Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  The sisters knew the uses of secrecy for good and for ill. They understood the consequences of each—the consequences were life and death. They had been initiated into that murky world and learned to navigate their way through it with little help from the adults. But these were not the only codes they lived by. Mother and the first culture had instilled in them the innumerable directives governing the proper behavior of proper girls. These were principles of decorum and etiquette, which the sisters could not shake or shed, though, at one point or another, each tried to unburden herself of the old customs. They knew, every one of them, how to keep and exhibit a proper-girl surface. The sisters knew they were judged by: They who ruled from above and Those who had passed (the many, the countless); Mother and Father; aunts and uncles (though they lived many thousands of miles away, could rarely be reached by telephone, wrote letters in a different script); their parents’ friends and their families and their friends; neighbors; teachers; dentists; policemen; school bus drivers; grocery clerks; televised politicians. The sisters were reminded often that the adult world watched them with a keen eye. They knew the price of too much wisdom shown, of secrets revealed, and of loose lips. And so they kept these things to themselves and hid them even from one another.

  But the keeping had a price as well. The cooking and simmering of solutions and the drinking and reabsorbing of these noxious liquids had a price. These practices and rituals were corrosive; they ate away at the delicate sprouts of the various flora of wisdom, emotion, and vision within each girl, which endlessly produced beautiful buds that never reached full blossom to leave their lips. Feelings and thoughts were turned in and under and created teeming gardens vividly real, beautiful, and harmful within each sister. Mother had said that a seed swallowed would one day sprout and find an exit to the external world, but the sisters knew that what went in only festered, then bloomed silently within. Emotion was looked down upon; expression became a solitary and internal endeavor. In this environment, secrets proliferated, the sisters created imaginary sisters who spoke in loving, sisterly tones, and held one another’s hands. They envisioned sisters who played and moved lightly through the world, as did the happy children on television or in their neighborhood. In this way, the sisters multiplied again. They were five, then they were twenty-five. They were ten, and then they were one thousand.

  It is true. The sisters did not fight. They did not express or share emotion. They kept hurt and anger and grievances to themselves. They kept dreams and stories hidden. They knew the cost of war and knew it was greater than the price they paid in silence and self-absorption. This is true and it is the way it was in the house and in the yard. It was the same in the car on long drives through infinite loops of freeway or on the walk to school over the uneven concrete sidewalks of their neighborhood or on a solitary bench in the schoolyard in the shade of a large sycamore tree.

  like cats, like cats

  It is all fiction. In truth, the sisters fought like cats. They were like many angry cats with piercing eyes that cut through laughter and conversation at dinner; like cats with ireful hisses in pitches Mother and Father could not hear; like cats with razor-sharp claws that flashed for an instant and left neat crimson lines across naked skin. When infuriated, they called each other dog, that vilest of curses in the first tongue. When hurt, they buried, burned, or tore-up the other’s beloved possessions. It was not necessary to tiptoe into the hated sister’s bedroom in the middle hours of the night, scissors in hand, to steal a lock of hair. No, the aggrieved sister, in broad daylight, simply grabbed and pulled a fistful from the other’s head. Yes, the sisters fought: they pushed and tugged; scratched and spat at each other; sprang out of nowhere onto another’s back, bringing her to the floor where the two writhed, bit, and screeched.

  It was when Mother and Father were away at work or visiting friends that the sisters’ claws and teeth were bared. Once the adults had left and the house was theirs entirely, it did not take much, or long, for a fight to break out between any two or three of the girls. But there were always another two or three who sat it out to watch with trepidation, or amusement, or who were simply too engrossed in their own activities or daydreams to take part. Sometimes the fights were purely vocal, angry shouts or empty threats launched back and forth across the house or screamed through walls and doors. Occasionally, quarrels escalated, turning into a war of words and claws. But the most treacherous battles were those that were purely physical and that took place as if within a void, outside of time, in sheer soundlessness. Then the two sisters fixed their gaze on something beyond each other, on something recessed further back in time or abiding in a different place altogether. In silence, their bodies coiled and uncoiled. In silence, they lurched and fell back. Their teeth, their fingernails blindly sought a patch of exposed skin on the other’s thigh, or neck, or belly. Their elbows and knees, their chins or heels, sought the vulnerable recesses where nerves collect and breath resides: the dips just above and just below the sternum. And the sisters who stood apart witnessed the background of television and window recede and imagined space swell around the two who were fighting. They recognized their sisters in the brawl; saw the flying braids or the familiar cuff of a sleeve. But they also glimpsed: a grown man’s unkempt beard and brow, a torn and blood-soiled trouser leg, the dull flash of a helmet, the burnished handle of a knife, yellowing teeth in a gaping mouth—and the hot breath that hung to it—life-weary eyes filled with loathing and animal terror.

