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

Over and over, she repeats this, like a mother soothing her child, convincing there’s no hurt, until Olivia laughs and nods and agrees that yes, everything is okay, and then wipes powdered sugar off the girl’s chin. Lailan lets her do this and licks her lips in case any was left behind. Mouth wide, she then presses on her tooth to show how loose it is.

“Soon,” Olivia says. “A day, maybe less.” Off to the side, there are men with dafs, handheld frame drums with metal ringlets that sound at once like thunder and rain, and temburs, lutes that seem to pluck ancient notes.

“You need to dance,” Soran tells Olivia when he breaks from the circle and finds her sitting. Breathless, he reaches for her hand.

The next thing she knows, she’s wedged between Soran and Delan, though mostly the men dance with the men and the women with the women. Still, as she’s noticed, there are allowances for her, the foreigner, and though her shoulders move like the others, her feet are helplessly out of step. She laughs, flustered and amazed at how hard it is. Kick, kick, knee lift, back, forward, turn to the side, kick, kick, knee lift. The steps are too fast. Lailan, even—left in their charge so Miriam could take care of things at the house—has worked her way into the line, a fast-moving sparkle who dances in between two women. The woman to her right prods her with the steps till she gets it, then nods, back to singing and smiling in the sun.

“Watch me,” Delan says to Olivia, and so she does, keeping an eye on his white klash shoes as she feels his hand in hers, the way he indicates what to do with a slight pull on her wrist.

Though she gets only a few steps right, she soon no longer cares because even her haphazard dancing takes her mind off any sad promises, and the gleam of the sequins on the dresses and the feel of the taffeta and sun combine with the fact that an entire field is dancing, the flute bright and the colors dazzling and the people happy, scarves at either end waved in the air like punctuations to their revelry. And there are only four days left of her trip, and the man she loves is holding her hand. They are laughing, their shoulders rising and falling and rising again.

It’s only at the end of the day that they hear the news, and it is relayed with joy: a road dynamited by the Kurds to prevent the military from getting through. Sabotage. A minor strike against the major player. Some of the younger men celebrate quietly, while others wander off in small groups, talking among themselves. Delan takes Olivia’s hand and leads her to an oak tree alongside the creek, the boughs gnarled and bent, the leaves longer, lighter in color than the oaks back home.

“Is that what Aras warned against?” she asks. Delan stands before her, her back against a thick, low branch. “The road?”

“Retaliation,” he says. “If I had to guess. We’re the closest town. Nothing might happen, but they could use it as an excuse.”

“You think someone here did it?”

“There are two things. One, they want to find who did it. Two, they want to kill Kurds, for any reason. You see how both points work? How one is not needed for the other? All we can do is be ready. He gave us that, so even if they’re waiting for us at home, we’re ready.”

Even if they’re waiting for us at home.

“They wouldn’t be, though, would they?”

He smiles. And traces her cheekbone with his hand. “No. All will be fine.”

But she sees it in the way he’s touching her face, the way he studies her, that he’s looking with the eyes of someone who sees possibilities. She turns toward the water, watching it trick itself around rocks. “The last wedding I went to, everyone worried the groom’s father would drink too much and hit on his ex-wife. And then we became bored because that didn’t happen. It was a little different.”

“But just as real.”

She laughs. “Was it?”

“It happened, did it not? If you live in a room that is dark, you see a ray of light the same way someone else might see a spotlight. Everything is real. Everything is felt. That is perspective. But,” he says, glancing back toward his family, “there is no denying luck. That you were born where you were. That you can choose. That you have the privilege of being bored. And do not have to leave your family. Or save your family.”

“What if I can’t make up for that?”

“Who says you have to? Sometimes living is all you have to do. Besides, you’d be surprised how you can save someone.”

He gives her a light kiss, just a brush. Then, from his pocket, takes out a napkin folded around two cookies shaped like crescents and holds one to her lips.

Cardamom, a spice she’s up till this trip associated only with holidays, dissolves on her tongue. “I taste Christmas.”

“You love Christmas.”

“What’s not to love?”

“This Christmas, we’ll get an eight-foot tree. A live one we can plant later.” He watches her break more cookie with her teeth and then slowly, softly kisses the crumbs from her lips. After a moment, he says, “I almost didn’t go into that café. The place with the pie.”

She wants him to kiss her again, and it takes her a second to loop his words with meaning. “When we first met?”

He nods. “I saw you. Before you talked to the dog. And I knew it was you.”

“But you were supposed to meet me. Why wouldn’t you go in if you knew it was me?”

“No,” he says, studying her as he speaks. “I knew it was you. You. The person I was supposed to be with. Forever.”

Forever. A certainty he’d had from the start. “So you wanted to stay away?”

“I knew what it meant. I felt my