Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  neat tribe

  They were a neat tribe, standing neatly on the tarmac, their backs parallel with the windows of the terminal. Their hands were tidily tucked in their pockets, or clasped behind their backs, or dabbing handkerchiefs daintily at their eyes, or forming small fists beneath compactly folded arms. They did not cry too loudly, show too much relief or confusion, or bounce too exuberantly with excitement or to get a better view of the airplane. Even as the country around them folded in and prepared—and how tidily the visiting forces prepared the country—for the implosion, the tribe neatly stood smiling, waving at the departing family.

  tidy forces

  How cleanly the visiting forces sever tongues at right angles, remove eyeballs whole, arrange extracted teeth and fingernails in order. How smartly the soldiers line the streets of the occupied city, rifles at their sides, standing tall in their smart matching uniforms, with clear blue eyes, combed blonde hair shining beneath polished helmets. How nimbly their colossal tanks maneuver through the narrow streets of the old city and effortlessly climb and descend its hills. And how smoothly the rich blood flows down those sloping streets! No neighborhood is too inaccessible, too remote, for the humming vehicles of the visiting forces. No walls too high or doors too thick to dull the efficient knock of visitors who do not take no for an answer, irrespective of time of day or night. How neatly the visiting forces prepare the school children, the radio technicians, the hairdressers, the dentists, and the politicians. With great organization and proficiency do they compel the people of the country to follow their program, to emulate their smart ways. And with such soft quiet methods do they dispose of those who will not. The capability with which they dig into the rocky soil of the arid land is wondrous; how tidily they cover the mass graves afterward: not a limb protrudes; not a groan filters through. And those who insist, those who speak, are allowed to do so in orderly and suitable fashion. They are proficiently dismembered, packaged in compact boxes or sacks, and in a timely manner delivered home to their families, who hear them clearly upon arrival. How tidily the visiting forces prepare the country.

  the Milky Way

  Onto the softly lit stage they step, the cast—not players, not practiced; unknowing.

  The stage—world-renowned, and called by various names: The Silver River, The Straw Road, The Bird’s Path.

  The cast:

  Mother

  Father

  the five sisters/the girls

  grandparents

  aunts

  uncles

  cousins

  neighbors

  tanks

  soldiers

  balloon peddlers

  the scribe

  the stars

  farmers

  the groom

  the bride/the widow

  the laundress

  the moon

  the taxi driver

  prisoners

  government officials

  engineers

  mothers

  teachers

  the cat

  the grandfather tree

  hands

  eyes

  ears

  fingernails/claws

  the book

  the rose/the oracle

  the mountain pass/the oracle

  gods

  grocers

  policemen

  the sun

  guests

  ghosts

  the sea

  the dead

  the astronomers

  the dreamer

  birds

  dust

  and water

  the alphabet

  And what called the alphabet forth, gave it rise? What basic need gave the letters form—their spoken form, their line-drawn form? Were their shapes not embedded into the fabric of the planet from the beginning days? Were the letters not forged alongside the mountains and the valleys, by the winds and the tides? Did the same elements that animated the cell and the synapse not also give breath to the letters? Do you not see the S curled up in the shadow of the rock? The V as it flies through the air? Look at the I on the milky surface of the pond. Hear the Z’s as they hover in and stick to the still summer air. Do we not share a history, we and the letters of the alphabet? Did they not evolve from their rudimentary beginnings, multiply, and beget as we begot? Shift in ways subtle and substantial over the millennia alongside us? And do the letters not have eyes, necks, shoulders, arms, spines, legs, and feet? Were we or they born first? Did we call them forth out of a primal need, shape them with our hands, with our tools—bone, bronze, clay, feather, and fur—in order to set down the unknowable? Or did the alphabet give rise to us in an effort to fathom that same vast deep? See how our ears are shaped, our mouths: the vowels slide in, the vowels slip out. Our tongues click, turn, and tuck to do the bidding of the consonants. Are the letters of the alphabet more fundamental than we, more ancient than our planet? There, an X twinkling in the inky sky over your head!

