“Saleh!” She held my gaze. “Why did you stop sending in reports? We heard all kinds of rumors about you. At one point, Dodonge from State TV had everyone believing you’d gone over to the enemy.”

“That son of a whore would do that! Dodonge wants the Syria coverage all to himself. I ran into him near Golan, you know. There was nothing going on. But he had some Syrians start shooting in the air for effect while his boys filmed him for Channel 1. He lied right into the camera and said there was a battle in progress!”

We sat in Café Lowkey between Bahar and Mofateh. It was a small place that served the finest kookoo sabzi in town. The best part about the joint was that no one we knew ever went there because it was next to a mosque and had no toilet. Atia kept looking at me as if I were a brother gone awry. There had been a moment, after enough years had passed, when we considered becoming lovers. Then the moment passed because, for starters, H had called Atia in one day and read her the riot act. It was just after my “questionable” short story collection was published, when H was not sure of my loyalties. Six months later H didn’t care one way or another if the two of us were lovers, because by then it had been established that the short story collection, which sold a total of sixteen copies, was hardly some foreign plot to bring down the government. Nevertheless, Atia and I had already let H’s intrusion make the decision for us. It was as if his nosing into our lives was a source of assurance rather than anxiety. We didn’t have to listen to him. But we did. When it really counted, we did. The things that we were not certain of, a guy like H could decide for us. He was like a holy man you go to for advice, a therapist.

“Saleh, we’re not talking about Dodonge here. It’s you. What’s happened to you?”

“I was looking for life’s meaning,” I said uncertainly.

“In Syria?”

“One has to start somewhere.”

One day I had watched a caravan of refugees being shifted from one place to another. There is something shameful in witnessing the hunger of an honorable woman. A mother, child held tightly to her chest, walks by not glancing at you and not asking for food, even though she’s half-starved and her feet are sore and blistered. Maybe she had been a teacher in another life, a musician, a nurse, a housekeeper; she asks for nothing except that you—you who are not a part of her solution but, she suspects, a part of her misery—go away and take the soldiers you’re with along with you. You are searching for life’s meaning and this woman marches her misery march. What do you do? What do you file in your report? What is it you all want from us? she says. Says it matter-of-factly. As if reason had anything to do with why any of this was happening.