The Hidden Light of Objects (6 page)

But with time, the boys began to generate more unease than comfort. Strange doubled beings and odd echoed speech soon came to symbolize to the increasingly bewildered residents the Janus-faced reality of producing and exporting oil. The mad fantasy of riches would come, but it would come on a wave of seismic destruction. Long after the echo twins were wafers in the memory of only the oldest Kuwaitis, the destruction still rained down, harder and harder. Crystal waters no more. Bluest skies no more. Delicate white truffles bursting in the desert no more.
Sidr
trees no more. Razed and replaced. Out with the old. To this day nobody knows for certain what has come instead. In with some vicious, damaging thing. In with perplexity. In with loss.

The boys, following their mother’s instructions, spent the years of their youth talking to the townsfolk, asking them questions, writing down the details they didn’t want to forget. Mish‘al and Mishari collected snippets of their mother’s life: an orphan with an inheritance, parents lost at sea, obstinate girl with face uncovered, cheeks raised to the sun. Some mentioned that, like the twins, their mother had once loved to swim; it was, after all, no secret. Most kept their mouths shut about the twins’ father. But a few, only one or two really, mentioned digging in the desert and Britannia. They let slip blond hair and the night. They brought up love. Nobody ever said anything about the end, but Mish‘al and Mishari, made clever by the clues their mother had taught them to read throughout their childhood, put two and two more or less together.

“One becomes two.”

“becomes two.”

“omes two.”

“s two.”

“wo.”

The twins echoed their mother’s story as they wandered around the narrow lanes of old Kuwait, as they swam through the waters of their sea, as they swung from the timber skel­etons of dhows under construction. Back and forth to each other, building up stories about Mama Hayat, about their father, about themselves, and then, increasingly, about the people they lived among. They fashioned tales, wild and roaming, unhampered by facts. They imagined away the restrictions of place. They created in leaps that hopped across time. They felt free, taking in long, deep breaths as they built for themselves a home in language, a shelter they carried everywhere with them, turning the heads of those who caught fragments of their oral symphony.

But the twins never once forgot about the box. It contained, they were certain, the answer to every question they ever had. Their mother had said so. Their mother was dead. She never revealed to them where the box was hidden, but they knew. It could only be in one place.

*  *  *

Mish‘al and Mishari washed their mother’s body and wrapped her in white linens, preparing her for the next morning, her journey into the desert. They could not bear to think of Hayat’s body abandoned in the sands now drilled with holes, safety there no more. They placed an unnecessary pillow under her covered head and left her lying on the mattress they had so often pulled out together onto the terrace. Later that evening, the feel of their mother’s weight still in their arms, the twins descended to the courtyard, sat on one of the benches, and stared at the familiar tree, old enemy, old friend. It was there, they knew, hidden somewhere under the tangle of roots. It was time to open the box.

At midnight, in the white light of a moon turning waves into plains of snow, the twins carefully unwrapped their legacy. The muslin, brown from years of wind storms and rain, disintegrated to dust between their fingers. The tin was rusted, the lock no longer locked. The brothers caught their breath as they removed from the box a heavy object not immediately clear in the shadows along the shore. Mish‘al held it up to the moon.

“A compass.”

“compass.”

“pass.”

“ss.”

A heavy brass-cased compass. F. Barker & Son. Trade Mark London. Sharp black points in all directions: north, south, east, west, northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest, and twenty-four others in between. Black on white dial. A heavy little orb with glass catching the twinkling stars and the lunar light as Mish‘al and Mishari passed it back and forth to each other with mounting pleasure. The world resting un­expectedly in their palms. A removable brass lid was engraved with the initials: ASK. The brothers held Alexander between them. Their mother’s Iskandar Dhul-Qarnayn, her two-horned lover, their father. Hayat’s version of life pointed them now in a direction they had not foreseen.

“Time to go,” whispered Mishari.

“Yes,” Mish‘al concurred.

III

An odd and inexplicable flash of light. Where was it coming from? Sitting at the bottom of the stairs, I tried to peer into the darkness at the top.

“Isn’t it strange how that keeps happening?”

