CHAPTER EIGHT

EXILE, PART 1

Almost exactly one week later, boiling with rage and humiliation, Rita was sitting on a South African jetliner flying from Baghdad to Amman, avoiding the glances of her fellow passengers, the homeward-bound private contractors and CPA hacks and a few other journalists, none of whom she was close to, thankfully. Flights into and out of Baghdad were notorious for their corkscrew takeoffs and landings— gut-churning spiraling ascents and descents that dispensed altogether with straight angles in a bid to avoid rocket-propelled grenades fired from the ground. Rita had heard many a tale of passengers losing the contents of their stomach in the process, clutching vomit bags with white knuckles, crying in shaken relief as the plane either touched ground or finally straightened up at a safe altitude.

And here was the takeoff. She gripped the arms of her seat. She’d lived through the corkscrew before, on her brief breaks out of the country. It was wild, even perversely enjoyable if you knew what to expect; it felt a bit like being hauled up the first steep ascent of a roller coaster with no subsequent plunge, your back and head smashed down deeply into your seat as the plane thundered straight up into the atmosphere before righting itself. Then everyone on the flight settled back, relaxed. The worst was over. They’d all escaped hell without insurgents having shot a fireball into the plane’s underbelly, and this meant that in ninety minutes they would each be in the utterly secure, anodyne confines of Jordan, having a burger and a beer before subsequent flights took them back to D. C. or Atlanta or Dallas or wherever they were going.

Sitting by the window, Rita looked down as the whole sorry, bitter, brown and tan expanse of Baghdad unfurled before her. She felt no relief, only frustration and fury. She’d left a job, a story, a whole population unfinished. She’d hung in there with Rick and Claude and their fucking hardworking Iraqi colleagues who’d risked everything. They’d been a family, a crew, muddling through day after day under life-threatening conditions, and now the Standard was doing this to her? I cannot believe this is happening, she thought. Tears rose in her eyes, but she gulped and pushed them back. She would die before she let anyone on this flight see her cry.

Part of her anger was directed at herself. If she’d only had not quite so much Maker’s Mark that night, even just not had that final glass alone in the dark before the laptop, she might not have hit “send,” and all of this could have been avoided. Pathetic, garden-variety drunkenness, of the sort displayed by the Irish side of her family, had set her downfall in motion. She cringed, massaged her forehead.

That following day had not begun well, obviously. She woke in her clothes, hungover and headachy, horrified to realize it was eleven o’clock. Cracking open her bedroom door, she heard the hum and chatter of work going on down the hall in the front room. Deeply embarrassed, she hurried to the bathroom for a shower, then put on jeans and a T-shirt and entered the front room sheepishly, calling out a sour good morning. Everyone was there; everyone turned to look at her, grinning.

“Well, good morning, Sunshine,” Rick said, and everyone laughed. And had Asmaa just laughed hardest?

“I’m so sorry,” she groaned. “I’ll just get some coffee and be right there.”

“Happens to the best of us in a war zone,” Rick called back.

Umm Nasim was in the kitchen, at the sink. She glanced sideways at Rita. “Habibti, are you sick today?” she asked.

Rita glanced back at her, ashamed, as she fixed coffee. Certainly the old woman could put two and two together. “I just didn’t sleep well,” Rita answered.

“I’ll make you a good lunch today.”

The thought of food made Rita sick, but she managed to murmur a thank-you.

“What’s the latest?” she asked in the front room, standing over Rick, Asmaa, and Nabil, who were running down a list of people they wanted to try to bring to the villa to interview. Rita glanced at the list and recognized the names of some of the cabinet leaders on the Iraqi Governing Council, as well as that of a woman who had already received death threats for announcing her intention to run for office when elections took place after the CPA vacated.

“We’re doing palace politics today on who’s up for the prime minister slot,” Rick said. “Trying to get some folks in today to talk about Ayad Allawi.”

Rita nodded. “Bremer’s darling.”

Asmaa looked up. “Who has not been in Iraq for decades until now.” She added, “That’s the kind America loves.”

“True,” Rita murmured. Asmaa, who probably had lost fifteen pounds during the past year and had chronic dark circles under her eyes, had reached a point of open disgust with American policy in Iraq. She’d once leavened her critique with a sharp wit, but by now the exuberance was gone, leaving nothing but bitter remarks and a haunted look. Rita couldn’t blame her. The mere commute to and from the villa each day was exhausting and nerve-racking for her and Nabil. It was risky, stressful work that they were somewhat imprisoned by, with no other options and an urgent need to squirrel away money so that their families might flee Baghdad if they had to. Although she went out of her way to be nice to Asmaa, it was clear nonetheless that Rita favored Nabil, her daily side-by-side, with a devotion bordering on motherliness.

She sat down before her e-mails, which included a reply from Sami. It read:

My sweet one,

You have to publish this. This is the real story of Iraq that nobody is hearing. Please let the world know. You have a responsibility.

A million kisses to you today for safety and love. I miss you so much I ache.

S.

