The Hidden Light of Objects (23 page)

Unheimlich
. Karim is right to use that word.
Unheimlich
, precisely. Every one of us had something in that windowless space, gray with unswept dust, that stood for home. For me it was counting objects. Not quite counting them. Naming them, sorting them into categories, telling their histories, and trying to remember where they would be in my house. I would explain it to myself as though I were attempting to give one of my daughters or Karim instructions over the phone to find the thing I needed. “My gray Kashmiri shawl. You know, the one we bought together on our honeymoon from the blind man who said he had spun the yarn for it with his own knotted hands. Remember how he held them out for us to look at? Remember how young we were, believing him to be over a hundred? He was probably forty-five. It’s in the chest of drawers on the left-hand side of the bedroom. It’s in the last one, under my leather gloves.” Or, I imagined myself saying to Jinan, “
Habibti
, if you go to the closet in the hallway, down in the storage area under the last shelf, you’ll find an inlaid wooden box. The key for that box is in a small porcelain bowl in the drawer of my bedside table. Unlock the box and inside it you’ll find the tiny emerald ring my father-in-law gave to me when your father and I got engaged. It was the only possession of value his mother brought with her to Basra from Circassia, pressed into her young hands by her father before he sold her off to an Arab merchant who, in turn, sold her to your great grandfather. Struck by her mythical beauty, he quickly married her.”

A litany of objects. My home for a decade.

Before she was taken, my mother was a quietly religious woman, her prayers like goldfish in a Japanese garden pond under a bridge. She prayed five times a day, but she never discussed her faith with her brood of agnostics and atheists. It didn’t bother her what we did or did not believe and it didn’t bother us that she believed. After she was taken, religion fluttered through the air as an option. We heard from meddling family members that it helped to submit to God’s will, to trust that He had a plan for our mother, for us. In the first few shell-shocked days of her abduction, we may have given in to some magical thinking. We would have made a pact with the devil let alone a bargain with God to get her back. It didn’t take long to realize that neither would return Zaina to us. Believing in the randomness of events gave us more comfort than any god or devil could. If we had any faith, we put it in the luck of the draw. We wondered whether her beliefs were providing her with sanctuary wherever she was. We wondered whether the things that were happening to her had caused her to lose faith.

Religion was Selma’s anchor. The loss of privacy – ten of us packed into a cell too small for five – made it difficult for me to pray. Selma had no such qualms. While I worried my phantom objects like beads on a
misbah
, Selma quietly recited her Qur’an. For Khadija it was singing, her husky voice as un­expected in that cell as a hot shower. She was the youngest among us, only twenty, and when she opened her mouth to sing, danger would pour out. Noor had her numbers, strings of equations dancing through her head. Hanan came up with as many palindromes as she could. Altaf used recipes, reciting intricate formulas for the preparation of meals we all longed to eat. Dalal drew portraits of people she knew in the dust on the floors and walls of our cell. Aisha collected insects and trapped them in plastic bottles she managed to secure from the guards. She helped reduce the population of roaches, beetles, and crickets coating our premises. Dana, a poet, puzzled through words, some she shared with us, others she kept to herself. When she felt like it, she would recite Mahmoud Darwish, Abu Nuwas, Adonis, her memory for language unfailing. For Hala it was tracing cracks in the walls. Hours spent following serpentine paths of hairline fissures or major valleys splitting some of the bricks clean in two. At first she was looking for points out to freedom. But after a year or so, she, and we, recognized that there were no gaps in the thick walls. Still, she didn’t stop, her graceful fingers gliding up and down, her lithe body moving to Khadija’s songs.

In these unlikely ways, and together, we survived.

After the week of sleep, my mother speaks. “What you may think happened, did not.” We immediately know what she is talking about. That ugly violation of the body, that laying claim over it. She stops there. No further assurances. She is still on the bed, still under her quilt covers, but no longer always asleep. She seems suddenly less fragile, less dazed. Yasmine is right. Our mother seems defiant. Is it directed against her captors still? We, in our perpetual self-involvement, worry it might be against us. We aren’t sure. We want to believe her. We want her intact, like she was before she was taken. Unraped. We can’t tolerate the desecration of her body. We can’t bring ourselves to think about the forms it could take, always takes, in war. Could she be the exception after ten years? Could she have come through unscathed? We want to believe her, but we think she is lying. We want to tell her that we will help her through anything, will give her back her body, will take away the damage. We are, all of us, unprep­ared, ineffectual. We are, mostly, silent.

