So I ate. Like Saeed and I ate in East Africa all those years ago. Around us there was unbearable hunger, but all we really cared to do at the Iranian Red Crescent headquarters was stuff ourselves and keep away the famine. Twenty years later in Iraq it was the reverse: it was the scale of the food waste that was a mind fuck. The mokeb casually threw away enormous amounts of food. The kind of absurd waste that only an army is capable of. Sometimes when a village was freed from the enemy and I stood in the back of the truck and distributed goods to the villagers, I imagined I was making up for all the discarded food in Arabia. But you cannot make up for that kind of waste. It was another kind of illness that went untreated because everything was ill. It wasn’t just the Americans who wasted. We all did. We all were guilty.

“I was wondering how the food is here.”

Mafiha spoke. My boss! Atia’s “husband.”

He was the last person I’d expected to see. The kebab lodged in my throat, I waited for him to speak.

“Atia told me you were back in the city.”

“I guess now that she’s your wife she reports to you. Chief!”

“Why do you not like me, Saleh?”

“I like you well enough, chief.”

“Then come back to the Citizen. The art section awaits.”

“You only want me there because Miss Homa talks to me and doesn’t talk to you.”

“Speaking of which, you just came from her place, didn’t you?”

“I would say: ‘Can’t a man go anywhere in this town without being followed?’ But the answer of course is no.”

“What does she want from you?”

“It’s our business.”

His baby-bulldog face went green a bit. He had a full mane of graying hair he was proud of, always running a hand through it like one of those rock stars you see on foreign TV.

“Then don’t call Atia again.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s my wife and this is the Middle East.”

“Oh. I thought this was Norway. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be so foolish, Saleh. Atia begged me to come talk to you—”

I didn’t let him finish. “Oh? Begged you to come talk to me? Here in this restaurant? And just after having me followed from Miss Homa’s house?”

“We’ll get to Miss Homa another time. For now I want you to come back to the Citizen. It’s a promise I made to Atia and I’m sticking to it.”

I thought of Atia and my anger turned soft. Then the softness became unmanageable. I relented. “What if I said yes?”

“Great! You can start tomorrow.”

“Can I eat in peace now?”

“Of course not. You’ve left a trail of angry people by disappearing like you did. As usual! I don’t know why you do these things. But there are two gentlemen here to see you besides me.” He pointed outside to the pizza house across the sixth-floor hall of the mall.