“You are an idiot. You think this is what these women think about? They want their husbands back. They want to be a part of life, not death.”

“Atia, you are the one who writes biographies of martyrs.”

“It’s a job.”

“I rest my case.”

“And no longer. The Citizen made me chief editor of their film section.”

“No one deserves such a prestigious position more. Congratulations!”

She reached for the last of the kookoo. Our waiter was a familiar young theater actor who had dressed up like Charlie Chaplin today. Chaplin with a beard. He shuffled over, winked, and set down two teas with rock candy. “Mr. Saleh, I preferred it when you wrote art reviews. What’s with writing about the Defenders of the Holy Places? I didn’t take you for one of those guys.”

I nodded to Chaplin. “Doesn’t the Bureau of Public Places give you a hard time about looking like a homeless Westerner from a hundred years ago?”

“They don’t mind Chaplin too much. I just tell them I’m practicing for a play.” He smiled. “Chaplin’s films were mostly silent, you know. Mute. The Bureau of Public Places likes things mute!”

Atia sucked on the rock candy as the kid walked off. I watched her. And loved her. It was an uncorrupted love, born of having fought in the same trenches, the same battles over every crumb of culture, every little weekly column we might scrounge and get past censors without having to completely sell out. I now realized that aside from the Defenders of the Holy Places, who had a habit of dying on me, I didn’t really have another true friend here. Atia was it.

“Saleh, now that I’m running the film section, the boss wants you to come home from the cold and take over the art section for the Citizen.”

“For that prostitute Mafiha?”

“You don’t give him enough credit. But yes, him. Mafiha.”

I looked curiously at Atia. Something was off. “Say, how is it Mafiha suddenly makes you the head of film?”

“What, you think I don’t deserve it?”

“Of course you do. But men like Mafiha don’t just hand one a plum. They usually have a motive.”

Atia glanced away. “What if I said there was one?”

“A motive for you to run the film section and for me to head the art section of the most widely read publication in the country?”

“Yes,” she said impatiently.

I didn’t want to know what the motive was. And didn’t care. Mafiha was the kind of guy who took and took. There was a difference between him and a man like Dodonge. Dodonge actually believed in the fight in places like Syria. He wanted to carry the fight everywhere, right to the Wailing Wall if he could, as long as he got to shine and play the hero. He was an image maker. But one who didn’t mind dying for that image. I was sure in the back of his mind he was already looking forward, preparing for his martyrdom. But he wanted it to happen on his own terms and on a grand scale. Mafiha, on the other hand, was a pure wheeler-dealer; everything in his hands turned on the axis of profit. He had hounded me before to take over the art section, but not because he thought me capable as a manager, which I wasn’t. But because I happened to know Miss Homa, the shining, dying star of Tehran’s art world who would not give Mafiha the light of day.