Even Iraq had turned into a lie—here, where men would take their tea at Cleric J’s mokeb in the morning and be dead by nightfall. I had, disgracefully, turned Abbas, the great hero of Iraq, and his life into shit, like everything else that was turned to shit here. I finished the bullet points and segments of dialogue for Ajooj and Majooj and the O Channel and sent it off to H this time to transfer to them. Someone had begun blasting martyr songs from the fuel depot. The songs and the rhythmic chest-beating of tens of hundreds of men was hypnotic. A remarkable symmetry and adoration. We all were itching to be back down south, in Samara, in Karbala and Najaf, taking that long walk of the martyrs for the Arbaeen pilgrimage ceremonies. It was surely more habit than belief, because our ceremonies of self-flagellation were really a mother song. We’d been born into it and this time of year was to have been ours. Instead we were here, fighting an enemy who wanted to make short work of us. At the same time our vigilance made us believe our sacrifice was on a mythic scale. We thought that we were not just fighting for ourselves but for eight billion souls. Because this enemy meant to destroy the world with its talk of jihad and its persistent suicide missions in all the major capitals. If anything, the Americans and Europeans should have feted us, lionized us, given us compensation and weapons for our sacrifice. What we got instead was their aversion. Because we did not look like them. Because we could afford to die in large numbers and they couldn’t. We convinced ourselves of all of this even if it was only half true and sometimes not true at all. Yet we wanted to be understood and appreciated. We were ruined and romantic at the same time. There was a reason that Lawrence of Arabia had gotten carried away with himself in these landscapes and wrote about it as if he were writing about something divine. He had come into contact with that touch of the divine about the Arabs—no matter which side of the fighting they were on. Their dignity was like skin; it never wore off, even when they had to turn to infidelity. In all of these ways they were different than us Iranians and the fighters from other places. They honored The Word and what it could do. They were born into poems and they died there; poets all, from day one.

By the time I got back to the mokeb, Maysam was beside himself. He came up and gave me a good shake. “You are alive!”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Saleh, don’t ever leave the mokeb again like this. Don’t go without telling us.” The concern in the big man’s face was of a scale different than I’d ever seen.