  B

  Before. All that happened and existed before the war, in the land that birthed the seven of us. In the beginning, there was life, simple. Then the war arrived. In an instant, much happened and, suddenly, we found ourselves upon a new shore, and looked about us: at the sand, the waves, the bright star overhead. But what was there, before, in the first land, in the beginning? Bood, nabood … There was, there was not … in the beginning, a family. A great and an ever-growing family composed of: a matriarch,

  our grandmother, my mother’s mother, the only grandparent living when I came into the world; many aunts and uncles, mostly on my mother’s side; and many, many cousins of all ages and heights, with myriad interests and manners, ensuring that we each had a friend of our own when we went visiting. And there was much visiting! There was much food and feasting. Tea served endlessly, sweets set out in great cascading hills, pillows piled on cushions laid over limitless red rugs. There was the regular celebrating and commemoration of births and birthdays, circumcisions and graduations, holidays and anniversaries, of life, great and small, of loss, great and small. There were many stories, those told and those unfolding … Bood, nabood … Much talk and sharing. Gossip and soothsaying. There was laughter and joy and life spread and interweaved across an entire country. We had my mother’s grand family in the city and my father’s small family of simple farmers who lived in a village hundreds of miles and a winding mountain pass away. There was travel between the two. And always adventure and play. Wagon rides and tree swings. Carrots tugged out of the ground. Corn twisted off tall whispering stalks. Goats, chickens, cows, and dogs to feed, chase, and climb. A gurgling brook and the strawberries that grew on its banks. Hills covered with dwellings, dwellings bursting with life, streets filled with the traffic of pedestrians, vendors, cars, buses, and bicycles. Connecting all were neighbors, grocers, barbers, midwives, tailors, each like kin. There were markets and movies, street peddlers and their singular calls accompanying a rainbow of balloons or mounds of blood-red beets, which bobbed and peaked over the garden wall. There were rivers and picnics, and the bright-colored, soft-curved automobiles that delivered us there. Parades and television shows. School and friends and painted pictures of sweet ripe watermelon or sailboats crossing bright blue seas. And then there was war. In an instant, much happened and suddenly.

  And war, on entering, obliterated everything and all. War, on entering the peaceful scene, turned it upside down and inside out. It shattered, severed, distorted, erased, violated, obliterated life, great and small, harmony, great and small, feeling, great and small, wonder, great and small. What was a flower to war, a child to war, a culture, a melody, a river, a picnic, a ritual, a statue, a farmer, a fairy tale, a people, a memory, a taxi driver, to war? So the buildings and farmlands and mountain passes were bombed; so the people were disappeared, raped, tortured, dismembered, swallowed whole; so the children’s senses became keener, the adults’ minds numbed, their skin crawled; so the horror straddled and settled over the land.

  In �
��the  beginning,  there  was  war.

  Before the war, there was family, there was life, simple.

  See how little patience I have for the orderly telling of things?

  the soothsayer

  The soothsayer looks at Mother, looks at the stones he has cast, and consults his book. “Her path is yet in this world. In time, her house will receive her children. No, your cousin shall not die.” He writes a prayer for the sick young woman on a miniature, narrow scroll. He folds the long piece of paper at angles to make a compressed, triangular, paper jewel. He hands Mother the talisman and an onion with instructions to take to her dying cousin who lies in bed at home amid preparations for her imminent funeral: cushions, china, and food set out for eighty. But the soothsayer does not let Mother leave without reading her her own fortune. “In four years’ time, you will leave your country, you will go to one city, then another, then a third, and you will not return here again.” Mother takes the talisman and the onion to her aunt’s house. Her aunt slices the onion in two and places the two halves on her daughter’s chest as instructed. She burns the talisman and wafts the smoke around her sick daughter’s face and shoulders. Around midnight, the fading young woman sneezes once, twice, then a third time, and opens her eyes. Mother returns home to tell Father her cousin lives again and tells him about the seer’s prophecy. Father is vexed; he is not persuaded by the divining arts, and contests he will ever go elsewhere, will ever take a step off his own soil.

