by Salar Abdoh
“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.”
Proust stared back at me with that by now familiar look of frightened disbelief. He was a small cornered animal at that moment. I watched the halo slowly lift and disappear from him. I had perfect vision on him suddenly. It told me he was not going to be a martyr. At least not anytime soon. I was not sure whether to be happy for him or disappointed. I only knew I had to get him back to Iraq before the wrong people discovered him here. Miss Homa in the meantime sat back and watched our exchange.
I repeated my question. “What about Marcel Proust?”
“My favorite writer,” he said hesitantly.
“Does one take this kind of writer to war?”
“I was not technically in war. I was with a film crew. But how do you even know all this?”
“Where do you think you are living, brother? The sixteenth arrondissement of Paris in the late nineteenth century? Don’t worry about how I know all this.”
“It is not a crime to take a book with you to war.”
“It’s not normal to take that book.”
“Why not?” He seemed positively affronted now.
“Well, for one thing, it’s too big. And elegant. And beautiful. And literary. It’s a bloody masterpiece, isn’t it?”
“For all those reasons I took it.”
“And underlined a lot of it.”
“That I did.”
“Why?”
“Sorry, but is this some kind of interrogation?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“I underlined the book because I was trying to compare the outdated English translation I had on me with the original French that I’d already read.”
“A regular scholar!” I scoffed.
“I’ve never read him,” Miss Homa suddenly cut in. “Mr. Marcel Proust, I mean.”
We both looked at her, surprised for an instant that she was even there.
I asked, “Why did you leave the book at the Eye of the Horse then? What kind of a man leaves a book like that in such a place? Are you mad?”
“There was an attack. We had to leave fast.”
“I figured. But where did you go after that?”
“Karbala.”
“Why Karbala?”
“Because . . . because I wanted to cry at Imam Husayn’s shrine. I’d been spared certain death and I wanted to join him.”
“You wanted to join Imam Husayn?”
“Yes, Imam Husayn. The greatest martyr of all time.”
“You are lying. A man who reads these kinds of books doesn’t go crying to Imam Husayn.”
“Anything is possible, sir.”
He was right. Anything is possible. Somewhere in the warped line of time, Imam Husayn and a European masterwork had come together. That was all there was to it.
I asked, “Did you go to Karbala instead of heading home because you knew they’d already made you a hero back in Iran? A martyr?”
“There was that too. I could not go back, could I?”
“So why are you here now? Why did you come back to Tehran?”
“No one knows I’m here. I’ve been staying in a flophouse in the Gomrok District. I got homesick. And I was running out of money. I saw a flyer for that event tonight so I went to Book City. I . . .” He hesitated. “I came back to Tehran because I don’t know how to become a martyr in Iraq.”
“Do you need help toward that purpose?”
He was silent for a while.
“Yes. I need help toward that purpose.”
“So do I,” Miss Homa murmured. “Please, gentlemen, drink the tea before it gets cold.”
The three of us drank in silence. The person who desires obliteration will get it. Some are quick about it, some take longer than others, some hesitate, and some even lie about it because they are embarrassed to admit they don’t want to die. It was often the talk of the trenches—exactly when a man should become a martyr. A volunteer to defend the holy places had a duty to do just that: defend. But you couldn’t exactly defend if you were dead. So how did you negotiate the two and come to a concord between life and death? These are ultimate questions that don’t get asked in peace, because peace means having to worry about the pair of new shoes you need to buy, or your kid’s braces, or the milk going sour. Trench talk in Mesopotamia was different than other wars because the bluster of martyrdom was actually real. Even those men who didn’t want to die had to talk the talk. And because they were there, sometimes, despite all their precautions, they became martyrs. They reached sainthood through a lie despite their every effort not to be saints. My concern was not these men, but the ones who walked into the butcher house willingly, knowing that there was a fifty-fifty chance there would be a video of their cut-off head posted online by the enemy the day after tomorrow because the op they’d volunteered for was outright suicide.
I tried to speak but Miss Homa hushed me. She had, she insisted, all the money she needed in the world. Her fame had reached its limit. And she was tired of this world. Her collectors had designs on her store of unsold paintings. After which she could die for all they cared, and in fact it was preferable from the collectors’ point of view that she did. But she refused to do her dying on their terms; she would manage it on her own. Everything that was hers she’d already bequeathed to a number of charities. A lot of the unspoken-for works, her house, everything. There would be plenty of stealing by the lawyers that she’d put in charge, because there was always stealing. But her last act would be a bilakh, a finger, to the world. She was going to get her way into or near Karbala with or without my help.
