Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  And so she spent her days hungering after wholeness, gathering all she could draw to herself: rose petals and snail shells; beetles’ wings and cats’ fur; paper—white or colored, blank or covered in the letters of the alphabet and bound between two covers; Mother’s broken jewelry; Father’s precise gesture of adjusting the watch on his wrist; the shame and agony of the family when yet again they were forced out of an overheated car and onto the side of the freeway; the school bus’s diesel fumes; the schoolboy’s smile; her sisters’ meaningful looks, looks piercing and looks tender. She gathered from far and near and, through the slit in her chest, she dropped her many treasures into the slender cavity that would not be filled. But her two small arms, lifting and dropping buses and houses whole, became powerful and out-proportioned her middle-child frame. She swung from tree limb to arbor beam and remembered the beginning days, the earth’s young days, and picked grapes as she went, filling her mouth but not the void that had produced two of her. Invisible to the others, and mindful of what feeds the grass and the trees, she went out daily to draw the sun into her. But unimpressed with its minuscule size in the infinite spaces within her chest, and never quite warmed by its generative powers, she searched farther out and farther on in the sky for more and ever greater stars. And there, she glimpsed the edge of things: the falling away of stars, the disappearance of galaxies entire. Shivering, she returned again, then again to be and to play with her sisters, to welcome the small space offered in their midst, the one simultaneously warm, buttressed on each side by two sisters, and suffocating, for it left little room for two of her.

  and Mother

  It makes the sisters glad when Mother speaks freely about her own childhood. Glad when Mother admits that she too fought with sisters and brothers, over friends or clothes or sweets, and went to bed not-speaking, woke in the morning to not-speak to the brother who sat on her right at breakfast or the sister who avoided her soapy and agile elbows over the laundry tub. But when Mother sees her daughters exchanging lifted brows or staring at her with mouths incredulous, jaws hinged open, she adjusts her story. And Mother tells them that in her time, she and her sisters: stayed up for endless hours, whispering and sharing dreams and secrets while the others slept on in the room the siblings shared at night; fell into deep sleep in the early morning hours with arms wrapped around each other’s necks; held hands all the way to and from school, to and from the market, to and from the kitchen; mended one another’s clothes; combed each other’s hair; rouged each other’s cheeks.

  Mother says that unlike her own five daughters, in her time, she obeyed her elder sisters and brothers, no matter the request: in all seasons, washing and hanging their clothes to dry; before breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, pouring a neat stream of water from a jug over their hands and collecting the rinse in a basin; on bended knee waiting for the return of the hand towel before moving on to the next brother, while other sisters, directly behind her, set the large platters of rice, vegetables, and meat before the men and boys. We never complained, she says. There were many of us. We cooked daily for 15 or 50—there were always guests—and every meal we prepared by hand, from scratch. There was always work to be completed: bread kneaded, rice and lentils scoured for pebbles and pests, eggs collected, floors scrubbed, fire tended, water drawn up from the well, carried in. Red knuckles, bothered hens. And they know she is still being truthful. Mouths closed, the sisters hang their heads.

  But they want to know the other truth as well. Want to know that Mother too was a girl, and suffered as a girl, not as a martyr. So they ask about grandmother’s reprimands and whether or not she spoke them with the same asthma-labored voice some of them recall. They wonder how their stooped and bedridden grandmother managed to chase her many children around her many-roomed house: did she shuffle in her leather sandals, leaning on her cane, or was she lifted and bolstered under each arm by the older siblings, her white skirts and scarves trailing behind her as she floated down stone hallways and over crimson rugs, her eyes and teeth set and stern, the fingers on her right hand counting prayer beads, while those on her left pointed and scolded? The sisters who remember their grandmother remember an old woman small and gathered—folded pale limbs, plaited gray hair, white skirts in layers around a small body seated on white linens atop a thin, cotton mattress on a low wicker bed; bed and linens and old woman gathered in the corner of her otherwise bare room. Notwithstanding the meager furnishings, Grandmother’s room was not a quiet, peaceful space. Those who entered it brought with them the noise and life from elsewhere in the house and from the neighborhood and the city beyond its walls. Like envoys, the passers-through retrieved and delivered news during their comings and goings to the room that functioned as a nerve center in the great house and in the great family. Grandmother’s was a room between rooms, with two doors leading to disparate parts of the sprawling, single-story house, and as such, was a sort of thoroughfare for the family—the children, the grandchildren, and occasionally a stray hen from the garden. The sisters remember: the ancient woman’s chest working up and down, suffering for breath; her moist mouth, sputtering words of judgment or reprimand or praise; her large, warm, heavy hands caressing their heads or cupping their chins or lifting their wrists and ankles to make sure they weren’t adorned with the bangles or anklets she detested. They sensed and witnessed that a great love emanated from this breathing, pulsing nerve center as they crossed her bedroom from living room to kitchen. But they knew also to not unduly disturb the white-gathered corner, sensing that at all times, whether she spoke or listened to her visitors and passers-through, grandmother simultaneously held another conversation. The girls knew their grandfather only from a single and imposing photograph, which hung on a wall in grandmother’s room; for them, he existed in periphery. He was grand, but separate and distant, a family legend framed in wood. For grandmother, he was near, his presence beside her as material a thing as the photograph on the bare wall directly across from her simple woven bed. But for the family it was she, small and concentrated, who ruled the home and from her corner gave orders and passed judgment on the many children and grandchildren always at her house, by her bedside, running her errands, passing through her room. She was their great leader, and her grown daughters and sons, heads of their own broods, were like her viziers, never questioning, always attentive, arriving daily from across the city to bow their heads, kiss her hands, deliver to her the day’s news, and mete out her decrees. Had she always been so severe, the girls ask Mother. No, Mother tells them. She was a kind and warm mother. She was a whole woman, strong for raising ten children, losing three, spoiled and daily softened by my father’s adoration of her. He was shameless and in front of all embraced her, held her hand, kissed her face, and sang her praises. He traveled often and brought her gifts from near and far, sitting at her feet as she opened them, watching her face like a child, devoted and giddy with expectation. It was this she was given and this she had taken away when your grandfather died. It was not common, his love for her. And we were many, arriving early in her marriage, having our own early and often. And there were ones who did not survive, ones who died young. With each new birth and each death she was splintered and the folds in her skirts and in her skin multiplied, while she shrank, became more concentrated, more severe beneath the garments, mind sharpened, body more poorly each passing year, unable to leave the corner of her room. This is what you remember.

