I came across a few photos of her backpacking somewhere by the Sea of Galilee some years earlier. The pain of losing Atia was now confused with the sudden love I had for this person whom I’d never met and, I knew, would never meet. So for the next two days, while waiting senselessly for her to show up at the coffeehouse at the souk in Erbil, I had visions of us in an alternate life. Married with kids and happily backpacking around all the troubled lakes of the world. I imagined long nights of heated political argument that ended in heated lovemaking and toasting to the spirit of all the martyrs of all the wars around us.

And then my four days were up. Without love, only with messages from Atia that said the going rate for Miss Homa’s works had already doubled and people were clamoring to know where she was buried. I knew she was not saying any of this in a mercenary fashion. She just wanted to provoke some response out of me and probably figured this was how to do it.

Saleh, the news said there was a major battle around where you are.

At the end of it all, the only justifiable reason for going to Erbil had been to put more money into my Iranian SIM card—something I could not do from the Eye of the Horse. After Atia’s text, I trawled through the Iranian news sites and saw that “major battle” was exactly how they were reporting the sad excuse of a fight that had taken Abu Faranci away from us.

By the time my ride dropped me back in front of our new mokeb at the quartermaster’s building at the Eye of the Horse, I knew what awaited me there: word had it that Dodonge, now truly the sole superstar of the Syrian front, had come to report about our “major battle” in Iraq and its aftermath.

I pulled my winter hat tight over my face and observed the new mokeb from the side alley. The place was like a painting: men cooking rice in the open space in the back, chopping meat, stirring lentils, unpacking bags of vermicelli; there were fires being lit, poetry being sung, prayers being sent for the afterlife; and somewhere there in that huddle of men and song there was also Dodonge with a cameraman trudging after him as he spoke to soldiers eating food and telling jokes.