“You will,” Miss Homa said. “It’s your job. It’s why you’re there. It’s what you do. You are our Charon!”

Chapter Eleven

11

Cleric J said, “Saleh, I know you want to go down south for the Arbaeen pilgrimage. But we have to first find out who this man is. This man, Claude. He carries a French passport.”

Cleric J passed the passport over to me. The fellow was certainly photogenic. A little older than I’d imagined when I first glimpsed him from the rooftop of the longhouse as they accompanied him across the mokeb. Forty-six, to be exact. An angular face. A voluminous shock of hair with stylish hints of gray. He looked distinguished, unhappy, highly intelligent, and enigmatic. What he was doing in northern Iraq by the Syrian border, and on the completely wrong side of things, none of us knew. Cleric J seemed to think I could find out. I understood what the issue was. This man, Claude—Claude Richard—could have been with the Kurds who would have welcomed him with open arms, like they did with all the Westerners who came to join them in the fight against our common enemy. There he would have found those poster-perfect Kurdish female fighters too. He would have enjoyed no-strings-attached American air support and adventures of a lifetime to write home about. Why had he come here then? Our equipment was mostly hand-me-down, our blankets were infested with fleas; out here hardly anyone spoke anything other than Arabic and occasional Persian, and we were mostly just lurching our way awkwardly toward our own eschatology. We were waiting for the Messiah, the hidden Twelfth Imam of our faith. We were busy flagellating ourselves and crying over Imam Husayn’s death 1,400 years after the fact. We didn’t want intruders. We didn’t want anyone to come study us. Fuck you! We wanted to be left alone to deal with our enemy, and yes, we’d take a little air support from the Americans now and then rather than have them kill us. Other than that, go away! That’s why there were no foreign journalists here. We would not have said no to them coming around. But we preferred they didn’t, and that’s what they did—they didn’t come. Because it was uncomfortable here. And dirty. And not cosmopolitan in any way. We were war’s guttersnipes and dog soldiers, despised by the correspondents who filed their reports from comfortable oases like Beirut and Istanbul. We didn’t mind. What we minded, what I minded, was this Claude Richard. His first and last names were two first names. What was that about? It seemed made-up. Yet the passport was real and so was the fact that he was here at the Eye of the Horse.

“Where is he now?”

“They took him to have a meal.”

“God is great!” I offered.

“God is great!” Cleric J chimed back.