The Hidden Light of Objects (22 page)

For us everything feels sharp, outlined in black. We remark on the rarity of the clouds in the steel sky. We read them as a sign. We have spent ten years reading signs. It is no surprise that on the day of her release we lose ourselves in a flurry of them. Sparrows precariously balanced on instruments played by the army band brought in for a special welcome. A sliver of obstinate moon at an hour when it long should have moved into someone else’s night. Most striking of all, through the sulphuric fumes anyone living in an oil town like Kuwait is familiar with, whiffs of vanilla.

They do not comment on my short white hair or papery skin. They fail to note my quick intakes of breath as I navigate the steps of the plane. They see a mask of calm, my practiced serenity. They cannot hear my irregular heartbeat or feel my brittle bones. I perceive little through the flash of bulbs, the microphones under my nose, the hands thrust into mine. Carefully, I embrace my daughters, three stunning women, almost strangers to me. And my husband Karim, his eyes, like mine, creased with age. I refuse to release my burlap sack, my sole acquisition in a decade. The smell of white cake surrounds me, and I wonder how they have managed it.

There are other signs on that arrival day, but we decide that clouds, sparrows, the moon, and vanilla are signs to be taken for wonders, a string of impossibles signaling that the impossible could happen, has indeed happened. We discuss those four signs at length soon after we arrive home, while she is in the shower, her first shower in a decade. There she is, in our father’s bathroom, their bathroom, washing off ten years of captivity. We can hear her.

I am not sure what we expected. The night before her arrival, we were a mix of euphoria and palpitations. My father and my youngest sister, Yasmine, were rapturous and starving, endless platters of food not enough to fill them. But Ghusoon, my other sister, and I were agitated, unable to keep down water. Privately, the two of us fretted over our mother’s damage. Ten years a prisoner of war. Had she been starved? Tortured? Had what normally happens to women’s bodies in war happened to hers? Would she be the mother who kissed our Band-Aids? We were all too old for that now. When Zaina was taken, Yasmine, only ten, was young enough to need kissed Band-Aids. While she was gone, it was those kisses we remembered most. What we would have given to feel her lips on our scraped skin, our faces, our hair. It was, for ten years, a desire that carved through our bellies like an ulcer. To feel her kisses. To hear her morning songs. That night before her return, Ghusoon, now twenty-five, and I, already thirty, wondered whether she could still be the mother who sang us awake. And we felt guilty for wondering.

We didn’t expect the calm mask of her face. We wanted tears and dimpled smiles. When we take her into our arms, we want more to be taken into hers. We feel ourselves clinging to her. It reminds us of the way she had always hung on to us before our trips away to school, to camp, to visit cousins in far-flung places. She always wanted us to go off into the world, already at twelve, at fifteen, to recognize ourselves as independent and as strong as she always was. But at the airport, at the final goodbye, she would cling to us as if our separation were going to be forever, as if our plane were going to plummet. We would be antsy, cruel in our childish insouciance. A plane ride! A ski trip! Off to college! We couldn’t get away fast enough. Our mother’s hugs were quickly forgotten, her pooling eyes a source of gentle teasing. Now it is all reversed. We cling to her. We cry. We worry she will melt into air. She kisses us back but she doesn’t cry. She doesn’t cling and we want her to.

In the brief interludes provided by her showers – she takes four in the first four hours off the plane and then one every few hours during the first week – we huddle together, parsing our observations of her. Does she seem happy to be back with us? Does she seem sad? Afraid? Angry? Nothing seems to fit. No word can be stretched enough to cover what we think we perceive.

We watch her especially when we think she isn’t looking. Every flicker of eyelid, every unassuming gesture, every ripple of expression. Hope? Anxiety? Despair? On the third day, Yasmine declares: “Defiance.” Yes, that comes closest, we think. Defiant but not bitter, seemingly without regret. Our regret is sufficient. Enough regret to fill the belly of a whale, a hollowed-out planet. All that time gone, everything she hadn’t seen, would never feel or hear. But, we decide, the missing bits we want her to know about have everything to do with our lives, our time gone by, not hers. We recognize our selfishness, feel guilty about our long ropes of regret.

