Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  H

  Home. What we carried with us no matter how often we moved, who and what we left behind. And while we were separated from our larger family, from what was familiar, the seven of us had one another in that space. Home was a world unto itself. A boundless, pulsing universe. And there were enough of us to make it so. There was the outside world, which called and to which we each went dutifully, to school or to work. And the outside world was open and wide and full of wonder, and yet small and precious, ever creating moments like scenes inside a snow globe. We each, awkwardly and tentatively, found our way in the outer world of school and job and market and highway. And over time found ourselves through the books and films, the friends and play, and the curious objects and experiences that world offered. It was the outside world and it was large and luminous, but somehow, home, however cramped and modest in size, home was always grander and more expansive. During those first years, home is where we knew ourselves for who we were. It was where we could be what we were: a many-limbed, vivid, young thing. Yes, even Mother and Father were new and young. They were young parents separated from their families, their land and language, taking care of a brood of small girls in an unfurling, unfamiliar world.

  We carried pain and horror always with us. Deep within us when we were out in the world. And this burden is what turned things inside out, what made the outside world innocent and precious next to what we knew, had brought with us, and carried internally. We were not innocent but we were young, and youth gave us the courage to play, to be still-curious, to grow and take form as a family. We had one another, and it was all we needed in those first years. But we came with more than knowledge of death and war; we, five girls between the tender ages of one and twelve, arrived knowing already how to cook, wash, sew, knit, saw, hammer, harvest, cut, glue, paint, dream, and invent. We were creators, each of us. Next to our love for one another, it was this, the making of things, that made home so vast, and so formative. We were never without something to shape. Inside the house were needles and fabric and yarn, scissors and pencils and paper, onions and flour and eggs. Outside, were dirt and water and seeds, tree branches and flowers, bricks and stones, and any tool we wanted in Father’s garage of wonders and supplies. We were forever making alongside Mother or Father, with one another, or off in one or another corner on our own. We made dolls and dollhouses, tree houses and tree swings, guitars and flutes, skirts and scarves, books and pictures, bowls and vases, soups and cakes, masks and swords. And with each creation, the world grew larger, more possible. If things could cease to exist, other things could be brought into existence, to fill our vision and our hearts. With little hands and small weights thrown into fleshing things out, the world was transformed again and again, endlessly to our great joy and fulfillment. Home was Mother and Father and sisters. And home was a workshop.

  the begetter

  Mother says, there is an old man, an ancient man, who sits by a river. You know the river, you have been there, have played at its edges. In his hand, the old man holds a pen, and in his lap are long strips of paper, unmarked. When a child is born, the old man takes up a strip of paper and, down its length, he writes the name of the newborn, the moment and date of its birth, the moment and date of its death. This is all he writes: name, time of birth, time of death. He then throws the paper into the river, which takes it, swallows it, and, churning, racing, carries it away. Mother says, we are all born, we will each die, and the number of our days here was set down in the beginning. The old man has written all of it down.

  And the sister listening sees the river in her mind, remembers it as the one the family stopped to picnic by on drives between the city and the village years before in the first land. Mother would roast potatoes and a chicken the night before. Father would rise early to pack the car. The girls would pile in, conscious/still-dreaming, in the pink early dawn. On the drive, Father sang the folk songs that made the sisters laugh, and wrapped his hand around Mother’s knee or her neck, as Mother, always nostalgic, reminisced about their last trip to the farm, or about grandmother’s first trip to the city to meet Mother years before. The road was long and, at its peak, the mountain pass was year-round under snow, winter and summer, spring and fall. The road was long and Father and Mother had a spot along the river, among the trees and boulders, they liked to stop at to enjoy the mountain air and the packed cold lunch. Down along the banks of the river that wound its way through the mountain gorge, the air was raw and crisp and did not filter what the equable mountain, the effervescent river, and the trembling aspens murmured to the girls, who sighed or giggled or whistled in response. They climbed the boulders and hung from the limbs of the trees. They shaped boats with bark and sticks and leaves and filled the boats with berries or pebbles and sent the boats sailing down the white river. They hid and called out and teased each other and teased the mountain sparrow. They roared and chased one another and stumbled back to where Mother sat handing out red clusters of grapes and chicken wrapped in springy leaves of bread.

  The sister now listening and imagining sees the old man sitting on a boulder worn smooth by time. He sits along the river’s edge, lean, wrinkled, and bent over the roiling waters. She sees his bony hand resting on his stiff knee, pen ready between quivering fingers, a lap full of long curves of paper, listening for something more subtle than the call of the mountains, the river, and the trees. The sister remembering the picnic and the cold, salty potatoes, Father’s intrepid rock-hopping, Mother’s dark, shiny locks and overlarge sunglasses, her sisters’ laughter, and the warm sun overhead, this sister wonders, was the old man there, just around the bend in the river, behind the peeling white trunks of the whispering close trees; was he there all the time we played and climbed and threw pebbles in after the quick glimmering fish?

  record

  And the letters of the alphabet stand tall, stand keen, look left, look right, and spring, dive, splash into the river after the stories.

