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

sunflowers. A toddler before a Christmas tree. Catching salmon from a rocky shore. Let’s see who wants to join us, her father used to say at their long-ago dinners, right before he’d close his eyes and reach his hand inside to feel for a photo that would then sit beside them at the table. Stories sprung from those photos. Everything a reminder made eternal.

Now Olivia wonders if all the seamstress has are these photos. If each time the bell rings, she looks up with hope, and if each night, she locks up and turns the key, looking forward to tomorrow with its slim and fragile chance.

Another ten minutes pass, and Soran has still not returned. From the door of the shop, Olivia watches the street. Men on bicycles and mopeds. Soldiers on the corner. When one turns toward her, she looks in the other direction to a couple of boys who chase each other around a car. An olive tree shimmers silver past a wall, and there are glares of brass and gold from the store that sells housewares. Then, beside it, the bakery. She crosses the street, heading toward a shining window display of baklava and sticky pastries. Inside, sweet rolls steam, fresh out of the oven, sprinkled with poppy and sesame seeds, and halvah is formed into giant blocks like fudge. Besides a woman in a bright-blue scarf who watches Olivia from behind the counter, there’s no one else inside the bakery.

Back on the street, she’s struck with the enormity of what could happen. What might have already happened. Because Soran could have been taken. Shoved into a car. Brought in for questioning as well. Who would she go to for help? She studies the street. Soldiers on the corner lean against a building. An old man sits on a plastic chair with tea and reads, and another man passing by drops his cigarette on the sidewalk, a trail of smoke snaking into the air. Her boyfriend has been taken, and now even his brother could be gone, and she doesn’t know how to help either one of them. A dress. She was just fitted for a dress when Delan is missing. Delan, the man she loves, is gone. Four days. Four days he’s been gone and they have no idea how to get him back. With this, everything goes loud inside her, and her breathing fights against itself, staggered inhalations that seem too shallow.

And then there is a voice behind her, saying hello in accented English.

Ferhad. His mouth opens when she turns, and he reaches for her as if she’s about to fall. At the last second, she jams her hand against the wall to steady herself and lowers her head, feeling those pinpricks of panic, that swimming static that means she’s about to faint. She focuses on his feet. Worn brown oxfords. One sock that is stark white while the other is an aged ivory.

“Delan?” he asks.

When she looks back up, he’s searching the street.

“Where is he? I don’t know. No one knows.”

His eyes darken with worry, and she realizes he assumed Delan was back. And in this honest reaction, she understands that being missing for this long is reason to worry. That all the brave faces and positive words from others have been hopeful, but not truthful. And though Ferhad now tries to cover for her sake, nodding as if everything is fine, she knows it’s not.

“Please,” he says, trying to hand her a handkerchief.

Voices from inside the bakery. She turns to see Soran walking with another three men through a back door and into the main room. Immediately, he spots her through the window, registers the look on her face, and in a rush is beside her.

There is Kurdish. A frantic back-and-forth until Soran takes a couple of steps away, facing the sky. After a moment, he nods, as if affirming the situation, but there are tears in his eyes.

“I thought,” he says, “when I saw you, there was news.”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Do not be sorry. Here,” he says and hands her a white piece of candy. “Manna.”

She takes the candy but lowers her hand. “At the bazaar,” she explains. “We were in front of a tray of manna.”

It takes him a second to find her meaning.

“Of course.” He smiles softly and then turns to Ferhad, who looks confused, and tells him what happened in a mix of Kurdish and English until Ferhad says something in return. “He says we were lucky,” Soran tells her.

“Lucky,” she repeats, feeling the empty space beside her.

Ferhad must catch her meaning, because he again says something in Kurdish, to which Soran nods. “Ferhad feels your love for Delan. And he says you should see with your eyes and hear with your heart, because Delan is alive and will be back, and you know this. Have faith.”

Later, in the shaded quiet of the garden, Soran tells her where he was.

“There is no meeting place for the resistance.”

“You’re in the resistance?”

He smiles. “Not me. No. I stay far from trouble. It shames me to say. Take care of my parents, Lailan. That is all I want to do. Simple. But I have friends.”

“And they meet at bakeries?”

“Bakeries. Picnics. At a house for dinner. In a garden. Small groups. No one knows who is involved—you know only your four, five people in your group. Then one of those people, they are connected to another group. And so forth. The groups are connected, but you never know who. It is safer, if you are arrested.”

The end of his sentence hangs. She does not need to ask why. “Ferhad thought Delan should’ve been back by now. I saw it on his face. This isn’t normal.”

He nods, accepting the direction of the conversation. “Well, yes. But nothing works the way it should. Remember too—Delan is here for Ferhad’s wedding. This makes Ferhad feel responsible. Of course he is upset. Try not to worry. There is hope. The people I met with, they