I'm almost out of breath when I reach the third floor and wishing I got more exercise. As I walk along the corridor, I see a handsome man with Mediterranean features and hair down to his chin, pulling the door of room 323 shut. We have to turn sideways in the hallway to let each other get by, and he gives me a small "hey" as he does, not quite looking me in the eye, and I watch him disappear down the stairwell. He could almost be a European-Arab, perhaps Lebanese but certainly not Iraqi, because I don't know any Iraqis who wear their hair long like that. I notice it, in particular, because it's wet.

I stare for a moment at Sam's door. My fingers hesitate, and then knock. When there's no reply, I rap harder. The door creaks open, and when Sam sees it's me, she swings it wide and holds it open.

"Hi Nabil. Look, I want to apologize. I'm under a lot of stress. I didn't mean to give you such a hard time on your first day."

She moves a few inches back, behind the line that separates the room from the hallway, her from me. She smiles at me and says, "Well? Ahlan w-sahlan. Welcome to my humble abode."

Inside, to my surprise, is a small kitchen area and a modern lounge which looks very Western with two small sofas, a coffee table between them, a large cabinet with glasses, and a white formica desk with a small computer sitting on it, open. There are at least a dozen wires running around the computer and on to the floor, leading towards the sliding glass door that might lead to some kind of balcony. Whatever is out there is blocked by a line of eggshell-coloured curtains. If Sam sleeps, it is not here - or not in this room.

"You're still on board, I hope?"

"Me? Of course. You don't need to apologize."

"Good," she says, gesturing towards the sofa against the wall, and seating herself in the other one. "Because I've just realized I'm already having an astonishingly shitty day."

"Sorry?"

"No, I'm the one who should apologize for my bad manners. I know that's important around here. Can I get you a drink? Orange juice? Pepsi?" Out of the corner of my eye, I notice there's a bottle of what looks like vodka on the cabinet.

"You're quick, Nabil," she says. "But that one's not mine."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean to suggest that-" I glance at the Timex watch my parents gave me as a graduation gift. It's 7:15 p.m. "I probably should go soon anyway. My family will start to wonder...and I think there's a military curfew at eight."

"Nine," she says. "But no worries. You should get going soon."

"Was it that bad a day?"

"Oh that," she says, rising and going to the kitchen. She takes a jug of orange juice out of the fridge, pours two small glasses and then slams the refrigerator door shut. "I tend to exaggerate. But not in my copy," she says, raising a finger. "Never in print."

She brings the glasses to the coffee table and sits down. "My editor, Miles, wants me to drop everything and focus on some clean-up story."

"You mean from the oil spill? I heard on the radio this morning that someone blew up the pipeline from Kirkuk to Baghdad."

Sam shakes her head. "Not that kind of clean-up. Though that would be a good story. In fact, that's a story I'd be glad to do right now. What I mean is that they need to clean up the mess from another reporter, and they want me to do it. Can you believe that? It's practically a fact-checking job. Something you'd give an intern. I don't know what to say. It'll totally take us off news features for a while. I won't get a damn thing in the paper, all because of having to clean up after some schmuck."

Sam shakes her head in disbelief. Funny, that word. Us.

"The best part of it is, this morning, which was last night for him, East Coast time? Miles was using Harris Axelrod's stories as an example, suggesting that I should be trying harder to get good scoops like that. Hah! And now it turns out Harris is in hot water, and the paper is trying to decide whether to bail him out."

"A scoop, that's a good story?"

"Hell, at this point, I'd settle for a good story that isn't exactly a scoop. That's where I need your help. Anything that might give an indication as to where Saddam's weapons facilities are. Or, in fact, if there are any. Any story that gives clear evidence of life under Saddam. Witnesses to a massacre, people who say they've been tortured. We had a big story in the paper yesterday about people who had their tongues cut out for criticizing the regime. Made the front page," she says, focusing somewhere in the vicinity of my chest. "That's what my editors want. Any time you get a good story that no one else has, it's a scoop. Or an exclusive."

"Why do you call it a scoop?"

"I don't know. Maybe because it usually means we're digging up the dirt on somebody. When you dig up something," she says, her hands holding an imaginary shovel, "it's a scoop. But we don't always use the dirt when we have it. Sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth. You have to save things for a rainy day. For example, do you know why the Hunting Club isn't being looted, even though every other symbol of Saddam's regime is? Did you notice that it was hardly touched?"

I hadn't given the contrast much consideration. "Perhaps the people don't really know it's there," I say. "It's hidden away, not like the other buildings right on the main roads. Ordinary people wouldn't be aware of it."

