“They were not. They were men like me. Translators. Fixers. You know my type. Why do you think I’ve had so little competition these past years? My competition died!”

“Stop this foolishness, Jasim. No one’s going to kill you. Those days of revenge are long over. The Americans are mostly gone.”

“You think so?” He snorted. “A time of peace gives people more unoccupied hours. They have more time to think and make themselves crazy.”

“Well, we don’t quite have peace yet. So you are all right.”

He smacked himself hard on top of the head. “I’m a fool. I should have never worked for the Americans. I should not have translated even one sentence for them.”

I was getting irritated and concerned. I’d never seen Jasim like this. “So what do you want to do?”

“I must leave this country.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Saleh!” he pleaded. “Don’t you understand? They have put the word out. I’ve been threatened, marked. It happened last week. You already know what that means.”

The phone vibrated. It was Proust. I patted Jasim’s shoulder as he cried quietly to himself. Somewhere in the past minute, with him falling apart like that, I realized I had to pull myself together. Between my own troubles and now Jasim’s, I was even more certain I could not face the crowds down south. There were easily tens of thousands of mokebs like the one I had been serving at down there. But they were not resting stations for war; they were for peace and love. The difference was in size. I was comfortable up there in the north where there was war, my world circumscribed, my schedule neatly fitting into the dawn-to-dusk timetable of soldiers and killers. I knew who the enemy was and generally where he was. And I knew there was no salvation for any of us. It was just the fighting and, yes, the revenge, and the occasional dying. I could handle that. This, the goodness of people, their hopes, their prayers and perambulations, their carrying themselves by the boots of their souls to get to the shrines of Imam Husayn and his brother Abu al-Fazl in Karbala to pray and revitalize their faith, this I could not handle. It was beyond me. It was too big in scope.

I said into the phone, “Proust, I cannot meet you and Miss Homa in Najaf. Impossible!”

Proust softly spoke back: “Saleh, you don’t have to. We are not in Najaf anymore.”

“You are in Karbala then? Are you at the shrines?”

“No. We are in Samarra and hope to come north. We are coming to you.”

They were already farther north than I was.

* * *