Why did we fight? I had believed I knew. But I didn’t. Why did any of us come back to this godforsaken spot over and over again? Why did old Haji Yusuf personally put that North African enemy combatant out of his misery back in early autumn? Haji Yusuf could have just as easily let someone younger and more enthusiastic do the killing. Why dip your hands in blood like that when you don’t have to?

* * *

Minutes passed and still no Atia. Maybe she’d never call again. Maybe she’d fall into the sinkhole of a Middle Eastern marriage like many a good woman.

I had a flashback of her while I remained there on the mokeb roof—a last glimpse of my beloved on the night of the Mafiha/Dodonge book launch back in Tehran. The two men holding forth like they were UN emissaries. It was a reunion of a lot of people I knew from work at the Citizen and also from other papers I’d moonlighted at during the past few years. Book launches in Tehran were at best an inglorious failure. But not this one. Book City on Shariati Avenue had a line snaking outside. Did people care so much about books on war? Or was it Mafiha’s peace hokum they’d come for? Interrogator H was there too, reckless in his desire to be anything other than what he’d been hired to be, a feared agent of the state. If he continued like this he was bound to get fired, or worse; you didn’t just walk away from a job like that, and you certainly didn’t show your face so freely at public events like this, since there were bound to be people there whom you had interrogated at some point. I’d always thought that what H really desired was reincarnation; now I was sure of it. He was a burnt-out case, his job a burden. I saw him perusing the young adult section and moved quickly away, only to catch sight of more folks from the Citizen between the Western art and philosophy bookshelves. A little farther down was an entourage of war veterans, some deliberately still wearing combat fatigues. No doubt Dodonge had brought them along for show, as a part of his ongoing bravery extravaganza. The vets shuffled uncomfortably next to psychology and social science, looking out of place but enduring. They knew everything that was happening here was because of them; they were the spark for it. They were doers, though now diminished, serving as background decor for a piece of theater that had nothing to do with the war and everything to do with two men’s literary ambitions.