“A passport for her son and an exit visa. She thinks the opposition can get it for her.”

“What opposition?” spluttered Basil.

“You can’t have lost all of your contacts. There must be someone.”

“Who? Tell me, who?” Basil threw his hands toward the sky. “Rami was killed. Raed was executed. Sami and Kareem fled and never came back. Naseem disappeared in Abu Ghraib.”

He drooped like a marionette with severed strings.

“If your friend thinks the opposition can save her, she’s living in a fantasy.”

“If we don’t give her what she asks, both of us will suffer.”

Basil’s eyes snapped toward her.

“What do you mean, both of us?”

“You know the mukhabarat and the lengths they go to.” Rania dug her fingers into her scalp but that wasn’t enough to banish the visions of power tools, branding irons, and fizzing electrical cables.

“Forgive me,” she whispered. “I lack the strength of a martyr; I don’t have the courage of Imam Husayn. I wish it weren’t so, but I know in the end the mukhabarat would find a way to break me. And then I’d have to give them names.”

The wind dragged a tear across her cheek.

“I’m sorry, Basil, but if you don’t help me, one of those names will be yours.”

* * *

On the way back from Basil’s farm, on the highway between Ramadi and Fallujah, a road train appeared in Rania’s rearview mirror. She watched it grow: an oil-stained truck dragging two grimy trailers. She steered her shuddering Volvo toward the edge of the blacktop. Burnt-out cars sprawled on the shoulder of the desert, their twisted chassis like dinosaur skeletons protruding from an archaeological dig.

The road-train soon caught the old Volvo and pulled out to overtake. As Rania battled the pull of its slipstream, her muscles knotted all the way up her spine. Yet even when the tanker sped on ahead, Rania remained hunched over the wheel, shoulders aching, while shrapnel from her past exploded all around. She wondered, Was Basil still out by the grape arbor, cursing her name? Or was he already seeking out his long lost contacts in the opposition?

Rania rolled her aching neck from side to side but her muscles stayed tight as a bow. Dead men’s faces flashed before her eyes. She tried to empty her mind, told herself that mourning the past was a luxury she couldn’t afford. A poisonous treat. When another road train appeared in her rearview mirror, she was glad for the distraction.