Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  But the sisters also know that movement alone does not generate dreams. So they listen to the old tree’s stories and through them know him and find that he is more kin than blood-kin. He too holds memory in his cells, opening their gates to unlock the secrets of his history when the mood suits him or the day is ripe. He too makes use of the inner channels and senses without knowing that they transport more than life-sustaining nutrients and fluids. And his memory, like theirs, reaches back to the beginning days.

  Because of the nature of the sun and its seductive relationship to the leaves and upward-reaching branches of the tree and because of the nature of the earth and its intimate and secretive bond with the downward-yearning roots of the tree, the indolent sister, resting in the grass in the shade of the grandfather tree’s mighty canopy, will not hear the same story that the intrepid sister, climbing the tree’s heights and placing her ear against the tree’s uppermost appendages and its whispering leaves, will know. And the mechanism that generates the earth-dreams is the same one that orchestrates the transport of minerals on the backs of water molecules. And it is the sun and his sibling stars who rejuvenate the ancient tales in their churning centers, drawing them out and sending them on their way as sky-dreams across the limitless cold spaces.

  On a certain day of the week, at a given hour, in the early morning or at the sun’s setting, the sister who wishes to hear the tree’s first story will be obliged. She will sit in the grass with her back against the tree’s forever shedding trunk, her shoulder blades curved around one of its rough burls—forms that the girls call knees or shins, though they know well that the tree has no feet, does not move. Holding a leaf of grass or a segment of tangerine in her mouth, with her eyes closed or looking out over the boundless yard, she will listen with ears and spine to the tree’s tale. It is an old story, a common story ubiquitously written: in the zigzag trail left by the slow-moving snail across the garden wall; in the morning dew dotting the spider’s web; in Mother’s eyes as she irons on any Sunday afternoon while she listens to the old film songs. But the sister prefers to hear it from the tree.

  The grandfather tree’s first story is also the earth’s first dream and it is the dream of water. The great tree will tell again the tale of water, of its pooling, its trickling and meandering through the labyrinthine channels within the rocky earth. It will next tell of water’s murmur and caress, its push and fall, its great roar across the open terrain of that same earth, giving shape to its many surfaces. And, finally, it will tell of water’s absolute need to travel also in the ascendant direction, against the force of gravity, in order to find its destiny in the sky. The listening girl will learn of how water, in it’s upward drive, brought the tree up along with it from its former prostrate position, cell by cell over the millennia, until the tree too stood upright, looked skyward and found there over its head a floating lake in the form of a cloud, and understood that the same lake once pooled deep within the cavernous earth, far below its roots.

  The sister who listens to the tree’s earth-dreams understands this story and feels it within her own body, a body governed by the same forces, the same desire to travel in the skyward direction, to find its own portrait drawn with lines and points across the dome of night. The sister knows well the upward movement of water, knows keenly the gathering force of saliva in her mouth and of tears in her eyes. But the sister also knows the circuitous movement of a second force within her of which she cannot tell the tree. She knows of blood, of its diurnal and nocturnal meanderings through her own channels. She feels its iron-rich drive, no less powerful than water’s roar across the earth. She has watched it pulse beneath her skin, up and down the tender inside of her arm, and has seen it break that same soft surface to pool in place like a ruby unearthed, or to trickle down her arm and burst onto her skirt like nectar from a pressed pomegranate seed. She has licked this liquid from a knee or a knuckle after a fall or a fight and knows its elemental flavor, understands that blood has a color, a density all its own. She cannot tell the tree of this second force, though she has read in books that others have tried. She knows of sacrifices, of pacts made by humans with the green world: those ancient exchanges of blood for sustenance. But she guesses that the tree would not ask such a price. The tree knows of life and of death, it knows of water but not of blood. It has no feet.

  The grandfather tree dreams of stars. He studies numbers and measures distances not in inches or yards but in the age of stars whose long light has traveled far and carries with it rumors and tales that tell of distant places and earlier eons. And the grandfather tree mourns the death of the ancient stars whose last light falls on his leaves and he divines and celebrates the births of new ones. His own ancient age is minuscule next to the youthful stars’ and this makes him mourn also the death of the girls who spend their days swinging from his many limbs. He knows that there are many beginnings and many endings but does not know which comes first: the nascent bud or the burst star. Years spent in the service of the sky, counting stars and measuring time, has taught the grandfather tree that light courses through the cosmos as water courses through his many limbs. The grandfather tree knows that light too travels a circuitous route and that: what turns will unwind; what enters will out; and what travels will return home again.

  mirror sisters

  The house was small, the sisters many, and the mirror one. The five sisters shared one bathroom and readied themselves each morning before its small mirror. The rectangular glass hung over the bathroom sink, onto which the youngest had to climb in order to see her image. To this mirror, the sisters were drawn to: brush, braid, and feather hair, rouge cheeks, make faces, admire lashes and tonsils, and practice the many smiles, those polite and polished, and those bare and wild. But their time before the mirror was brief, for the sisters were many and were always coming and going: to school or to bed, to a party or to the store with Mother, to their chores, their homework, or to their guests. And while the house was always humming with their moving bodies and various activities, the many rhythms in the house rose and fell at different rates so that unexpectedly, after a great peak of bustle and push, a deep trough of silence and stillness emerged in that part of the house. In that space, a sister might linger before the small bathroom mirror without interruption.

