Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  The grass, which seeks nothing but water from below and light from above, works diligently in both directions to achieve its modest stature, laterally making up for that stature by sending out roots, just centimeters below the earth’s surface, over distances short and distances long, roots forever evading the sun’s soft fingers, which cannot penetrate earth. And the grass’s own tough, green fingers, having broken through earth, humbly receive the daily offering of light. Knowing nothing of the sun’s need, it cannot give away its underground secret to the aching star. And the sun, knowing no night, untiringly and without satisfaction, brushes the surfaces of the earth with its incorporeal fingers, petting the grass as a child, standing still, attempts to pet a dog running past her. The grass’s secret: an intertwining, forever-advancing network of persistent roots, nodes, rhizomes, and intrepid blades that toil to colonize the many faces and planes of the spinning earth in a silent attempt to find and keep family. But the sun, blind, is alone in the heavens, its radiance obscuring its relation to billions of others like itself. Unaware that it possesses its own living network over spaces vast and mysterious, it pines after a nearer idol.

  the mourners

  The sisters forged an alliance one still and sunny day. It happened during a time of peace; recent battles had been resolved, lingering wounds healed, and old animosities forgotten for the day. It happened on its own, for there was no planning involved and no intention on the part of any of the sisters to act on such a thing. On that day, the mediator, taking respite from her usual work, the work of undoing rivalries and bringing sides together, was preoccupied with a different task. Using a rusty nail, her finger, and her saliva, she etched then filled in, etched then smoothed out, then scratched again, a tentative note of condolence into the hardened earth beneath the wilting leaves of the tomato plants in Father’s garden. It is difficult, I know, it is hard for you … It cannot be easy producing fruit under these conditions … In your condition, it is difficult, I know … It is hard, yes, in this weather, the condition of the soil … It is the soil, it refuses, I know … In another part of the yard, the giver, that other sister full-of-good-intentions, was lying on her back watching the small mechanical movements of a robin’s head in the branches above her. Under normal circumstances, the giver would have been the first to take advantage of the uncommon silence and peace among the sisters to call for a picnic on the lawn, or start a spontaneous game of hide-and-go-seek, or offer the services of her nimble fingers in the braiding of the younger sisters’ hair. But she, like the other four, and like the still air and the dry earth, was under the spell of the sun.

  The treaty that was formed on this day had not been foreseen in a dream or foretold by the garden oracle. There was no specific event that led up to it. On the contrary, what united the sisters on this day was a lack of circumstances. They had made no plans, and set no agendas. The day’s sweetness lay in the absence of responsibilities—of housework, yard work, schoolwork. On this common-uncommon Saturday: all chores had been accomplished in the morning without the slightest nudge from Mother; the sisters more fastidious had bathed early; the sister who preferred bare feet to a bright smile, on this Saturday, joyfully chose to forgo all rituals involving the grooming of hair, teeth, and skin; and all, even the studious sisters, pushed the responsibility of homework aside, onto Sunday, or erased it from memory altogether. It was the absence of duties—whether through completion, denial, or rebellion—and the much-felt absence of adults that brought the sisters together. On this Saturday, neighbors slept in or drove off early in their long cars loaded with children, sandwiches, beach-balls, and towels. And Mother and Father, who usually took the day to put back to order the house and the garden and the girls, left them all shortly after breakfast to visit an old and distant friend of the family, a woman newly arrived from the first country.

