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

Soran motions to them from the door. As they stand, Olivia glances behind her and catches the eye of one of the men at the back table. He stares at her and then slowly looks down at Olivia’s table: a spread of uneaten food. When the man looks back up at Olivia, it feels as though she’s brushed against something cold. From the kitchen, something shatters. Hurried steps, laughter becomes louder. Suddenly she needs to be in a crowd, gone, and as she turns to leave, Delan glances to her to make sure she’s following and must see the man as well.

“Come,” he says quickly, pulling her arm.

The man’s stare bears down on her.

In the bazaar, they wind through the aisles. The early-evening air is a cooling separation between where they were and where they are. She listens for gunfire, but there’s only music that drifts from a radio and the chaotic din of voices. “Is he going to come look for us?”

“No. He’s going to finish his dinner,” Delan says. “Which we should’ve done.”

“Better to starve than be dead,” Soran says.

“No one is starving, not with all this food. And no one is dead.”

Olivia glances back at the restaurant, to the men smoking hookah on the sidewalk, faces lost in swirls of smoke like identities obscured in a hazy memory.

Delan motions her forward. “Most likely we spent a lot of money on a dinner we didn’t eat. That’s the truth.”

He’s right that no one is dead. Nothing has happened. But that doesn’t mean that the man stayed seated. Or hadn’t sent someone to find them. A tap on the shoulder and any one of the men to his side could’ve slipped from the restaurant. Could be, at this moment, steps behind them, watching.

“Liv. Stop. Enjoy where you are. Nothing is wrong until it is.”

Heating oil and dust and spices. The deep breath she takes catches on its way in, particles of choking worry. Be present, she tells herself. Don’t dwell on the past and don’t exist in a future worry. He’s right: nothing is wrong until it is.

Mounds of almonds and walnuts and pistachios line a wall. Rows of shoes loom to the tarped ceiling, and bins of spices in every shade except blue crowd an aisle. She tries to forget everything except for what’s before her—ropes of dried figs and the shocking gleam of bright brass kettles and trays. With a turn, there are stacks of rugs and a tower of fava beans and loops of shiny prayer beads.

“Should I get one?” she asks, touching the amber beads.

“Worry beads?” Delan says. “You worry fine on your own. You don’t need help.”

“Tezbih,” Soran says. “Prayer beads. There are ninety-nine beads. You use them for zikr. Each counts for a prayer.”

“Sure. Or they are worry beads.”

She turns to Delan. “Do I worry a lot?”

One brow raised, he looks at her, incredulous. “Is this smuggling? Is the man from the restaurant after us? Have I been tortured enough to be taken seriously?”

She bites her lip, smiling to piles of parsley and cilantro.

“You’re ridiculous,” he says and hooks his arm around her waist.

His hand on her hip. The smells of the bazaar. The music in the stalls. The day has a spark to it, good or bad she can’t tell, only feels its intensity like a charge that could carry her through miles of boring nothing. From across the aisle, she catches Soran’s eyes flickering to his brother’s arm, and though she wonders if this is proper, ultimately she doesn’t care.

Then they’ve made a loop and are near where they started. Pigeons drink from a puddle of water, and light skims the surface. An image she wants to capture, the birds and their thirst and the reflected chaos. So she starts to get out her camera, debating over angles and how much space she should allow in the foreground, when all of a sudden, she realizes the amount of attention this would draw. A tall American woman with red hair and a camera, crouched in a pathway, tripping people and taking pictures of birds. If anyone had been sent to find them, there she’d be. There is no hiding you, Soran said. If the man from the restaurant is looking for them, she’s the giveaway. She looks up ahead to the opening of the market that’s across from the restaurant. Right now, he could be there, waiting.

Delan pulls her around and points to a stand with the white shoes the Kurdish men wear, but in her turn, Olivia catches a dark-gray sleeve disappearing into a stall before them. Quickly, she faces the shoes. The world’s gone hot. She lifts her hair off her neck, fanning her skin. She needs to relax. That could’ve been anyone. But once more, she turns to look, just as a boy with a cart of pomegranates cuts behind her. At the top of the pile, the fruits are split, red and gleaming.

“Klash,” Delan is saying. “The shoes. The top is woven wool cotton and the bottom recycled material and animal intestine. There is no right or left. The shoes are the same. The most comfortable shoe. And sturdy. First worn by Zoroaster.” He adds that last part with a shrug, as if acknowledging it as a fact he cannot verify.

Soran calls to them, stopped at a tray of wrapped treats. “Hallwa. You know it as manna,” he says. “From manna trees. Sap falls with the dew, hangs like icicles. People stretch cloths beneath the branches and shake the trees.”

Manna from heaven. Connections between stories and terms come to life. There’s something about it that’s comforting, a feeling that all the world is a web and though she’d started in only a little corner, if she keeps going, things will make sense, patterns will unfold, and everything will prove to be part of the next. She touches a wrapped piece of candy, imagining how