Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  And all of the days were one. Folded into the single one. And were recorded as one.

  M

  Above   us  the   Milky   Way,

  so        resplendent         that

  I       can       write     this

  by        its            light.

  unsleep—the insomniac

  The sister who could not sleep often shared a bedroom with the dreamer. She wondered, as she tossed and turned, how it was that her sister, who searched all day between the covers of books and beneath insect wings, among blades of grass or within Mother’s jewelry box, did not tire of seeking at night and slipped directly into her dreams, as if slipping into the next room, to begin her search anew, to follow a new hunch, to pick up yet another silvery thread. Each night, the insomniac kept her eyes on the ceiling while her mind walked up and down the same thousand steps—up to the locked door that was her future and back down to the locked door that was her past. Though it was her mind that made this nightly journey, the balls of her feet and the knuckles of her right hand ached in the morning and calloused over time. And who were these doorkeepers, she wondered? Did they not hear her desperate knock? Did her pleas not move their cold blood?

  It was when she thought she had made her last descent and taken her final step, when the knees of her walking mind were ready to give, that the ancient knob on the door to her past would turn and the door open. Behind the door: the scent of lilac or of mint; the creaky voice of an aged aunt or the call of a beloved teacher across a familiar schoolyard. Also behind this door, the sister’s best friend, who wore her hair in a single braid down her back and nearly to her knees, who took the sister’s hand and whispered schoolgirl tales in her ear. All about her, an ocean of blue and white matching uniforms, the din of many dozen feet running, of balls bouncing, of laughter booming and breathless. Behind this door to her past, the light, whether gray or warm, dim or bright, the light was different and somehow more natural than it was in her current life. Behind the door, the air was filled with the scents of a less sterilized life: of rising dough, of the street vendor’s ripe melons, of onions frying in animal fat, of mint leaves drying on Mother’s clothesline, of snow and ice covering every surface and every article left outside in winter. Did the cold snow not have its own fragrance there? Behind this door: the laughter was of a different pitch; the milk was sweeter and the chicken more tender; the hills were nearer; her mother, taller and thinner; her family, much, much larger. How many sisters and cousins she had carried on her own child hips up and down the steep hills of their neighborhood. How well she knew the gender or the age of a child by its weight or its movement on the edge of her pelvis. So many hands—large and small, graceful or strong, calloused or withered, sticky with sweets or with the steam of baking rice—she had held in her own. So many cheeks she had kissed. So many elders she had bowed down before who had kissed her own cheek or the top of her head with their soft, crinkled lips. So many eyes she had met straight on or with her own averted. Behind this door there were customs and rules that were familiar to her. Behind this door: the questions ceased; she simply was and simply lived the single life; she knew and had her place and cherished it.

  The sister who could not sleep did not choose to haunt the world on the other side of the lower door. The war that shut this door behind her had also closed paths of communication, cutting down telephone lines, shutting off borders, searching then discarding letters at these borders. This was the only way she knew to get back to who and what she missed and once was, and often the only way she knew toward sleep. And once asleep, she did not dream but continued her ascent/descent in the stairwell, wondering: where were the eyes, the cheeks, the hands she once knew? What did those eyes now see, if anything? How many dropped bombs, how many dead bodies, how many missing relatives had they silently counted? What color was the night sky during an air raid—she herself remembered then unremembered red. When the loved ones in the first land gossiped with neighbors, did they look over—as they once had—or through the walls that perhaps no longer stood? How tired now were those hands and how sunken the cheeks she had once held and kissed? Was it these worries that kept her from dreaming?

  It seemed to her that in her current life, her family was an abridged version of the greater family she had known before and left behind. And within this new family in the new land, she, no less than Mother and Father and the younger sisters, played more than one role to all the others, comprising aunt and uncle, cousin and hairdresser, schoolmate and neighborhood gossip within a single skin. Was she not her sisters’ ancient great aunt with the stooped shoulders and spirited laugh? Was she not also the spinster schoolteacher with ruler forever in hand? The cook? Did her ankles not ache from standing before the kitchen stove all afternoon, a schoolbook on the counter beside her? Or was the cause of this ache in her legs those same thousand steps, the ceaseless march that kept her up and kept her from dreaming at night?

