Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  While the dreamer, that other great basin of brine, sleeping in the first bedroom, cut down bramble and vine with her glass axe to find a way into the heart of the forest where the jewelmouth giant lived, the sister who would forget slept a breathless sleep. In the second bedroom, the second sister lay immobile, unknowing, in the bed that was not a bunk bed. Above her, the window that would not shut let in the night air: a constant and soft sigh, a cool pressure across the girl’s cheek. Carried in on this current: a cat’s cry or the screech of tires or the scent of geraniums. Carried away: her burdens and memories, her dreams and her nightmares.

  the twin stars

  And so fortune-misfortune, circling about one another across the cosmos, smiled upon this family.

  Father, ill

  Father is healthy, always moving, making, doing: productive. In body, he is at once the farmer, sinewy and strong, and the engineer, precise and mechanical. The two reside in his small frame, which never pauses, is never idle, always efficient. And Father is sick but the single time. He falls ill after receiving the rare and precious communication from the first country. This time, it is not a telephone ring in the late hours of the night, stark and demanding, but a package, quiet and humble, left in the mailbox by the mailman in the bright middle of the day. It is a small parcel containing an audio cassette, a recording made by Father’s sister, who does not read or write, who tends a farm, looks after chickens, goats, and sheep, plants seeds and harvests vegetables and fruits, bakes bread and cures meat, and lives in a small village many hours from an official post office. She speaks to him through the cassette player he keeps on his desk in his office in the garage. Speaks in the familiar sister voice, loving and soft, but still audible through the crackle of machine and distance. Her words unwind slowly with the spools of narrow tape. She blesses him, sends her love and blessings to his wife, to his five girls, and she tells him of the poor state of their crops, of unsold cotton and mildewed beets. Then faltering, crying, Father’s sister tells him about her most recent loss, her third child, and her last child of five dead in a handful of years, this son cut in two, cleanly. This is not her first recording, and she does not want to deliver more such news, yet she must; she does not know when and if she will see her brother again: the war rumbles on. Her soft familiar voice, the telling, and the listening make Father ill. He remains in his garage-office through dinner, through tea, then makes his way directly to his bedroom. He calls his girls to him, calls them away from the television, from the women modeling evening gowns in the beauty pageant. He asks Mother to bring them to his bedside where he lies beneath the covers, shrunken, desperate. And Father, who does not cry, who speaks few words, tells them each he loves them, chokes and whimpers as he blesses them, speaks to his daughters as if for the final time, then turns and disappears beneath the blankets. Mother sends the girls back to the television, to their books, and does not question Father the next morning when he rises at the usual hour to dress, and to leave for work on time.

  suit

  He is young. He wears a suit. Is proud to do so. He walks the village roads proudly to the main street where he is employed at the repair shop to fix radios, clocks, and watches. He is a farmer’s son but keeps his forearms level, his elbows against his ribs, and his shoulders drawn back and down, even when he is bent over his work. His wrists are agile and steady. His fingers are adept at turning screws, uncoiling springs, connecting wires, and adjusting gears, tubes, circuits, wheels, and weights. His eyes are sharp, and made sharper by the loupe he keeps in his pocket. His ears pick up sounds faint and sounds amiss in the broken instruments before him. He understands gravity and temperature and works his materials accordingly to achieve precision. He loves accuracy and dresses smartly. But what is fashionable in the city is not appropriate in the village. Moreover, in wartime, propriety resides more with power than with custom. The men who have appeared recently to oversee village affairs tell him it is indecent to wear a suit, to emulate the ways of the godless enemy who occupy the cities and infect the people. The dress suit he wears is not new, was purchased from a friend in a neighboring town, and fits tightly across his shoulders. His neckties were cut and sewn by his mother, who used the spare scraps of fabric to finish a quilt for her granddaughter. And the village leaders, the new men of god who have recently appeared, warn him a second time about his dress. But he is young and cheerful and proudly walks the same village roads to and from work that they sternly walk to keep order and keep an eye on the prideful. Coming home in the evening, the repairman is stopped by two men and knocked to the ground onto his hands and knees to be made an example of. The first man turns and cinches the fallen man’s tie around his neck and uses it and his own knee braced between the repairman’s shoulder blades to keep his clean-shaven head steady. The one wielding the sword lifts his arms high above his head and relies on the strength and heft of those arms to bring the blade down swiftly, to cut the young man’s head off cleanly with a single blow. They know where he lives and know his family; they drag his body over the dusty earth and drop it in middle of the road in front of his house. They toss his head over the wall, into the courtyard where his mother, rising early, will feed the chickens and bake the morning bread.

  loss

  And Mother says, It is not that they have passed, but that their simple innocent lives were taken, senselessly. The legacy they leave is one of futility, of nothing where there should have been something, of a small void where a modest life might have been lived fully. A small void left by an insensate war that suctioned each life up as a vacuum suctions up dust. If you hold up to the sky the fabric that was once our land, Mother says, you will see these apertures and you will know that our dead dot our land as the stars dot the sky: endlessly, mutely.

