Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  The dark and greedy hole that had replaced Mother raged coldly in the very center of the house, halfway between the front and back doors, halfway between the bathroom and the kitchen, in that cold and rugless space between the dining and the living rooms. The sisters dared not approach this drafty space. The two youngest, warmed by the heat streaming from the kitchen, found the courage to face the thing that was not their mother and was, in truth, the absence of their mother. Dressed in their pajamas and armed with nothing but lengths of silver hair ribbon in their hands, the two danced a frenzied circle around the nothingness, weaving a silvery web around the void. Soon the nothingness had a shape that all had sensed and now could see: it was a great pulsing, many-fingered orb that floated three feet from the floor, at times ballooning to great proportions, at others collapsing and disappearing entirely. Its cold fingers licked the air and continued to charm stray almonds and pennies to it through that resigned air. But now the objects stuck to the net of ribbon and went no farther.

  The sisters continued their resistance and all the while each saw—though she tried desperately not to—in the bark of her tree or in her bubbling pot of meat and vegetables, visions of latex gloves, of blue-markered flesh, the clean bloodless opening, the parts that once were Mother, still warm, still pulsing with her blood, pulled out and taken away by nurses in white uniforms.

  The second sister, regardless of the problem, always had one solution to everything: the shoebox diorama. She marched to Father’s closet and pulled out his dress shoes from the last unbroken box. She ran around the house collecting markers, scissors, tweezers, paper, glue, cardboard, and foam. From the garden, she collected twigs, leaves, grass, berries, and soil. She worked quietly, diligently, always with a secret, giving smile on her lips, in the barely lit corner of the dining room. The others heard the snip-snip of the scissors, the crunch of paper and the recurrent sigh of her cyclical smile, which came and went with her focus. In no time she had built a model of the house, perfect to its finest detail. She called the others to her. They took turns looking into the sealed shoebox, that beautiful universe in miniature, through a hole in one end of the box while the second sister shone a flashlight into the box through another hole in its lid. Ohhh, they each said in turn, and Yes. Through the viewfinder, they finally saw the remarkable thing that ended their struggle and at last quenched the void. Like five small gods, the girls stood in a circle, passing the simulacrum from hand to hand, from eye to eye, no longer anxiously awaiting Father’s call from the hospital.

  tidy

  The sisters were tidy and worked diligently to keep themselves and the house in order. They were neat in appearance, soft in manner, lithe in their gestures. They completed their many daily and weekly chores on time and without complaint. They took turns dusting and vacuuming, cooking meals, setting and clearing the table, washing dishes, watering Father’s trees, flowers, and herbs, mowing the lawn, raking leaves, washing windows, scrubbing showers and toilets, buffing Mother’s silver teapots and serving platters, taking out the trash, sweeping the floors, doing laundry, ironing shirts and skirts and jackets, serving the guests, feeding the cat.

  Everyone who saw them, thought, “What hardworking children,” or “How well-mannered,” or “How delicate, how gentle these girls are!” All who came to visit or were paid visits by the family praised Mother on her “well-brought-up daughters.” When neighbors stopped to speak with Father in the driveway, they complimented him on his dense green lawn or the health and beauty of his roses. On the subject of his daughters, they said little but always were surprised to learn that he had five. “How quiet they are! Five girls, you say? Not two? I would have guessed not more than three from this house. Five! And all girls?”

  untidy

  The sisters were not fastidious by nature, but by upbringing. They were neither tidy nor demure, though they played the part well and fooled all who saw them. When they were not being watched, the sisters:

  • belched, slurped their food, and chewed with their mouths open and their eyes gaping at the television.

  • spilled tea, soda, candle-wax, and rubber cement glue on the floor, happy in their assurance that the many-colored, densely-patterned Eastern rugs would not divulge their messy ways.

  • proudly wore clothes that were stained green with grass and yellow with turmeric.

  • scratched, bit, kicked, and pushed until knees and elbows were covered in scabs loose and scabs obstinate.

