5.

Living On the drive over, I find myself thinking about Amal and her precocious advice. Beneath her sympathy is her own self-interest, and rightly so. She's not sympathetic to arranged marriages - nor to parents choosing our professions. Her hope is that if I can escape all of this, she can as well. Ziad married a woman he met at university in France, but no one even likes the thought of her. This is the only blemish on Ziad's record. But my parents blame her, not him, for the fact that he's stayed in Europe without having returned in over three years. They disregard Ziad's explanation: he's afraid if he comes back for a visit, he won't be allowed to leave again. Only his job at a hospital there keeps him in good stead with Baba. That, and a grandson.

The car park outside the Hamra Hotel is full of cars of a sort I've rarely seen in Baghdad. A lot of them are luxurious-looking vans and big jeeps with wheels almost as high as my waist, and they have signs taped to the windows that say "TV" or "Press". I wonder if the commanders tell the reporters where to stay, or if the reporters decide on their own, because just yesterday my neighbour Imad told me that the new foreign journalists in Baghdad, the ones who weren't here before the war began, are actually part of the American army. I wonder if that's true. Would Samara Katchens have come in with the army, but not have told me so?

The hotel's front entrance is blocked by a line of cheaply set bricks, and the drivers outside tell me to go around the back, towards the service entrance. After asking two other people which way to go, I finally find my way inside. The lobby is dimly lit and small, but something about it seems posh to me. There's a gift shop selling carpets and ancient jewellery that the women I know would never wear, because it looks old-fashioned and tribal, and is made of silver rather than gold. Each of the windows and doors has an "X" taped over them, like surrender signs. I think that's why Baba didn't tape up our windows at home; it would be an acknowledgement that we're afraid. The X-ing, the boarding, the bricking, all of these are an admission that the Americans are more powerful than we are. That they are going to beat us, that we can only try to minimize the damage.

Small clusters of men are standing around, and it's easy to tell who's who. Young Iraqis dressed in trousers and short-sleeved shirts. Foreigners, largely white-skinned and taller, carrying bags, cameras and bottles of water. The latter remind me of the way football players stand on the sidelines before they rush into the game. Just like the footballers I watched from the stands with Baba when I was twelve, supporting Birmingham City against Manchester United. Back then, I wished that we would stay in Britain forever, become English, be just like a regular family going to see the footie on a Saturday.

All the other Iraqis are dressed informally. When I got dressed earlier this morning my mother had insisted I wear a suit, and now I am beginning to think that maybe I'd have done better not to listen to her.

I walk to the reception desk and tell the man I have come to see an American woman. I put my hand into my jacket pocket to pick out her business card.

"Miss Samara Katchens from the Tribune," I pronounce.

The man frowns at me like I am bothering him. Behind him I can see that the wooden honeycomb of boxes for the room keys is almost empty, with only one or two dangling from their nests.

The man asks me to repeat her name, and looks at the business card I have shed from my palm. He checks his list.

"Your name?" he asks.

"Nabil al-Amari."

His nostrils flinch and he jots something down. "The second tower," he says, lifting his chin towards his left.

Sunk into the centre of the courtyard is a vast swimming pool, the likes of which I can't remember ever seeing in Baghdad. The water looks dirty, coloured to a light brown that gets to be almost coffee at the bottom. But the hotel staff are working on it, standing near the edge in their white shirts and black bowties as they run two underwater vacuums across the water with great concentration.

A sun-reddened foreigner with a shaved head directs me towards the second tower, and even though it is right in front of me, somehow I still need it pointed out. A shift of nausea rises in my stomach. How utterly strange to be asking a visitor in my own country for directions.

The entrance to the second tower is brighter and more lush, with plants and oil paintings lining the atrium that leads to another reception counter. The man behind the desk picks up the phone, punches in some numbers and hands the receiver over to me. Beneath his moustache a smile is gaining ground.

"Nabil!" Over the phone her voice sounds strong, less demure than it did when we were at Noor's house. "I'm so glad you came. Do you want to come up?" Her voice moves something inside me and subsequently no answer comes out.

"Uh, yes, or...do you prefer to meet down here?" I manage.

She is quiet for a second and then says, sure, she'll be down in a minute, and I think I can hear a tiny ripple of amusement in her voice when she says it.

The ridges in my yellow tie are still crisp from never being worn, and I consider taking it off. I will roll it tightly and stuff it in my pocket. But what will the man behind the reception desk think?

He continues to look me up and down and I pretend not to notice because I don't want to have to answer questions, to admit that I'm about to take a job I wouldn't have been offered if that bullet hadn't come through Noor's window three days ago.