That first week, we don’t talk about her ordeal and neither does she. We don’t want to push it. We have decided to give her space and time to figure things out. There is no one around to advise us and I’m not sure we would listen anyway. We want to build a wall around her. No therapists, no counselors, no experts. The politicians are there, of course, for the pictures, the papers, the votes, hoping their florid displays of sincerity will cover up the unresolved POW fiasco. Then there are the inevitable family members and friends, thunderously forthcoming with their congratulations. We can feel her wince and it makes us want to slap them all and send them as far away from her as possible. Well-meaning brothers and solicitous sisters. She embraces them though they were never close. They stay for a while that first day, come back the next, but by the third they are more or less gone, promising to visit again soon, to call. We haven’t seen them in ten years. They wouldn’t call, we thought, and that was fine with us. But nobody, not the politicians, not the family, not the friends, has any advice for us on how to deal with her return, on how to treat her.

That first week, we try to talk about ourselves. Ghusoon goes first, unwrapping her life layer by layer. Married. Working. As happy as our mother would want her to be. A good man. A good job. No baby yet, but soon, in a year, maybe two. Me, Jinan, next. My slow writing life. Yasmine, still in school, almost done. Zaina’s three daughters unfolding their lives for her to see, fresh, clean, upbeat, leaving out the grime. But our father, a broken man, unable to voice his layers of sorrow. She listens and watches, her mask of serenity intact. She listens in absolute silence and we chitter like birds to fill the stillness where her voice should be. We are used to doing that. We have learned to speak to ourselves in her voice. We wonder if she still speaks that way, if she still sees the good in everything. “Luck will find you,” she always said. We wonder if ten years could come down to what we are sharing with her. Marriages. Jobs. Degrees. How can we demonstrate what it has taken to get to here? Every joy scalloped with sadness. How can we convey to her the years of deliberation before accepting any man, any job, before making any decision? Every opinion and thought already filtered through her. We figure, surely she must know.

It is like having our mother back from the dead. When she was first taken, I would wake up every night in a panic, wanting to run through the streets to find her, to get her back, to erase this abomination that had blackened our already heavy lives. My heart pounding, I would probe the events of that day again, point by point, a sort of unholy equation that I couldn’t get to add up. She had woken at dawn. She had prayed. She had gone down into the kitchen to make herself coffee. She had taken her coffee into the living room. That’s where we had found her still warm cup. Something had made her go to the door. We would have heard the doorbell. We would have heard a knock. Something had made her leave her coffee on the table and go to the door. She wasn’t supposed to do that. It was too soon to feel safe enough, the streets a mess of retreating soldiers and loamy young heroes looking for glory with guns. It had only been a week since the liberation of Kuwait from Iraq, and it was a novelty to be able to open the front door. I figured my mother, restless after almost seven months stuck indoors, had wanted to exercise her newly regained right to step outside, to leave curtains undrawn, to fling open a window even. It had only been a week, but we had quickly recovered old habits. Curious how bodies slink back into their comforts, their ordinary pleasures. So my mother with her coffee and recovered freedom must have heard something, must have forgotten or pretended to forget the procedures that had kept us safe for seven months: doors bolted, curtains drawn, lights out, down into the basement shelter. Her blue and white robe was missing. Her leather sandals. Early March in her flimsy robe and sandals. This image seared me for a decade. She got those sandals in Greece. There is a black and white photograph, taken unawares, of her and my father stepping off a ferry on one of the islands. They paid for the photo when it was offered to them later because she looked gorgeous, her long brown hair, her white cotton shirt.

When she was abducted my father put out photos of her in every corner of our house. Photos of her when they were first married, of her pregnant, of her at parties, at conference dinners with him. Photos of my mother feeding her beloved birds in the garden. The photos gave my father some solace, but they tortured me. It wasn’t that I wanted to forget her. I thought about her every day for ten years, not a day without thoughts of her. But I couldn’t, even after a decade, look at pictures of her without slipping into the abyss of guilt and regret. I tried to avoid looking at my father’s gallery, not needing pictures of her to remember every little thing. Her freesia smell, her butter skin, the small whisper of lines around her light brown eyes, and, as I got older, an insistent memory of her anxieties, the stresses of her own life she had always tried to keep from us. That first week of her return, as we sit huddled together in the living room, it is the island photo behind her back my eyes keep falling upon. It is easier to focus on that than on my mother in the flesh. A vision in a white shirt on an island in Greece, sandals that would disappear for ten years.

