Take What You Can Carry

such atrocities could not be under the jurisdiction of a compassionate God, and who wanted to believe in an uncompassionate God? That Delan believes is something she’d never considered. “I didn’t know you believed in God. Allah?”
“My family’s Muslim but not practicing. Most Kurds are Muslim, and most were converted ages ago at the end of a sword. But we have all religions. I’m Zoroastrian, or I was. Now I don’t believe in anything, as much as I believe in everything. But I like to be convinced.”
With that, he places his hand on her thigh, out of the view of the cabdriver, and she closes her eyes to his touch, wondering which side of the argument she represents.
Soraya is his aunt, a short woman with short, dark hair and a midsection that seems equally distributed, chest and stomach plentiful. A smile breaks upon her face when she sees Delan and flickers only once upon seeing Olivia. A confusion. Delan wasn’t expected, much less a red-haired American. Give her the chocolate, Delan had told her moments ago as they pressed the buzzer, and so now Olivia presents the box like roses from a suitor.
It works. The small hallway cracks with excitement, and words are spoken between aunt and nephew until the woman takes Olivia’s hand in her own, pulling her through her door, into an apartment with walls that are painted like a garden. Every surface has a yellowing ivory background covered in painted plant life: blooms and stems, vines and trees. With the old furniture and aged Oriental rugs, it’s like stepping through time to an abandoned garden world.
Olivia lifts her camera bag. “Can I?” she asks Delan. He turns the question to his aunt, who nods an approval, pleased, it seems, that this room will make it onto film that will be carried overseas.
“My cousin,” Delan says as Olivia focuses on a framed black-and-white photo of a man, full stalks of blue hyacinth painted on the wall in the background. “Don’t worry, my aunt doesn’t understand English. She was sick, cancer. All this he painted to cheer her up. He was an artist, one of the best. But he had just started teaching. Without his job, there was no money for her treatments and his job was in our hometown, six hours away. Tall, I remember that. He must’ve been six two.”
The man’s face is smooth in the photo, though perhaps softened by the black and white, the haze of the soft focus and diffused light. Still, he’s young. Too young to be referred to in past tense.
“The government wanted him to speak out against the Kurds,” Delan continues. “He said no, and one day went to buy yogurt. They shot him on the sidewalk. In the back of the head.”
Olivia tries to not react.
“That was a decade ago. Maybe more. He just wanted yogurt.” A beat as he looks at the photo. “I hate that. Dying, having been hungry for something.”
Before Olivia can say anything, Soraya is there, pressing something into the palm of her hand and then clasping her own hands over Olivia’s for just a moment, as if sealing in a gift. A delicate square of soap, tied with a ribbon. Rose, sweet and peppery. If her luggage never arrives, Olivia decides she’ll keep it in her pocket, and the scent, as Delan intended, will mark the voyage.
She thanks Soraya, who says something in Kurdish. Delan follows with the translation.
“She wishes she had more to give you, but she didn’t know. And she told me that ‘a good companion shortens the longest road.’ Which means she’s thanking you for bringing me home.”
“I didn’t. You brought me here.”
“If it weren’t for you, I don’t know that I would be here.”
Words that will soon, in only weeks, repeat in her mind in an unstoppable refrain.
Delan is given the couch and Olivia a room with a twin bed and a window that’s gone gold with the lit-up mosque. The room used to belong to Delan’s cousin, a man Olivia sees never got the chance to need a double bed, and now she stands before it, studying the Pacific blue of the bedspread and knowing that tonight she will sleep in the imprint of his ghost.
Shew bash: good night. At last she closes the door to her room, the brass knob worn from the ghost’s hands. The window is open, and jasmine’s rich aroma drifts from a plant Soraya has on her narrow balcony, its many arms wound around the railing. Directly above the mosque, the stars appear faded but far off are emboldened in a crisp contrast to the kohl sky.
The night curls on its edge. Dark deepening, some sounds muting and tucking away till morning, while others—cars, dogs barking—simply fall into the background. As she rolls over, she catches voices in the other room.
Unable to sleep, she goes to them; Delan is perched at the end of the couch, Soraya sitting forward in a chair, voice a furious whisper and hands a moving blur in the lamplight. Rocking back and forth, as if gathering momentum for the next tirade, his aunt opens her mouth to speak but stops when she sees Olivia. Quietly, she takes Olivia’s hands and gives them a squeeze before leaving, her bedroom door clicking in place.
“She’s mad at you?” Olivia asks Delan.
“At me, no.” He opens the balcony door and steps outside, then motions for Olivia to follow.
The night is a sweet pollution. On the sixth floor, where they stand, they’re above the buildings across the street, and the city lights beyond stretch into black, braced by billboards. To the left, the light from the mosque is like nothing she’s seen. “I need my camera.”
“No, wait. Stay.” He’s leaned against the gray iron railing, his arms on the spots where the jasmine doesn’t vine, and for a moment she wonders if he’d chosen to stand exactly there so he doesn’t hurt the plant, which is, she knows, something he would do. “We talked about