We were late arriving in Damascus, though I can’t remember exactly why. There was traffic coming out of Aleppo, or perhaps we got lost in Damascus, or perhaps the stop for strong, bitter coffee along the way—our driver’s eyes kept fluttering closed—took longer than it should have. In any case, our group of seven American poets, novelists, and journalists was well behind schedule, and there was nothing we could do about it. We drove: desert, scrub-brush hills, then Damascus, a city, with all the requisite noise and chaos. Our two guides, the preternaturally calm Hassan, a teacher, and Fatih, a pharmacist with reddish-brown hair and a broad, welcoming smile, were both from Aleppo, and they didn’t know their way around. It was such a helpless feeling: any corner might represent the correct turn, or the absolute wrong one, and we had no way of knowing the difference. There were no street signs we Americans could read and no one we could ask; between the seven of us, we spoke maybe a half-dozen words of Arabic, and none had ever been to Syria.

We finally made it to the University of Damascus and were wandering around the campus, looking for the right classroom, when some students recognized us—not as individuals, naturally, but as foreigners, likely Americans, possibly the writers they’d been told would be arriving that day. They’d been looking forward to our lecture. They led us to the right building and into a classroom, where we found a handful of students waiting patiently. Everything about it was strange—the harried morning leaving Aleppo, the long meandering drive, the teeming streets of Damascus, even the limpid quality of the sunlight in Syria, golden, unlike any I’d ever seen. Like my colleagues, I was still trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing here. Another class was about to get started, and so a brief discussion began around us, Fatih and Hassan explaining our situation, apologizing for our tardiness, while some of us milled about, trying to appear professional. Eventually, the professor ceded us the floor, and just like that we had a classroom to ourselves, just us and the students.

The next four hours will rank, I’m certain, among the most moving experiences of my life. We sat on a raised stage in a large lecture room, as the wine-red desks gradually filled. Eventually, there were about seventy students, an even mix of men and women, though many faces changed in the course of the afternoon. Students filed in and out, or clustered at the door, peeking in at the American writers. Each of us read—poems, fragments of stories—and they listened very politely, and then they spared us nothing. Your stories are very nice, they said, but why are you here? How do you explain what the US has done? Why was Bush reelected? What if your brother were asked to bomb us? What did Islam do to you? We’re scared, they said. We’re nervous. My brother and sister are dying. Israel will attack us. America will attack us. This university won’t exist. This city. We’ll be dead. I once lived in Baghdad, and I know I’ll never go back. There are refugees everywhere, even in this room, and we don’t know what the future holds. So tell us, who has power in your country? And why should we believe you? Who let the war happen?

It went on like this for hours.

Finally we left the classroom, and the conversation simply moved with us into the hallway. Women and men, politics and religion—the students wanted us to hear all of it. Students clustered around us, each eager to share his or her opinion, to clarify something that had been said, or to expand upon it. It was impossible not to be impressed by their openness, their excitement and eagerness to share. One young man—a boy, really—brought up women drivers, a relatively new development in Syria, which he considered dangerous, and it was amazing to watch his female classmates pounce on him. These women were fiercely intelligent, and they made mincemeat of that poor boy. He shrank away, and the conversation turned once again: 9/11, Israel, the troubling weight of history, and the war, the war, the war. By the end, I was exhausted. We all were. Our trip had only just begun, and already it felt like we’d been gone for weeks. That night I fell ill and nearly threw up in front of the Minister of Education.