His “You have a responsibility” irritated her slightly. He’d grown up with French newspapers and didn’t fully understand, or believe in, the concept of unbiased, nonpartisan reporting, as much as she’d tried to explain it to him. He’d say that nothing was purely unbiased, so why even bother trying?

So she wrote back:

Sweetness, that’s not the real story, that’s my drunken rant to you in the middle of the night! Which of course earned me a nasty hangover today and a late start. So many kisses to you too and talk to you soon. B7ebak.

Then she began plowing through her other e-mails, making calls. Her hangover dulled as the hours crept forward. Asmaa gave word that a security detail was bringing by for a lunchtime interview a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, one of the Shiites on the body, which set Umm Nasim to fretting that she had nothing special to serve him beyond the daily lamb, rice, and salad, but then the IGC member sent a deputy instead, a dour young man who merely parroted the CPA-IGC line that everything was proceeding apace for a smooth transition of power from the Americans to the Iraqis come the end of June.

“But so many Iraqis,” began Rita, “are disappointed to see the IGC filled with exiles. Can you really get the trust of the country with so few members who actually went through the Saddam era?”

Nabil translated, and the deputy smiled, as though indulging a child’s grievances, addressing only Nabil and Asmaa as he replied.

“He says that the members of the IGC have the full love and support of the Iraqi people, but they are afraid to say so publicly for fear of revenge from the insurgents,” Nabil said, with a dutiful flatness that almost made Rita crack a smile.

She set to writing up the interview once the deputy had left. It was past four o’clock when she noticed she had an e-mail from Claude, who was sitting across the room, his back to her.

“You better look at this,” read the subject line.

She opened the e-mail. Inside was a link from Fertile Crescent Follies, a blog purportedly written by a twentysomething Baghdadi woman that, every few days, and in bitterly scathing language, gave an unvarnished, Iraqi-civilian’s-eye view of the dysfunction and violence playing out in the country. Launched shortly after the invasion, the blog, which everyone just called FCF, had developed a mass worldwide following and was read obsessively by every foreigner in Iraq.

Speculation as to the true identity of its author had become a bit of a parlor game in the Green Zone, at Al-Rasheed, and in the Standard’s own villa. Some people remarked that the tone seemed just a tad too robotically anti-occupation, too lacking in certain quirky and mundane daily details, for it to be written by a genuine twentysomething Baghdadi Everywoman. Others—including Asmaa—were convinced it was written by a stealth dissenter in the CPA or somewhere else in the occupation universe—a private contractor, perhaps, whose guilt at profiting from the chaos had pushed him or her to publish this anonymous takedown.

Rita, for her part, had sometimes wondered if the author was Asmaa, whose biting humor reminded her of the blog’s.

She clicked open the link. Instantly, she gasped to see a photo of herself alongside the type. She recognized the photo immediately. Sami had snapped it of her—making a silly face as she held a piece of bread with a blob of lebneh on the tip—at a portside café during a day trip to Byblos they’d made in the fall of 2002. Her stomach began churning. The headline read:

DISASTER . . . FAILURE . . . TRAVESTY . . . NIGHTMARE . . . WE FUCKED UP . . . ILL-EQUIPPED IDIOTS . . . WE’RE SO TOXIC”: AN IRAQ WAR REPORTER FROM THE STANDARD FINALLY LOSES IT

A cold dread crept slowly over her entire body, worse than any fear or dread she’d experienced thus far in Iraq. Two thoughts immediately pervaded her. The first was that she could not believe that her own boyfriend had betrayed her. The second was that, drunk and careless, she had brought this on herself. And it was the second that galled her even more than the first. She glanced around the room, terrified. Everyone was working, head down, except Claude, who shot her a pitying, doomsday look. She quickly looked away. Then at the subhead:

In one e-mail to her boyfriend in Beirut, she writes everything she has been holding back in her “balanced” articles from Baghdad. And it’s as bad as you thought.

Now she was hating the blogger as well as Sami and herself.

We were forwarded an e-mail this morning from Sami Haddad, a Palestinian graduate student at the American University of Beirut who is the boyfriend of Rita Khoury, an American reporter for the Standard who has been based here in Baghdad the past year (living out of the Standard’s infamous villa in Mansour, which looks like a mini-Green Zone). Sami wrote to us: “I know I am probably ending my relationship by sending you this—

You got that right, Rita thought bitterly.

but this was simply too important. I know that Rita will feel the same way one day. This is her real report of what’s going on in Iraq, very different from the ‘balanced’ and ‘neutral’ reports she says she has to publish. I simply cannot stand to hear this and to know she is keeping this from the world at large. I even told her so. So, I will pay the consequences of my actions in the interest of a bigger truth.”

Then the blogger continued:

It’s nice to finally hear an American on the ground here admit what a disaster her country has made out of ours! We are just sorry that she thinks the food is so horrible compared with her beloved Lebanon. It’s hard to make world-class cuisine when your homes are being raided and your loved ones don’t make it home from the market with the vegetables because they died in a car bomb. But we certainly hope Miss Rita is back on the beach in Tyre soon, sipping wine and eating her delicious fatteh. Sounds like she might need to find another man to make it for her though.

