I stuffed the prayer bead, which smelled vaguely of Egyptian musk, into my pocket and punched the widow’s address into my cell phone.

2

The next fortnight I spent drunk, my only contact with reality the scene from the living room window where it seemed every five minutes scavengers would dip into the large trash container in front of the synagogue, and of course the synagogue folk themselves who came every other day in their skullcaps in the early morning to take loving care of the trees and flowers of their holy place. It was probably some special time of year for them as they arrived even earlier than usual and I could hear the haunting cadence of their utterances as the sun rose above the filthy sky of Tehran with the old, grime-ridden stock exchange building in the distance. The telephone buzzed ceaselessly for the first few days but I did not have the heart to answer. The war had ruined me, and the simplest tasks were beyond me now. Washing clothes, getting food, even making tea seemed like chores that had to be negotiated in my head before being discarded. There was no agency on my part. I had gotten used to channeling daily work into rituals of prayer. The more I remained unsober, the more I prayed, believing that in this way I was staying true at least to the men I had left behind across two borders in Iraq and Syria.

Until finally one day a number flashed on the screen that couldn’t be avoided: it just said 1234.

I’ll name him H, short for Handler. He was a heavyset man. Kind, despite his job. A man who couldn’t fully wrap his will around being a state interrogator. It wasn’t his style. Mostly when he called me in we’d discuss literature. He didn’t understand why you couldn’t put literature in the service of some greater good, like teaching young men to be more devout or more committed to the state. There was a purpose to everything in his accounting. A guy didn’t write stories just for the sake of writing them; they had to strive for something bigger, more meaningful. So our “literary interrogations” ultimately had a ceiling. There was a point beyond which we could not speak to each other. And that was all right. In the grand scheme of things H was still preferable to a lot of people in Tehran. He didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was. An agent of the state. His job was to make sure you didn’t stray far from certain parameters. He didn’t want to have to recommend that you be blacklisted. H wasn’t that kind of person. He was, ultimately, a good man. A good man in a questionable job who at least read all of my writing, and diligently. What more can a writer ask for?

“Saleh, if you go to Syria again without permission, I’ll have to take away your journalist’s license. Your clearance does not extend beyond Iraq.”