  When it was over, after the feuding sisters had exhausted their limbs and their spirits, each returned to her chores or her homework and carried on not-speaking. With minds turned inward, roiling stomachs, and busy fingers, they went about their daily tasks, awaiting the adults’ return. And in that strange calm of the fight’s aftermath, each sister created half-truths and untruths about the other. In her mind, she worked and unworked scenes and plots and dressed the sister-villain in suitable garb. Each was a master of her art and crafted a tale worthy of her rage or her injury. When Mother and Father returned, all of the sisters went on as usual, in the usual tones, employing the usual proper-girl gestures, asking polite questions of their parents: “The drive was not too long, no traffic, I hope?” or “How many were invited on the bride’s side?” or “Did the old woman die here or in the first country?” or “What dishes did they serve?” But all the while, each battle-worn girl endured the many minutes and the encumbrance of too much family. She bided her time until she found Mother alone, winding her hair around plastic rollers in front of the bathroom mirror or turning down the blankets on her bed. And in that abridged and rare moment of confidence, the sister looking for sympathy, with raspy voice and tear-filled eyes, recited her well-practiced tale to Mother:

  “Look, Mother-Dear, at this fistful of hair, which she has pulled from my head and that I found hidden beneath her pillow. And look at the tears in my drawing; she clawed at it with her long, dirty fingernails. Had you not arrived when you did, I’m not sure I would have any hair left on my head—and the others, they did nothing to rescue me; they aren’t true sisters. But she, she is a wild animal! She cannot be of this family; she doesn’t resemble us in the least. Maybe it’s true what the others say. Maybe you did find her in the desert, roaming the hills, barefoot, shirtless. Well, she’s little better now.”

  “Ma-Dear, see how she parades around the yard, doing cartwheels no less, and in my beautiful new skirt! And when I threatened to tell you, she said she doesn’t care because she is the youngest and you like her best and she has the prettiest eyes and she can wear anything she likes, whether or not it belongs to her, whether or not it fits her. And how poorly my skirt fits her, Ma-Dear.”

  “Do not tell Father, but I found her looking through his desk again, taking his pencils and his mints once more. And, this time, scratching her name with a razor into the back of the antique watch he keeps in the second drawer. What will others think? They’ll say we are not raising her properly, not teaching her our ways. I think s
he may turn into a thief; I felt I should warn you. She doesn’t listen to me, doesn’t appreciate my guidance or my kind, sisterly words. You know how others talk. It’s your reputation I worry about, Mother-Dear.”

  Mother did not know all that passed between her many daughters when she and Father were out. But often she guessed correctly what did not. She herself had grown up with no less than a dozen siblings and knew the tale-telling ways of sisters and brothers. Mother knew how to sift truth from falsehoods and exaggerations. She knew that the watches in her husband’s desk drawer were broken and awaiting repair—a testament to her husband’s thrift and industrious ways—and that the skirt her youngest wore was neither new nor beautiful. Like most of the items in their home, it had been purchased secondhand, with her thrift-store employee discount. She saw clearly that the hair her third daughter presented as evidence was her very own, wavy and fine, and that the clean tears in her drawing had been cut with scissors, not made by little hands. But still, she listened to her many daughters’ tales with an easy ear and hidden smile as she clipped the ends of peas or stacked cans of tomato sauce in the kitchen cabinet. It was Mother who kept the peace. She knew whom to reprimand and how severely, which girl needed a gentle word and whom she needed to send to Father for a quieter and briefer, but more potent, scolding, and how to coax the feuding sisters into forgiving one another. Her own father, full of laughter and a strong distaste for conflict, inside or outside their home, had taught her and her siblings a simple yet powerful gesture of reconciliation: the hooking together of the feuding parties’ pinky fingers. She had passed this on to her children, whose proud and stubborn feelings never failed to give way to the power of a pinky-finger truce.

