Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  And each sister had a favorite article of red clothing, and each was tempted to test the grumbling sky monster, to draw him out of the clouds so that they might see him, might finally fix a face to that roar and rumble they feared and knew so well. The frightened-curious sisters regularly sat at the upstairs window during thunderstorms to look out for children who may have forgotten or never been taught the rule and may require warning or aid. When feeling especially bored and brave, they even dressed in the dangerous color and ran out into the yard or down the hill waving a red scarf or lifting pant legs to reveal red socks, while sticking out tongues or wagging fingers at the sky. But they never saw the terrible visage of Old Man Thunder, though each imagined that she had seen an elbow, a fist, or the end of a beard protruding from the clouds, terrifying images that made them race back home to change and hide. Though the sisters were five, not one of their number was lifted into the air by the mysterious beast. It was an airplane, quietly humming and evenly cool inside, that finally lifted all of them into the sky and through the clouds.

  denouncer

  They take the man into a room, a windowless and unfurnished room, save a single metal table. They close the door and remove his crumpled clothes and whip him. They whip him across his back, across his arms, across his legs. They are careful not to mark his face. They whip him expertly and tirelessly. He does not know how long for. It is a long time. Then they leave and the guards return with a rag to wipe him, and return him to his small cell. They let him rest and when again they come for him, they arrive with his clothes, ironed, and a necktie and a suit jacket, which they tie around his collar and put about his raw, blood-caked shoulders. They shave his face, comb his hair, give him a glass of water to drink, and take him by car to the television news studio. Here is a list, read it carefully. Here are the names of other betrayers like you. Learn it well. They seat him in a chair, at a table. They aim the lights and adjust the height of the microphone. But I do not know these people, he tells them. They point to names. If your tongue does not flap, we will take your toenails. He tells them so-and-so has left the city, returned to his people in the foothills of the northern mountains, he is no longer here. So-and-so crossed the border and left the country last month. This woman here, she has disappeared, no one knows how, why, or where to. He tells them I do not know these other people. I do not recognize these names. Beneath the table someone with sturdy pliers and a firm grip is at the ready. Beneath the table his feet are bare and one by one they pull out his toenails. They recite to him the names of his children and his wife, his mother and his aunts, of his brother and his nieces, his sisters and their husbands. They shine the lights, zoom the camera in, and roll the film. And he reads from the list before him. His teeth chatter, his tongue thickens and his eyes water, his hands tremble and he reads the names off the list. Father’s name is on the list. It is one of many.

  midmorning

  Before the war, there was Mother, and the leaning midmorning light she cast across the cushions and the rug in the second floor living room of the house. In her light, the moisture rising from teapot and teacup curled, swayed, and spread. In her light, air’s emissaries, dust, like flecks of gold, attended Mother’s breath, which sent them spiraling and rising, tumbling and returning. Her ruby ring, illuminated, was a window onto a distant cosmos. And the sister not in school, not napping, looked deeply into this red starry night or with somnolent eyes followed the pink dancing light it cast upon wall and ceiling as Mother sipped from her cup. All was silent, eternal.

  Dog and Jackal

  Long, long ago, in the beginning … Bood, nabood … There was, there was not, before our time in this city, before your grandparents’ time, a pact made between Dog and Jackal. Dog lived in the barren wilderness and Jackal lived here in the city, among us, as a companion and a protector. One day, Dog called across the borderlands to Jackal and said, “Let us switch places for ten days. You come out and live in the wilderness, where it is fresh and open and where none will bother you, and I will come to the city and live with the humans to see what they are like. When the ten days are up, I’ll come back to the wilderness and you can return to your home in the city.” The two animals switched places. Dog came to the city. He lived among people and experienced their kind ways. They invited him into their homes, they fed him, and their walls sheltered him from the cold wind and the scorching sun. Jackal roamed the desolate wilderness, chased the swift birds and the nimble hares, picked withered flesh off of dry bones, and shivered in the moon’s cool light. The ten days passed, yet Dog remained in the city. The ten days passed, but he did not answer Jackal’s call across the borderlands. To this day, Jackal raises his muzzle skyward and howls. From the desolate edges of the city, he calls to Dog in the twilight hour, asks him when he is returning to the wilderness, begs him to remember their pact.

