It was then I knew we were the living dead. Nothing mattered. Refugees. Civil wars. Atrocity. Starvation. Someone still had to go stroll for a breath of fresh air in the madness. I went right back to the Iranian Red Crescent office to tell them I wanted out. We’d been young and adaptable back then.

Twenty years later, not so much.

But I’d found myself working with Saeed again. Because work is work. If I only relied on working at the Citizen and writing art reviews I’d end up in the poorhouse and my mother would have to stop watching Turkish TV.

In the meantime, Saeed could stew for a while.

The black Peugeot was still outside. Two men. They were parked near the sky-blue gate of the synagogue. The driver got out and looked directly up at my window and waved me down.

I knew him. I knew the other one who now got out of the car too. They were the State TV hacks who had stolen my idea and bought the sniper footage off Saeed.

4

Several barefoot Iraqi kids played in the mud, and in the distance the sound of big guns rumbled like an earthquake in successive waves that made one imagine beasts lurking beneath that earth.

The woman came out of her hut, unsmiling but gracious. Somebody had reported that a month earlier she’d cut the heads off two dead enemy combatants.

She offered me bread that she had freshly baked. It had been awhile since I was last in this region. The place had changed hands a few times until the men managed to push the enemy deep into the mountains beyond Tuz Khurma. Up there the sons of bitches would have to be flushed out one at a time and eliminated, and I didn’t mind being a part of that operation.

“Will they pay me?” she asked.

“To film you? Yes. But you didn’t keep the heads, did you?”

She looked crestfallen. “I should have kept them?”

“We must get away from here.”

“But they are coming to make the film. Yes?”

“No . . . I mean yes. But they are only using you.”

“What?”

She had a distant resemblance to Atia, and like Atia her cheeks flushed red when she was distraught. I wondered to myself what kind of knife she’d used in order to cut off those heads. Was it difficult? Did anyone see her do it? All we knew was that for several days the outside of her hut was decorated with them, as if it were a set for some gory medieval war film.

“Maybe,” she said hopefully, “they will help me leave this evil land.”

The ground shook and shook. Above us the sound barrier was being broken. Americans? A convoy advanced toward us. A last-ditch desperate battle fought by men who should have given up on this area and taken their war somewhere they could actually fight it. I saw Saeed and his British charge stick their heads out of one of the Toyotas as it zoomed past us.