"No, no." Sam is shaking her head. "That's not why. It's because Chalabi wanted it for a base, or at least one of his bases, and his folks went straight there with the protection of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had a nice gaggle of Marines sent over to guard the place so the riffraff wouldn't come in and Chalabi could slide right into his new headquarters. Or at least one of them, because I've already seen another huge villa that he's taken over. How's that for planning?"

One of several phones on the desk rings. She rises, still watching me, and picks it up. "Hello?" A smile spreads across her face. "Hey, surfer boy. Did you have a nice swim?" I soon realize, during the part of the conversation that I can't hear, that this is an internal hotel telephone. "Wait for me. I'm coming down for dinner right now."

When she hangs up, she remains standing. "How about we wrap this up. I'll explain the rest of it tomorrow, okay? Come, say, 8:30?"

As I make my way out, my own head is swimming with questions, about the Marines, Chalabi, the Hunting Club...

"You be careful going home at this hour, all right?"

This "surfer boy", presumably the blond fellow I saw earlier, is he Sam's boyfriend? And what about the one I saw leaving as I arrived?

"Of course I will," I say.

"Don't get in the path of any of those looters."

"Sam, if the Marines could guard that Hunting Club for Chalabi, like you say, or any of the other buildings, why couldn't they manage to guard the other buildings from looting? The Art Museum. Or the hospitals."

Sam jiggles the doorknob for a moment, then shrugs. "No idea. Understaffed, I guess. They're picking and choosing their battles. Just like we have to pick ours. At the moment, mine is getting you out the door so I can get a decent dinner in my stomach." She gives me a wide smile and so I smile along with her, though I'm not sure if this comment is funny or insulting. "Bukra, Inshallah," she says. Tomorrow, God willing.

I suppose these are the kinds of sayings a foreigner would pick up in a few days, but still, the sound of her words in Arabic moves something in me, and I'm not sure if it's attraction or disdain. I want to compliment her on her pronunciation, but she is already releasing the door, allowing it to close behind me.

11.

Allowing I devour the baamya and rice my mother has saved for me, one of my favourites, meat with okra. But since they've already eaten, they seat themselves around the table and use the opportunity to pepper me with questions.

Baba: So what did you do for so many hours?

Mum: Didn't she give you a lunch break? You haven't eaten all day!

Baba: Did you interview anyone important?

Amal: What's she like? Was she nice?

Baba: How much does the job pay?

I feign being hungrier than I am so I don't have to answer, buying time. And when I get to the fruit for dessert, I allow my eyes to flutter as if I'm about to fall asleep on them. Bukra, I promise. Tomorrow I will tell them more. Tonight, I'm too exhausted to speak.

But later, in my room, I'm wide awake. I want to tell someone, anyone, everything. But there's no point - it will only confuse them and worry them. Or maybe I want to tell Sam. Maybe. So I take my old typewriter out of the cupboard. I've hardly touched it in the past year, and am relieved to find that the ribbon is still good. The surprising thing is that I don't have an urge to write about what happened today. Instead, I feel the need to write about what happened leading up to today, about things that happened a long time ago. Things I would like to tell Sam, assuming she would want to listen.

I didn't lie to Hatem, not about myself, anyway. My mother is a Shi'ite and my father is a Sunni. When I tell people this, which isn't often, they sound surprised. But it's not so uncommon. Sam was impressed when I told her. Westerners assume that all Sunnis hate all Shi'ites and vice versa. But it doesn't work that way It's all much more complex than that.

In our neighbourhood, there are other mixed families like us, though no one really talks about it. Still, it's considered a Sunni neighbourhood, and that meant it always felt relatively safe and calm - that is, up until now. In university, I met friends who were real Shi'ites and I came to realize that they had suffered more harassment, more late-night visits by the mukhabarat, than the rest of us.

My mother's family was willing to accept the marriage because she was marrying up, as they call it in the West. Although she was in university when she met my father, her parents had not had a higher education and they were, therefore, very impressed with him. His father was a doctor, and he was going to be a doctor, too. It promised moderate wealth, but also prestige and security, which were more important.

With my father's family, it was a little different. They wouldn't have been keen on their son marrying a Shi'ite girl, Grandma Zahra once told me in her later years. But there were several mitigating factors. First, my father's father, had once treated one of my mother's cousins when he was very ill. Thereafter, my mother's cousin sent presents every year at the end of Ramadan.

And so, my father's family knew that my mother came from a good family. Even if they were working class - my mother's father was a welder - they had dignity, pride, good manners. Second, they were impressed that a working-class family would send their daughter to university and that my mother, unlike her mother, did not wear a veil, which they viewed as a sign of backwardness.