She felt her face burn red. Claude anxiously glanced her way once again. She then skimmed, in their entirety, the very words she’d pounded out last night in a bourbon haze. True enough, the part she regretted most was having slurred Iraqi food. She could not have come across more like a spoiled American—or, for that matter, Beiruti—if she’d tried.

The account of the White House and the CPA, however, was brutal. Already, she was ticking off the likely chain of consequences. She looked up, stared straight ahead for several seconds, then stood up and walked over to the table where Rick and Asmaa were working. She pulled up a seat.

“I need to interrupt you,” she said quietly. “You need to read the latest post on FCF.”

They both looked up. “Can it wait?” Rick asked.

“No. You’re going to be hearing about it very soon.”

She sat there stoically while Rick and Asmaa read. She examined Asmaa’s face for any indication that she might not be surprised. But all she saw in Asmaa’s eyes was a slowly widening shock as she read.

“Oh shit,” Rick muttered, his eyes tracking back and forth.

Finally, Asmaa looked up, made eye contact with her. Rita wasn’t sure what she saw there. Awe? Respect, perhaps?

“I’m sorry you hate our food so much,” Asmaa said, before getting up and walking into the kitchen.

“I didn’t say that!” Rita called back. Now Nabil raised his head at a nearby table, alert to some sort of conflict.

Rita propped her head on one hand on Rick’s table. “Jesus Christ.”

It was Rick’s turn to meet her gaze. “Jesus Christ is right.” Then, lowering his voice, “Was that the whiskey talking?”

She felt her face burn crimson again, simply closed her eyes, and shook her head.

“Why didn’t you just go to bed?”

“I don’t know!” She felt tears rising and swallowed them back. “I decided to look at my e-mail late last night, and there was an e-mail from Sami saying he missed our life, and I just let loose.”

Rick folded his arms over his chest. “You sure did.”

“Just tell me what to do. Please. I’m totally paralyzed right now.”

“You need to send the link to D. C. and alert them.”

“I’ll do it now. Rick, I’m so sorry.”

He looked at her, shrugged. “I am too. I know where you’re coming from, but you know this is probably uncontainable. You’re shot as an objective observer.”

She closed her eyes again to hold back tears. Mortification seized her every muscle.

Back at her desk, there already was an e-mail from her editor in D. C., complete with the link to the blog post, which had already been forwarded by staffers twice before arriving at him.

“Call me ASAP,” was all it said. It was time-stamped 7:02 a. m. Likely it was the first thing he’d seen upon waking.

Take your punishment, she thought, picking up her sat phone. Get it over with.

“It’s me,” she said, when her editor picked up. “Rita.”

“You did write it?” His voice sounded raspy, as though he were uttering the day’s first words.

“Yep.”

“It’s not a hoax.”

“Nope.”

She heard a pause and a sigh. “This is not good for us, Rita. Not not not not good.” On the final not, she heard the first eruption of anger. Institutional anger. She’d done the unthinkable. She’d shamed the American Standard, exposed the human flaws and passions in its impersonal, impassive editorial machine.

“I know.”

“E-mails and calls are already flooding in.”

“I know. On my end, too, I see now.” Sure enough, they were. “Thank you!” read many of the subject lines. “Truth at last!” And also: “Shame on you—traitor.” And: “So you hate Iraqi food? Poor baby. You can leave that hellhole whenever you want.”

“What would compel you to do this?” her editor asked.

“It was an e-mail to my boyfriend.”

“Yes, but you know the rule about divulging work information and work feelings in any sort of e-mail whatsoever. You never know who’ll turn on you at some point.”

She was silent. If she told him she’d been drinking, she’d doubly seal her fate. He’d likely find out eventually anyway. So, for now, she just said, pushing back hot tears yet again, “I’m sorry. I guess I’ve been here a while and I just cracked.”

There was a pause that she interpreted as sympathetic. “That’s why I kept a private journal during Bosnia,” he finally said.

She said nothing to that.

“Listen,” he continued. “Keep working for the moment. No byline for the next forty-eight to seventy-two. Obviously we have to have an internal discussion.” He paused. “Maybe this will play itself out quickly.”

“I doubt it.”

“I do, too.” A silence. “Listen. Take care of yourselves over there, okay?”

“Yep,” she answered lifelessly.

She hung up, glanced at e-mail, saw Sami’s name. “I’m sorry,” read the subject line.

She clicked it open. “I thought about it a great deal before I did what I did,” was all that the rest of it said.

She hit “reply,” wrote, “Go fuck yourself,” then hit “send.”

In the ensuing hours of her professional purgatory, she watched through the portal of her laptop screen as her leaked meltdown became an international news item and bloggers’ field day, with sentiment seeming to divide fairly evenly between the idea that she was an outspoken hero (to critics of the war and of American foreign policy in general), a traitor (Republican partisans), and a spoiled brat (Iraqis outside the country with strong feelings about their national cuisine). A total of three websites ran posts with recipes for fatteh—“the creamily satisfying Levant-region breakfast bowl of warm chickpeas, yogurt, toasted pita crumbles and pine nuts that Rita Khoury, an Iraq war reporter for the Standard, seems to equate with good sex,” as one put it.

