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

it, trying to keep this essential existence without complication, without importance or past or future.

Like her, Delan is lying on the blanket, facing the sky. Past him, Lailan is in a tree, and a couple of men are below her, pointing out the branches she should take—not to get her down but to help her go higher. A few blankets over, Gaziza spreads out food while Hewar scans the mountainside with binoculars, searching for birds. All around them are white flowers, the smell of meat and spices thick. Nearby, the creek is fresher than anything she’s known. And in this moment, with Delan beside her, she misses him.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “For our fight.”

“We’re allowed to fight.”

“About who we are?” she asks.

He turns his head toward her, and she sees he’s about to answer, but his eyes go past her.

“Don’t move,” he says. “Pretend you’re asleep.”

It’s then that she registers the silence. There’s no singing. No talking. No taunts from the men playing tug-of-war. There’s no music, even; someone must have shut off the radio.

“What is it?” she whispers.

“Soldiers. They’re looking at our papers. It’s fine, but better you’re asleep.”

She feels heat on the back of her head, the side that faces the soldiers, the exposed side. She hears Delan stand, then shuffle through his bag. Hears men speaking. Delan’s voice is steady in whatever he’s saying, but as the conversation continues, his mother and then his father join in. Soran as well—by now she knows the steady quiet of his voice.

She needs to know what’s happening. Slowly she sits up, taking in the soldiers. Six of them with rifles.

“Olivia,” Delan says, using her full name. “I showed them your papers. They have questions for me.”

One soldier has turned away from Delan and is talking to Wassim, who gestures toward the path they took and then to Delan, saying something in a voice that is at once respectful and yet commanding—itself an accomplishment, to have mastered such a tone with a gun inches away. A sidelong look at Delan and the soldier is speaking and just like that, they have Delan’s arms. Olivia jumps up, but he shakes his head at her. There are no handcuffs, but the soldier’s grip shows little choice. Delan is calm. He is smiling, even. But he is an actor and he’s telling her it’s okay and she doesn’t know what to believe. They want him for questions about a friend, he tells her and adds a shrug, as if the friend could be anyone. As if the friend is not his best friend, Aras, the one who’s always known him as well as he knows himself.

Olivia feels a little hand within her own and looks down to see Lailan, the sun an angry bronze upon her hair. And then Soran is on Olivia’s other side, his hand on her arm to keep her in place, to prevent her from moving. Because now the soldiers are leaving, and they are taking Delan with them.

Shock clears a space within you. There is a new emptiness. A place without feeling but with a spiked strip of anxiety. Panic without understanding. Nothing feels real but rather like a nightmare, something only vaguely familiar upon the telling.

Strangely, the picnic continues. Of course everything changes, prayer beads stringing through hands, women gathered on Olivia’s blanket with comforting snippets of English and pats on her hand. But the fact is they can do nothing, and to follow in any way, even from a distance, would be an invitation for trouble. And so the music gets turned down and the games are put away. People eat and talk quietly. Olivia sits on her blanket, emotions a seesaw of panic and stunned incomprehension. Lailan, beside her, sits silently, wiggling her tooth and barely looking up. On their blanket, Hewar and Gaziza speak in low voices, solemn, their eyes on the trail that took their son. Another hour continues in the shadow of the event, and all Olivia can think of is getting back down the mountain.

They want to know about Aras, which she gathered. “Questioning, it is just questioning,” Soran explains. “This happens all the time.” He tells her of a man who is higher ranked than any of the soldiers who’d taken Delan. “A cousin. I will drop in to his office tomorrow. Delan will be back by then, I am sure,” he adds, but he says it looking up, either in prayer or as a way to not meet her eyes. “And if not, he will help.”

In the midst of this, in the midst of the long walk down the mountain and the dizzying car ride and a house gone silent, Olivia feels herself back in Geneva. On the night Delan told her he had a feeling they shouldn’t go. The night she’d not listened. Had she listened, they would be in Switzerland still, arms dangling from the heights of a gondola, spring grass below and the air crisp and safe. But that didn’t happen. Regret spirals wildly within her, paths that led to this fateful choice lit up.

“He will be fine,” Soran tells her. “Do not worry.” And indeed, he doesn’t look worried. Her only consolation.

When you can’t sleep, her father used to say, it’s because you’re awake in somebody’s dream. When she wakes after midnight, she thinks of this and hopes it’s true. Rolling onto her back, she sees the moon, solid and bold, and stares at it with defiance and anger, as if it’s the watchful eye that’s let too much pass. But then a beat later, she’s plaintive and closes her eyes and says a prayer to anyone or anything that might intercept it. Her mother. God. Allah. The little boy at the restaurant who she can’t stop thinking about.

Bring him back. Please.

The next day, she wakes with the panicked start of someone hit by memory. Sleep a respite that’s ended. Recollection, a wall that’s hit.

He’s gone.

Their fight. Worries that loomed so large. Everything has fallen aside.