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to the Uzbek leader Abdel Rashid Dostom. Then he talked about the civil war, the warlords and the militarization of the country. He was alwaysthere, and seen everything, and he’d occasionally carried out tasks and missions beyond his duties as a journalist.
    He sometimes oversimplified things, but at other times told us secrets we knew nothing about. His analyses had a tone that was neither journalistic nor scientific.
    He spoke very simply but analyzed matters with remarkable accuracy. When he talked about himself, however, it was with a tediously self-congratulatory manner. Nancy must have told him my opinion of him, and he tried that day to present an image of himself that was different from the one we all had of him. It must have pleased Nancy to prove to me that what little I knew about him was nonsense and that he had other, unusual talents that I’d never suspected. At any rate, it was the first time I’d been able to put up with this pompous journalist among whose personalities I was lost, one of which I admired, and the other that I utterly detested.
    But who was he?
    He spoke that day about his memories and the reports he’d published in foreign newspapers. It was a funny coincidence that he’d also worked in advertising, writing commercials for Mexican rice, swimming pools and saunas in five-star hotels. He talked of services during the tourist season, of swimming pools and fishing tackle. He’d worked for a while making kids’ cartoons. Perhaps this was the reason, he said, that he became so popular with children. This was before he started writing articles for a number of Arabic and foreign newspapers, and before moving on to work for well-known television channels. But all his writing was done under a pseudonym. I discovered that there was something else we had in common. Faris Hassan also wanted to write a novel. At least he regarded himself more as a writer than a journalist. Thiswas a common feature of many journalists, who viewed writers as having a higher status than journalists.
    ‘You probably hold the common view that a writer is superior to a journalist,’ I said, without mentioning anything about myself. At least I didn’t tell him that it was my own point of view as well. He didn’t try to defend this claim but treated it as an indisputable fact, something to be taken for granted. He told me only that the main reason he’d gone into journalism was because he wanted to make a living from a job in some way connected with writing. He wanted to earn from his writing, regardless of genre. He also said that journalism gave him the ‘editorial skills’ that were so necessary for writing a major novel. It was the first time, I felt, that he’d spoken realistically, in a graphic, down-to-earth way. He talked with a great deal of sarcastic humour, which was reinforced by his despair. The conversation brought me closer to him, a person for whom I had earlier felt nothing but utter contempt.
    The following day, we all had a business meeting at the Canvass restaurant on Jabal al-Weibdeh. This was a classy place that journalists avoided like the plague because of its exorbitant prices. Nancy called it ‘the Guillotine’ and its waiters the ‘executioners’. We sat in the garden outside, drinking wine and eating grilled fish, while we discussed all aspects of the situation. At this point I should mention that our information on Kamal Medhat was very sparse. None of us knew much about the man. At the beginning, our discussion of him was sterile and hesitant, as if wading through a swamp. Nancy would talk and fall silent because of the yellow pollen falling from the blossoming trees, which clung to her eyebrows and lashes. She’d wipe her lashes with a paper tissueand look expectantly at us. Faris Hassan wiped his own face as though he’d just stepped out of a pool. With an unexpected jerk of his tall, lanky body Faris then said, ‘Let’s go straight to Baghdad.’
    We moved on to the Negresco.