“Yes. Everyone’s wrong.” He pauses as she watches the hawk through her viewfinder, losing it behind a tree. “Or everyone’s right. Some people are more right than others. The Kurds, I’d say we’re more right.” He smiles. “You’re still angry. I know. I’m sorry.” He leans over and snaps a yellow flower from its stem. “Liv. Olivia.”
“What?”
“Just saying your name. It’s a good name. I’m the only one who calls you Liv, though.”
“And my dad.”
“Why, you don’t like Liv?”
“It’s fine. Sometimes it just sounds like a command.”
“Like you’re being told to live. I never thought of that. What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet. I did Romeo and Juliet in San Francisco; did I tell you? I was Mercutio.”
A shadow from a cloud moves slowly along the base of the mountain behind the far line of roofs, just enough to provide further separation between background and subject. Click. Reaching into her camera bag, she grabs the red lens filter and twists it on. With this, the clichéd blue sky with white clouds will turn dramatic, the blue changed to dark gray and clouds to electric white. Click. Tilting the camera, she puts the horizon’s dividing line lower so the sky seems to take over, increasing the tension of the photo. Then the opposite, lifting the horizon to make the photo heavier. The rough lines of the mountains feel like the rise and fall of the land itself’s language, one intense with emotion and churning with stories of ancient armies and invaders. “The Zagros?”
His shadow nods. “‘Kurds have no friends but the mountains.’ That’s our saying. Our proverb. And that mountain there means ‘close friend.’ As a kid, I thought of them all as friends. I thought that was what it meant. Then the Elburz Mountains, I thought they were the nice neighbors who look after you if you wander too far. Taurus were the distant-cousin mountains. You might never see them, but if you did, they would still take you in and give you dinner. There”—he nods to the peak before them—“that’s my mountain. At the top, you’re above clouds, and all you hear are birds and wind. You’re so high up, the earth feels round.”
Olivia looks at the sheer cliffs. “I’m not going up there.”
“No. Now, you’re meeting my family.” He stands and reaches for her hand, as above them the hawk swoops low, its shadow lengthening upon the grass.
“What does it mean?” she asks. “That the mountains are the Kurds’ only friends?”
“The old story is that any time an invader was going through Kurdistan, the Kurds raced to the hilltops and rained stones onto the enemy at night. When the enemy got tired and left, the Kurds returned to their villages. But really, the mountains are the only ones who’ve never betrayed us. That’s the truth of it.” A pause. “Also, you’ve heard head for the hills? Think of protection, of people running from tanks or planes. You’re harder to kill in a mountain.”
CHAPTER 7
An old stone bridge with three arches. A blue-green river with a tuft of white from a current in the center. There must be a drop there, Olivia figures, picturing a cut in the earth that rushes with its own, deeper force. Along the bank, men pull a net with white, sun-flickering fish, and just before the town, there’s a trench that’s been dug, a scar from past fighting. Iraqi military patrols the streets, and when she turns to watch a soldier, Delan nudges her.
“Best not to look at them.”
“Why so many?”
“Military occupation.”
Now she studies him, this man with his recklessness and oversights. “You didn’t tell me.”
“They were always just here. Since ’61, more or less. I forgot. It wasn’t intentional.”
And though she is nervous over this omission, she believes him, because what is daily is often overlooked, and with every hour upon this soil, she’s realizing that the baseline of his world is nothing like her own.
Streets are narrow and thick with life. Shoe repair shops. Bakeries. A place that sells birds, peacocks strutting on a roof of patched aluminum. One long, iridescent tail hangs over the awning, and in the background, cinder blocks rise into a half-hearted second floor. All the houses and buildings are right against each other, many made of mud bricks with roofs that are flat, timbers evident in the eaves. And though main roads are paved, the rest are stone or dirt with channels through the center to prevent flooding.
When they turn onto another busy street, something strikes her: the men are with the men and the women with the women. The groups are not mixed. “Men don’t hang out with women.”
He glances at her, as if he’s felt a first step onto shaky ground. “And women don’t hang out with men. It works both ways. Because it’s not proper.”
“So how do you date?”
“There is no dating. Not like in the West.” A pause as he taps his cousin on the shoulder, pointing to what must be a restaurant, pictures of food taped to the windows. Something gets said in Kurdish, and he sits back. “Some, they might meet in secret. In groups maybe, if someone has a sister. Just not out in the open.”
“And then you get married.”
“Or you don’t.”
“And what if you don’t know? What if you need time to figure it out?” They pause at an intersection, alongside a fig tree’s low sprawl, the bark white against a shifting evening. Already the start of sunset charms the streets, spilling onto sidewalks in a honeyed light. When she turns to him, she catches him shaking his head as if she’s just told him she’s unsure of their relationship. “I didn’t mean you.”
He grins. “You only think you didn’t know at first.”
“Lucky for you, I know now, because arrogance would go in the con column.”
“See—columns. What is that? That’s not instinct.
