Before I headed for Baghdad my wife handed me a scrap of paper.
'Shari-al-Emiraat - Emirates Street,' Zina had scrawled on it. Followed by a cryptic number. '4-2-3'.
Underneath, she had added some helpful detail.
'Big green gate. White house with a high wall. Near the old ministry of oil, behind the Mansour race track'.
This was the road map to my wife's past life.
She had lived in the villa on Emirates Street in Baghdad until she was 14 years old, until her father was taken away - never to return - by Saddam's Baath party thugs, until the rest of her family was forced into permanent exile.
Emirates Street was the place where she took her first steps, learned to ride her bike. It was the roof she used to sleep on in the crushing heat of summer, just her and the housekeeper, forsaking the electric fans inside for the soft breeze of the Baghdad night.
At first it seemed easy, this journey into Zina's past.
I jumped into my air-conditioned car with Saad one of the BBC's local fixers. Within minutes we had crossed the Tigris and passed the blackened shells of Saddam's ministries of fear: interior, information and internal security.
Finding the house
We were in Mansour - comfortable, middle-class Mansour and we followed an armoured American humvee right into Emirates Street. A soldier was perched upright in the back of the vehicle, his bronzed arms cradling a machine gun, his pose a curious mix of indolence and menace.
We stopped close to a small office block that used to be the ministry of oil - yes, we had found a crucial landmark. But quickly my confidence turned to frustration.
Baghdad's street numbers had been completely overhauled in the past two decades. Zina's address meant nothing to the bewildered people I approached on Emirates Street.
Forty-five minutes later, I called Zina on my satellite phone. Inevitably, we managed to have a row about her directions.
"
Your the husband of little Zina, thanks be to God, thanks be to God.
"
Abu Majid
"It doesn't make sense," I said. "The race track's on the wrong side of the road and, besides, you've got to be more specific about the height of this wall of yours."
"For God's sake, I was 14 years old," she shouted from Brussels. "All I know is that when I left, the wall was higher than me."
Saad and I were about to give up when we saw a man - he looked about 50 - sweeping weeks of uncollected garbage from his front gate. I described the house one more time and gave him my wife's father's name.
"What did he do?" the man asked.
"He owned a factory which made heaters," I said.
There was a pause. "Come with me," he muttered.
Down a small side street, then a right turn and finally we found it. The gate was no longer green, the wall wasn't so high, but I knew this was it. There were two slender, strikingly tall date palms close to the house. I had seen them before, in a dozen fading family photographs.
Reclaiming the past
We walked into the garden. It was overgrown, and yellowing grass came up to my thigh. The house looked dilapidated but it was intact. No bomb damage, no sign of looting. And, there was something else, a line of washing on the roof, flapping in the hot wind.
I knocked. For a long time there was no answer, then a fumbling at the metal door and an old man in a grubby dishdasha robe appeared.
Saad helped to explain who I was, why I was here. The old man, whose eyes were cloudy and whose chin was covered in grey stubble, suddenly grabbed me, hugged me tight and kissed me so vigorously I thought my cheeks would bleed.
His name was Abu Majid. For years, he'd been guarding the house, he said, paid by the al-Addin company which my father-in-law used to run.
"You're the husband of little Zina," he murmured, now holding my hand. "Thanks be to God, thanks be to God."
One day soon, I will come back to Baghdad with Zina and with our three children who never knew their grandfather, and who, for now, know nothing of his country.
We'll go to Emirates Street, drink sweet tea with Abu Majid and begin to reclaim a past confiscated by Saddam Hussein.
And we won't be alone. There are countless thousands of Iraqis who suffered grievously at the hands of his Baath regime. In the past two weeks, I have seen them weep bitter tears by the side of the mass graves.
But, amid the anguish and the misery, I've seen something else too. A deep-seated desire to learn the lessons of the recent past - to build an Iraq more humane, more democratic.
The country's future course can't be dictated by Washington, or by the United Nations - it will be settled from within, by the people who outlasted Saddam.
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