It seemed that she would leave at any time. For a long time, she stayed here, unruffled, in an eternity that stopped time, with empty eyes. Visibly, she…, she hesitates, well, no, no, she is struggling, she is fighting, a blind combat in slow motion which sometimes looked like a tender dream. A bloody combat though. Sometimes she holds her head in her hands, goes outside for a few minutes, comes back and leaves again. She speaks softly, she stays again silent as she would not want to talk to anyone. She wants to be everywhere but here. She remains. She came to brave: to converse, inside herself, with this obscure necessity of the unbearable confrontation. I had rarely seen a specter so clearly, and then a year later she told me, in the car, after the filming session: “You know, I believe in ghosts.”

She looks at the hook above her bed: it happened there, this is where Saddam’s torturers operated. She was struggling with Abu Ghraib ghosts. This is precisely what it means to be haunted: it sticks to your skin. She finally decides to get inked and lets me witness the rise of the pain on the surface of her flesh.