Calls and e-mails came in asking her for comment, but the Standard had instructed her to keep mum, while her editor in D. C. issued a statement attributing her e-mail to the intense stress faced by reporters in Iraq.

When news came in later that day that a car bomb had killed Ezzedine Salim, the erudite Shiite scholar who had been serving as chief of the Iraqi Governing Council, Rita’s dismay was mingled with relief that some of the media attention shifted away from her—and that the fresh disaster gave her work with which to occupy herself. The saddest aspect of the assassination was that everyone had expected it would happen at some point. She huddled with Nabil and her sat phone to try to reach others on the council and within the CPA for comment.

On one call, Nabil announced that he was speaking alongside Rita Khoury from the Standard. A moment passed before he smiled awkwardly and answered, “Yes, yes, she is still.”

Once they’d concluded the interview, she asked him,“What did he say to you at the beginning of the call when you mentioned my name?”

Nabil looked down, awkwardly. “He asked if you were still in your job after the e-mail.”

She shook her head, amazed. “Wow. The head of the IGC gets assassinated, and they still have time to talk about my stupid e-mail.”

“Well, you have to understand something.”

“What?”

“Not one American here has come out and said what you said so strongly—including journalists. And people can believe it because you are from the Standard.”

“But I didn’t write it for publication!”

Nabil raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you sure you didn’t? There is not much you forgot to say in it. It felt to me that you wanted people to read it.”

She paused. She wasn’t always very good at understanding her own intentions—she’d learned that much about herself.

“I was drunk when I wrote it,” she half-whispered to him.

Nabil pursed his lips, seeming to consider this. “It was still very well written,” he finally said.

“I guess I have that to be thankful for.”

“But can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“You really hate Iraqi food?”

She dropped her head into her palm again. “That one line is going to haunt me more than everything else I wrote.”

“But you think Umm Nasim’s food is bad?”

“No, I don’t. It’s good.”

He looked skeptical. “You think it’s good?”

She laughed slightly. “I mean, I think it’s perfectly fine. We’re so lucky to have her. I hope to God she doesn’t find out about that line. I just meant that I missed Beirut, certain restaurants, certain dishes.”

He was looking at her intently now. “Rita,” he began. “Can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“I wish it were two years ago, before the occupation, and I could take you to my family’s favorite place for masgouf on the river. Or I wish I could invite you to our house and you could have my grandmother’s bamia. It is so good, Rita. It is really like tasting heaven. I think you would think differently about our food then.”

He’d never seemed so deadly serious to her. It was more than she could take. She felt her face contort and began weeping, trying to do so silently. She grabbed Nabil’s hand briefly, then hurried to her room, where she smashed her face into her pillow and wept uncontrollably.

It was the first time in Iraq she’d ever wept. The wailing survivors in the streets after the American bomb near Al Saha, sleepwalking through the wreckage; the tense faces of the hundreds of Baghdadis she’d interviewed in market stalls and cafés; the nerve-strafing car rides to get from here to there, day in and day out, Ali a necessary madman at the wheel; the constant ambient rat-tat-tat of Kalashnikovs; the doctors and nurses at the threadbare hospitals after car bombings, walking the halls like ghosts, their smocks and hands covered in blood; the victims dying on gurneys, their limbs gone or their skin shredded by fire or shrapnel; keening mothers and grandmothers in their black shrouds—she’d not cried through any of it.

And Nabil just wanted to turn the clock back two years so he could invite her for his grandmother’s okra stew. For some reason, that had been the remark that had put her over the edge.

By dinnertime, it was clear that the Western blogosphere wasn’t through with her—was, in fact, doubling down. She wasn’t surprised at ten o’clock when she got an e-mail from her editor in D. C. saying, merely,“Call me.”

Here we go, she thought. So she called.

“We’re gonna call you back to Beirut, Rita,” he said immediately. “If you stay in Baghdad, your byline is going to have a slant to it now. We can’t put that genie back in the bottle.”

She snorted aloud. “So Orientalist of you.”

Her editor laughed grudgingly. “You’ve done great work in Iraq under more and more difficult circumstances, Rita. For the better part of a year, which is no small feat. We were probably going to rotate you out after the CPA withdrawal anyway to give you a break.”

“No, you weren’t,” she snapped. “You know that’ll be the most important time of all to be here, to see what really happens.”

“We’ll rotate someone in. Come on, this whole thing happened because you were burned out.”

“Who are you going to rotate in?” She could feel blood pounding angrily in her temples.

“We’re not sure yet. Maybe Marna Gelman in Jerusalem.”

“Marna Gelman? She speaks Hebrew.”

“She’s very steady, Rita.”

This stung her into humiliated silence. Steady, as in, not like her, not a hothead who popped off at the keyboard after too much to drink. Again, her stomach churned at the thought of telling her father she’d been kicked out of Iraq, as much as he’d not wanted her to go in the first place.

“Go back to Beirut and see your friends and take a breath and edit and assign and keep your byline out of the paper for a while.”