The morning I was abducted, what I heard, what drew me to the front door away from my coffee, was the strangled sound of a woman struggling for air. My instinct was not to warn my family, not to dive down into the basement. It should have been – I have my own tangled ropes of regret. My instinct was to go see. What I saw when I threw open the door was a young woman on her knees with a thick clear plastic bag over her head. Her stricken eyes, jerking desperately in my direction, appeared strangely magnified. Two heavyset men stood over her, pulling the rope around her neck in opposite directions. I heard the snap. They removed the bag. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. I didn’t recognize her, but she was somebody’s daughter. Before I could react or make a sound, the men swooped down on me, put the same plastic bag over my head – I could smell her saliva, her fear – and stuffed the dead girl and me into the trunk of what I am certain was a stolen Mercedes. I was grateful for the roomy trunk.

They hadn’t bothered to tie up my hands or feet, so it was easy enough to pull the bag off my head and push the poor girl into the deepest part of the trunk. I kicked out one of the tail lights with my foot. In that first week after liberation, however, there wasn’t anyone around to notice. There were people on the streets all right, but they were too busy doing wrong – looting, exacting revenge on innocents – to pay any attention to me. The car flew through the desert. I don’t know how the men managed to bypass undetected all those American troops, but they did, all the way to Baghdad. In the few seconds from when the car stopped to when they opened the trunk, I thought only of my three girls. I expected an immediate pistol to the head and I was trying to blot out fear with images of my babies. They dragged me out of the trunk. My legs would not hold, so they propped me against a wall. They blindfolded me and tied my hands behind my back. I could hear them yelling to someone named Mohammed to come out for a pickup. They didn’t say a word to me and I kept as silent as cotton. I could hear them struggling to remove the girl’s rigid body from the car. I anticipated a similar end for myself. Instead, I heard the car doors slam shut and the engine revving up. A squeal of tires and they were gone.

I expected Mohammed to bear down on me at any moment. He didn’t. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my forehead, could almost see its orange glow through my closed and covered eyelids. My limbs ached. I tried as hard as I could to escape the binding, unsuccessfully. Hours must have passed. I could feel it getting darker, the cold seeping into my bones. No sign of Mohammed. I fell into an irregular sleep, waking up confused, fingers reaching for Karim’s hand the way they often did. After five hours, maybe ten, someone pulled me up by the hair. Mohammed. He pushed me from behind, leading me somewhere. He must have spoken, but I remember nothing of what he said. He removed my blindfold and shoved me into a pitch black hovel, nothing more than a hole in the ground with wood over the top, two small cracks for air. I must have fainted almost instantly because, again, I have no memory of that first time in the hole. All of us spent our first day in the hole, a kind of breaking in, but after that it was rare. When a guard was in a sadistic frenzy, he would shove one of us down in, but, thankfully, that didn’t happen often. The hole smelled of river mud, and we had taught ourselves to close our eyes and imagine floating on a raft in blue waters, an endless course of aquamarine. It took discipline, but over time it worked, and the hole, like our cell, couldn’t touch us.

There weren’t many guarding us, only four or five, and as far as we could tell, we were the only prisoners in the building. It wasn’t a conventional prison, we knew that all along, and when we were released, we weren’t surprised to find that it was the basement of a quite ordinary villa in a suburb of Baghdad. The guards were all men. This caused exactly the kind of trouble you would expect, especially during the first few years and especially for the lovely Khadija, who has two children to show for it. My daughters suspect I lied when I said nothing happened. It isn’t shame that stops me from telling them. We aren’t that kind of family, and I was not – am not – that kind of woman. What stops me from telling them right away is something more complicated than shame or guilt or even regret.

