The Hidden Light of Objects (3 page)

The box of four, more precious to me than pearls or rubies or emeralds from India, was carried back to Kuwait, back to the land of desert and sun, with care, with love. A gift to me from my parents, so young then. Their love, too, under that glass, for me, for each other, for the dot. I kept them safe in the top drawer of my oak dresser, in the bedroom I shared with my sister, safe with Mr. Potato Head’s smile, a pendant of a pyramid at Giza, a paper-wrapped razor. Safe but not forever, nothing safe from war.

*  *  *

On one of our weekends in Japan, my father gathered us up and took us to a town with a spa famous for its steaming, therapeutic waters.

“These waters are supposed to heal aching muscles, to rejuvenate tired limbs, to recuperate weary souls. Do you want to try? Just up to your knees.” The dot and I did not want to try. We did not want to lower ourselves into the dark, scalding waters. We didn’t know what was down there, deep in the bubbling darkness. We weren’t going in. Wide-eyed shakes of the head. Vehemently, no. We watched our parents in the waters, closed eyes, slow sighs, small smiles, pink cheeks. We waited for them on the wooden planks outside the soaking pools, the dot with her purse patiently emptied, refilled, emptied again, telling her version of a rosary, and me, with my story objects, telling mine.

Back in our room, the balcony, the scene of disaster averted, of sadness snatched back, overlooking a verdant valley, an Asian Ireland. One side of the perfect square momentarily loosed, fragile, almost broken, falling but not fallen. The dot standing between a damaged rail and the end of time. Small, exposed, with a wide, deep space below, a valley and a certain end. She was curious, surveying the lushness, the mossy greenness matching the light that flecked her arms during our morning strolls. The valley below, like the trees above us, tingeing the light the color of freshness, of spring and things newly born. It could be that what I really remember is the photograph capturing the moment after the disaster averted. A photograph of my mother with the dot enfolded in her arms. My mother’s panicked eyes glazed with somber relief. The dot mostly oblivious but aware slightly of my mother’s pounding heartbeat against her little back, of the raised veins of her butter hands against the dot’s cheeks. What  made my father rush to his camera then, at that moment, the moment immediately after his daughter was snatched back from the great fall down through the damaged rail, down to the valley below? What was it exactly he sought to capture, to put under glass? By the skin of, on the brink of, back from the edge of, clinging to? My mother had that same look in her eyes, later, dying, on the brink of, on the edge of, clinging to, but not able to be saved by the skin teeth of. My mother into my sister’s ears then, “My baby, my baby, my baby.” Her whispered mantra an aural ghost of the future, dying, dying, four seconds before death, “My babies, my babies, take care of my babies.”

Her death came, poisoned lungs, ten years after the war that saved some of us. After her, fish died, millions, buildings fell, people fell, thousands. And more wars, always, for us, here, war after war after war. Four seconds before the end, what did they remember? Before jumping off, before being blown to bits, before bombs on heads from above. What did they remember?
Hmmmmmmm
.
Aaaaaaah
. Cooing can help, and sighing and humming. He is most certainly dead now. And Ali’s son, the one who never came. And my mother, with them, dead. Each with a packet of four seconds before, if they were lucky or, perhaps, very unlucky. Four seconds to pack forever into forever after. Did she remember him? Did he remember us? Will we remember him? We will remember her. How could we not? “My babies, my babies, take care of my babies.” Who was she saying it to? To my father, whose intricate medical instruments were of no use in the end? My bewildered father, whose camera, decades earlier, had captured unbearable terror, undiluted intensity, under glass? To the humid hospital air? To the small brown birds on the sill, chirping in the silence before death, impossibly alive, for now? To her dots, no longer so little, but always little to her, remembering our ten tiny fingers, our ten tiny toes intact? Nobody can take care of us now with fish dying and buildings falling down. Did she know that? Is that why she said it? Defiance in the face of unbearable terror, undiluted intensity. Defiance under glass. But our mother dead anyway.

*  *  *

The last story object I collected in Japan was a razor. From the day we moved into our ground floor apartment home away from home, I was fascinated with the abandoned window above my bed. It was high above, too high to look out of. An odd window, long and narrow, without a screen, without a latch of any sort. Even light seemed hard pressed to filter through, the glass pane tinted orange-beige or rust brown. My mother hated the room. It was small, with barely enough space for a narrow cot, mine, and a corner cot, fold-away, the dot’s. My mother seemed squished in that room. She detested its thick, mustard gas gloom. But with the door shutting everything out, the dot and I, feeling like we were floating inside the belly of a submarine or spaceship, loved it. I had tried a number of times to lift the dot above my shoulders, to have her peek outside the window, to see the adventure that had to be beyond the orange, the beige, the rust, the brown, but she was too heavy for me, my shoulders too unstable, my arms too weak. So we dreamed beyond the glass pane.

