Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  immovable

  And the letters of the alphabet, the movable type—immovable in their mission—combine and recombine, turn and click, circle and search untiringly after meaning, after sense.

  before, so

  And Father, squatting, swaying, harvesting leek and basil in the

  garden at dusk for Mother’s dinner, says:

  Before the war, life was simple.

  The earth was giving, it was bountiful.

  The farm produced beets and melons, corn and cotton.

  We carried the beets in two hands, they were as large as our heads.

  Watermelons ballooned before our eyes, until the earth cratered

  under their weight, until they split.

  Before the curse, life was sweet. It was simple.

  Before the curse, life was simple and blessed.

  The sky was blessed; it poured rain.

  The earth was blessed; it produced bounties.

  Our lives were blessed, simple, before the war.

  P

  Plants, the great chroniclers of human history. They gather our annals diligently with root and leaf, store them in rings, blades, flower, and fruit, and pass them on, without review or censure, neatly packaged in seed and pollen. The voiceless, immobile plants see without eyes, listen without ears, speak without tongues, and travel far and wide without feet. The upright tulip, the papery poppy, and the tart crisp apple, like silent ambassadors of their native land, spread the history of that deep ancient land across the globe. And who is not transported in their presence? Whosoever reads the chronicles of the planet’s flora, backward from the present, will discover the old places, witness the early events, and glimpse answers to the many questions. The farmer’s practicality and good sense, the king’s ardent desire for riches and novelties, the investigations of the meddling scientist with his thin blade, the blunders of the explorer on his great ship, and the lover’s fondness for expression are all collected in the earth’s vegetable libraries. Read the flora, and you will know the history of the roads and the trades, the wars and the famines. Hold the firm ripe fruit in your fist and sense the voyager’s lust, the conqueror’s appetite. Gaze long into the center of a flower and you may come to know the suffering and the ecstacy, and spontaneously recite the poetry, of lovers and saints. And all this the photosynthetic historians accomplish without aim or intention; they simply occupy the same space in the same time with the human species. But every so often, the garden rose, having listened much to, and lived long with, the one who tends it, picks up the ways of its caretaker, and having come to understand her needs, it desires to return the tenderness the little gardener has always shown it. Knowing that history alone will not sate her, the blossom speaks back to its caretaker in her own tongue. Listen, the rose says, I remember your people. Let  me  tell  you  a  story.

  sleep—the image-maker

  She was not shy, not proud. If she wished it, she could have asked openly and outright: “and what happened next,” or “who was she to us” or “but where was Father that day?” Instead, she, who was the youngest, listened and took in all of their words, watched her many sisters and mimicked their many faces and guises, their dress and their walk. She had questions, she yearned to know and to grasp, but she held back, afraid to give herself away, afraid that in their eyes and in her own she would become superfluous, an unnecessary cog in the story-making machine that was her family. It was common for them to say to her: “but you were only a baby” or “it was before your time” or “how you used to cry in Mother’s arms.” She knew she was of them and had touched, if not with the soles of her feet, then with the palms of her hands and her soft knees, that other land; had taken in the perfume and smoke of that previous life with nostrils that were her own; had tasted the honey and dust with her moving, though still inarticulate, tongue. By day, she watched and gathered, absorbed all that was theirs because, by birthright, it was hers too. She did this not with greed or envy but with care, cutting out one image at a time, one phrase, one sound, placing it in this pile or that, to tell this or that story, in a style befitting each, and marking them with labels: in-the-beginning, good, fearsome, brave, happy, the-end. She was watchful for their memories muted and memories vivid, their tales true and imaginary, their many emotions hidden or volatile, and nightly stitched every emotion, memory, and word into a moving-picture reel that was all her own.

  The family-machine that roared by day reached a pitch before the evening meal as Mother and the older girls set to, to prepare the night’s dishes. And she, the youngest: was not trusted with a knife; did not know the difference between a pitcher and a bottle; could not help it if her hands were too small to carry a platter of hot baked rice from the kitchen to the table; could not help it if the plates, the cups were stored in cabinets beyond her reach. But she chased the cat out of the kitchen, swatted away the flies that landed then landed again on the same fork, and when all was ready, she ran out to call Father in from the garage. The whir that moved above her head and within her chest settled after the sun did, after the evening meal was eaten, dishes were washed, and books shut for the night. It was the brewing of tea, the pouring of tea, the intermittent nibbling of sweets, and the mesmeric sipping of bottomless cups of tea that settled all and invited the cat back into the house. Then the four older sisters, tired and undone, withdrew into one bedroom or the other. But she, the youngest, remained and turned her face to Mother, that warm sun, who at night, after a long day’s toil, after Father and the older girls had gone to bed, emitted a warm glow, cast her light, now soft, on all that surrounded her, on coffee table and couch cushions, on lampshade and wall. In this light and by the blue light of the television set, the sister who would go to bed late stayed up to watch old films with Mother. Spellbound, she took in the songs, the dance, the dramatic sighs and glances, the swordplay and the airplane crashes. She did not look away when arms were severed or blood ran down a flight of stairs or vampires bared pointed teeth. She took this in as she did all else; she was no younger than any of the others. It was here she daily came into her own, in Mother’s company, sharing Mother’s love for the form that would open and close worlds entire in the space of two hours.

