“I won’t be able to meet you on the roof of the building after today. I hope this doesn’t upset you. I have a room now. In a faraway hospital with a big warm bed. It’s well lit. It has lamps in it that you can’t find in the shops. If I improve my behavior they may put in a television for me. Perhaps a small television, perhaps not. Sometimes I entertain myself by looking at the fluid dripping through the IV tube but that gets boring fast. The sound of these drops is muffled. I have gotten to know all the little sounds without being forced to hear them. But all the muffled sounds are distant at the end of the day. Even the drops of medicine, which scramble around inside the veins in my arm, seem very distant because they are muffled. They are not as close as they seem or very close at all. I feel like they aren’t mine. I dream that I’m pushing a long train with my hands, a train carrying all the stars in the sky in coal carts. It’s true that I’ve never seen a train except on a chewing gum wrapper in the shop, but I’ve dreamed of a train. It was also yellow and pink. The stars were dusty and my hands were big. Bigger than they should be, and thicker too. Because of this my back is bowed and you see me hunched over toward the ground. When I woke up I was thinking about the locust. I don’t know where the train has arrived. The locust we found on the roof, do you have any news about it? I urged you that day to open one of the boxes and put it inside. You had to do it. We put the locust inside, we resealed the box and threw it with the other boxes. I closed my eyes with all my strength. Sometimes I think that this locust is eating a little piece of the moon, that it tricked us and didn’t reach the stars. I hope I’m mistaken, but after my mother falls asleep in the chair, I go up to the roof of the hospital and look at the moon. Sometimes it seems to me that its color has changed on one of its sides. I fear that the locust is eating it. Are you sure the moon is so big that it can keep rising above people’s houses even after we did this? Can you send it some gauze? In boxes? The gauze could fill in the missing, eaten part and no one will notice. In the hospital no one asks me where I’m going. I leave my room and steal down the stairs. I can’t take the bag of medicine out of my arm but I drag it with me on a metal pole. On the roof I’m completely alone. I close my eyes as tightly as I can like I always used to do when I was with you. And I lift my head up. Toward the sky. It seems to me that when I close my eyes, the color of the sky suddenly changes and becomes the color of the little strap around a gas canister. That thing we put between the screw-top and the tube so that gas wouldn’t leak. I think that perhaps the night is this layer of artificial leather that prevents our dreams from leaking out of us and rising. Up above the sky. To what is above the night. Did you ever wonder what we could find sitting up above the night? But after I close my eyes, I totally know when to open them. Yes. At the very moment you stop throwing boxes on the roof of the building, I open my eyes here on the hospital roof, holding onto the medicine pole with both hands because I’m exhausted. I won’t open my eyes except when you ask me to.”
6.
I wanted to tell Nazmi more of the secrets connected to the boxes. When we threw them in the air, they rose, slithering along invisible tracks. Tracks like the chains of the only swing at the amusement park. Every box takes a different sinuous route from every other box (and to make it easier, I would have to ask Nazmi to imagine the pipes of the sink instead of imagining the amusement park chains on a winding frame). With distance, feverish boxes grow hotter and open the moment they arrive at the star. No box pays attention to its right or left. It doesn’t look at any other box, nor at the passengers who wave at it from the airplane, nor at high-flying birds, nor even at the boats in the sea or the beams from the black-and-white-striped lighthouse on the street parallel to ours. It doesn’t pay attention to anything, but instead passes on its way, concentrating on how to not waste energy for nothing and to not be delayed in arriving at its desired star.
But Nazmi went to hospital the day before we left the building. My parents had decided to leave and hadn’t informed me of this ahead of time. This surprised me, so I was forced to leave with them at the last minute. Were it not for that I would have stayed. I would have hidden in the electricity room that gave off the stench of urine soaked into the land under the building. I would have lived inside it and finished preparing all the boxes there. We left because the war began. But the war at that time was still small. Like children. It wasn’t more than sounds that came and went. Personally, I didn’t see the war at all. I didn’t see anything, therefore I can’t tell you anything about it. They started to talk about it on the radio at the time and stopped talking about anything else. But the sound of the war wasn’t like the sound of the radio. Its sound wasn’t like any spoken word. It wasn’t like Nazmi’s voice or even the sounds of the boxes after they are thrown. The colonel also left for the mountains. Nazmi didn’t come to the roof of the building the night before or the night we left. When I finally read his letter, it was after he’d already died of leukemia, blood cancer, more than three years earlier. I wished that I hadn’t ever gotten close to the gas-canister boy. I felt kind of jealous of him because he died. Nazmi became this precious piece of paper that I folded in the small wooden boxes. Without him, I couldn’t unfold this paper anymore or even see the boxes as I saw them before.
When I entered the shop to get some wooden vegetable crates that first time, Nazmi asked me what I was going to do with them. I said, “Boxes.” Because I didn’t want to tell him what I thought about the desultory things in the world, I added the word stars to the word boxes. So it became, “Boxes for stars.” Then I finished, “Small boxes, I throw them in the sky when it’s dark outside.”
“What do you mean by stars?”
“They are small bodies that shine in the sky at night. Like little crumbs of bread.”
“I never thought about looking at the sky before. I spend my days moving things, canisters of gas, for the people who live on this street. Everything is heavy. I hate all heavy things and avoid looking at them when I can. Therefore I don’t look at the sky. Because the sky is itself a heavy thing. Don’t you think? At school, don’t you study how heavy the sky is?”
Nazmi refused to give me any crates that day. But the next afternoon he knocked on the door of our house and had three crates with him. He said excitedly, “These wooden crates are for you. Can I come with you when you throw the boxes at the sky? How many boxes can you complete by tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, I will try as hard as I can,” I answered him, bewildered.
“I can bring you string, glue, and nails — yes, even gas-canister wrenches. I will tell the owner of the shop that they fell out of my pocket. He will punish me but his punishment won’t last for more than one day. Could a wrench be helpful in preparing boxes?”
Nazmi brought me string, glue, and nails. I don’t know where he got them. As for the wrench, I refused to accept it because it was too heavy for me.
The next day I found Nazmi standing in front of me. He asked, “Can I go with you? I won’t look at the star you are looking at. I will look at another star.”
But I stipulated that he should close his eyes and I would throw the boxes. Like him, I closed my eyes. Because the boxes won’t get anywhere if an eye can see them. The pupil of the eye is small and if we look at the box with it, the box will be inside it. And in that case it won’t be able to get out. Instead, it would plunge into the depths of his eye, inside his head, and from there would sink toward his chest, stomach, and intestines. There are no stars in the intestines. It will generate a pain in the teeth when its muscles start pushing the box slowly, from the belly on up, to leave our mouths when we’re sleeping. Not all muscles do that, only children’s muscles. What I said to Nazmi was true, so I also used to be afraid to look at the boxes while I was throwing them. After doing this, I left the roof immediately.