  The keeper of the door at the top of the staircase, the door to her future, did not bleed as the other did, refused to open the locked door despite the sister’s tired pleas, despite the ever-growing pile of gifts—of thick, sweet honey from the corner shop, of blood-red roasted beets purchased from the street peddler’s basket, of lace from her grandmother’s cabinet, of cured meats from her second aunt’s cellar—gifts pilfered from her previous life each night and offered to the keeper of the door at the top. In exchange, a single request: a return of her original, unopened future. A future once promised her as the eldest daughter. Among the gifts she left were pictures she drew and colored with care, images of a grand and multitiered family, of big gatherings and celebrations, of bounteous tables laden with an array of ancestral dishes. But the keeper of the top door, standing behind it, peered out of the peephole with an unblinking eye. He kept his hand on the lock and denied the sister a look into her future, refused her a single night to dream her first fate.

  No, the eldest sister did not choose to make this nightly trek, to wear thin the soles of her sneakers and slowly over time wear out her welcome in that world that was her past, with the friends and family who slowly grew to not recognize her, to suspect her and occasionally mistake her for one of them: those who walked with too straight a back and too stiff a gait: the pilfering invaders. This endless ascent to nothing and descent to less and less was not of her own making or of her choosing. It was her vocation, just as it was the dreamer’s vocation to search over rainbow and beneath mossy bridge for the thing she had possessed in her early life but lost in the chaos and wished only to bring back to the family who had lost alongside her.

  outside, the rain

  Outside, the first drops of a light rain begin to fall on parched concrete walkways and well-watered lawns. The swing raps against the tree that is the sisters’ grandfather. The tree’s broad leaves, covered in dust, resist the feeble rain. Up and down the block, color television sets flicker blue images and information into living rooms. The street is quiet. All the streets in the neighborhood are deserted and quiet; the people have gone home, turned in. Above, it is only a partial lunar eclipse that makes the moon blush: an act of love performed against a twinkling backdrop on the firmamental stage. The rain clouds, like a curtain, close over the scene, and the sisters’ cat does not return home tonight.

  rocket

  The two are brothers, farmers, young fathers each. It is a close summer evening and they remain outdoors with their uncle. The sun has set but the sky in the west remains lit, flecked with herds of soft golden clouds. The sky shifts and, liesurely, one by one, reveals the stars. The spent dusty men stand among quince trees that have only recently been unburdened of their crop. Night advances slowly and the day’s heat lingers in the orchard. The brothers say tomorrow will bring more heat; there is no moon to draw the clouds over the mountain peaks. They say, a break by week’s end. They say, God willing.
One brother leans against their cow, the other squats on the ground, his arms slack over his knees. Their uncle smokes his pipe, tells the brothers about his day, his journey that started in the early morning hours and took him to and brought him back from their nearest neighbor-village to the north. Their uncle is a driver, has two horses that pull his wagon; he makes deliveries and transports people and goods about the village and occasionally farther. He is tired. The journey was long, hot. He has not washed yet, and has yet to fulfill the day’s missed prayers. But he has put his horses, hungry as he, in the stable, put out their feed. He looks over his shoulder, through the orchard toward the light that is his own house, a short distance up the road. His wife will step out soon, calling him in to wash, calling him to dinner. He laughs, tells his nephews about the beet sugar factory owner’s plans to marry his second daughter to an eye doctor in the capital. They will have two weddings, he says, one here, another in the city. What feasting, what a pageant it will be! Three nights and three days of celebration! How ugly she is, he says. The young men smile, nod. Their father’s first wife and her grown children raised the brothers, who are close in age and together cannot remember their father and share only the few memories of their birth mother. She died young and her brother stayed near to look after the boys. But they do not look to their uncle for fatherly advice or direction; he is a friend, comes daily as a friend to share news, gossip, the small goods—leather, string, buttons, glue, dried fruit, candy, tea—goods he has picked up on his drives, from his fare. One brother holds the rope, holds the cow near, though the animal strikes the earth with its hoof, pulls in the direction of the barn. The other picks up pebbles and flicks them against the trunks of the quince trees; the chickens roosting in the boughs stir. A window shuts; a door opens; the older man clears his throat. Together the three men leave the orchard, lead the cow toward the barn. The night is still, clear, dark now. Several miles away, the men who fight for the country’s freedom load and send out half a dozen rockets, each in a different direction, not particular. Their work is brief; it is important; the countryside belongs to the people. A single missile, shot from a shoulder miles away, hits the three men and the cow. The hens flap their wings, kick out their legs, and settle again. A measured breeze, like a long exhale, moves over the orchard. Indoors, their women and children tremble, they wait. In their pots and on their plates, their dinner cools, stiffens. At the first light of day they venture out. It is easy to see where the rocket hit: it has left a great dark bruise in the ground near the rows of newly sown beets. But the flesh is in tatters and strewn broadly, and it is difficult to make out what was man and what was cow. This news does not leave the country for many years: who will tell their older brother in the golden land that his family contracts further still? Who has the will? It is enough to tend to the turning of the earth.

