And what about the other martyrs of that fight in Syria?

Even in death some people were luckier than others.

At the Citizen, Mafiha seemed chirpier than ever. All the young women at the literary desk paid him more attention now that he was at last married and supposedly unavailable. He bantered with them and went to the gym and then to the sauna with the heads of the Censorship Department every afternoon to plead our cases. He was a hero, because everyone assumed that he fought for us to be less censored by the powers that be.

This all was a losing fight on my end. It was no fight, really. The fight was in northern Iraq and Syria and Yemen, yet I was here and didn’t know why. Men were dead and when I remembered them I had a moment’s pause, nothing more. My grief did not plumb deep enough to know tears, and even if there had been tears—in the way that people went on and on at martyr ceremonies—those tears would have been artificial, manufactured. I thought of that other martyr of the Syrian front, Nasif, who had pretended to be an Afghan: a man goes to the lengths of pretending he is from another country so he can go and fight a war and he gets killed for it. The mayor’s office and the Martyrs Foundation were not even giving him the benefits of a proper martyrdom back home. They had decided not to put up posters for him since he had gone to Syria to fight as an Afghan under false pretense. They would have to put up his posters in Afghanistan instead, which was beside the point, because over there no one would remember him or cry for him. He had never even been to Afghanistan. If there was ever a catch-22, this was it: Nasif went unremembered in two countries because at the end of his days he had belonged to both and neither.

During this time I received another e-mail from the scholar who could not come to our “excellent” country. I still had not answered this entity, ostensibly a woman, and had no idea what to say to her. The safe thing was to say nothing and forget it. I had had enough trouble from H about writing a short story where my neighborhood synagogue made a cameo. To go researching for a foreign scholar about the old Jewish neighborhoods of Tehran while this war was still on and while I was a part of it, I just didn’t know . . .

But what if she was genuine? Her reality played at the fringes of my mind. And each time I drove the thoughts off.

More weeks passed. The first showers of the season came to the north end of the city and one could glimpse snowcaps over the mountains surrounding Tehran.

It was Atia who finally broke the ice on the ground floor of the Citizen one day. She asked about my bad eye and wondered if I needed recommendations for a good doctor.