On our last afternoon in Japan, with my harried mother gathering bits and pieces of things to pack away, my father trying to help, and my sister, disturbed by all the hullabaloo, hiding in my parents’ bed, I pushed one of the kitchen chairs into our little room and shut the door. Carefully, ever so, I balanced the rickety chair on my cot below the window and myself, circus girl, on the chair. I could reach the sill, but I still couldn’t see out the window. It was enough for me. I ran my index finger along that coveted sill, slow, slow as stones. Halfway, I had to stop to move the chair further along the bed. My finger was covered with a fine, white dust, like powdered sugar. I tasted it. It tasted like the smell of the ground after a duststorm washed away by a rainstorm, the smell of Kuwait in November or April. Balanced again, I continued to run my finger across slowly, lulled. But then, all of a sudden, an icy feeling, quick, sharp. I drew my finger away. Powdered then bloodied. A cut. Again, I tasted. Dusty rust. With my other hand, I reached up and found the culprit, a razor half-covered in gray paper marked with red script and my blood. I wrapped the razor in the paper, came down off the chair, and pushed it back into the kitchen. I washed my finger and put a Band-Aid on it. I didn’t tell my mother or my father or the dot about my cut. I pocketed the razor and took it back home with me.

The razor’s story was one of losing, being lost, loss. Its story the story of remembering and goodbye. Touching that sill was saying goodbye and, at the same time, inscribing myself there, in its lonely, orange light, forever, though I must have half-realized, even then, the impossibility of that. Goodbye to Japan, my mother, my story objects, which would never come as thick and fast as they did during that quiet trip without language. Goodbye to the kind of love that, even in the face of death, continued to love and to worry about her babies, the dots she made, her stars in a velvet sky, hers in a box under glass. The razor was remembering, remembered, memory. The old man’s fallen daughter or sister or friend. A cobalt candle, land lost, a son left behind. It was the blue and white robe my mother used to wear in the evenings before bed or at the breakfast table while reading the papers, which now the dot – all grown up, a facsimile of my mother, loveliness and grace, limpid black eyes – wears and wears. It was a packet of tiny playing cards wrapped in fuchsia tissue paper found on a shelf after my mother’s death, just there, inexplicable, but undeniably hers. It was all those objects that make me sick when I see them, that cut me every time, because the one who chose them, lived with them, used them, adored them is dead now, just dead.

And when the objects were lost, stolen from the top drawer of my oak dresser during the war of oil and cancer, I was sad, like sweetness had been sucked out of everything. Where are the stolen four now? Do they remember me like I remember them? Before the end, Chinese apples.

II

Almost every April, a group of teachers would catch spring fever and plan a trip to the island of Failaka for their students – seventh or eighth graders, sometimes even high schoolers. We were thirteen when they piled us into a ship, out in the sea breeze for a day, at a time in our lives when a day was really worth something. Getting to Failaka was easy. The water must have been a crystal blue tinged green, not sullied, as it would become, with fish still relaxed close to shore. I remember the marble ruins, marks of the great Alexander. I remember the temple of Icarus, named for the son who flew too close to the sun. I remember the citadel, the cemetery – Kuwaiti sand, Greek bones in part – and the artifacts. I didn’t know that
fylakio
was Greek for outpost. I didn’t dwell on the implications of an ancient Alex in my blood. Failaka, at that instrumental point where the Tigris and Euphrates pour into the Gulf, an outpost indispensable to Alexander’s global plans; young Alex, dead in Iraq at thirty-three. I didn’t realize Failaka had been inhabited for centuries, at least four before zero, before, that is to say, Christ (another goner at thirty-three). But Failaka, like Icarus, like all of us, would fall. It would be occupied, its inhabitants chased out, their belongings on their heads, its beaches and its unexpectedly green terrain sown with mines. Icarus, reaching for the sublime, for a beyond his father could see past and warn against, falls. His leg, clawing like a crab’s, the last appendage above water, of no use. Icarus falls, cracks like an egg. All of us on that ship oblivious of his fall, of Failaka and its fall, and of ourselves, so many Icaruses, falling out of a dazzling sky.