  And the sister who stands idle before her own image and whose gaze long remains on the line of her chin suddenly sees this line blur. For a moment she loses her face, familiar, as her image softens and blurs, then finds it again, clear and close, but ever so slightly changed. Not in form but in gaze returned. And she recognizes that gaze and welcomes it as an old friend. Then seeing her own enthusiasm and warmth returned, she smiles, jumps. It is not long before she finds that she is two in the looking glass—the girl she is here, the girl who runs and climbs trees and walks to school over flat concrete walkways, looking twice before crossing the many streets, and the girl she is in the beforelife, the girl who runs and climbs trees and walks downhill past pine tree and fruit vendor to get to school, routinely stopping along the way to pick the red poppy or its musical dry seed head. The sister finds over time that she may come to the mirror to brush teeth and hair, or come to the mirror to visit the self she is in the first life and with whom she will one day merge again, for the war will not last long.

  So all of the sisters, by accident or through searching—for each knows she exists in the duplicate and lives two lives simultaneously on two continents—all of the sisters early on see the first self in the mirror. And each finds time and space to steal away from the family to come to the mirror-self to converse, to exchange notes, to find out what has changed and what remains the same in each life. And the sister in front of the mirror sees that in the first life her hair still glistens, her brow still knots when pondering a question. The one shows the other a purse she has recently sewn, or shares a new song, or whispers gossip about the older sisters. And the sister asking her mirror-likeness how her day went, hearing of another rocket attack or a school
closing, and finding her image in tears, tries to soothe her. And the girl behind the mirror asks the girl in the land of the sun, does Mother still make the barley soup? Does Father still recite the many and melodic names of god? They compare the heights of the mountains to the depths of the sea. The sister and her mirror-self talk of homework, boys, and the color of the sky at dusk. And the two discover that winter makes the one but not the other shiver. But the moon in both lands follows the sister when she is moving, on foot or by car, on Father’s shoulders or in Mother’s lap on the city bus. And when the immigrant sister praises the airplane, she sees instead of enthusiasm a forced stillness upon the other’s face who remembers that fateful day of separation on the tarmac.

  Time moves in each land, for each girl, but at different rates. The sisters looking into the bathroom mirror see their images mature, their hair grow in length or get cut or become hidden behind a scarf. They celebrate the piercing of ears, giggle at the donning of eyeglasses. They ask one another what she’d like to do and be and are surprised to know that though their wishes change seasonally, the two are the same and remain alike beneath the surfaces. Both love and dream alike. Both celebrate and suffer alike. And when Father is taken and not returned in the first land, all ten sisters mourn as one, and Mother in the land of the sun wonders why at the evening meal the dishes she has prepared go uneaten. News of the war enters the house only in this way, for the television is silent on the subject. And the resilient sisters living through the unending war have to console the immigrant sisters, whose hearts have become timid and tender even as their lives have blossomed in the sunny land. And the tenderness by and by draws them away from the bathroom mirror. And over time, they say that the mirror-self has shifted significantly: she dresses strangely, speaks with an accent, is bound by rules and rituals of a nature deeper than the sisters in the new land can fathom. By and by, the mirror-selves come only to share news of a marriage or a birth, or come dressed in the dark colors of grief, mourning a death or a disappearance, or they come not at all, and the sister in the new land wonders and knits her brow and returns to the brushing of teeth or the trimming of bangs or the dabbing on of lotion. The war runs on. And the sun shines year-round in the golden land. The sisters forget the first self or let her be as they try to dispel the first land and let it be. And over time, the mirror begins to reflect only the surfaces again so that the contours of a sister’s face hold no matter how long she stares at her reflection or how much she crosses her eyes. But very occasionally, a sister thinks she sees a smile when she’s felt none or, frowning, finds that the mirror does not follow suit.

