“I can’t do it anymore, Atia. I can’t write art reviews. I never believed in them to begin with.”

“You don’t have to actually write them. Just run the ship as chief editor, like I do with the film section.”

“I’m not like you. I’m no good at that stuff, Atia. I don’t know anything about managing people.”

“What are you good for then?”

I thought about the red house at Khan-T. Defending it. I hadn’t been much good at that either. The whole ordeal had been an exercise in futility anyhow. The enemy had probably already retaken the place. Or pulverized it. But there hadn’t been time to think about all that back then. This was what I wanted: to not think. I wanted to disappear the way that Proust guy had disappeared in Iraq.

“In any case, I have a job to do. I have to go back to Baghdad.”

“Says who?”

“H.”

I told her about the book and having to bury the thing at the Eye of the Horse, only to have it resurrected in front of me in H’s interrogation room.

“Saleh, are you even supposed to tell me any of this?”

“Certainly not. If H finds out I told you, he’ll make my decade miserable. Yours too.”

“Saleh, please visit your mother.”

“I will. I’ll go as Charlie Chaplin. I’ll put on a show at the nursing home.”

Atia didn’t laugh.

* * *

My mother hung on to life in such a foul mood that one of the health aides at the nursing home had called it “bad taste.” It was as if Nane-Saleh only stayed put for the sake of the endless Turkish soaps she watched on television. She had never forgiven the universe for fooling her into marrying a man who did not know how to make money—my old man. She forgave the world even less for having her make that mistake a second time.

I made up for the guilt of having committed her by spending nearly every penny I made on her habitat. Five years earlier she’d buried that second husband who had squandered his own considerable inheritance and left her nothing. After that she had started going downhill herself.

As I watched her now I felt the onset of the occasional blindness in one eye that I’d experienced first back in Iraq, in Karbala. It usually became more acute when I was around death and the dying.

“Saleh, why have you come here? Go! Leave!”

“But I love you, Nane joon.”

“You do not. You only come here to watch my suffering. Scribble, scribble—that’s all you are good for! Like your wretched father. You are not a man. You are a monkey of a man. Your poverty does not interest me.”

“Nane, I’m not rich, but I’m not so poor either. Look around at where you live. Not just anyone can afford this.”

“Why do you have them call me Nane-Saleh? My name is not Saleh’s Mother. You’ve been hanging around Arabs too long. You have become an Arab.”