The Hidden Light of Objects

by Mai Al-Nakib

  To my parents,

  Nazha Boodai and Basil Al-Nakib

  The mind has to do violence to itself, has to reverse the direction of the operation by which it habitually thinks, has perpetually to revise, or rather to recast, all its categories. But in this way it will attain to fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its sinuosities and of adopting the very movement of the inward life of things.

  Henri Bergson,

  An Introduction to Metaphysics

  The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.

  Marcel Proust,

  In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way

  Contents

  Vignette I

  Chinese Apples

  Vignette II

  Echo Twins

  Vignette III

  The Diary

  Vignette IV

  Playing with Bombs

  Vignette V

  Bear

  Vignette VI

  Elephant Stamp

  Vignette VII

  Her Straw Hat

  Vignette VIII

  Snow Dossiers

  Vignette IX

  Amerika’s Box

  Vignette X

  The Hidden Light of Objects

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  I

  Blink and it’s gone. But when it’s there, it’s expansive and may appear to cover a lifetime. It’s a sand fountain or a bubble in a box. It’s kept impeccable under glass. Sandwiched between one ordinary day and another, it’s a night of school performances – a play or concert, band or choir. Walking, no, sauntering into school grounds at night, when it feels like we aren’t supposed to be there, is an early experience of confident ownership not soon forgotten. Parents come later, after us, but, unlike us, they inch in timidly, on legs wooden with awkward reluctance. They don’t really want to be there, though they are proud of us in advance for whatever it is we are going to do. What we do – a clarinet or sax, a song or dramatic turn – doesn’t matter much. What matters, really, is the irresistible edge our school develops at night – the sexy shadow of the bubble against a pitch black concrete wall; hushed corners, invisible during the day, now deep, inviting pockets. As we march through the gates, heading toward whichever room we are supposed to be in, we think we hear something, a voice with an unexpectedly hoarse timbre that tickles the pelvis, maybe someone moaning. We look behind, to the left, to the right, nothing. But we can hear giggles about ready to explode into something grander. We feel the air pounding around us, like being encased in someone’s racing heart. It feels like mischief.

  It’s dark and the December air is cool and crisp as a Chinese apple. Nothing big happens on this night, though electricity tingles all around us, and there are shapes in the shadows glued on like construction paper cutouts. The band plays, and then there’s an extravagant performance of The Frog Prince or Oklahoma! It’s background noise to the temptation strung all around like paper lanterns or popcorn, hanging there for the taking. We don’t take enough, the arrogance of youth, and now look at us in our corner of the world, shattered in shards.

  Once there was still mischief to be had and we were safe as crystal dreams.

  Chinese Apples

  Japan is marvelous when you’re ten. Japan is a street fair with white paper lights strung overhead. Japan is clip-clopping in wooden shoes through the twinkling night, your parents sauntering behind, pinkies linked, your sister, small as a dot on a map, safe in a stroller. Japan is a teal-colored kimono with a glorious peach sash. Japan is streets full of people you don’t understand, laughing, pausing for breath, celebrating something unknown.

  In Japan I was still the cherry blossom princess with a view of the world extended. That trip, a month and a half of our lives, now over two decades behind me. My father training to use complicated medical instruments, acquiring valuable expertise. My mother, my sister, and me along for the ride, suspended in a new place for a while, away from our desert home. That trip to Japan – an old man with Chinese apples, my sister the dot not falling, but almost. That trip to Japan – a razor on a window sill, four rice people in a box under glass. That trip – before the war that saves some of us, before my mother says, “My babies, my babies, take care of my babies.” We were perfectly happy then, perfectly aligned. The four corners of a perfect square.

