“A visit to your mother’s grave, for starters.”

“Nane-Saleh is gone?” I closed my good eye and tried without success to see her.

“Are you all right, Saleh?”

I imagined this place without a war. Just men casually missing limbs and other men turning a piece of farming equipment into a killing machine.

How did it feel to execute someone? It was an insight that Abu Faranci would possess by now.

“Atia, tell our mutual friend I will go to Erbil for him. I promise.”

“Saleh!”

“And thank your husband for arranging my mother’s funeral. I’m sure he’s the one who took care of that too. I know he’s really doing all this for you. But I’ll take it. I owe him in a big way. I’ll even read his peace poems and try to like them. I’m not saying this with irony. Honest!”

One of us hung up.

Beneath some hard-to-make-out Arabic graffiti on the battered vault of the mosque, someone from somewhere had written, in concise and nearly immaculate Persian: A mountain will never reach another mountain, but a man will reach another man and take his revenge . . . if he must.

It was a variation on an old saying. The original Persian proverb said nothing about revenge. Whoever had written those words had some precise ideas about what they wanted to do. And you could have summed up this land in those words.

* * *

Miss Homa lay in bed in the back of a barbershop near al-Alwa Square, a short walk from the Askari shrine. Her eyes were closed but she was awake and Proust held her wrist, crying quietly. Jasim waited in the car outside. The barbershop was a two-seater and pilgrims, all of them Iranians, were lined up against the wall waiting for haircuts. From their beaten appearance, you could tell they were the kind of tireless wanderers for whom a simple march to Karbala was not enough; they had to come this far north and had walked past Baghdad all the way to Samarra to show their true worth as walkers. You’d see them on the side of the road, looking haggard and monumental in their great revel of sacrifice. They were beyond reach and reason, like exquisite skeletons. I imagined some of them reincarnated as Christian martyrs nailed to a rock and weeping ecstatic tears of blood. While others came on buses and didn’t walk at all, suggesting that they were complainers and a potential nuisance in their excessive wants.

The chaos of it all was infectious. The look of trance, and rapture, in the eyes of a pilgrim who has trekked a thousand kilometers is worth being born into this world for.

I walked over to Jasim.

He said, “I may not see you again, Saleh.”