No one would know he’d been here—no one outside Iraq and the orbit of our Hashd lives and deaths. When I followed the news of all the people who were joining this war from far away, those delicious stories took place elsewhere and belonged to other people—and that was just as well for us. Yet I knew that Cleric J had already made sure news would head south to the tribe of the executed man: a certain Abu Faranci is dead. The revenge narrative would stop with him. The equation was complete. It would not go beyond that.

Proust said, “Why did you not come to say a prayer for Claude?”

I had not wanted to hear the names of the dead. I’d drunk a lot of coffee from the hands of that coffee man. If he was dead, I didn’t want to know. If he was alive, I didn’t want to know. And if he was wounded beyond recognition, I still did not want to know. I wanted, in general, to stay ignorant of many things now. I didn’t want to get to know people and then have them die on me. It was better; the flights of despair came less frequently that way.

I said, “I’ve been praying for Claude all night. He was . . . a complicated man. I am sorry we did not get to know him more.”

“What becomes of me?”

“You’ll have to stay here. Try not to die if you can. This war’s ending. There’s no reason you should do what Abu Faranci did.”

“Stay in Iraq? Really? Forever?” It was as if he were pleading his case.

“Do as you wish. Go back to Iran if you like. They’ll think you’re a ghost.”

“Please don’t mock me, Saleh. You know that return for me is impossible.”

It was. And it hadn’t escaped me that with two major works of Miss Homa to my name, I’d be a rich man when I got back to Tehran.

“You can stay with Cleric J in Diyala for now. I’ll arrange it. I will send money your way from Tehran. After a while you can join the sea of refugees from this war going to Europe. Head for France if you can, your first love. Take long walks in Paris. I always wanted to go there. Send me a photograph.”

Chapter Fourteen

14

You can lose everything. Refugees know this. But so too do people who live their lives in photographs. I had many pictures of this war. One war among many and one I tried in a roundabout way to write about. Because it was there.