  Every weekday morning in Japan, my mother would carefully place my four-year-old sister in a stroller and push her along the lovely tree-lined street near our apartment. The dot would squint her eyes at the sunlight squeezing through the trees, examining curiously the green and gold specks streaming across her arms. The dot wasn’t very talkative then. She was thoughtful and maybe a little sad, like she knew something she wished she didn’t. I didn’t take her silence too seriously. I was content to be left alone, collecting the story objects I would share with her at night. The first week of our stay, my mother was preoccupied with the quotidian, figuring out where to get bread, butter, honey, vegetables, where to go in case either of us split our heads open, how to heat the water, how to pay for things. I didn’t mind. I could never have enough time to myself. Like the dot, I too liked to be more quiet than loud. Surrounded by people speaking a language I didn’t understand, the trip to Japan was ideal for expanding my collection. Without the usual tonnage of verbal distractions, I was free to devise my own.

  I have collected story objects for as long as I can remember. Story objects are both objects and stories. Either the object or the story may come first. Most of the time, I select an object. It can be anything: a pouch of cat’s-eye marbles, a sweaty scrap of blanket, Mr. Potato Head’s smile, a small wooden bear, a pendant of a pyramid at Giza, a white cotton robe with blue flowers, a tiny packet of playing cards wrapped in fuchsia tissue paper. The object might appear in a room, under the seat of a car, on a desert trip, behind a green trashcan, on a forgotten shelf. I don’t necessarily have to save, own, or touch the object. Spotting it, even fleetingly, is usually enough. But once in a while I stroke the object methodically, my fingers creating an invisible grid around it, then cradle it possessively in my arms to feel the story enter me directly.

  That’s exactly what happened when I was eight and I decided I wanted to dig to China. I was slightly concerned because I imagined hell to be somewhere between China and me. But since it was daytime and the park full of adults, I was pretty certain nothing too serious could happen. Those were the days before smart bombs pinpointed children’s heads, before oil was exchanged for lung cancer. Back then, a quick glance around the crowded playground was enough to quell any of my niggling fears about hell’s creatures, its fire, its dank, fusty terrain. I started to dig at once. Past the loose top layer down to where it was damp, then wet, then thick as clay. The second I began to worry about worms, I felt something hard against the edge of my nails. I scraped away the wet sand around whatever it was and pulled. A fat, cobalt blue, partially melted, lopsided candle. It smelled awful, like stale, wet yeast. I brushed off the sand and ran home with the candle wrapped like a prize in my dirty red sweater. I washed it in the kitchen sink, but it still stank.

  That night, I told the dot – a captive audience even at two – the story of the candle. It had been buried years earlier by Xiao Yong, a small boy in China. Like me, he had the idea of digging through the planet to get to the other side, to reach the place that wasn’t China, to see if things were different there and how. He had dug far deeper than I and had needed a candle to light the way in his dark tunnel.
Fortunately, his family happened to be candle-makers, so there was no shortage of candles. From among the various colors he could have chosen – fire red, pus yellow, moss green, party pink, plum purple, mottled – he had selected blue for immortality and also because it had been the favorite color of his freshly dead brother. He knew he could face hell with his brother in his heart and his family candle in his hand. The blue candle had done well by Xiao Yong. It had glittered long past the center of the planet and almost all the way to the surface on the other side. But just when he thought he might actually make it, the slimy creatures of hell had caught a whiff of the candle’s plucky little wick. Yong had been sucked into hell’s fury and was never seen or heard from again. The blue candle had remained buried where he had last been. I flipped the candle over and, sure enough, found a stamp on the bottom that could only have been the Xiao family trademark. I kept the candle beside my bed and, on the one-year anniversary of finding it, lit it in honor of Xiao Yong and his brother.

  Less often, I invent the story first. This happens mainly at night, in those rubber moments reserved for brains to bounce before falling asleep. It may also occur on a balmy day at the beach when the sun and breeze make me feel like I will stay young forever. Or while flying in an airplane through the clouds or looking down at them, thick and rolling, from above. In any case, seldom does the story come first, but when it does, the next day or two or three or the entire following week is organized around locating the object belonging to it.

