There was a pause during which all three of us imagined the alternate lives we could have lived. Something was happening. A transformation and a coming into being of light at the end of the tunnel. But this light was the light of extinction, of annihilation. This was about dying. Call it martyrdom or whatever name you want to put on it. The colors in my left eye began to jump. Shafts of light going every which way. I hadn’t been taking care of the eye again and now everything was a rainbow on a roller coaster. I saw Miss Homa, and to a lesser degree Proust, as bundles of moving light, as if they were saints in those Persian and Mughal Indian miniatures of old. Miss Homa glowed the way the soldiers I’d known at the front began to glow when the spirit of martyrdom came calling. At first I used to put it to excessive imagination. But later, when I talked to others, especially men who had fought in the eight-year war three decades earlier, I realized this was something you really did begin to see. You began noticing the signs of martyrdom-to-come. Its colors and variations. Its velocity.

Maybe getting left behind enemy lines was the best thing that had ever happened to Proust. Luck had made him survive the ordeal. The lines were still so fluid just a year earlier that you could walk half a kilometer and be on the wrong side of the war. Proust had walked, by utter chance, to the right side. The Iraqi Hashd men had taken him in once they found out he was Iranian. Somewhere along the line he’d left that book of his which I’d found and buried at the Eye of the Horse—the same book that Interrogator H was now steeped in. This toss of incongruity had no end and no one would believe it unless you were there and saw how allegiance was not necessarily to any belief but to the blood of friendship. I’d sat in that house across from the mokeb many times, when Khaled, a Shia Muslim to the marrow of his bone, somehow received word from his hidden-away Christian neighbors in Mosul about enemy troop movement inside the city.

“What about Marcel Proust?” I now asked. “And I don’t mean you, son! I mean the real one, the writer. Mr. Marcel Proust, the Frenchman.”