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He remembered the conversation again six months later, when his leg had healed and he was tried, and convicted, for insubordination and cowardice.  And then again under the braided leather whip of the state flogger as he delivered the 150 lashes he had been sentenced to for the crime of hesitating to kill a fellow human being.

Who was the enemy and who was the friend?  A soldier whose life you have spared should not shoot you in the back; your team leader, whose honour you have saved, should not put you in the brig for cowardice and insubordination.  That had been the final straw.

How could he tell the difference?  Would he have to live his life always looking behind him, fearful of turning his back lest a dagger be planted between his shoulders?  In a land where Fear has dominion, where men walk with their backs against the wall, afraid of exposure and betrayal, where every look has but one question, AWill it be you who will betray me?@, the soul of man withers away.  The body can suffer, and survive, the lashes of braided leather delivered with rage BAwhat did I ever do to you that you hate me so?@; it can recover from prison and shattered bones; but the spirit of man dies where Trust is dead. 

And so it was that twice decorated for bravery in action and one of the best snipers and commandos of the Iranian army during the eight years of wanton slaughter that some euphemistically referred to as the Iran-Iraq Awar@, Hessam finally decided to leave homeland and kin and to become a refugee in a land he had heard of only in fairly tales.  He told no one, not even his mother, when he left <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Tehran.  He knew every peak, every pass, every pathway of that wild region of Western Iran where it joins Northern Iraq and Southeastern Turkey.  He walked in snow and braved treacherous passes, slept in caves and lived on nuts and dried fruits for a fortnight before surrendering himself to an astonished Turkish Gendermerie post.  In fluent Azeri Turkish he declared himself a refugee, showed his credentials (including pictures of his lacerated back, right after the whipping, and his medals B to prove he was not a mere draft-dodger) and collapsed from fatigue and cold.  The next day he was taken to a military hospital for treatment, which lasted all of two hours.  He simply needed sleep and a hot shower, that was all. 

As he was leaving, he noticed that his knapsack had been searched.  The only thing missing was his remaining bag of pistachio nuts; the Turks prefer Iranian pistachios to their own.  A bundle of money B about $10,000 in various currencies B had been left untouched.  In Ankara he lodged with a gentle Turkish family who, hearing of his ordeal, refused to take money from him, treated his wounded soul with care and love, and gave him hope that all was not rotten in the world.  He then presented himself to the Danish Embassy, showed his credentials (the pictures, but not the medals; a statement from the Turkish military hospital about the state they had found him in; and a testimonial from his adopted family) and was bundled off to Aarhus as a Geneva Convention refugee within two months.

There he met his wife (a Dane); there his children were born (all with the strikingly exotic combination of tanned skin, light hair and blue-green eyes); there he started university (at the age of 32, supported by the Danish state B he studies business management); and there, in that land in which he is still an alien, whose language he speaks with a strong accent, whose ways of life he has yet to fully absorb, in that land so far away from the land of his fathers for thousands of years, he will stay.  His exotic-looking Danish children will have a dim second-hand memory of another world accessible to them only in fairly tales (or horror stories); and they will see other cousins, equally exotic looking, spread all over the world following paths similar and different, who will also have dim memories of the land of their forefathers.

Among strangers he found friends, where among friends he had met only enemies.

The trick all along had been to know the difference.