Above Us the Milky Way Read online

  Mother enters the government building, climbs the stairs, and takes the petition to the office that provides the signatures for her documents. The upright guard at the door tells her the official is out, come back tomorrow. She leaves and returns the following day, forms in hand. The guard at the door tells her, the official is busy, he is in an important meeting with so-and-so, come back in the afternoon. Mother is angry, she is frightened. She has burned the talisman and passed through its smoke. She does not have much time. She rushes down the hall, past guards and rifles, and down the stairs, upset. On her way down, she runs into a slight, frail man coming up the stairs, accompanied by a guard. She nearly knocks the man over. She wants to apologize, she tries to avoid eye contact, she looks down. He says, “Excuse me, sister, I am sorry. I was careless.” Mother is taken aback by his kindness; she watches him go up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, the other guards salute him and part to let him pass. Mother thinks, this is someone, this is an important man.

  She follows him upstairs, sees him enter an office and inquires of the guard at the door who the man is, and is informed that he is the head of the department but is not seeing anyone. The official overhears this through the half-open door. He calls Mother in and asks her to sit, asks her what it is she needs. Mother gives him the petition and tells him, untruthfully, her daughter is gravely ill and daily getting weaker. She tells him they need to leave the country for treatment. The official looks at her, seems to look through her. All the while, he himself is disappearing into his overlarge jacket, his loose collar, his imposing desk chair. He slouches into the chair, rests his elbows on the desktop, props his head on his knuckles, and, sighing, asks her a question. Why does your husband not accompany the child? Why is he not here now? She draws out another practiced lie and tells him her husband is a simple, unschooled shopkeeper. “He has a small grocery; he sells this and that. Without his earnings we cannot feed our children. Without him, I cannot run the shop.” The official looks at her petition, he looks at her, smiles faintly, fumbles for a pen in his shirt pocket, and signs the petition. He says, “You must not tell anyone I have done this for you, dear sister.” He tells her he is only recently released from prison; he is unwell. He tells her the latest coup has bought him his freedom, but his freedom and his position are not assured. He says to Mother, “Wherever you need to go, go, and get yourself out of here by Friday. Now go with God.”

  Mother returns to the street scribe. He makes the necessary additions to the petition. He writes: My five daughters, my husband, and I need to leave the country, need to travel to I____ for medical treatment. We need passports. The old man administers the requisite official stamps. Mother pays him well for his aid. He nods and sways; he says to her, “May God keep you. May God keep us.”

  Mother visits other offices, pays fees and turns in forms. On Monday, she receives the seven passports. On Thursday, the seven climb the cold metal steps, file into the airplane, and lift up into the sky.

  company

  Dear reader, we’ve only recently met, but how comforting it is to have you here. Did I not tell you that I too am a reader? I understand the need to understand all. And yet here, I stumble, eyes closed, I run into this and that, lights dimmed, I search and return, examine and reminisce, as I work to unravel this circuitous tale. How good it is to have your company.

  bird, tree, man

  Before the war, Father was many-legged. Not spider, not beetle, but capable nonetheless of accomplishing and orchestrating many things with many arms, scrambling here, scuttling there, always active.

  No, before the war, Father was a little wren, hopping from place to place and activity to activity, one moment in his tiny rooftop office at his desk over his notes, the next teasing Mother in the living room in front of her guests, and, soon after, high up in a tree with a saw in his hand, clearing dead branches. Father, always cheerful, always flitting. Always tuneful, he sang to his girls the arrhythmic village songs he’d learned as a boy. Sang them out of the blue, after a meal, on long car drives, in the midst of clearing a garden bed. He worked tirelessly and spiritedly. And when he rested, he was instantly drawn back to the farm, and to the first river, the small river on his parents’ land, which birthed and bathed him, the river that still drew his gaze, now inward, and soothed him.

  Father rose early, dressed early, was from home and at work with the sun, proud. He returned for lunch and for dinner with stories and jests for Mother, and with new ideas and strange objects, unwieldy words and curious customs garnered from his foreign coworkers to share with the girls. Mother, Queen of Stories, lent Father, otherwise timid, her ears and her heart. And the girls, audience to all they did and did not understand, laughed with Mother and delighted in Father’s antics when he replayed a scene for their comprehension.

  No, before the war, Father was a poplar tree, slender and upright, his leaves always turning, always twinkling: active then nostalgic, timid then jesting, man then boy.

  readers

  The youngest sisters, the ones still illiterate, marvel at the grown women’s ability to read the leaves. Mother and Grandmother, aunts and married cousins, seamstress and spinster neighbor, all pour and sip and interpret the tea leaves expertly. And the older sisters and cousins over the many years and the many pots of tea are steadily initiated. They are taught to study the steeped letters and to decode them by their shapes, shades, and by where they float or rest in the teacup. And the little ones look over shoulders and under arms and listen attentively, record assiduously in their little minds the shapes, colors, and behavior of each leaf and twig, as well as the blessing, the omen, or the story associated with every type.

