“Why can’t you change where he lives? Have him living across from a mosque if you like, or across from a shoe store or a mall or a park or a real estate office. Anywhere! Why does it have to be a synagogue?”

“Because that’s where he lives.”

“That’s where you live, Saleh.”

“So I’m too lazy to make up an imaginary location. Choose a location for me then.”

When he saw that I really didn’t care and that it was really out of laziness I’d picked my own address as the protagonist’s dwelling, his mind was set at ease. But today we were back to the synagogue questions. It was a loop of pointless back and forth that one simply had to survive. His next set of questions were about Daliri, the owner of the Marcel Proust book. H wanted to know if I was aware of the guy’s whereabouts.

“He is probably dead, for all I know.”

H played with his fountain pen and gave me a concerned look. “What if he’s not?”

He opened a drawer and took out a photograph. Daliri. Baby-faced. Beatles haircut. The look in his eyes was one of sadness or bewilderment. With some people you can’t tell the difference. In a country with more opportunities than ours, he would have gotten a PhD in something precious and insubstantial. Literary theory, maybe. Or philosophy of the mind. He would have had a following of young students who swore by him and loved him. He’d marry one of them. And he’d still be sad.

Instead, what was this Daliri guy? A sound engineer for State TV in Iran. Now lost in Iraq. Or dead. Or on a boat with other refugees escaping Syria and Iraq.

All the information was in his margin notes. Our soundman for State TV had gone on location with an Iranian film crew to northern Iraq. In a battle near Sinjar he had somehow gotten separated from his team and ended up having to work his way back from behind enemy lines. But by the time he did, it was too late; at home, they were already calling him a martyr of the war. A street was going to be named after him. All of this information he could already glean from his cell phone from across the border, while he remained invisible to friends and family. For all they knew, his phone was in enemy hands now too. They wrote to him, sent him messages which he did not answer. How could he? Providence had made an impostor of him. Now his recently widowed mother would probably get some kind of martyr’s allowance. How could he go back and declare himself not dead and not a hero?

“I understand what your concern is,” I said. “But I would not worry too much. If this guy were alive I would not have come across his book.”

“It’s not impossible there was a battle and he had to escape in a hurry again, leaving his stuff behind.”