  C

  C is for Color. Life in the first country was saturated with color. It was as if life there, before the war, was made up not of events or people or places, but of yellow and blue and green and orange. Of blushing ripe fruit hanging from taxed tree limbs and verdant eager vegetables bursting from the earth. Of crisp blue skies framing our mother’s black hair and her coral lips. Of rose-covered skirts and poppy-covered hills. (It is still with me, will not dissipate: a scene of hilltops covered in tens of thousands of papery red poppies. And the scene is at once still, as in a photograph, and stirring. There is a breeze, the clouds sail, the flowers on their tall stems sway, then freeze. There is the sound of a hundred thousand bees in spring. Then silence. I am within the scene, then without. But even then, the four white borders only frame the vividness of color in the first life.) I believe it happened this way: color escaped first.

  When  the  war  arrived,  it  disappeared. Thinking of it now, color was gone long before. Where was it during those strange, silent months before the armies began lining the streets, filling the squares, entering the houses? In those months when husbands and wives, fathers and sons and sisters whispered behind doors and curtains, and in the back seats of taxicabs, when everyone eyed the dressmaker, the school teacher, the young neighbor back from his studies abroad, color was nowhere to be found. It was as though color had divined our lot, drawing the information out of the solid ground or from the trembling air, and had simply faded, slowly leaching from road signs, mittens, and potted flowers. It was as though color, long friendly with our people, could not remain to be witness to what would soon befall us. And now I see that of course the two, war and color, cannot coincide. But for red, that most vital of colors, which endures despite, and perhaps informs, war.

  Afterward, there were only the brown of the earth and the dull greens and grays of uniforms and tanks and rifles. The pale blue of the soldiers’ eyes beneath their helmets. The red of their flags.

  In a land without color, we, the sisters, could not dwell. We filed into an airplane and lifted and landed, lifted and landed, again, then again, in search of what we had lost. We did not choose our new home, but it promised us a return of color. When we arrived at the airport of the new country, were the walls of the terminal not painted with a rainbow to welcome us? In the new land, the land of the sun, color reigned.

  friends

  The five sisters alighted from the airplane tentatively. They felt the ground beneath their feet, smelled the air, listened to sounds strange and distorted, sensed an eager heat upon their skin, and looked about them: at the sand, the waves, the bright star overhead.

  It did not take the new land long to befriend the sisters. It approached them warmly, artlessly, without judgment or inquiry. The sisters fell out of the sky and though it knew not whence they’d come, the new land asked no questions and nothing of them. It simply wished to play. It was all-innocent and all-generous, bringing the many gifts and dropping them at the sisters’ feet daily. Here were flowers, seedpods and beetles, here were dresses to share, dolls to dress, here a cat to chase, a tree to climb, friends of all ages arriving on b
icycles and skateboards, sugary bright candy and popsicles delivered by musical trucks, sky-skimming swings and seesaws, an endless lawn to spin and spin and tumble upon, a sky that turned and turned and showed the same bright smiling sun, a sun that warmed and caressed their dark tresses, baked their small hand-shaped earthenware, and drew them to a blue sea, which kissed and cooled their feet and shared its riches—seashells and anemones, shorebirds and beach balls, breadth and a horizon to rest their eyes and dreams upon. The new land gifted them what they had lost and wanted returned above all: childhood.

