The man looked at his brothers. He knew. But didn’t have the heart to say. And his saying that he wished he could kill the jailed sibling with his own hands was not true. The pain in his face was shame multiplied, threatening a heart attack. I had stopped wearing diapers after Syria, but now I wished I had one. The camera shook in my hand, the cell vibrated (Atia from Tehran). And now I glimpsed the man who had confided in me last night, Abu Faranci, standing at the edge of the road from the gas station looking south. Again I wondered if he at least missed his son, if not his marriage.

Cleric J, seeming to be a whole other man than what I’d known these months and years in and out of combat, spoke in a low voice and gazed at the floor somewhere between us and the four brothers. “I will tell you when he will be out. He will be out tomorrow morning. At eleven, to be precise.”

None of the brothers spoke.

“Now then—”

The man interrupted him with a loud clearing of his throat. “We disown him. We haven’t a brother. He is yours to do as you deem just.”

“I know I speak with honorable men here,” Cleric J offered, “or we would not be talking.”

There was a loud murmur and one of the brothers began uttering a salawat which the others and Cleric J and even I immediately picked up.

We grew silent again. The air remained heavy. We had done the salawat and dutifully remembered the Prophet and the family of the Prophet and somehow that absolved us of . . . what? I didn’t know. My mind was wandering some more. Now I thought of Atia and Mafiha having a child together someday. It did not bother me, this image, not as much as I thought it would. Maybe there was truth to the words from Abu Faranci—getting to the point where even your wife’s or husband’s faithlessness becomes a nonissue. I felt for him, for Abu Faranci. As I felt for the men in front of us about to give up their thieving brother to the take-no-prisoners justice of Mesopotamia.

“We are indeed honorable men,” big brother said forcefully, willing himself to believe his own sacrifice and the sacrifice of his tribe.

Cleric J cleared his throat. “He must die. You understand?”

All said it together: “Understood.”

“But, brothers, countrymen—yours is a tribe known for its courage and its respectability. It is not our intention to bring disrespect or shame to your history. This is not the way of the men of Iraq.”

The more he spoke, the more his Arabic fell into a classical baroque that I could not understand. I felt dislodged, as if standing on air.

Big brother said, “The men of Iraq must stand together, after all that we have been through.”