Tears filled Hashim’s eyes. He told Qadir of how the sand beneath them had opened and how he saw the butterfly, and reached out to the woman, and they survived.

“You have been devoured by hate.”

“What am I to do, grandfather?”

Qadir touched Hashim’s face.

Hashim opened his eyes.

He wasn’t in his grandfather’s house.

His clothes were disheveled and dirty.

A large moon climbed the sky.

He was in a back street of Mosul.

He made his way out of the alley and walked among the people, unnoticed. Head bent. Eyes covered by a nervous hand. The last thing he remembered was getting Nazir home alive.

16

16

South of the war-torn center of Mosul, in the shadow of the Al-Nabi Yunus Mosque, in a modest home, on a tiny street, in a skintight kitchen with bullet holes and battered concrete walls as a constant reminder of war, Nazir stood, shaking and wounded before his grandmother.

She wore a nutmeg colored headscarf. It softened the wrinkles on her face—a face toughened by the sun, the desert wind, and life.

She applied ointments and a gauze dressing on the wound in her grandson’s arm. Shrapnel from the drone had sliced a gash across his bicep. She’d stopped the bleeding. She told him she was concerned with infection now.

The adrenaline from the event still rushed through Nazir, making it impossible to stand still. But his grandmother was strong, and tugged at his waist until he stopped pulsing with energy that made it difficult for her to do her job of healing him.

Her firm yet gentle hands reminded him of how she had cared for him after his parents were killed. She’d left the gashes in the wall as a reminder of the attack that killed her daughter and son-in-law—a reminder for her of the sorrow and uselessness of violence. Nazir had a different take on what it represented.

She placed a hand on his cheek.

“You were spared for a reason, Nazir.”

“Yes, grandmother. To continue on.”

“Jihad is wrong.”

“How many times must I tell you?” he shot back. “Others hear you speak like this it will not be safe.”

“You won’t bring your parents back with blood.”

“No,” he said, pressing his opened hands onto the section of wall where they died, “but their voices will rise through the death of our enemies.”

“Blood for blood is not God’s way.”

“Yes it is, Grandma.”

He knew she would never stop trying to impart the futility of war, or relinquish her vow to infuse in him the love of all men, which she believed Allah spoke. But after he witnessed his parents’ murder, Nazir had been on a different course, following a different reading of that love.