  Father, the boy

  The girls can see, vividly, and not without a tickle, Father, as a little boy of five riding the wild village dog, his small body shirtless and mud-speckled, in muddy cotton trousers, drawstrings hanging, single earring in his left ear, hair long, dusty, and unkempt, feet bare, eyes intent, mouth like a lantern. It is Mother who tells them these tales; Father does not remember or refuses to see the importance of remembering. It is a time long gone, why not feed the cat now, take out the trash, sweep the porch, water the roses, do your homework, check on your sister, hand me the pliers, look at the time, it is nearly 7, your mother needs your help. It is Mother who recorded the stories as a young bride on visits to the farm Father had left years before. It was the new bride who listened raptly to the many tales her mother-in-law told her about her youngest child. Mother: the young city girl in short skirt and lifted hair, lipsticked and eye-lined, solicitous and spirited. Grandmother: timid and tender, weathered and small, with long white braids, in white shrouds, and mirror image of the girls’ city-dwelling, maternal grandmother. The two women sat together for hours in the dappled shade of the old fruit trees, in the packed-dirt courtyard of the life-churning, food-churning farm in the ancient village. And the sisters who remember for themselves know that courtyard for the place: where the morning bread was daily baked in the early dark; where the harvest, planted, tended, collected, borne, and stacked by the elbow—the farmer’s humble fulcrum—was stewed, baked, boiled, roasted, fried, and set out by hands coarse and hands agile; where the members of the family gathered, alone or with visitors from near and far, to partake of food, shade, rest, story, and company.

  The remembering sisters know the trees of the courtyard and the various fruit of those trees, know which limbs are good for climbing and which limbs bear the tastiest specimens. And they know too that those are the trees Father is forever trying to raise again from the new soil of the new land in each new house the family occupies. The past they hope to unlock is Father’s, but it is Mother who pulls out the fragments of story like swe
ets from her pockets. Mother who hands them out to the girls between chores, after meals, in moments of collective reverie that all of the sisters delight in. Your Father wore an earring, rode a dog, stole melons from neighboring farms, chipped his teeth cracking the shells of almonds and walnuts, begged to go to school and snuck in in his brother’s place, lost his own father at nine, ran away at fourteen in search of more learning, nightly climbed up and crouched in the uppermost limbs of a tree to study by moonlight, found his own way to the city, to the schools, to me, found me amid my many sisters and brothers, behind two gates and three walls in a house on a hill in the city four hundred miles, a mountain range, and many rivers’ distance from the farm where his brother tilled the earth and his mother and sister kept their eyes on the dirt road, awaiting his return.

  And the girls study Father in search of the little boy. In search of story and evidence, they check his ears for the piercing. He pulls out his dentures to show them yet again, this is what happens when you break walnuts with your teeth, chew on your pencil, chomp on hard candies. He pulls off his glasses to teach them, this is why you must halt your reading to switch on the light at dusk. And some of the girls know he is not all human, he whose people came from an earlier and an enchanted land, a place of elves and jinn. Father does not deny the girls’ claims that his origins are magical and neither does he offer an alternative explanation for his singular ways. Father does not talk as other men talk, does not boast or brood, yell or curse. He speaks little but smiles often with his mischievous grin and impish eyes. And Father prays for many hours a day, and when he prays, the girls’ limbs feel the weightlessness of time expanding, their stomachs become restless, grumble more as lunch, dinner, or tea await the lifting of the hush and the prayer rug, as even the cat, overly lulled, head nodding, awaits Father’s return from the netherworld.

  And while Mother draws the girls, the family, in and holds them near with her warmth, her will, and her stories, Father, the Timekeeper, lets them see that there are doorways through which they can exit and return regularly and with ease. He departs for work at a precise hour in the morning and each afternoon returns at a precise hour, keeping time by the company clock. Keeping time with the sun, he recedes several times a day, as a tide recedes, into prayer, and returns as if from deep waters, unhurried yet revived, to take part again in the family’s activities, to listen to their stories, their gripes and gossip, to play a hand or two of cards, and even to sit still for a few minutes in front of the television, which transports his wife and his daughters but leaves him disengaged of purpose, restless, and too aware of time desecrated. Each afternoon after work and early morning into late evening on the weekends, Father toils in the garage, on the rooftop, in the yard, or beneath the hood of the car in the driveway in the service of Time, and, depending on the job, calls out one or two or three, the second or the middle, of his daughters to hold a lamp or a ladder in place, to pass a tool or hammer in nails, to dig a hole to remove or to plant a bush, to coax the cat out of the crawl space beneath the house, or to untangle and reconnect wires in a broken appliance. And whether he works alone or with the girls, leaves for minutes or for hours, he returns to the family, like clockwork, and returns bearing herbs or pears or flowers from his garden, and returns wearing his half-drawn mischievous smile that precedes or caps a joke or a short tale of his own, quietly fashioned during his time of focused work or prayer.