  Their ordinarily reserved aunt squeals and nearly spills her cup of tea before she is able set it down to show them all: A marriage! A marriage, look! My eldest! Must be. See how the small, dark leaf tucks itself so modestly behind the broader, green one up against the side of the cup where the sunlight shines so brightly on both? Ten yards of silk; two of lace; ten kilos of almonds, fifteen sugar, muslin too!; the photographer’s son, such a handsome boy!; four sacks of rice, two lambs, five cars, three hundred plates… And counting, adjusting her headscarf, checking her purse for bus fare, slipping on her shoes, she trips out of the gathering to head home with the good news.

  Mother looks into her daughter’s cup and teaches her: Here, look at how this twig floats and bobs, just beneath the surface; a guest is coming, a man, a tall man, a serious man; your uncle will be here in two days’ time.

  Grandmother gathers her guests about her, stares deeply into her cup and deeply into the eyes of the women and girls about her: Haven’t I been warning you all? Another loss, another disappearance; who this time? Look at how the listless leaf floats at an angle. She is not so young, but a virgin still. Someone near to us all. Poor, helpless one. Such a shame! And all who are present cough and shift, the family pour more tea and press more sweets on their guests.

  in the beginning: tea

  Dear reader, it is early. We have not left the old land yet. Pull off your shoes, lean back into the cushions. I have poured you a cup. Stay awhile and read with me. Or, if you’d prefer, I can read you in these leaves.

  in the beginning: wonder

  The ancient land—mountainous, arid, landlocked—had many rivers coursing through it, and lakes like sapphires set in gray, impervious rock mounts. The deepest of these lakes lay where no human lived. But a dirt road ran along its length and when the family drove beside the blue abyss, Mother would say, this is where they bring the sick to heal. Those who are fearless will submerge themselves beneath its still surface, suppress many breaths, and rise again healed, whole. And the girls knew the land was wondrous.

  best man

  Father, a village native, has the one dear friend in the city. He is a school friend, a friend like a brother, a man like Father himself: a builder and an engineer, guided by numbers and rulers, and drawn to line and form. He shares Father’s industrious nature and playful humor
, and Mother’s ready ebullience and charm. He is Father’s only representative at his engagement to Mother, and stands beside him through his wedding and the births of his five girls. He is like an uncle to the girls, who see both parents reflected in the single man. He delights them with laughter and love and gifts, and lifts them high into the air and onto his strong shoulders. The engineer visits often, leaves and returns with Father regularly so that the girls come to see him as Father’s bright shadow, as Father’s steady but more jovial mirror image. He is a single man, without Father’s familial responsibilities, and he looks to Father and his family as models for the ideal life, which he has worked long and hard to earn for himself. And when he has completed his studies, been offered the job, and found his bride, he brings Father and Mother to ask for her hand in marriage. It is Mother who decorates and fills the silver platters with sweets and almonds to offer the future bride’s family. Mother who befriends the bride and sister-to-be. And it is Father who sits beside the now-shy engineer and speaks the humble words to, asks the important questions of, the bride’s parents. And her parents are welcoming: her mother nods and smiles and keeps the teacups filled; her father laughs and boasts and heartily shakes the engineers’ hands. Now he is a joyful man, the groom-to-be! He has the new job and the beloved betrothed and a forthcoming wedding celebration to dream about. It is not war he sees descending. It is not in his nature to sense darkness. He is all cheer, all light. And with his cheer and his light he drives himself forward through space and time toward the eve of his wedding.

  He is an engineer and leaves the city early with four other engineers to travel to a neighboring town to draw up the blueprints for a new school. The five work all day and into the night, the night before his wedding day. On their drive back to the city, they are stopped along the highway by the new forces, omnipresent now in the cities, towns, and villages, and along the winding lean roads connecting them.

  The engineer’s brother is a doctor in the city hospital. In the morning, a colleague from the hospital morgue finds and says to him, “Five bodies have been brought in and one has your face.”

  In the morning, Father drinks his tea; he is elated, he is restless, he readies to leave for work, but thinks only of his friend’s wedding and his joy. Mother has set out her dress and Father’s suit for the celebration. She dries her hair and dresses to leave for the salon where she will have it styled for the evening. Father answers the door when the bell rings. Mother can see him from where she sits at her vanity in the bedroom, but cannot hear what the unfamiliar man at the door says to him. But she sees Father diminish in stature, she sees his head fall forward and to the side, she sees him tremble and lean into the door. And she feels her own wrists twist and freeze, her hands become rigid and paralyzed in midair, her fingers clamp about the handles of her brush and her hair dryer. Here is the old news, fresh again.

  The five have been cut into six each. Their heads, arms, and legs have been neatly removed from their torsos, and thus they arrive at the hospital, a collection of thirty parts. And the engineer’s brother, the doctor, cannot reassemble him. And Father, the engineer, cannot buttress his heart or tie his own nerves back together after receiving the news.