She thought of Marna Gelman getting to know Nabil, becoming friends with him, becoming his new Danger Twin. It felt like more than she could bear.

“You know this is unfair,” she said. “The world knows my unvarnished take on this place now. You should let me keep reporting here from that baseline, and let readers judge my fairness.”

“You know it doesn’t work that way here, Rita. Maybe some other outlet that’s not as scrutinized but not here. You broke your vows. You’re not a blank slate anymore.”

“I’m in a unique position now for my stories to get more attention for the Standard than they have before,” she persisted. “Rick can be the impartial voice of the paper, and I can be more freewheeling.”

After a silence, her editor said, “That’s not going to happen right now. I think you should gratefully go back to the Beirut office and lie low for a while.”

Gratefully. She understood exactly what that meant. She was lucky they weren’t firing her outright.

“Lisa will e-mail you tomorrow about a flight, okay?”

Now it was her turn to be silent. She knew what her mother would say right now. A very pointed Go to hell.

“Yep,” she croaked. Then she hung up and just sat there, staring straight ahead. Behind her, on the other side of the room, Rick, Claude, and Ali were watching Seinfeld on satellite—Nabil and Asmaa had gone home—but, she had noticed, they weren’t laughing. They weren’t drinking tonight, either. She knew they’d taken note of her phone conversation, likely knew what it was about. She could not bring herself to turn around, face them, give them the news.

Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up. It was Rick. He sat on the edge of her table, crossed his arms.

“What’s the word?” he asked.

“They’re sending me back to Beirut.” As soon as she said it, her voice broke and tears rose in her eyes, but she quickly squeezed them back. This room, this villa, this makeshift family, the knife-edged trips out of here and just as tensely back again, were almost all she had known for a year. She could not believe she was being banished.

“I lobbied so hard for you to stay, you know,” Rick said. “I told them you were an indispensable part of the team here.”

“So you knew this was going to happen?”

“D. C. called me earlier.”

“I didn’t hear you on that call.”

“It was when you went to lie down for a while.”

“Oh.”

They were both silent briefly. Behind Rick, she saw Claude lower the TV volume, then lumber over her way, with Ali in tow.

“Rick,” she began. “I’m so sorry I let you down.” She swallowed back tears again. “I was so honored to work with you.”

“Listen,” he said. “You told the truth about a horrible situation. There’s no shame in that. You just told it to the wrong person.”

“It was so ill-considered. I’ll kick myself for the rest of my life.”

“No, you won’t. I promise you won’t.”

By now, Claude and Ali were standing alongside Rick. “They’re sending me back to Beirut,” she told them flatly. “In a few days.”

“That is fucking bullshit!” Ali exclaimed. “You just told the truth!”

“It is a thing of American journalists,” Claude said. “They are supposed to be like robots.”

“Does this mean they are going to fire Nabil?” Ali asked.

“They’re gonna send in a replacement for me.” She glanced at Rick. “Maybe Marna Gelman.”

His eyebrows arched upward. “Are you serious?”

“That’s what D. C. said.”

“She speaks Hebrew.”

“That’s what I said.”

The next few days were the worst. There was nothing else for her to do but help out with the reporting as best she could, all the while knowing she’d get no byline, and she’d not even be around to witness the very thing they were reporting on, life in Iraq after the CPA withdrawal. Worse, the generator blew out, and they were without air-conditioning for a full day and night in Baghdad’s 125-degree summer heat, so they resorted to guzzling bottled water and mopping up sweat with endless towels, as it was too dangerous to venture respite on the roof. Their hands were so sweaty they could barely type or scrawl notes; anything other than lying flat on one’s back, perfectly still, was excruciating, and even that was miserable because one’s sweat quickly soaked the sheets and mattress. Rita had no idea how Umm Nasim, whose fleshy face glistened with sweat, continued to wear her polyester abaya, or cook while drinking hot tea, without passing out.

The morning after the call from D. C., when Nabil and Asmaa arrived, Rita began to inform them of her imminent departure.

As soon as she started to speak, they glanced at each other—Rita had long marveled at how they had exactly the same sharply bridged nose and Cupid’s-bow lips—before Asmaa said, “We know already.”

“How?”

They shared another glance, sheepishly. “Ali called us,” said Nabil. “Well, he called Asmaa, and then she called me.”

“Oh.” Of course the Iraqis told one another everything, instantly. This was part of their livelihood, their survival. Iraqis working for foreigners were hustlers; they had to be. Interpreters, fixers, drivers, cooks, and maids secured new bosses for themselves as soon as they got news that a current one was leaving, even if it was weeks or months in advance.

“So I guess you know, Nabil,” she continued, “your job is safe because they’re going to swap me out with someone.”

“Yes, we know,” he answered gravely.

“Marna Gelman from Jerusalem,” said Asmaa.

“You even know that?” Rita had to laugh. “Jeez. Well, yes, probably Marna Gelman, Nabil, who is a real pro and also who won’t give you any guff about tolerating her Arabic because she doesn’t speak a word of it.”

The three of them were silent then, uncomfortable. “But I am still here another two days,” Rita added.

