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

to think of what to say, her head heavy, while Soran talks and pats Lailan’s hand, speaking in a soft, reassuring voice. After a while, the girl’s breathing evens and she lifts her head from Olivia’s shoulder, peering toward the empty stalk, the tall stem that reaches into nothing.

“Soran,” Olivia says, suddenly thirsty, but conjuring a plan as well. “Could you get a few cups of water?”

The brown of soil. Gray from crushed granite. Purple of a hollyhock bloom that had broken, dried and dangling. In the cups, she adds the water and stirs, then brushes the color onto a piece of paper. Watercolors in their true sense. Lailan loves it and searches the yard for more material for new colors. Of course by the next day, this paper with its painted mountains and flowers will be faded or blank, with rises and dips where once the water sat. But it doesn’t matter. Everything is for this moment.

A plate of snacks on the bench. Dried apricots and naan bread. Olivia has no appetite but moves with Lailan to a spot on the ground under the pomegranate tree, placing the artwork in the sun. “Yellow,” Olivia says, pointing to the sun on the page. But it’s not yellow; it’s more orange. Or is it? Language, vision, everything seems a trick. The sun is blazing, her back hot.

When Lailan looks up, she looks above Olivia’s shoulder and again collapses into tears.

“Lailan. The plant is okay. I promise.”

But then Lailan raises her arms, her cue to be lifted, and so Olivia turns, figuring Soran is there, and shades her eyes with her hand as she looks up.

Delan. Standing, watching her even as he lifts the girl into his arms. He’s in the clothes he wore at the picnic, though everything is darker, and there are tears in his shirt and rips at his knees. At last she stands with shaky legs, disbelief and relief and a rush of love bottle-jamming inside her, stamping down words. The sun flashes. He adjusts Lailan so she’s on his hip and reaches for Olivia with his other arm, drawing her in. Then somehow he’s setting the girl down and has both his arms wrapped around Olivia. They stand there. Her fingers pressed into the flesh of his back, her mouth at the base of his neck. And it’s then she realizes that her throat hurts, as if her body has wanted to get sick this entire time but knew it needed him first. As they hold each other, her cheeks burn in the sun.

The fever fills her. Fast and heavy till she’s lost and weighted inside herself, tucked in under covers she kicks off and pulls back on. A few times she gets up, trailing her hand along the wall as she walks. Delan and his family are in the kitchen, and the sight of food makes her sit in the corner with her knees up and her face in the crook of her arm. She watches them from over her elbow, not wanting to be alone and wanting to keep an eye on Delan, needing the proof that he’s returned, because now and then, she doesn’t trust herself. Then Delan and Soran help her back to her room, and Gaziza appears with cold washcloths for her forehead, abdomen, and feet.

It is assumed his release had to do with Aras. Someone Aras must have known, someone high up and with questionable government loyalty who’d made paperwork appear. That’s all he says, and it’s a hesitant speculation. “I’m back,” he adds, and it’s the final word and all that truly matters. But soon, he is not there, and Gaziza is the one with her, making her swallow aspirin, bringing tomato broth and trying to get her to eat yogurt or drink tea with honey. She cuts meatballs and brings them to Olivia’s lips, and Olivia chews obediently, not wanting to eat but wanting to be good. She cannot remember the last time a mother fed her. She watches her, this woman. Sturdy and full. Black hair pulled back in a scarf. Just her presence makes Olivia know everything will be okay because a mother like this would not have it any other way.

Soran lingers in the threshold of the door. When she sees him, the fever erases Delan’s return, and she asks when he’s coming back, where he is. There is a panic in her question that narrows Soran’s face in confusion, until he understands.

“He is here. In bed.” He motions down the hall.

“Sick?” she asks when she’s fit the pieces back together. Now she feels him there, his presence a murky light.

Soran tilts his head to the side, as if sick could be loosely interpreted, and says only, “Recovering. But he needs time. Like you. Your fever will break. You will both be downstairs soon.”

Her eyes feel cold against the burning of her skin, and it feels good to have them shut, so even when not asleep, she sees only the bright orange of her closed lids. Soran sits beside her and tells her stories, weaving Kurdish history into her dreams. At one point, she wakes to him listing cultures that have disappeared. Akkadians, Phrygians, Hittites, Lydians, Babylonians. A parade of extinction. A lineup of loss. She feels them under this house, deep in the earth below. “Isolation helped the Kurds survive,” he tells her, and in her mind, she sees mountains and clouds and below them, swarms of people with swords tearing down statues with ropes and dragging them off with elephants. “In Turkey,” he tells her, “the Kurds were in Anatolia for twenty centuries before the Turks showed up. Twenty centuries. But the Turkish government calls them Mountain Turks who have lost their way.”

The goranibezh, she thinks. This is him. A Kurdish storyteller. Reciting history at her sickbed. She opens her eyes just enough to see his folded hands resting on his knee.

His voice goes deep as he says that Vice President Saddam Hussein, that