Nostos

Nostos Aria Aber poetry Afghan o≠icials say they have uncovered a mass grave in an underground prison on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, which dates from the Soviet era. —BBC News, 2007 Lately I’ve been moved by how the skeletons were found: skulls with cloth around the eyes, wrist bones tied by rope— a miracle that fabric (what color was it, what material?) has touched, even witnessed, the su≠ering of those two thousand men, who stood naked with their eyes bound and were raped before they were shot. Among them we suspect lie my great-grandfather’s and my mother’s youngest brother’s remains. What is it with the disappeared that survival, this dumb extravagance, insults us so? I felt nothing when I slayed the Hajis, my student, an ex-Marine, wrote. In fact, those barbarians fell easy, like buildings in Mazar-e-Sharif. What could I have said? I praised the urgency of subject, her apt simile. To fight, you understand, was aimless. I’ve been primed for this, for disappearance, for all my life. I dreamt of my student that night, her voice muscling the soft framework of memory, whistling Leiche, Leiche, Leiche. Dearest, I wonder why in English the body is both dead 16 | ARIA ABER and alive, but I know the blight of grief has a heart and thus will love, and learn, and thusly learn to hate—I want to believe that he, too, settled porous into the light. He was twenty-one when they took him in for questioning. My uncle, I mean. Do not return, my mother shouts from her sleep. Do not return. His eyes were green. ARIA ABER | 17 ...