  Elias’s story came to me this way, many years after Japan, after the Chinese apples and razor, but before the loss of the rice people, before the war. Late one night, I shared his story with my sister. A middle-aged man had decided to leave a green bottle by the side of the road. He had drunk from that same green bottle always. It was what he happened to be holding when they had come that morning to shoot his father and to pull his own life out from under him. For the next thirty-five years, Elias had funneled arak into that bottle religiously every night, then taken slow sips from it over the following day. By the time he was ready for bed, his bottle would be ready for a refill. One morning, Elias had awakened to find his bottle empty. A confused bird or gust of wayward wind through the window might have knocked it over in the night. His routine had been disrupted, but he had continued to take sips from the empty bottle that day because he hadn’t known how not to. Every sip of air had surprised him, lacerated him with a loss he had for so long squeezed out of his memory with the help of distilled aniseed. By nightfall, Elias had felt less a man than an animal. He had collapsed onto the blue and white tiled floor of his apartment, his knees and hips melting away. He had moaned like death for twelve lingering hours. Every moan had stood for one thing he would never have because his people’s land, his father’s land, his land had been filched: a wife with magnolia skin, a child with delicate fingertips, an orange grove, a shattering blue sky, pine nuts in a bowl, bougainvillea climbing the garden wall, evening cicada songs, green bottles for clear water, a patient, persistent peace. The next morning, the first thing Elias had done when he got up was to take the empty green bottle to the side of the road and leave it there. The time to bottle loss had come to an end for this man. It was time to remember, not to forget.

  It took me two full weeks to find the green bottle on the side of the road. But as always with story objects, it was there, patiently waiting for me.

  There is never only one story per object. An object’s stories are without limit, infinite. Like a fingerprint, my story will never exactly match anyone else’s or even another one of my own about the same object. Though just as fingerprints may differ from each other by a tiny whorl to the left or right, such is sometimes the case with stories. A man in Gaza today might find the same story object as a man escaping on a ship to New York in 1941; a woman in southern Beirut the same as a woman in Dresden; a child in Basra the same as a child in Warsaw. Their stories will slide into each other, commingle, cohabit, connect in every way but one. Story objects are cobwebs across space and time. When you think it has never happened to anyone else ever before, a story object proves you wrong, though you won’t always know you have been proven wrong. Most people’s stories are hidden away. Objects may provide the only chance – unlikely, impossible though it may be – to unravel kept secrets.

  * * *

  We encountered the old, old man on our fifth morning in Japan. Without words, my mother, my sister, and I would ready ourselves for our daily walk, finding a home in a newly acquired habit. The dot, normally quiet anyway, would silently allow our mother to change her into a pretty summer dress and plop her into the stroller to wait until it was time to go. While neither stubborn nor prone to the usual obnoxious tantrums of children her age, the dot nonetheless would insist on one non-negotiable point: she had to carry a small purse wherever she went, and her purse had to match her outfit. She would choose from the four or five little purses she had acquired in her short life and then allow my mother to select clothes to match. My sister was not terribly impressed with conventional toys, but putting choice objects into her purse and then tenderly taking them out again one by one was a game that kept her amused for hours. My mother’s discarded lipstick; a stone she had found mysteriously under her pillow; a tiny Kinder Egg teepee; a packet of mini colored pencils; a postage stamp-sized notebook full of her scratch ’n sniff stickers, one per page; a barrette threaded with sky blue and yellow ribbons; a pendant of a four-leaf clover preserved in resin; a silver bead; a plastic compass so she would never get lost; five bottle caps from five different sodas she was not allowed to drink; a Grover Band-Aid for her thumb, which she sucked raw. These objects defined the dot’s existence then, and she felt secure and happy carrying them around with her everywhere she went. Waiting quietly in that stroller, sucking on her right thumb, clutching her purse tightly with her other hand like an Italian nonna on a tram, staring at the world with limpid black eyes, my little sister made me love her, made me realize this kind of love could create like magic and destroy like death.