  Mother and Father traveled over concrete highways, through many adjacent and indistinguishable cities, and to the side of a woman newly arrived from the before-country. This elderly woman arrived from that landlocked and war-isolated land with recent and unsullied news. She was received by her hosts in the land of the sun as a monarch bringing lavish gifts from distant realms, though she arrived without a suitcase and wearing a man’s coat over a hand-sewn, unembellished long tunic, loose cotton trousers, and worn plastic sandals. She’d traveled with only a large wool purse that contained her passport, unchanged money, a few photographs, a large bag of golden raisins and withered almonds—-from the homeland—a handkerchief, a prayer rug, and her prayer beads, which she now held in her hand and which softly clicked and slipped under her thumb continuously, seemingly of their own accord. The news she brought was not the kind published in papers or prompted from the mouths of broadcasters. She had her own personal accounts, tediously recorded over the months and years and now held painfully, but preciously, within her person. And some of these records were like small, tightly coiled scrolls, which she kept tucked in the oily canals of her ears or under her red wrinkled eyelids. Some of her articles of news were like gossamer webs—thinner than the aged scarf that covered her head—folded into quarters, and placed beneath her breast, over her heart, or wrapped around her kidneys. And some were like impervious raw jewels stuffed into the soft corners of her mouth, a mouth which had learned to hold its secrets tightly, even as a running murmur of prayer passed from her lips from morning to night. The old woman, once her family’s storyteller, had chronicled their quick demise, and the destruction of the wider world about them over the previous half dozen years. Much had shattered and she had done her best to gather the fragments. Illiterate, she set them down within herself, hoping that someday she could relay them, deliver them to rational minds that might make sense of the horror.

  The woman sat on the couch, not hungry, not thirsty, not touching the many small mountains of sweets that her host, her niece, had set before her on the coffee table next to a dish of the almonds and raisins she herself had transported. Gathered around her on chairs and cushions and bare floor were men and women who’d traveled from the many adjacent and indistinguishable cities to receive her news. They sat with eager eyes and humble folded hands. The only news they received during these years was delivered in person by newcomers fortunate enough to have escaped the brutal war. The new arrival pulled out her chronicles and organized her facts. She adjusted her headscarf and smoothed out her skirt. And the news-like-gossamer the old woman brought out from the hidden places. She looked at the many faces about her and began with a story about the beginning days of the war. In the beginning, war was only a trickle, a new spring born on a distant hillside: far off, unsteady. But the trickle grew into a running stream, which the people still did not heed or hear for they were preoccupied contemplating the sudden proliferation of wildflowers in midwinter. And when the meadow flowers turned into giant trees overnight, the people, too busy looking up, did not notice that their feet were wet and the bottoms of their trousers and skirts soaked. It was only after their children, their in-laws, and their grocers disappeared that they perceived the red river at their knees. Only then that the outer mind grasped what the inner mind and the heart had known for many months: the lives they’d had, nurtured, and claimed for themselves were no longer their own; the landscape they’d inhabited had fractured and shifted. Though many of the listeners knew this story intimately, had lived it for themselves, heard and recited it many times in disparate company, still they listened as a child listens to a fairy tale: hopeful and bound. But by and by, those in her audience who had left the first country during the beginning days, or shortly after, filled in the gaps in her story, for they had left with that tale intact while she had put hers away in order to record the onslaught of each advancing year, each unfolding barbarity.

  She continued with a tally of the dead, recorded not as integers but as names. Looking to the small group to her left, Do you remember B—— who lived five houses from your aunt’s, and raised doves on his rooftop and took them to the Saturday Market
, not to sell, of course, but to show to the young female passersby, hoping the birds would do for him what his people could not accomplish for twenty-five years. Yes, that fortunate-unfortunate man found a wife, a pretty villager, a widow, and not long after disappeared, then reappeared in a gutter, leaving her his cooing doves and his three-story house, which was blown up by rockets even as his stepchildren were preparing it for his funeral. And turning to another, Z—— who was a good friend of your eldest brother, he was one of the first to go over to their side; you did not know this? Well, my son, his disloyalty to his family was not enough, and when they were finished with him, his mother alone might recognize him … though the poor woman was not so lucky to have him back … and turning to another, He was useful to them for something. After all, it was through Z—— that they acquired your uncle’s name, learned of his illegal newspaper, located his distributors, then his readers. She told of hillsides flattened and charred; of daughters hidden from the occupiers for days beneath mounds of sawdust or sacks of potatoes in cellars, or inside clay ovens in courtyards under snow; of sons lost to that bitter cause in the cities’ outskirts, pulled from their mothers’ arms in the night, lured by the call of the barren mountains, whither it was said sanity and valor had retreated; and of animals unhinged—goats from their craggy perches sprouting wings and adopting flight, chickens mating with apples, and dogs returning to the desert in search of the jackals they’d once deceived and replaced.

