her straw hat. Matches collected from restaurants. Her fine Kashmiri shawl, pulled through her wedding ring with a flourish. Boxes of Christmas ornaments on which she had written Packed by Mom with love; we could never bring ourselves to open those boxes. Wave-worn stones from Capri. Silver bangles that sounded like wind chimes around her wrists. We went through some of these things over the years, always looking for answers that weren’t there. We tried not to allow ourselves to think too hard about the specifics of her absence. We focused on her being alive, not on the conditions of her life away from us. We wrapped ourselves in the familiarity of her things. But now that she is back, we fear that her objects, her rooms, the life she was forced to leave behind are no longer her home. To her, they must be both familiar and unfamiliar. Maybe their familiarity makes her afraid, makes her recognize what she, like us, has taught herself not to see over those ten years. To survive.

  Unheimlich. Karim is right to use that word. Unheimlich, precisely. Every one of us had something in that windowless space, gray with unswept dust, that stood for home. For me it was counting objects. Not quite counting them. Naming them, sorting them into categories, telling their histories, and trying to remember where they would be in my house. I would explain it to myself as though I were attempting to give one of my daughters or Karim instructions over the phone to find the thing I needed. “My gray Kashmiri shawl. You know, the one we bought together on our honeymoon from the blind man who said he had spun the yarn for it with his own knotted hands. Remember how he held them out for us to look at? Remember how young we were, believing him to be over a hundred? He was probably forty-five. It’s in the chest of drawers on the left-hand side of the bedroom. It’s in the last one, under my leather gloves.” Or, I imagined myself saying to Jinan, “Habibti, if you go to the closet in the hallway, down in the storage area under the last shelf, you’ll find an inlaid wooden box. The key for that box is in a small porcelain bowl in the drawer of my bedside table. Unlock the box and inside it you’ll find the tiny emerald ring my father-in-law gave to me when your father and I got engaged. It was the only possession of value his mother brought with her to Basra from Circassia, pressed into her young hands by her father before he sold her off to an Arab merchant who, in turn, sold her to your great grandfather. Struck by her mythical beauty, he quickly married her.”

  A litany of objects. My home for a decade.

  Before she was taken, my mother was a quietly religious woman, her prayers like goldfish in a Japanese garden pond under a bridge. She prayed five times a day, but she never discussed her faith with her brood of agnostics and atheists. It didn’t bother her what we did or did not believe and it didn’t bother us that she believed. After she was taken, religion fluttered through the air as an option. We heard from meddling family members that it helped to submit to God’s will, to trust that He had a plan for our mother, for us. In the first few shell-shocked days of her abduction, we may have given in to some magical thinking. We would have made a pact with the devil let alone a bargain with God to get her back. It didn’t take long to realize that neither would return Zaina to us. Believing in the randomness of events gave us more comfort than any god or devil could. If we had any faith, we put it in the luck of the draw. We wondered whether her beliefs were providing her with sanctuary wherever she was. We wondered whether the things that were happening to her had caused her to lose faith.

  Religion was Selma’s anchor. The loss of privacy – ten of us packed into a cell too small for five – made it difficult for me to pray. Selma had no such qualms. While I worried my phantom objects like beads on a misbah, Selma quietly recited her Qur’an. For Khadija it was singing, her husky voice as un­expected in that cell as a hot shower. She was the youngest among us, only twenty, and when she opened her mouth to sing, danger would pour out. Noor had her numbers, strings of equations dancing through her head. Hanan came up with as many palindromes as she could. Altaf used recipes, reciting intricate formulas for the preparation of meals we all longed to eat. Dalal drew portraits of people she knew in the dust on the floors and walls of our cell. Aisha collected insects and trapped them in plastic bottles she managed to secure from the guards. She helped reduce the population of roaches, beetles, and crickets coating our premises. Dana, a poet, puzzled through words, some she shared with us, others she kept to herself. When she felt like it, she would recite Mahmoud Darwish, Abu Nuwas, Adonis, her memory for language unfailing. For Hala it was tracing cracks in the walls. Hours spent following serpentine paths of hairline fissures or major valleys splitting some of the bricks clean in two. At first she was looking for points out to freedom. But after a year or so, she, and we, recognized that there were no gaps in the thick walls. Still, she didn’t stop, her graceful fingers gliding up and down, her lithe body moving to Khadija’s songs.