During her second week back, my mother sleeps the sleep of the dead. We can’t wake her, hard as we try. She eats only once a day, when she gets up to use the bathroom. She doesn’t shower. She doesn’t speak a word. She is groggy, drugged by a boundless exhaustion, her head flopping around as she swallows cold broth, tea with as much sugar as we can spoon in. We are scared, unsure what to do, no one to ask for help. Where are the experts? We whisper to each other in her room, never leaving her alone for a second. Is it a slow suicide? Will she ever wake up? Will she ever want to speak again? Ghusoon mentions trauma and elective mutism. We can not picture our mother silent forever.

I have only the faintest recollection of the first weeks back. I remember cradling my burlap sack between my feet. I remember refusing to allow Ghusoon to wash my blue and white robe, needing to maintain the smell of my captivity, at least for a while. I remember drowning in sleep and, when coming up for air, I remember thinking only of the nine others.

Before she was taken our mother was loud, the center of every conversation. She would argue with strangers if she felt she had to, never shirking confrontation, but she would also talk intimately to women at the neighborhood fruit and vegetable stall, joke with people in supermarket checkout lines. Shopkeepers adored her, as did the local ice cream vendors on bicycles, for whom she had bought umbrellas and folding chairs, a small reprieve from the crushing heat. In our insular little country with its ten-foot-high concrete walls fortressing private homes, she was an open, generous oddity. People loved her for it, her wide laugh, her sparkling teeth. They felt privileged to be scolded by her, even more to be included in her easy charm. She elevated their lives for a second and they never forgot it. Anywhere else, she would have been a movie star. Even in Kuwait, in the late 1960s, she had been a glamorous host of some television show. We hadn’t heard about this till after she was taken, casually mentioned in one of the many newspaper articles about her abduction, the talk of the town for a while. We asked our father about it, and he confirmed the story. Our young mother, a television queen in her green Alfa Romeo Spider, her endless legs in a mini dress, her brown hair twirling in the wind. It was this Sophia Loren image of her that had compelled our father Karim, a fresh graduate from the University of Vienna medical school, to seek her out, to, as he put it, “Forge my destiny.” He knew the kind of life he wanted, and, with the confident certainty of someone who had learned German and Latin in a year, he went after it. So many things about Zaina we didn’t know, secrets hidden in other people’s pockets, in the objects that belonged to her.

With the exception of her clothes, we didn’t have it in us to go through her belongings for the first five years or so. Our father asked us to move her clothes out of their room about six months after she disappeared because he couldn’t stop himself from slumping down in her closet, inhaling what was left of her smell. We all did that whenever we thought no one else was around. If for me pictures of her were the hardest residue to bear, for Yasmine it was our mother’s smell. For a year or so after our mother disappeared, the unmistakable smell of her clothes, of the inside of her purses, even of her shoes would make my baby sister weep. We would find her asleep on the floors of various closets, hidden under layers of our mother’s shawls and dresses, on a bed of her high heels. It was difficult to comfort her, to take her into our arms. She was inconsolable. Maybe she felt our touch as a kind of betrayal. She would allow only our father to carry her back to her small bed, her skinny arms dangling over his shoulders as he whispered things Ghusoon and I couldn’t hear.

We worry that our mother feels left out, a foreigner in her own home.
Unheimlich
, our father says to us and to her, a familiarity made uncanny, a home no longer homey. We tried to keep the house exactly as it had been before she was lost to us. Not a thing out of place apart from her clothes, which we put back meticulously when we were informed she was going to be released. We had memorized the placement of every object in our parents’ room, in her drawers, closets, cupboards, in the dining room, living room, her kitchen. Her
Betty Crocker Cookbook
. A string of old Kuwaiti pearls given to her by her mother. Her Clinique Nude lipstick. Monogrammed handkerchiefs. Hand-painted champagne flutes. Flower vases from Prague. Her father’s books that smelled of India. Her straw hat. Matches collected from restaurants. Her fine Kashmiri shawl, pulled through her wedding ring with a flourish. Boxes of Christmas ornaments on which she had written
Packed by Mom with love
; we could never bring ourselves to open those boxes. Wave-worn stones from Capri. Silver bangles that sounded like wind chimes around her wrists. We went through some of these things over the years, always looking for answers that weren’t there. We tried not to allow ourselves to think too hard about the specifics of her absence. We focused on her being alive, not on the conditions of her life away from us. We wrapped ourselves in the familiarity of her things. But now that she is back, we fear that her objects, her rooms, the life she was forced to leave behind are no longer her home. To her, they must be both familiar and unfamiliar. Maybe their familiarity makes her afraid, makes her recognize what she, like us, has taught herself not to see over those ten years. To survive.