“Thank you.”

“What do you mean, thank you?”

“Arabs are not like us. Their blood is warm. They mean what they say.”

“No one means what they say. You are such a fool, Saleh.”

“Nane! Why won’t you look at me?”

“I don’t want to look at you. I’m busy.”

She had not been this chatty in months. It was a good sign. Unlike most mothers of the Middle East she showed her love, or those rare tiny bits of it, solely through scolding. It wasn’t love to write home about, but I took it.

Her gaze never wavered from that TV. On the screen was another Turkish chef d’oeuvre with a lot of colorful Ottoman period costumes and casual overacting. I left her to her room and the make-believe. There was an ancient woman next door who wailed three times a day for exactly five minutes—as if she were calling the morning, noon, and evening prayers—warning everyone within earshot that Churchill was attacking from the south and the Bolsheviks from the north. She was living a loop of Iran and the Allied invasion of the country in 1941. It would have been funny had the place not smelled of mothballs, cleaning agents, urine, and insolent nurses.

I wish I could tell you that my heart was heavy as I left that place. That I missed the woman who had birthed me. But what I mostly felt was an absolute resentment that included almost everyone in this city. Sleepwalkers. I would have not minded bringing the war here for just fifteen minutes—maybe up in one of the posh neighborhoods of the north side where they hired dirt-poor Afghan laborers to wipe the ground of their palatial homes where they showed off gold-plated shower heads and toilet seats. There is something about coming back to peace that makes a man rot from inside. Not every man, I am certain, feels this way, and not everyone wants to rain rockets on people who do not know, or feel, that there is a war next door.

But I felt it. Because I was rotting from inside.

* * *

Back at the house, the synagogue was jumping. There was a great big red table that had been moved out into the courtyard upon which men and women were setting plates and dishes. I thirsted for a feast like that. For happiness. For the living. The blindness in the left eye was like fireworks. There were starbursts of lights, and objects flitted about as if on holiday. I could still ride the motorcycle but it wasn’t easy with just one eye. Dimensions became tricky and everybody seemed to be wearing a gigantic neon hat. With artillery shells, sometimes it looked like it was raining meteors. I would stand rooted to my spot mesmerized by my own nonseeing. Green and yellow smoke would turn into a cacophony of more color and I imagined genies of various shapes dancing on these fields of death of my own private Middle East. As men ran every which way shouting in Arabic to take cover, I stood there like a child, overcome by my ineptitude, thankful that I wasn’t a soldier but a witness, a periodically blind one, free of having to grease a weapon or kick a dead enemy combatant in the ribs.