Meanwhile, Proust insisted more than once that if he were to die, I must take him back to Samarra and bury him next to Miss Homa. He liked to talk about himself in the past tense. I said yes to his request though I never intended to make good on it—not because it pained me, but because I was lazy. And it all really depended on how a man went; if it turned out to be a case like that old man and his sheep, then you’d feel stupid collecting meat parts off the earth to go bury them a couple of hundred klicks down the road.

When H still didn’t answer after several attempts, I figured his lack of discipline and general predilection toward high art and Marcel Proust had finally cost him something. Maybe his freedom. Or maybe he was already in Erbil or somewhere else trying to escape this rotten Middle East forever. I waited one more day. Neither of them wrote, neither H nor the enemy scholar.

In return, I did not answer Atia’s calls and messages, not even when she reminded me I’d better soon come up with that new ending for the Abbas show for State TV.

More eventless days. No casualties. No captures. The mokeb was running itself with Abu Faranci and Proust and the other guys. One night I dreamed of the Kurdish combat women over in Syria and suddenly I had the end of the Abbas show in sight. He would not be felled by an enemy sniper whom he had fallen in love with. But rather, he would save a platoon of Kurdish women, his occasional allies and occasional enemies, depending on the time of the year in Mesopotamia. He would put his body and his soul in between them and the enemy as they approached the heights in which the Kurds were trapped. The greatest sniper in Mesopotamia would make one last stance to save the women. He would not be killed by one woman; he would die for many. Heroically. Rapturously. This melodrama, I thought, State TV surely had to accept.

I was back to being a writer, even if what I wrote was questionable at best, and hackwork at worst. I didn’t want to think about that.

I spent most of the following days cooped up in that room, rewriting and periodically listening in on the chatter of the mokeb, its poetry and its occasional French.

* * *