So the war would go on, but not here. It made us feel disrupted. When I told Cleric J that I had to go to Erbil on some business, he did not protest—even though in his mind the city of Erbil, firmly situated in the sphere of influence of our uncertain allies the Kurds, was an eventual battleground.

I went back to Baghdad and from there flew to Erbil. I took a hotel room and every day for four days visited the coffeehouse at the hour I’d asked the enemy scholar to come. She was a no-show and I’d figured as much.

I drank.

The second day, as I was drinking in the Ankawa District, I saw a Kurd I knew from three years earlier. He had been part of the bodyguard detail of a man I’d tried to name, in a dispatch, the “kindest warlord in all of Iraq.” The Censorship Department in Tehran, naturally, had slashed the entire sentence—in fact, the entire paragraph. The warlord was a brave old rotund Kurd who had fought Saddam to a draw in another lifetime and had had to live with wolves, so he said, in order to do it. This former bodyguard of his was a poet at heart who had been caught too many times writing instead of being alert. The kindly warlord had let him go so he could be a poet instead of a warrior. And now I was seeing him four tables across from me, scribbling away deep in his notebook, the world literally at his fingertips, happy, content in his art at last. I envied him his happiness. And I was not even sure why, besides the drinking, I had come to Erbil at all.

I went back to the hotel and for the very first time tried to look up this enemy scholar online. I hadn’t done that until now because I’d been afraid of what I might find. Maybe I’d find nothing and realize it was all a hoax and that Interrogator H was testing me as usual. But there she was. Smallish and with the graceful face of a reader. Her steel eyes seemingly lit up the camera, her smile intelligent. I did not want her to be my enemy, or anyone else’s enemy. Why had she not written back? What were we to each other but two people riveted by the same universe?