  In these unlikely ways, and together, we survived.

  After the week of sleep, my mother speaks. “What you may think happened, did not.” We immediately know what she is talking about. That ugly violation of the body, that laying claim over it. She stops there. No further assurances. She is still on the bed, still under her quilt covers, but no longer always asleep. She seems suddenly less fragile, less dazed. Yasmine is right. Our mother seems defiant. Is it directed against her captors still? We, in our perpetual self-involvement, worry it might be against us. We aren’t sure. We want to believe her. We want her intact, like she was before she was taken. Unraped. We can’t tolerate the desecration of her body. We can’t bring ourselves to think about the forms it could take, always takes, in war. Could she be the exception after ten years? Could she have come through unscathed? We want to believe her, but we think she is lying. We want to tell her that we will help her through anything, will give her back her body, will take away the damage. We are, all of us, unprep­ared, ineffectual. We are, mostly, silent.

  The morning I was abducted, what I heard, what drew me to the front door away from my coffee, was the strangled sound of a woman struggling for air. My instinct was not to warn my family, not to dive down into the basement. It should have been – I have my own tangled ropes of regret. My instinct was to go see. What I saw when I threw open the door was a young woman on her knees with a thick clear plastic bag over her head. Her stricken eyes, jerking desperately in my direction, appeared strangely magnified. Two heavyset men stood over her, pulling the rope around her neck in opposite directions. I heard the snap. They removed the bag. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. I didn’t recognize her, but she was somebody’s daughter. Before I could react or make a sound, the men swooped down on me, put the same plastic bag over my head – I could smell her saliva, her fear – and stuffed the dead girl and me into the trunk of what I am certain was a stolen Mercedes. I was grateful for the roomy trunk.

  They hadn’t bothered to tie up my hands or feet, so it was easy enough to pull the bag off my head and push the poor girl into the deepest part of the trunk. I kicked out one of the tail lights with my foot. In that first week after liberation, however, there wasn’t anyone around to notice. There were people on the streets all right, but they were too busy doing wrong – looting, exacting revenge on innocents – to pay any attention to me. The car flew through the desert. I don’t know how the men managed to bypass undetected all those American troops, but they did, all the way to Baghdad. In the few seconds from when the car stopped to when they opened the trunk, I thought only of my three girls. I expected an immediate pistol to the head and I was trying to blot out fear with images of my babies. They dragged me out of the trunk. My legs would not hold, so they propped me against a wall. They blindfolded me and tied my hands behind my back. I could hear them yelling to someone named Mohammed to come out for a pick
up. They didn’t say a word to me and I kept as silent as cotton. I could hear them struggling to remove the girl’s rigid body from the car. I anticipated a similar end for myself. Instead, I heard the car doors slam shut and the engine revving up. A squeal of tires and they were gone.

  I expected Mohammed to bear down on me at any moment. He didn’t. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my forehead, could almost see its orange glow through my closed and covered eyelids. My limbs ached. I tried as hard as I could to escape the binding, unsuccessfully. Hours must have passed. I could feel it getting darker, the cold seeping into my bones. No sign of Mohammed. I fell into an irregular sleep, waking up confused, fingers reaching for Karim’s hand the way they often did. After five hours, maybe ten, someone pulled me up by the hair. Mohammed. He pushed me from behind, leading me somewhere. He must have spoken, but I remember nothing of what he said. He removed my blindfold and shoved me into a pitch black hovel, nothing more than a hole in the ground with wood over the top, two small cracks for air. I must have fainted almost instantly because, again, I have no memory of that first time in the hole. All of us spent our first day in the hole, a kind of breaking in, but after that it was rare. When a guard was in a sadistic frenzy, he would shove one of us down in, but, thankfully, that didn’t happen often. The hole smelled of river mud, and we had taught ourselves to close our eyes and imagine floating on a raft in blue waters, an endless course of aquamarine. It took discipline, but over time it worked, and the hole, like our cell, couldn’t touch us.