Abdul Amir lurched from the couch and lumbered past her. She followed him down the hall and into the bedroom. He threw a checked shirt over his singlet and scowled at his master’s in finance diploma hanging in a frame on the wall. After ten years of sanctions, the economy was almost dead. No one needed an analyst like him to check its pulse. Like Iraq itself, Abdul Amir’s pride had taken so many hits, Huda feared it might never recover.

He swapped his pajama pants for trousers and stomped back to the living room.

“These foreigners only want to destroy our country.”

“That’s not true.” Huda pursed her lips in irritation. Of course, she’d thought twice about working at the embassy. Anyone even remotely connected with foreigners, especially Westerners, drew the suspicion of the mukhabarat. A case of the pox was more welcome than that. But what was she supposed to do?

Abdul Amir’s company wasn’t the only business to close its doors. Huda’s previous employer, an agricultural import-export company, had resorted to paying her with sacks of almonds or pistachios from shipments abandoned in their warehouse. Unfortunately, Huda couldn’t pay her bills with rancid nuts. Then a cousin who worked as a driver at the German embassy called. He’d heard through the gossipy driver grapevine that the Australians down the road needed a secretary with good English and typing speed of eighty words per minute. When he mentioned the salary, Huda’s eyes bulged. She’d swallowed her reservations about working with foreigners. Not only would this cover their debts, the salary was more than her and Abdul Amir’s former paychecks combined.

“The staff at the embassy are nice people,” she scolded Abdul Amir. “They’re ordinary people. Like us.”

“Everyone knows, Australia is nothing but America’s obedient lapdog.”

“You can’t judge people by the actions of their—” Huda broke off as the six o’clock anthem blared from the television. The president rode across the screen in an army jeep. Abdul Amir grabbed the remote and flicked to the next channel. From a gilded balcony, the president saluted a battalion of goose-stepping troops. He growled and tossed the remote back onto the couch.

“I fear that people will question your loyalty.” His words were barely audible above the television, but like most sensible people, they’d long ago grown accustomed to reading lips, filling in blanks, talking in code.

“I love my country,” whispered Huda. “You know that.”

“It is not what I know that matters,” he muttered. “I’m going to the coffee shop.”

“What about dinner?”

He had shrugged, grabbed his car keys, and stormed off, leaving her to seek comfort in a box of nougat, unaware that the mukhabarat were about to descend upon their home.

* * *