“Yes, they’re shits. He’s just a little bit less of a shit, if you will. And a winner.”

I sighed. “That he is.”

“And he’s not dishonest in love, Saleh.”

I winced. “Fine. I get it. Don’t go there, please.”

“And he wants you back writing for us too, even if you won’t edit the section. Imagine, when I’m Mrs. Mafiha I’ll look out for you 100 percent. You’ll get a raise. I’ll have them send you on sweet foreign assignments, not ones where you get shot at.” She meant all of this and she’d stopped crying. She was like the mother I’d always wanted. She repeated, “Bless me, Saleh. Please!”

“But if it’s only a matter of marriage, I’ll marry you. Yes, why not! I’m proposing right now.”

She looked away, exasperated. “You’re an idiot, Saleh.”

“Why am I an idiot?”

“Because you are consumed with martyrs and martyrdom, while Mafiha wants to live and let live.”

I muttered, “Sort of like you, I suppose. You’re pretty good at this business of living too.”

“Yes,” she hissed. “And why not? Why can’t I be good at life?”

“With Mafiha as your life partner?”

“Yes, with him. Why not?”

I said meekly, “But Atia, those peace poems he writes!”

“Shut up, Saleh! He’s more than just those poems. He’s a good guy. He sticks around. He’s capable. That counts for a lot.”

“Some would call what you’re doing selling out.”

“Or buying in.”

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

“They’re not. And if you had half the brains he has, you wouldn’t let people steal your documentary footage or your TV pilot. At least at the paper, I can watch over you. You’re a child, Saleh.”

It’s not a good feeling getting deconstructed like that. She couldn’t have possibly meant it when she said I was as awful as Dodonge or Saeed, could she? Suddenly my whole existence was in question. The men in Syria were dead. Men who had saved my life more than once. Gone up in smoke just like that, and I didn’t even know how. Maybe I was a pimp in this war, after all. It was sickening.

I reached out and barely brushed Atia’s hand.

She looked back at me. Sad. Exhausted. Thoughtful. “Bless me, Saleh. Bless me, I beg you.”

And I did. I blessed her marriage in the Abdulabad District of Tehran, at a smoothie shop across the street from the home of the widow who might have been another young man’s wife if it hadn’t been for a miserable, utterly purposeless piece-of-shit red house in faraway Syria.

6

Yet it was the sniper Ali-Akbar’s accidental martyrdom in Iraq, and not the martyrdom of the men in Syria, that finally sent me into a tailspin. I had stopped sending dispatches from the Eye of the Horse. And after my phone was lost in that truckful of onions while we were preparing to liberate the village outside of Tal Afar, I was at last free from having to answer to anyone about anything. H couldn’t find me unless he sent Military Intelligence way out here for someone they could care less about. H, I knew, hated Military Intelligence as much as they hated ordinary Intel. Besides, they had more important things to do than play cat and mouse with a stray, half-committed journalist.