Proust looked positively ecstatic hearing Miss Homa’s words. The two of them were on the same page; they wanted to experience the rapture of being extinguished like two moths in a candle. They wanted to die together. It was their pact. It was serendipity. And poetry.
It was also madness.
“You both wish this because it is in fashion now. It’s not something you can take back, you know.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Saleh. Will you help me?”
“To die in Karbala?”
Miss Homa nodded.
Proust turned to her, beaming. “I am your servant, Miss Homa.”
“Think hard, young man. I can leave you something. Enough for you to live a sufficient life.”
“No, I want what you want. I’ve already tasted it. Even if what I tasted was not real. I want to make my martyrdom real now. I cannot go back to what I had.”
“But you can go forward.”
“What would Imam Husayn do?”
“He would think both of you are mad,” I cut in.
They looked at me as if bothered by my presence. I seemed to no longer speak their language. One of them wanted to die so she could smother her own late fame and be finished with it, and the other wanted to die because of a glitch in the apparatus of martyrdom that had made him a hero before he was ready.
I added, “Besides, neither of you would be considered martyrs that way.”
“Saleh,” Miss Homa said, “please stop talking out of your ass. Martyrdom is just a word I use. You can call it anything. Call it ‘aluminum’ if you wish. It doesn’t matter to me. It is the act that matters.”
“And I’m already a martyr,” Proust said brightly. “I don’t need to do anything but finish the job and earn my title.”
There was nothing more to say. Neither of them could take an AK and defend a sater, waiting until a Toyota filled to the brim with explosives came crashing in. Yet they wanted what all the martyrs of Syria and all the dead Hashd boys of the land between the two rivers wanted. They just had to do it a bit differently.
“I need another strong drink,” I said with resignation.
“Don’t worry, Saleh,” Miss Homa said, “I am leaving you something too.”
I stared at her, waiting for her to continue.
“My biggest canvas that
I still own.”
“Your rendition of the Goharshad Mosque cupolas?”
“It’s worth a good amount of change.”
Proust was beaming again. I considered ringing his neck right then and not waiting till Karbala. He said, “Just think, Saleh, you’ll be like Charon the boatman in Hades, and Karbala will be your River Styx.”
“And we your passengers,” Miss Homa pitched in.
Both of them seemed thrilled with this sudden Western classical allusion that showed off their learning.
“What if I don’t do it?” I asked.
“You will,” Miss Homa said. “It’s your job. It’s why you’re there. It’s what you do. You are our Charon!”
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.
Now Maysam came into the room, towering above us. He peered down at me and Cleric J and ran an index finger against his own neck, as in cutting someone’s throat. It was a question—one that at the same time was both innocent and brutal.
Cleric J said quickly: “La, la. Not yet!”
Both men turned to me.
I swallowed hard, turning to Cleric J. “You are going to put me to the test again, aren’t you?”
Maysam answered, “You can talk to him in his language, or some language, and tell us if he is a spy.”
“He doesn’t look like one. And even if he was, look at us! What is there to spy about here? We have been just sitting around for weeks and weeks eating onions. We haven’t moved.”
Cleric J began adjusting his prosthetic leg. “Listen, this is what we do: we find things out. One day this man just shows up down the road in Tal Abta and says he wants to sign up. Are we a circus that he showed up like this? Do I look like a donkey, Saleh?”
“God forbid! You are a great man, sayedina.”
“Then go talk to him. Find out how he got as far as Tal Abta. What he wants. And why he is not somewhere safe and warm.”
“And if he answers wrong?”
Cleric J undid his prosthetic leg and waved it in my face. “This is a war, not his mother’s lullaby. Now hurry. Yallah!”
* * *
H’s text message said: Why have you not answered my messages?
Me: You told me to go find the Proust guy and I went to find him.
H: He is at the Eye of the Horse?
Me: No, I’ve left him down south.
H: Why?
Me: He loves Imam Husayn.
H: Don’t be a fool, Saleh. What do you mean?
Me: I mean exactly that. I’ve left him in the south because he’s in love with Imam Husayn. Aren’t we all?
