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braced myself against this wave of nostalgia and feigned nonchalance in my smile as I pointed to the minaret and said to those sitting beside me, ‘I climbed all those steps when I was less than ten years old. All the way to the top.’ The scenes of my childhood poured over me like hot rain, burning instead of cooling. I watched, as if a feckless tourist, the Bedouin women as they passed by with baskets on their heads, holding the hems of their abayas in front of their faces as they stopped to watch our convoy. The faces were difficult to read, except for the faces of children, who waved to us with thin, sunburnt arms.
    I hadn’t given much thought to how Iraqis would receive us. What I’d seen on TV wasn’t discouraging. These were people eager for regime change, dreaming of freedom and welcoming to the arrival of the US Army. Why, then, were the black eyes looking out from behind the abayas overflowing with all that rejection? There was no friendliness in those eyes, or joy. Their irises seemed to be made of the same substance of sadness. What did this country hold for me in the days to come, besides the bones of my ancestors?
    I don’t remember how many hours it took us to cross what they called the ‘Highway of Death’. We sensed danger whenever the driver suddenly speeded up as we passed through an inhabited town or a major crossing. The convoy didn’t stop or slow down for anything until we reached Tikrit. We wound our way into the inner streets until the main American camp appeared before us, a zigzag road and concrete barriers marking its boundaries. Again, the children were waving to us, while the looks of adults surrounded us with suspicion and resentment, looks that seemed to be saying, ‘Here come the rabble!’ What little energy I had left wouldn’t permit me the simple act of jumping out of the dusty lorry. My behind had taken a battering from bouncing with every bump in the road, and all my bones ached. In a move of uncharacteristic chivalry, the soldiers helped the women off the truck and carried our things inside.
    ‘Inside’ was just another one of Saddam’s palaces.

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    Zein. Darling Zayouna. Zuweina. Zonzon. The zeina – adornment – of the house. My Grandmother Rahma always went over the top with nicknames, as if under her tongue there lived a cunning bird that prompted her with words of affection, pampering and coddling. As if she carried, in the deep pockets of her dressing gown, a clockwork device that disassembled the complex letters of any phrase, beating and grinding them, then mixing them anew into delicious little shapes that were somehow easier to digest.
    My grandmother told me that Tawoos was coming to visit, and I knew that she meant the tall, dark, somewhat masculine woman into whose open arms my brother Yazan and I used to run whenever she came, carrying sesame buns and sweets from her faraway house in Thawra City. Was Tawoos – Um Haydar, as she was known to the outside world – a relative of ours or just a friend of my mother’s? My grandmother gave me a sidelong look, contemptuous of the stupidity that I seemed to have imported from overseas. Could I possibly have forgotten Tawoos, the seamstress, who was tied to us by a lifelong kinship? ‘All our clothes, all our handkerchiefs and scarves, sheets and pillowcases, come from the work of her hands.’ That was my grandmother’s summarised calling card for the woman who came over every Tuesday to help with her chores, which comprised a list that would have been too long to include in the most up-to-date encyclopaedia: patching up worn curtains; tidying up Rahma’s cupboards; washing and changing pillowcases; ironing sheets and tablecloths; picking oranges from the garden, making juice and filling bottles with it to put in the fridge; making kibbeh balls and half-cooking them for freezing; preparing the henna mix in the special pan and applying it to Rahma’s hair (under the pretext that it prevented headaches);