An Uncertain Dawn On a Scarred Street

At the time, Amal shook her head. "I don't know what to say," she confessed.

Another year on, though, Amal was no longer the young girl who parroted the hollow slogans of Hussein's state and, as it crumbled, directed prayers to God. She no longer deferred to her sisters, formulating her tentative opinions but often too shy to deliver them. The conflict around her had become more than a simple struggle to survive. Karima, her mother, now listened to her, as did her sisters. They might disagree with her, but they witnessed in Amal liberation measured in the most personal of terms: She saw for herself.

"All the government officials say, 'What do I want,' " her sister Fatima said one afternoon in August. "They don't care about the people. They don't care about the nation."

Amal interrupted her. "I feel like it's going to change," she countered.

The girls sat together in the apartment, where iconography had proliferated over the months. More posters had gone up of Shiite saints, placid portraits. A blue porcelain plate still hung. "God," it read simply. The electricity was on, and the dank stairwell was lit. Inside, enough sun filtered through the window, and the girls left the lights off.

"The intervention of the Americans in Iraq has brought about the biggest revolution the world has ever seen," Amal insisted.

"It's an occupation," her older sister answered.

"Did the Americans change the regime or not?" Amal said.

She was speaking neither in support nor opposition; she was simply reflecting fact. She didn't try to reconcile contradictions; she understood there were ambiguities.

"It's an occupation," Fatima answered again. "When the Americans move, we have to stop in the streets. We have to pull over. If we don't stop, they'll hit us. It's our country. Why do we have to stop for them? We should be giving the orders."

"It's going to get better and better," Amal countered confidently. "This is just my opinion," she said, "and I'll say my opinion freely."

"The people who died, did it get better for them?" Fatima asked, a little frustrated.

Amal turned her palms up and smiled.

She talked about the insurgency. Guerrillas fighting American troops in the western province of Anbar were honorable, she said. "I respect them, but it's not resistance to kill someone working for the Americans. That's not what we call resistance."

"The American presence has positives and negatives, but it was a revolution," she said. Amal pointed her finger at her older sister. "It changed the regime. We don't say it's all good now. We don't say it's all positive. But we hope, we hope."

Occasionally in her diary and more often in conversations, Amal speaks of what she calls the contradiction -- pessimism and hope, sentiments seemingly irreconcilable.

In that contradiction is perhaps one of the truths of her city: Baghdad, its residents often say, deserves better, and they mourn the perpetual loss of the most fabled Arab capital. Resilience, a truly Iraqi quality in its defiance, somehow propels it forward.

"There's no answer to our problems. If you look for one, there is none," Amal said. Her family had turned quiet, listening. "The situation is bad. It's true, it's really bad. It's true that every day is worse than the one before. But we don't ever want to be hopeless.

"I always want to leave something for tomorrow," she went on. "The sun will set today, but it always rises again. Everything rises again. Even without life, there is hope."

She stopped for a moment and smiled at the attention the others were paying her.

"I don't know how to express it," she said softly, "but I understand it."