  Much happens, and surreptitiously, in four short years. Mother and Father, aunts and uncles, teachers and barbers, laundresses and goatherds, silk traders and dentists do not know, cannot know what brews and swells beneath the surface. Above it, birthdays and anniversaries are celebrated, weddings and street parades attended, newborns delivered and received by homes and bosoms eagerly awaiting them, roads laid and leveled, fields planted and harvested. Then one day, Mother and her in-laws step outside to hail a taxi to visit her father’s grave in a cemetery across the city. A taxi passes, but does not stop for her. A second taxi speeds by. A third pulls up and asks where it is she wants to go. “Turn around, turn around, get back inside your house!” the taxi driver yells at her. “Do you not know what is happening?” Mother and her guests rush inside, lock the doors and, with the girls, hurry up to the rooftop. They watch the planes fly over the city below. Night falls and bombs with it. Night falls and the city quakes. Night falls yet no one eats, sleeps, breathes. When day breaks, the streets are lined with soldiers and heavy tanks. When day breaks, neighbors eye passersby, grocers eye customers, brothers turn on brothers, nephews turn in uncles, village women preach the new politics of the new leaders to lifelong neighbors, politicians and engineers, medical students and bakers vanish. A strange hush falls across the land. A bewilderment and a terror rises. Tanks rumble and bombs fall; families gather and huddle and wonder at what is amiss and who is absent from their midst; individuals are gathered up and not returned, kept behind doors and bars, prodded, pried, snapped, and unceremoniously pushed into the ground.

  The ancient land is tilled up and under once again.

  clock

  And the moon rotates and revolves and presents the same steady countenance.

  the talisman

  Mother attends the funeral of her neighbor’s son, a young student killed by rockets on his university campus. Her neighbor has three grown sons: the young student killed by the new government; the official high up in the new government responsible for the overthrow of the old government and the dropping of bombs and rockets; the middle son caught in between. The middle son eyes Mother, cautiously whispers to his own grieving mother over the grave of her youngest son. After the funeral, the neighbor woman, carefully, furtively, covered in shrouds from head to foot, stops in to see Mother at home. She tells Mother that her eldest son has received an official document demanding Father’s arrest. And as Father and Mother helped arrange his marriage two years prior, the government official has torn up the document and asked his cautious brother to relay the news and the warning to Mother and Father. The neighbor woman warns Mother that there will be other documents delivered to other officials, that time and luck run thin.

  Father does not need further evidence. The space about him has contracted even as it has emptied in recent months, as his colleagues and his friends have disappeared in the night and reappeared in morgues and on roadsides in the morning. They are whole one minute and in pieces the next. At their desks one minute, on the television screen denouncing others the next. Father applies for visas for his family and is denied. He pays a colleague a large sum of money in exchange for passports for his family. The man takes the money quietly, he shakes and nods his head in sympathy, he makes the promises in hushed tones, and when Father next approaches him, the man threatens to turn him in.

  Mother begs Father to leave on his own, to traverse the winding dusty roads on foot and on truck bed, to cross the borders as others have before him. But Father will not leave Mother and the girls: he knows what will happen to them should he leave and they stay. He is afraid and aware—all eyes and ears, day and night. He does not sleep, does not eat, does not leave the house without looking before and behind, above and about, his person. He asks her to visit the soothsayer again.

  Mother returns to the seer and reminds him of the prediction he cast four years prior, in another time and in a different landscape. The seer gazes at Mother, he casts his stones, and consults his book. “By next Friday you will have left your country. By next Friday, you will have flown away.” Mother says they have no passports, no documents. Mother says there is no way her five small girls can make the journey on foot, unnoticed, unharmed. He assures her, “You will not be here next Friday.” He writes down a prayer for her, hands her the talisman and instructs her on its use: When next you leave your house, burn the talisman before you and pass through its white smoke as you cross the threshold of your front door.

