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

top off, she can see inside—a plastic-lined hole with nothing inside. “Kurdish books. Histories, poetry,” he says. “Anything written in Kurdish could be called propaganda. They would be burned, and we would be labeled resistance. One book, that is all that’s necessary. When there’s a raid, everything is put in here. As long as we have warning.”

A raid. The word is chaos and motion, and without thinking, she looks toward the side gate, almost surprised to see it shut, the boughs of trees undisturbed. “They happen often?”

“Not lately. But they can, if they have reason. And sometimes if they do not. Everything depends on who is in charge and what mood they are in.”

He lowers the cover, setting it back into place. Would she remember where it is if something were to happen? On the wall above, plaster is missing in the shape of a hand, exposed bricks underneath, as if someone had stood there with their palm in place and chipped around it. Which, she realizes, is probably what happened. Nearby is a large bush of pink oleander, its poison sweetness thick and luring and a bit like apricots.

“Hi-lo,” Lailan says, on a hunt for rocks she adds to a collection she’s placed in the hammock of her shirt, her pale, slightly rounded stomach glaring in the sun, a jagged scar near her belly button. A flash in Olivia’s mind: the people in the street, the wobbled flesh of stomachs exposed. She blinks hard, then focuses on Lailan, who’s now lined her rocks into the shape of a star.

The girl stands back. “Art. Lailan art!”

Olivia smiles for the first time all day. “It is. That is art. You have to sign it now.” A request that involves Olivia teaching Lailan how to write her name in English. An entire column of Lailans is soon etched in bark on the concrete, most with the lines of the A’s on the wrong side. Then the girl goes to the bare rosebush and carefully inspects the thorns. Olivia is about to stop her, but Soran holds out a hand. “Let her,” he says quietly as Lailan carefully bends a dried thorn off the cane. She studies the point, then sits on the ground and flattens a patch of dirt before using it to draw a delicate line for the L. Soran, watching, nods admiringly.

The rosebush. Olivia leans in. She’d thought it dead but now sees the starts of bright-green leaves, tight but ready to unfurl. “My neighbor across the street,” she says, “he planted a rose but I figured it was dead. Just spiky canes.”

“Roses are not weak. Look at their armor. Where it is hot, you must take off the leaves, to help the plant start over. No, someone cut that rose back, and when you return, you will see it bloom. This, I can promise you.”

She smiles at his certainty, his faith in a plant he’s never met. “Really? You can promise?”

“If I am wrong, you can tell me.”

“And if you’re right?”

“You will have a rose to look at. And me to think of.”

A break under the pomegranate tree. Face to the sun, she listens to Soran talk quietly to the plants. Whispered encouragements. He cares for them like children—guiding them, feeding them. The garden, she realizes, has his heart, and she wonders if this is because he misses the woman back in London, if the soil and plants are the recipients of his unlanded love.

The back door slams. Two men step into the yard. Dark trousers and button-down shirts, one with a vest despite the heat. Quickly, she turns to Soran, but he’s smiling a greeting, and the men are heading to Hewar, who approaches them with arms held out for an embrace.

“My father’s friends,” Soran says. “The man with the black vest, he grows geraniums. The best geraniums. He won a competition. Very known. Very famous here.”

But the men don’t come bearing news. Instead they talk about the garden, with politics and Delan mentioned in between, walking with their hands clasped behind their backs like thoughtful, wandering professors, stopping now and then to pull a weed or snap a dried bloom. To talk only of what worries you, Soran tells her, is too much. So they will garden.

A tray with glasses and white liquid is brought out. Do, a thin yogurt drink. She takes a sip and cringes because there’s nothing sweet about it. It’s sour, brawny. “A treat,” Soran tells her, smiling when he sees her face. But expectations, once they are adjusted, allow for the true experience, and subsequent sips go down smoother. At the end, she realizes she might actually like it.

“It’s good, is it not?” Soran asks. “Refreshing. For us, it is like beer to a German, only without alcohol. Now you are an honorary Kurd, if you like it.”

Close to the back door, Lailan whispers to herself, lost in an imaginary instruction, until suddenly she stops, places her finger on her tooth, and moves it back and forth. Tempered with her mission but also purposefully out of the way. Though there’s a wildness to Lailan, a streak of energy that flashes bright and fast, it’s as if she knows she’s on something like borrowed time at this house and with this family and so she’s learned how to blend in at the right times, just as a child who wants to stay up past bedtime walks quietly. She’s learned how to make it easy for people to care for her. How not to be a problem.

Olivia turns to Soran. “Does she have friends?”

“Some. More when she is in school.”

“A girl’s school?” To that, he nods, and she watches him, curious. “Why is it okay that I’m with Delan? Here, I mean. When men and women don’t hang out. Is it because I’m from a different culture?”

“Partly. But mostly because you are engaged.” He laughs and then quickly explains. “He told me later it isn’t true. But to everyone else—you are engaged. It’s more