“Whatever they want to happen. Jail, at the least.”
On the ground, next to the back door, are woven white shoes, one slightly atop the other as if someone had used their feet to remove them. For a moment, he studies them, placing his foot beside one as if to measure the size. Confused, it seems. Again, she’s struck with uncertainty: his parents could’ve moved, the house now belonging to strangers. But no, the neighbor would’ve said something.
With a quick glance at the sky, he opens the back door and for a moment doesn’t move. Struck, perhaps, with an unfamiliar home. But then he presses his hand to his head, nods a few times as if savoring in a near miss, and waves her inside.
The first thing that hits her is the smell. Heavy and strange. Scents she’s familiar with—cooking spices and leather and old wood and must—are held in an unfamiliar palm, braced by a pungent backbone. Almost like diesel. If they’d been outside, she would’ve thought that it.
“Heating oil,” he says. “The smell. Electricity here doesn’t stay on. You’ll see. So they use oil heaters. Kerosene. To me, this is home. This smell.”
Their shoes get left with others by the door, the tile of the kitchen floor cold. Again, the scent. This mix, it’s the bits and pieces of his family’s world and of his past, what marks his own memories. Never has she smelled this combination exactly. Not in her friends’ houses, or stores, or restaurants. And with all the life she’s lived, it amazes her how scent can still be discovered, and how despite all she’s seen since arriving here, the mosques and bombed ruins of homes, it’s smell that separates the place from anything she’s known.
One room off the hall is lined with two long cushions upon the floor, each covered in dark-red blankets and pillows in varied, geometric patterns. A wooden plank is in the middle with a sugar bowl and little glass cups and saucers. The dining room. At once, she thinks of the dinners they’ve had at their house where the table could never fit everyone and so people sat on the floor, leaned against walls or furniture, lost in comfort and hours of talk. She’d not known how much of this world he’d taken with him until now. All the little things he does at home. Now she’s seeing the why.
“In here,” Delan says from the living room. “Leave your bags here till my mother tells us where we sleep.”
Family photos. A glass ashtray filled with pistachio shells. A small couch of gold brocade and matching chairs. Next to the window is a table with a radio and a small vase with a single plastic daffodil, leaves beige with dust. Radio Baghdad spread lies about the Kurds, he’d once told her. Right in our living room, we heard the lies. Even seeing the radio, it feels like glimpsing a celebrity. Everywhere, the details of his stories are coming to life.
And in front of the flower, a black-and-white framed photograph of a man. Mustafa Barzani. The general who stood only five feet six but looms in mythical proportions within the minds of many Kurds. The founder of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the man betrayed only years ago. He’d led every major Kurdish revolt since the ’40s and died just over a month ago from cancer, a result of the hand-rolled cigarettes filled with powerful tobacco from the Kurdish mountains.
“Every house has one,” Delan says when he sees her studying the portrait. “In this area, I mean. KDP territory.”
Against the wall is a long wooden cabinet with three doors, the outer doors each painted with a peacock and a folksy jumble of flowers. The center, however, is what draws Olivia closer. A mythical creature, a woman’s head with dark flowing hair on the body of a winged white horse. She wears a crown, and her tail is a burst of turquoise plumes, her saddle pomegranate red. Behind it all is a sky that’s bold and blue, and when Olivia leans in, the glass that covers the images flares with light. Chips and missing paint hint at age.
“How old?” she asks. The woman has white eyes, the black paint of the irises so faded, it appears missing. Something about her image makes Olivia feel that this is a woman who somehow senses everything but says not a word.
“Who knows. Here, if it works, you use it; you don’t talk about it. My grandmother had it; that’s all I know. We don’t have much from when I was young.”
She’s tracing a line of feathered plumes with her finger when the front door opens.
There stand the clear origins of him, like two branches of DNA once grafted. In his mother he exists in dark-brown eyes, pale skin, and a straight nose. His father has his height, with gray hair that curls but a nose that’s different, wider in the middle, and ears that stick out, making him appear sweet and goofy, like a cartoon character who’d grant you a wish. Upon seeing his son, his father’s face seems to collapse—the purest expression of love Olivia has ever seen. Unmonitored, uncensored. For a moment she looks to the ground, to afford a bit of privacy as they embrace, studying a rug of bold sienna and blue.
And then his father is smiling, and even while he holds his son, his eyes find Olivia, and he nods as if promising a greeting eventually, as if admitting he is powerless over this moment. His father wears ranku choxa, the traditional male Kurdish attire—baggy pants with a matching jacket atop a white shirt, held in place in the middle with a large sash around the waist—and
