Most of the men appeared like life-size question marks just then, lowering their centers of gravity, convinced that a bullet would somehow miss them if they walked around as if they suffered kyphosis. The bullets had felt random and I didn’t have eyes nearly good enough to notch the distance. It was the luck of the draw and if you heard a bullet go past, it was already gone and you had nothing to worry about. If it caught you, you still had nothing to worry about; you were done. This question of luck always lurked in the back of the mind. Two years earlier when the war was still in its infancy and the enemy was winning, we’d gone with Saeed up to nearby Lalish to film the Yazidis. They were a curious people, their religion reaching so far back into the bowels of Mesopotamia that they seemed hallowed simply by surviving as long as they had in this unfriendly land. I could not get a handle on their faith but they were unbearably handsome and utterly decimated, the enemy having reserved a special kind of savagery for them. By a little rock formation at their holiest site in Lalish, an old holy man handed me a common towel and said this was their wishing well. If one threw the towel at the rocks and it did not fall to the ground, the wish would come true. The only wish anyone had at the time was to not be slaughtered a few kilometers down the road. How was one to reconcile the fact that the enemy was closing in, the Yazidi men had been butchered by the thousands and their women and children raped and sold into slavery, while here we stood trying to throw a goddamn face towel at a holy rock formation? The Middle East was dying. It was dying right here too in this forlorn outpost in the Nineveh Province, where we imagined bullets would not catch us if we made ourselves small.

* * *

Claude said, “Have I passed the test now?”

“What test?”