Once again, the cousins exchanged a look. Still in a low voice, Asmaa said, “We don’t really understand why they are sending you away just for telling the truth. There wasn’t one lie in what you wrote.”

“They don’t want the whole picture?” Nabil asked. “You think they are still working with Bush?”

Rita closed her eyes and shook her head. “I broke protocol. We’re not supposed to put our own feelings in writing. I wasn’t careful.”

“But you didn’t write it for everyone to read,” Asmaa said. “You were betrayed.”

The remark might have upset her more if she hadn’t thought she heard just the faintest note of schadenfreude in Asmaa’s voice. Or perhaps she was just imagining it? She really didn’t know anymore. She was exhausted and the dried sweat on her body felt like a rubbery second skin.

“Shit happens!” she answered, with mock cheer, and then stalked into the kitchen, where she sat, arms folded, at the small table.

In a moment, Nabil entered and sat across from her. “That was a very typical remark of Asmaa to make. She is like a sled hammer.”

Rita smiled in spite of herself. “You mean a sledgehammer.”

“A what?”

“A sledgehammer. I know the word you’re referring to. It means a huge, heavy hammer. But the word is sledgehammer, not sled hammer. I don’t even know why, but it is.”

Nabil nodded, mouthing the word. “Okay. Good to know.” They were never offended by each other’s corrections of their English or Arabic. They wanted it that way; they’d worked that out several months ago—at this point, perhaps a hundred stories, dozens of trips, ago.

As though reading her mind, he asked, “Who will help me with words now?”

She shrugged. “Marna Gelman?”

They laughed. She looked at him, shook her head, moved to put her hand on his across the table, thought better of it, then did it anyway. “You have been my number one everything the past year,” she said, her voice hoarsening. “You are so smart, Nabil. You and Asmaa both. You deserve a good life.”

He bowed his head, his eyes welling up. “This was my first real job. Ever. Not for Asmaa, but for me. She got it for me.”

“I know. And I will—” She paused. “Look at me.”

He looked up, embarrassedly blinking away tears.

“I will do anything for you I ever can. I promise. You just have to ask. And you know how to reach me.”

He held her stare for several seconds, then looked down again. “Thank you. I don’t know what will happen here.”

“Nabil.”

“Yes?”

“Are you gay?” She said it almost inaudibly, under her breath.

He did not look up, but she saw his body freeze, saw him suddenly catch and hold his breath.

“I’m asking you,” she continued in a whisper, “because that could help you leave. It could help your case.”

He held his frozen pose for several more seconds. Then he slowly, resolutely, shook his head. “No, I am not. I know what that means, and I am not. I don’t know why you ask me that. I am very offensive.”

She scrutinized him, then slid her hand from his. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked. Truly. Pardon me.”

But she was still leaning toward him, and hence did not notice immediately when Asmaa stepped in, an empty water bottle in her hand.

“Oh,” said Asmaa, startled, stopping. “Am I interrupting something?”

Nabil was still looking down, his cheeks flushing crimson, and it was clear to Rita that Asmaa knew she’d stumbled on an intimacy.

“I was just thanking him,” Rita said crisply, brushing away notes of conspiracy. “I wanted to thank you, too, Asmaa. I couldn’t have made it through the past year without you both.”

Asmaa seemed to be sizing her up. Rita held her stare. She allowed herself to see someone she’d half-willed herself not to fully see those many months. It was a woman not much younger than herself, who even looked somewhat like herself, educated at Iraq’s equivalent of Harvard, smart, ambitious, hardworking—and trapped in a country whose future was currently a vision of hell.

“I’m very grateful for all the work you’ve put in,” she concluded.

Asmaa’s eyes on her hardened. She likely figured she had nothing to lose at this point, thought Rita, who prepared to absorb some sort of rebuke.

But then Asmaa’s face seemed to soften. “Well, what I would like to say to you is something I spent a great deal of time pondering last night.”

Rita nodded, as though to say, Go on.

“It wasn’t fair what I said yesterday,” Asmaa continued. “Everyone has the right to love and to miss the food of her own homeland, and that is not necessarily to malign the food of another culture. So for that I must apologize.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Rita said quickly.

“No!” Asmaa interjected. “Please just hear my apology, and then you choose to accept it or not. I’m sure if I ever will go on a long trip to France or America or Mexico, or wherever I might go, I will reach a point where I miss the food of my own country, just as you or anyone would miss.”

Then Asmaa just stood there, having said her piece.

“I accept your apology,” Rita said.

“Thank you.” Asmaa turned away to the refrigerator, retrieved a new bottle of water. Rita stole a glance at Nabil, who was still looking down into his lap, distracted, frowning.

Finally, the jet she’d connected to in Amman touched down in Beirut. She’d fallen asleep briefly before the descent and now felt somewhat dazed. Such a violent transition in one day, waking up for the last time in the villa, the final work of packing, the bleary-eyed early-morning good-byes to Rick, Claude, Ali, and Umm Nasim, who pressed prayer beads into her hand and kissed her four times on alternating cheeks, the slipping into the opaque-windowed armored SUV they’d hired to speed her to Baghdad Airport, the crawling traffic getting out of Baghdad, then the turn onto the dreaded Airport Road, site extraordinaire of some of the most spectacular car bombings.

