I have to keep on telling this story then, like the American writer said. A story about how, among a thousand and one other unreasonable things, I also came across the very last segment of Marcel Proust’s masterwork, near the Iraqi/Syrian border. I could tell from the cover that it had come from a much larger tome. But perhaps in the interest of traveling lightly the owner had cut the volume up, then taken Scotch tape to bind the cover back over the parts he was reading. The cover depicted a drawing of a woman, and what strikes me even now is that she looked a lot like the veil-less Kurdish female fighters I’d photographed up in the northwest when I’d gone there from Erbil. This synchronicity was all the more unsettling because next to many of the highlighted sentences the book owner had included bits and pieces of his own story.

But at some point this partial book had also fallen into enemy hands. I imagine they were not able to understand the English translation. Someone had written in Arabic next to the uncharacteristically undefaced woman’s face on the cover, Send to Council for research. I could just see the Council poring carefully over Marcel Proust’s baroque paragraphs, looking for enemy ciphers and hidden agendas.

After taking photos of all the pages, including the highlights and margins, I buried the book at the Eye of the Horse. I had no reason to bury it. But I did. Which gave birth to a whole series of events that came later.

Now, from my hide site at the red house, I discerned movement but could not tell if it was far away or just on the other side of the line that divided our position from theirs. The sardar’s voice echoed in my ear from two days earlier, telling his troops they needed to hold the line. There were so many lines here I could not tell them apart. Sometimes I thought the lines were just imaginary markers in the heads of the various sardars. Losing them would not make much of a difference and keeping them just piled on the casualties. For a moment I felt unbearably alone, in a red building that may or may not be attacked any moment, with a weapon I was not comfortable using, and a retired soldier who should be home with his family and an oxygen tank. I called to Moalem who answered immediately and came down.

I pointed down the road.

Moalem prayed under his breath and looked at me. I knew that look. It’s too late for us, it said. There was some tenderness too to that face. A feeling of finality. It was as if we were underwater and I was hearing a voice bubbling up to say that they have a BMP and they’ll probably be here in a few minutes. Moalem started to talk rapidly into the walkie-talkie, giving gera, positions, that I didn’t understand, and before long our batteries were pounding near the BMP. The tank stopped, like an animal unsure of itself, then scurried and disappeared behind a building. But the little figures kept coming. I had long run out of disposable contact lenses for my left eye, which could see nothing without them. As a result, my right eye tired easily and would burn when it had to focus for longer than a minute. This was not going to be a heroic death; it was going to be a blind one. And I was still thinking that I didn’t want the photos of the Kurdish women falling into enemy hands. They were our posters of this war, those unsullied faces carrying rifles while smiling into my camera and a thousand other cameras that had captured and beamed their images around the world. These women humored me even though they knew sooner or later they might have to fight us too, like they fought the Turks and the Syrians. They were beloved by the world. They were darlings. There was a freshness to their gazes and to their perfect suffering that was completely disarming. They were everything we were not. They were beautiful. They were angels.