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

of the outer world, she tells herself it was a dream. A strange dream of dusty shoes and noise and a girl in a cabinet. And then she opens her eyes to see Delan and his entire family, everyone asleep in the dining room, even Miriam whom they’d gone to, whom they’d taken home and cared for as best they could. She took down the portrait of Barzani, Delan had whispered to Olivia as his mother held her friend, rocking and crying. But she forgot her Star of David.

By early morning, the shocked horror has twisted to a sad, hard anger, and while the others sleep, Olivia scours the kitchen countertops, then quietly stacks dishes. The windows are still dark. The world outside unfathomable. The violence, the violation. What happened to Miriam, their friend, and to others on the street—Olivia keeps seeing it on a replay. Closes her eyes and hears the screams. Steadies herself against the sink and sees Miriam, the way she’d held on to Hewar’s arm when they came through the door, unable to meet anyone’s eyes.

When there’s nothing left to clean, Olivia sits in the silence of the dining room, waiting, watching the others with her fist pressed against her mouth. When Delan wakes, he goes to her, taking a seat beside her with his back against the wall. Together they watch the two women on the cushions across from them, faces eased with sleep. After everything, all that can be done is comfort. They cannot stop this from happening again, and no law will make a difference because it was the government—the supposed source of protection for the people—that committed the atrocities. This understanding is like something seen from a great distance. It doesn’t make sense to her. She doesn’t want it to make sense.

Now and then, Delan glances to the window, as if weary of what awaits. Morning’s begun its push into the room, and the sounds from the neighborhood are quiet but growing. With his little finger, he touches Olivia’s hand, his voice soft as he watches his mother and neighbor.

“I wish they could keep sleeping. Even an hour more. I wish I could give them that.” When he puts his hand on top of Olivia’s, his fingers curl into her palm. “I’m not going to be able to say anything that makes this better.”

The room shakes as her eyes fill. “I didn’t think you would.” A pause as she studies Miriam’s hair, a dark spill on the pillow. When she speaks again, the words are an incensed whisper. “There’s not even police to go to. No potential. Even that, just the potential—there’s no chance for justice. Everything is too big. What can you do when everything is too big?”

He stares up at a crack in the center of the ceiling. “If it’s too much to see how big a problem is, then don’t. Get closer. Make it smaller.” With his chin, he motions to the room. “Here. What you can do today. Look for that. For the people around you, because they will wake up, and they will remember.”

And he’s right. And now that the military is gone, grief can be expressed. A cry will not be answered with a bullet. Family members and friends arrive up and down the street, and through the windows there is a new sound: mourning. Olivia stands in Delan’s room, at that same window where she’d stood the night before, before the world spun on its terrible new axis, and sees three women across the street in the spot where the man had crumpled. They are wailing and hitting their chests with their fists. They yell at the sky, and their voices rise and fall. Imploring or cursing, Olivia cannot tell. And then they are kneeling, their foreheads on the ground, and only then does Olivia hear the call to prayer and wonder what the women are actually saying.

He said, There are no Kurds here. The words come back to her. The reason they were spared. Saved. Which is it? she wonders. Saved or spared? One involves action, the other a passive assistance. A choice to look the other way. What the man did was spare them. What Delan did that day, she realizes, was save them. She’d started this trip thinking of her own hidden magic, daydreams of saving the day with feats of some unseen greatness that waited within her. And yet it was he who saved them.

They are alive, in truth, because of one small kindness.

An inventory has slowly, twistedly been collected throughout the day, funerals already begun, bodies under clean sheets with the mullah reading the Koran. Three killed on their block, one being a nine-year-old girl down the street. But other forms of devastation are widespread—as are theories. Revenge for the sabotaged road, it is known and accepted, fueled the attack. Justification from the government. The “resistance” was targeted, it is claimed—as if a little girl were resistance. But from there, the talk is jumbled. There is an informer among the Kurds who was spared, it is relayed from someone who knows someone, but then it is also said that the informer has not lived up to his bargain and was killed. Or will be killed. Or might never be killed. No matter who believes what, suspicion angles eyes and turns talk to a whisper.

And Lailan. Lailan has been quiet, has barely spoken, but when she does, Olivia leans in, peering at her mouth. “Lailan, open.”

And the girl does and then realizes what Olivia is looking at. With her finger, she touches the spot where the tooth had been. Her shoulders hunch as she tries to not cry, and Olivia’s heart breaks because it was her first tooth, and it’s gone, most likely lost in a night that took too much.

The trip is drawing to an end. She’s relieved to go, but to count the minutes while knowing that his family and Lailan will be left behind is like celebrating that