  The sisters were not innocent; they had seen and felt too great a deal too early, lost much and many that would never be returned. Still, they welcomed the play, the beaming friends arriving, the strange sounds congealing in their ears, the many-sided words forming on their tongues, the silent library, the playground din, the uncharted neighborhood, the bush-hopping, yard-hopping finches, the flowers like great white saucers and small red lanterns, the light forever golden, the eternally emerald trees, the blue reflective sea.

  movable

  You have observed, esteemed reader, that the sisters/the girls are nameless. When they arrived in the new land, did their residency cards not identify each of them with the designation, “NO ‘GIVEN’ NAME?” And what a peculiar way for the new land to label the newcomers! Who does not understand the importance of a name? First and last, a name! We are born into it, answer to it eagerly, wear it proudly our lives through; our greatest hope is to leave it behind us when we pass. And yet, what is a name? A set of letters organized in a specific pattern to label an individual, not according to vocation or nature or form, but based on a whim, a preference for a sound: someone else’s whim and preference. The sisters’ vocation is sisterhood. They are girls. They are multiform. This is all you need to know about them, dear reader.

  The sisters are five, the letters are 26, the numbers are infinite; all are movable. Move the numbers around, they shift, they transform: 26 is not 62; 2 + 6 = 8; 2 - 6 = -4. Multiply them, and the numbers proliferate, exponentially. They are mystical, variable. The numerals move here, move there, shrink and expand, multiply and divide, repeat and transform, infinitely. This is because what is movable is also infinite. But the numbers do not alone claim this attribute. The movable type, the 26 characters, can be organized in innumerable ways to tell innumerable tales, truths and fictions, to fill file cabinets, books, and heads innumerable. Yes, the letters, the type, are movable, have always been so, before and since the printing press (though that great invention gave them a new stage, allowing them to broadcast their tales farther and wider, and gave them new audiences, readers multiplying, infinitely, everywhere). The movable type, like the numbers, endlessly transform, arrange and rearrange to tell ever new, ever different tales. And they are playful, they are players, ever donning new faces, new forms. See the letters of the alphabet say, we are letters, we are numbers, we are twenty-six, we are 26! We are bears, we are stars, we are joyful, we are anguished, we are fixed, we are movable, have always been so. And the sisters too are movable, changeable. They shrink and grow; they are one, then they are five, then they are 26, then 1000! The playful sisters move here, move there, climb into trees, travel underground, into and out of the past, into and back from the distant future, into and out of one another, any other, anywhere (they are readers, after all). They infinitely transform, arrange and rearrange themselves into other selves, donning new faces, new forms. The sisters are movable. Their imaginations make them so. Their numbers make them so. The letters of the alphabet, the books on the library shelves, the worms underground, and the stars overhead make them so. If you need to identify them by a name, you may call them the Movable Sisters. According to nature, form, and vocation, they are simply sisters, girls. And they wear the designations proudly.

  the recordkeepers

  Daily, the sisters walked over the red rugs that covered the floors of nearly every room in the house. The rugs were generations old and had comforted the bare feet of multitudes, those living, and the many long dead. They had been in attendance at weddings, births, and funerals, and had cushioned and absorbed all that fell or spilled or was generated at such gatherings. The rugs had been daily swept by girls who were now old women or lie buried in distant lands. They had been rolled up and carried on the shoulders of men to new homes, over bridges or peaks, as dowry or in exchange for dried goods or fine linens. Through marriage or after death, the rugs had changed hands. War and commerce had driven them across borders.

  Recently, the rugs had traveled with the family over continents and oceans to the new country. The family, hopeful and loyal, would not take the new land into its heart because it knew loss and evaded it at the cost of comfort and joy. The family could not acknowledge that it had come to settle in the new land, and yearned still for a return to the before. But the rugs accepted migration as a basic fact, knowing this most recent one was not their last. So, while the girls’ feet stepped gingerly, tentatively across the rugs’ pile, the rugs themselves settled and released onto the new substrate, letting go the old, letting gravity work the weight of their natural fibers and dyes into the floor. And sensing the tidiness of that immediate subterranean land beneath the floorboards—the pipes and wires of precisely measured diameters, the homogeneous composition of the machine-expelled substrate, the meticulous lines drawn at right angles—the rugs too resolved to reverberate with the hum of neat living that coursed through all houses, cars, and concrete highways in the new country.

