"It can also be a verb. Ani at'amal inno y-kun salaam. I hope that there will be peace."
"Ani...hold on, hold on. Too fast. One word at a time."
"Maybe we'll leave it with *amal''. When you come back to Iraq, I'll teach you the rest."
"Deal. What's this area called?"
"This? Hajj Sallum. Why?"
Sam shrugs. "I just like to know the names of places. It's when you pass through this part that the architecture changes. You really feel like you're leaving the city for something more, I don't know, traditional...pastoral."
"You mean when there are more mud buildings?"
"Yeah," she says. "It's kind of pretty."
I nod. Pretty to foreigners, poverty to us.
"What does Nabil mean?"
"Didn't I tell you?"
"No, I told you what Samara means, but you didn't tell me what Nabil means."
"Maybe you didn't ask." I glance at her, her honey-and-sand eyes more arresting than ever, with all her hair hidden away. "It has two meanings. The main one is noble."
"Noble," Sam smiles. "How appropriate. That's really you."
I find myself feeling hot. Perhaps it is Sam's words, though she looks warm, too. I put my hand in front of the vent for the air-conditioning. "Is it cool enough in here?"
"Well, it's a little stuffy to me, but I'm not used to wearing this thing," she says, pulling at the jupeh.
"I'm sorry about that."
"Nabil, you don't need to apologize. I don't mind at all. In fact, part of me likes it."
"Really?"
"Yeah. It reminds me of being a little girl and playing dress up. Usually I'm so, well, kind of noticeable here. Wearing this, I feel like I can blend in. Sort of lose myself and just disappear."
We are safely out of Baghdad, and I don't see nearly as many illegal checkpoints as we expected. Mostly, I think, they're just attempts by people to protect their neighbourhoods. Baba probably worried too much. Still, I'm glad not to have to make meaningless conversation with Safin. Glad to be alone with Sam. I wonder if I could take her for a visit to Samarra - a beautiful picture to leave her with, to wash out all the ugly ones we saw in Baghdad.
"Ah. So what was the other meaning?"
"Oh. Nabil also means sublime."
"Sublime? Ooh. That's pretty heavy...I mean, deep. Sublime!" We both laugh at the same time. "What an amazing name, Nabil. Is there any connection to the word noble in English?"
"You know, I thought this was very likely, and I still think it. But when I checked in a dictionary of etymology at the university, it said that noble was from Old French or Latin. But I think they are wrong. Arabic has been around much longer than those languages, you know."
Sam nods. I probably sound like I'm trying to hold an originality contest between East and West, which wasn't my intention.
The traffic slows down now, the two-lane highway quite congested, in part with other cars heading north. Baba was smart to have us pack up the car like this; we've probably seen ten others just like it. Occasionally we pass humvees and Bradleys. Painted in their desert beiges and faded browns, they are starting to become an unwanted but familiar part of our landscape, like a piece of furniture in your parents' home that you never liked, but wouldn't dare ask to be removed.
"We will pass through Samarra soon."
Sam reaches back for a bottle of water, twists the cap off, and throws back her head to swig it down.
"You know, if we are in any place where there are people around, you mustn't do that."
"Do what?"
"Drink the water that way."
"What, from the bottle? Don't Iraqis get thirsty?"
"Yes, but they will never drink from a bottle in public. Especially not a woman, and not people of a certain class. You will never find a lady driving in a Mercedes and drinking straight from a bottle."
"So what happens when you're thirsty?"
"You must always pour it into a glass first. If you search around in the bags there, I'm sure you'll find that Mum has packed at least one."
"Oh-kay-ay!" She drags out her syllables just like that, in a way that says she finds this lesson in Iraqi manners amusing, but won't bother to argue.
"So, you know, Samarra is very beautiful. The city, I mean!" Sam looks at her knees, smiling at my clarification. "Well, not the city itself, but the shrines and the Malwiya minaret. "When you came to Baghdad in April, did you see them?"