  After a quarrel, Mother would bring the two sisters together to face each other. And the seething sisters, silent and defiant, with eyes averted, would inch their clenched fists toward each other, deeply sickened by the prospect of making the slightest contact with the hated sibling. But Mother was patient and, looking on from above, spoke the words that the sisters could not or defiantly refused to say to one another: “But you know she didn’t mean it; she is sorry and did not escape unscathed either; look at her shin, it’s blue beneath the scratch already.” or “She didn’t steal your magazine, she only borrowed it to do her homework; there it is now, in her hand behind her back, neatly rolled and ready to be returned to you.” And while she spoke in pacifying tones, the sisters’ fists relaxed and inched closer, until each girl’s pinky finger opened, trembling, to meet the other. The effect was immediate; the slight but intimate touch of bird-like bones hooked about each other smothered the storm within each girl and set things aright in the house once again.

  eyelid

  The sisters slept nightly and woke each morning, but it took the moon many nights to close its heavy lid and many nights to lift it open again. And how genial and diverting was the moon when wide awake, cheering up the gloomy sky with its radiance, dressing itself alternately in clouds swollen and clouds trailing, outlining the rooftops, the telephone lines, the apricots, and the swing with its soft spray, bobbing, as the night went on, from hilltop to hilltop, to chase the cat out of its hiding place, and finally, at its peak, filling the valley with its liquid blue light so that the basin became one large pool for the sisters to swim in. And how sluggish and reluctant a playmate the moon was when, in daytime, a sister met the faded friend lolling over the school playground with lid half-drawn, with little to say.

  brothers

  They are brothers. The more clever of the two—the one who runs his father’s business, knows his customers, listens to what is exchanged and whispered in the city’s clubs and back alleys—he reads the signs early and joins the party of the new government. His younger brother, a youth still in school, is taught the new dogma, learns to dress conventionally, speak softly, and avoid eye contact with those in authority, those carrying rifles, riding tanks. But his heart is with the cause of the rebels in the mountains. At home, the two brothers, once inseparable, grow suspicious and watchful of each other. Their mother says, “You are like dogs, sniffing, circling. What will come of this?”

  One day, the student yells across the courtyard of their sprawling house, “I will tear you to shreds in your sleep!” His brother yells back, “In bed or at your school desk, sipping your tea or squatting on the toilet, look up and find me ready to skin you from navel to toes.” The young merchant leaves the market early one day and comes home with forms, with pamphlets. The student, looking out over his schoolbooks, yells to him, “You are official now. Okay, come here.” And he strides across the courtyard, past the rooster, past their mother peeling carrots and, though smaller, lifts his brother into the air and slams him to the earth.

  Their father, on hearing the official news, says to his older boy, “You are a merchant’s son, you will amount to nothing under them. Those that rise in the party are the poor—the farmer’s son, the delivery boy, the fruit vendor—not the likes of you.” Still, the young merchant and his three penniless friends enlist in the military and pledge their allegiance to the party in power. He comes home one final time to show his family his uniform and his gun, and departing, tells them, “My uniform is weighty, but I leave you lighter, unburdened of family and God.” His young brother shortly leaves school and exchanges his school uniform for a religious cap, his schoolbooks for the holy book. He listens to the radio and to the neighborhood murmurings in order to keep up on the advances and the losses made and suffered by the rebels in the mountains and in the countryside. He studies his book diligently and begins to preach to his mother and father, and to the children of the neighborhood. He grows his hair long and spends his days walking about the courtyard, clinking beads and hissing prayers, peeking over the garden wall to watch for government vehicles or neighborhood children, so that he may hide from one and scold the other.