  • skipped many showers and let their hair became heavy with grease to closely frame their thin, sullen faces, like the veils Mother wore to the many funerals she and Father attended. Fingernails became packed underneath with dirt, leaves, chalk, and the zest of oranges. Mouths turned green or purple with popsicle dye.

  • put their chores off until the last possible minute, quickly stuffing laundry, leaves, or silverware into drawers, into jean pockets, beneath rugs, and behind bushes just before Mother and Father came home in the afternoon. They dusted tables wearing Father’s socks over their hands, then returned the socks to their drawer.

  • peed in bed in the night and simply pulled the covers over the wet, stained sheets in the morning; out of clean underwear, they went to school not wearing any.

  • gave away each other’s secrets and blackmailed one another for candy or deliverance from a hated chore.

  • cursed in two tongues and used the first to confuse or tease their single-tongued friends and neighbors who came to visit, curious and trusting, but unequipped, like visitors from a distant land.

  • and, despite what Mother and Father said about stray children … only children without parents, children loose and foul roam the streets to make a show of their deprived upbringing … played barefoot in the front yard, kicking up leaves and skirts, or sat indolently, slouching and sucking a lollipop on the front porch, glaring at neighbors as they passed by.

  • rode their bicycles with eyes blindfolded and arms stretched out in the alleyway behind the house, ramming into parked cars and closed gates, laughing at the dogs they vexed.

  • made great orange or black or gray arcs in the air as they swung the cat by its back legs.

  • hunted garden slugs, following their silvery trails in the early morning, salt shaker behind their backs.

  • picked and ate unripe pears, plums, and apricots from Father’s beloved trees, and threw the pits at a bird in the same tree or over the fence at the dozing dog next door.

  • made elaborate forts and dens using the sofa cushions and Mother’s elegant, guest-only tablecloths and bedsheets.

  • lied to Mother, to Father, to each other, to guests, to neighbors, to teachers and librarians, and prided themselves on the reach of their lies, which was far and wide and spread their great reputation.

  D

  The Dead. And there are many that will file through this book. They are loved ones, family, friends, and some are strangers. They are comfortable here, perhaps not uninvited. I was born into a culture whose first law is hospitality. I have observed this trait in members of my family, near and distant; we all open the door, set out the tea, live with the dead.

  My father’s family was modestly sized next to my mother’s burgeoning clan of city-dwellers. The suffering on both sides was tremendous. But in my father’s small family of farmers, the losses seem remarkable. His family was cleaved, and then cleaved again to an excessive degree and in brutal ways by the war. My aunt, my father’s only sister, had five children and lost all five, in one or another manner. My father lost all three of his brothers. It is strange, whether chance or fate, that his own life was not taken. In the beginning, when the forces first arrived, disappearances were common. My father would have been labeled as extremely dangerous to the new and occupying government: he worked, after all, for the embassy of their foremost enemy. And his friends, his coworkers, those he was acquainted with and those he cherished, were picked up one by one, imprisoned, tortured, murdered. The week after we left the country, my father
’s name was read off a list of enemy sympathizers; he was one of many who needed to be brought in and silenced. If they knew my father, they would have known he is silent by nature and would not harm the smallest of creatures. They would know he thinks of family and land, but little of politics. When they came to silence him, we were already gone. They missed us. But just.

  We did not leave intact. The knowledge of death, the wisdom you gain from the understanding that a beloved uncle is tortured, then buried alive, a cousin decapitated, that women are raped, have their fingernails pulled out, their breasts cut off, this wisdom you carry with you across borders and over the years of your life. This wisdom circles the nuclei within your cells and ensures you metabolize all suffering, great and small. And this wisdom reshapes the young in ways unknowable to those fully grown. This knowledge remakes the children into something else.

