“True. These things do happen.”

H gave a hard stare. “We can’t have this war turn into a joke. We have to know if this guy is alive or not.”

My voice faltered. “And if he is?”

“The idiots at State TV have already held ceremonies for him. There have been posters. Speeches about the courageousness of our heroic TV reporters and their teams going out there to the front lines. This guy’s name makes it even more problematic: Daliri, Courageous. For the love of God, I can’t have a man named Courageous returning to Tehran all of a sudden. We’ll be a laughingstock, don’t you see?”

“What am I supposed to do about it?”

“Instead of going out to Aleppo to play soldier, go back to Baghdad and start looking for this guy.”

“And if I find him?”

“Tell him I better not see his mug in Iran. He has to stay in Iraq. Make a new life for himself over there. We’ll give him something to tide him over for a while and we’ll also help him create a new identity. We’ll even give him a new name and an Iraqi passport. If he wants to get married, we’ll help with the cost of the wedding. But if he comes here . . .”

“I think I get the point.” After a pause, I added, “And if I don’t find him? If he’s dead, never to be found?”

“Then we don’t have a problem.”

All of this was why I was eating one skewer of liver after another. I was eating automatically, resentfully. Not because I had been tasked with finding Daliri, no. It was because once again I had encountered that wall of ridiculousness. I wanted this war to offer gravitas, but there was only more absurdity—my diapers, finding Marcel Proust at a place called the Eye of the Horse in northern Iraq, and now Daliri’s fake martyrdom. I hungered for high seriousness, the way that the nineteenth-century British critic Matthew Arnold had instructed us to be serious. In fact, I’d spent a decade before this war writing essays, reviews, and criticism for local papers and journals that I imagined were serious. At the University of Art off 30th-of-Tir Boulevard, down the street from my apartment and the synagogue, where I had occasional teaching gigs, I’d tried to drill into my students the value of getting serious about things. I forced them to read in other languages, the way I’d forced myself years earlier, so that their worlds would expand beyond the stifling prison house of their native Persian with its accursed mystical poetry and Sufi drivel about transcendental love. I wanted them to break out of the petty chaos of their lives in Tehran and the endless problems of the mad Middle East and learn something about the larger world. But all of it had been an illusion; now I knew. One more war had killed all of life’s buoyancy and I understood the foolishness of wanting to ever do anything—anything at all. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt this way, but after achieving the near impossible in this city, which was to make half a living as a writer, I thought I’d crossed a threshold at last. The war had seemed at first like a chance to do something new, something fresh after years of borderline hack work in Tehran. That was the trouble: the war was fresh. It made everything else irrelevant. One became a follower, a hanger-on, an addict. I had a feeling that this Proust guy Daliri was alive, if not well, and in Iraq, unable to come back to Tehran not necessarily because he didn’t want not to be a martyr, but because the war had swallowed him up—and like all the volunteers fighting there he was no longer good for anything else but playing the death game. I could not be sure about this logic 100 percent. But I thought I had pretty good insight into the man’s head.