Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  Though Father writes several letters in response to this one, he hears nothing back from his friend for another year. When he does, it is not from the first land, but a neighboring one. He braces himself for more good news. Here it is, Father’s name and address written in the hand he remembers well. And the envelope is dated only two weeks prior. Surely, his friend has removed himself and his wife from danger and left the first, the relentless, land for good. But still, Father turns over and pats the unopened letter, finding it difficult to face its contents, guessing somehow that it contains unwelcome news: the mind-splintering, heartrending news he has become accustomed to receiving and logging and hiding from his daughters. He has learned that good news does not have the endurance to travel such distances so quickly. It is bad news that flies like an arrow.

  His friend writes that he has finally left the smoldering land, the well-fed furnace, as he should have many years ago. He writes that he was released into his wife’s arms and, though his mother had passed and several family members had left the country while he was in prison, his return to his remaining family was more blissful than anything he had dreamed while locked away. He slept enfolded in the warm, sheltering arms of his still-new bride for two nights and followed her about the house like a devoted dove for two days. On the third day, his sister and brother-in-law invited the couple to their house for a meal. His brother-in-law prepared a lamb to celebrate and bless his release and had set up a grill on the veranda for the occasion. While the released man and his sister cut and dressed the vegetables in the kitchen, his wife carried the marinated lamb to the veranda. She was not gone a moment before the house trembled. Then wheezed. Then sighed. It was the neighbor’s house that was hit by the rocket. But something of the rocket, or of the neighbor’s house, or of the tree outside, or of the dusty cosmos above, landed on their veranda, on his wife and brother-in-law, killing both of them instantaneously, and soon burying them under inches of soot and debris. Her ears, her eyes, her nostrils, her mouth were filled with the stuff, he writes. I was eight years in prison, and 31 days with my bride.

  Father folds the letter, folds it again, runs his fingers over the creases, and stands up to walk to his office in the garage to file the letter away with the others.

  the immigrants

  And war in one place is like a wound in all. What are walls and borders, disparate tongues and dress, to the free flow of blood? When the throat releases the singular wail in each place wasted by the scourge, do not all ears, everywhere, perk up? Do not all bodies shiver at once?

  nocturnal

  The sleeping girl, lying on her back in bed, breathes deeply, rhythmically. The purring cat, crouching on the sleeper’s chest, careful not to tickle the sister with its whiskers, holds its nose to the sister’s nose and breathes deeply, eagerly. Every time the sleeper exhales, the cat draws into its own lungs the scent of the small bird that lives inside the girl’s lungs. Every time she inhales, the bird senses the crouching cat’s sulfurous purr. Its wings flutter against the sister’s ribcage and cause the girl to shift to her side in her sleep, and to dethrone the cat.

  the uninvited

  The innocent and the persecuted were not the only ones who crossed the borders on foot, in the beds of trucks, by car, by plane, through snow, through mud, in the dark, across desert, around mountain, over limitless expanses of sea to reach safety. So too did the persecutors, the torturers, and the butchers who infested the government, methodically shot the prisoners lined up, indiscriminately launched the rockets that killed multitudes of innocents, avidly cut, bled, and dismembered their own people, buried the dead and the living in single or mass graves, or left them to the animals and the elements out of laziness or hubris. These people also emigrated in search of the quiet life, in search of anonymity in the new land. They quickly found their countrymen and unabashedly slipped into their midst as members of the displaced people, attending their weddings and their funerals, arriving, uninvited or accompanied by acquaintances and relations, at the homes of the immigrant community’s members. And Mother in the new land, knowing well who her guests were, having heard the many stories, old and recent, would have to serve them tea, fill their plates, nod and smile as they praised her dishes and her daughters. And the former torturer would squeeze Mother’s shoulder or pat the back of her hand and call her “sister.” And the girls, unknowing, thinking, here is an old friend of Mother’s newly arrived, would force a smile or a laugh at his poorly delivered jokes, and would pour him another cup of tea or press on him another pastry. And it was so with the former rocket launcher/arms procurer/god’s devoted servant. And it was so with the former government official responsible for collecting, imprisoning, and sending to death thousands of innocent city dwellers.

