But I hated film people even more than I hated the enemy. Maybe it’s the old envy of a poor writer who does the heavy lifting before the buzzing of the flies in the film business. First Saeed, then the O Channel from State Television. With my blueprint for Abbas’s character in their hands, O Channel had gone to Saeed, bought the footage of the sniping legend, and made their stupid hit series just in time for the Persian New Year—a tired old formula of a bunch of guys with shaved heads and two-week beards walking around acting angrier than anyone should ever get if they want to live, in the middle of a war—flashing around the latest weapons instead of the shit we had to improvise with over there, and giving long, somber soliloquies about having to make “tough choices” in combat. It was bullshit pseudowarrior stuff, written by men who had seen a half year’s combat at most, if that. Nothing like Abbas or others like him back in Iraq who’d been in combat nearly continuously for almost four decades.

The only poetic justice was that Saeed never finished his documentary on Abbas. He needed that one final kill recorded through Abbas’s telescope lens. There’s a special camera for that and while Saeed waited for its arrival, Abbas met his end at Hawija. Without that kill, there wasn’t a finished product. This time, Saeed was just another documentarian waiting and, thankfully, failing at recording other people’s misery.

What if I simply refused to write the TV pilot H asked for? As far as interrogators went, H was all right, but he wasn’t exactly a friend, was he? The ministry could confiscate my passport and not allow me to cover another war. Then what was I supposed to do? At the paper, the Citizen, they’d put me in a corner of the city desk to cover small fires and stories of women who had been swindled by married Muslim Casanovas. No. I couldn’t say no to H.

* * *

I waited at the Parkway fire station for Atia to come out of the Citizen. She always took the same route and always seemed in a hurry to squeeze into a shared taxi or a crowded Valiasr express bus before gawkers accosted her. Atia’s life was one punctuated with “no­”—to the bosses who wanted to sleep with her, no to the marriage proposals from colleagues at other papers and magazines, no to the lecherous interviewees, and a big no to your average unctuous fool on a Tehran street who thinks when a woman says no she’s misled or playing hard to get and needs her logic set right before inevitably saying yes.

We’d been together on the ever-shuffling musical chairs of several magazine and newspaper staffs for years, always keeping that uneasy distance, not caving to the intimacy that traps folks who work on deadline in closed spaces. Readers knew her for her short biographies of famous commanders of the Iran-Iraq War, martyrs all. Capable and cool under fire, she ended up eventually running the show wherever she worked and had to play nice to the men who got depressed over her no’s and the women who labored to bring her down a notch or two. She was from the northeast, and like a lot of the women of that region of Central Asia, her attractiveness was wholesome, round-faced, smiling, and crimson, and maybe that was why she got accosted so much. She was exotic in an exotic land.