Finally, my mother was beautiful. As beautiful as any model in Paris or London, Grandma Zahra said. I knew she'd never left Iraq, and I wondered how she could know what women in Europe looked like. Later I realized it was just an expression, a way of saying that our beauty was as good as their beauty.

The typical path in our part of the world is for the woman to adopt the man's sect or religion. And so, the idea was that even though my mother was Shi'ite, by marrying my father, she would follow Sunni ways, and adopt the Sunni style of prayer.

The only problem with that was that my father was probably the last person on earth to teach a person how to pray.

When I was small, and then after we came home from England, Mum would take me to the Imam Khadum shrine on Fridays, or to a small husseiniye, a Shi'ite mosque, in the neighbourhood. I was fascinated with the men who knew the Koran by heart. Oh, to have the labyrinth of all those poetic words imprinted in one's mind! I didn't know what they meant, but I loved the way they sounded. I came home one afternoon declaring that I wanted to learn the Koran by heart and become a hafiz. Baba gave Mum a talk and said she should stop taking me to prayers so much.

We've never even had any framed calligraphy with Koranic verses on the wall, like many Iraqis do, with the exception of a small ceramic plate my mother has hanging over the kitchen sink that simply says "Allah" on it. Baba didn't like such displays of religiosity, and considered them closer to superstition than divinity. He didn't like for Mum to put up pictures of Ali, as many Shi'ites do, but I'd seen the one she kept in her handbag, and another one she kept tucked inside the Holy Koran that sits by itself in a drawer in the lounge. When I was about fourteen, I asked why some of my friends' homes had these religious items displayed and we didn't. Mum told me that I should have a sign on the inside: in my heart and in my mind.

I was in my first year of high school when the Gulf War broke out. After Saddam pulled our defeated army out of Kuwait, all of the Shi'ites in the south tried to launch a war against him. We knew it was going to fail, but somehow the people in the south didn't see that. My father said it was because America encouraged the Shi'ites to overthrow Saddam and made them think they could do it, but then did nothing to back them up when Saddam began to slaughter them.

I remember some of the boys in the school playground chanting slogans against the Shi'ites. Bassem Azabi started a chant, calling Shi'ites dirty infidels and collaborators with Bush. I was stupid enough to challenge him, trying to get everyone on my side in the name of Muslim unity. No one bought it. After class, Bassem and two of his friends jumped on me and started laying in to me, and all the other kids gathered around us in a circle, shouting. I don't think they were for or against Saddam, because most of them didn't know anything. They were just boys excited to see a fight. The headmaster came out after a minute or two and pulled them off me. By then, I had given up trying to fight back and was curled up like a snail on the asphalt. I don't know what was more embarrassing, having the headmaster rescue me, or the fact that no one had jumped in to defend me. The friends I had were disparate parts who did not constitute a whole, and individually, they were no match for Bassem and his boys.

That evening, at home, my father saw my puffy left eye and my red face, patches of it swollen like I had been stung by a bee. I would have preferred that to having my father know I got beaten up at school.

"But you haven't been in a fight since you were ten years old." My father looked at me like he was looking at somebody else's child, as if he preferred to trade me for the real son I must have been switched with at the hospital, the son who had his strength, his bulky arms instead of my skinny ones. The son who would be a doctor by the time he was twenty-five, just like my brother; the son who was popular in school. The son who never got pushed around.

I told my father what they had been saying in the school playground that day about the Shi'ites. He sat down on the edge of my bed and ran his fingers over the black stubble emerging from the pores of his chin. He sucked at something in his teeth.

"Did you tell them that your mother is a Shi'ite?" I was sitting at my desk and just wanted to go back to my books, where everything was resolved in the end, where my father and Bassem's boys would never find me. I thought for a minute about running away, tracking down my mother's simple relatives in Al-Kut and spending the rest of my life with them.

"No, I didn't tell them, that wasn't the point. I just didn't think it was right."

"Of course it's not right," he said. "But you don't need trouble at school. You don't need to talk about your family with boys like that. No one needs to know your business. You just do your work. Don't get mixed up in politics. You'll be sorry you did."

"I am not mixed up in politics." As usual, my father failed to understand what I was saying, to even try to understand. It was amazing that he could care so much and listen so little.

"Tell your mother you got hit in the face with a ball," he said, beginning to stand up.

"She already knows," I said, turning away from him and back to my book. He stood where he was and when I looked up at him, he was studying me. Behind the pity, behind the disappointment, was something that told me I had failed an even bigger test. What was it? Failing to protect the women from everything that went wrong? Refusing to reassure my parents that there were no complications to being half-Sunni, half-Shi'ite?

