For a few minutes a steady hail of bullets came into the defunct fuel station on the halfway road to Wardiya and then stopped. The place was a lone, long-abandoned empty depot in the middle of nowhere. It was walled in, but still in the open and vulnerable. A chubby man was bleeding from the thigh and I watched Claude bandage him up for the ride back. Maysam was shouting at someone walking toward the kiosk where normally the stationmaster would have been. The man stopped and turned around, looking befuddled as if the dangers of booby traps were just tall tales from other places. He was one of those people from Kut who did not say much and had damaged skin. He kept to himself, read the book of the sayings of Imam Ali, and wept. His weeping was infectious. It made other men weep too, and I wondered often what anyone in their right mind would think if they saw our mokeb on the move. We truly must have resembled a circus, despite Cleric J’s protests to the contrary. Maysam continued shouting at the poor man. Our head of security’s gruffness while on the job was only matched by his tenderness when he was back home with his family. He became a teddy bear then, spoiled his little daughters, wore his caftans and held court like some benevolent minor king on holiday. Cleric J was no different. The kids from his second wife could have been his grandchildren, but at home he was out there every afternoon playing ball on his one working leg while men stood twenty-four-hour guard outside since infiltrators in Diyala had sworn to assassinate him. It was a special kind of madness, all of this. It turned grown men into adolescents and for a lot of them the fatwa from the grand cleric to stand up against the enemy was really just that perfect excuse to get out of the dreariness of domestic life.

Cleric J shouted into the walkie-talkie: “If we try to take off now we’ll be left with a martyr or two.”