““Mohammed ignored the abuse. What did Ahmed know? It had been years since anyone had studied music in Paris or Seville on a scholarship paid for by the country's oil profits. The only knowledge people mastered these days was how to steal copper wire and load a gun. Mohammed felt like a relic from a lost civilization, buried in the muck of the Tigris. Sassanid, Seleucid, Sumerian. Achaemenid, Assyrian, Akkadian. He sometimes thought he was the only one who remembered. For what it was worth, he could sing the ancient songs of the pearl divers.””
