At the bakery near Forest Street—a tree-lined promenade that ran beside the Tigris in eastern Mosul—I had claimed to work. I did not bake. The owner was a man I paid for the arrangement—not a friend, not a relative, a man I had known before the fall [of the city to ISIS] who was willing to accept the risk for money. The bakery was a small space, low-ceilinged, with a clay oven set into the wall and flour dust on every surface that light could reach. People entered, waited, spoke to each other and to whoever stood behind the counter while the bread was prepared. The conversations were not directed at me. They were the ordinary speech of a neighborhood conducting its morning business complaints about prices, questions about which streets were passable, the particular silence that fell over the room whenever a man in ISIS dress walked past the open doorway. What I heard was not intelligence in the formal sense. It was the sound of a city thinking aloud in the one register it still trusted: the brief, careful, elliptical speech of people buying bread from a man they recognized.
[…]
The bread came out in the early heat. The smell of it—the yeast, the char from the oven’s lip, the particular warmth of flour and water transformed—filled the small space and drifted into the street. People entered that smell and relaxed inside it, because bread is older than any regime and the body responds to it before the mind can intervene. That is what [gathering] intelligence looked like at the bakery: not a secret passed in a whisper, but the shape of what people could not say pressing against the shape of what they did say. The smell of bread was the last neutral thing in the city.