“Not quite the case. When the British ripped off a large chunk of Mesopotamia and manufactured Iraq out of sand and shale, they tried to make friends by bribery, or to influence the noncompliant by sending their sons to university, just as the Yanks sent my son to Georgetown.

“Still, Abdul prefers to think of me as backward and uninformed. I’m his skeleton in a closet that has to be swept clean. He of course would like to do the sweeping, and I think he’d like you to help him.”

“I’m not good at that sort of thing.”

“And why not?”

“Because I don’t want to be.”

He nodded slowly. “Would you be interested in keeping the closet the way it is?”

I hesitated, stalling. Saeed al Sadr waited patiently, and so did the gnome. He leaned forward, head cocked to indicate his curiosity, aroused at long last.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’d have to know more about what’s in it.”

And then a dog bounded into the room, barking gaily, and threw himself into Saeed’s arms: a ghost of a dog, a second coming, back from the dead.

“Where the hell did he come from?” I asked in a bloodless voice.

Saeed grinned. “You thought I ate him?” His fingers kneaded the ears of the ecstatic little beast. “According to Saint Paul,” he said, “the Corinthians suffered fools gladly. I refuse to suffer them at all. But they’re always with us; they petition me consistently for one damned thing or another.

“I don’t wish to appear inaccessible to my people, so I’ve found a way of having them avoid me, by the simple expedient of spreading rumors about myself—that I am mean and eccentric, that I do frightful things, like eating a puppy and defying the label on a poisonous bottle of hair dye. Which also enhances the legend of my indestructibility, and that is not bad at all.” He paused, then added, “I think we’ve had enough for one day.”

We shook hands, and I galloped off in my burnoose tent.

THIRTY-TWO
THE CAVE AND THE ETHNOGRAPHER

Val and I loved to wander across the yellow plains, combed by the hot wind. (What, you say, I thought you hated the place? Well, I say, the world is full of hellholes, inhospitable and cruel, from Oymyakon in Siberia, where the temperature falls to minus eighty-nine point nine, to the Kalahari Desert, but, I say, even a pilgrim in Gehenna might be moved, even purified, by the sights—“Hey! Look at that there fiery pit!”—and sounds—“Just listen to those sinners scream!”—if he were in the company of someone he loved and cherished, and with whom he could share the experience and shape the remembrance.)