  And the fickle sisters move on to ask about the broken nose given Mother by an angry and spoiled older brother, the evidence of which still sits on her face now, though barely visible to their accustomed daughter-eyes. He was angry, yes. He woke me in the middle of the night to wash his police uniform—in those days, he arrived late each night and left early each morning, always tired and made more proud by the rising-early, the coming-home-late, the spotless and tidy uniform. I fell asleep over the wash tub. It was two o’clock in the morning, a school night. He was young and proud. He was angry and brutal. He didn’t speak to
me for weeks after. The sisters study her face, see their mother in her perfection, and know that she has lived many days and many lives.

  It makes the sisters glad when Mother lets down her guard, sheds her mother-role to reminisce about evenings spent in the company of sisters, listening to an adored singer on the radio. So Mother too swooned. She tells them about their grandfather’s intolerance for rules and tradition. It was their grandfather, an immigrant from a neighboring land, who encouraged his daughters to be playful, to be girls, to dress as they liked in modern clothes, to wear their hair out and up, unveiled and beehived. He who, notwithstanding his disdain for the cinema, gave them the bus and the film fare, and sent them off to the city’s central marketplace to shop and watch foreign films in the new theater.

  And the girls delight to discover that Mother’s initiation into the dreamworld of the cinema, her first love, followed the natural pattern of girlhood ardor. They see the marquee, the bright colorful posters; they wonder at the soft rise of the velvet curtain, the white letters over the silver scene; they hear the bells on the dancers’ feet, and perceive a shift in Mother’s quickening speech as she describes the dancers’ mirrored, sequenced dresses, their arms adorned with lustrous jewels, their eyes cast upon their beloved. Mother recites the titles of films, the names of stars. She tells them how she grasped the meaning of lovers’ scenes and songs with her heart first, and through her love for the form, learned to speak foreign languages. With her eyes alone, she gave color to the black and white screen, painting flowers red, fields green, and silks golden. The five sisters elbow each other and nod significantly. One thing Mother cannot hide from her daughters is her complete devotion to romance. Around the house and over her daughters’ heads, she preaches innocence, chastity, and duty, but when the sisters push a button for her to play a favorite film song or a beloved scene while Mother irons or files her nails, they watch her recede and return to her girlhood. The lights dim, the red curtains rise, and Mother remembers her allegiances. And these are not religious or familial or civic; her loyalty is to the lovers and their cause, no matter the barriers—ethnic or geographic—between them. And though she’s watched the same films countless times since girlhood and knows their tragic outcome, still she urges the lovers across the desert or out of their homes, urges them to break their fetters, deny their parents and their customs, and sacrifice all for love. And if Mother could read well in the new tongue, the sisters guess that her shelves might be lined with books instead of silver and china—and they know which books would dominate those shelves. If Mother could write, the sisters imagine that her stories and her girlhood might be hidden from them.