  And the way he orchestrates the growing of things in the yard, and accomplishes the making of things in and around the house, shows the girls that Father does have powers unusual, that perhaps what he does not say is tilled under and transformed into the doing of things. Father who climbs the ladder to the roof to patch leaks, and walks with ease from eaves to apex, just as easily climbs the heights of the tree, unharnessed, to cut and clear dead branches. With his tools, Father: builds shelves to hold the many objects he makes or collects, and all of which have purpose and place in his mind, for what in this world is purposeless?; takes down walls to put up new ones better aligned with those in his mind’s eye; digs earth to find the source of a leak in the old house’s plumbing; builds a tree house in each yard the family occupies so that his girls too will know that time spent in trees is more elevated, more evolved. In his doing upon doing interpolated with momentary rest, Father, the eternal farmer, regulates time and pushes time’s usefulness to its extreme, so that toil eases the heart, and rest and food fully, but not overly, sate the spirit and the stomach. All this in order that remembering, which is cluttered with the dead and the usurpers of life, is given the smallest sliver of the clock.

  When the girls ask him when he was born, Father says at the blossoming of the peach trees. And when they ask how and when their grandfather died, he tells them that they found him lying, lean and spent, in the fields, atop the tender spinach. Mother tells tales of his boyhood, youth, and courtship and the girls listen raptly. But eager to understand the enigma that is their father, wanting more information yet, the sisters question the juvenile fruit trees, the roses, and even the herbs that rise year after year in one or another corner of the yard and which originated from a small handful of seeds transported by Father from the old country. They marvel at Father’s love for his plants, seeing how much care he puts into the soil at their roots, into the pruning of their leaves and limbs, into the fighting-off of their pests. They see what pride he takes in each ripening plum or apricot, each sprouting leek seed. And the knowledge he has in his skin, eyes, and nose, given him by the sun and the seasons, the air and the clouds, impresses the girls. And they guess that the many watches and small clocks in Father’s desk drawer do not await repair but rather unwinding: the unlearning of regulated time. Perhaps Father’s aim is to coax them to keep time with the plants. And if the broken timepieces are not swayed, the sisters who come to the garden to learn about their quiet Father, slowly and incrementally, come to understand the moon and its steady math, the sun and its oscillating ways.

  Father, who, indoors, silences the house in order to send out his blessings, like many doves, over their heads, Father, outdoors, draws out lightness in the girls who play and run about him as he clips dead roses and rakes the earth. He hums, smiles, and laughs to himself or with the girls, inviting them over to show them a grafted branch, newly budding, or how much to cut back an overly eager mint plant. And in his loving, devoted care of the garden, the sisters see that Father is still the farmer, though he left the farm early to pursue the learning, and that he shows the care, caution, and pride of the farmer, distilled. But when the light changes and along with it a breeze arrives to pass through the grandfather tree’s branches, they find that Father is up in the tree, sitting with the small animals of the canopy and speaking to them as the sisters have heard him speak to the cat on occasions he has thought himself alone. And coming across the creatures, he is for a moment again the boy, the strange, impish boy who wants to show the girls his find of grasshopper or caterpillar or bird. And the sister who loves the various-legged creatures shares in his delight. And the sister who hates spiders and insects, desperately screaming and many-armed herself, runs from him as from a pesky little brother. And all the remaining sisters listen to his nonsensical clicks and trills, and wonder at their effect on the hushed creature in his hand. They add this to that growing pile of evidence that supports Father’s mystical origins.

  ubiquitous

  The sister remembering knows that time does not stand still, but neither does it travel in a single direction. It is many-legged. It rushes past, it scuttles back, it spins in circles. It finds the openings and passes through them. It is there, it is there, and it is here. At once, simultaneously.

  the idolater

  The sun does not ache for the stars. Blinded by its own churning brilliance, it knows nothing of the night and nothing of its siblings in the sky. But it knows of the grass that grows over pastures and in valleys, that covers lawns in a regular patchwork and forces cracks in concrete sidewalks. The sun is drawn to th
e infinitesimal grass even as it draws the spinning earth to itself and keeps it there in deliberate and perpetual orbit. And with its far-reaching fingers, the sun travels across great distances of space at a fervent speed to hear the song of the grass for which it wistfully yearns, to find an answer to the grass’s apparent and uninterrupted state of ease, to probe into the soil of the living planet for this logic.