Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

And in a beat, everything makes sense.

This man is Iraqi military. Quite possibly the other men had been Kurds—and this man was what they’ve been warned against. He is, in fact, the enemy. And he’s sitting in their car.

The air constricts. The world gone brighter, flashing with threat. What this man could do to them, just in thinking they are Kurds. On a whim, he could drag them in for questioning. Could pronounce them resistance and shoot them on sight. He could decide that she, the American with the camera bag under a blanket, is a reporter or a spy. Does he have a gun? Olivia wants to look at his waist but can’t move. Instead, she stares straight ahead at Delan’s cousin, who must have also spotted the card because he’s nodding, the tendons of his knuckles bulged against the steering wheel.

Only Delan acts as if nothing is wrong. Calmly he reads something off the card opposite the military ID, and the ride goes silent. Cypress trees line the street, bent from years of wind.

At last they reach a house that looks as if it’s been poured of cement and shaped into a square with windows and a door. Two pots of geraniums line the path, bloodred against the tedious gray of a low wall. Wordlessly, the man uses his good hand to open his door, and it appears he’s about to simply walk from the car. Go, Olivia thinks. Don’t turn around.

But right as he’s shutting the door, he stops. And turns. He stares at Olivia, her brown pants and white linen shirt, her brownish-red hair. Then he studies Delan, as if trying to understand something. His eyes trace his features, and it’s then that it hits her—he’s recognized Delan as a Kurd. We are our own ethnicity, Delan has so proudly bragged.

Now Delan opens his mouth to speak, and Olivia can’t breathe. The wrong accent, the wrong Arabic words. Anything could be the tipping point.

“Allah ma’akum,” Delan says, calmly, as if dropping off a friend.

Olivia watches the man, waiting for any indication. And for a horrible moment, she sees it—something is off, something registered. There is the slightest narrowing of his eyes, like a curtain that stirs with the shutting of a door.

But the man nods and turns. And the car door clicks behind him. No one breathes. A face moves in the house’s window, and the front door swings wide. And though it’s distant, Olivia thinks she hears the sound of a cry, something that rises and falls. Just for a moment, the man’s steps falter, but then he keeps going, his head bent to the ground.

CHAPTER 6

Though she felt nominally prepared, she now sees she was never ready. Never should she have gone on this trip, because the idea of dying was not a true consideration. What she’d thought of was physical or emotional discomfort, hushed voices and downcast eyes. She’d thought of being the only one in the room not to understand the language. His parents not liking her or preferring he be with a Kurdish woman instead. Boarding the plane at the end of the trip suddenly uncertain they could last or, worse, breaking up on the trip and boarding the plane alone. Never had she thought of being in the same car with someone who could have them killed, who most likely had a gun within reach.

“Tell me,” Olivia says. No one has spoken since they left the man at his house, and she’s angry. She wants this explained, this encounter that didn’t need to happen. This unnecessary risk.

“Saddam’s man,” his cousin says from the front seat. Anger makes his voice high.

In turn, Delan’s voice goes louder. “His son was just killed. He was no one’s man. He was a father. He couldn’t see; he couldn’t think; he wanted to die. What, I let him be killed on the street because he’s so lost in grief, he doesn’t know?”

“Ew sagbabe!”

“He might be a son of a bitch, any other day he is a son of a bitch, but today he was a father blind with grief.”

“You knew?” Olivia asks. “You knew he was military?”

“He knew,” his cousin says. He holds the steering wheel as if it might get away, the skin on his knuckles stretched tight.

“Just this morning, his son was killed,” Delan says. “Eight years old,” he adds and then unleashes a string of Kurdish.

After a few minutes, when Delan has stopped ranting, his cousin finds his eyes in the mirror. His words are soft, which carries a different threat and implication—that meaning alone will land his point. “Zor dameka roishtooit lera, nazani.”

To that, Delan leans against the door.

“What did he say?” Olivia asks quietly.

For a moment, he rolls his head to look at her, and she sees something in his eyes. Resignation.

“He said, ‘You’ve been gone too long.’” Then he looks out the window, at a car abandoned in a field, a scattering of holes along the doors like the dark outline of a wave.

The afternoon undoes itself like a coiled snake. The problem is that Delan has been in the United States too long. She understands this now. Though she accepted it was more dangerous than she’d previously understood, never did she realize that her boyfriend himself would in fact amplify that danger. Unnecessary risk, not reading the situation or grasping the consequences—all the result of his absence, the hazard of the foolish optimism he’s picked up in the States. And now, Olivia realizes, that part of him that’s always tried and tested her, that part that talks to everyone, invites everyone to his home, that part of him that needs to be loved by everyone, that’s what could get them killed. What almost got them killed already. Because this place is an avert your eyes place. A place like a child whose only goal is to not be seen by the parent with the whiskey breath. You do not speak unless