Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  And time has stood still. And the sisters have remained in the courtyard even as they have returned home. And even after Mother and Father have returned home, and the neighbors have put tired heads to soft pillows, the sisters still muse, purse their lips, twist their brows in both lands, and hold hard to their resolution. Though the earth spins and the days fold one into another, though the girls, like spires, rise in height, leave the house, the yard, to study or roam or marry, the pact to rescue the pomegranate tree stands. Through time, the sisters curl and open in bed and at twilight, they bend and tug, they release and gather, they gesture and sing to charm the sun to shift the stones to open a path through which the water might course to the tree.

  old woman

  The old woman walks to the market. She is following their proscriptions: she is covered head to toe; when she speaks, she speaks softly, briefly; she walks with someone of the male gender—her small grandson. He carries her empty shopping bags for her over his shoulder. He kicks the stones that come before his feet. She keeps hold of his small hand, tries to steady his speed, and steady her gait beneath the enveloping garment; her tattered shoes peep out from underneath its hem as she walks. At the intersection of two narrow streets, she meets with the roving men of god who see her white shoes and are alarmed by her impudence, by her flagrant disregard for their rules, and the desecration of their flag. They grab the small boy from behind her and push the old woman to the ground. They pull off her shoes and beat her with them; they whack and kick her ankles, her shins, her back, and her arms. She is a small heap beneath the garment; they lift it and see she is an old woman. “Granny, you should know better!” The oldest of the men steps over her unmoving form. The two younger kick her again in her ribs, her spine. “Take the old mother home!” they yell. “Teach her modesty.” The beaten woman lies in the street as the men move on to continue their rounds and others cautiously pass and regard her from a distance. A young woman, walking alongside her brother, leaves him to run over and draw the voluminous garment over the woman’s legs and feet to cover her, then catches up with her brother again. Unmoving, the old woman lies there until her grandson returns with a neighbor, who lifts her, sets her down in his cart and tows her home.

  celerity

  So our earth reels. So our galaxy hurtles through the vast deep. So.

  ghosts

  The sisters are not unfamiliar with ghosts. They were taught and learned early that the world they inhabit is not theirs alone. Mother, who was raised in a land where the living fill all the indoor spaces, the courtyard and the garden spaces, the street and the market spaces, and who now raises her own brood of five in a small house that is rarely silent or empty, Mother has met several ghosts in the few solitary moments of her bustling life, and heard tales of many, many others from the living who were raised and walked alongside her. Mother, who might write a natural history of spirits were she inclined, recalls them by name, type, and origin. Her native taxonomy includes not only the specter but the spectator as well; she lists sightings and encounters by: year,your grandmother was pregnant with your aunt R——; time of day, on her way home from the bread maker’s; specter, Sheeshak, who sits in the tree, long hair, long nails, red eyes, envy; location, in the wood behind the house; and effect upon the spectator, she gave birth two months too early to a fragile and birthmarked son. If Father does not speak of ghosts, it is not for lack of belief; he simply is not one for stories. But the sole time he has mentioned his own father, it was not the man he described, but his spirit, who continued to walk and work the fields, to converse with the goats, the sheep, the roosters of his farm long after his natural death.

  The sisters love to read tales of terror by candlelight or flashlight, and to watch horror films alongside Mother into the early hours of a Saturday morning. But they know that true ghosts are not the wispy, pale things or the lurking, shadowy things that haunt the hallways and attics of old houses in the books and films they relish. The sisters know that ghosts are what the living carry within themselves their whole lives through. Ghosts do not hide in closets or beneath beds, though the sisters have checked and checked again. Ghosts are housed within the living, in the cavities of the skull and chest. The halls they walk are the passageways of breath; the doors they rattle are the tongues of the living. Their voices echo within the head, their torment bursts within the heart. And the dead glimmer within the living, as do jewels in the cavities of the earth; though no light reaches them there, they glimmer.

  Did the sisters themselves not let the dead in? Did they not collect them even as they gathered memories and visions, as other children collect flowers into a basket? Did the girls not utter, with open arms and bowed heads: come, I will give you a place though this world may not; I will lend you a warm bed and shelter from the elements; you may use my own eyes as windows through which you might, if you please, look out on the world that has relinquished you. And did the dead not take up this offer? Homeless, they had nowhere to go. They accepted politely, wiping their feet before entering, with hearts heavy and eyes dazed. And once inside, did they not tint the windows of the girls’ eyes with a myriad of hues: with their crimson blood, which, continuing to spill, saturated the cells, painted the cheeks, and filled the small frames of the welcoming girls; with the hazy or the crisp blues of their unfulfilled dreams; with the green of their unharvested fields. Did the dead not shift the sisters’ gaze and focus it on yet more suffering outside? And when the sisters shivered, was it they or the dead that yearned for the sun? When they bit into a mulberry, who savored the familiar sweetness? Whose hands stroked the warm grass? Whose dreams moved the sisters’ eyes behind their curtains at night?

