“What if I don’t write so well?”

Ajooj: “Then I’ll personally bash your head in for creating a character you can’t sustain. The whole country will hate you for it. We’ll make you the most hated writer in Iran. The guy who turned the Abbas show to shit.”

“I just wrote a pilot for it. I never meant for it to get so out of hand.”

Majooj: “But now it has. And the O Channel demands that the show go on. You’re responsible for it.”

I stared at my hands. Once again, I could not get these thoughts out of my head: My brothers in Syria and Iraq had died so these guys could have their hit TV show. So Mafiha could be feted in Frankfurt and Amsterdam for writing “with a human voice.” So Dodonge could publish a book about himself as “the true voice of Syria.” And, finally, so that Saeed could chauffeur Europeans around for their weekend documentaries about combat.

I wanted out.

8

Nevertheless, within a few weeks the show’s ratings were already up. Ajooj and Majooj turned out to be better writing partners than I thought. I would give them the most absurd ideas with just a few pointers and they would run with it. Suddenly the entire machinery of State TV and the O Channel were pulled into gear so that episodes could be filmed on the fly and shown as early as two weeks later. It was a record-breaking production time and Ajooj and Majooj were the faces behind the resurrection of the Abbas show.

Strangely, I had not heard from H, but he was certainly on my mind. So I took the show back to 2006, just as H wanted: The Americans are all over Iraq and Abbas the sniper legend, who is called into action from one of his many retirements, decides to give them a bloody nose for their perfidy in his beloved motherland. He begins taking out select individuals from long distances in Baghdad through his immaculate aim. Abbas can’t miss.

The flashback to 2006 on television was a particular hit. Ajooj and Majooj became actual stars.

That was when I finally began to receive messages from H. It was obvious he had been reading the Marcel Proust book in his possession and he would send, via text message to my new phone, peculiar sentences that seemed like his own out-of-context ideas and mutations from French, via English, into Persian: Gilberte is not unlike an unstable country with whom you should never form an alliance.

One time I replied with a simple: ?

And he came back with: D’Argencourt appeared gentle, since he lacked the physical ability to express that he was still rather mean.

I wrote back: Your English has improved so vastly that you are able to read this stuff and understand it.

H: But my writing in that language is still poor. Too poor! And my true wish is to be able to read it in the original French.