Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  It was on these occasions that Mother also shared her best stories. The stories their mother told her guests were nothing like the ones the sisters heard otherwise. All agreed that their mother was an accomplished storyteller. But the tales that passed her lips during the day-to-day motions of their lives were lessons disguised as stories and came with a wagging finger that spoke more of admonishment than of adventure. When guests filled the house, whether two or twenty, young or old, the sisters watched Mother transform before their eyes. Not long after the visitors had emptied their third or fourth cup of tea, shared and further exaggerated community gossip, and settled comfortably into the cushions of the sofa, their mother opened up like a rose, fuller and more vibrant than any their father proudly grew in his garden, its color a deep red, like the ancient ruby that Mother wore on her finger. They watched their mother’s eyes grow larger each second as she took in the scope of her own story. And they listened to the quickened pace of her breath, which reminded the older sisters of their asthmatic grandmother, a woman who still lived in that far-off country, and was already a legend herself.

  “Is she a flower or is she a fruit tree?” the sisters would later argue. And one decidedly would answer, “Our mother is a fruit tree! See how she keeps the best stories, the sweetest, juiciest, and the most colorful, in her upper branches where we cannot reach them?” And angry that the guests had finished all the best chocolates, the youngest would add, “And the guests are the ladders that we use to climb to get to the sweet fruit!”

  And the sisters were right. Their mother was a fruit tree who bore five girls with cheeks like red apples and a thousand tales that hung heavy and hung light from her many strong limbs. And the tales, like the girls, were not all-innocent and all-sweet. Mother told of death with as much relish as she did of angels. She told of ghosts and of thieves and murderers. She told of displaced kings and their buried treasure, of whispering elephants that passed the secrets of princes, and of scorpions that crossed mountains and rivers hanging from the tails of unwitting horses with the lone motive of revenge. She picked her apples with care, ripened for the individual guest. With the old women who came to visit, Mother shared stories of her own parents and her parents’ parents, each generation born in another time and in a different country. To the young women, she told tales of handsome young men, of lavish weddings, of love victorious over cultural and geographic obstacles. And to those who had seen and been through what she had, she spoke eloquently of unspeakable loss.

  But who among her guests had not suffered loss? The war they had escaped was still young, an open and a deepening wound. On these occasions, when the room filled with silence and women and men, young and old, blinked dry their tears, one sister or another would attend to the soft knock at the door and courteously usher in the other invited guests, those swallowed up by time or by war: the newly and the long dead, the missing, the lost who’d traveled not by car over gray concrete freeways, but through the red inner channels of pulsing arteries and veins, to arrive at their front door. Like the first guests, they too pulled off their sandals or their shoes and lined them up behind the door; the shoeless did not forget to wipe their dusty feet on the doormat. And some of the silent-invited, hand over navel, bent deeply at the waist before entering the living room, while others, reluctant to make eye contact, hurried past, awkward and nervous. Each found a place to sit on the floor or on the sofas’ arms or to stand leaning against a wall or a cabinet. They were mostly men and mostly young. Some came dressed in turbans and white trousers; others, usually young boys, came in t-shirts and jeans and took a place next to the sisters on the floor. There were the aged who arrived bent over a stick or leaning on the arms of the young. And there were women, some in white scarves with clinking beads in their hands and others in colorful blouses, brightly lipsticked and rouged, modeling tall and perfectly sculpted perms that made the sisters smile into their hands. Some of the dead were regular guests and came often; others passed through the single time. And a few, like the half-book man, never missed a call, though he was always one of the last to arrive and took a seat closest to the door. The sisters knew him by the gray suit jacket he wore over his white trousers and tunic and by the tattered book he always carried close in his hand, a book missing half of its spine and one of its covers. The circle would widen, the mood deepen. The sisters would prepare and serve more tea, pile on more sweets, and look to their mother to conclude or to begin a new story. And as she spoke, the living guests sipped their tea while the silents unwound their turbans or shook the dust from their long skirts, and, settling in, joined the living in the nodding or moving from side to side of heads, with eyes closed and ears bent in Mother’s direction.

  son

  The boy runs into the house. He has seen them coming. A group of five or six soldiers is in the next street, moving house to house, asking the questions: how many men in the household? occupations? affiliations? ages? height? weight? The boy has in recent weeks returned from his uncle’s house in the country. The countryside is also filling with soldiers and tanks and is coming to resemble the city. His mother has called him home again to the city, where he now spends his mornings studying with a tutor alongside his nieces at his sister’s house, and his afternoons running errands for his mother or cooking alongside her. He finds his mother in the house and tells her they are coming. They will take him. He is not a fighter, he will not fight. They took and did not return his father. They took and changed his cousin into something he does not recognize. He is young, a boy, but old enough. His mother knows this. He and she are terrified. They have seen this many times before. She will not let it be his turn. She tells him to lie down on the living room floor. She tells him, play dead, they cannot enlist a corpse. She brings out the white sheets, she cuts them to the customary dimensions. She ties shut his jaw and stops his teeth chattering. She wraps his trembling body in the white cloth and ties the shroud at his feet, his knees, at his elbows, and his head.

