She rests in her chair, tossing a tepid gaze into the window beside her. This happens often on nights like these when the clouds come to reign over the somber sky. The pavement outside rests solemnly, void of any traffic. All the cars are asleep. No one is uttering names anymore and so the silence only grows, masticating every stray thought crossing the avenues of the mind. The darkness outside painted over the windows, the light inside can’t help but bounce against the glass. Suddenly, the window is a window no longer. It becomes a mirror. I don’t glance often, but whenever I do, I make sure to focus on her reflection instead. Somehow, it’s easier that way. Her hair has been burnt by the years. She finds time once a month to have those spent wicks of hers slathered in dye. I can’t figure out why she’s ashamed of her gray hair. It is the marker of a full life, of hour hands reunifying at the midnight of life. Those eyes stay fixed on the outside, past the window. Perhaps, she’s studying her reflection. She’s looking with her milky eyes that once owned the blue of the sky. At times, I see sparks, distant starlight. Someone is in there with a piece of flint, striking. As I lower my attention to her lap I see her hands embracing one another, her thumb rubbing the back of her other hand. One can hardly ignore the withered and wrinkled stretches of skin on her hands. It is the sort of skin only aged leather boots could envy. The sound is the worst part. Thumb over hand, it sounds like sandpaper. She’s sanding herself down to nothing, waiting for something. I can’t recall hearing that sound before. Ten years ago when her presence afforded but warmth, that sound did not exist. Now, I can feel her person drawing the heat from the room. She is a sink where no light, no fire may survive.
I hold the world in my hands and I read what it gives me. I notice she’s here now, my grandmother. The TV is on, but she couldn’t care less. A stack of unopened books rots by her feet. The pages lie dormant and the worlds in them rest buried between yellowing paper. She’s by the window again, looking out, meeting her own glass gaze. I wonder if the woman before her is from the past or the present. Is she here in the room with me or is she back home, whenever and wherever home was? Sparks again, behind her eyes, the smell of sulfur, yet there is no flame. My heart starts drumming in my ears and I turn my gaze back to the world in my hands. I can’t look for too long, for who knows what I may see. I might see myself.
Tomorrow evening, it’s the same. This time I ask her, “What was it like growing up?” No sparks. A flame! There is candlelight behind her eyes and I peer into it. She recounts her earlier years. This was in the fifties. My great-grandfather wanted one thing, a son. God found it funny or just to bless him with three daughters instead. They would suffer his blessings in turn because of it. My grandmother was the middle child. Her older sister was never allowed to write or read. My grandmother was allowed to read and count. Her younger sister managed to go to school after their father’s heart had softened. What was her older sister’s dream? To see the sea. She heard about it once and knew it only as the place where people get tuna from. Her mind conjured images of blue deserts, warm waters the taste of sweat, and waves crashing and folding into themselves. She never did get to see it, in the end. Now, she’s buried in a small cemetery where no one visits, save for the overgrowth. What about her younger sister? She wanted to live in Sarajevo. She moved, eventually. My grandmother? She just wanted to read books. Books, however, cannot keep cattle for you, which is what my mother’s side of the family had been doing for as far back as we can trace our roots. I am the first generation to have its plebian blood diluted. My great-grandfather flew into a rage whenever he caught her trying to read books. I can picture the fire in her, a defiant and jarring flame that singed everything it touched, the unbridled female rage of a strangled soul seeking escape. It is a common truth that in all people burns a fire. It is our inheritance from Prometheus — the drive towards a brighter tomorrow, the fuel of all ambition. Her fire was snuffed out by the uncaring world of men who saw it fit to cage that beautiful sparrow whose mind had grown into a pining hunger for the recorded knowledge of our history. The busy streets of Baghdad sound in her mind. I can picture shelves full of books, names etched into the leather — Dostoyevski, Austen, Woolf, Camus, Joyce, Whitman, Tolstoy, Angelou, Faulkner, Kafka, Brecht, Wilde, Hughes, Selimovic. Baghdad fell, and the city was razed by fire. It wasn’t the fire of Prometheus, but the cruel and unjust flames of a broken past and a hollow present. She always dreamt of reading, but she never did. When I was twelve, I wanted a new PlayStation. When she was twelve, she dreamt of reading. When I was sixteen, I had to vacuum the apartment. When she was sixteen, she led a herd of 50 cattle, and she had been doing it for the past ten years. When I was eighteen, I wanted to study literature. When she was eighteen, she married my grandfather. When I was twenty-three, my parents sent me to the Netherlands. When she was twenty-three, she had my mother. As the boundaries of my world stretched to encompass all seven continents, hers stayed as they were, dwindling until what Eratosthenes saw as the planet became a mere seven acres to her. The candlewick goes dark. My question surfaced the mirth of remembrance, but remembering tends to burn the soul as well.
I was born into a family of ambition. The point my grandfather started from was no better than my grandmother's, yet he was the first of my family to finish high school. Marred by the struggles of their circumstances, my mother got to experience the horrors of war alongside her teenage years. My father fought in that same war when he was my age. I have inherited their ambition and everything else it entails. There was never a shortage of ambition in my family. There is no shortage of ambition in any family, in any person. Some fires, however, are not allowed to burn. Is it fair to say that my grandmother lacked ambition or diligence? I shudder at the thought of how bright that beacon might have shone had it been lit. It is now lost, the breadth of all that knowledge. The well of wisdom that was once my grandmother’s mind has dried over. Always hungry, always wanting more, but there is no more fuel to keep it going. Slowly, not at once, but a day at a time, her flame softened and choked. Until, one day, it ceased, resigned to a life yoked onto her neck. Could I, I would light that flame and have it sear the surface of the earth. Such rancor would wax hot and sunder all semblance of sanity. It would burn all our books, flatten all our monuments, and annihilate all things just or unjust. In her wroth vengeance, nothing would be spared. That is the fury of the unheard, the unrealized, the unremarkable. When ambitions are strangled, they may never be relit. If they were, they would burst into a raging inferno, finally leaving the mark of a dream deferred.
She goes to pray. As the sun and moon settle into akšam, the air lingers in anticipation of the ezan. When she does pray, bending her knees and kneeling on the floor, pressing her forehead against the serdžada, I can’t help but wonder something. Does she ever ask him? Does she ask her God why she wasn’t allowed to dream? Do the others, the ones like my grandmother, do they wonder about, or ask for, or at least consider the reason as to why their ambitions mattered less? Perhaps Prometheus’ gift is so rare and precious a thing it can only be spread among a select few. Perhaps some souls can’t withstand the heat in their hearth, so the flames just die. I wish every person’s life were the fertile grounds of Eden, where every dream could sprout. I wish the world held enough space for everyone’s forest. What a green and wonderful world that could have been. But her God is cruel or maybe he is dead. Or perhaps there are no Fates or strings around us. Maybe the fires of our ambitions are not fueled by hard work but by the arbitrariness of a cold and indifferent universe that cares little for the whims and moralities of men. There is liberation to be found in that realization — your path is your own and most setbacks are at the behest of a pair of dice being cast somewhere beyond your vision.
I leave her alone and let her pray in peace, by the window and the stack of unread books lying on the floor. She says inshallah when asked if she’ll ever read all of them. I wince. I hate that word. “If God allows it.” Her dreams hinge on that merciless “if,” not a hope or a request. There is no fire in her soot-laden hearth anymore. As she starts to pray, I leave the room. Alone, I sit at my desk and catch my reflection in the window. I see the conclusion of a hundred generations staring back at me, the first ever to get a university degree, the first ever to claw away from the old country, and I sit there and wonder. I wonder if I’m next.
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