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

way through town, because by the next morning, its spread is evident in downcast gazes. Gaziza won’t leave the house, but Hewar looks boldly at people, daring them as he picks out lamb and desert truffles—a treat—for Olivia’s last dinner. Everyone is silent, but everyone is thinking. Including Olivia, who sees sticky cubes of manna for sale and remembers that night at the restaurant, how Soran urged them to leave upon spotting the Kurdish politicians. Someone would’ve seen them, would’ve made a call. The temptation to take them out, he said. Opportunity. Had he been the one to make the call? The thought shames her with betrayal but once there seems to stretch out, at home. They could’ve threatened his parents, his brother. Perhaps that was even why Delan was taken—you don’t work with us, we’ll hurt your family. At the restaurant, he went to the bathroom and returned with orders for them to leave. Of course, he also could’ve just gone to the bathroom and seen the politicians—as they assumed. As is most likely.

Everything remembered now is cast under a different light. That need for reasons, that need invents links and connections and sees motive rather than coincidence. But memory lies. Like incident light in photography. The way a face seen at sunset will have an orange-red hue or a white piece of paper beneath a tree in which light falls through the leaves will look green. A lie, tinted by the situation. By the source. At the restaurant, Soran went to the bathroom and passed by the political figures and saw it was time to go. But in the light of her suspicion, she worries this may have no longer been the case.

The garden feels haunted. Leaves stir on the pomegranate tree and shadows move and everywhere she thinks she sees him. In quiet moments, she hears his voice, his soft cadence and even pace. And people come and go, leaving food behind. In the late afternoon, the second day’s crowd has been gone for almost an hour when there is a knock on the door. They wait—usually a knock is followed by someone loudly announcing themselves, as if a knock alone would not be answered. When nothing follows, they stop what they’re doing. Down the hall, in the living room, Hewar peers toward them before facing the door. Gaziza puts down her knife. Delan closes the refrigerator. From where Olivia stands, she catches sight of Hewar talking to someone in black. A black dress, as if in mourning, but exposed light-brown hair. A woman. When Gaziza heads down the hall, Olivia follows.

The woman glances over her shoulder before being brought inside. She’s young. Eyebrows arched. Lips a muted pink, like the underside of a shell. As she speaks, there seems to be confusion, as if the group is settling on a mutual language or sifting through words to find the ones that work. Olivia understands none of it but watches, intrigued, till suddenly Gaziza sways back and forth, crying, and grabs the woman in a fierce hug. When Olivia turns to Delan for an explanation, she sees that tears are streaming down his face.

“This is her,” he whispers. “Soran’s girlfriend from London.”

“She came from—”

“No. Liv, she’s saying she lives here now. With her family. Twenty minutes from here. They’re strict,” he says, “and Chaldean. That’s Catholic. They weren’t allowed to see each other.”

“But I thought it was okay.”

“Not for her family. Their children would be considered Muslim, even though he doesn’t practice. Her mother is sick. That’s why she had to move back. And so he moved too. To be with her.”

“But he wasn’t with her,” Olivia says. “He never even—”

“Liv. He was. They were. Every chance they got. When no one was around.” He smiles through a saddened relief. “Mostly in the morning, right after curfew lifted. Just for a bit. At cafés. They sat at tables next to each other and whispered.”

And then it hits her, and Olivia feels as if something in her has collapsed. Some pillar of worry that should never have existed in the first place.

The young woman’s name is Nina. No one in her family knew about her and Soran, save a cousin who was sympathetic to true love because he himself had once loved a Shi’a girl from afar. The cousin heard what happened through a friend who arrived at his house without shoes. Just hours before, this man had been visiting someone when he was told to give his shoes to a soldier, a soldier who’d broken his own shoe hiking into the mountains. The sole, the soldier said, came right off. Still he limped into the mountains to kill the Kurd—and then limped back out and searched the street for someone his size. The friend made polite conversation with the soldier, not wanting to be identified as Chaldean, and when the soldier thanked him for his shoes, he gave him a tip: there were okra plants left behind, just a few blocks away. Get them, because I cannot pay for these shoes.

The cousin listened to this and asked the name of the town his friend had been in and felt dread inch as he remembered Nina telling him that Soran lived there and was going to plant okra, had found some small plants that he would add to the garden he spoke of constantly. Though of course okra is common and the town is big, an instinct in him trembled to life, and the world, with these bits and pieces, spun tighter. Without telling anyone, her cousin drove all the way there, to the mosque, and learned the name of the man killed: Soran. Still, he said nothing. And when he stopped at the store before going home, he listened to more gossip about this Soran and said nothing, just held the name inside him until he was with Nina again and his voice went low, fearful of her love and what it would make her do.

What it