  ears, eyes

  Yes, I was there. I heard, I saw,

  says the book.

  engraving

  Reader, look about you, at the trees, the grass, the flowers, the bright star overhead, the markers humble and ornate, the limitless sown horizon. Here rest the dead. Here the letters of the alphabet remember them.

  once upon a time

  Bood, nabood, a taxi driver.

  stillness

  The sisters did not know stillness. But day in and out it was what they longed for and worked to achieve. When a sister opened a gift, it was this that she looked for inside the box, though a doll or a wristwatch put a smile on her face. When another vacuumed the ancient red rugs on a Saturday morning, it was stillness she tried to gather as she sang in the first tongue. And when an older sister snatched her dress from one younger, it was time she was reprimanding, not her sister. But how were these tender and core years of their childhood not steady? Were not their fixed, gazing pupils backdrop to that ever-burgeoning dusty universe? Did the sisters not enjoy a periodic repose within the walls of their childhood, having fashioned their own timepiece, one separate from and, by design, at variance with the cosmic one, that churning light-consuming-dark-begetting-life apparatus? While four sisters slept, the one on duty slipped out of bed to unwind the great clock, to hold it to the hour of two—or three, should she have overslept—so that the others might lie motionless a few hours longer. Did they not escape, in those early years, the cosmic eye of the unruly universe through buttressing the four corners of their house with rope and stakes, and with furniture and their own slight bodies, doing all they could to hold down the house that shook and flapped like a tent in a tempest in the wilderness? The careening universe slowed neither for war nor the garden snail, but against it, with it as constant contrast to their lives of play, school, and slumber, did their childhood not take on at least a semblance of stillness?

  These, the central years of their childhood, when all sisters lived under one roof, were not steady because their blood roiled at all moments, in sleep and at school, within and without the walls of their home. These were not motionless years because their minds lurched forward one moment and suctioned backward the next, into adulthood and all of its mysteries, its callings, then backward into the womb, that country that had birthed them all and continued to birth others, now joylessly, hidden from the eyes of an incognizant world. They did not know stillness because the warmth of that womb, even the now-war-torn womb, continued to call. They did not know stillness because it called Father and Mother with yet greater insistence and the girls saw it in the adults’ faces, read it in their tea leaves. How many cups they emptied each night! What stories written there!

  If the universe was unruly, then so was the blood that pulsed in the chambers of their small hearts. And each girl was a universe unto herself, a churning loss-consuming-life-begetting-tenderness system. And did she not fold/unfold like the great spiral galaxy itself? If stillness could be achieved, the sweet-toothed sister might enjoy her daydream even as the popsicle melted down her forearm. If stillness could be achieved, two sisters walking side by side to school might hold hands for a long moment before pride broke in to part them. If time lingered, then perhaps some
of the photographs in the family’s albums might look plausible.

  The sisters knew honeysuckle and jasmine, but the scents of these flowers never belonged to them, were always of a different and a distant past, which belonged to Mother’s stories, or were locked away in Father’s far-off gaze. And these scents, though they wafted in through the living room windows, did not belong to the present because the memory of things weighed more than their experience. The girls knew that the weight of a single memory is greater than the weight of all objects within view in any present moment, yet still they wished for time to linger, for a scent to pass through the nostrils and not through the longing heart alone. Wished for the great dial’s mechanism to lock the sun at a definite hour, or to keep the moon’s face open. What was stranger still was that these things not belonging to the present somehow but with certainty seemed to await them, as if all the turning away from their past only led to that same distant past in the far-off future. And always the distance! The great and the growing gulf between what had been and what might have been. There was no now because the war might end in the next moment and the family return to what had been steady and knowable in the before. There was no future because that steady and knowable before had long since been consumed by the war. There was no stillness in the present, only a lurching forward and a suctioning back, as if the first life, though a handful of years in length and long vanished, was the only reality for the sisters, and everything else and since was but a long night’s dream.