  That fifth morning we followed the same path we had on the four previous days: a left at the gate and straight down the tree-lined street. It was an extraordinarily quiet street, every sound hushed by the leaves, like walking through snow. There were never any other mothers or children around. We had not crossed paths with anyone yet and were not anticipating any different that morning. But about twenty meters into our stroll, we noticed that, unlike before, a gate to one of the homes along the street was wide open. Our pace slowed automatically and we all peered inside, three curious floating heads. The dot even stopped her incessant sucking. The old man glided out from behind a tree like a ghost. My mother jumped and made a strange, small sound with her breath. I screamed. Only my sister looked on unperturbed. The old man went directly for the dot, petting her on the head as if she were a baby goat and cooing at her. Cooing and sighing, cooing and humming, cooing and petting. Hmmmmmmm. Aaaaaaah. His great, big toothless grin seemed to stretch his fragile face to the point of tearing.

  It went on for what felt to me like hours. At first my mother seemed disconcerted. The veins in her hands stood out so I knew she was tense and unsure what to do. My mother never, ever showed us her worry, but the raised blue veins on her butter smooth hands were the sign I had learned to look for. Her concern quickly passed. My mother adored old people; through them she adored her dead parents. Soon enough she was smiling encouragingly at the old man, nodding and cooing back at him. After he had had his fill of the dot, he signaled for us to wait. We waited, quiet as time. The old man returned with a round object wrapped in laser purple paper. He placed it carefully in my sister’s open hands. The dot smiled up at the old man, the kind of smile that reminds you of all the joy that survives in the world despite lost children and dead parents, despite cancer and war. He bowed gracefully, withdrawing behind the tree through which he had seemed to materialize earlier.

  My mother kneeled down and unwrapped the object in the dot’s lap. It was a
fruit we had never seen before, larger than an apple, about the size of a grapefruit. It was round and yellow like the leaves of a neglected book. It had the stem of an ordinary apple only shorter. When we got home, my mother washed the fruit as carefully as a prayer, dried it with a pink-edged kitchen towel, and sliced into its crisp white flesh with a sharp black ceramic knife. The juice from the fruit sprayed into my mother’s brown eyes, and she giggled like a little girl. She gave me a slice, then one to the dot, and then bit into a slice herself. It was crunchy and sweet and full of fragrant water that dribbled down my chin. The dot and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, delighted at the new taste on our tongues. We shook our heads back and forth like the old man had done, cooing at each other and laughing hard, with our mouths wide open and our heads thrown back, for the first time since we had arrived in Japan. My mother continued to slice the fruit in threes, and we ate it slowly, slice by slice, till there was nothing left but a stem and a few brown seeds.

  The next day, the gate was again wide open. Again we slowed down, and again the enchanting old man appeared as if from thin air. Again he cooed. Again he petted the dot on the head and cheeks for a very long time. My mother and I stood back and watched him. The dot had him mesmerized, his big toothless grin something to behold, an addition to the universe we would never forget. Again he signaled us to wait, and again he returned with a round object wrapped in purple paper. A final pat, an elegant bow, and goodbye. This routine continued every single weekday we remained in Japan.

  The old man is certainly dead now. Even then, twenty-five years ago, he was old. Not old the way grandparents are old, but old to the point of paper thinness. As papery thin as the white lanterns strung overhead at the street fair. As papery thin as a dying petal of bougainvillea, no longer shamelessly pink, not even pale yellow, but transparent, ghostly, fading to nothing. Who did the old man see when he looked at the dot? Who did my little sister become for him? A daughter? A sister? A friend? What had happened to his version of the dot? She had to be lost, missing, a space in need of filling. A feeling to be remembered or maybe forgotten. A day at the playground in the sunlight or a picnic under a canopy of trees or a wade in a shimmering forest stream. Who was she? Where was she? Inside my sister? Inside the fruit he presented to us so carefully wrapped?