A relief. She sees it on their shadowed faces, a slow, hesitant release from a past that wasn’t long enough ago to be forgotten, a time when the fighting was not just in the mountains. Suddenly what feels wrong is that she’d not known. What’s wrong is that to her, a plane has only ever been a plane. A fundamental difference even in what they fear.
And then a click. And a brightness. The power returned.
Gaziza presses her hand to her forehead and returns to her seat, eating with unsteady fingers. Rice falls to the table. Soran drinks from his glass while staring straight ahead, and Hewar nods, shyly, to his plate, as if it had just spoken some sort of logic.
“Now I’m telling them about our house,” Delan says, refusing to acknowledge anything other than the power outage. He reaches for a fava bean in the bowl near her glass and clenches down with his teeth to capture the beans and the soft, boiled pod. “I said our yard is small and a mess, and they want to know why we don’t grow more vegetables in the empty lot behind the house, since it gets all sun.”
“It isn’t ours,” Olivia says slowly, lifting herself from the past moment. She’s still thinking of the plane, wondering where it was going. “It could be built up any day.”
“A poor excuse,” Soran says.
Olivia turns to him. “Can you imagine doing all that work on something that might be taken away?”
“Yes. All the time,” he says and smiles timidly to his plate.
And though she realizes what he means, that here—a place where a low-flying plane means destruction—nothing is forever and things and people and places are taken just like that, for some reason she feels that he’s talking about a woman. She watches him, and when she looks to Delan, she sees he’s doing the same.
There is a single bed in the room Soran has been sleeping in, so he will take the couch, and Delan has been given his room. Olivia learns this as she stands in the threshold to the room she’s been given, which has a double bed and a view of the garden. She tells Delan that he and Soran should take this room and share—that there’s no reason for Soran to be on the couch when one room has a double bed.
“You’re the guest,” Delan says. “This is the room for the guests. It’s the nicest room. Please, you argue, it will upset them. And,” he adds quietly, “if my brother is with me, there’s no room for midnight visitors.”
She glances at his parents’ room, right next door. “No way.”
“The couch is best for me,” Soran calls from the hall. “I do not sleep well, and from there I bother less people. Come, the garden.”
Outside, the moon is heavy and the sounds of cannons have faded.
“The Kurds in the mountain villages, they keep their lights off at night,” Soran says. Olivia thinks of electricity, a lack of power, until he adds, “Or they are targets. Hopefully tonight will be quiet for them.”
The plane. Was that where it was going? To the mountain villages? What she’d heard might have been the beginning of someone’s night. A mere rustle here but chaos on the other side.
“All you can do is say a prayer,” Soran adds when he sees her face.
Delan shakes his head. “Prayers were needed an hour ago. A bit late for that.”
“It is never too late to wish someone well,” Soran says. “And you know this; it is never over.”
“Enough,” Delan says, draping his arm around Olivia’s shoulders. “Our first night. Let’s not get depressed.”
In the silence, they walk the path. Now and then, Soran points to plants and says their names in English and Kurdish, introducing Olivia to them like a new teacher at school. Olivia repeats their names. Xiyar, cucumber. Kuleke, zucchini. At the end of the path, a birdcage hangs from a branch. Olivia goes to it, hoping there’s nothing inside. Nothing could be worse than having a bird outside, among nature but barred from it. A few more steps and she sees the gray top of a head and then the whole pigeon, sitting in a box with straw. “Why?” she asks. The bird looks up at her with its head tilted, echoing her question.
“He is hurt,” Soran says.
“My father fixes them,” Delan says. “Sometimes he has three, four birds.”
A relief. Already she loves his father with his big ears and the pen in his pocket.
“Finches, pigeons. Once an owl. Whatever falls from the sky, my father will fix.”
“And chukars,” Soran says. “Do not forget them. Though they will not let you forget them, even if you tried. In the back. By the wall.”
“Partridges,” Delan says. “We call them chukars.”
The sound, she realizes. She’d thought them chickens. Laughing chickens.
They approach the coop, wood and chicken wire under the cover of a large peach tree, and three birds stand for a greeting. Mostly gray but with black-and-white-striped wings, red beaks, and black around their throats like fur collars.
“The food,” Soran says, turning back to the house. “They like what we did not eat.”
“Fruit,” Delan says. “Get them fruit only. They’re not pigs for leftovers.”
But Soran is already at the back door and then inside.
She turns to Delan. “So the fighting is close.”
“Close in your terms. Not in ours.” He takes her by the waist, thumb hooked into her belt loop, then touches the hair at her temple with his finger.
She glances toward the house. “We’ll get in trouble.”
“Not if they don’t see.”
His lips on hers. She lets her eyes close until she hears Gaziza’s voice from