  G

  Grandparents: those beings of long ago, mysteries to us. A series of curtains, one after another and with each subsequent generation, had dropped behind us as a result of too much movement over the face of the earth. Our parents and the five of us were all born, but just barely, in the same country. My father was born in the same year his family, escaping invasion and war, crossed a border to seed a small farm in a new land. My youngest sister was not yet one when we left that land. Three of our four grandparents were born elsewhere. Our great-grandparents were shadows, nameless, their bones and their stories buried in other places. Our entire history was unknown, a great and an unyielding mystery. But we picked at it and drew bits enough to tell our story by, bits enough to sustain us, so that we did not feel entirely cheated of a history. We had no records of births or deaths, no facts or dates written on paper, no family trees embroidered on linen. Days before my eleventh birthday, I found out we had been celebrating the wrong birthday for years; with different calendars, the conversion of dates was easily miscalculated. On my thirty-ninth birthday, we worked out that we had left our country, had taken that fateful flight, on the day I turned seven. We arrived in the new land the day my younger sister turned six; against the din of war, birthdays were peripheral, forgotten, and, besides, what have numbers to do with age in wartime?

  Of my mother’s father, I remember only the single formidable photograph that hung in my grandmother’s room. I can easily recollect my grandmother; she was with us when I came into the world. She held the great clan together with an unfathomable strength from her sickbed. Her power, along with her illness, made her as inaccessible to me in my earliest years as were the other three grandparents who had already passed before I arrived. And then we left, and were further removed from her and from the others. We gathered our history from my mother, who was its only source after we left our birth country. She alone knew of the generation that came before hers. She had her childhood with her own family by which to recall that more distant past, which she did with a nostalgia that regularly broke my small, young heart. And she had for a short time known my father’s mother, who had handed down to her my father’s history, what little there was to pass on.

  From my mother’s stories, whole or fragmented, we put together a slim history and fashioned a larger one using our own imaginations. Our mother took up and left off at any point in a story, depending on which guest listened, or which fragment suited her when she disciplined us, or when her powerful nostalgia pulled her back into herself. She introduced her people to our guests as living and present beings and found ways to connect our story to theirs. She knew who had lived where, on which street, in what year, and how any two people may have run into each other in the market or at a wedding celebration. She called on our history when she corrected us, drawing ancestors out of the air to aid her in her examples and admonishments; she was mother and village at once. And these people, our grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, however they arrived, they were large, heroic. Their stories were not common; they had all come from elsewhere, forced from their homes by war and treachery. They had traveled by foot across mountains, floated on the inflated skins of goats down churning rivers, accompanying deposed kings and their many consorts, or carrying their own children on their backs or in their bellies, as my grandmother had carried my father. They had seen and lost much on their journeys, and started again, then again in the new land.

  Her grandfather’s people on her mother’s side, who had been exiled for decades and then recalled by a fickle king, brought back with them new members: wives and children with cheeks like red apples. Her father, the son of a vizier, had lost his entire family to invading armies and run away with the king of that ancient land. My mother often told us of how, then a youth, her orphaned father had buried his family’s treasures—while he could not bury his slaughtered parents—in the soil of his birthland before fleeing it, never able to return and reclaim his property. And I always imagined the colorful gems, the gold fashioned into beautiful and intricate forms, still glimmering though hidden beneath a barren and torched landscape in our distant past. But the ancestors glimmered more brightly. I was separated from them at once by the ages and by a mere series of misty veils. Their stories were somehow my own, or rather, mine was theirs repeated. I knew the roads they had traveled; I had traveled them too.

  Of my father’s parents, I know only that they were forced out by the same armies that came to occupy much of that part of the world. His parents arrived in the new land in time to deliver my father to it, and took up spade and sickle to live by, though my mother, reaching back, remembered that perhaps theirs had originally been a line of merchants. At another time, she recalled that perhaps my father’s father had been a simple village holy man.

  As children, we did not have grandparents who came regularly to spoil or to squeeze us. We were separated from our grandparents, first by death and second by enormous distances over uncharted memory, and were separated even further from our great-grandparents, who were nameless, wispy things. The distance was not a mere generation or two, but many centuries in time. They lived in another age altogether; they were farmers or merchants, holy men or viziers to kings. They plowed the earth without machinery. They wore gold in their hair and rare gems on their fingers. They traveled by horse and wagon, and sat cross-legged on rugs woven by their own or the
ir servants’ hands. Somehow this moving over land across three generations had moved us centuries, perhaps millennia, through time. And the distance is immeasurable. It is not one that can be reconciled, except in the imagination, and through my own memories, which still reflect the landscape of my early childhood in another country, a landscape that is vivid, one I know well and often traverse to reach those I have not met in life.

  gravity

  And, of course, it was not blood alone that coursed through their veins and bound these seven to each other. It was, first and foremost, gravity, that undeniable and elemental force, which pulled them into each other, so that all were as one. It was gravity that towed them here, shuttled them there across the wide empty spaces, and drew them endlessly toward that great internal cauldron.

  the cat