  And when her throat was dry, the newcomer stopped to sip tea, to look about her at the people who had gathered there, at the photographs hanging on the walls in her niece’s apartment, at the too-bright sunlight on the balcony outside. After many cups of warm tea, the news-like-jewels dislodged, were brought forth, and shone with such glitter that many in her audience shut their eyes.

  The old woman now shared her own private tales. She told of her youngest daughter’s inability to hold a single child in her womb for the duration of a pregnancy through two marriages, two widowhoods, and three rapes. She told of her niece, the bright one, fond of letters and numbers, who climbed into, but never again out of, a neighbor’s stove, though, in turn, the occupiers, the preaching men of god and guns, her family, and her neighbors called and called for her. She told of the rocket that fell in broad daylight onto the small shop across from her house. Of whole melons, peach pits, gum wrappers, marbles, mud, flesh, teeth, and hair caught in the limbs and needles of her pine tree.

  Her now thin, now low voice shuddered and quaked as it recalled the myriad events, stages, and transmutations of the war that would not end. And other news tightly coiled for years, months, and weeks, oily and warm, now uncoiled to run like a film. The images played over the curtain of many-faces before her, cinema for her eyes alone. She put together the disparate stories and put words to the images that shuttled through her mind and simultaneously transposed themselves over the silent visages of the company gathered about her. Tired as she was from her travels, she kept pace with the moving images, translating all she witnessed into a language her audience understood well. The voice that struggled to hide anguish soothed her listeners, who found much knowledge in its peaks and valleys. And happily/unhappily, the visitor unloaded her burden of gifts into the arms of the veterans of life in the new country, a people whose relatively softened skin now puckered again, its sensitive hairs standing upright against the assault of wanted/unwanted information.

  This woman, like those who came before and would come after her, held court (as Mother and Father had on their arrival) and sat like an aged queen, alone on her throne, meting out what was left of her dying empire—her many and painstakingly gathered memories—to her subjects. And those who were lucky to have known her or of her in the first country were seated in the first circle, having the most to gain or lose, waiting for the name of a loved one or a description of a beloved place to fall from her lips. And each name she spoke reverberated through the crowded living room of the fifth-floor apartment, traveled through all who sat there as each tried to put a face to the spoken syllables. Many names found a home within the lucky/unlucky person who recognized and claimed it as one of her or his own. And in that moment, the receiver performed all rites, shedding tears, reciting prayers, and burying the loved one in a fleshy grave within themselves. But other names roamed about the room, entering and exiting ears, trying to find a foothold in the memories of those gathered. Then, unrequited and homeless, these unclaimed letters of the alphabet slowed and settled into a single mass grave in the middle of a small living room in an unfamiliar land.

  With great reverence and patience, the audience waited for the woman to finish her telling and showing before asking her their own burning questions. And the concentric circles took turns, those on the inside taking the longest to question and reminisce with the old friend, to ask about sisters and mothers and neighbors and relations of neighbors, and parts of town, and customs, and pined-for foods, while those in outer circles waited with tear-stinging eyes or sat simply nodding, taking part in what all there shared: their collective and great loss of home, kin, history.

  It was the absence of responsibilities and the presence of five sated bellies, drifting minds, tapping fingers, the hot sun at midday, and the dry grass beneath their feet that allowed the sisters to be girls, just girls, and to form their unforeseen alliance. It was the lazy swing of the screen door that led from kitchen to yard, and the perspiring glasses of water or fruit juice, which traveled in the same direction. It was the open but unread book, the dreaming cat’s arcing tail, the beetle’s dainty march across a shin and over a kneecap. It was all of these things—the clearing away of responsibilities and the lingering of the sun at the noon hour—that opened up a door never before seen or imagined by the girls, one that led from a child’s backyard to a castle’s courtyard.

