"Tell me, then. You can tell me. I promise I won't tell Baba and Mum."

"Sure you won't. You think I don't know that they send you in here to check on me?"

Amal's eyes betray a sense of guilt. "What do you expect from them? They're just worried about you. Mum is so sad about what happened to Sam. And considering Baba's car, I think-"

"Amal," I say, cutting her off. I feel a slicing in my stomach, the sound of the glass showering over our heads. "I'm going to pay him back for that. I've saved up a lot."

"Good luck getting it out of the bank."

"It's all in cash, from working with Sam. I have enough to buy him a used car today, but he said it's better that they hire a driver to take the three of you to the border, because you wouldn't be allowed to take the car into Jordan anyway."

"That's not the point," she says.

"I know."

"You should go and talk to them. You should be with them now."

I shake my head. "Later maybe, before you leave."

Amal carries on but I find myself tuning her out, like a radio losing reception. I have no energy left in me for giving comfort, nor for receiving it. As much as I love them, Amal and my parents, I want them all to go away. I'm glad they're leaving. Maybe I am responsible for that, maybe Sam is. Maybe George Bush is. Maybe all of America. Maybe Saddam. It hardly matters. Most importantly, they'll be safer elsewhere.

The helicopter in my mind is taking off again, and this time, I jump on the landing skids, too. Get carried away along with Sam. It would be terrible of me to tell Amal to leave me now, but that's exactly what I want.

Instead, I'll go where she can't: out. I hold my hands out to hug her, and she falls into me. There is nothing in the world like a little sister's love, one of the few kinds of love that comes without condition, without a price, and, if you are as lucky as I am, without the pain of almost every other. I rock her in my arms, the most beautiful moment of my day.

"I'm going out for a while. Tell them not to worry."

Amal pulls away from me. "Where? Where are you going now?"

"I don't know. For a walk."

"You can't just go walking around town, Nabil. That's crazy."

No, you can't just go walking around, I want to say, because no father in his right mind lets a pretty young daughter out on to the street anymore. But just an average man like me? It hardly matters. "I do it all the time. I walk closer to town to get a cab to work." I say walk and not walked, as though I will get up tomorrow and do what I used to do. As though I have any idea what I'm supposed to do with my life tomorrow.

"Can I go with you, then? I want to see the city once more before I leave."

Her hopeful face makes me want to cry. "Not now, Amal. When you come back."

Her head rolls back with disappointment, the remnants of her girlishness snapped into place by her growing womanhood, which decides that she is not going to cry. Instead, she picks up the half-knitted sweater she had set down, which looks like it is unravelling more than it is being put together. "Just don't do anything foolish, and don't stay out late," says my fourteen-year-old parent. "And don't take any unnecessary risks," she calls as I leave the room, her hands moving the long needles quickly, as if her time were precious.

The long walk is good for me. What does it matter if I walk for miles, from Yarmouk Street down to Jinoub, all the way south though Qadisiya, into Tamim and Maarifa. It feels better just to move, to keep putting one foot in front of the other until my soles are almost numb. It is only now, when I get to Jazair, where I know I can find some place to get close to the river, that I feel the throbbing in my thighs, the pain of pushing too hard for too long, of pretending to be unable to feel anything. My shoulder, too, is sore, though much less so than yesterday.

Everyone says you should avoid the river these days. The Americans control everything along the Tigris now, because how can you control Baghdad if you don't hold the river in your hands? Many people stay away, because if a soldier thinks you look suspicious even for a moment, they say, he will shoot you dead and never hear a word of complaint about it. But there are still fishermen who come here regularly, whether early in the morning or late in the afternoon, the cooler parts of the day, to fish out a fresh catch of simmich from the murky brown water. If you're not sure your family will eat dinner, you will fish despite the fear of not coming home again.

Of several fishermen on the bank, I see an older man who has more than one pole with him. I ask him if I can borrow one for a while, and I hold out a few dinars in my hand. The fisherman waves away my offer and readily hands me his extra pole, scratched and burnished as though Abraham himself might have used it. Maybe he, our forefather, fished just like this in Ur, south of here, on the other river that demarcated what we were from what we were not. Between here, the Tigris, and there, the Euphrates, we became a Mesopotamian people, probably the world's first civilization. We built cities and languages and towers. Wrote tales of Gilgamesh and codes of Hammurabi. Founded mathematics. Forged religions. Hosted prophets. Discovered God, or let God discover us. No defeat from afar can take that away from us, can shame us from the love and pride for Iraq that we carry in our hearts.

I move down the sloping stones, closer to the river. From here I can see the silhouette of the statue of Scheherazade, just a little further down the bank. Maybe instead of trying to tell Sam about the hand of Fatima, I should have told her about the mind of Scheherazade. She saved her life from a murderous king by her ability to tell him a new story every night. Until then, the king had a habit of marrying a beautiful woman every day, enjoying her for the night, and then having her beheaded in the morning, sure she had betrayed him. Through her great knowledge of history and literature, through her ability to weave stories together, Scheherazade told the king enchanting tales that kept him on tenterhooks each night until it was almost daybreak. After a thousand nights of this, he fell in love with her and made her queen. The writer Ibn al-Nadim mentions it as already having been famous in his tenth-century catalogue of books in Baghdad. So we have known for at least a thousand years that a storyteller - a female one, at that - can change the course of history.

Our stories are our strength. They have the power to keep us alive.

The odd thing about the bend in the Tigris in this part of Baghdad is that it is sometimes hard to tell which way the river is flowing. Logic says it must be moving downstream, but right now, I am quite sure it is flowing up. Sometimes you must simply trust that things will flow exactly as they are meant to, and when they don't seem to flow in ways that make sense, to believe that the hand of God is behind it. Al Mu'eed - the seventy-fifth of God's ninety-nine names - is the Restorer. Though I hope it is not blasphemy to say so, I should like to create the hundredth: the Fixer.

I tie my bait with a flimsy knot that I know will never hold. I like the liberating feeling of the khamsa as it flies off my pole, waving to me just before it hits the water.

Nihaya - The End.

end.