Take What You Can Carry

with them in the mountains at their mutual aunt’s house, training Hawshar dogs how to tend sheep. This was a wedding Delan should attend.
And she’d heard it was better there. He’d told people that. Already, though she’d barely conceived of the idea of going to Kurdistan, it felt like a challenge. Both to know him and to knock herself off the safe ledge from which she viewed the world. Because while others made a difference, she sat at a desk. Reserved in her risk, her electric bolt of curiosity constantly kept in check by a heavy layer of caution. And going to Iraq would break that. Though even the idea made her nervous, the fact was, she was far more terrified of being scared, of forever being that person who didn’t experience life because of fear.
“Take me,” she said.
He was surprised, and she saw it flood his face—something she knew was happiness. He wanted to take her. But then it changed. “I didn’t say I was going.” He paused, drumming his fingers on the letter. “I don’t know if I should.”
“Why?”
“It’s hard, facing what you’ve left.”
“Because you have it so much better than they do?”
The green clock on the wall ticked. “To say it like that.”
“But that’s it, right?”
He folded the letter along its original creases. “Having left anywhere, for any reason—it’s a lot to return. But you don’t want to go. It’s not a vacation.”
“It doesn’t need to be a vacation. It’s going home. It’s important. And you said it’s not that bad.”
Though he was calm, she saw it in him, a tightness about to unwind. The flip side of his charm, the other angle of the two-headed snake—that passion that drew people in, that kept people glued to their seats, was the same that fueled his words and could make a pleasant dinner party go awry with rants on the Kurdish plight—though, she’d noticed, not his own. His peoples’ story, but not his.
“Not that bad. America’s tolerance for what is bad, it’s different from ours. Kent State—people will talk about that for decades. How could the National Guard do that to their own people, they cry. Iraq’s government, the Ba’athist government, they used napalm on us. Bombs. You name it, they got it and used it on us.”
He paused, and she saw the anger had already moved into his eyes. Quick, lit like an anonymous fire, present in a matter of seconds. She’d seen it before. They all had. But because it was usually gin-fueled, their solution was to walk away or help him to bed. But now she stood there. She wouldn’t move. She would listen, and he would take her. She knew.
He continued. “Villages incinerated. Faces of children burned off. Did anyone take to the streets for us? Were there signs, picketing? Did anyone know?”
“I know.”
“Because I told you. Not because you read about it. Here, the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front—they bomb in protest. Power stations, banks. For impact. For interruption. Not to kill. There, it’s to kill. To destroy a people. For genocide.”
Moments like these, she tried to extract the truth from the tendency he had to constantly find himself upon a stage. Not that she didn’t believe him, but his words often swelled with drink, and an audience riveted with joy or fear was what he craved. Already there was a ring of wet on the kitchen table from his gin and tonic’s base.
“The fighting,” he said. “There are clashes still.”
“But where your family is?” Because he’d made it seem that they were fine. And again she saw the fact that though his stories were often passionate or angry or despondent, very few were ever personal, as if he could tread upon a territory only just outside his own. And if it was indeed dangerous where his family lived, that, too, would be something crucial he’d held back.
“They’re fine,” he said at last. “But only years ago, we were at war. You feel that still.”
“But if it’s safe, I could meet your family. I could see where you’re from. What if this is it? The best chance we get? The best chance you get?”
He watched her, and she saw it once more—he wanted to go, and he wanted to go with her. Then he shrugged and sat back in the chair, and in his eyes she saw the beginning.
And now she’s on a plane she’s realized is making an emergency landing, and understanding that the calm she saw on the faces around her had really been acceptance, and that for people who grew up where she was going, a flock of pigeons was not often the cause of trouble. Prayer beads have begun to slip through hands.
“Another five things,” she says as the plane makes a sudden dip.
“Mulberry trees. Sweet like wine right on the branch. Caves with Neanderthal bones and fields with huge chunks of white marble. And waterfalls. Springs that go right through houses—”
“What? Why would you love that?”
“Who doesn’t love running water? And the people. This is the best part. Generous. Friendly, like nothing you have known. The hardest thing is saying no, because they will invite you into their houses and feed you even if you’ve never met them, even if they don’t have food for themselves.”
Despite her rising panic, she smiles. One part of his personality explained.
“Now, tell me about Washington,” he says.
“I can’t. You go again.”
“Just five things you love.”
“No. I’ll cry.”
Turning to face her, his eyes flicker to the window. The ground feels closer. She wonders what he’s seeing but won’t look.
“Knock-knock,” he says.
At this moment, a knock-knock joke. She laughs, a strange laugh of release and incredulity and fear. “Who’s there?”
“Control freak. Now you say, ‘Control freak who?’” A pause. “Did you get it? The control freak is telling you what to ask next. You got it?” A jump as the plane lifts before a sharp descent. “Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“You’ll catch the plane? The Kurdish Superman?”
“Nothing will