Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  In time for the holiday, Mother has sown, sprouted, harvested, and ground the ancient grain. She has acquired an enormous enamel pot for the cooking of the sweet porridge and has washed and scrubbed the walnuts in their shells to add to the pot. And now has spent a full day, sunrise to sunrise, cooking the sacred porridge over coals on the grill in the backyard. The five sisters advance and recede in twos and threes or singly to stand by her side, to take the paddle, to stir the immense pot, to make their secret beloved wishes, to sway with the old tree’s branches, to utter the syllables that honor the prophets and remember the dead, to listen to Mother’s tales or Father’s prayers over the bubbling pot, and to swat at the flies that attend the ritual like many murmuring pilgrims.

  When it is dawn in the new land and dusk in the old, when the porridge is cooked and sanctified through and through and the old grain is sweetened by the stirring and the bubbling, by the tales and the prayers, by the dead and the pilgrims, Mother enters the house to call her family in the first land. It is only her third year in the new land, but already she is able to make a phone call across the distances without bringing harm to her family there. The girls know with what enthusiasm their mother enters the house to call her own mother and sisters. They know she is brimming to wish them a joyous holiday, to hear their voices and, for a moment, to be transported into their midst to share the felicity of their celebration, truer than any she can construct in the sunny land. When she returns from her phone call, only minutes later, she is subdued and walks directly into the garage to tell Father news she will not share with her daughters. She had found, on the other end of the telephone line, mourners, not celebrators. Her niece, across the past five days, was wed and widowed. On day one, the young woman was married to her childhood love. On day two, she lost him to the new forces, who picked him up from his home, carried him off and into one of the newly constructed buildings on the outskirts of the city, and tortured him there for three days before releasing him. On day five, her family could not drag her away from his gravesite.

  After the phone call, Mother is somber, she is silent, and she fills the dishes with the blessed porridge and lets them cool on the kitchen counter. She will deliver a dish to each family at the holiday picnic. She fills her daughters’ bowls and sets them before the delighted and eager girls at the breakfast table. The bowls are filled with a flavor and give off an aroma that have been distilled by ritual and through stirring by many hands over the many generations, a flavor and an aroma that still cling to the girls’ memories, and take them back to the beginning days. Mother does not put any porridge to her own lips, and neither does she color them with lipstick this morning. She dresses, then leaves for work. It is not until the day has ended and Mother has found her way into bed that the newest death accosts her. She knew the boy, had watched him grow up alongside her nieces and nephews; he was a neighbor of theirs, always present, another child playing, studying, and helping out among her older sister’s large brood. Mother is unable to sleep and rises often to get air at the window. Father is awoken by the sound of her body slumping to the floor. Her cries are muffled, held back, but he knows she is in intense pain. In the middle of the night, he dresses her and walks her past their daughters’ bedrooms. He puts her in the car and drives her to the hospital, where Mother’s body, unable to house any more grief, more death, or life, unburdens itself of a son, her only one. She does not know when she wakes in the hospital bed that she has lost a child. She did not know that she was carrying one. But once she learns of her loss, she decides she will not have any more and returns to the same hospital a few months later to assure she does not.

  In the hospital, after yet another surgery, Mother is asleep, she is herself a child again. She murmurs, there will be no more children falling from the sky. There will be no more airplanes dropping babies into the sky and onto the land. The land is barren, the sky is filled with planes. The babies fall and land and they are not babies, flesh and blood; they are dolls … The words follow her out of the dream. It is a dream, but it is not her own dream that Mother remembers as she comes to in the hospital. It is an old dream: her younger sister’s. Her sister told Mother the dream of the falling babies on waking one night, many, many years before, when the two were still girls sleeping next to each other on the family room floor and among the others still unmarried, still at home.

  And Mother’s dreaming sister finds and collects the babies and fills her arms with many blue-eyed dolls who move and shift—though she holds them close—and speak and sing in a language she cannot decipher. But the sister loves the dolls still, though she understands them not, loves them all, and is made happy. And are they not precious filing out of the door of the airplane, diving into the sky, their skirts ballooning like parachutes, their hard plastic arms held over their oversized heads? Are they not precious collected in her arms, all radiant, smiling? She wakes happy. She wakes Mother-the-girl sleeping next to her. She tells her the dolls were plastic, not cloth; their eyes blinked, their lids revealed blue, not brown, eyes; their arms and legs turned in their sockets. She is ecstatic, she beams. It is night and Mother’s little sister whispers, yet her eyes beam. She says in her dream, the dolls spoke and she clung to them; they sighed and she felt their breath on her neck, her arms, her cheek as she tried to collect them all. They had fallen from the sky for her; the airplane had dropped them for her, but she would share with her sisters, and would keep the prettiest for herself. Though the dream dolls are not there when she wakes, she cradles her empty arms and hums to them.