  The dead litter the faces of the earth. The sisters have collected and house many, mostly men and boys, mostly the casualties of the war they themselves just escaped. And their tenants, having sharpened the girls’ ears, attune them now to the voices of the women they’ve left behind: wives, brides, mothers and sisters and daughters. Though they live half an earth’s distance away, the women speak and the sisters listen. Those left behind whisper, pray, moan, and anguish day and night through. The wives, mothers, and daughters speak the names of the dead and call out to them. And the sisters who’ve grown accustomed to these voices respond in tones and with words not their own. The sisters nod and smile. They feel their hearts within their chests flutter or fix, and their breath catch or release in great sighs. Their bodies stiffen. The palms of their hands moisten. And they cry. Though no wound originates in them, the sisters cry. And the wounds not their own pain them still and perhaps with greater acuity, for their sources are unfathomable, lie elsewhere, in a ditch or in a tree, or left to the birds on a mountainside.

  It seems that war was written into the pages of the family’s history long ago. Did the garden oracle in the new land not foretell of the war years before the family arrived in the country to water that thorny plant’s roots and take in the scent of its dark flowers? Was it not war, another, earlier war, that lifted the girls’ grandparents from their beloved lands and placed them in strange cities and on unfamiliar soil? And the sister who looks back, wonders: Why was I preserved while others were felled like the fields of corn on our uncle’s farm in late autumn? But who then lives and who is dead if the ghosts that haunt the world reside within us who walk the earth and breathe its air? Did I strike a bargain with the dead? If so, when, why, and what for? How will I fulfill my end, and when I have, will it come as a release or a death repeated? Will I recognize the sound of my own voice in an empty house once they have departed?

  And the sister who accepts the dead within her and knows their presence, as she knows and accepts the birthmark on her forearm, says: It is me, it is of me, it is a simple fact of my life. And those I carry around are as much a part of me as is this birthmark, and they move and shift within me even as this birthmark, apparently motionless, moves up my arm, ever so slightly, across the unfolding days of my life. And the unfolding, is it not also only apparent? In
reality, is it not a folding in, a forever turning inward into the very center of existence? Is life not like the many-armed galaxy, which spirals in even as it spirals out?

  And those who fell, who were mowed down by that monster-machine that is war, those whose natural lives did not unfurl as the fern’s green fiddlehead unfurls, did their spirits at the moment of death not snap inward, spiral back toward center as do the dry arms of the geranium’s seedpod at the moment of dispersal? And the sister who tends the garden alongside Father asks: From the beginning, did I not collect the dead as one collects seeds that have fallen to the earth? And later, did I not swallow them and give them a place to root and sprout within me, into my own flesh and, further, did I not irrigate the fields in which they grew with my own blood?

  And the sister who feels with the dead, wonders: When I curl up, breathless, from pain or horror, when I can no longer bear to keep the windows that are my eyes open, am I mimicking the same automatic action/reaction as did they whose lives were violently, suddenly extinguished? Will I forever cave inward, chasing the death that should have been mine too?

  And the sister who blesses the dead, wants to know: Are we not all forever fleeing, forever chasing the gaping mouth, the bottomless well, the black hole at whose edge our feet are permanently strapped, as we furl and unfurl, live and die, receive the dead and honor the dead, collect the flowers and scatter the flowers?

  I

  The interior. It is in the internal that this story was born and there that it took on its form. It follows the laws of that place, where everything happens simultaneously, and an entire childhood spans a single day. The logic of the interior is not the logic of the temporal. The vast interior takes all that happens externally into itself over many of our days, our years. It folds our hours, our gesticulations, our utterances in on themselves, again, then over and again, to draw out another tale entirely. What I tell you is not the story of my childhood as it occurred neatly, chronologically, but of my childhood as I experienced it internally. It is in the silence and dark of the interior that story is able to ferment, to burn off excesses, to distill down to its essence. In the great internal sea where story seethes and writhes in perfect darkness, new tales are born, unknown to the one dreaming them, until they are ready to be drawn up, as if from a well. That is in fact how this book was written, its tales pulled up by rope and pulley, bucket after bucket over the many days and recent years of my life. And I see them now before me, the tales that do and do not tell of my childhood. I have dreamed them often. And I know that it is in dreaming nightly, in drawing up and remembering regularly, that I have learned to fall in line with the laws of the interior.

  It is repetition that aligns us: the cycling of days, of deeds and gestures, of a single dress passed down f r o m      s i s t e r t o        s i s t e r t o       s i s t e r  , of one home left for another, of one tree welcoming the ghost of a former, of the heart’s measure that clenches and releases, of the breath’s rhythm that fills then falls. See  the  rising  and  falling  of  breath, and of the head as it looks up to the sky then down at the earth, and of the body in the morning and into bed at night, and of water into the air then onto the land. See the turning of the seasons, one into and out of another, of summer into fall, and spring out of winter, of man into woman, and child out of mother, again and again repeated over the many generations. It is repetition, do you not see, which aligns us with the internal. It is incantation, which stirs the cauldron and burns off the excesses to make what is nebulous formful.