"No," she says. "Baghdad was falling. We didn't exactly have time for tourism."
"When we went to Tikrit, I thought to take you then, but we also didn't have time to spare. But it is very special, Samarra, and I haven't been in a very long time."
I glance in my rearview mirror, the way I have countless times in the past hour. Al-Hamdulilah, there is no one following us. "I would love to take you there now. To stop just for a little while and see the shrines. I want you to see the view from the top of the Malwiya minaret."
Sam doesn't answer. But the movement in her face defies her quiet: the widening of her nostrils, the suddenly rapid fluttering of her eyelashes.
"You don't want to."
"It's not that I don't want to," she says. Her eyes softening in that arc of pity, that same look I had trouble facing yesterday on the roof. "I just don't want to take any more stupid chances. I want to get as far away from Baghdad as possible. What if someone is following us?"
"No one is following us."
"The people who know how to follow someone know how to make it look like no one is following us. We really have no idea what could-" Her voice breaks up.
"I'm sorry, Sam."
"I can't believe Rizgar is gone."
"I know."
"I still keep expecting to find out it's a mistake. When I woke up at your house this morning, I thought I was at the Hamra. I'll just get dressed, go downstairs and meet Rizgar. That's what I thought."
"I know what you mean."
"You do?" Sam reaches into her bag and pulls out the tail end of a roll of toilet paper, rips some off and blows into it. "I always felt like maybe you two didn't like each other so much."
It takes me a moment to answer her truthfully.
"I know because of Noor. I didn't really want to marry her. But I didn't want her to die, either. It's still a shock. It's still a horrible thing. Just because I didn't want her to be my wife, it doesn't mean I'm not sad for her. And bloody angry, too. Somebody made a totally innocent girl die. And that happens here every day."
She places a hand on my upper arm and squeezes gently. "I'm sorry."
What do Americans say now? Thanks for feeling sorry? It seems better our way. Allah yarhamha. God keep her. Then again, that's all about the one for whom we grieve, and not at all about the one who does the grieving.
Sam waits a few minutes to see if I have anything more to say, and then finally asks: "Do you want to tell me about Noor?"
"Not really, Sam. Not right now. I think I'd better concentrate on where we're going."
Sam lets out a quick sigh of acquiescence. "Well, tell me more about Samarra. It's a Sunni area, isn't it?"
I consider telling her I don't feel like talking at all. But in a few days, when she's gone from Iraq, I might regret it.
"In terms of population, yes, it's Sunni," I say, "but this is where it gets interesting. One of the most important sites for Shi'ites anywhere in the world is there. Shi'ites will come from all over to make pilgrimages to the shrines there."
"You mean the Malwiya minaret?"
"The Malwiya is something totally different. The Malwiya, you've seen pictures of it? It's the huge spiral minaret with steps going up the sides, so that you climb to the top on the outside."
"I saw the top of it from the road. How old is it?"
"Well, that's the funny thing. It's built like one of the famous ziggurats of Mesopotamia, but in fact, it is much newer than that. A Caliph, that's the ruler, named Al-Mutawakil began building it in the middle of the ninth century, when Samarra was the capital, during the period of the Abbasids. Oh, but you asked me about Samarra. So, yes, it's Sunni, and the Al-Mutawakil Mosque - I mean, the old one connected to the Malwiya, which isn't really functioning any more as a mosque - that's considered a Sunni site. But also in Samarra you have the graves of two of the Shi'ite imams, the Tenth and the Eleventh, plus the, I don't know what you would call that in English, the spirit, I guess, of the Twelfth Imam, who is known as the Hidden Imam. Shi'ites believe he will return again at the end of days."
"This is why some of the Shi'ites are called Twelvers, right?"
"Exactly. Most, in fact, are twelvers. It sounds funny to me, but that's it. We call it it'naashariya, but it's the same thing. Have you heard of the Mahdi?"
"He's like the messiah, right?"
