I decided to make myself scarce.

Outside, Atia and a group of theater actors were chatting away. I tried to shove off, but she’d seen me.

“You’ve barely been here.”

“I’ll come back when it’s less crowded.”

In her hand she held a postcard-sized invitation. It was for the Mafiha-Dodonge “War & Peace Talk” in a bookstore the next evening.

I pointed to the cards. “You are really working hard for your man, aren’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“What are they going to talk about? That there are two sides to a story? That sometimes you need to have war, but that peace is really much better? Could have fooled me!”

“Why do you always have to be such a killjoy?”

“You know, your husband just tried to work Miss Homa . . .”

“And?”

“She’d have none of it.”

Atia laughed. “He tries too hard sometimes.”

“Just sometimes?”

“I’ll put your sarcasm down to your hanging around so many dead men. It can’t be good for your mind, you know. You are an encyclopedia of trauma.”

“I don’t have any trauma, Atia. My only trauma is that you went and got married.”

She pointed to her theater friends. “See all those people over there? They all say you’re working for the state promoting war. They say you’re an informant. A stooge. A warmonger. An opportunist.”

I knew most of the people she referred to by face. A predictable lot. They never got tired of shoving Chekhov or Samuel Beckett down people’s throats. Throw them in a real Beckett landscape, like the town of Baiji in Iraq after the enemy had finally retreated from there, and they wouldn’t last half an hour. There’s nothing more absolute than square miles of rubble after a prolonged battle. Nothing more soul-crushing and thorough. Beckett knew something about that. These people hadn’t a clue.

Suddenly I wished Mafiha had given me the theater desk too. I’d know what to do.

“I’m an informant?” I shrugged. “Yes, I inform on war.”

“You know that’s not what they mean.”

“If I’m an informant, what’s Dodonge, your husband’s new best friend? The guy has made himself a virtual hero on other people’s miseries in Syria.”

“Dodonge is different than people like us.”

“Meaning he has never read Kant or Rousseau? Never worked for any literary journals?”

“Yes, something like that, Saleh.” She shoved one of the invitation cards into my hand. “Come tomorrow night if you like. Or don’t come. I don’t care.”

She walked away. Walking like a trailing oud solo behind the looking glass and beyond my reach forever.

Oh Atia!

* * *

I was being followed again.

I texted H: The art of life is to reach the divine through those who make us suffer.

He replied almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting: To glimpse something anew is to revisit all that one’s eyes saw the first time.

H, I decided, had lost his mind. He was sitting in his interrogation room reading a mountain of a European book from early in the twentieth century. I wondered if he’d ever had to torture anyone.