She sucked on her cigarette and thought of the book merchant stroking his pudgy fingers over the last vestiges of her father’s library. She glanced at her empty bag and winced. When she had handed the final book over, the calfskin binding had felt as warm as her own flesh.

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3

The window behind Ally’s desk squealed as she pried it open, startling a trio of pigeons from the palm tree in her courtyard. In a flurry of wings, they flapped toward a traffic circle dominated by a hand-painted billboard of Saddam Hussein chatting on an old-fashioned rotary telephone. With rosy cheeks and a twinkle in his eye, he looked like a kindly uncle catching up with his favorite nephew. More likely, Ally thought, he was ordering someone’s execution.

Ally hoped the squawking birds might pause, perch on the billboard, and deposit a few pasty droppings on the dictator’s mustache. The birds knew better. They flew on through the bright blue sky, past tall gates and squat, sand-colored shops, in the direction of the Tigris River. As Ally eyed the billboard, a familiar clang-clink-clang drifted through the bars on the window. It was the neighborhood gas vendor—a skinny boy, about ten years old—beating a scrap of pipe against one of the gas canisters stacked in his sea-blue donkey cart. He followed this route every morning, banging out a melody to advertise his wares. In the past month Ally had learned his tune by heart.

When the peals faded, Ally sat down at the desk and picked up a yellowed postcard of Mutanabbi book market. On the back, a scrawl of faded ink told of parties and picnics by the river. There was a joke about a humorless boss, a pledge to write again soon, and three kisses marked XXX. Like the gas vendor’s tune, Ally knew it by heart. It was written by her mother, Bridget, on June 12, 1970, and addressed to her father, Robert. Ally wondered, Did she already suspect her pen pal would one day become her husband?

Back then, Western nurses like her mom were paid handsomely to work in Baghdad. Inevitably some found the heat, and their homesickness, too much to bear. Not Bridget. Who would have guessed that Baghdad possesses the world’s biggest, bluest, most flawless sky? It’s paradise!

Ally liked to picture her mom as a female Marco Polo, adventuring in foreign lands. But cancer claimed Bridget early, before she could share her daring exploits with her daughter. Those untold stories had gnawed a hungry hole in Ally. She raised her eyes to the enormous expanse of forget-me-not blue outside her window and imagined her mother doing the same. For a fleeting moment, she could almost understand how someone might mistake that sky for paradise.