  Yes, it was strange to arrive in a peaceful land, to share a classroom and a schoolyard with children who still had their innocence and peered out through a single pair of eyes: for our lids opened and closed as theirs did, but revealed intermittently different sets of eyes. We could stand at once in a desolate cityscape surrounded by tanks and headstones, and on a school playground filled with the din of laughter and bouncing balls, skipping children. I remember seeing my sisters across that schoolyard and seeing them apart, unnatural among the other children. And when in passing we were close enough to catch each other’s eyes, the cognition was both sweet and painful. We had come from a place no one knew existed, from a reality we could not explain to anyone, and we had seen and known things we dared not utter to those around us.

  They reshape and redefine you, the dead. They cast their pall over you, draw the pink from your cheek, or color it and your lips a too-deep crimson, and they hold your hand while you skip, climb, and jump rope.

  They are loved ones and there are others I don’t recognize. The man who carries a book, half-torn, he comes and goes silently. But I do not know who he is, what it is he wishes to communicate, if anything. He isn’t in a hurry and seems content to be dispossessed, unbound to land or time. He simply comes and goes over the days of my life—as do the other war dead—carrying the half of a book, a book he never opens, but which seems an extension of himself and the hand that clutches it, as if it is his blood that circulates up and down the spine of the book, and his thoughts that make its pages flutter.

  The dead are many and pass through and reside in books comfortably. Perhaps it is in books they find solace and home. They move through this one. And some may stop a moment to gaze up at you. Do not avert your eyes.

  moored

  And if Mother is the sun, is Father not the moon? See him silently revolve around his daughters, even as they six revolve around Mother. He, the family’s steady Timekeeper, paces his own rotation so that he is always in step with his daughters and his wife, always facing them, whether in the shadow of his holy book or brightly illumined by Mother’s warm glow at the dinner table.

  one

  And the sisters, knowing they were one, refused to be separated into fractions of a whole. They held on to their single identity and were like a braid that would not be undone. They were like the woven red rug that covered their entire living room floor, and which knew every footstep, every grazing knee, every spill, and recorded all. Much like this great rug, the five sisters never missed an incident, and recorded every bruise or cut, each exchange, every harsh or loving word, all burdened silences in the home, all telling glances, no matter which body, pair of eyes, or set of ears registered the information initially. If Mother was angry, they all suffered; if Father was silent, they all retreated; and when laughter broke the silence, all sighed and were relieved as one. And who is to say that five is greater than one? If the sisters were not 1, how did five hands, in early summer, simultaneously reach for the first ripe fruit on the apricot tree in Father’s garden?

  family

  In the beginning: blood: a vast network of aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren spread across the valley, the hills, the city’s bustling streets, the open farmlands, the foothills of the mountains. And how knowledge, history, and tenderness traveled these streets and byways! Hear the traffic course in the middle hours of the night: it hums, it pulses. It is a full sound! As junctions within this network, the sisters were never alone in the first life. Their shared knowledge, old and forever coursing, dispensing, collecting, did not begin or end with them, their time and place, their spirits or their bodies in the first land. Living in the city, they inhaled the fresh village air, tasted the quince on their uncle’s farm, and listened to the gurgling of a brook in a distant valley. They donned their father’s pride, having journeyed that long road that changed him from wild farm boy to steady engineer; were wistful alongside their ailing grandmother, aware that the old woman’s pain did not inhabit her bones alone; and were not afraid to challenge the crooked grocer’s gaze, knowing as well as he the price of walnuts in late autumn. The sisters were born with the knowledge and expertise of thread, needles, and scissors already established in their wrists and fingers. They cut, stitched, knit, and shaped with precision and grace. They were born with an understanding of hair, knowing how to braid, pin, and sculpt it on one another’s heads. As babies, their need for milk was far surpassed by their desire for sweet tea, for meat dumplings, for lamb stew, and baked rice; and their appraisal of these things was only slightly less critical than that of their great-uncle. Each was linked by appearance, voice, or manner to this aunt, or to that distant cousin. In her own way, each echoed the past, reinterpreting and renewing old habits, sorrows, and devotions. Life within this great and evolved vascular system was familiar, intuitive, and intimate. If a loved one, near or a long distance away, was hurt or ailing, its members knew where, why, and how to help; if there were transgressions, the family forgave or shunned as one, and sent forth its decision through the elaborate network; if a secret was kept it was only as a formality, as secrets too made themselves known to all almost simultaneously. The network was both ancient and sophisticated. It worked using methods sweeping and precise. It carried gossip, blood, and memory with equal force and to all members equally. It connected and collected its members, those living, those buried, and those yet to come, in a great embrace, bound them to one another in ways subtle and intricate. And when the war, that mighty and hungry machine, arrived in the land, it severed more than fingers and limbs. The invasion shut down more than the country’s electric grid.

