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

She doesn’t know what to say, so she goes to him. Arms around him, she pulls back to look him in the eyes. “There is nothing, nothing you should be ashamed of.”

And she means it. And if need be, she will stand here holding him till the next call to prayer, listening in case he chooses to say more.

Later, she sits with him in the darkened garden, trying to only survive this evening that’s done so much. The moon throws an imprint of the pomegranate tree to the ground, and the wine they drink smells of hay and berries. Now and then, the electricity cuts out, and lights from houses disappear as the sky takes over with brightness. Sound changes as well, the natural world suddenly amplified. A minute, two, maybe more. Then everything seems to lurch as the power returns.

After a while, Gaziza comes out to the garden with a plate of stuffed grape leaves.

“Yaprakh,” Delan says, “but you know them as dolmas. That’s right—no one got dinner.”

He sounds surprised, as if the lack of meal had been an oversight. But now Olivia’s thinking of the people in the restaurant, how someone might have died hungry and waiting. How of course that happened. Eye on the kitchen, fork in hand. A sip of water to try to fill a stomach, an anticipation of fulfillment that was trusted to come—and then life ended. Such a mortal quality, to hunger. Born from a body that is vulnerable and capable of ending in a flash. And to crave. To ache for something. To identify that thing you long for and seek it out, it’s heartbreakingly human. He just wanted yogurt, she remembers Delan saying about his cousin. I hate that. Dying, having been hungry for something. It hadn’t truly resonated with her until now.

When she looks up, Gaziza is still there, standing before her as if deciding what to do with her, this American who’s ended up in her house. At last she opens her arms and nods as if to summon her. Without a word, Olivia stands and wraps her arms around the woman’s thick back, and though she has to bend to put her head on the shorter woman’s shoulder, it feels good. There is the night air and Gaziza’s smell of pepper and tea, and Olivia tells herself not to break down. She will not cry. But it’s the feeling of being in a mother’s arms that finally does it.

At last, Gaziza lets go. Her dress is a faint swish in the dark as she returns to the house.

“No hug for you?” Olivia asks Delan, smiling as she wipes her tears with her thumb.

“It’s different for me.”

He’s looking at her, and in his eyes are apologies.

“You didn’t do this,” she says, because only now does she realize he thinks he did, and she needs him to know that if there’s something broken within her, he did not break it.

He tilts the wine bottle above his glass. A stream that’s black in the night. “I never wanted this to happen to you.”

“Delan, I wasn’t hurt. I’m the last person to feel bad for.”

“The first night is worse, for anything. Even tomorrow will be better.” At their feet, the shadows of leaves change and shift with a breeze. “When you were mad at me,” he continues, “when you thought I was calling you naive in Baghdad, and I said no, I meant innocent—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Whatever it is, she wants to say, I’m no longer that.

“What I was trying to say is there’s a difference. Between naive and innocent. One is something I’m not interested in, and the other is something I should have done anything to protect.”

“This was not your fault.”

Light spills into the yard as the back door opens, Soran now approaching with a plate of baklava. Together they eat in silence. After a few minutes, Delan refills her wine, then leans against her on the bench, pressing his shoulder to hers till she sees his hand, palm facing up on his thigh, waiting. She places her own on top, and together they sit as the night deepens.

“Were they Kurds?” she asks eventually. “The political figures. The ones who were there.”

Soran stands with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass of wine he’s barely touched. As he answers, he glances over his shoulder as if to make sure no one’s wandered into the garden. “Some of our best.”

“How did you know what would happen?”

“I didn’t. I guessed. There were too many. Someone would have seen them, would have made a call. The temptation to take them out.” He shrugs. “Opportunity.”

“I had my camera,” Olivia says. “And I didn’t take one photo.”

Shame and doubt. She feels them at her back, her heroes—Dickey Chapelle with her Leica camera and cat-eye glasses running to the sounds, into dust and mud, and Catherine Leroy parachuting into combat though at any second the air around her could’ve hailed with bullets. Their eyes are on her back. Disappointed. Not that Olivia ever intended to be a combat photographer, but the fact is, her camera was the last thing on her mind. She did not get the shot.

Soran’s words are slow. “You were trying to stay alive. Even the dead would want that for you.”

Now Delan moves to the path before her, sitting on the ground and peering up at the moon. “No,” she says, watching him. “They’d want justice.”

“And that comes from a photograph?”

“Sometimes it starts with one.”

“And sometimes it is just a photograph. And that photograph could get you killed.”

She takes the last sip of wine from her glass, the sediment a grit on her tongue. “There was a family. Next to us.”

“I saw them,” Delan says. “They were almost done. I’m sure they left.” Moonlight shines on his face as he continues to stare at the sky. Somewhere, a mourning dove calls in the night, searching. Again, he nods. “I