“Soran-gyan,” Delan says. “You’re not telling me something. It doesn’t make sense. You were about to graduate. Why here, why now?”
Soran pushes the dirt around the plant, firm, the imprints of his fingers left in the soil. “They wanted me here.”
“Bullshit,” Delan says and turns to Olivia. “Kurdish parents expect perfection. To give up on school? That’s a failure. That, they would not ask for.”
Now Soran looks up. “They are old. You might not have noticed.”
Olivia doesn’t have to look at him to feel Delan’s anger.
“Baba has trouble walking,” Soran continues.
Delan lapses into Kurdish, and Olivia turns to the house behind her, wanting to get away. Then she remembers the seed packets. When they were packing, she’d thrown in three seed packets—California poppies, snapdragons, sweet alyssum. A bit of their home to share. It was only at the airport that she’d realized it might be considered smuggling, a worry that made Delan laugh. Now she goes to her room, where she finds the packets in her suitcase, and listens to the brothers argue through the open window. Sitting on her bed, she begins a count to two hundred but stops when she hears her name. Who said it? Their voices are so alike, though Soran’s speech is slower, paced out as if in a marathon while Delan sprints. Though she listens, she doesn’t hear her name again.
“Here,” she says when she returns. A cloud sits below the moon, scattered and long. “I brought these for your garden.”
“She smuggled them,” Delan says proudly. “All by herself.”
Their conversation has turned. When she looks back to Soran, he’s flipped a packet over, lips moving as he reads.
In the dark, she wakes, listening to a call to prayer that’s soft and distant. No one in the house stirs. From her bed, she sees lights on in two of the houses behind Delan’s property. Within would be Muslim families, knees upon their rugs. Her eyes close again as the call continues, wavering and old, coursing deep burgundy and purple in her mind, leading into dreams she won’t remember.
A knock on her door, and she wakes to sun through the window. “Liv,” Delan says. “Meet me in the kitchen. Let’s get going.”
In the kitchen, he’s not there, but Gaziza is, on her knees as she cleans the floor with what looks like a short-handled brush. Her wrists are dented, heavily creased with lines.
“Let me help,” Olivia says, kneeling down. “Please, Gaziza.”
But Gaziza bats her hand away, then turns to sweep in a different direction. Her hair is wispy in the back, patches of gray in the spot that’s usually covered by her scarf, areas that must be hard for her to reach on her own when dyeing it dark. Does Delan know she dyes it? Or does he see her with the love of a child, that love that never glimpses death or aging? Already Olivia has seen it, the difficulty the woman has standing and kneeling so much. Always, it seems, there is standing and kneeling. Even to sit for dinner, Gaziza’s face tightened, eyes closed as she found her way to the floor. And here she is again, on hands and knees.
Under the sink is an old cloth that Olivia moistens and uses to start wiping the floor.
“Olivia,” Delan says, standing in the doorframe. “I don’t think my mother—”
“That needs a handle. What she’s using, there’s not even a handle. Where’s the handle?”
“That’s always how it’s been. How they all are.”
Olivia stretches to wipe the corner of the floor. After a moment, she sits back and sees Gaziza’s stopped what she’s doing and is watching—shocked and not pleased—and it’s then Olivia realizes that Delan is behind her and also on the floor, wiping quickly and with much less care but wiping all the same.
“You don’t have to do this,” Olivia says to him.
“Of course I do. It will be faster; then we’ll go.”
Quietly, she says over her shoulder, “Your mom hates me now.”
He stands and motions to her to give him her cloth. “Give it. Let me rinse.” The faucet in the sink comes on, and after a moment, he hands her back her cloth. As he does, he looks her in the eyes. “Ignore it. Mothers never like it when a woman changes their son.”
For a second, Olivia stops wiping. Beside her, he is already kneeling, the wide arcs of his arm swiping clean the floor.
Tea that is hot and sweet. Baklava that is honeyed, sticky flakes. From the table at the café in town, the mountains are tall and jagged and capped in white. Soldiers patrol the streets, set up at the next block’s corner. Though she and the brothers sit at a table fairly far from others, far enough that no one can hear them, Soran still turns his voice to a whisper as he tells of Kurdish glories. Sheikh Mahmud who they’re related to, Saladin who battled Richard the Lionheart, and even the three wise men, the Magi from the bible, who are thought to be three Zoroastrian priests. “That is what the priests were called,” Soran says. “Magi. Zoroaster, the prophet who lived in this area, he said a king would be born to a woman who was a virgin. So the Zoroastrian priests, they were waiting, and then they saw the star in the sky. Or so it goes.”
“I know where he gets it from now,” she says, motioning to Delan. “The storytelling.”
“The goranibezh,” Soran says. His eyes, that sun-filtered green, move between Olivia—the recipient of the tales—and Delan, who takes over now and then as if by cue. “They are our storytellers.”
“Our bards,” Delan says.
“Yes, Shakespeare, our bards. For centuries. A very special people. Trained for years. More than a hundred stories that they sing from memory, some stories an hour long. It is an art. Started by women too. When someone was injured, they would sing to distract from the pain.”
“Two hours,” Delan says. “Three.