  loss

  And the weeping old woman finished her story, looked at the five sisters, still small, still tender, and said,

  And the grandfather tree balanced the five small bodies on his many limbs and said to girls,

  And the red rugs felt the girls’ anxious steps across their sensitive pile, and said to them,

  And Mother hung up the phone, stared at her trembling hands and, once again, said to her daughters,

  This is how the world is, one dies, one remains.

  eyes

  The sisters had eyes, five pairs of eyes that took in all they saw—and there was much to see—in the ever-expanding universe around them. And while their ten eyes were like the dark, feeding mouths of fish—gaping, keen—they were also like small mirrors. It was with regular frequency that one sister looking into the eyes of another would see reflected there her very own thoughts and visions. In this way, images multiplied as in a hall of mirrors and filled the house with multitudes of others. But the ten eyes were also like living marbles of different sizes and hues. The daily visions rebounded off the firm, wet, convex surfaces of the girls’ eyes without entering the girls’ minds. They reverberated off walls and chairs and dishes. They filled the rooms and increased the heat, the energy, inside the thirty-five-year old, single-story house, little different from others on the block. Occasionally, one vision or another that one sister or another had captured and released left the house through a window or an open door and made its way into the street, so that a neighbor climbing out of her car at the end of a long workday, or another trimming the hydrangea bush in front of his house might stop a moment and look in the direction of the sisters’ house with its verdant and neatly mown lawn, its many-colored rosebushes forever in bloom, and imagine for an instant that she or he had seen in place of the sycamore on the front lawn a peach tree in full bloom or had seen a man, barefoot, with tattered book in hand, sitting on the curb looking expectantly in the direction of an advancing car or had seen the polished rifle butt and muddy boot of a soldier rounding the corner of the house.

  N

  News. And how little we had of it! How little we knew of what happened, continued to happen in the first land. For many months at a time there was no news. Nothing at all. Not from family—who dared not send word for fear of reprisal in the first land, or fear of wounding us in the new land with unwelcome information—and nothing on the television. Yet our father watched the news nightly, first thing after returning home from work, and last thing before bed. And he called us with great urgency when he thought there might be a news piece about the East. We all gathered around the set, seven faces, homework or toothbrush or teacup in hand, and waited. More than not, we went back unsatisfied, disturbed, but perhaps relieved, when the news story turned out to be about another conflict, elsewhere. On those very rare occasions when there was something reported about us, we drank it in with great thirst, however brief or uninformative the piece. How little anyone seemed to know or care.

  The other news, equally rare, which arrived by post and was written in a script only a few of us could read, this news was always potent, filled with too much information. We wanted and did not want to know. Each letter, each audio recording, added to the tally we all kept within us: bodies, limbs, homes, livelihoods. On these occasions, Father was reluctant to gather us around. If he did, we knew that he censored as he read. He passed along the love from the uncle or the aunt who included all of us in their letters, with terms of endearment specific to each girl. And the love was always palpable, visible, even in that other script that was indecipherable to my eyes. As the years went on, I wondered how it was they remembered us at all. And as the years went on, it became more and more difficult for me to remember them. I did not want to know about them, about their lives. Did not want to hold their lives up against my own. And    yet    I    would.