  Mother in her hospital bed remembers the old dream that was not her dream. And she recalls that it was this same sister who loved the stillborn child that arrived late one autumn to momentarily add to their great number. And while Mother-the-girl and her older sisters had run back and forth between the family room—where their mother writhed and wailed in agony on a cot—the kitchen, and the courtyard, bringing in buckets of heated water, taking out blood-soaked sheets and clothing and washing them in buckets of cold water drawn up from the well, her younger sister, ardent lover of all things small and lifelike, had stayed near their mother, who, after the birth, held the six-month-old fetus cupped between her breasts. She stayed near and begged and begged their now-silent mother to let her play with the tiny, unmoving, red baby boy, perfectly formed in every way, and for a long while still warm.

  And this small lover of small things, later, in her teenage years, liked to pinch the arms and sides of all the little children in the family and in the neighborhood, loved to bite their plump red cheeks, and squeeze them until they laughed, cried, or turned blue. She did not marry young as her sisters before her had. She finished school, and finished college, and became a high school teacher, one beloved by the young women she taught for her beauty and her dress, and feared for her strange and, often, cruel humor. She looked as young as many of her students, and was walked home after school, as some of them were, by doting young men. She had many admirers, and cultivated their devotion, wore their many gifts on her fingers, in her hair, across her shoulders. There were those who came to the house, to meet her parents, and brought their womenfolk, their arms laden with presents, and with dried fruit and sugared almonds to begin the long process of asking for her hand in marriage. These devotees she demurely turned away from the house, and laughed at when next she passed them in the city streets. There were others whom she met at the clubs or restaurants or private parties held at the home’s of the city’s artists and musicians. Was it not rumored that after teaching school in the daytime, she spent evenings in the company of the King of Music? She enjoyed her youth and her liberties, liberties that none of her sisters before her had sought or even envisioned. She was fierce and took for herself what her brothers were freely given. Mother in her hospital bed thinks about this sister, now a grown woman, recently married to a government official who has helped secure the release of their oldest brother. Married to the official in exchange for the release of a brother who spent months in
prison, months being questioned and tortured. Not long after his release, when Mother called the first land and heard her younger sister’s voice, she heard in it something missing, something forfeited. It was the loss of her sister’s freedom, the loss of a life lived wildly, fiercely. And this sister, always jesting, had said to Mother on the phone, “Of course I am happy! I have exchanged an innocent torturee for a true torturer! What they did to him in there! And you think our brother could have stood it any longer? There was no one happier than he at my wedding! How our brother smiled his now crooked-permanent smile. How his one good eye shifted from bridegroom to bride while the broken eye stared ahead at the merry dancers!” And Mother in her hospital bed wonders now about this sister, about her husband, feared both within and without the family for his politics and his methods, a man trained in the finer arts of official interrogation and torture. Mother wonders will this sister now have her own children? And how many? How many more births will Mother miss living in the new land? How many more weddings? Funerals? Holidays?

  differentiation

  The sisters needed one another to discover themselves. Each sister was a many-sided cell and had her heart and her outlook shaped by the pressures of being up against the others, within the boundaries of one small house, and beneath the awning of their parents. Each saw her parents in herself or in the others and was proud, envious, or hateful for those resemblances small and great. And what they saw and did not see in one another told them who they were and were not. Without the others, each would have remained too-many-sided, therefore nothing at all, or a soft and yielding sphere. Like cells specializing, they differentiated into themselves among the others. The gum-smacking sister was not the sleep-deprived sister was not the melodic sister was not the daydreaming sister was not Mother’s pet. But all of the sisters gave with both hands, pulled up with both hands, shared easily. And the two sisters who would skate around the neighborhood together did not mind sharing the cool shade, after a morning spent conversing and laughing over the hum of wheels, with the book-reading sister who’d never left her place on the porch. And the sister who would hide did not mind being discovered by the sister who would set off on adventures with the cat at her side. Each looked to the others for reference and tried on the others’ ways: their timbre of voice, their gait, and their ardor. But seeing themselves reflected in the others, they saw what was false and what was true. They each recognized who they were and were not. They knew their place in the family and in the world. They found their vocation and set to it. And like many specialized cells pressed together, into one being, they were greater and grander than the sum of their sister-parts. Together they were an immense and glorious thing, with many busy hands and many skipping feet and one massive blazing heart.

  birth

  And Mother remembers the birth of her first daughter in the first land in the newly constructed city hospital Father had her admitted into. Father would not have his young bride deliver at home as her own mother had, as her sisters before her did. He took her to the hospital early, before the pain. He walked her as far as the maternity ward and was guided back to the lobby by the nurse. The room was already occupied by five other women. Mother, a child herself, was the youngest among the women, the only one carrying her firstborn. Timidly, she undressed and put on the nightgown she herself had sewn and embroidered for the occasion. The nurse hurried her into her gown, rushed her into her hospital bed, under the covers, and commanded her to lie still while she tucked the sheets and blanket under the mattress. Mother’s form, like the forms of the other five women, bulged beneath the neatly and tightly tucked bedsheets. When Mother shifted to adjust her nightgown or to scratch her shoulder, the nurse yelled at her and returned to her bedside to remove the wrinkles that had appeared in the sheets. If one of the other women moaned in pain, the nurse shushed the woman and threatened to release her before she gave birth. The window that looked onto the room from the corridor brought past it visitors who looked in at the bulging, silent women, and nodded their approval. When the wife of the leader of the country, who had helped to fund and design the ward, came by to look in, Mother was pinched on her arm beneath the sheets to induce her to keep still and to wear a smile. She spent two days in this state in bed as the other women, each in her turn, were wheeled away to the delivery room, until she was no longer able to suppress her cries, and it was her turn to deliver. And Father, all this time, patiently paced the corridors of the hospital, wilting flowers in hand.

