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names of the authors of the books that Hatim had bought for me before my coming to Baghdad to entice me with a life resembling mine in Egypt. “Manfaluti, Mazini, Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid, Abbas al-Aqqad, Taha Hussein, and Mahmoud Hasan Ismail.”
    He said, “Beautiful.”
    I said, “Boring! Boring! Boring!”
    Hatim embraced me, saying, “You don’t like my taste?”
    I said, “It’s too classical. Where’s Abu Nawas, Al-Mutanabbi, Adonis, and Rimbaud? Where is The Waste Land , Bonjour Tristesse? Where are Sartre, Camus, and Proust?”
    Hilmi Amin sided with Hatim, saying, “They are the modernist generation!”
    Hatim said, “She bought all she wanted as soon as she arrived.”
    I said, “These are Iraqi books about art, history, and literature. Leisure enabled me to finish three novels every week. Would you believe it?”
    Hilmi accompanied me regularly every Tuesday morning for five years to the bookstores on Saadun and al-Rashid Streets, looking at the new books and buying what we needed. He introduced me to Salama Musa and, of course, Marx and Lenin, in addition to the works of Hemingway and Somerset Maugham. We bought Jack London’s The Iron Heel . He also introduced me to John Steinbeck and gave me The Grapes of Wrath as a gift. But Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea remained a key work that implicitly charted the complex relationship that grew between the two of us, a relationship whose lines got so entangled that unraveling them was not possible any more. Our office in the heart of Baghdad, and under the weight of our exile, came to resemble that little boat on which the old man sailed to try to catch a giant fish, helped by his deep knowledge of the sea and a little boy and how he came back empty-handed after the sharks ate the fish he caught. Hilmi would tell me in an affectionate tone, “You are the catch I am betting on. Please don’t ever let me down.”
    I didn’t and Anhar Khayun had not appeared in our lives yet.
    Tears filled my eyes. I said to myself, “I am returning to Baghdad without him. Oh my God! And without knowing where Anhar was either! Is she in some other country as some dubious reports would have it, or in a dark dungeon in the hands of the security service? Or did she depart this world altogether? Only God knows! And where is Basyuni and will I be able to convince him to go back to Egypt?”
    I got busy working at the al-Zahra bureau. As time went by I got to know Iraq, its people, its streets, and its history better and at a deeper level. I laid down a plan at the bureau to visit the Iraqi sacredshrines in Najaf and Karbala, the seats of civilization in Samarra, Babylon, and Ur, the Assyrian and Sumerian monuments, the land of the Kurds and the swamps of Basra, and from Iwan Kisra in Salman Bak to Baba Gargar where Sayyidna Ibrahim’s fire was. We wanted to write about this vast, varied, and splendid world that opened its doors wide and allowed us to enter.
    I followed up on the problems of Egyptian workers and their increasing numbers in Iraq. I’d pass by a number of them in Tahrir Square in the morning on my way to the office as they waited for contractors’ cars to carry them to work sites that were mushrooming all over Iraq. I developed a close working relationship with the Iraqi News Agency and its journalists by working side by side with them on a daily basis. I also had good relations with Majallat al-Mar’a al-Iraqiya (The Iraqi Woman) magazine published by the Union of Iraqi Women, Tariq al-Shaab (The People’s Path), the organ of the Iraqi Communist Party, al-Thawra (The Revolution), the organ of the Ba‘th Party where many Egyptian journalists worked, and al-Jumhuriya (The Republic) newspaper. I also found my way to al-Khalsa village, owned by Egyptian peasants in a precedent of the utmost importance: transferring ownership of Iraqi land to peasants from Egypt with the purpose of reclaiming it.
    My colleague Salwa al-Attar, sitting next to me in the VIP