I knew I’d been tailed all the way back to the house. They’d made sure that I’d notice it too. But who could it be? H’s people? No reason for it just now. Dodonge? He’d already rubbed it in by dropping in on Atia and me at the café. I’d parked the motorcycle next to a twenty-four-hour health clinic on busy Valiasr, where I knew it would be hard to steal, and caught a cab home.

The phone lit up. It was Miss Homa.

I congratulated her on her upcoming gallery show.

“Saleh, you have not come to visit my studio in some time.”

“I don’t write about art anymore, Miss Homa. You know that.”

“That is no reason not to pay an old woman a visit.”

I promised her I’d come the day after tomorrow. But even before we’d hung up, Saeed’s name appeared on the screen.

I paused, hesitant to answer. In light of all that came about during this period of shuttling between peace and violence, I should have known nothing was an accident, not even Miss Homa’s apparently casual call. Because the fraudulence of this calm, which I was enjoying a fragment of just then, was evenly matched by the fraudulence of the war, which sooner or later I’d have to return to.

I said a gruff hello into the phone.

Saeed cleared his throat. But I didn’t give him a chance to speak.

“Listen, you human-trafficking poor excuse of a man, was it you who had me followed this afternoon?”

“Brother—”

“Don’t brother me!”

First time we had been hitched together was in East Africa. Saeed got the job because he was a native Arabic speaker, I got it because my English was good. We were there only a few weeks together and it cemented something: we lost our minds—not completely, but enough to abandon any speck of hope we had in ourselves.

“I heard you were in Damascus,” he said. “Why didn’t you take me?”

“I wasn’t carrying a camera. I simply went to visit the Zaynab shrine. I went for my heart.”

“Your heart is satisfied now?”

I didn’t answer.

“I have a job for us.” He explained that a British channel needed footage and they paid well. I listened but still didn’t respond. Finally, he barked, “Say something! What is your problem?”

“My problem is Africa, you son of a whore!” I hung up.

A bright early morning. We’d left the Iranian Red Crescent office to roll some film outside of a refugee camp. Another civil war. Another continent. We watched a chirpy white reporter—I don’t know from where—go on a stroll for “a breath of fresh air” right under that African sky inside the refugee camp. I put away the camera and sat with my head between my hands.

A little later I’d caught Saeed working the guy, entreating him in abominable English for a foreign assignment job. When I called him a whore that first time, he looked at me quizzically and said, “Yes. Well, so?”