Me: Next lifetime, inshallah!

H: All of humankind is in this book, you know.

Me: Appears that way.

H was taking credit, alongside Ajooj and Majooj, for the Abbas show’s success. As my handler, he could explain to his superiors that it was really via his insistence that I come up with a new pilot for the war that the show had been given new life. Those Marcel Proust sentences he was sending me via text message were his way of expressing that he approved of the TV work, but he still hadn’t forgotten that sooner or later I had to get back to Iraq and find the actual owner of the volume.

One day I found an old, translated copy of the novel in a bookshop near the University of Tehran. It was a fair translation of Marcel Proust into Persian, not great but not a disaster either. I bought it and went straight to a line I vaguely recalled.

I wrote to H in the Persian translation: The nature of the moment meant that he had to entertain a mediocre crowd.

To which H replied in English: It felt fraudulent, like a book written in forced vernacular.

When I wrote nothing back, he added: A book with theories in it is an object that still displays its price tag.

Of all the people in Tehran, my interrogator had become my one and only interlocutor, my savior. My saint.

* * *

Writing seemed to matter after all. It wasn’t all lies. And even if it was, then you could examine that lie, work it, and stitch it into the fabric of your truth.

One day, as I was putting together the unlikely sixth new episode of the Abbas show about how the Iraqi sniper hero was visited by a man with angelic white wings who gave him a rifle with a special scope (made in the City of Brass at the far reaches of the Muslim Middle Ages), I received an e-mail.

Even now, as I write these words, I shudder to think that I might have been making the Iraqi champion into a cartoon figure, or a stock character from The Thousand and One Nights. My only consolation was that all the martyrs we knew were somehow turned into cartoons anyway. Go into any city where martyrdom is not an idea but something tangible, something that is of the mud and earth of that city, take a careful look at the faces of the departed on their memorial posters as your cab travels from the airport to your hotel room—in Tehran, in Baghdad, in Mashhad and Basra, martyrs posing with their weapons and other accoutrements of their death—and your mind will settle on how their absence has become a force of nature. The shadows of the departed hang over these cities not like saints but mood regulators.

The e-mail I received, like much else in my life, had to do with a piece of writing. It went back to a time when I’d been thrown into exile at the city desk at the Citizen, that section of the paper which held far more readers than art but no personal profit.