  The sisters did not expect this sudden change of scene: the many tall towers of a pristine and enormous castle, with walls of stone running three hundred feet into the sky and dotted with small dark windows; an expansive courtyard, open and empty, save for a single fruit tree near one of its walls, and sunlight that filled the desolate courtyard as hot tea fills a cup; and above it all, a still, brilliant blue sky. The silence mimicked the stillness in the yard they’d left a moment earlier. The sun hovered high above the spires of this castle as it had done above the telephone poles in their neighborhood. The sisters did not expect this sudden change of scene but neither were they startled by it; they were movable. Each of the five took a separate course to discover the place in her own leisurely and indolent manner. The first sister wondered to herself why the courtyard had no doors leading to or from it to the rest of the castle grounds, forgetting that she and her sisters had arrived through a door only moments before. She marveled at the vastness of the castle, the towers of which seemed to stretch for miles toward an unseen horizon. And though she could not see the many winding pathways and stairways, the heavy wooden doors, the tables set for forty, the long, lamplit halls, the four-poster beds, the wardrobes filled with silks and laces, the jewel-laden tables, the first sister knew these things existed within. The fifth sister played a game she often played at home. Starting near one of the walls of the courtyard, she walked deliberately, with her hands clasped earnestly behind her back, and followed a spiral pattern that started wide and very slowly narrowed. The fourth sister, squinting, tried to see into the many dark windows above her head, and imagined not only their interiors but also what might be visible of the surrounding country from their apertures. She did not wonder about the castle’s inhabitants. In fact, none of the sisters ventured in this direction, for they all knew that the castle was deserted, as their neighborhood had been deserted on this Saturday. The second sister measured the perimeter of the courtyard using her small outstretched hands, one over the other. And as she counted, she felt the texture of the wall and wondered at the close fit of the heterogeneous stones, which sat one atop and one adjacent to another without the slightest gap; she studied t
hem and hoped to take what knowledge she gained back to Father, who had been working on mending the garden wall. The middle sister, attracted by the only color in the place, visited the fruit tree, which bore a single ripe pomegranate on one of its lower branches. She helped Father tend the garden at home and knew this tree was thirsty, could tell from a distance, but confirmed it by putting her fingers in its soil. Eventually, all but the youngest gathered around the tree and spoke for the first time, their small high voices bouncing off the walls of the enclosed space, and traveling skyward. They forgot about the castle and took council over their concerns for the tree. Behind them, in another part of the courtyard, the fifth sister walked ever more deliberately, in ever tighter circles until it seemed that she was spinning in place. But soon she came to a stop, her small feet positioned atop a single stone. And just as deliberately as she had walked, she came down to her knees, then to her elbows and shuffled back in order to put her ear to that single stone. Beneath the stone: the murmur of running water.

  Without tools and without knowledge of a way back home to retrieve them, the sisters wondered how they would bring water to the parched tree. They sensed the water ran deeply and saw the roots of the tree lie in a single plane, confined in a shallow bed by stones on all five sides. They guessed that tree and water were not aware of their proximity—a few dozen feet—to one another. The stones covering the ground were heavy and their joints but thin lines; the sisters’ hands were small, their fingernails short. They were aware that they had arrived with nothing and would leave with nothing. Without Father’s tools or Mother’s knives or hairpins, without a telephone or pencil and paper, without books or the cat, the sisters had nothing but their words. And their voices were clear and the unblinking sun was stark and the stones would not budge. The water ran and the sister who held her ear to the ground gave testimony that it did not falter. The fruit tree, its leaves wilted, its roots wrinkled, stood upright and held on to its single pomegranate. And the sisters came together. And an alliance was forged. And it was agreed by all that time would stand still, though the sisters might age, until a solution was found. Without picks or spades, ropes or pulleys, the sisters would find a way to bring the water to the tree’s roots.