  Later, long after the mechanical sounds of her family’s doings and undoings had quieted, and even Mother’s light had diminished, she made her small way to her bunk bed, content that she had not missed a thing and had recorded all, but not ready yet to leave the world of the movies. Though she slept warm, she drew the covers over her head and drew down her eyelids. Onto that soft, dark curtain she projected the day’s various articles of interest and fell asleep to the soft whir of her own movie-machine: here was a face, still and nameless, yet vivid and familiar, cut out from a handtinted photograph found in the family’s photo album; and here Old Man Thunder, who plucked reckless red-garbed children from the city’s streets and carried them away into storm clouds—her older sisters had witnessed many an abduction and disappearance of children into the dark, rumbling, slow-moving thunderclouds in the first country; on their heels, Father, with long hair and a single earring in his right ear, riding on the back of a giant and ferocious bear through furrowed fields of rubies on golden stalks; next on the screen, a mountain pass forever covered in snow and in danger of avalanche—this she’d collected from Mother’s own lips, from the oft-repeated story of their red car stopped at the snow-blocked mouth of the forty-mile-long tunnel; and at the other end of the tunnel: a tall green glass filled with a wintertime treat of snow, milk, and sugar from the first life, which the eldest sister had tried and tried again to recreate, with little success, in the land of the sun, using refrigerator ice and a dull pick.

  In her sleep, the sister who would cast shadows brought together image and sound in order to give new life to an inaccessible past, in order to give gesture to the static limbs, and expression to the fixed gazes, she’d memorized in the family’s photographs. She switched out the hero of one tale for another, added f
lowers where before there was only a wasteland, gathering tulips from here, pushing them down there, no matter the dryness of the earth, no matter the sun hidden behind a dark smoke. She recalled stories of their uncle’s farm: if cotton grew there, why not here, along the fence; if cows and roosters roamed freely there, why not here alongside the cat, up and down the sidewalk? In this way, she built a world of mismatched faces and voices, memories and facts. In her world, the war too needed a face, a voice, and a reason. War was a red, scaly, many-horned, sixty-foot-tall creature. In search of home, abandoned and hungry, it walked and shook the earth with its angry roar and step, knocking over power lines, flattening cars and playgrounds, devouring people and trees as it went, unaware of its size or its power. In her cinema world, it was not the vampire alone who hid by day and roamed by night in search of fresh blood; she’d heard of others in the tales Mother whispered to guests or the older sisters, and she placed those villains here now, where she knew they belonged. Here, her sisters were the heroines who quenched War’s thirst with snowy milkshakes or pierced the vampire’s heart with hammer and nails from Father’s toolbox. In this world of cast shadows, the warm, smiling woman standing next to Mother in the old photograph, with headscarf and flowing, rose-covered skirts became the school lunch lady who filled her plate with sweets alone. In her world of shadow play, cities went up and went down, heroes appeared and disappeared, goats took flight on immense diaphanous wings, stars circled around Mother’s head as she gathered her children around her, holding them to her trunk with her many leafy limbs while Father, now a small bird, sang to them the old folk songs as he flew overhead, and her sisters changed form continuously, shifting from rocking horse to swordsman, from airplane pilot to whale. And she herself sat back in the audience, directing even as she winced or laughed, answering for herself the questions she would not ask the others by day: “and what happened next,” or “who was she to us” or “but where was Father that day?”

  revolution

  Outside, the air is still and the sky clear. The sister who swings by night lets her head loll back and with her bare feet touches alternately the dewy grass and the tree’s tender leaves. The sturdy limb of the great tree bobs but does not creak. The neighbors turn in their beds. The sister who has wiped the kitchen counters, swept the floor, washed and dried the last dish, steps outside and leans against the laundry room door to take in the cool air. And though it is still below, the stars above are turbulent. There are two sisters and two cats in the garden tonight. The cat, the one newly arrived, is introducing itself; it rubs itself against the tired sister’s calves, turns, steps over her feet, then pushes into her ankles, her calves again. The other, the one departing, leaves its hiding place beneath the rosebushes and, with something small and stillstirring clamped between its jaws, the cat lifts into the sky. Drawing crumbs of soil and a stream of crushed rose petals in its wake, it rises above rooftops and telephone wires, glides over trees broad and trees slender. High above the sisters’ heads, the cat sails gracefully through the windy stars.