  Now, in the sunny land, the sisters are closed, have learned to be so. But the currents start up and sputter still, wake them in the night, or divert their attention at their school desks. The information comes still, in small spurts and flares, and the sisters know whence it comes, but do not know where to send it. It collects within their small frames, eddies in places, and settles in others. It seeps and escapes through the eyes and the nose, or sometimes as laughter, unsolicited, shocking to the girls’ own ears. Occasionally, the sisters are conductors still; they exchange the knowing look, rise, unasked, to help Mother when she needs it, speak the words that mend when one or another is unwell. Mostly, the old knowledge shelters within each girl. In the land of the many closed doors, it finds correspondence in other hidden sources: between the pages of old books on library shelves rarely visited; at night, behind drawn lids; at night, outdoors, beneath the stars.

  many

  The sisters were five. The family, seven. The dead, who immigrated and lived with them, walked with them, sat down to meals and lay down to sleep beside them, were innumerable.

  guests

  A great deal of pushing and shoving went on inside the house. The sisters, all elbows and knees, like a twenty-legged spider, scuttled over furniture and up walls and raised dust behind them as they went. They howled and hooted, stamped their feet and jabbed their nearest neighbor with a finger or a fist, out of fun or anger. It was not uncommon to have five sets of teeth flash in the same instant out of a wi
ld tangle of hair. Occasionally, the cat was caught up in the scuffle and spit back out, landing on the couch, the dining table, or in the ficus plant that stood in the corner of the living room. Neither was it rare for doors to slam, curtains to flutter, and lamps to fall over without any apparent cause or disturbance as the sisters, a mostly invisible force, raced and scrambled about the house. But if Mother was sitting in her chair, three balls of yarn in her lap and a pair of needles between her fingers, she might catch, in the corner of her eye, a glimpse of pattern—floral, plaid, or striped—the sheen of a silver hair clip, or a fuscia-painted toenail in midair. Or she might hear, beyond the clicking of her needles, the rustle of a skirt, or a soft giggle by her ear, though she alone occupied the room. The sisters were everywhere at once, always shoving, scrambling, whooping. But when the phone rang to announce the imminent arrival of a guest, knees and elbows disappeared and pant legs and shirtsleeves relaxed back into place. Dark locks settled into neat braids and ponytails or were tucked behind clean-scrubbed ears. The girls were once again models of demureness and respectability. And in no time, fifty nimble fingers had restored the house to its humble yet elegant glory.

  Guests were treated like royalty. The upper cabinets in the kitchen, which stored the best sweets, were opened during these visits. The finest china was brought out for the tea service and the most delicate platters were filled to overflowing with fine chocolates, individually wrapped, with an assortment of many-flavored cookies, and with dates, raisins, almonds, and walnuts imported from the East. When they arrived, the guests received three kisses each from Mother and the sisters, who lined up by the front door, in the early years by age and height, which corresponded, and later by nature—gregarious to timid—to receive their guests. While the sisters hung the visitors’ coats and purses in the closet and neatly lined up their shoes behind the front door, Mother led her guests to the highest position in the house and seated them on the nicest sofa and chairs. Then immediately, the service of tea and sweets began with one sister after another bringing in trays of the best the family had to offer.