And after all, few people really see me as half-anything. You always take the religion of your father. My mother had to know that when she married my father, Grandma Zahra reminded me.

But my mother was the only one in the house who ever mentioned God, the only one who seemed to turn to something greater when she was upset, and the only one who had any interest in taking me to the mosque on the occasional Friday.

My father never went because he saw religious people as a bit common and naive, and the mosque as an intellectual backwater. He could appreciate the culture, the architecture, the liturgy, the literature, the history, but never the belief that required submission of thought. He didn't like the idea of there being one truth, he said, when I asked him to explain it further. My father wore his Sunni identity like a pedigree that signalled grooming, a tick-box in his profile that gave him privilege. It had little or nothing to do with religion, except that he was proud that Sunnis don't beat their own backs the way Shi'ites do on Ashura, to commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed's grandson.

It was my mother who sometimes got me dressed on a Friday and announced that we were going to the mosque, usually the Imam Ali Shrine in Khadamiyah. My father would smile, his lips closed and faintly callous, and say zein. Good. Very nice. Good, fine, repeatedly, like he was trying to convince himself. Zein, zein. Please enjoy yourselves and put in a nice word for me.

When my father wasn't around, my mother seemed freer. Freer with her piousness, freer with her lips. She used them to place kisses on everything she saw: on the shrine's weathered doors, on the larger-than-life pictures of Imam Ali, on the tombs of the great departed martyrs, on the laminated picture she carried of the faceless twelfth Imam. Even on the prayer turba she brought with her, that little square of pottery, so that when she put her head to the ground she would be in touch with God's own earth.

In summertime, everything grew so hot I was afraid she would burn her lips kissing the walls as they baked in the sun's open kiln. I've heard it can happen. But I came to the conclusion that my mother's lips must have had a holy salve of protection over them, a special lip balm from God. Before letting me head off to the men's side, she kissed my forehead, wishing me Allah's baraka, His blessing. Allah ma *ak. Allah bi-kheir. God be with you. God has good plans in mind for you. After, she met me in the courtyard with her palms radiating bright orange from henna, as if God had placed a portion of his best light right in her hands.

12.

Radiating When I step up to the desk in the morning, Rafik hardly bothers to mumble sabah en-noor after I say sabah el-khair. He presses the numbers for Sam's room and hands me the house phone. His mouth is pulled down at the corners, almost into a frown.

"Hello?" Sam told me 8:30, but her voice sounds groggy, as if she has just woken up.

"Good morning," I say. "Shall I wait for you here in the lobby?"

"No, why don't you come upstairs? I really need you to help me plan out what we're going to do next. I don't want to do it in the car."

I hang up the phone and notice Rafik watching me. I wonder if he understands a lot of English or only a little. "She says to meet her upstairs," I say, as if he is some male relative in charge of her safety, and I must ask permission. I still feel as if Rafik is keeping an eye on me on Sam's behalf, whether she realizes it or not.

The stairs seem less onerous now that I know my way. I stare for a moment at her door. There's a new sign on it. For main Tribune office, go to the first tower, Room 520. Perhaps she hopes this will deter people from bothering her. I press hard on the buzzer until my fingernail goes white. Sam's voice skips towards the door. "Come in! Door's open."

She is in the kitchenette, lighting the stove. She sets the kettle over the flames and turns around. Her hair is wet, and damp indentations around her shoulders make the straps of her bra more visible.

I keep my gaze on the stove, away from her body, trying not to stare. Sam crosses her arms and looks at me. "I know Iraqis start early, so that's why I said 8:30, but this isn't my best hour of the day. I hope you don't mind talking to me before my mind's fully functional. And I need some coffee first. You?"

"Me?"

"Do you drink coffee?"

The kettle moans softy, growing gradually more audible, like the morning muezzin.

"Real coffee or Nescafe?"

"Nescafe." She opens the cabinet and pulls down the jar, adorned by a picture of an attractive, European-looking man with his nose happily close to his cup. "That's all we've got. If you want that rocket fuel you guys drink, just order it from downstairs."

"I'm fine. I already drank some this morning." It isn't true, I had tea. But I will not drink her artificial coffee after she has put down our own.

Sam sits and blows across the surface of the milky-brown liquid. As she puts the mug on the coffee table a spill runs over the rim of her cup. "Uch, klutz!" She picks a few tissues out of the box on her desk to her left, pink then yellow then blue, dabs them over the spill and then pushes the soggy, coloured pile away from her.

"All right." She takes a big breath and then exhales with a flourish, almost as if, had she puckered her lips properly, she might whistle. "So here's the deal. A few days ago, the paper ran a story by a stringer named Harris Axelrod, and now-"

"The stringer is the writer?"