“What’s the difference? There is war in both places. In fact, it’s the same war, isn’t it?”

“There are rules. And rules of engagement.”

My body, sore from the drinking marathon, shook involuntarily. He fished a shopping bag from a brown briefcase and then took out something from the bag and slapped it on the table. It was the Marcel Proust I’d buried in the ground at the Eye of the Horse.

“You want to explain this?”

“It’s a book by a great writer.”

“You’ve read him, this Marcel Proust?”

“Bits and pieces. Not really.”

“Then who is this man named Daliri?”

“The original owner of the book, I assume. He wrote his name on the inside jacket. And those are his notes in the margins of the book.”

“What’s the book about?”

“I think it’s about the passage of time and that we’re all dying. No, that we’re all dead.”

“Do you not feel well?”

“I feel horrible. I haven’t stopped my evil drinking since I came back. But you already know that. You know everything.”

“You are a writer and a reporter. Why did you pick up a gun in Syria?”

“I hate my job. I wanted to do something that counts.”

“Like shooting people?”

“Not randomly. At our enemy.”

“Who is our enemy?”

“You know, the people who want to kill us.”

A jolly, round-faced man with glasses knocked on the door and stuck his head inside. I’d seen him before, one of those nondescript types in a gray suit who’d probably wanted to create great works of art at one time but, out of necessity, instead ended up working at the Bureau of Censorship. H left the room to talk to him. The Proust sat like a slab of gray decayed meat on that table. It wasn’t lost on me that had my interrogator been someone other than H, this book that I had buried in Iraq might be used as material evidence. For what? For anything. For being born. These things have a life of their own and when you fall into the sick orbit of suspicion by the state, anything goes. Anything. Just a thin line between farce and the utter ruination of a man. Always there. Always waiting. And so I stared at the Proust with wavering solemnity and the full breadth of my hangover and sickness.

If H would let me, I’d simply stay here, ask for a cell in the ministry to sleep in, and never leave. I needed shelter from many things.

H returned to the room and offered tea, which I accepted.

“Why did you bury the book in Iraq?”

“Someone saw me do it?”

“Of course. Someone always sees.”

“You are spooking me.”

“That’s my job.”

“Well, I knew I wasn’t going to read the thing. It’s just too much of a book, you know? So I took photos of where this Daliri guy had underlined certain passages, figuring those are the important parts, and then I buried it.”