“You have barely talked to me since you came back from the south, Saleh.”

I shrugged.

“Are you unhappy about what happened at Tal Abta? Maybe I didn’t carry out that execution, you know.”

“You did. The men told me. I don’t care how you did it, if that’s what you want to talk about.”

“I did it with a bullet. How else would I do it?”

“You should be very proud of yourself then, Claude. Welcome to our world.”

“It’s war, you know. People die.”

I stood up and got right in his face. He had aged. Literally aged in a matter of days and weeks. As if he’d been here doing this for many years. This story was winding down and I wanted to hit Abu Faranci, and mostly because I cared for him.

He had managed to make himself a part of our myth. I did not begrudge him that. I begrudged him his absence of indecision, the lack of uncertainty. He hadn’t come here to write dispatches for anyone.

I begrudged him his conviction.

“You’ve proved yourself. Go home now, Claude. What you did was not part of the war. It was personal business between Iraqis.”

“I don’t agree with you. When there is war, everything is war. All the wheels that turn.”

“Go back to your wife and child. Do it before it’s too late. They will come for you.”

“Who will come for me?”

“The man’s tribe.”

He smiled. “My wife and child are no longer mine. They are another man’s. You know this very well. You are angry with me for something that I do not know. I do not understand this anger you have now.”

Proust came toward us and stood at a respectful distance. Haji Yusuf let out a few rounds of AK at the tea stand on the other side of the thoroughfare near Khaled’s old place. I knew it was him by the way he exhaled his rounds—it was a tat, tat-tat, tat-tat-tat burst that made me think of my old bike’s sleepy exhaust on a winter day in Tehran.

I turned to Proust, speaking Persian: “Have you told this man why you are here?”

“Bale, yes.”

“What does he say?”

“He says every reason is a good reason.”

“What language does he say it in?”

“French.”

“You discuss literature?”

“Often.”

I pushed past Abu Faranci who now stood there silently listening to our incomprehensible Persian.

“Do you think about Miss Homa?”

“I try to keep myself busy so I don’t think at all.”

I patted Proust gently on the shoulder and kept walking, heading for my usual spot at the mokeb roof.

Abu Faranci called out: “I was sure that old man with the sheep would blow himself up one day.”

I stopped and turned. “Why not say something then?”