He was in love.

“With an Afghan girl. I thought if I joined the Afghan units here, I’d either die, which would be a blessing, or come back a real man. Then no one would be able to deny me the woman I want.”

“They would not let you marry her?”

“Worse. She got asylum and moved to Sweden with her family. Can you believe it? Sweden! I don’t even know where that is. I mean, I know—but what is Sweden to me? It may as well be another planet. But you can help me. This is why I am telling you now.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a small wooden prayer bead. “It belonged to my best friend, Asghar. We were together at Samarra. Please give it to his wife.”

Unconvinced, I turned to him. He looked like a kid who wasn’t telling the entire truth. I reminded him that he’d been in Syria for more than six months. Asghar, from what I recalled, had taken a bullet in the head at Makhoul, in Iraq, a year ago.

“Why give me this now?”

“Because I want you to go khastegari and ask for her hand for me.”

“You want to marry the martyr’s wife?”

He nodded.

“What about Sweden?”

“I don’t know any Sweden.”

“Why her?”

“She is my best friend’s widow. It would be like marrying my brother’s widow. It is the right thing.”

“This logic leaves me unmoved. But all right.”

“I am grateful. I am your slave.”

“But what if they don’t give her to you?”

“She’s a widow. They might or might not. And, well, this is why I am asking you. You are honorable. They read your stories about the martyrs in the paper.”

I did not bother telling him that half the outlets I’d written for over the years were long out of business and had nothing to do with martyrs.

He went on: “They know you are a friend to us. They cannot say no to your face.”

“And the widow? What if she doesn’t want it?”

“She wants it.”

He said this turning away, embarrassed. And I knew that there was a love story here somewhere, but one so twisted that to bring it to the tip of the tongue was to commit sacrilege. This man had probably seen the widow once or twice. At most. Perhaps on leave with the martyr when they served in Iraq together. Now, in the absence of his dead friend, there was only him left and the widow.

He gave me an address in the Abdulabad District in south Tehran.

“Nasif, you are still a soldier, serving in one of the most dangerous places on earth. What if you make her a widow twice over?”

“Then she will be twice blessed.”

Bullshit! None of us ever thought about how these once-, twice-, thrice-blessed mothers, wives, daughters, felt when they went down the street to buy bread in the morning. Ours was the laziest of paths, simply to die; theirs was calamity, followed by the backbreaking grind of daily life. Ours was fantasy; theirs raising that fatherless boy who’ll grow up to be the spitting image of his father.