  She hears the soldiers down the street. Shhhh she whispers to her son. Lie still, lie still. She hears their boots coming up the path, through the front door, up the stairs, down the hall, into the room. She kneels beside her son, cries, moans, rocks to and fro over his shrouded body. “Ohhh, my boy, my boy … Ohh, my boy.” She moans, and cries, and trembles and collapses on her son’s unmoving body. The soldiers nudge the body with their boots. They lift the woman off her son. They untie the shroud and unwrap the boy. They find a pair of open eyes transfixed skybound, teeth clamped around a pale tongue, and a small trickle of blood traveling from his nostril to the corner of his mouth. They find his torso slack and his fists clenched over his unmoving chest. They find a heart not beating in a still warm body. They see a schoolboy recently dead, fourteen or fifteen years of age, between five and a half and six feet in height, equal in weight to the smallest in uniform among them.

  seed

  Mother says that if a girl swallows a seed whole, the seed will find a warm, dark place within her and, after many meals, many sips of tea, and many nights of dreaming, the seed will sprout, sending roots one way, and branches and leaves another. The little seed will germinate, feed on what the sister eats, grow in height and girth within her over the many years, branch and flower in the internal spaces, then finally grow out of the ears, the nostrils, the mouth, the eyes, the elbows and the knees, the fingertips and the toes. And the fourth girl remembers the cherry pits she swallowed last summer at the beach picnic. She wonders if the seeds have found a bed within her, wonders if any have yet sent up a shoot. She feels and taps her belly and her chest, she checks her ears, her nose, her throat, and her eyes in the mirror.

  Father says that an innocent killed, no matter age or sex—infant, girl, youth, or old woman—whether in a time of peace or in wartime, the innocent will become like a seed again, to sprout elsewhere. And the third child checks her ears, her nose, her eyes, and her mouth in the mirror. Who has she swallowed and who grows inside her? She wakes in the night to revi
ew her dreams, unfamiliar. She reads aloud the words from her favorite book in order to scrutinize the timbre of her voice, changed. Is she herself or is she another? She finds herself praying next to Father, swaying, reciting the sacred syllables, grieving for the old places. She finds herself crying when Mother hums the old songs.

  in winter, the sun

  And the sun, as if acquiescing to human needs—not the tree-dwelling human but the recent human with greater sheltering needs: roof, walls, windows, and rug—the sun in winter lay low in the sky. In winter, the softened orb sent in great leaning rays of light through the windows, rays that stretched from windowsill to opposite wall, rays to warm the sisters’ backs and legs and feet while they sat or lay on the floor to play checkers, or to crack sunflower seeds between still-neat teeth, or pick a scab from a bent knee, or converse with that near star, photon to cell, beam to muscle, dream to dream. And so the sun, on a winter’s afternoon, nods in the westerly direction as the dreaming sister’s head sinks into the red patterned rug.

  the widow-bride

  The municipality has been given its own delivery truck. It is not a large truck, but it is a well-built truck, foreign-made, with an engine that hums, and wheels that glide. There is room enough in the bed of the truck for numerous parcels if they are stacked and arranged neatly. Its cab is comfortable and adequately spacious for two strong men, men with arms like elephant trunks, able to lift the hefty packages they deliver. The deliverymen, whom the residents of the municipality have never seen with their own eyes, are hardworking men who must have day jobs that keep them from delivering while the sun is still up. Or perhaps the local government, anxious to keep the traffic in the streets of the town running smoothly by day, has obliged its residents by making its official deliveries only in the middle hours of the night.

  The residents know the delivery truck, not by sight, but by sound, though it barely purrs as it moves down the narrow streets of their neighborhoods in the darkest hours of the night. They hear the truck’s firm tires rolling over gravel or paved road long before it has turned a corner onto their street, and hear it still, long after it has gone. Since the start of the war, many of the residents swear that their hearing has grown keener; some would even admit their ears have grown slightly larger and somewhat more curved-forward to better collect and decipher the sounds from the new world that has sprung up around them.

  The two deliverymen are not talkative men. They are respectful of the residents and would not dream of disturbing their sleep. Or perhaps they are tired and have little left to say after a long day at their first jobs, and after a long evening in the company of their wives and children. Regardless, they do not talk and barely do they breathe while they work, though occasionally a grunt or a sigh escapes their throats as they lift a parcel from the bed of the truck or bend to drop one off on the front steps of a house. The deliverymen work hard, seven nights a week, from midnight until five o’clock in the morning. But they enjoy a holiday each month when the moon sits swollen in the sky.

  It is on a quiet, moonless night that the truck makes its first delivery to the bride’s house. It is the night before her wedding and she wears her hair up in curlers. The bride has not slept for many hours; she has tossed and turned so often, the spines of her curlers have pricked her scalp; blood dots her white pillowcase. The bride has listened for the truck for many nights; she has studied the various sounds of the night and has learned by heart the subtle shades of silence; she has slept with her window open despite her parents’ pleas, listening, listening for the wheels, the hum, of the delivery truck. And tonight she does not mistake its approach, though she knows it is yet a mile away. She lies on her back, rests her arms at her sides, and waits.