  madness

  She is a neighbor girl. A single child. The sisters befriend and invite her in. Mother welcomes her as she welcomes all her guests: she brews the tea, sets out the sweets, asks the girl about her family. And the girl, not younger than the oldest sisters, but bigger, softer, and more innocent, finds comfort in the strange home. It is a comfort she cannot find in the schoolyard or in the kid-filled streets of their neighborhood or inside the shuttered house her mother occupies day-through dressed in a nightgown, day-through filling an ashtray at the kitchen table, in front of the television. The girl comes regularly and over time finds her place with the youngest sisters, who play as she does, but are many inches shorter and several years younger. The neighbor girl is joyful and innocent, forever ready for an afternoon of dress-up and make-believe, a walk to the corner store, a game of tetherball. She is all-child and, as an only child, she is all-sharing, bringing over her dolls and her board games, inviting the sisters over to her house for hotdogs or to record songs on her tape player or to wonder at her pet rabbit—its ever-twitching nose, its menacing pink eyes, its snow-soft fur. The neighbor girl is all child, all innocence, all joy: she celebrates the call of the ice cream truck; she swings and slides with glee and abandon; she puppy-barks at the cat in the tree. Slowly and before their eyes, over the months she transforms from girl to madwoman. And the sisters, always obliging, invite her in, play along, and watch, helpless. But Mother’s heart grows larger, sadder, more welcoming. Madness finds an innocent vessel in the golden land. It rises through the neighbor child, enters and distorts her pliant, biddable face, and leaves her twisted mouth as curses vile and precocious. She hisses and spits at unseen demons; she glares at houseplants, at bicycle wheels; she tries with her strong, soft hands to choke the evil spirits out of the neighborhood children. She screams and thrashes, curses as grown men curse, and is dragged home by her mother, her father—called home from work again—and returns to the sisters’ house the next day a child afresh. But over time, the neighbor girl comes less and less often to school, to the sisters’ house, out to the curb to meet the ice cream truck. On their way home from school, the sisters pass her house and meet her eyes through a slit in her bedroom window curtain, which drops, then quickly rises to reveal her hand, waving. When the gone-mad girl comes again to visit, she comes with her head tilted, her eyes questioning and unsure, and her lips curled in a permanent smile that releases a girly titter when she drools or knocks something over in the house. And daily, her large drooped frame swells so that she comes to tower even over the older sisters. They bring out their toys, their drawing materials; she smiles and she nods. She picks up the cookies Mother places before her, then sets them down again, uneaten. All the while, her mind regresses until it is the toddler, the youngest sister, whom she comes over to play with. Then one day, she leaves the neighborhood entirely. And the vanished neighbor girl’s house takes on a new appearance: its lawn is regularly mowed, its exterior painted, its shutters opened. Her mother purchases a car, takes a job, cuts and curls her hair, dresses in a suit, and joins the other wage earners.

  signpost

  The only way forward is through the alphabet.

  the stalker

  And violence in the sunny land takes a strange form. It adopts the guise of a willowy young man who visits houses at night, exploits the giving nature of suburban windowpanes and screen doors, and enters into the bedrooms and kitchens of the sleeping valley-dwellers to shoot, rape, hammer, mutilate, and murder them. And the family sleeps fitfully through one winter and two summers; they sleep with all doors, windows, and the cat securely barricaded.

  heritage

  The girls know very little about their grandparents, and have even less knowledge of who came before these filmy legends from long ago. But the sisters know that as a lineage they have never stayed any one place too long. Movement is their legacy. It is a heritage that courses through their liquid channels and marks their features. This movement has contoured and colored their biology over the centuries. Chased by war and called by the unknown, their ancestors moved from land to land, over sea and mountain, across the faces of the earth. As an itinerant beggar collects alms on his travels, the sisters, over the many generations, collected their traits from this or that ancestor in this or that land. The girls’ languid eyelids are an artifact of earlier lives lived in the frigid northern peninsulas, where plump lids keep dreaming eyes warm through the long, dark winter nights. Their spindly fingers, assuredly, were given them by a mathematician of the westernmost East, who, because he had the night sky wide open to him above the still desert and the roiling sea, learned to count and to measure distances with his digits, and passed down to the girls his passion for numbers and rulers and, through it, his ardent love for the night sky. The girls’ red-apple cheeks, and the smiles that produce them, they picked up in the very heart of the old continent, the native home of the fruit that has traveled farther and wider than the sisters. The various colors of their eyes were distilled by the rug weaving women of the mountains who knew the secrets of drawing color from roots, nuts, beetles, and stones. And the color of their hair, which they all share, was sanctified by the priest who slept by day in the hot climes and stood chanting at dusk and dawn in the smoke of the funeral pyres. When a sister lies napping facedown with arms spread wide on a rug in the ho
use, it is because she and the rug have traveled great distances and find comfort in their shared odyssey. When a sister finds herself spontaneously chanting while washing dishes or raking leaves, she guesses, correctly, that another family member, somewhere, has passed. When a sister tastes a supermarket apple that Mother has reluctantly brought home, she wrinkles her nose and, at the same time, mourns the imminent loss of her own piquancy. When a sister stares out at the sea, is she remembering the great merchant ship that brought her ancestors across the frozen waters? And when a sister looks out into the night sky, she knows already the distance to the nearest star, and, knowing it is not great, she playfully closes that distance by pinching closed her forefinger and her thumb.

  K

  K  a  l  e  i  d  o  s  c  o  p  e  . And this book is one. See the little movable pieces, watch the bright colors arrange and rearrange to tell ever new, ever different tales. Did I not say that you can enter, turn, and return as you like?