This world was empty that way, and a man like Avesta still wanted to have more of everything.

Avesta gestured at me to follow him outside. He didn’t say anything until we were well beyond the walls of the nursing home. Across the street two men sat in front of an expensive-looking Citroën. One of those men was Saeed, my backstabbing filmmaker partner. He didn’t get out of the car.

I said to Avesta, “It was you who was having me followed yesterday. You could have just knocked, you know.”

“What about that article you are going to write taking back everything you said about Miss Homa’s work?”

I started to repeat my usual line, that I was just a poor writer and that my words were not even worth the paper they were printed on. But he stopped me.

“I’ll pay you. I’ll give you two paintings.”

Avesta had been trying forever to make a name for himself beyond, to him, the lowly Middle East. But when middle age came and he was still not considered a tier-one international artist, he’d settled on the art markets of the Gulf where he too was followed by Emirati collectors the way Miss Homa was. With our currency’s value plummeting as it was, one of his paintings could now buy me an apartment here. Two of them could buy me two apartments. I could rent out both of them and not have to think about writing art reviews anymore.

I had to get him off my back. “All right. I’ll write something.”

“When?”

“What’s your hurry? Miss Homa’s not feeling well anyway. The poor woman will probably die soon.”

“No!” he shouted. “She can’t die. Not now. If she dies, her prices will go through the roof and . . .”

I was no longer listening. I was thinking of Miss Homa. Our vocations of martyrdom had prices and estimates, it seemed. The war too had turned into an auction. And the martyrs were the works being sold.

Chapter Nine

9

Cleric J stuck close to the ground in his faded blue tunic. He could have been a nineteenth-century dervish in an Orientalist painting selling spiritual mumbo jumbo on the pilgrimage roads of Western Asia. In his hand was the AK he seldom used but kept close. Maysam, a mountain of a man and Cleric J’s head of security from Amara, lay twenty meters to our right. Maysam had the face of a bear and when he smiled it was ample, as if the world had opened up at last and it was a holiday. He was frowning now, telling me to keep my head down. He swore something in dialect that I didn’t understand.

Cleric J laughed and said in his singsong Persian, “Saleh, you are trying too hard to become a martyr.”