The driver, Mahmoud, an extremely fat middle-aged uncle or cousin of Ali’s—she’d not quite discerned which—accelerated, and she gazed, to their left, at the shabby Shi’a district of Amil, where they’d not spent much time. The ubiquitous knot of barefoot or flip-flop-clad little boys, some of them shirtless, kicked around a soccer ball on a flat brown patch of land just off the highway.

She felt not relief that she was leaving the cursed city, but extreme anger with herself that her misstep had thwarted her need to stay here and witness, chronicle, how it would all play out. She’d talked about this with other reporters: you became addicted to the baking dung-colored hell, attached to the stoic fatalism of Iraqis, compelled to share their fate and muddle through and see what would happen. Only now she realized she’d grown to love the ugly, dusty, doomed capital.

* * *

From the airport in Beirut, she took a taxi directly to Salma’s parents’ apartment in Achrafieh. She’d e-mailed Sami telling him to remove himself and everything that might remind her of him from her apartment before she returned, and he’d written back merely a meek, “Of course, chérie,” but, still, the thought of going directly to the apartment was too painful.

In the taxi, she rolled down the window and inhaled moist, sea-salty air, a blessed change from scorchingly dry Baghdad. It was late May, and the weather in Lebanon was balmy and perfect. As they came into the city center, she looked up at a giant billboard for a French tanning lotion featuring a twenty-foot-long bikini-clad beauty with a body not found in nature and the requisite mane of blond hair, and she smiled, slightly happy to be back, for the first time that day.

Salma enfolded Rita in a hug—her parents were at their mountain house, where it was cooler, and she had the sprawling apartment to herself—and took her out onto the terrace, proffering watermelon, jibneh, gin and tonics, and cigarettes.

“I know it’s selfish to say, but I’m so glad you’re back,” Salma said, cooling her forehead with the damp surface of her glass. “I can’t run around anymore with these stupid girls. I want to move to Brooklyn.”

“Don’t move just yet. Please help me segue back into Beirut life. I am so tense, I can’t relax. It doesn’t feel right to be just lounging here on an open roof.”

“Ya haram, you have some PTSD. My mother has it from the war years here. She hears even a little bang, and she has a nervous breakdown. I have all the Ativan you need.”

Rita laughed. Salma’s answer for nearly everything was a pill. “Thank you. It’s so good to be with you again. I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too, chérie. I just wish—” Salma then shook her head, as though to dismiss her thought as pointless, and continued dabbing her forehead with her glass.

“Wish what?”

“No, forget it.”

“No, tell me.”

Salma sighed. “I just wish I had warned you off Sami more strongly. But you were having fun and I didn’t want to spoil it.”

Now it was Rita’s turn to sigh and shrug. “How could you have known he’d do something like what he did?”

“It’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do,” Salma replied sharply. “He’s a lost soul, a poor little rich boy. He has no life, no future, so he spoils it for others because he’s jealous. He was jealous of you.”

Rita considered this, then shook her head slowly. “I dug my own grave. Partly because of this right here.” She pointed at her glass, and they both cracked up laughing.

“Well,” announced Salma, “there’s more of that for you tonight, because I am going to be selfish again and drag you to a poolside party at Sporting that I have to go to because an Italian editor is in town. I can’t bear that bourgeois crowd alone.”

You’re bourgeois!”

“But I’m different.”

Rita shook her head slowly. “I can’t believe you are dragging me to a party my first night out of a war zone.”

Salma cackled. “You’re back in Beirut, baby! Parties and war, it’s all the same to us. Come on, you can wear something of mine.”

The next day, Saturday, Rita dragged Salma to Hamra, for moral support upon entering her apartment, which had last been the site of happy cohabitation. In the lobby, they caught up briefly with Fadi, the concierge, who had been taking care of Joujou, the cat.

“That is disgusting, what he did with your e-mail,” said Fadi.

“He told you?”

“No. It was on Al Jazeera. I jumped up and said to my mother,‘She lives in the building!’”

“You’re famous, chérie,” Salma commented dryly.

The apartment was much as she remembered it. Spotless, thanks to Fadi’s mother. A first look around revealed no traces of Sami, until some emerged: A bright red plastic pasta strainer he’d obviously bought after she’d gone to Iraq. A pack of American Spirits in the top drawer of the desk. A forgotten pair of black Calvin Klein briefs in the bureau. But there was no Joujou. Rita looked everywhere, enlisting Salma as well—under the bed and the couch, in the crevices of the closet, behind the dresser. She became increasingly agitated.

“I told him to leave Joujou for me,” she told Salma. “I paid for him and his food.”

Salma joined her in the bedroom. “SMS him.”

So she did: Where is Joujou?

To her surprise, he texted back immediately: Who took care of Joujou for a year while you were away? Then: Please leave me something.

“I can’t believe him!” Rita exclaimed, enraged, showing Salma the text. “He stole Joujou! He must have slipped in when Fadi wasn’t looking.”