"Visiting United Nations' teams used to stay here, including the weapons inspectors," he says, answering a question buzzing in my head. "I guess they won't be back to bother us for a while!" He laughs like a motor, mechanical and a little too loud. I force myself to laugh, too.

"Are you going to be Miss Samara's new translator?" He has very bad skin, as if someone had taken a fork and poked holes, the way my mother does before she bakes potatoes.

"Perhaps. Did she have one before me?"

"Sure she did. Most of them need an Iraqi or they can't work."

Sam comes down the stairs in multiples and then lands near the reception desk with a clap of sandals on tile. "Rafik!" She beams a wide grin at the man behind the reception desk. "Sabah el-khair."

The pock-faced man looks like the happiest person I have seen in months, and he smiles back at her with a sheepish countenance. "Sabah en-noor, Miss Samara."

After they say their good mornings, I step out to greet her. I hold out my right hand and she takes it firmly. Then she extends her left as well and clasps my hand between both of hers. Her hair, so full of that orange fire the other two times I met her, seems darker now, and I realize that's because it's wet. The smell of a shampoo or maybe a powder runs invisible circles around her, carrying the scent of some flower that grows somewhere else in the world, but not here. In Iraq, a woman would never come to a meeting with her hair like this, as if she's just stepped out of the shower.

"You found me," she says, though she doesn't look at all surprised to see me. "I'm glad you held on to that." She points at her business card, which I'm still holding in my hand, having bent it back and forth so often that my sweat has nearly worn it to tissue. On those two occasions I met Sam, she was dressed in clothing that resembled what I might have worn when I was a teenager - loose khaki trousers and a button-down shirt. There was nothing particularly ladylike about it, although the way she moved in her boyish clothes seemed feminine. Today, however, she's wearing blue jeans that are tighter, like the way the women dress in music videos. She's wearing a white T-shirt with a deep V along the collar. I haven't seen a woman dressed like this, in person that is, since our time in England, when Mum used to nudge me in the shopping centre and whisper to me about how inappropriately the young women were dressed. I try to block out her voice grating somewhere between my ears.

And then I realize that Sam has already been telling me what she's been doing since I last saw her, and I haven't heard a word she's said.

"Anyway," she looks at me and blinks twice, then stretches out a hand much the way the merchants do when they want you to look at their fruit. "Why don't we have a coffee out by the pool?"

I follow her out of the atrium to the courtyard, towards the big murky mass of the swimming pool. She doesn't wait for me to open the door, and when I try to hold it open while it's already in mid-swing, she exhales a small laugh.

We sit on the white plastic chairs at a table in the sun, and I wonder why she would choose a table without an umbrella, without shade. I remember that on the rare sunny days in Birmingham, young people with white skin would sit in the park, their faces turned skywards. In England, even a slight suntan was a source of pride. Here, of course, it is frowned upon. Only labourers who must work out-of-doors get suntanned, my grandmother once said, and women especially want to be lighter, not darker.

Sam plonks her notebook on the table, and this seems to define the way she touches things around her. She does not place objects, but lets go of them and allows them to fall - her bag on to the chair next to her, her sandals on to the concrete ground. She looks at her watch and raises her hand to catch a waiter's eye. "Wow, it's almost ten," she says. "We've got an interview at twelve with the INC."

"We...we have an interview? Today?" I am embarrassed by how slow I must sound, but I am confused. "I thought you wanted to tell me more about the position first."

"Oh, right." Her mouth drops open, her lips coated by something shiny. "We forgot to talk money, didn't we? Would a hundred dollars a day be okay?"

"A hundred dollars a day?"

"Well, I could maybe go up to $125, but that's really the most I can do." Sam reaches into her bag and pulls out a thin electronic gadget that is the same size as the grocer's receipt book which tracks my family's monthly bill. She puts the tip of her fingernail to the screen, I expect, in order to clean off the dust. But instead, I see she is curving her index finger in different directions, creating tiny black letters on the screen.

"You write on it with your finger?"

"Well," she smiles without looking up at me. "You're supposed to use a stylus, but God knows where I left mine." I focus on the grey screen and I think I can make out the words, though upside down: ask M about money. And then she presses the green button and the words disappear. "I can't remember anything if I don't put it into my palm," she says.

I nod. If I were to write anything at this moment, I'd make calculations about what my savings might look like a month from now, because in one day of working for Samara Katchens, I can make more than what I earn in a month of teaching at Mansour High School.

"Sorry, what is the INC?"

