And then we both turned and saw our world. Maysam and the bomb-disposal guy in the middle of no-man’s-land. The disposal man digs his hand with its two missing fingers into the ground and slowly picks around a diameter. This is nothing like the movies. Rather, it’s as if he’s a child—and he is a child, twenty at most—looking for treasures of the Median armies who passed this way before time. Soon he has a barrel next to his feet and is explicating on it quietly to Maysam. He walks not nearly carefully enough some paces, digs again, and comes up with another barrel. Then another. And another. It’s a mine highway. It’s a painting. It’s midfield in a football stadium. It’s many things and giant Maysam and the bomb-disposal boy stand there and look toward the horizon, while Cleric J talks into the phone telling other commanders other things they should know about the location. From all of these barrels they’ll extract incendiary material and reuse it for rockets. This war may be stupid but it possesses genius. Meanwhile, Cleric J’s faded and muddy blue tunic flaps magnificently in the wind. The awkwardly built armored vehicles, looking like mud-caked lozenges, rattle their way back down the road to their own shitholes, oblivious to the miseries they have set in motion.

I wrote: Do you continue not to like your life?

H did not answer.

* * *

That night the big guns aiming toward Syria would not give it a break. Unable to sleep, I walked across the road to where Khaled used to keep house and where Ali-Akbar and the Three Magi of the sniper team would come every afternoon unless they were pulling duty at the sater. It seemed like a lifetime ago. In real terms only a few months had passed. Nostalgia can blanket a man when the people who populated the dangers he knew are no longer there. I knocked on the door and no one answered. But people were staying here. Recently washed clothes hung from clotheslines. I knocked again and when there was still no answer I let myself in. Same room. Nothing had changed, except for the fighters who lived here while the war continued. In a corner the same mattress lay where Shorty, one of the Three Magi, had taken a long sleep after his best friend Ali-Akbar’s martyrdom. Shorty was a compact twentysomething from Qom whose prayers tended to go on interminably. That day, the way he slept after Ali-Akbar was killed, it was as if he were cleansing himself of something. When he woke up it was like he’d slept a thousand years and during that time he’d made many ablutions. We didn’t talk about Ali-Akbar again until Tehran.