Not much. I’d gradually come to think of them—the Americans—as entities beyond the realm of touch, or comprehension. Now and then we would run into their convoys on the trunk roads of Iraq. We passed one another like ghosts in the afternoon. Their equipment and vehicles had the feel of high walls with no human beings visible from our vantage. They were extraterrestrials to us. Here but not quite here. And sometimes I asked myself if we too were not just as invisible to them.

I stared at my buzzing cell and put it on speakerphone.

Atia was quietly crying.

“Dear, I don’t have enough money on my account here. If you’re going to cry, please hang up, cry to your heart’s content, and call me again later.”

She stopped. “You are a fool, Saleh. Do you mean you are over there again?” When I stayed silent she said, “I take that as a yes. Who are you in competition with? My husband?”

“Atia, please forgive me, but . . . fuck your husband!”

“That is my job. Not yours.”

“That hurts!”

“Good! I need to talk to you.”

“Well, I’m here and you’re there and my phone will go dead in a minute if you don’t go and put money in my phone’s monthly balance. I can’t do that from here.”

I waited for her to call back. Haji Yusuf waved at me from the tea stand he had set up across the street. Men huddled here and there over small fires warming their hands. The guy I called Egyptian Mo was teaching several young Hashd warriors how to do a headstand. He lined them up against the bullet-riddled metal of an old rattletrap and patiently went through the motions of showing the proper placement of the hands and the initial kick to get themselves upright. It was almost pastoral, this image. Except that about fifty meters away an old man walked in their direction with two sheep. My initial reaction was, What if he’s carrying? What if in the next half minute Haji Yusuf and Egyptian Mo and the Hashd boys become scattered body parts? The old man and his sheep approached and passed, quietly and without fuss. Just a straggler who had been left behind when the last of the villages in the outlying areas were liberated.

There was clapping of hands from the Hashd boys as Egyptian Mo stayed in position on his hands, then twisted around, did a flip, and went up again repeating everything on just one hand this time. It was a performance worthy of a champ. I thought: I have no idea what has brought Egyptian Mo all the way here from Egypt; I have no clue what has driven him to become one of us instead of one of them. Is it his love for the story of Imam Husayn’s martyrdom? Is it a love for the underdog?

I knew nothing.