Khazaria will rise again. Today, I threw the plastic replica of my own head (with the bullet-hole between the eyes) down the incinerator, along with the meager belongings of the deceased look-a-like actor I paid to play my fiancé, Tarkhan. I found myself this evening in new millennium Baghdad, but it was not the Baghdad I had many times rode across, when the reign of Haroun-Ar Rashid ended. Baghdad is where I became a relic, and I must repair and restore righteousness to be able to use again the secrets of Weasel cave, my time-travel fortress, far away in the Caucasus. Soldiers strolled below my high-rise apartment window, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I had the Kalashnikov trained on a group of teenage women, below as they rocked their baby carriages. The last recalcitrant rays of August sunlight washed Baghdad's crowded streets. A caravan of military tanks slid over a few feet between the Mountain of the Two Horns, a yellow barren stone and stopped beside the Tigris. My fiancé Dr. Tarkhan, no longer a medieval Khazar baghatur (warrior) this year posed as an American pathologist. The new controller, the man who sat second in line to the power in Iraq, stood near his car and dabbed at the tears in his eyes. “What this country needs is a righteous and tolerant woman for president,” I whispered to Tarkhan. “It’s a long way back to my ninth-century homeland.”… (more)