“What does?”

“That flash. Every once in a while I see a flash.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t noticed. All he could think about was that some girl, the love of his life no less, had broken up with him. This compact, earnest boy had recently moved to the American School of Kuwait, ASK. I don’t know how we became friends – the only Kuwaiti boy I would ever befriend and not for long – but my patience over his misfortune was fast running out. Even here, at this remarkable party (and it really was astonishing: a villa empty of furniture, police bouncers at the door, a bar on every floor), all he could do was go on and on about the pain, the ache, the sorrow. I wanted to stuff his broken heart with a bouquet of pink carnations.

At the end of the year, I would add to the hurt of his heart a bit myself, would go with him to a dance – as his friend, that was the agreement – and then leave him for Jonas. This little gentleman would soon be angry with me. But that was still months and months away, forever in adolescent time.

“Look, I’m going inside to dance for a while. Coming?”

“You go ahead. I think I’ll stay out here.”

He stood as I stood – was he ever polite – then sat back down and lit another cigarette. I didn’t see him again that night. I couldn’t understand the extent of his sorrow over a girl. It felt sticky, unseemly for a boy already sixteen. I was trying hard to be nice to the new guy, but I couldn’t be around it all for too long. It felt like waking up smothered by sheets hiked over your chest. It felt like clenched fists.

Walking into the tar black room at the top of the stairs was a wide stretch of relief. The place was nothing – a black box with blacked-out windows, dark and moist, with kids leaning against walls. The place was everything. I wandered into the middle of it, into the dancing center, crowded bodies parting for a split second to let me in. Hands thrust up, pushing high, torsos swaying, determined, and, suddenly, strange arms catching me. “Holy girl your lips of clay.” Someone’s liquid breath against my neck. Again, that flash – in it, chandelier crystals floated above us then disappeared. I threw my head back and fell into the music, into alien arms. “Will whisper words of yesterday.” I was outside the new boy’s heartache. I was free. I would guard against his wall of lost potential. His weariness would not be mine. “Absolute a principle to make your heart invincible.” I would dance in the black box forever, my arms waving, my hips gliding – watch me.

Another flash and there he was, leaning against the wall, white kerchief knotted around his neck. “A girl to make a dream come true.” I saw Jonas see me.

The Diary

It hadn’t started out as a diary. It began as a log of quietly observed and methodically recorded details.

Monday, June 16, 1980. Rip in black trash bag. Smells very bad. Sticky trail left along sidewalk. Small birds whispering outside window. Yellow skies in afternoon before storm. Bright lightening comes after cracking thunder. Fish fingers are not always crispy.

For a while, it was page after page of carefully chronicled minutiae. Mina carried the notebook – made in China, black with red triangle corners and binding – everywhere. At the unlikeliest moment, before going down a slide, seconds after the lights dimmed in a movie theater, the instant she blew out her birthday candles, she would flip it open, write something down, slam it shut again.

Wednesday, March 11, 1981. Mirrors reflect light and eggplants do too. Smoke rises even as hot wax sinks. Marbles get dusty when played with. Sometimes the sun hangs pink and low. Cages can’t trap light.

Her father found his daughter’s habit disconcerting and intriguing. Her mother was initially encouraging, then mildly curious, but as time passed, increasingly uneasy.

The first-person pronoun changed everything. Two years after she first began to write in the notebooks, Mina, with her cropped fringe and slow-blinking eyes, discovered that describing objects wasn’t the only thing words could do. Her words, initially shy, were now more boldly wrapping themselves around her and other people.

Saturday, September 25, 1982. He doesn’t always wipe his mouth with the napkin his mother packs in his lunch. Sometimes he trades his plain milk for chocolate. When he raises his left hand to answer a question, he rests his right hand over his heart, like Napoleon. I wonder if he knows I watch him and that I carry him home with me after school.

Language was slinking into smooth, dark corners, places with sharp crevices oozing disorder. She worked her way through the jumble, slow at times, other times quick.

