Delan says something to his father in Kurdish and then translates to English. “I asked him who is Soran’s friend with the okra. So we could call and tell him to be careful on the way home.”
“Does he know who?”
“No. Soran has many friends. With many gardens.”
The garden. “I’m going out there.”
Delan looks at her questioningly but lets her go.
Outside, she spears the hardened soil with the shovel, stands on the edge to jam it in farther, and then steps back and lifts the blade to turn the earth. Over and over until she comes back to herself. She is here. She feels her body, at last and painfully. New blisters form on her hands. But she is alive, despite her stupidity. Her misguided bravery. Delan was angry from the start, that scared anger parents get when their child unthinkingly walks into a street, the I almost lost you anger. It wasn’t aimed at her, of course, but at the situation. For the fact that a walk had turned into this. So she’d not told him of the photos, that she’d sat there for a full minute, maybe two, exposed to anyone on lookout who might have walked along the ridge.
The noon sun turns angry, temperate morning gone. Within minutes, she’s sweating, and when Delan joins her, she wipes her brow with the backside of her hand to squint at him, to see what he wants. He doesn’t say anything. Just gets the other shovel. Her eyes sting as she watches him begin to dig. And then she starts again. Turning the dry soil, mixing in the rich compost. Hewar even appears and kneels at one side, riffling through upturned earth and removing the weeds and grass. Now and then, he points to a bird in the trees, smiling as if seeing someone who finally returned.
The far back garden is ready. The soil turned and amended. Rows dug and ready. All they need are the plants.
Together they eat lunch outside, rice with almond slivers and raisins, chicken in a red tomato stew. In the distance there is a banging, someone building something. Olivia listens to the beat of the hammer and notes that Delan keeps glancing at the side gate when his parents look away. A strange flutter has begun in her chest, a sort of loose anxiety.
When they’re done, Olivia helps Gaziza take the dishes into the house while Hewar and Delan stand before the cleared section and plan. Plates clink in the silence of the house. The refrigerator hums. In the distance, the chukar birds laugh into the afternoon.
Then there are voices. Gaziza is out the door, frantic, with Olivia close behind, just as Delan throws his shovel on the ground and Hewar lets go of his rake and there, at the side of the house, are Kurds carrying the same man who’d tried to stand in the ravine, a man whose brown pants are dirtied at the knees and whose white shirt is now almost entirely red. His head hangs and his arms are flailed, and Olivia can only look at the man’s hands, but even that is too much because she knows those hands—the ones that were beside her when she was sick—and she only has to look at them to hear his voice softly telling her tales.
Everything slams to the surface. Fast, like a punch. Then a gauzy lightness takes over, and she can’t move. Frozen in a moment of realization. It was Soran. Soran standing, trying to stand. Soran being stabbed. But even as she understands this, it slips away, despite the evidence before her. Not real, no. A humming builds in her ears, an enraged static.
Gently the men set Soran on the ground, his blood no longer flowing though still, the dry soil turns red. Gaziza is there in a second, holding his head in her hands as she yells something over and over, as if she could possibly wake him. Then Delan is on his knees, grabbing at his brother’s hand, pulling on his arm, and Olivia kneels behind Delan and presses against him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders as she both clings to him and holds him up. Standing above them all is Hewar, watching with his hand covering his mouth, his face wet.
Then there is a sound. A wailed shock of understanding as Gaziza begins to pound her chest with her fist, stopping only to lift her arms to the sky, her voice soaring. And Olivia looks up and sees Lailan. In her second-floor bedroom window, watching. Frozen. Her mouth open and eyes wide, as in her hand, her doll hangs, forgotten.
Soldiers were seen driving fast, too fast, down a street at the base of the mountain. A man in his nineties was sitting in his window seat, keeping an eye on things, and said he knew right away that something was wrong. Standing, he went outside and asked his grandson and his grandson’s friend to walk into the ravine to gather wild toleke, a bitter green that would be cooked with oil and onions later to help his ulcer. They in fact did not need to go that far for toleke, as it grew across the street, but the grandson did as asked. And alongside the road, they found the body. And then found someone with a car.
There is a swiftness to death in the Middle East. People appear immediately, and already Soran is in the mosque, washed and wrapped in white, about to be taken to the graveyard. Delan is needed everywhere. Dragged from this room to that, talking to people in Kurdish and pressing a cloth so hard onto his eyes, it’s as if he’s physically shoving back tears. Between the language barrier and the whirlwind of Muslim traditions that Hewar and Gaziza apparently practice only with death, Olivia is stunned. Uncomprehending. Though Islam mandates a funeral right away, she sees