"Sort of. So, in Samarra there's one shrine with a beautiful golden dome, the Al-Askari Shrine, where Imam Ali al-Naqi, who was the Tenth Imam, is buried, along with his son Hasan al-Askari, who is the Eleventh. And the second shrine has very beautiful blue tiles, and downstairs is the place where the Imam al-Mahdi went into concealment. Whether he disappeared or is hidden, we don't know. But people view him as if he is still alive and will come back again to bring peace and justice to the world. Something like what Christians and Jews think too, no?"
Sam's head wavers from side to side. "Something like that."
"In fact, many Muslims believe the Mahdi will come along with Jesus."
"A double-messiah day!" she says. "Two saviours for the price of one."
I smirk. I feel like telling her to watch it: you should never take the piss out of people's religious beliefs, not in this part of the world. But this, I have learned, is Sam's language. Even when she isn't facing a deadline, she remains a journalist with a talent for catchy turns of phrase - and for cynicism.
In the moments of quiet, Sam seems to read that she may have been too quick to poke fun. "Sorry, Nabil. I don't mean to sound sarcastic. I told you I'm not a religious person. I think journalism has become my religion." She smiles so warmly, with such self-deprecation, that I have to smile back. "Are these places holy for you? Do you believe in the Mahdi?"
I turn on the radio. "No comment."
"Nabil!" She turns the radio off. The reception is terrible here anyway. "That's not fair."
"Why not fair?"
"We were having a serious discussion," Sam says.
"Were we? I thought you were finding it quite funny."
"I wasn't, really. I'm sorry," she says. "Really, please. It's just, I don't know, you do this job for long enough, and you start to become cynical about everything: every government, every leader, every system which tries to control people's lives. I guess I end up just dismissing religion, particularly in the Middle East, as a form of oppression. If you don't mind me saying."
"Say whatever you want."
"After what I saw in Afghanistan under the Taliban..."
"That's another story," I say. "Afghanistan's not even the Middle East."
"You're right."
The road has cleared up again, and somehow, this puts me at ease. "To me, it's complicated. My father doesn't believe in much of anything but the god of medicine. But he strongly identifies with being a Sunni, whether he admits it or not. My mother doesn't believe in asserting sectarian identity because she thinks this is bad for the ummah, that is, for the entire community of Muslims around the world. But she is a spiritual person and her beliefs and practices are very Shi'i."
"Yeah? Is there a big difference?"
"There are many differences. I don't know if any of them are so great. I'll tell you more about it later, if you want. Shi'ites love to visit tombs and graves of holy men. There is a belief that these visits can help you and protect you. Remember how Mum was on about us stopping in Samarra?"
"Did you promise her we would?"
"No, no. There are no promises in anything."
I don't say that it's not just Mum, that I also have a dream of taking Sam there. In my mind I've had an outrageous image for days, with me leading Sam by the hand until we start laughing and running up the wide, sloped stairs of the Malwiya minaret, just like we did in that stairwell but this time flying up instead of down, high above and far away from everything and everyone that could ever hurt us, a little closer to heaven.
58.
Flying I must have got lost in the clouds somewhere at the top of the tower, where I have not been since I was perhaps fifteen, for Sam seems to have grown tired of trying to pull my theology out of me.
She lifts her index finger and pushes the small khamsa swinging from the rearview mirror, a bright blue bead dangling from each of its fingertips. "Why does everyone here hang these things from their rearview mirrors?"
"Oh that? I don't know, for good luck." I take a hand off the wheel to turn the khamsa towards me. "See, it says *mashallah' on it. Literally, it means *God has willed it.' But we also say mashallah when we get good news. And when you hang it in your car, it's as if to say, *May God prevent anything bad from happening here.' It's also supposed to stop you from catching the evil eye. A lot for one word, yes? My mother must have hung this here. My father doesn't believe in these things."
Sam swings it again. "It's cute. What do you mean, believe in it? Because it's like a good-luck charm?"