  My story was born and brewed in the internal; it will not follow the form or the logic of one shaped in the external. I cannot give you the arc you desire; if you seek biography, look elsewhere. It is a dream I offer you.

  the pond

  There was a small pond on Father’s family farm. Though the farm was boundless and teeming with delights for eyes, hands, ears, nose, and mouth, it was the pond which often drew one or another sister to its edges. The small pool occupied a peculiar space on the farm. Here, nothing grew but a slender small tree that made a graceless arc over the pond in which it barely forged a reflection. It was a spindly tree, a tree perhaps long dead (for it never bore a leaf), a tree perhaps not a tree but a root misguided, a tree little taller than the sisters who carefully walked around and squatted at the pond’s edge in an attempt to fathom its depths or find their own images in its cloudy surface. The pond was in a barren dusty space: past the courtyard where Father’s sister baked bread every dawn in her clay oven; between the two fruit orchards, which took turns bearing their bounty through the seasons; many yards’ distance from where the beet and cotton fields began; far from the little brook that ran the length of the farm. It was a murky and still pond. Its diameter, which the chickens could easily flutter over when given chase, was no greater than two cow lengths. Its depths were unknown and unknowable—for the girls had driven in reeds and branches of varying lengths and never sensed a bottom. One might fall into this pond and never come up again. It was narrow and deep and quietly swallowed up whatever slipped or was plopped into it. One might fall in and come up somewhere entirely different, somewhere different and a long distance away. If not careful, a sister might slip along its muddy edge, fall into the pond and rise up elsewhere, might rise up a fish or a frog in another land under a different sky. In this other land, a sister might sprout wings to take flight, or a powerful tail to hang by. The new skin, the new visage, the new sky might be green or speckled. A vigorous and many-limbed old tree bent over the pond where the sister comes up in another land might house a witch. Or a peacock. Or a house of glass and mirrors might sit near the edge of the pond in the alternate land. A blue boy, many times reflected, might glide through and disappear in the rooms of this glass house and might finally open the front door and signal an invitation to the traveling sister. All was possible beneath the murky surface that barely yielded a reflection of the sisters’ images. And it was this, this delightful and frightful unknowing, that brought the sisters to the pond’s edge again and again on their visits to the farm. This that called them out from the blooming quince orchard, that lured them away from the friendly donkey, that made them forget the ripening strawberries on the brook’s banks.

  the letters of the alphabet

  From a distance, we appear not unlike the well-ordered rings around the girth of a giant planet. Come nearer, and you will recognize us as the remnants of dead stars caught in the gravitational pull of a persuasive and beautiful dirge, swooning.

  alchemists

  And the girls were master transformers, making the world over again for themselves and for one another. They shaped and converted the materials about them into objects of function and wonder. They sewed handbags or headbands, molded clay into miniature trees or teapots, shaped dough into rings or braids, fixed flowers to skirts or hair, altered the color of their eyes to match those of the sea or the schoolbus. They knit scarves many hundreds of feet in length with bits of yarn of various diameters, colors, and textures collected over the months and the years to keep all the cats in the neighborhood warm in winter. They constructed worlds within worlds within shoeboxes that were then placed on cabinets or desks or in the branches of the grandfather tree just so, to catch the sun just so, to lengthen the day by minutes or hours or to push the clock forward by entire seasons inside the shoebox. On random sheets of paper, they painted rivers against mountains against clouds against a keen azure sky, and placed a giant ant on the mountainside and a girl on a bicycle crossing a bridge over the roiling river to reach her beloved cat on the other side.

  Birthdays were holidays observed by all and the making of gifts for the one growing a year older was a ritual that most in the family performed, and with deep devotion, with set avid intention. This ritual commenced days or weeks or sometimes months in advance of a birthday. The gift-making-sister would find the rare unoccupied space in a bedroom
or the garage or the treehouse and put up a sign to keep the others out. She brought to her workshop the materials she had collected and hoarded behind dressers or between the pages of her schoolbooks. She’d fidget and fold her limbs and find her place on the floor, always the floor, and sometimes necessarily against the door to keep out spying intruders. Sitting among her materials, she’d set to. She’d gather her focus and work with her small, articulate hands to bring to life the gift she had for eons envisaged in the depths of her mind for the birthday-sister. And the making and the transforming, as all other things in the home, was done in earnest, with the brow twisted and the teeth clamped about the bottom lip. The making was in earnest but the giving on the special day was done with modesty or nonchalance. The sister who had toiled over the gift did not boast or push but waited, nonetheless, expectantly for her present to be opened, to be cooed and delighted over, and to finally release its spell, the charm she had worked into it with her imagination and her fingers. And when thanked, she would respond, “It is nothing. It is nothing, of course.”