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lounge, moved while preoccupied in conversation with Mona Abed and her shoulder unintentionally touched my chest. The contact was very painful. She realized what happened and sat up straight on the sofa and apologized to me. During the nursing period a sudden touching of my breast turns my whole chest into a mass of burning pain. The knocks on the door of my memory kept getting louder. I let the memories in.
    The foreign correspondent office relayed to us an invitation from the Iraqi Ministry of Information to travel the day after tomorrow to the north of Iraq to meet the Kurdish families returning from Iran after a general amnesty was declared. I couldn’t sleep that night.This three-day trip would be the first work trip for me outside Baghdad. I was worried that Hatim would refuse to let me travel alone to the north. I arranged my arguments in favor of the trip in my mind. I remembered our honeymoon on the mountain of Saffayn in Salah al-Din village and the wildflowers there. The Kurds told me at the time to come in the winter when the north was much prettier with the snow-covered peaks and the quiet after the summer visitors were gone. Hatim agreed to my going on the trip without much fuss. I started to fantasize about my first trip and what it would be like. Hatim asked me while embracing me, “Have you started your trip already?” I came to, and, apologizing, I turned to him.
    The merrymaking began as soon as the cars started. I made the acquaintance of a Chinese man and his wife who looked to be about thirty, a Lebanese journalist, two Russians, a Yugoslavian, and a French journalist. There were only two women and that would be typical of all our subsequent trips. We arrived at a military airport where helicopters took us to the city of Erbil in the north. From the helicopters we saw flames coming from the ground. Our escort Hisham told us, “This is the sacred fire.”
    I said, “Aren’t these the oil refineries?”
    “Yes,” he said.
    Hilmi Amin said, “Nebuchadnezzar used to roast his enemies in it.”
    I said, “Isn’t this Sayyidna Ibrahim’s fire?”
    Hisham said, “Sayyidna Ibrahim’s fire is in the city of Ur in Baba Gargar. This is Kirkuk.
    I said, “They’re right. How can reason accept the eruption of fire from the ground all the time without fearing it? When life on earth was in its infancy, man created gods to stave off fear.”
    The Russian journalist, Izak, said, “I know Arabic, but please speak slowly, Nefertiti, so that we might all follow you. Sayyidna Ibrahim the Prophet, right?”
    I said, “Yes. He is the grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad and the father of all the prophets. The Glorious Qur’an says: O fire , be cool and safe for Ibrahim . Can you imagine that the fire would stop and oil would stop erupting from the ground?”
    Izak said, “We have our own beautiful myths.”
    I replied in protest, “This is not a myth.”
    Laughing, he said, “That’s the beauty and your beauty.”
    I ignored what he said, noticing resentment on Hilmi Amin’s face. I said to myself, “I hope this is going to be all right. This Russian seems to be brash. I hope to God he doesn’t cause any trouble for me.”
    The cars took us to a small building. Hisham said, “Let’s have some breakfast before going to the camp.”
    I sat with Chen. She said to me, “I have a daughter your age living with the rest of my children in Peking.”
    I gasped in astonishment. She was delicate and well dressed in a simple manner and looked very young. She never left my side throughout the trip. I felt her hand patting me on the shoulder kindly from time to time.
    She said in her broken Arabic, “My husband Yang and I visited Cairo before and we hope to do so again.”
    We went back to the cars that took us over rough mountainous terrain to a camp where hundreds of refugee families lived. I tried to understand why they had not returned to their original villages and towns. One of the officials said, “They