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

It’s possible that’s all this is. With this consideration, there is a small surge of hope.

Then there is a man, a bit younger than Soran, whose eyes are dark like obsidian, like pebbles of black. Something about them makes Olivia nervous. Impenetrable, that’s it. Eyes like a wall through which nothing can pass. Unknowable. “Wassim,” Delan says when he introduces him to Olivia, and Wassim nods and studies his shoes and in his timidity, Olivia understands that this is how he is with women, that most likely he’s not had much experience, and she wonders how much of that has to do with his eyes, with women unable to find themselves within them, unable to feel that they’ve made it past his surface.

“A cousin,” Delan says. “Everyone’s a cousin. I’ve known Wassim since he was a baby. Almost everyone here, since I was a baby or since they were babies.”

The cousin who’s to be married, Ferhad, arrives in a wave of greetings he accepts with his right arm, as his left is bandaged and held to his body with a sling, and the second he sees Delan, he goes straight to him, tears in his eyes as they embrace. His betrothed, a tiny woman with waist-length black hair, disappears into a flurry of well-wishes.

Ferhad is smiling but looks pained. He faces Olivia. “I sorry. I—” He shakes his head, looking to Delan for help before adding something in Kurdish.

“He says he didn’t know you were here,” Delan explains, “that he heard only about me just this morning. And a gift, he wishes he had a gift for you.”

“I don’t need a gift. Tell him I don’t need a gift.”

In scattered English, Ferhad thanks her for coming, then turns to Delan, shaking his head in disbelief. A man worn thin, Olivia decides. On a journey much longer than promised, at a picnic but masking an internal frenzy. “Weddings must be hard,” she offers.

He shrugs but looks thankful for these words, like someone who would deny a compliment but repeat it silently later. Then she remembers there was a woman he’d refused. An arrangement turned down in order to pursue true love. Drama that went with that, drama that perhaps was the cause of his broken arm. The divisions within families from such a refusal, Olivia has no idea of the extent but assumes that as happy as any of this must make him, everything would be edged with a sort of betrayal. Then she thinks of Delan’s family, of his parents. They’ll wish I was Kurdish, she told him. They will love you, he replied, an avoidance of her point. Looking around now, she knows that if they had to pick for him, they’d pick a woman who spoke their language, who knew their customs, who would live near them and give them grandchildren they would actually get to see. They’d pick a Kurdish woman. Someone who’d know exactly what he’s gone through, whose past was composed of the same worries and the same sounds in the night.

“I’ve heard stories about you,” she says to Ferhad, trying to loosen these thoughts in her mind. “You and the flute in the tree, when Soran had his first kiss.”

Now Ferhad throws his head back and smiles to the sky as Delan puts his arm on his shoulder and says something in Kurdish that makes both men bend with laughter. But then something occurs to him, and he points to Soran, saying something in Kurdish.

Delan looks confused, and when he responds in Kurdish, Ferhad just nods.

“What was that?” she asks Delan when Ferhad has joined his betrothed.

“My cousin wanted to know if Soran has a new business, something that has him leaving town. Ferhad has an office by the checkpoint and sees him pass in the mornings a few times a week. But Soran works in town, mostly at home. It’s the other owner of the car, I’m sure. The wedding is tolling on my poor cousin. Refusing the other woman cost his family.”

Olivia watches Ferhad, his slow walk alongside his fiancée. “The saddest-looking happy man I’ve seen.”

“It’s hard to make someone understand tradition. What it meant to do what he did.”

“No,” she says. “You’re right. I don’t get it.”

A sigh, as if he’s reached the end of a fight and is disappointed to find her still entrenched within it. “If you don’t want to understand, you won’t.”

Which, she knows, is true. But his world has made him tolerant of that which she disagrees with—marriage for something other than true love—and vice versa, their differences sifting loose. “This picnic is serious business,” she says, trying to step away from their argument.

“If the sun is out,” he says, “Kurds picnic.”

Metal and brass samovars heat water for tea, and small, clear glasses are placed upon platters. While the youngest boys and girls play with one another, those a bit older have split off; boys play soccer while girls gather on blankets, helping with food or quietly whispering among themselves. Shy, searching glances. Questions through that murk of adolescence. Against a rock, a transistor radio leans, music hazy with lack of tuning, and in the middle of the field, men divide into sides for tug-of-war, which is so pure, so wonderful, and so contradictory to anything she’s ever seen from adults that for a moment, Olivia forgets her worries and simply smiles into the sunlight. Soran, who must have just arrived with others, is on one side and lets go to wave in her direction.

After a moment, she leans back on her elbows. Grass bristles from under the blanket, and the sun is pleasantly warm. Illogically, she feels a distance from everything. From her job, from her worries, even from what happened at the restaurant and the distant bombings in the mountains. It’s a comfort, this separation. Because she feels isolated. Protected in a field that is just a field. Small. The way grasping your own insignificance can lead to a sort of freedom. She breathes into