  sleep

  Shhh … close your eyes,

  says the book.

  laundry

  And the girl dreamed that she and her sisters stepped outside and, in the pale light of the late moon, together hung the corpses of the dead on a clothesline that traveled from tree to telephone pole, from one to the other end of the yard. And the dead filled baskets; and the girls worked steadily. And when they were pinned to the line, the corpses resembled well-worn garments, in places threadbare, in places discolored, and were flat and stiff like laundry frozen on the line in winter. And the quandary of clothes hanging on a line outdoors in the dead of winter is something that some but not all of the girls can remember from their former life. And the sister dreaming remembers, even in the dream, sucking on the sleeve or the hem of a frozen garment: she knows well the texture of frosty linen, the flavor of soapy ice melting in her mouth. And in the dream, the sister wonders and asks, why do we hang the dead outdoors in winter when they and all around them must surely freeze? Should we not bring them inside and lay them about the stove where they and we can keep Mother company while she cooks the soup that will warm us?

  shadow play

  Some of the girls remember where Father was raised. In the first land, the family lived in the city and had to travel through the city, over the hills, across the desert, up, up, up the side of the colossal mountain till they reached the clouds—where they stopped to pack, throw, shape, and eat snow—through the endless dark tunnel, and back down, down, down the colossal mountain, across the colorful fields, and through the small, whispering forest to get to their uncle’s farm. And they made this trip regularly, and looked forward to it always. In Father’s birthplace, the nights were long because they were lit by candles, lanterns, the moon, and the stars. With electricity a full day’s travel away, nights came alive, entered their aunt’s small mud home through its door and single window and called the sisters outdoors.

  Indoors and out on the farm, nighttime teemed with shadows that abducted the girls’ imaginations. And the sisters loved the shadows and the mysteries they promised. The darkness held and hid the dead ancestors, whom the girls expected any moment to materialize, dressed in the garb of the old land, speaking in strange tongues, bearing fantastic sweets and opulent jewels. The shadows loomed, then sprang suddenly. They swallowed the farm animals whole—though the goats’ eyes always remained, to hover and float across the courtyard or over the pond—and then released the animals, changed. The cow transformed into an elephant and stomped into the quince orchard, knocking fruit off of trembling trees. The hens morphed into kites that floated up and away into the inky sky. Little demons peaked out of the pond, as curious about the sisters as the sisters were about the fiendish, shy creatures who followed the girls with their large eyes, blinked and blinked, blew the occasional bubble through the soupy water, but refused to answer the sisters’ questions and taunts. The intrepid sister entered the peach orchard by herself to spot the elusive sparkling cap of Sheeshak, the tree-witch, whose feet and dark locks dangled beneath the canopy as she hummed and ran her long, curling fingernails through her long, oily hair. The witch, whose glance they were instructed to avoid at all costs, promised those brave enough to speak to her a look into their futures. Darkness on the farm made other promises to the sisters. It promised ripeness, an early and untimely harvest of sweet fruits and crisp vegetables, always more tasty when picked directly from the source plant, and picked at night. Listen to the corn stretch, rasp, and quiver. The sugarful melon’s skin cracks in the field. By the moonlight, the sisters plainly observed the strawberries on the brook’s edge lift their leafy skirts and walk into the water to rinse and cool themselves.