  O

  O.  The  character  that  is  and  is  not.

  O.  The  form  that  is  both  letter  and  number, and must be, for the duty it performs is one in the two lands, and is vital to both language and mathematics.

  O. The only form. The single One. The one that encompasses all others. It  harbors  nothing  and  all,  simultaneously.  It  calls  and  it  hears.  It  is  blind  and  observes  perfectly.

  O. It is the wail. The eardrum. The lens. The bullet hole. It is the opening. The first and the ultimate one.

  O. The great Open. Ocean. See it. It goes on and on and on. And its depths! What dazzling creatures reside there. Hear  it.  It  calls.  O,  Oh!,  oh…  And  the  stories  therein…

  Once    upon    a    time, there was a family: a mother, a father, five girls, a cat, a tree. Nearby were neighbors and grocers and friends, guests and ghosts, soldiers with rifles and peddlers of melons, drivers of school buses, of taxis, of tanks and bound bodies, teachers and butchers of cows, of women and children, launderers of dreams, of uniforms, of news, hairdressers and deliverymen, fixers and farmers.

  No,  there  are  not  so  many  characters.  I  have  strayed  again.  There  is  the  single  ONE. Do not all books contain the single character and use their many pages like mirrors to reflect and divide her so that she is at once whole and all of her many parts, so that you see her simultaneously from all sides, front and back, afore and after, from above and below, within and without? And is a book itself not a mirror? My dearest reader, be still a moment. Focus. Look intently. Who    looks    back    at    you?

  unsleep—the somnambulist

  The house, always a different house in a new neighborhood, never had more than three bedrooms. The five sisters shared two between them. The first room, with two twin beds, lodged two sisters, while the second room, with a twin and a bunk, took in three but not always the same three so that the legs that climbed the ladder to the
top bunk were not always the same pair that climbed down in the morning. In some seasons, in the second bedroom, in the upper bunk, beneath a hand-colored picture of a seascape, lay the somnambulist. She, like the dreamer, searched, but only at night and not in the dream realm. To prepare for bed, she followed all of the customary rituals of face-washing, hair-combing, teeth-brushing. In fact, she was more fastidious than the other sisters, picking up all of her toys and organizing her books and pens before settling in for the night. She always changed out of her day clothes and into her nightgown and never forgot to kiss Mother and Father goodnight as the others too often did. When she climbed up the ladder to her top bunk and slid beneath her neatly tucked linens, she did so with ceremony, as if climbing into a carriage, as if displeased with the state of the disordered room beneath her, as if only too eager to escape that unenlightened province.

  Unlike the insomniac lying awake in the first bedroom, the sleepwalker did in fact fall asleep once she crossed her arms over her chest and dropped her heavy lids over her tired, day-filled eyes. After two or three hours, these same lids, now weightless and unburdened, lifted again, and the eyes that stared out reflected lights that did not originate in the dark room. The sister who’d climbed up to the top bunk climbed down again, with as much ceremony, using the same diminutive, tight, and pretty movements as before. And now, she smiled and bowed; she raised the hem of her sleeping gown with the tips of her fingers; she glided across the bedroom and through the door, mostly in silence, but sometimes with a giggle or a verve of step that softly filled the quiet house in the midmost hours of the night. And the sister who could not sleep, taking these sounds for ones in her own mind, incorporated them into her own schoolyard reveries, unaware that another moved and shifted within the house.

  The somnambulist searched nightly. She had left her birth country too young to remember faces, names, or places, or to tell stories of that former life to her now-friends by day; her memories were half-formed and unfamiliar, not her own. Unsure, she let them go and lived in the now-world, unconvinced that there ever had been another country, a former life, a host of relatives, endless mountains, a time when she ran freely and giddily like a child. And what was she now, small limbs and teeth forever coming in, bangs forever in her eyes? But at night, the need to fashion whole memories out of fragments half-woke her. What made her unsure and awkward by day gave her poise and purpose at night. The house, which was her home by day, became her empire at night and she walked through it as one sure of her mission in life. She walked about the house opening and shutting doors, lids, drawers, or envelopes in search of the missing halves of things. She was and was not dreaming. She fell into the space between the two states and, half awake, she moved through a silent house and a lonely world, part queen, part child.

  In the kitchen, she opened the door to the refrigerator and delicately pulled out a weighty plastic bag. Taking the bag to the living room, she sat on the edge of Mother’s flowerpot, crossing one leg over the other, prettily undoing the mouth of the bag to take and eat from it slices of cold wheat bread: the bread limp in her hand, her pinky finger poised in midair. She knew bread and knew its dense, chewy texture, its sweet, earthy flavor, its warmth, feel, and color, but could not find it in the bag she held, though she chewed through half a dozen slices. Unsatisfied but full, she placed the near-empty bag inside the washing machine. This sister searched for scents as she did for flavors, removing the cap from a tube of toothpaste to sniff and sniff and not find the scent of the spring flowers that refused to bloom in her night-world. She searched for the owners of voices lodged in the broom closet. She opened and shut her mouth to form the same words or names that fell from Mother’s lips so easily, but no sound left her own. She held the partial memories in her arms like the many limbs of broken dolls, but unable to find their missing pieces, she dropped them one by one even as she searched for memories: for the sunny afternoon in the green hills in that photograph that held her likeness but not her memory; for the voices and faces of the many relatives she heard tales of from Mother and the older sisters; for the dress which they told her had been her favorite for far too long and which, in the hurry to leave the country, had been left behind.