  On the day of her wedding, the bride bathes and dresses, not in the wedding gown that she and her mother have spent one hundred nights adorning with beads and mirrors, but in her washing dress with her curled hair tucked beneath a faded scarf. She does not paint her face and does not send her guests away, though they arrive dressed in the dark colors of mourning. Behind the house, in the open courtyard, streamers made of white paper flowers stretch from tree limb to tree limb to rooftop, and rustle in the mid-morning breeze. China cups and saucers, plates and bowls, piled one hundred high, tower above the red geraniums growing along the stone walls. Cherries and loquats, peaches and melons fill borrowed silver bowls and platters. Large copper pots filled with dry rice and soaked beans sit atop the unlit stone oven in the corner of the yard; she empties the largest of these. The unopened parcel rests beneath the old walnut tree where her father, with the help of her youngest and only remaining brother, dragged and set it, grunting and panting, in the early morning hours. The bride stands beside the unmarked box in the center of the wedding party, a swarming, vibrating, many-armed spiral made up of her: mother, father, little brother, two grandmothers, aunts and uncles, cousins and classmates, friends and neighbors, hairdresser and baker, meowing cats and buzzing insects. She pulls the lid off the wooden box and opens the mouth of the coarse hemp sack that sits within. The wedding guests groan, some swoon, but most cannot pull their eyes away: here is the groom, his teeth and his hair, his fingernails, his toes, his ears and his nose, his kidneys and his heart. The bride is silent and those around her cry and moan, they pray and they curse, but none too loudly; the courtyard contains the sounds and motions of their peculiar celebration.

  Some in the wedding party swallow an herb that turns them both dumb and invisible, and which commonly grows in the dry soil of this forgotten land; they exit by the back gate on a silent errand. The bride immediately sets to work. She tallies and measures the pieces, accounting for all of her groom’s handsome features, and wonders at the whiteness of the flesh, its bloodlessness. She fills the copper pot with water from the Well of Death and rinses the pieces carefully, lovingly, one at a time before setting them out on a white sheet that has been spread over the hardened earth by her elders. She works her way upward from the toes, mistaking, occasionally, a part of his arm for his calf, a shoulder joint for a kneecap. She calls the children to her; they work together to piece her betrothed back into a man, tall and slender, awkward and modest even in death. He lies supine and naked in the dappled shade, his lids drawn down over eyes recently replaced in their sockets. When all of the pieces are in their proper order, the bride wipes the sweat from her brow. She sits on her heels, her arms wrapped around her knees, and waits in the shade of the old tree. After three hours, her brother returns from the River of Life and reports that it still runs dry; the unhappy party bemoans its lot. The unseen guests who left by the back gate silently enter the yard again and from their invisible pockets draw forth the blue feathers of the whistling thrush. Bride and mother stitch one feather to one piece of flesh. The elders find patches of sun or shade on mats and rugs, seat themselves along walls and against tree trunks and begin to pray. And the children, taking a feather-bound piece of the groom in each hand, make a circle around the bride and sing a song that is not a wedding song. Through the song’s old words, they teach the dead man how to change his shape, and at the song’s wailing end they throw up their hands, emptying them of man and releasing a whistling thrush, which rises and spirals and sings, circles over the rooftops, and comes back to perch in the walnut tree.

  E

  And every so often, the great eye, the eye of that ancient whale slumbering in the depths of the sea, it opens. And in the pitch dark of the sea’s depths, it casts its gaze and faint light upon what has brewed inmost and just now is born, sees the thing for what it is and, clearly seeing it, acknowledges it, and so releases the thing, unnamed and unknowable, to the surface, to the outside, where it may be dressed by the letters of the alphabet, soldiers ever ready to advance on Chaos and the Dark. The   eye,   it   seldom   opens. In that instant that the dense lid rises, it is known to the dreamer, whether she lies asleep in her bed or moves and fusses about through her day, for she sees the opening eye in her mind, and it is
more than a light coming on in the dark; it is enough to wake her. She knows its gaze, still and keen; she has seen it before and forgotten it each time. She sees the eye even as the eye sees before it the thing newly born and ready to rise up. The   recognition   is   immediate.

  division

  The sisters had a knack for division. If they could be five, then why not twenty-five? Like cells, each divided, first into two, then four, then eight, and so on, with the occasional mutation that engendered three cells from one, or the unforeseen death that left one cell where there should have been two, or the eager cannibalization of one cell by another. It seemed that each time Mother or Father looked up from a telephone call or from prayer, there were more daughters to count and more to distinguish one from another. Where one day there was one girl, the following there were seven, and the next, twenty-four more. When Father complained about the water or the electric bill, or the great tangle of hair in the shower drain, he did not consider the girls’ spontaneous regenerative powers. In the time it took Mother to call a girl idle, three others, identically dressed, finished the chore. The cat had one tail but the sister who would pull it had many dozens of hands. If you say the sisters were five, you are mistaken. You have not paid attention. Look again.