"Oh." She looks surprised. "The Iraqi National Congress. Ahmad Chalabi's group?"

"Yes, yes of course," I say, though there isn't any reason I would have known the name Ahmad Chalabi, had my father not mentioned it recently. "I just didn't recognize the translation to English."

There's a strange jingling coming from her bag, and she pokes around in it and comes out with a black phone about the size of a large spectacles case.

"Damn. Nabil, I'm sorry. I need to get this. Can you wait a minute?" And I wonder where Sam could think I need to be going in such a hurry that I'd have trouble waiting a minute for her, or five, or twenty. "Of course," I say, but I feel that she has hardly heard me, because she is already putting the phone to her ear and bellowing into it. "Wait, I can't hear you. The reception here sucks." And she walks away, moving to the other end of the pool while holding the phone out straight in front of her, like it could be one of those falcons the men in the Gulf States train to fly and return home again, landing dutifully on its master's arm.

She then raises the phone to her ear and turns her back towards me, leaving the fat antenna pointed in my direction. I can still hear her from across the pool.

"Hi Miles. Sorry. Can't always get good reception at the hotel because of the tall buildings." Sam is quiet for a minute. "Jonah? Yeah, he's all right. Well, some of Saddam's security guys actually arrested him while he was filming somewhere without permission and took him to Abu Ghraib. You know, where they torture people for fun. No, I think they just roughed him up. He's very lucky."

She drags a plastic chair from a nearby table and sits down. "Well, yeah, everyone was worried. After we heard that report about the bodies of two European-looking men lying near Haifa Street, and they said one looked like him and all.

She looks back at me, rolls her eyes, and mouths: "Sorry." She's nodding, issuing several "uh-huhs." She lunges to one side and then the other, like a football player stretching out. "He'll be all right. No, no. I'm definitely staying."

A waiter comes to ask me if I want to order anything, and I decline, not wanting to miss what she's saying.

"Axelrod's big story? Yeah, I read it. Quite the scoop." She hesitates. "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't know how he gets his stories. But yeah, good for him. I mean, good for us."

Sam turns and looks at me again. Her lips have the look of sucking on something sour.

"Of course, Miles, I know we need more of that. I've got a few things cooking here on the INC that could be really good. Just give me some time. Sorry, Miles? I really have to go. You got me in the middle of trying to hire a new fixer."

Trying?

She seems frustrated and her expression is very different from the one she wore when she leapt down the stairs.

"Sorry. My editor. Nagging me for investigative stories at two o'clock in the bloody morning. For him, I mean." She stands the black phone up on the table. Across the top in Arabic and English, it reads Thuraya.

"You can get a mobile phone that works in Iraq?"

She smiles as though I've said something silly. "It's a satellite phone. It connects to a satellite somewhere over the Indian Ocean. You haven't seen one yet?"

I have to admit that I haven't, and I wonder, should I have? Our phones have been out of order for weeks. The government said it was because of the US bombing our stations, but now there are rumours that the government itself shut down the lines to prevent the Americans from listening in on any of Saddam's advisors and figuring out their strategies. Even when we did have service, we couldn't call overseas. But we could get calls from abroad, and there were only two types of those. A short call from Ziad every month, and a yearly call from one of my father's old colleagues in England, wishing us a happy Christmas and a jolly good New Year.

"Samara, I must tell you, nobody in our country is allowed to have these kinds of things, not even a satellite dish to watch television," I explain. "The only person who could have a phone like this would be mukhabarat, you know, the secret police. Maybe some other people working directly for Saddam."

"Yeah, I know," she says. She picks up the coffee the waiter brought while she was on the phone and blows on it with puckered lips. "And please, call me Sam."

"Even though your given name is Samara? It's a beautiful name."

"Thanks. But I prefer Sam."

"Samara almost sounds like an Arabic name. We even have a city by this name, but we say it a little differently."

She grins at me and sips the coffee, placing it a bit lazily back into the saucer, so that a milky film spills over into it. I hate this kind of coffee, with the hot milk and too much sugar, but I assume that the hotel makes it because this is the way foreigners like it.

"I know," she says. "I passed it on my way to Baghdad."

I feel embarrassed again, because she is new in my country and has already been to places I hardly know. Samarra is less than two hours to the northwest, but I only remember going there once, when I was a boy and our parents took us on a holiday up north.

"Where else did you go? Did you go to Tikrit?"

"Yeah," she says, gazing into the distance, as if remembering the view of it. "We were covering the war from the north and went everywhere we could on the way down, essentially wherever the lines were retreating - from Suleimaniye and Irbil down to Kirkuk, and then Tikrit, through Samarra and then here."

