“You needed to come to an end-of-the-world sort of place. This one just happened to be available. And it was for a good enough cause. Look at all the Yazidis and Christians those sons of Satan have killed. You wanted to do something about it. And you were already tired of your everyday life, wherever it was. I don’t know what you did before besides being a journalist, but you had had enough. Like the rest of us. You came here, where you don’t have to worry about anything except getting shot at and making tea for the fighters and having them call you Abu Faranci. That’s enough to make you happy. I’ve been watching you, Mr. Claude. You are content here. I don’t really know why a Frenchman needed to come all the way out here to find contentment. But you did. And I’ve seen stranger things in this world.”

“Your English is better than mine, Saleh. How come?”

“I worked hard to acquire it. I thought it would be my ticket out of the Middle East. Instead it has been a ticket to stay here, in this prison. Then again, where would I go?”

Haji Yusuf had begun to sing the evening call to prayer. You could hear his crackly old voice with a hint of self-mockery in it radiating from the rooftop of the longhouse.

We sat there listening in the room I shared with Cleric J, and now also with Abu Faranci. Soon there were other calls from other abandoned, semihabitable buildings that the Hashd had taken over. The prayer calls got entangled in one another, like poorly tied knots that could not be undone. The better voices suffered the most for it and were lost. Every evening was the same. And every evening the enemy too sang his own Allahu akbar thousands and thousands of times over. We were really fighting with our own shadows. Some of us deserved dying, but very few of us deserved the flower of martyrdom.

The Frenchman’s ease was compelling. He really did love it here. Every night all the men who had been lost to these plains and hills were recalled in our evening prayers. I prayed for them too. But there was no time to pause for them too long, no time to remember them beyond an idea. And so at the end of the day, all the martyrs you’d known became one bandwidth of death, a rainbow of body parts and browned blood. Sometimes at moments like these you just want to cry for your loss. It’s a plaintive hymn of self-pity that I’d heard some men, but not all, descend into once in a while. And now I was feeling it too, especially since tomorrow morning I had to finally return south to Miss Homa and Proust, both of whom wanted their own share of martyrdom.