  On the farm, the days began early and were long, colored by the sun and by their adventures. But the sisters rediscovered the farm after the evening meal. Once out of doors, they stepped tentatively or boldly here and there. They carried candles or lanterns or used wattage from the sky to gather ripe/unripe fruit; to visit and converse with the tired farm animals now bedding down in their own mud dwelling; to climb the aged, bent, barren fruit trees at the far edge of the farm; to seek out the flower oracle that opens between dusk and dawn; to watch the glistening earthworms that dive in and rise out of the soil as whales dive in and rise out of the sea. When they tired of their explorations and wanderings and grew hungry again, they, each in her turn, returned to the enveloping mud house where the adults were already on their third or fourth pot of tea. Each girl found her place between the adults and the cousins and the visiting neighbors and poured herself a cup of tea and helped herself to sweet milk-rice, fresh almonds, dried peaches and plums, and fried bread. And they sat back to listen to Mother, Queen of Stories, who even here, and perhaps especially here in the humble lantern-lit room, was in her element. And the girls, sated and shadow-tired after their rovings, teacups in hand, settled back into the giving pillows. They and all others listened to Mother and saw the miles and miles of tales that lay in Mother’s swaying shadow as she sat cross-legged on a floor cushion, lit by a single lantern that hissed in rhythm to her telling.

  in summer, the sun

  And in summer, in the new land, the sun beckoned the sisters out of doors. From where it stationed itself, directly above and near, it sent down pulsing rays to heat their heads, covered in dark hanging tresses, to guide their hands into cool earth, and to call forth minerals and moisture from the girls’ glands. The sun instructed them on all that blushed and blistered across the face of the earth: the ripening peach, the naked hatchling, their own hearts. The great orb bleached out rooftops, illuminated the timid spider’s silk, and divulged the pattern of the fickle bee’s flight. Because it knew the girls’ thirst for color was great, the giving sun by turns separated, then stacked its light to color the many flowers, fruits, leaves, birds, and insects before their eyes. It made the girls intimate with and sympathetic to all that was not human yet still breathed, writhed, and quivered. And that which was inert—the pane of glass, the wide expanse of uncracked concrete, the unearthed marble, the smooth stone shaped like a small whale—it offered as a point of respite for the sisters whose roving, reeling, busy legs, hands, eyes, and shoulders sought these places and objects even as the girls flitted from activity to activity and place to place in the garden. And in summer, the unblinking sun saw all that the girls were and were not, in the world, among each other, and unto themselves. It witnessed their ways, what they hid and what they bore proudly, and showered them with silent pra
ises and condolences. It applauded their exploits, those heroic, and those sensible. The sun, in summer, measured the depths of their calluses and the arcs of their smiles. It reddened their cheeks, and browned their skin. It warmed their hearts and soothed their brows. And it was the sun who named the sisters. And knowing the girls, the sun kept their names hidden.

  the sea

  The sisters, who were born landlocked, live now in a valley near the sea in the land of the sun. It is the sun that charms them out of doors the year round and it is the sun that calls them to the seaside in summer. And the ocean receives them gladly as it does all the other valley dwellers who travel to it by car, bicycle, and bus over the concrete highways and byways, and the hills great and small, to rinse off the heat and the dust from their oily skin, to play and toss, to lounge and feast, to tease and chase the bold seagulls and the lapping waves. And the sisters see that they were called to this continent’s edge, were towed, as in a skiff, on currents of warm air, from the beginning, over desert, mountain, and valley by this sea. They know that the call comes from its depths and that the ocean draws with an undeniable power its devotees from the interiors of continents.—Yet they cannot guess that this immense force tows from farther out still, has its origins in a center more dark and fathomless than the ocean’s mysterious depths. And perhaps more beautiful, more wondrous.—It is a call they would not deny. They are invited and they come regularly to: drift with the sand from dune to wave; wonder at the anemone’s dance at the tide’s edge; sort the shells, broken and whole, by hue and texture; mock the pelican’s comical form and envy his intimate flight over the ocean’s still surfaces; laugh, tumble, splash, and float in the turbulent surf; and be lullabied into a soft dream by the sea’s pacifying tongue and the sun’s tender fingers. It is in the bright middle of day, at the water’s edge, that the sisters sleep the joyful sleep.