  in the beginning: questions

  And, in a very short time, the sisters became accustomed to asking questions in silence and expecting answers from sources singular—flowers, ceiling, shoes—knowing that when questions were asked of an adult, the adult sometimes disappeared. In the weeks before their departure, when Mother and Father did not sleep and the sisters lay in bed not-sleeping, many questions filled the sisters’ minds. Why do the adults smile even as they wring their hands even as they speak in the even tone even as their eyes flit from side to side and floor to ceiling? And what happened to the old tones, the warm tones, the rise-and-fall tones of their many voices, which now, by day, speak in a single pitch across the hills and in the streets of the city, and by night, whisper and sigh? In that time before their departure, the sisters came to see clearly that day had turned into night. And had done so surreptitiously, had done so without the sun’s blessing. In the day, in the streets and in the markets, the adults walked as though asleep: silent, unseeing. Yet theirs was a strange trance, the sisters saw but did not remark. Unlike the gliding somnambulist, the unseeing adults moved ever so cautiously, so as not to run into anyone on the street or in the marketplace, know them though they might, so as not to disturb the dust on the dish vendor’s ware. And the sisters saw clearly that light, however dimmed, flickered in the adults’ eyes only in the late hours of the night, and even then intermittently, and only when the overworked, arching, twitching ears settled back into place on the sides of their heads. The observant girls saw that the adults’ ears had in a very short time grown in size and capability, and in that same short time the adults’ eyes had diminished in size and sheen. And yet the girls were unaware of their own large eyes and small mouths. The five sisters, ever so watchful, cautiously observed the adults, but they asked their questions quietly of the soup ladle and the spider. The sisters wondered: Have all the fathers stopped lifting their daughters on their shoulders, stopped singing the folk songs that make the daughters laugh? Do all the mothers sort linens and china, socks and trousers
in the dead hours of the night? Some have left; will we go, when will we go, why do we go, where are we going? For how long? And what about everyone else? Will we be back in time to celebrate my birthday with the many-cousins, to open the many-gifts, to eat the three-tiered cake, to choose the biggest brightest balloon from the street peddler’s bouquet, to blindfold the giggling cousin, to hide ungiggling behind grandmother’s chicken coop with the little sister, to beg and plead to have the beloved cousins-like-sisters sleep over to tell the stories and share the sweets to celebrate my birthday? While Father paced the living room and looked out the window every five minutes, the sisters questioned the clock and the living room curtains: who goes there this time of night, when will the sun rise again? And while Mother, not-sleeping, packed and sighed, they questioned the zipper on the suitcase: what do you carry, do you have room enough for my green dress, for my dearest doll, for my schoolbooks?

  the scribe

  The old man sits on a cushion before a wooden box, cross-legged and bent over a tidy stack of forms, various official stamps, a jar of black ink, and nibs of different sizes. Beside him on the ground is a thermos of black cardamom tea and warm bread wrapped in a scarf. He sits in front of the government office buildings that open daily like clockwork, sits beneath ancient trees, and among others like himself. The scribes arrive at sunrise, and set up before the offices open for official business. Mother arrives soon after and approaches the old man. She kneels on the ground beside him. She has practiced a small lie to get the documents she needs. Mother tells the scribe, “I cannot write, uncle dear, no one at home can write, will you please take down an official request for me?” She has not told Father what she has planned to do. It is their last chance and she does not want to raise his hopes. The old man finds the proper form with the proper letterhead and chooses a nib for his pen. Mother watches him and gauges whether he can be trusted with more. As he prepares to write, she puts her hand on his. She tells him her husband’s life is in danger, her children are many and young. She whispers that she will give him a substantial sum of money, her own and her children’s saved over many years, if he will leave room in the script to add family members, after she has obtained the signatures she needs from the government officials in the buildings behind him. He shakes his head and murmurs. They will both be caught, times are strange, and strangers treacherous; how can he trust her? He cannot risk his life, he has a family too. In hushed tones, she pleads with him, tells him this is her only hope, assures him if she is caught, no one will know it was he who helped her. She begs and pleads and promises. So the scribe, in his beautiful hand, writes: My daughter and I need to leave the country, need to travel to I____ for medical treatment. We need passports.