  It is a day of funerals in the city of many hills. To get to the engineer’s house, Father and Mother have to make their way through a city choked with mourners. The masses, young and old, wail and scream in the streets as they follow the casket of the country’s beloved King of Music, recently killed by the new forces. Father and Mother have to drive past the house of another of the five dismembered engineers, past his shrouded body carried by his father and his uncles from car to front door. Funerals for the young daily draw and collect mourners still unaccustomed to their ubiquity. The frequency of the ritual dazes the people of this ancient land and energizes its new government and the foreign forces that steer them. The frequency does not dull Father’s ache or Mother’s terror. They arrive and are received by the bride at her betrothed’s house. She is in her wedding gown, her face and hair made up.

  She takes Mother’s hand and leads her to the bedroom she has spent months decorating with photographs and posters, with garlands and bouquets of flowers, with hand-sewn and embroidered curtains, pillows, bedspread, and bedsheets, all in her favorite colors, pink and cream. She tells Mother it is her wedding day. She grabs a hold of Mother’s wrists and says, my heart is bursting. As mourners arrive, she takes them to the room so intimate to her senses. And each time she enters the room, she enters as a bride, at once proud and bashful. When she leaves to attend to another knock at the front door, she leaves as a widow in deep mourning, carried out on the arms of those she escorted in.

  the disappeared

  In the beginning, the taking and the killing was not particular, not honed. They took those who did not look right, who walked askew, who spoke the wrong words in the wrong place to the wrong individuals—individuals with a keen interest in all that was said and done in the streets and in the marketplace, behind every wall, door, and curtain in the cities, towns, and villages of the country. They took those who would be a threat: the grocer comparing his cabbage to the new leader, the bicyclist asking directions to the theater showing the foreign film, the student returning home late from a meeting, the teacher too learned, the banker too well-connected, the athlete unnaturally youthful, the mechanic overly assiduous. Later, they had names, they had addresses. And the names and the addresses were acquired through strange methods by avid hands wielding specialized tools, and purloined from the mouths of the captured grocers and teachers and bankers too much of a threat to the state to ever see their families or their freedom again.

  blood

  In the beginning: blood.

  confidant

  Mother loves easily, she loves many and deeply—her girls, her husband, her mother and her many siblings, her neighbors and her myriad friends near and scattered about the city and the country. She loves devotedly and protectively and she does not tell those she loves and whom she must leave behind that she is going. She does not tell them that she leaves for good or will travel far. She cannot tell them where it is she and her family will fly to. But her heart is full and she cannot leave without saying goodbye to those dearest to her. She takes two of her girls, takes a taxi to the far end of the valley, to the base of a newly developed hill. She and her girls climb the steep and narrow streets of the neighborhood on the hill. They climb past houses-like-boxes, like-teeth, past boulders and children playing, women sweeping, men leaning in doorways, to the hilltop where her dear friend, who calls her sister, lives with her two small sons. While the girls and the boys play, Mother tells her friend she must leave, and soon. They are coming for her husband. Her friend, an old friend, a dearer-than-blood friend, does not take her hand, or kiss her cheek, or circle Mother with her arms. She rises, she stares at Mother, she crinkles her lips and furrows her brow, “You are leaving your motherland! You betray our new leader, the beloved father! I can, I will report you!” Mother collects her girls, descends the hill, and returns home. She cannot tell Father, she will not amplify his silence or his fear. Here is the world turned inside out, here new leaders sprouting, savage forces proliferating, flowers and trees fading, old friends wearing new faces, strange declarations spilling from familiar mouths, ancient prisons overflowing, modern ones rising, the earth reluctantly swallowing, life shifted and unrecognizable.

  monster

  Before the war, the monster the sisters feared was Old Man Thunder. He arrived with the dark, towering storm clouds to chase lightning over the city and across the sky. He roared and roared and the sisters quaked and peered out of the second-story windows of their house on the hill. The girls were safe as long as they stayed indoors, Mother said. But if they absolutely must go out, to deliver Mother’s jam to Grandmother’s house, or run to the baker’s up the street to pick up the morning bread, or make it down to school in time to take the test, they would be safe as long as they did not wear the color red. It w
as the only color the thunder man could see from his elevated perch in the storm clouds. And his favorite meal, before clouds and even before lightning, was children: soft, warm, delicious children. Mother and the aunts told the sisters many stories of small, red-garbed children being lifted from the ground and suctioned up into the dark clouds, into the beast’s mouth, never to be seen again. Families diminished in size. Children lost siblings and playmates. But life went on, said Mother, because there was nothing the adults could do once a child was swept up into the storm clouds by the angry, hungry beast. There was no official or department in the government they could go to for recourse, no ladder tall enough to retrieve the children, the aunts said.