The Hidden Light of Objects Read online

  We never learned the name of the fruit while we were in Japan. About a month after our return home to Kuwait, we learned its name from our neighborhood fruit seller Ali, a scrunched up man from Iran who had fled the revolution. The magic of our trip, a secret shared by the four of us, was already tucked tightly in a pocket, to be mostly forgotten for years, remembered unexpectedly during war or before death or on the night of a mid-Ramadan moon. Ali called my mother “Um Ali,” mother of Ali, because he believed the dot, with her short, nearly blond curls, was a boy. All through my mother’s pregnancy, Ali had been cheerfully adamant that she was carrying a boy. He had made her promise to name the baby Ali, after his son. When my sister was born, my mother didn’t mention Ali’s mistaken prediction; she didn’t want to break his heart. Ali had left his son behind in Iran with his wife. Like the old man from Japan, he too would sometimes linger over the dot. “Ali! You’re bigger today. Much bigger than last week.” But Ali’s focus would quickly shift from the dot to his own little Ali, for whom, soon, soon, any day now, he would pay someone large sums of money to bring over from Iran.

  Ali’s shop was tiny, no bigger than an average-sized bathroom. But it had a higher-than-average ceiling and Ali used every bit of shelved wall space to display his fruits. Fruits from Colombia. Fruits from Chile. Fruits from Lebanon. Fruits from India. Fruits from New Zealand. No fruits from Iran. “On principle,” he would say. My mother pointed up at a shelf close to the ceiling. Ali slid onto his ladder like a lizard and brought down the box. It was stamped “China.” It was full of purple tissue paper. The dot and I sucked in our breath together.

  “These are Chinese apples, Um Ali. Have you ever had them before?” He pulled out a round, familiar yellow fruit from the box.

  My mother, as excited as the dot and me, inquired, “Are you certain they are Chinese, not Japanese?”

  “Chinese, Japanese, what’s the difference? These are the apples that grow over there. We don’t have these in Iran. We don’t have them here. As far as I know, these apples have come from China, but maybe they grow in Japan too. Maybe in Japan they’re called Japanese apples.”

  “We’ll take the box.”

  Four Chinese apples. Carefully wrapped in purple paper. Never quite as yellow or as crisp as the old man’s offerings to the dot. Nonetheless, every week till she died my mother bought a box of them from Ali, whose son, by then a man, never arrived despite all that money changing hands.

  * * *

  Each weekend in Japan, my father would plan some great adventure for us. Since he was busy all day, all afternoon, all night during the week, he saved the weekends for “his girls” – my mother, the dot, and me. We would spend most of the time wandering around Tokyo, visiting the markets, pointing at squishy food that looked like worms or eyeballs, daring each other to taste the samples generously offered. I would hold my little sister’s hand and we would walk ahead together. Every once in a while, we would glance back over our shoulders at our parents happily swinging their clasped hands up and down like children do. On one of our weekend outings, I discovered that machines that looked like they should have gumballs in them instead contained little colored pendants imprinted with animal images. I was born in the year of the dog, so the machine spat out a blue enamel pendant attached to a blue string with a silver image of a dog on it. It seemed too precious to have come out so unceremoniously and for the price of a gumball. I was enthralled. Even the blue string was special. Not yarn or thread but a strong, robust string worthy of the pendant. An important story object.

  I discovered also that in department stores women dressed like princesses bowed in elevators. They bowed as we entered; they bowed as we exited. It made the rides up feel like flights into the sky and the rides down like falling into clouds. One of these elevator trips landed us in the children’s department. My parents wanted to buy me a kimono. The loveliness of the cloth – blues tinged with pinks, purples with pale yellows, greens with sharp oranges – plunged me into a garden. I was overwhelmed by the swish of silks; even the modest cottons had me captivated. I remember wanting to bury my face in the colors, to inhale the texture deep into my lungs, to hold it there forever. My mother picked out an exquisite and unusual teal-colored kimono printed with peach and white blossoms. The approving assistant brought out a matching peach sash, or obi. A pair of greenish, wooden geta completed the ensemble. I was in heaven. For the first time I felt beautiful, like my mother. I refused to take the kimono off, and my mother said she didn’t blame me. I felt like the women in the elevators. I bowed to the assistant, who bowed back. I didn’t know then that the kimono would also become an important story object, containing in its billowing sleeves my mother’s love for me and her youth and beauty too.

  But the most important story object from Japan was the red box with the glass lid and the four rice people inside. I found it in a dusty old shop, small, barely there, like Ali’s room of fruit, with shelves all the way up to the ceiling, but lined with velvet, red or blue or maybe green, and piled with clay vases, rolled-up parchments, books of all sizes, porcelain sculptures of horses or dogs, silver dishes, and old clocks. Tucked away in this small, dark space, with the light slyly filtering through and the dust hesitating in the air, I found a small box. It was my ultimate story object. The story found the object this time because for about a week I had been thinking about these perfect four. I never dreamed they would turn up on one of our weekend outings together, in a tiny red box my parents agreed to buy me.

  The box and four figures began to arrive in my head one day, while we were waiting for the old man to return with his purple-wrapped present for the dot. What I saw first was a small, square piece of glass. Then nothing for several minutes. Then, abruptly, a red square box – an inch and a half by an inch and a half by half an inch – its lid the small glass square. Then, inside, one by one, like tiny stars in a velvet sky, the four appeared. Four members of a family. Four friends. Four together and sometimes apart. Four seconds before a long fall down, before a razor’s cut, before death. Four small grains of rice, painstakingly painted, eyes and ears and hair and smiles, necks and noses, brows and bosoms. Four rice people together in a box. Perfection under glass, still, silent, secret. Among those shifting four, sometimes Xiao Yong. Among them Elias, Ali, sometimes the old man. My sister. My mother. My father. Me. The four corners of a perfect square. Four specks of rice laid out on a velvet bed, like stars in a velvet sky. With the rice people, the story came first. Not just one story. All the stories. Each and every story together but also laid out, separate, not touching. The story of these four was together and apart, remembering and forgetting, shapes and cuts. The story of these four was the sustaining secret of a perfect square. Swishing silks and clomping geta. A cooing old man and Chinese apples. Before stolen objects and collapsing lungs. The story of these four was an impossible forever in a box under glass.

  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 occu
pied, 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.