Tuesday, February 7, 1984. I continue to obsess over the things others remember. We all carry little packets of memories. Some of us put our packets into little boxes. Some of our boxes have keys that are sometimes worn on a leather cord around the neck, sometimes kept in a bank security box opened with yet another key, sometimes plunked in a drawer of trinkets and trash. Some of us keep our packets on shelves, others in closets. I have a suspicion that our packets are actually all laced together so that if any are dropped or misplaced or buried, it won’t be forever. Though there is no guarantee they will return to the original holder. I am constantly tripping over dropped packets and lost keys.

Notebooks, always made in China, always smelling of an apothecary shop in Beijing or Shanghai, were filled at an extraordinary rate. By the time Mina turned fourteen, the diary was her second skin, her life lived twice.

That year, a teacher gave Mina books to read, other people’s writing. He noticed her in a classroom of forty kids, mostly because she hadn’t noticed him. He was too old for her to notice. He tried to convince himself that it didn’t really matter. It didn’t matter, he told himself, that she smelled of sea salt. It didn’t matter that she bit her lower lip when she stared unnervingly, never at him, with his horn-rimmed glasses, tan slacks, checked shirts, and moustache. It didn’t matter that she still hadn’t quite learned how to arrange her legs under the navy blue skirt of her uniform. It didn’t matter that her eyes, when the sun hit them, were brown and not the olive-stone black they appeared indoors. What mattered to him ultimately, desperately, was that the potential he saw coiled tight in her, as tight as the knot in his own stomach whenever she passed his room, had to be released. He could not leave it to her parents. How could they possibly see the future of this child they had conceived? Parents cling to their children’s pasts; they belong to them. Most cannot fathom that their children’s yet-to-comes will never be theirs. They grasp with gentle tentacles, drowning their oblivious offspring in love or guilt. Against these parental impulses, against his better judgment, he started to unravel Mina’s coil, bit by bit. He selected authors for her to read: Kafka, Woolf, Durrell, Márquez, Kundera. She carefully read each one, curled up on the small landing of the carpeted stairs at home, her skin warmed by slants of afternoon sun.

She had been reading her whole life, so this was nothing new. Her mother, who had inherited the obsessive reading gene from her father, had read tirelessly to her improbably alert baby, everything from Mother Goose to Dr. Seuss. When her grandfather died, her mother had given Mina one of his books, a first edition of
The Wizard of Oz
. Mina could smell her grandfather’s life in the pages of that old book, which had found its unlikely desert home only because, in his youth, a curious Arab man had become captivated by the story of a childhood that could never have been his own. In it she smelled pipe smoke and cigarettes, whiskey and gripe water. She smelled the dust of his old projector which had worn out reels and reels of Laurel and Hardy, whom he preferred, only slightly, over the Marx Brothers. She smelled his overfull but fully ordered bedroom, its cool gray marble floors and heavy velvet curtains pulled almost completely shut, allowing only the slightest splinter of daylight to prick in and illuminate the suspended dust. She smelled his big creaky bed, quilted with neat piles of paper, and even the plastic of the ivory Ericofon he was so proud of, its dial hidden from sight. She smelled her mother’s childhood in Pune, layers of mango ice cream, sliced papaya, and jackfruit.

The pages of that old book were heavy with her grand­father’s losses. His small trading company in India had gone bankrupt, and during the sad voyage back to Kuwait, he had lost his restless audacity too. The desert had never been to his liking and working for the national oil company – where, after all, it was only one thing everyone was after­ – had violated his sense of enterprise. His life became less about what he was doing or going to do and more about what he had already done. Every weekend, Mina and her cousins would flock to his quarters – a library, a bedroom, and the avocado green tiled bathroom where soon he would have his heart attack quickly and alone, the false teeth he used to frighten and delight the children still floating in a small glass beside the sink. He would recount to them how he had sailed off to India in a dhow, against the wishes of his parents, to look for rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and other glittering things. He would tell them how he had met their grandmother, where else but in a garden, under a banyan tree, and how her father, their great grandfather, had openly balked at the idea of his precious fairy daughter marrying an unreliable Arab jewel trader, however keenly intelligent and well-read. Love won the day, and soon many children were born.