Echo Twins

Mama Hayat stopped breathing in the early evening, around the hour the sun turns the sky above the horizon the color of a bruise. The twins, hovering over their mother’s declining body for days, tabulating the signs of her approaching end in the slightest twitches of her fingers and toes, noticed the instant her chest sank and failed to rise again. The young men gulped air twice in quick succession. The first gulp, understandably, expressed shock. While they knew their mother had been battling something these last few months, they had never allowed themselves to think that whatever she had might kill her. The second gulp, however, was irregular. Had anyone else been in the room to hear it, they might have considered it indelicate, possibly conspiratorial. Together with the rapid glances fired between the twin pairs of glinting black eyes, the second gulp could have been interpreted as joy.

That would have been a mistake. Eighteen-year-olds Mish‘al and Mishari adored their mother. They were not happy to see her dead. They were devastated and, soon enough, would begin to feel as if their skin were being peeled off slowly, lemon and salt rubbed into their exposed flesh. The feeling of losing a mother. But there was a secret hidden beneath the ribs of their family, and their twin hearts beat wildly with excitement because they realized the age of vagueness was over. That second gulp was an acknowledgement between brothers that the years of living under the shadow of a mystery, a childhood of unanswered questions, nearly two decades of stories impossible to pin in place, were done. The golden age of certainty – what they craved more than any other thing, even more than a father – would dawn. They believed, as they had been led to believe by Mama Hayat herself, that their mother’s death would bring with it disclosure.

The family secret would be revealed.

*  *  *

Truth be told, the twins had not suffered in the early years of their childhood. On the contrary, until they were eight, they believed in the full glory of their lives. They lived with their mother in a typically Kuwaiti mud brick house overlooking the glowing waters of the Arabian Gulf. The thick, mostly windowless outer walls enclosed a charming open courtyard overrun with pots of purple and yellow flowers reaching out to the sun all day, then tightly folding up their petals in late afternoon. In the middle was a sheltering
sidr
tree ringing with sparrows and red-vented bulbuls. Bright rooms with windows and paned doors opened onto the central courtyard which could be seen from every corner of the house. The courtyard was bordered by a shaded, arched corridor surfaced with tiles hand-painted blue, green, and rust. Burnished teak beams, likely scavenged from one of the dhow-building yards nearby, supported the roof.

When it rained in late November, Mish‘al and Mishari would sit huddled close together on one of the wooden benches along the corridor and watch as muddy rivulets streamed down from the
sidr
tree to the four corners of the courtyard where the drains were located. It looked to them as if the tree were growing new roots before their eyes. They would convince each other that the normally placid tree, aggravated by the unfamiliar thunder and rare deluge, was planning to take over their home and that, in the dead of night, its roots would twist around their mother’s neck, their necks, and pop their heads off. Screeching with self-induced terror, the boys would jump off the bench and, each trying to get ahead by pulling back the other’s
dishdasha
collar, they would scramble madly to the kitchen where Mama Hayat could always be found preparing something unusual for them to eat – chickpeas and pine nuts simmered in molasses or crabs poached in red lentil broth.

The kitchen, like every other room of the house, was cooled by wind tunnels designed to suck in the sea breeze. Even during the hottest days of August, the temperature of their home remained tolerable, even pleasant, the tiles refreshing under their cracked bare feet. The sound of the wind wending through the rooms and corridors was constant, a familiar fourth member of their household. The family slept together upstairs in a loft with paned doors that opened onto a terrace. On summer nights, when the wind was still and the temperature hot enough to boil a pot of water, they would pull their mattresses out onto the terrace to sleep. From there they could see the silent black sea, flat as a mirror. When they looked down over the low terrace ledge, they could make out the shadows of their tree, and the brothers, feeling vulnerable in the night, never forgetting for an instant what the roots of that
sidr
tree might be capable of, would glance down frequently just in case. Spending the night on the terrace under the stars was part of summer life in Kuwait. In the days before air conditioning, everyone slept out on their terraces during the long, scorching months. It was like a slumber party to which the whole country was invited. Mama Hayat would tell her boys stories late into the night, making them giggle and gasp, allowing them to eat sticky, almond-stuffed dates in bed. They would fall asleep to the sounds of their neighbors’ snoring, their furtive whispers in the night. The sleepy trio would often blink open their eyes at exactly the same moment too early the next morning, stirred awake by the rose glow of the sun peeking over the terrace wall.