How could I go back to Tehran and order coffee on Karim-Khan Avenue after this experience? How to contemplate leaving this geography?

I slowly became, then, the keeper of the cemetery of words in this war. It was work that fell on me because these men thought one had to know something special to be able to scribble stuff down and send it as dispatches. I could live with this. It was not unlike the job of the regiment typist falling on the only dummy who took a three-week course in working a keyboard.

Nasif’s news about the red house halted us. The words blanketed the room like debris after an attack. Seconds crawled by and I recalled an image of a white SUV blowing up at a checkpoint back in the Diyala Province right after Fallujah’s recapture the year before. Did no one teach that militia boy never to let the driver open the passenger door, since there was a high probability it was rigged? That blast remained on loop in my dreams for the past year, and there was always the voice of someone, I don’t know who, shouting dir balak—be careful—just before everything turned purple. And now that same purple blanketed the room with Nasif’s announcement. The Afghans who had abandoned the red house, God bless them, were tired. A few of them may have been here for the love of our supreme martyr Imam Husayn, but like I said, most were strict mercenaries. Granted, they were mercenaries of the best kind, because they also believed in what they did and they’d been seasoned in the killing fields of their own country. But they would not put themselves on the line without pay. When a man takes money for his faith, he tends to get tired after a while; he wants a decent bed now and then, a warm meal, maybe a flight back to the city of Mashhad where his family are permanent refugees from Afghanistan. This is really why the red house was empty and why Nasif felt obliged to right this terrible wrong.

Grabbing his AK and taking another off a coat hook for me, Moalem cursed under his labored breath. “Professor, come! I’ll take one lion over ten goat hearts.”

He stomped out and I followed. Two middle-aged men with enough health problems that the last place on earth they should be was this dogfight. Just yesterday Moalem and I had finally gotten to the gist of it: our prostates. I told him that massaging mine, as the doctor had suggested, helped a little. Moalem laughed, shook his head, and told me to keep my fingers to myself, that there are different pains in the world. There was not a weapon this man couldn’t handle, while I struggled even with the old reliable AK. It took Moalem a good ten minutes just to remind me the proper angle to get the magazine in. “Otherwise, even Imam Husayn can’t help you!”

Mortar rounds fell near the red house. The enemy could have and should have taken a tank to the place. But their illogical conviction, much like ours, that somehow the tall red house would give them an advantage over the rest of Khan-T, kept them from completely destroying the building. When we got there, for a moment I thought that the place was crawling with them. I imagined them lurking, laughing, waiting for us to walk into their trap. The enemy, they were haters of everything, but they reserved a unique hatred for us Iranians, convinced that we personified sacrilege, the worst of the worst, Muslims who did not follow the path of the Prophet and his companions, who did not even pray properly or the requisite number of times per day. They were especially horrified at our annual self-flagellations for the martyr Imam Husayn and his family. We were idolaters at heart, they thought. Magians. Zoroastrian fire-worshippers. Off with our heads. Their loudspeakers seldom quit reminding us of our special place in hell.