  She searched and came up with nothing but continued night after night to open and close, and open again the drawers, the bottles, the boxes that promised her their secrets and pledged to help her solve her many mysteries. She opened cupboards and brought out Mother’s china, one plate, one cup at a time to set a table in the dining room for twelve. And she sat at the head of the table and ate warm food from empty plates with half-formed guests, who, missing lips, tongues and teeth, could not partake of the meal she set before them, nor laugh at the jokes she told with so much spirit. On one occasion, the somnambulist donned a coat and boots and marched over to the hallway closet as though marching through a snowstorm to the outhouse and, once inside the closet, pulled down her underwear to pee in Father’s work shoes. On another night, she mistook the toilet for the trunk of a car and, opening its lid, dropped in a ball and a tennis racket, in preparation for a picnic with cousins and friends who never arrived or came nameless and faceless or with missing appendages, unable to catch the balls she threw or to smile for the camera that refused to take pictures of her play. Then sometimes in her search and in her play, the sleepwalker, opening a window, let in a music that was not hers and which she couldn’t even half-place because it traveled from so long ago. Yet somehow she knew the lyrics to the song, though it was sung in the first tongue and in the language of the poets, poets long gone, tilled under and asleep. And sitting by the window in the middle hours of the night, with wistful eyes, which reflected a distant blue sky and another sun, she sang out with her child-voice the lyrics to songs long forgotten by everyone but Mother. On these nights, Mother woke but did not rise or wake Father. She listened, with heart and lungs stilled, to her daughter’s unfaltering voice and felt the same sunlight on her skin, watched the same clouds cross the same blue sky and remembered her own childhood, its very scents, textures, and colors replete and palpable.

  outside, the wind

  Outside, a wind, moving from sea to mountain through the slumbering valley, rustles the leaves of the grandfather tree and he, as if aware, awake, respiring, releases his most restless leaves into the neighbor’s yard, where they spiral into a small mound against the sleeping dog’s side. The recently watered lawn now passes its moisture to the driving, parched air. The sky above, cloudless and moonless, casts shadows of trees, telephone poles, and power lines across lawn and roof with the light of the stars alone, and summer’s unripe grapes, hanging beneath the shadowy arbor, like many dull eyes, watch the living scene. Across the street, the wind/unwind of a tetherball around its pole attracts a dozen of the neighborhood’s cats, who, sitting around the base of the pole, follow the swinging yellow orb with the untired, unblinking eyes of the nocturnal.

  policeman

  The land is arid. Though many rivers lace through it, and the peaks of its mountains are winterlong covered in snow, it is an arid land. The young policeman is not on duty but he is called into service. He leaves home at dawn and travels for two days in the bed of a truck with the military men and the engineers. Their caravan is long and winds through the mountains and rumbles through the desert. They travel away from the city and travel morning to night with the sun. At dusk on the second day, the caravan stops, and the military men, the policemen, and the engineers step down from the beds of the uncovered trucks. The young policeman is handed a shovel and follows the military men, who follow the three engineers, who follow the two senior officers. They work by the beam of the trucks’ headlights; the policeman lowers his cap to cover his eyes. He wraps a handkerchief over his nose, his mouth; the trucks’ lights are strong and thick with the earth’s rising dust. The sky above is thick with a band of stars that the working men cannot see. They use shovels and picks to dig the great pit and are relieved to see the headlights and hear the engines of the constru
ction vehicles start up across from them. It is a large pit: it takes the three hundred men and the twelve excavating vehicles seven hours to dig it to the depths and dimensions dictated by the engineers and the officials who’ve tallied all but make adjustments still by the trucks’ bright beams. In the middle hours of the night, the policemen and the military men are given orders to unload the cargo trucks and to line up the prisoners who, bound at the wrists and ankles and blinded by the light in the desert, need the aid of the working men to walk to the pit’s edge. And the cavity fills quickly along its four sides. And the policeman is ordered to jump in, to drag, roll, pile, and evenly distribute the bound men’s bodies, which writhe and coil in the dark, dusty cavity. He and the other contractors work until the sun’s rising. He rests with them against the truck’s tires, drinks from the thermos that is passed down, and, in the pale light of the early morning, watches the working vehicles spread and flatten the desert earth again. And the vehicles’ engines do not dampen the voices of the buried men. And the policeman imagines he hears his own name called and called again through the earth. And he tells himself it is not so, the desert does not speak, its earth is level, has always been so, and the sun has risen to prove it, this is what I believe. He sits silent, immobile against the truck’s tire. But later, at home, in his dream, he does move, breathe, blink, put down the thermos, get on all fours, and crawl to the place where the earth speaks in a thousand voices. His wife wakes him, yet he returns to the dream. He rises for work, and at the end of the day returns to the dream. His hair grays, his shoulders stoop, his children grow and wed, and he heeds the voices and crawls to the pit in his dream.