"And you did all of that without an interpreter?"

Sam makes a face like I have just posed the most preposterous question in the world. "Oh, no. That's never an option. We had a translator until Tikrit. And then he, well, decided to give up and go home. So I teamed up with Jonah for a while and shared a fixer with him."

"A fixer?"

"Fixer, translator, same thing. More or less."

"And so your friend Jonah is okay."

"Yes," she smiles, her chest falling with relief - or exasperation. "You heard?" She wags a finger at me. "You were eavesdropping."

"You were not speaking quietly."

She picks up her coffee cup again and puts it to her mouth, all the while with her eyes set on me. "Also, Rizgar's been my driver all along. I mean, since Suli."

After a moment I realize she means Suleimaniye, and I feel a rising distaste over the idea that Sam and her colleagues have already given abbreviations to Iraqi cities I have never seen, as if they are old friends, on intimate terms.

"What happened to the last interpreter?" I suddenly realize that it is as if I'm interviewing Samara, not the other way around, and now I regret my words. I certainly don't want her to find me cheeky or rude.

She grins close-mouthed, her lips spread wide. "I like you, Nabil. I like people who aren't afraid to ask questions." She drinks her coffee again, watching me across the rim of her cup. "My last translator was Saman. Kurdish, of course. He and Rizgar started with me in Suli. They were a good team. But Saman's Arabic was weak and he had an accent when he spoke it, and so when we got to Tikrit he had a hard time."

"What happened?"

Sam lifts her cup higher this time, and I can hear the rest of its contents draining into her throat. When she's done, she shrugs. "Someone said something nasty or something, then, when we were trying to leave, they threw things at the car. It was just...it scared him a bit and he decided not to come to Baghdad with us. Hopped a ride back to Irbil, where he's from."

"I see." Most of the people I know think that the Kurds are part of the cause of the American invasion. One of Baba's friends who came for a visit a while back said the Kurds have been selling their souls for years, begging for Washington to overthrow Saddam. Baba nodded, and though we were sitting in the garden speaking quietly, I felt his discomfort with any political talk in our house. Most people I know don't like the Kurds, especially the nationalist ones from the north. A Kurd from Irbil probably would have a bad time in Baghdad.

"I was thinking, Sam, that many of the interpreters for the Ministry of Information are professionally trained. Maybe you would prefer to work with one of them."

Her nose crumples as if smelling something bad. "Someone who used to be a minder? That's the last person I want to hire."

I have never heard of a "minder" before, but I can use my imagination.

"You know, they're basically government lackeys who happen to speak some English. Kinda like a low-grade spy. There's no way I'd voluntarily work with one of them." She raises her hand and waves it until a skinny waiter in a bowtie, the ends of it drooping like a frown, heads over to our table.

"Nabil, listen. Your English is essentially perfect, and that's why I want you to work with me, but I also think this is a good opportunity for you. You'll get to find out what's really going on and meet people you'd never meet, and you'll help me get the right information out there in the public eye. That's never happened in Iraq before. Do you know how important that is?" She looks up at the waiter and offers a tart smile. "I'm starving," she says to me. "Have you had breakfast yet?"

I look at my watch. It is nearly 10:15 a.m. I ate almost three hours ago, and I didn't feel hungry then, either. "Please, not for me."

She turns back to the waiter. "Do you think you could make me a cheese omelette? With toast?" She seems uncertain about this request. Does she think that Baghdad is such an Arab backwater, that we have nothing but fuul and hummos for breakfast?

She stares at me hard now and when that strange gold-brown light in her eyes hits mine, I have to avert my eyes for a moment.

"Let's try this," she says. "Work with me for a week at $100 and see how it goes. You have nothing to lose because school's not in session anyway, right? If things go well, I'll ask my editor about bumping you up to $125 a day. If it's not your thing, fine, no commitment, we go our own ways, shukran and maa-salaama."

I raise my eyes involuntarily, surprised at her Arabic.

"Deal?" Sam holds out her right hand.

I am about to give it to her, but am suddenly aware of the waiter rushing back to the table, looking apologetic. "I'm sorry, Misses Samara, but no eggs. No eggs today. But toast. We make the toast."

Sam grins and drops her hand.

"Deal." I have the urge to take her no-longer-on-offer hand, to feel her skin against mine for a moment longer than a handshake. Then I remember Noor and instead my hand curls in on itself. I feel my nails digging into my palm, almost hard enough to break the skin.