  The rugs recorded all that went on above ground with the family and in the house over the many years. They shifted the lines of their woven floral and geometric patterns, ever so slightly, across the generations to accommodate the living and to make room for the old histories, which over time became embedded in their patterns, as new stars become embedded in the fabric of the ever-shifting cosmos. The red rugs took in what was girl and what was cat, what was woman and man, guest and ghost, the old sorrows, the fresh humor, the sun’s leaning warm rays, the moon’s particulate light. The rugs recorded all that passed over their surfaces, and they listened with a keen but wry curiosity to the underground workings of the new land, which pulsed with a rhythm different from any they’d previously known.

  two

  A sister could laugh at a cartoon playing on the television and recite the prayers for the dead, the disappeared, and the imprisoned with the same mouth. She could push a new friend on the playground swing with one arm, and cradle memories of a best cousin with the other. She could look out through the same pair of eyes that looked in. She could look onto the bright and friendly land she stood upon and look back onto the one recently scorched and left behind. Where have we come? Why have we come? For how long? And what about everyone else? From the beginning, the sisters were two as a result of being cleaved.

  They were separated from:

  • the first—the first self and the first life and the first parents, who all were more carefree, more innocent, more whole than what they’d now become;

  • the first land, that ancient and hospitable cradle, now turned fallow, now harboring mines in the ground instead of beets and potatoes;

  • their great and grand family, now continuously diminished as bombs fell, as limbs were pulled from trunks, as terror, paralyzing bodies, minds, and tongues, silenced the first land;

  • the first culture, that wondrous mix of hospitality, daily bread and bountiful gatherings, story, gossip, mysticism, melody, and kinship;

  • the first future, the first dreams, which must be unfolding somewhere, where?

  They each were split into two by:

  • distance and space: unfathomable;

  • time, now also two: before and since;

  • knowledge and guilt, which competed with curiosity and joy;

  • what rose and rose from below;

  • what was showered on them from above.

  In the land of the sun, the sisters played and flourished. In the land of the sun, th
ey received and cherished the gifts with one heart and buried the dead with the other. In the land of the sun, the sisters learned to divide and multiply.

  in the land of the sun

  And though the family held back, its members each existing with one foot, one ear, two chambers of their hearts in each of the two lands, Father nevertheless planted the seeds he had snuck into the new country in the ready soil of their small suburban yard. And up rose proud leeks, poppies and tulips, while carrots and turnips nestled in the warm earth, and mint eagerly crawled over it in many directions. Here was earth, here was the sun, and both were wondrous and giving in the new land.

  the hand

  The sisters had a knack for numbers. They were five but pretended to be three when their landlord arrived. One sister or another, looking out a window or pitching and bobbing above the garden wall on the tree swing, seeing the old man approaching up the walkway, would in feverish haste run to the others and, in the first tongue, yell and shout to warn them of the imminent deep knock on the front door. Father, who had rented the house under the guise of having three, not five, children, had instructed the girls that two of the five must hide any time the landlord came by. And he came by often to: fix a faucet or pick up the rent check or warn the family that the keeping and slaughtering of a sheep in the backyard was not permitted, even if the animal was prepared with prayer and its body aligned with the heavens. But Father was not specific in his instructions to the girls. Each time the landlord arrived, two sisters disappeared, and in the rush and frenzy to subtract two from five, it was a different pair who hid: sometimes the oldest two, sometimes the youngest, or a mix of older and younger, and often the middle girl, who hid because she loved the adventure of hiding and not being found. The sisters dove into closets, slid under beds, clambered up tree limbs, or tucked neatly behind a large bush or a trash can. The old man visited for minutes or for hours, for he liked talking to Father. And if his visits ran endless, the hiding sisters snuck out to grab a snack or the cat or a book to take back to the hiding place, or switched one spot for a better, or swapped identities with an unhiding sister, who either merrily or resentfully took her place. And the landlord never asked how it was the girls, across his visits, suddenly grew or diminished in size, were sometimes friendly and on other occasions timid.