  The merchant-turned-soldier serves four years emptying homes of those disloyal to the party, tracking well-armed rebels over mountains, and driving officials from the city to the villages, to the borders, and back again. The three friends he enlisted with have each advanced to become a general in the military, a consul to a neighboring country, and a minister of construction, positions that keep them occupied and unable to see visitors or respond to letters from former friends. At the end of his fourth year, while clearing mines, the soldier steps on one, and loses a leg and half of his face. He returns home bandaged and penitent. His mother says, “This. In shreds.” The devout brother brings his holy book to his ailing, disfigured brother, who kisses it and rocks it against his chest and, drooling, begs for god’s mercy and forgiveness.

  gem

  Mother wears a ruby ring on her left hand. And when she braids the sisters’ hair or rinses the rice in the sink or readies herself for work, the girls hear it clink and clink again against the handle of hair brush or the dish in the sink or her car keys. And the small and rhythmic sound of her ring against other objects, and its brilliant color against her skin, their hair, the teacup in her hand, this sound and color are as much a part of Mother as is her voice. The ring is old, they can see. And Mother tells one of her daughters that when she was a teenager, she and her best sister had identical rings made from a single stone to honor their sisterly bond. And she tells another daughter that the ring has been passed down from mother to daughter for many generations in their family. And each of the girls believes one day it will be hers. Though they are five and the ring one, each sister knows it belongs to her, and momentarily borrowing it, the girl admires its color and form on her still-small finger.

  pride

  The sisters are proud. They do not share their fears, their loves, their secrets, their visions, their wishes. In the land of the many closed doors, they too have become closed.

  tenderness

  But beneath the pride lay tenderness, a soft and unspoken devotion practiced between the sisters. The five girls, full of dignity, loved deeply. The girls who held in hurt and disappointment, who s
uffered loneliness and misunderstanding, were adept at loving one another tenderly, without cause or obligation. They showed their love in small and dear ways. Proud and unable to express love openly, they often worked surreptitiously. When a sister fell asleep on the rug, over a book or in front of the television, another lifted the sleeper’s head to place there a pillow, and draped a sweater over her bare legs. In the car at night, the sister falling asleep on the long drive home from a party draped herself over another’s shoulder to enjoy the closeness she would not by day. (And the sister leaned-on did not shrug the sleeper off.) A sister-not-in-trouble took another’s blame, and Mother’s admonishments with it. A sister-not-involved stood up for another, during fights great and small, in spite of consequences, in disregard of current peril or future strife. And their love for each other flowered through the smallest of openings, mimicking the poppies that emerged in summer through the cracks in the concrete sidewalks of their neighborhood. And it showed with all of the beauty and the grandeur of that papery blossom against and despite such a backdrop.

  The sisters gave joyfully and often. So giving was an art form with them. One gathered flowers and grasses from near and far, wove and bound them, dried them in the cool space beneath her bed, and placed the finished bouquet in the intrepid sister’s favorite hiding place. Another woke early on a Saturday morning to bake the sick sister, listless and dull-eyed, her favorite dessert for breakfast. The gregarious sister stopped mid-play with her friends to smile at the timid sister across the schoolyard. The fashionable sister neatly folded and placed her best top in the awkward sister’s dresser drawer. And the two sisters who shared adjacent birthdays made, wrapped, and delivered each other’s gifts three months in advance. All graciously shared clothes, toys, pencils, books, time, talents, sweets, and friends. They were patient and forgiving, sincere and sympathetic. They were, after all, movable. Kindness came easily to them. All were sensitive and had lived with hearts and eyes open. Mother taught them to not shun, look-down-upon, or think-better-of-yourself-than. They observed Father and saw that he did not judge, gossip, or resent. So they practiced with one another the kindnesses they’d witnessed bestowed on others. The movable sisters suffered for and through each other, understanding the why’s and how’s and even-so’s of a life lived in two. They lived closely, suffered one another’s proximity, and loved and admired each other gingerly, joyfully, deeply.