The Hidden Light of Objects (24 page)

Authors: Mai Al-Nakib

I am not defiant. I might wear my intransigence on my sleeve more than before. “The thing is to be as light as air,” I used to say. It’s what I wanted my girls to learn. To enter the interstices of life like air, like a shawl through a rose gold ring. To be present and, at the same time, to wander through the alleys of the past, plucking memories and possibilities like grapes off vines. A scarf, a ring, a string of pearls. An alternative to the inexplicable anxiety that would sometimes grip me in the best of times, would have me shaking for hours in the bathroom where Karim would find me, coax me through. Burlap sack, leather sandals, blue and white robe. Not to ground me or to weigh me down, but the opposite. To set me free, to give me the strength to remember that, in the end, we all die. I will die. My husband will die. My beautiful girls, one by one, will die. The thing is to be as light as air in the meantime. I see the three of them now, gazelles with wide fearful eyes. I sense, too, the steel rod running through them. My indelible mark.

The objects. To find them – in their drawers, cabinets, closets, on tabletops, under beds – is an uncanny delight and a heartbreak. They are more familiar to me than my own body. Seeing them again after a decade means more to me than seeing my family. Sometimes language should fail. I wander through this space that cannot yet feel like home, touching the random oddments that kept me alive. Everything is exactly in its place, like I never left. Who was the dogged monitor of this decade-long precision? Jinan? Ghusoon? Surely not Karim, his legendary absentmindedness an impediment, to say the least. Little Yasmine? All of them, in their way, involved in curating this museum of my belongings. As if they knew all along; as if from afar they were trying, so heroically, to save me. Their lives, like mine, suspended, in spite of marriages and schooling and jobs that pay well. Their broken, damaged lives held together by the painstaking placement of objects that belonged to their lost mother. It takes every speck of self-discipline left not to fall to my knees and wail. The bitterest guilt, a paralyzing regret. To pick up an old book with its dry, saffron pages, to see my name and a date inscribed inside the front cover, from so many, many years ago, is to know with the certainty of a sharp slap that time has betrayed us. My conjured objects, frozen under a forgiving layer of ice, were safe, forever preserved. But in the heat of life, books and lace yellow, vases and porcelain chip, and shawls, even magical ones from Kashmir, are easily perforated by moths. No going back.

From the pages of
One Hundred Years
, a phantom kiss. Karim and I on our honeymoon on a houseboat in Kashmir. Beneath our feet, water as blue as the blind eyes of the man who sold us the shawl. It strikes me as tragic that he will never see the tremendous, heart-stopping beauty of his homeland. He laughs as he hands me the shawl, as though mocking my unvoiced pity. Our hunger to see everything in the universe is voracious, and we thank the glittering stars above – so impossibly close, we notice, almost near enough to grab – for our eyes, our ears, our noses, our mouths. On a rock as round and smooth as an egg, Karim and I kiss each other hard, like the world itself depends on it. With our eyes closed and our mouths open, we feel what it means to be young, to believe everything is utterly possible. I hadn’t noticed Karim’s tripod at the time and forgot about that kiss until he showed me the photograph of it months, maybe years, later. I placed it carefully in the pages of my favorite book, never wanting to forget again – in the whirlwind of children and work and habit – the promise of that kiss.

Ten years interned, a litany of objects, but not this photograph. It falls out now, a lifetime later, forgotten thing. In the smoothness of our skin and the white rock under us, I see the old man, his ancient glacier eyes. A promise to love despite war and unrecoverable time. A way home.

Acknowledgements

Thanks, first, to Andy Smart, without whom, no book.

At Bloomsbury, thanks to Kathy Rooney, for her unstinting support; to Sophia Blackwell, whose generosity extended way beyond her role as publicist; and to Erica Jarnes, for her meticulous attentiveness throughout the process. Thanks to Michelle Wallin, editor extraordinaire, ideal reader.

Thanks to Frances and Andy Lench, for throwing open the doors of Chateau Carignan to members of the Bordeaux Writers Workshop every summer since 2008. Thanks to the brilliant women of the Bordeaux Writers Workshop: A. Manette Ansay, Jean Grant, Frances Lench, Martha Payne, Natalia Sarkissian, Laura Schalk, and Lisa Von Trapp. Many of these stories are better for their discernment and care. Special thanks to Manette, for reading and rereading over the years, for her eyes, both sharp and wise, for her encouragement.

Thanks to the island of Sifnos, for keeping alive what in most other places has disappeared forever, and for taking us in. Many of these pages were written there.

To my sisters, Wijdan, Rania (my first reader), and Farah, thank you for reeling in the crazy and for keeping me fundamentally, despite everything, happy.

Thanks to my parents, for their improbable union, their ease in the world, their unwavering love, and for letting us go. This book is dedicated to them.

Finally, thanks to Adeeb, without whom, nothing.

A Note on the Author

Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait in 1970. She holds a PhD in English literature from Brown University in the US and teaches postcolonial studies and comparative literature at Kuwait University.
The Hidden Light of Objects
is her first collection of short stories. She lives in Kuwait and is currently writing her first novel.

First published in 2014 by

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing

Qatar Foundation

PO Box 5825

Doha

Qatar

www.bqfp.com.qa

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Extract from Henri Bergson,
An Introduction to Metaphysics
. © 1973, 2007 by

the estate of Henri Bergson. First published in 1913 by Macmillan and

Co. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

A slightly different version of “Chinese Apples” originally appeared in
Ninth Letter
.

Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd.

Reference to “The Word Girl (Flesh and Blood)” in “Bear.” Words and music by David Gamson

Gamson Songs (ASACP) and Jouissance Publishing (ASCAP). All rights on behalf of itself

The poem “The Passage” from
The Pages of Night and Day
by Adonis. English translation

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

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printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

eISBN 9789927101144

Cover by Holly Macdonald

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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