For a few minutes a steady hail of bullets came into the defunct fuel station on the halfway road to Wardiya and then stopped. The place was a lone, long-abandoned empty depot in the middle of nowhere. It was walled in, but still in the open and vulnerable. A chubby man was bleeding from the thigh and I watched Claude bandage him up for the ride back. Maysam was shouting at someone walking toward the kiosk where normally the stationmaster would have been. The man stopped and turned around, looking befuddled as if the dangers of booby traps were just tall tales from other places. He was one of those people from Kut who did not say much and had damaged skin. He kept to himself, read the book of the sayings of Imam Ali, and wept. His weeping was infectious. It made other men weep too, and I wondered often what anyone in their right mind would think if they saw our mokeb on the move. We truly must have resembled a circus, despite Cleric J’s protests to the contrary. Maysam continued shouting at the poor man. Our head of security’s gruffness while on the job was only matched by his tenderness when he was back home with his family. He became a teddy bear then, spoiled his little daughters, wore his caftans and held court like some benevolent minor king on holiday. Cleric J was no different. The kids from his second wife could have been his grandchildren, but at home he was out there every afternoon playing ball on his one working leg while men stood twenty-four-hour guard outside since infiltrators in Diyala had sworn to assassinate him. It was a special kind of madness, all of this. It turned grown men into adolescents and for a lot of them the fatwa from the grand cleric to stand up against the enemy was really just that perfect excuse to get out of the dreariness of domestic life.
Cleric J shouted into the walkie-talkie: “If we try to take off now we’ll be left with a martyr or two.”
Most of the men appeared like life-size question marks just then, lowering their centers of gravity, convinced that a bullet would somehow miss them if they walked around as if they suffered kyphosis. The bullets had felt random and I didn’t have eyes nearly good enough to notch the distance. It was the luck of the draw and if you heard a bullet go past, it was already gone and you had nothing to worry about. If it caught you, you still had nothing to worry about; you were done. This question of luck always lurked in the back of the mind. Two years earlier when the war was still in its infancy and the enemy was winning, we’d gone with Saeed up to nearby Lalish to film the Yazidis. They were a curious people, their religion reaching so far back into the bowels of Mesopotamia that they seemed hallowed simply by surviving as long as they had in this unfriendly land. I could not get a handle on their faith but they were unbearably handsome and utterly decimated, the enemy having reserved a special kind of savagery for them. By a little rock formation at their holiest site in Lalish, an old holy man handed me a common towel and said this was their wishing well. If one threw the towel at the rocks and it did not fall to the ground, the wish would come true. The only wish anyone had at the time was to not be slaughtered a few kilometers down the road. How
was one to reconcile the fact that the enemy was closing in, the Yazidi men had been butchered by the thousands and their women and children raped and sold into slavery, while here we stood trying to throw a goddamn face towel at a holy rock formation? The Middle East was dying. It was dying right here too in this forlorn outpost in the Nineveh Province, where we imagined bullets would not catch us if we made ourselves small.
* * *
Claude said, “Have I passed the test now?”
“What test?”
We were back at the mokeb. Cleric J had gotten an earful from the commander who was charged with flushing out the enemy on the escape routes past Wardiya. I did not know how to negotiate this man, how to write about him. There was no interiority to Cleric J. He carried his tasks of looking after the fighters as if he were possessed, pumped with supernatural drugs. The commanders gave him a talking-to each time and it made no difference. They needed him, so they didn’t berate him too much. When there was an especially dangerous mission, he was one of a handful of guys in Nineveh at the time who could rouse the fighters, bring them to a fever pitch. He could have said Imam Husayn was riding a white horse on the horizon, and yes, men would have braved the rockets to follow that imaginary white horse toward perdition. How could you scold a wild, lovable holy man like that?
Claude smiled. I didn’t know where it had started, but someone had called him the Father of the French, Abu Faranci, and the name had stuck. Abu Faranci had quickly become one of us. He spoke English with a deep, almost antiquated inflection and volunteered for everything. He was up before everyone cleaning the mokeb and at nights he cooked long into the evening and then washed the pots and pans. The men couldn’t communicate with him but they offered him genuine smiles. They came right up to his face and sang him the breathtakingly heroic and improvised Arab poetry of war and he grinned back and said, Allah, Allah! He was in his element here, like Cleric J. Our merry gang had needed an Abu Faranci to be complete and it got one.