The Hidden Light of Objects (2 page)

It took me two full weeks to find the green bottle on the side of the road. But as always with story objects, it was there, patiently waiting for me.

There is never only one story per object. An object’s stories are without limit, infinite. Like a fingerprint, my story will never exactly match anyone else’s or even another one of my own about the same object. Though just as fingerprints may differ from each other by a tiny whorl to the left or right, such is sometimes the case with stories. A man in Gaza today might find the same story object as a man escaping on a ship to New York in 1941; a woman in southern Beirut the same as a woman in Dresden; a child in Basra the same as a child in Warsaw. Their stories will slide into each other, commingle, cohabit, connect in every way but one. Story objects are cobwebs across space and time. When you think it has never happened to anyone else ever before, a story object proves you wrong, though you won’t always know you have been proven wrong. Most people’s stories are hidden away. Objects may provide the only chance – unlikely, impossible though it may be – to unravel kept secrets.

*  *  *

We encountered the old, old man on our fifth morning in Japan. Without words, my mother, my sister, and I would ready ourselves for our daily walk, finding a home in a newly acquired habit. The dot, normally quiet anyway, would silently allow our mother to change her into a pretty summer dress and plop her into the stroller to wait until it was time to go. While neither stubborn nor prone to the usual obnoxious tantrums of children her age, the dot nonetheless would insist on one non-negotiable point: she had to carry a small purse wherever she went, and her purse had to match her outfit. She would choose from the four or five little purses she had acquired in her short life and then allow my mother to select clothes to match. My sister was not terribly impressed with conventional toys, but putting choice objects into her purse and then tenderly taking them out again one by one was a game that kept her amused for hours. My mother’s discarded lipstick; a stone she had found mysteriously under her pillow; a tiny Kinder Egg teepee; a packet of mini colored pencils; a postage stamp-sized notebook full of her scratch ’n sniff stickers, one per page; a barrette threaded with sky blue and yellow ribbons; a pendant of a four-leaf clover preserved in resin; a silver bead; a plastic compass so she would never get lost; five bottle caps from five different sodas she was not allowed to drink; a Grover Band-Aid for her thumb, which she sucked raw. These objects defined the dot’s existence then, and she felt secure and happy carrying them around with her everywhere she went. Waiting quietly in that stroller, sucking on her right thumb, clutching her purse tightly with her other hand like an Italian
nonna
on a tram, staring at the world with limpid black eyes, my little sister made me love her, made me realize this kind of love could create like magic and destroy like death.

That fifth morning we followed the same path we had on the four previous days: a left at the gate and straight down the tree-lined street. It was an extraordinarily quiet street, every sound hushed by the leaves, like walking through snow. There were never any other mothers or children around. We had not crossed paths with anyone yet and were not anticipating any different that morning. But about twenty meters into our stroll, we noticed that, unlike before, a gate to one of the homes along the street was wide open. Our pace slowed automatically and we all peered inside, three curious floating heads. The dot even stopped her incessant sucking. The old man glided out from behind a tree like a ghost. My mother jumped and made a strange, small sound with her breath. I screamed. Only my sister looked on unperturbed. The old man went directly for the dot, petting her on the head as if she were a baby goat and cooing at her. Cooing and sighing, cooing and humming, cooing and petting.
Hmmmmmmm
.
Aaaaaaah
. His great, big toothless grin seemed to stretch his fragile face to the point of tearing.

It went on for what felt to me like hours. At first my mother seemed disconcerted. The veins in her hands stood out so I knew she was tense and unsure what to do. My mother never, ever showed us her worry, but the raised blue veins on her butter smooth hands were the sign I had learned to look for. Her concern quickly passed. My mother adored old people; through them she adored her dead parents. Soon enough she was smiling encouragingly at the old man, nodding and cooing back at him. After he had had his fill of the dot, he signaled for us to wait. We waited, quiet as time. The old man returned with a round object wrapped in laser purple paper. He placed it carefully in my sister’s open hands. The dot smiled up at the old man, the kind of smile that reminds you of all the joy that survives in the world despite lost children and dead parents, despite cancer and war. He bowed gracefully, withdrawing behind the tree through which he had seemed to materialize earlier.

My mother kneeled down and unwrapped the object in the dot’s lap. It was a fruit we had never seen before, larger than an apple, about the size of a grapefruit. It was round and yellow like the leaves of a neglected book. It had the stem of an ordinary apple only shorter. When we got home, my mother washed the fruit as carefully as a prayer, dried it with a pink-edged kitchen towel, and sliced into its crisp white flesh with a sharp black ceramic knife. The juice from the fruit sprayed into my mother’s brown eyes, and she giggled like a little girl. She gave me a slice, then one to the dot, and then bit into a slice herself. It was crunchy and sweet and full of fragrant water that dribbled down my chin. The dot and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows, delighted at the new taste on our tongues. We shook our heads back and forth like the old man had done, cooing at each other and laughing hard, with our mouths wide open and our heads thrown back, for the first time since we had arrived in Japan. My mother continued to slice the fruit in threes, and we ate it slowly, slice by slice, till there was nothing left but a stem and a few brown seeds.

The next day, the gate was again wide open. Again we slowed down, and again the enchanting old man appeared as if from thin air. Again he cooed. Again he petted the dot on the head and cheeks for a very long time. My mother and I stood back and watched him. The dot had him mesmerized, his big toothless grin something to behold, an addition to the universe we would never forget. Again he signaled us to wait, and again he returned with a round object wrapped in purple paper. A final pat, an elegant bow, and goodbye. This routine continued every single weekday we remained in Japan.

The old man is certainly dead now. Even then, twenty-five years ago, he was old. Not old the way grandparents are old, but old to the point of paper thinness. As papery thin as the white lanterns strung overhead at the street fair. As papery thin as a dying petal of bougainvillea, no longer shamelessly pink, not even pale yellow, but transparent, ghostly, fading to nothing. Who did the old man see when he looked at the dot? Who did my little sister become for him? A daughter? A sister? A friend? What had happened to his version of the dot? She had to be lost, missing, a space in need of filling. A feeling to be remembered or maybe forgotten. A day at the playground in the sunlight or a picnic under a canopy of trees or a wade in a shimmering forest stream. Who was she? Where was she? Inside my sister? Inside the fruit he presented to us so carefully wrapped?

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.