“What happened?” Delan asks.
He doesn’t wait for a response, just sees the woman and goes to her, saying something as she starts crying, reaching through the open window to cup and then kiss each of his cheeks. Olivia doesn’t move, scared and then not scared, surprised and then not surprised, when the little face returns. A girl, maybe five years old, with shoulder-length brown hair that curls into wisps at the ends, a pink-and-yellow-beaded bracelet that’s far too big resting at her elbow, and a loose red T-shirt that says I’M A PEPPER in white lettering. Olivia smiles and waves, and the girl—though just seconds ago terrorized—grins in return. There’s blue on the corner of her mouth, as if she’d bit the wrong end of a marker, and her teeth are small, just tiny white squares.
“All right,” Delan says. “My neighbor Miriam. And she tells me this is Lailan, but I say we’ve got a monkey who jumps onto counters.”
Though he follows his words with Kurdish and a laugh, Lailan watches him, serious and captivated. “English,” she says. An awed whisper.
“Do you speak English?” Delan asks.
But she doesn’t answer. Instead she turns shyly, wrapping herself in her mother’s apron, face covered. Miriam says something in Kurdish and pushes the girl forward. Though Lailan nods, apparently in answer to Delan’s question, she now looks only at Olivia. “I love doll, she with hair.” She pauses, looking for a word, and then motions to her knees.
“You have a doll with long hair?” Olivia asks.
Encouraged, comfortable, the girl nods quickly and within a second is at the counter again, elbows straining as one leg lifts all the way up and a bare foot gets jammed in by the sink. Then she’s on the counter. She’s done it, though it’s clear she didn’t expect to. Her face opens with surprise, and she quickly shoots a look back at her mother before once again peering outside, now acting nonchalant, a child feigning cool in front of the older kids. Her eyes are big and brown with bits of gold that catch in the sun.
“Hi-lo,” she says, eyeing their suitcases and clothes before fixating again on Olivia’s hair.
“Hi-lo,” Olivia says back and catches sight of a brass Star of David on the side wall, tucked into a corner and partially hidden.
“Dinner with them at the picnic,” Delan says, motioning Olivia forward, toward the backyard. “There’s a picnic. There’s always a picnic.”
Olivia turns once more and sees Lailan with her head out the window, watching them go. Another wave from the girl, and the woman’s arm appears around her waist, pulling her back into the house.
We have Kurdish Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Delan loves to tell people, proud that Kurds believe in democracy and religious secularism. But Olivia’d never been sure. When he spoke of his people, she’d suspected that claims and facts merged and expanded and became sweeping statements that may or may not have been true. “They’re Jewish,” she says now.
He stops, finger on his mouth. “Not loud, please. She is. One of the few left after the government, those monsters, hung them in the squares. A friend of mine, he was in Basra when this happened. From five a.m. to two p.m., they were hanging in the hot sun. Necks a foot long. All to scare people. Show them who was in control. Miriam, she changed her name, everything. Before it was . . .” He pauses, then shakes his head. “I don’t remember. But this is not to be known. So keep it quiet.”
Necks a foot long. A horror, reduced to a detail. Slowly, she says, “But the Kurds are okay with—”
“The Kurds, yes. But not the rest of Iraq. Jews and Kurds, they love each other. It was the Kurds who helped them escape.”
Once more, he urges her forward. At the end of the building, the garden is revealed. Large and lush, a sense of sprawl from the creeping vines and branches. Towering sunflowers and hollyhocks. Pink and white blossoms of fruit trees. Passionfruit vines that cling and reach. Enclosing the entire space is an old plastered wall, parts of which have chipped away, revealing stacks of mud bricks underneath. Despite what he’s said, how accurately he described it, she’s now confronted with her past doubt. After all, peach trees growing in the Middle East? Plums? That he spoke of walking to school in snowstorms or his first kiss under a waterfall, how did she know what was true?
On the left side, there is a trellis covered in grapevines and a green canopied walkway underneath. Scatterings of smaller fig trees grow along the perimeter, and in the center is a giant pomegranate tree, its base gnarled and thick, new red leaves sunset-lit and impassioned with light. A cement bench is underneath, a pair of black plastic glasses on the seat. By the side wall must have been a large tree, but all that’s left now is a thick stump, a ghostly footprint of what once was. Then beside it, a rosebush, the canes bare of leaves. Somewhere, chickens laugh, if that were possible, which in this garden, it might be.
Delan points to the hollyhocks. “Pollen from those were found in Neanderthal graves nearby.”
Neanderthal graves. Bones beneath her feet, perhaps. The rocks in the garden would’ve once been larger, bright and shadowed with early-human firelight, and the land around them would’ve seemed empty and forever. There’d have been no concept of oceans. No awareness of planets. And here, right before her, are those same silhouettes of mountains, the same spikes of peaks. A shared view, glimpsed across time.
He, too, glances toward the mountain. “My parents should be here by now.” Then he points to a heavy tree branch that crooks over the fence from the neighbor’s yard. “Walnut. Not ready till the end of September, unless there’s not much rain. Then later.”
Oddly, there’s a lightness within her.