There is no going back. I should have realized this after the occupation, the so-called liberation. Nothing, not a thing, went back to the way it had been. New people in the country, new food, new habits, new language. Suddenly, women swathed in ominous black hoods. One year can blot out the past, everything that we were before – twinkling water, pure desert – and life is channeled into a bucket of mud. No going back. The filth and dirt everywhere, the corruption, the sooted skies and murky seas. Nobody seemed to care, everyone swallowing fistfuls of dollars as fast as they could. We were suspended, watching it all through sandblasted glass, thinking everything was different because she had been taken from us, making it personal. But it wasn’t just her absence, this new and sadly rotting Kuwait. She would have known how to deal with it, we told ourselves, how to make life work despite the doomed tangle. We were, for ten years, in a situation that was
unheimlich
. We no longer belonged. All we could do was look back and pine for what could never again exist.

Our lives before were padded by her presence. There are people who know how to make life safe despite the deepest sorrows. With a matchbox and Kleenex my mother would fashion baby ghost dolls in a tiny bed for us to play with. And when she and my father had some money, working like demons in their twenties, the early successes of our precious little boomtown, she spent it on travel, on buying beautiful things, on her garden, her house, because she knew it could all disappear, that now was the time to enjoy it. “The thing is to be light as air,” she would say. Our lives before were as light as air. We were lucky. Luck of the draw. The lucky are hated the world over, detested, and rightly so. The lucky make it worse for everyone else. But we have paid our dues. So has she and she didn’t deserve it.

In the trunk of that still Mercedes, when I believed I would be dead in seconds, thoughts of my girls filled me. It felt like being lit from the inside and the fear of death, though undeniably there, diminished. They go on, I go on. Once it became clear none of us was going to be killed – the small number of Kuwaiti POWs kept alive were, apparently, valuable bargaining chips in the endless negotiation for reduced sanctions or increased loans – I knew something had to change. I could not keep filling myself with their light, my children’s or even my husband’s, because it made me want to go home,
heimlich
, and, as we came to realize after that first year in captivity, there was no chance we were going home any time soon. It wasn’t that I stopped thinking about them completely; that would have been impossible. But what allowed me to create a new kind of home for myself out of the infuriating suspension we now inhabited, a limbo punctuated by the violence and disregard of men whose poverty and desperation could be seen in their bloodshot eyes and crusty yellow nails, was shifting focus from the life I knew to the objects I had once owned. Between my body and me, between the ones I loved and me, a cavalcade of possessions. I can’t expect them to understand any of that yet. How the things that belonged to me – fine lace pieces from Burano, clumps of silver jewelry from Peshawar, my youngest daughter’s old blanket, red clay pots from Lebanon, my father’s dusty books from India, a little packet of playing cards wrapped in the brightest fuchsia tissue paper (which I could never bring myself to unwrap), my mother’s string of delicate pearls floating in gold, her gift to me before she died – each in their way embalmed the kernels of my life.

It has been a month now since her release. She walks through the house in a kind of bubble, touching her objects. She wanders from room to room, opens every cabinet, every drawer, touches the lace covering her mahogany tables, the transparent porcelain teacups, the carved wooden duck. She opens her old copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, the one she bought the year I was born, the one in which I had found a black and white photograph of her and my father kissing. Not a kiss others would have been allowed to witness, not the kind of kiss we had always seen them share. This was a private, phantom kiss taken by I don’t know who, maybe just my father’s camera on a tripod. I see her find that lost photograph one morning, watch her breathe out sharply as it falls from the yellowed pages. She is, I think, trying to account for something. I’m not sure what. We’ve all lost our bearings now that she is back. The guilt I feel for putting that into words. Sometimes language should fail. We’ve become ghosts again, like we were the first few years she was gone. In the years since, we built small lives, with guilt, with regret. Does she see it? Now we are suspended again, unable to work, to speak, to think. My father stumbling, trying to make sense of himself with his wife back. She can’t help him yet. He can’t help her either. She stepped off the plane with a burlap sack. Inside her sack: blue and white robe, Greek island sandals. To see her walking through the rooms in her blue and white robe – the same robe, the same sandals – shocks. We can’t make it add up.