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spoke: That is what those fools in the mountains say, give it all to me and it will never be lost. They create nothing and so the little over which they fight is already lost. You will learn another way. I have been saving our money so you might start at the madrassa.
    Who will help you with work? I asked, hurt by Ali’s wish to be without me.
    That is my burden now, he said. Your burden is to be educated. It’s what Father wanted for me. It’s what I can give you. To make something new.
    I won’t abandon you, I said.
    To not go, you abandon me.
    These last words he spoke the strongest of all.
    –
    For a long time that is how it was. I went to the madrassa each day and in the evening I returned to the bazaar. Ali never let me help with the deliveries. He insisted I study. I sat against one of the bazaar’s stalls, reciting the Holy Qur’an or my math, the two subjects we learned. At night we stayed in whatever shop hosted us. We lay on the floor, on opposite sides of our oil lamp, staring at it. The jerking flame became all that moved between us.
    Tell me what you’re learning, Ali whispered.
    Ask me how many aayaaths there are, I said.
    He asked and quickly I gave the answer.
    There are 6,666 aayaaths in the Holy Qur’an. Ask me my multiplication tables.
    He asked what 13 times 13 was, but my math didn’t always come as quickly. Soon I figured the way of it and answered, 169, and Ali listened carefully as I went on, telling him how we’d soon be taught algebra and the other holy texts such as the Bukhari. He asked me what algebra was, but I didn’t know how to explain it. The imam had only told us that wewould learn it, not what it was. And in this way, Ali would listen to me until he fell asleep.
    Always he fell asleep first, and always I turned off the lamp between us.
    –
    Whatever small life we’d built unraveled on a gray afternoon in winter. The air was hard and cold. It was the day of Ashura, almost five years since the Americans came. I left the madrassa and was walking back to the bazaar. The fast had not yet broken, but already people piled into the streets. Somber marches carried the crowds toward the mosque where in the night they’d commemorate the ancient martyrs.
    I walked through the alleys, jumping over the open sewers, avoiding the crowd. Suddenly a shaking like thunder overcame the city with a noise like steel down a washboard. I stopped. Alone in the alley, I searched the rooftops. Dark smoke curled upward from the bazaar. My body stiffened with fear. I stepped into the crowd. They rushed toward the smoke and the violence which just occurred. I didn’t follow them. I ran to the hospital instead. If there were something to learn of my brother, I would not find out as a victim in the street.
    I arrived at the hospital red-faced and gasping. I shouldered through the swinging double doors. Inside the echoes of my breath traveled the long linoleum hallway. Apart from this, it was quiet. A doctor with a young face and neat-trimmed moustache grabbed my wrist.
    No one has arrived yet, he said. When they do come, make yourself useful. Help unload the ambulances.
    I stood in the dim corridor with the hospital staff. Sirens wailed in the distance. Everyone pulled on rubber gloves. Nurses rolled out gurneys made up with white sheets. The sirens’ noise rose and fell, closer and closer, and my stomach followed the rhythm, sick with sound. Hold this, said an old sinewy nurse. He placed my hand on a gurney. The task steadied me.
    The wounded and dead arrived together. Two paramedics threw open the hospital’s double doors, backing their ambulance into the main corridor. Its well-dented fender crashed into either side of the jamb. Its decrepit engine sputtered exhaust in our faces.
    Unload them outside! shouted one of the doctors.
    The paramedics ignored the doctor and began to empty the ambulance. Inside bodies were stacked on each other. We pulled them apart just as my brother once pulled apart the