“Oh, sweetie. Let him have the cat.”

“That was my cat!” She was shaking, on the brink of tears.

Salma took her hand. “We’ll get you a new one that’s all yours.”

When she entered the bureau Monday morning, braced to stoically accept whatever anonymous tasks awaited her as she served her tenure without a byline, and feeling surreally as though Iraq had never happened, she was shocked to find her editor from D. C. there, sitting at what once had been her desk, scrolling through his e-mails.

“Charles!” she exclaimed. “You’re in Beirut!” Out of the corners of her eyes, she sensed the other bureau staffers watching her. She’d gritted her teeth on the way in and greeted some of them casually, as though she’d never been away.

“It’s my big surprise treat for the office,” he said. “I flew in Friday.”

“That’s the day I got back in, too.”

“How is it to be out of the ninth circle of hell?”

“It feels very unnatural to be able to just walk the streets. I’m very on edge.”

He nodded. “To be expected. Think of the transition your brain’s going through.”

“I know,” she said dutifully.

An awkward silence ensued. He looked at her . . . what was the word? Ruefully?

“What brings you here?” she finally asked.

He jerked his head toward an empty office, then rose. She followed. He gently closed the door behind them, sat behind the desk, gestured for her to sit in the facing chair.

“I came over for a general check-in,” he began, leaning forward, his hands folded on the desktop. “But I also came to give you some hard news face-to-face.”

She felt the floor drop out of her stomach, her face blanch. “What?” she croaked.

“There have been many, many meetings while you were flying back from Baghdad. And the folks at the tippity top have concluded that you’ve become just too much of a story in and of yourself to play a role in any sort of foreign reporting that’s not going to distract the critics and the Standard haters and keep them all over us, saying our Iraq coverage is biased.”

Her whole body went hot with rage, which she determined to contain. “You’ve already stripped me of my byline for the indefinite future.” She tried to keep her voice even. “Isn’t that enough?”

“Have you read the blogs the past twenty-four to forty-eight?”

“No,” she said coldly. “I tried to give myself a break from the whole thing at least for the weekend. And then I came in here today resolved to take my lumps and be a good editor behind the scenes and a team player. And even to reach out to fucking Marna Gelman for a chat.”

“I know. But the chatter hasn’t stopped. Fox is having a field day. How can we keep you on in any capacity at this point? I mean, that’s the drumbeat.”

She gave an ugly laugh. “You guys are such fucking cowards. Why didn’t you stick up for me when this happened? I was doing good work over there—in hell, as you put it.”

Charles closed his eyes and shook his head.

“But I know why,” she continued. “You were too complaisant with the administration in the beginning, and you got called out on it by the entire world, and now you’re using me as an example to show you’ve reversed course. I’m your scapegoat.”

Charles simply opened his eyes and regarded her helplessly with upraised palms.

She released another sharp laugh. “You’re too afraid even to admit it.”

Charles picked up a pen on the desk and rotated it in his hands, saying nothing.

“So what happens now?”

He signed. “What happens now is, you are suspended pending review. I assume you’ll be bringing the union into it.”

She said nothing. Certainly she would not show him her hand.

“We will cover your flight back to the States. And we’ll also give you a five-hundred-dollar flat sum to put toward any logistics this brings up. Maybe you want to stay in Beirut for a while.”

She leveled a hard stare at him, and he continually glanced away, then back again. “After all the good work I’ve done for you,” she merely said. “One of the youngest foreign correspondents you’ve ever had. Arab American, too.”

He rubbed his right temple. “The Standard’s a tough place, Rita. You’re not the first something like this has happened to.”

“So utterly disposable if we make one false move.”

“You’re going into review. It’s not necessarily over yet.”

She rose. “I assume I work out all the logistics with Lisa.”

Charles nodded.

“I hope you have a great time in Beirut,” she said, finally injecting acid into her voice. Then she picked up her bag, turned, set her face in a mask, opened the office door, and walked through the bureau, neither speaking to nor making eye contact with anyone, until she’d passed through the glass doors and stood at the elevator, her heart pounding, desperately hoping that nobody would rush out to catch her before its doors parted. Nobody did.

Outside, her heart still racing, she simply walked, in a daze, the length of Hamra Street toward the water until she crossed the highway and found herself in front of the shabby seaside amusement park with the Ferris wheel, at the summit of which she’d made out with Sami in their first weeks together, all of nighttime Beirut and the Mediterranean arrayed dizzyingly below them. Adjacent to the park was an equally shabby café, populated at the moment with nothing but dozens of the ugly white plastic chairs she’d once joked to Sami she was certain were spawning through the Middle East, so nearly ubiquitous were they.

She took a seat, ordered an Almaza, fished a cigarette out of her bag, lit it, and stared out at the glittering sea, where hundreds of gulls swooped and cawed in a late-morning frenzy. Mortification—what Arabs called a’ar—began creeping in around her rage. She’d made it to a foreign bureau of essentially the best paper in the world before she was thirty—only to be sent home. All she could think about was what she was going to tell her father.