  type

  So, the movable type, ears pricked, eyes dotted, shoulders rounded, legs set, travels backward, travels forward. In time, it will work out what is missing, what has been lost.

  unbirth

  Mother meets others like herself in the new land. Others recently arrived from distant, once-peaceful befores. Others recently arrived in the land of the sun with little more than their scared fixed eyes, their tired heavy ears, their broken tongues. They speak with voices colored by disparate landscapes, histories, and horrors. They come from lands east and south. It is an age of disruption, of governments toppled, of covetousness and invasion from without, of ideology, blind and ravenous, unleashed from within. She meets these new arrivals at one job or another; she meets them at her night course, where they all learn to speak a common language; she meets them in the aisles of the grocery market, where they coach one another on how to cook an unfamiliar vegetable or together make out what a box or a bottle holds inside it. And she brings these displaced newcomers home to meet Father and the girls, who recognize themselves in their new guests. So the girls open the door. And the immigrants file in. They enter the home, some bowing, some holding out their hands, some offering their cheek. Some left their lands in a boat, others on foot, others in the beds of trucks, or hidden beneath their seats. They have all left much behind and they find comfort in what they find common among each other. In the land of the sun, they are invisible. In the land of the sun, they are welcome. Mother too welcomes them. The girls open the door, and the guests file in, bringing flowers or a loaf of bread, a cake or a stew.

  There is a young woman new at work: small, quiet, solitary, frightened. But Mother, her adopted language limited, knows how to speak to her, knows how to host even in the bare lunchroom the women gather in at their workplace. Mother brings the food and shares the stories, and soon knows this woman too. The young woman is a more recent arrival, unsure of herself, moving through the new world with the old world still on her skin, in her nostrils, in her throat, and much in her thoughts. In her own country, she was a teacher of small children and lost two of her boys to the militias that efficiently made soldiers of them. Soon her girls stopped coming to class. Then the school closed down. Her father did not return from his walk down the hill to the fruit stand. Her brother collected his small family and, with two strange men, left for the border in the night; but she would stay with her mother and younger sister. Her neighbors began to shut their doors and board up their windows. The dry season set in. Hunger set in. She tells Mother she lost much and many but stayed despite the regular disappearances; the daily state-ordered beatings and shootings in the street; the roving ideologues with guns strung across their backs, who shouted their righteous slogans at closed windows and doors; the nodding heads on TV, who mouthed words but said nothing; the regular funeral processions; the hushed children; the strange new order/disorder. She stayed and adjusted each time. She stayed until the day her uncle came to their door to silently lead her by her sleeve to her sister’s body lying in the weeds along the side of the road. She did not recognize her at first. The corpse wore her sister’s dress, her sister’s ring, her sister’s shoes. But her sister was a virgin and this headless girl was pregnant. It was their mother who understood first. Who fell onto the body and, wailing, choking, claimed it as her own. It was their mother who stroked the raised belly and shed her tears, delivered her kisses there, onto that taut, unnatural mound. It was her mother who forced the young woman to leave her home the same night, wi
th the same men, by the same road her brother had taken months before. She did not stay to see her sister’s head removed from her abdomen, though her uncle promised her the dead girl would go into the earth as she was delivered to it: whole. Mother’s new friend understood that her sister left the world through the same channel that she had entered it. It was an image and an understanding she brought with her to the new land. It was an image and an understanding that was seared into the surface of her desiccated eyes. And Mother’s grasp of such visions and of eyes wrung dry by unnatural events was great. She had five small girls to raise and a meandering line of multitudinous dead behind her.

  the grandfather tree

  The sisters agree that he is a tree; he does not move as they move; he has no legs, no feet. He has only his trunk and numerous arms, two sets of many-arms: those that always reach skyward and love the radiant sun and collect nourishment from it and splay their many broad leaves like a thousand open hands giving thanks to that distant orb, and those that forever reach earthward with their many fine filaments-like-fingers that love the cold dark places, the wet mineral-rich places, the secret-giving places. The sisters see that without legs and with two sets of vigorous forever-reaching arms, persuaded by divergent needs, pulling in opposite directions, the tree is incapable of lateral movement, immobile, bound and locked in place, in a small yard, in an ordinary neighborhood, in a valley near the sea. He is their grandfather yet he is unable to understand their own tired legacy of feet, of forever-movement over an earth that spins, though not steadily enough. And they know that the soughing in the old tree’s leaves or the occasional rattling of its limbs is nothing more than the wind moving westward from the mountains toward the lapping sea.