  Again    and    again. It’s a strange connection, blood. It delivers the news using its own channels and it demands a gentle regard. And so I tallied and noted.

  sleep—the forgetter

  By day, the giver bestowed on the other sisters all that she earned for herself. After she dusted shelves and vacuumed rugs in the living room, she called in the others to play again, to make a mess again of the space she had put in order. She made a game of all she did with and for the younger girls. With cardboard, crayons, and a single nail, she fashioned a wheel, her own wheel of small fortunes, which she held in midair and which the girls spun with delight, landing on: one dollar or five, a bag of potato chips, a one week’s holiday-from-dishwashing, a bottle of nail polish. In a separate game, called prisoner, she locked the younger girls, joyful, in the garage to let them play magician or mother, while she ran back into the house to finish for them the chores they’d put off, scrubbing sink, tub, and toilet in the bathroom, washing plates, cups, and pots in the kitchen, raking leaves into small mountains on the front lawn. Between chores, she stopped to fix them an afternoon snack of french fries and soda or cake and tea, which she slid through the tall gap beneath the garage door. And the younger sisters who stood on the other side of the locked door
could not see the giving sister’s smile but knew it was there despite the sternness in the prison guard’s voice.

  The giving sister gave daily and nobly. She gave of things great and small, never complained, nor cried, nor demanded anything in return. Tirelessly: she pushed the others on the swing; amused them with jokes, with the latest music; shared with them her clothes, too large, her friends, much older. She saved money only to spend it again on them; she put off her own homework to bring them soup or extra pillows when they were ill. When she had nothing else left to share, she presented her smile: the too-large two front teeth, the single dimple in her left cheek, the squinting watery eyes. And in exchange for her daily giving, she slept each night the sleep-of-forgetting, undoing by night what had been done by day, unknowing each morning what had been learned the evening prior.

  This was no accident or grievous twist of fate. The sister who would give was not by coincidence the same who would forget. It was the war that had orchestrated it. In the first land, the war had unraveled her childhood, taking from her what she wouldn’t have given freely, and turning the native act of gathering memory into something unnatural, perverse. The war entered suddenly her child’s eye and, while others looked away, she took in: the too-perfect lining up of clear-eyed soldiers in brown uniforms along the sidewalks of her then-neighborhood; the winding of enormous, unseeing tanks through its too-narrow streets, and later the blood that ran down those streets; the falling of stars not from the cosmos; the felling of trees and cornfields; the folding of women’s hands to hide missing fingernails; the folding of men’s heads to shelter shattered pride; the biting of tongues lest too much be said; the perking of ears lest anything be missed; the going gray of heads; the turning putrid of mouths; the taking off of limbs; the magical vanishing of grocers and taxi drivers. Her eyes ached. The parched earth, the arid climate, the dusty streets, the ruthless doings of strangers and friends alike, took their toll on the gaping eyes that would not shut, leaving them desiccated. And so one day in that former life, the sister who would not look away lingered behind the others after school to walk home at leisure, to take a side street, to stop before the washerwoman’s gate and offer that old woman her cheek in exchange for the gift of daily forgetting. And the laundress who had once used all of her charms, so often in vain, to coax children to her gate with sweets and toys, to enchant them with her honeyed voice in order to steal their dreams, now labored beneath the weight of her two jobs—that of neighborhood laundress and that of capturer of children’s visions—as day after day the children came, now of their own accord, faded and unblinking to offer her their nightmares. With one waterlogged hand, the old woman balanced the basket of wash on her hip, and with the other, raised the girl’s chin, to stare into the dry pools that were her eyes, to steal from the child her nightly and her daily visions, and then in exchange, to plant on her cheek the kiss of forgetting. So thenceforth, the sister who would give away her memories and her visions would also give freely, selflessly of all else, forgetting not only the first land’s dust and the old violence, but also herself, her own needs, her own wishes. Daily in the new land, she gave of her time, her patience and care, her abilities and humor, and her few found and earned possessions to those around her. And whether engaged in the act of giving or the act of sleeping, the sister wore a smile. Her eyes, which had once owned then lost luster, now held pools of water forever on the verge of overflowing.