  Mother, ill

  And Mother, strong like a mountain, is underneath ill. The sisters have heard her tell of her five pregnancies. Of how she carried on, while she carried, until the last moment: uncomplaining, preparing throughout, and at every moment primed. And in those last moments in the house, after she had swept the floors, ironed Father’s suit, curled her own hair, packed a suitcase, cooked a feast, fed the guests, and set out their tea, she snuck out with Father to the hospital to deliver a daughter. She labored, silently and cooly, for minutes or hours or days, and each time returned home with her hair pinned smooth and high, her eyes outlined and her cheeks rouged, holding in her arms a glowing baby neatly wrapped, not crying.

  So in the new land, Mother continues to bear her pain undetected until the last moment, and the girls come home from school in the afternoon to find her absent and Father fussing over the small things—the running of the house, the cooking of dinner, the how-to’s and how-so’s, which the girls understand better than he, who knows garage and garden but not house or kitchen. But they let him run on in place of Mother, see him try to exhaust his frantic worry through his lists and his instructions, and see him to the door, then to the car to return to the hospital to speak to the nurses, the doctors.

  And Mother’s internal mechanics falter, one after another each year. She is young, tall, and strong, but within, she falters. And the doctors chase the illnesses from one anatomical system to another, removing, adjusting, and adding as they go, prescribing the many medications and suggesting the rest that she cannot and will not take. Mother herself does not guess that what ails her is the loss of life elsewhere. Her internal landscape of bones, organs, blood, and tissue is connected still to her birthplace. And war rages and pillages in both lands. Mother loses a nephew and simultaneously loses her gallbladder. When her cousin, raised from birth alongside her—suckled alongside her on her mother’s other breast, on long winter nights enchanted alongside her by the same fairy tales and family legends, nightly set down to sleep and dream alongside her beneath the same quilt—is gunned down in front of her young children, Mother clutches at her heart, which clenches and sputters inside her. Her niece’s young husband is taken alive and shortly after returned dead, so Mother miscarries. Her first brother is taken and tortured and she tries to shelter and keep him, as a mountain shelters its gemstones, painfully, within her kidneys. Her stifled moans wake and collect the girls about her bed in the middle hours of the night. They become accustomed to seeing their mother stand tall by day and bent over with pain on the edge of her bed at night. Her glands and her feet swell and shrink; her blood rages like fire or it courses like honey; her heart pauses and starts again; her bones splinter; her nerves pinch; her lungs spasm. And she does not allow anyone to see this, not by day, and not by choice in the single-lamp-lit hours of the night. She is strong and denies the war, its heat, its hunger. She has five small girls to care for, a husband whose life she has barely escaped with, and siblings trapped in the first land who look to her as to morning’s first light, as a singular hope in a distant sky. Mother is not ill, will not say she is ill; her surfaces are still, they are solid.

  Perhaps the doctors do not know what they look for when they chase the pains and diseases inside Mother. Perhaps the true cause of Mother’s ailments is the piece of lead she accidentally swallowed when she was a little girl. Mother scolds her daughters when she finds them lost in thought, over their books, chewing on their pencils. It was the same daydreaming rumination at her own school desk that caused Mother-the-girl to snap the point of her pencil with her busy teeth and inadvertently swallow the sharp lead. She had felt its tip, like a minuscule scalpel, score the back of her throat as she swallowed. Perhaps it is this piece of pencil lead that has traveled through her, nicking veins and arteries, slicing organs, severing nerves, and, over the years, writing a tale of terror within her steady frame.

  loss

  Father says,

  This is life.

  This coming, this going.

  We are born, we die.

  the lodger

  The neighborhood, empty for three years, has filled again in recent weeks, house by house, with its former residents. But the families returning find they are not the sole inhabitants of the streets and the homes that were pillaged, occupied, then deserted as the war rolled on. There are others who dwell here now, who have nowhere to go, who cannot be turned out. And this house, near the base of the hill, is no different from the ones farther up; it hosts its own lodger. He visits nightly. Though this is not his birth-house or the land of his forebears, he comes through nightly.

  They found his body in the next-door neighbor’s well. They pulled him out, still fresh, only a few weeks dead, a young man of eighteen or twenty, dressed in cotton shirt and trousers, wool vest, leather sandals on his swollen feet. He comes through nightly, enters and leaves the same room at the back end of the house. Through an interior wall, he enters the ro
om where the young woman sleeps, exits through the large window overlooking the yard, the grape arbor.