The funeral included religious and social events at various locations. He was most curious about those at the cemetery. His family managed to do the grave interrogation. It surprised him. If it wasn’t done the evening of the day of death, it had no efficacy. His wife couldn’t have wanted it. Certainly his brother, the Ann Arbor pizza manager, wouldn’t have asked for it. Who, then? He’d not spoken to his wife on the phone. She might have put a note in with the photographs. It wasn’t there when he got them.

He studied the pate of his uncle as he stood in the grave. The camera was pointed down, so only the top and back of his head were visible. Hoseyn remembered how it had irked Will when Iranians buried their dead standing up.

His uncle faced the dead man. Where had they found this corpse? And who was he? In the customary kafan push, it could have been anyone.

His uncle had his hands on the shoulders of this cadaver. He was shaking it, but not much. This was supposed to be the rehearsal before the actual questioning at the gates of hell. The male relative, basically, played Allah. If the dead man gave the right answers, he might make it to heaven. It was an entrenched custom of Tehran; nowhere else did such apostasy survive. The hardliners didn’t stop it, but they didn’t approve of it. For once, he agreed with them.

Some harassed the dead, pushed and pulled; they took out their anger under the cover of grief. Hoseyn wished he could have heard his uncle’s questions. Most times he’d seen the interrogation, he’d heard rote queries: Did you make the haj? Did you keep the fast? A few times it was: Did you lie? Did you kick a man in need? One time, winter, plow blades were scraping snow, and he stood in the wet air with a big family. Did you seduce her? Did you kill him? One brother tried to drag and lift his sibling out of the ground, pulling hair to get a grip. Hoseyn just walked away from that, stood talking to the snowplow operator down at the mouth of the martyrs’ section.

He was in it now. Or his surrogate was. Since Hoseyn had lived and died in the nuclear program, any death of his, even a natural one man-made and false, qualified. His slotting among martyrs offended him. In Iran’s war with Iraq, waves of men fell to muzzles. They died so fast in such numbers, the military had to put four to a grave. Stood them up and poured in the cement. The martyr section grew like bacteria through crud water. He, the planner, wasn’t worthy of a place with the unquestioning.