He nodded.

“Dead?”

He nodded again.

“How?”

“She got it into her head she wanted the world to know her story.”

“She told people what she’d done up north?”

“Worse. She walked into one of the TV stations. Saleh, one can do that in Sadr City among our own—maybe! But Baghdad is a city that dies a thousand deaths every day. It is still a divided city. She was followed, I’m sure, once she came out of the station. They got to her by the Queen of the Rosary Church not far from here. I’m sorry, my brother. I have never failed so hard. I did not watch her carefully enough.”

I was the one who had failed. Maybe in Tuz Khurma she would have had a chance. Maybe the documentary would have turned Zahra the Beheader into a genuine heroine. Some country or other would have even given her a visa . . .

“Here.” In Jasim’s hand I noticed several notebooks. They looked familiar. He handed them over. “They came for you.”

Syria. Moalem’s painstakingly tedious notes about defending a useless red house at Khan-T.

Jasim sang another classical verse: “Such times when I struck my sword on the waves of mortality.”

“Do you know, Jasim, my left eye and right eye see the world as differently as the moon and the sun? I am mostly blind in the left eye.”

“And that has something to do with what?”

“If I close the right eye and look at the river with the left eye only, all the garbage in this ancient river could be diamonds.”

“But they are not diamonds. There is no romance to them. We Iraqis have to live here, you know. You are only passing through.”

We were silent awhile.

“Tell me, how many ways are there to die in Mesopotamia?”

“Six thousand years passed, brother Saleh, and we are still counting the ways.”

* * *

Afterward I went to the Queen of the Rosary Church alone and walked around. Somebody had left flowers in a corner of the sidewalk and I wanted to believe it was for Zahra the Beheader. Two men, guards, watched with curiosity and then with some alarm as they saw I was hanging around outside the church too long and not going away. There had been dozens of bombings in the area.

I walked off.

There is a window of time to grieve for others. And sometimes you have to shelve it for another day. Other times you have to do the grieving now and be done with it because there won’t be another time. I’d had no ideas for Zahra other than to try to take her away from this country. But she had neither a passport nor the proper identification (the enemy had seen to that) to get her a passport anytime soon. It meant that this thin attempt at kindness had been a pipe dream. I had unwittingly left her in Baghdad to die. She had been a walking time bomb with just enough notoriety to get herself assassinated.