The Englishman shouted, “Don’t you bloody well lose her!”

I would have shouted back that he could take his cameras and his recorders and his cash and go fuck himself, but now came the inevitable: shrapnel, smoke, the earth shuddering as if a prehistoric giant had stepped on its own toes.

I stood with this woman, Zahra, who was no one’s heroine. If we lived through today, Saeed would film and the Englishman would interview her, and later, if by some grace of luck she managed to leave this “evil land,” she’d probably be implicated in war crimes. Someone with a degree in international law and a regular paycheck would decide that having her four brothers, husband, and three sons killed in front of her was not reason enough for Zahra to take a bit of revenge on a couple of already-dead motherfuckers.

The children who were playing next door a few minutes earlier were gone, as if they’d never existed. The convoy was gone. Saeed and his Brit were gone. It was just me and Zahra the Beheader left in this place, and I didn’t even know if it was a friend or foe that was bombing us.

Nonplussed, she looked at nothing in particular and said, “I don’t care if I die. But will they help me leave Iraq? Please eat the bread while it’s hot. Are they your friends?”

A sharp whistle went over our heads and in the vague distance the ground did a somersault. Bread in hand and half deaf, half blind, I told her, “They are not my friends. And now we must leave.”

“To where?”

“We’ll start with Baghdad.”

Her eyes sparkled like a child’s. She repeated “Baghdad” like it was a magic charm. “In Baghdad they will film?”

“Inshallah, they will never film.”

* * *

I finally lost the cell phone containing the photos of the Marcel Proust pages and the Kurdish women of combat. There would be other phones, like there would be other battles. And none of this should have mattered. Except that it did.

The outlying village we’d been trying to take was critical for cutting off the escape road from Tal Afar into Syria. The barrage of ammo that fell upon the village was senseless; it was overkill. The enemy was not fighting back because it was probably no longer there. There was no reason to lose a cell phone during a lopsided fight like this. But I did. And then I lost something far more precious.

Afterward, my days and nights turned into stirring huge pots of rice for the men in the front. I let myself go in the life of the mokeb. I did not ever want to think about another art review. I could, like a few of these guys here, hope that the war would never end. And I’d go on peeling potatoes and shouting “moz, moz,” handing bananas to the grime-ridden, empty-eyed men who took time away from the ever-shifting front to rest awhile at the mokeb. I had already begun to fall in love with the Arabs in previous tours, but this time our struggles were the same and so my love for them turned into something acute, physical; I would have taken a bullet for any of these men. It takes time to arrive at such a place. I was willing to die for them because in the Arabs I found an innocence, a childlike bigheartedness that embarrassed my own unscrupulous world. How could men be this way and not lose the shirts off their backs? Generous to a fault, they humbled you, awed you with their transparency, and finally turned you into a better person.