Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  Our mother’s tendency to mythologize our childhoods would have you believe that Sami, who had never touched a musical instrument before, sat down at that piano for the first time and was rolling out bagatelles by sundown. I don’t think it was quite like this. A more accurate version surely begins with a fact that has long confounded my parents, and me to a degree as well, and that is that my brother did not like living in America. Almost from the beginning he complained of missing his Baghdadi friends and pointedly lagged behind in school, although he was no less clever than his classmates and had spoken English as well as Arabic since he was three. At home, he became mopey and shiftless, getting off the sofa only for meals or to smoke marijuana in the basketball courts in the park with a Trinidadian girl who lived behind the synagogue on the next block. Then one afternoon Shabboot, who’d come upstairs to address a glitch in the plumbing, lingered over the Weser Bros. long enough to pluck out the opening measures of Bohemian Rhapsody and Sami got up from the sofa and asked him to do it again. Half an hour later the drainpipe in the kitchen was still leaking and Sami and Shabboot were sitting hip to hip at the piano, Sami chewing his lip and Shabboot humming corrections, rearranging Sami’s fingers, and jabbing indignantly at the keyboard’s sticky middle D. This is how one would find them nearly every Wednesday afternoon thereafter: in summer silhouetted against the terrace, in winter with mugs of tea steaming up the mottled mirror. In theory, there was no practicing allowed after ten thirty at night, but often Sami would wait until all was dark at the other end of the apartment and then resume his playing with one foot on the damper pedal and his head cocked so low to the keyboard you’d think his ear could vacuum up the sound. Of course, one can play a piano only so quietly. About as well as you can whisper a tune. But no one dared discourage my brother; he was unhappy and my parents blamed themselves. At least when he was playing the piano he was not shiftless.

  Nor was he ambitious, in any conventional sense. He did not give recitals. He did not perform. For Sami, the aim in playing was simply to play: to match finger to key, one after the other or in their cherrylike clusters, and to enjoy the result as one enjoys listening to a story unfold. In his tiny bedroom that was more a corridor than a destination, my brother hunched over his piano with something like the charged necessity that grips chain smokers, or binge eaters, or people who bounce their knees. Maybe it absorbed a nervous energy. Maybe it blunted a pain; I don’t know. It could even seem wasteful, the way he went through sheet music, rarely playing a piece more than twice in favor of moving on: to another sonata, another concerto, another mazurka, nocturne, or waltz. As though their notes were part of an infinite current and Sami the copper wire through which they wanted to flow. Of course, every now and again he would stumble over a difficult passage and back up to play it again, but this was rarer than you’d expect. And never, not once—I cannot even imagine it—did he growl or drive his fists into the keys with impatience. I have always envied my brother his affair with that piano. You can tell when someone is unbedeviled by time.

  WHEN I’D SAT HOLDING my half sheet of paper for a full forty minutes more I stood up and asked the woman in the lavender hijab whether I might be allowed to make a call.

  Who’s dealing with you?

  I didn’t catch her name. She has blond hair, down to here. . . .

  Denise. Let me see if I can find her.

  My seat was still warm.

  I had some extracurricular reading on post-Keynesian price theory with me, but instead of opening it I was watching the other arrivals as they reached the end of the metal maze. A man wearing a turban and a badge on a ribbon around his neck stood at the terminus and directed each new group or solitary traveler to a desk. People shuffled forward in suits and saris, stilettos and sweatpants, pushing strollers or carrying neck pillows or briefcases or teddy bears or shopping bags festooned with two-dimensional bows and holly. Sometimes only one passport would be stamped; other times you heard two or three or four stamped in quick succession—like library books, once upon a time. And the overall rhythm of people advancing and stamps stamping had a kind of prolonged regularity to it, like a jazz improvisation that, for all its deviations, never loses its beat.

  Then a small, unaccompanied woman failed to move on. She had dark shoulder-length hair and stood at the desk she’d been shunted to shyly, as though trying to become invisible. She nodded at everything the immigration officer said. She nodded even when it looked from the officer’s face that maybe she had not understood the question. She did not have any luggage with her, only a small satin-embroidered purse that she held with both hands in front of her hips like a fig leaf. The officer frowned at her kindly, but also intently, as if he were trying to prop her up with his eyes.

  When the officer handed the girl a half sheet of paper like mine the girl turned around to sit down and I saw that she was Chinese.

  Not five minutes later her officer returned. It piqued me that this should happen so quickly, while my own officer took her time.

  To a second officer the first officer said: Tell her that you are here to translate.

  The translator tugged up her trousers and crouched down to speak to the girl in short twanging sounds that to my ears could have been the same language played backward. The girl nodded.

  Tell her that she’s not in trouble, we’re just concerned about her welfare and need to ask her some additional questions before we can let her through.

  Again the second officer spoke and the girl nodded.

  What is the name of her school here in the UK?

  The girl took a piece of paper out of her purse.

  Pointing, the first officer said: Whose number is this?

  Her professor’s.

  Who is her professor?

  ‘Professor Ken.’

  Professor Ken helped her arrange this visa?

  Yes.

  But she doesn’t know the name of Professor Ken’s school?

  ‘Ken School.’

  How long is she planning on staying?

  Six months.

  Does she have a return flight?

  No, but she’ll buy one.

  Where will she live?

  Professor Ken has a house.

  Where?

  She doesn’t know.

  How much money does she have?

  Professor Ken has given her a scholarship.

  Do her parents know she’s here?

  The girl nodded.

  Does she have a phone number for them? A number we could call?

  The girl produced a pink Nokia and showed it to the second officer, who wrote something down.

  Tell her she’s not in trouble; we’re just concerned that she seems to be here without a place to stay and hardly any English skills.

  When the second officer had translated, the girl spoke at length for the first time, in a high-pitched rush that seemed to strain against panic. Then abruptly she stopped talking and both officers looked uncertain as to whether she was done.

  She says she’s here to learn English, the second officer said. Her family knows she’s here. She got a scholarship from Professor Ken, who arranged for the visa, and when she’s collected her luggage she’s supposed to call this number and Professor Ken will come and pick her up.

  The first officer frowned. Tell her she’s going to be waiting here just a little bit longer. Tell her she has nothing to worry about. Tell her she’s not in trouble. It’s just that we’re concerned for her safety and need to make some general inquiries. We need to ensure she’s in good hands.

  When the second officer had translated this, the girl sniffed.

  Tell her she’s not in trouble, the first officer said again, more kindly than before, but this time the girl, still sniffling, did not seem to hear.

  ACCORDING TO CALVIN COOLIDGE, economy is the only method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow. Whatever else you think about Coolidge, the statement does seem more or less correct, and when I came across it for the
first time shortly after starting graduate school I thought: At last, I’m pursuing a profession befitting of my neuroses.

  This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now. Later in the day. Later in the week. Later in a life starting to look like a series of activities designed to make me feel good later, but not now. Knowing I’ll feel good later makes me feel good enough now. Calvin Coolidge would approve, but according to my mother there is another term for such super-modulated living, and it translates roughly into not being able to live like a dog.

  You would be happier, she has been heard to say, if you were more like your brother. Sami lives in the moment, like a dog.

  For the record, my brother’s name means high, lofty, or elevated—not traits you’d readily associate with an animal that sniffs assholes and shits in plain sight. But I suppose my parents could not have predicted his canine spontaneity when they named him; nor could they have known that the one they named making a home would grow up to have nothing in his refrigerator but seven packets of soy sauce and an expired carton of eggs.

  In December of 1988, on the flight to Baghdad from Amman, our parents forbade us from bringing up two subjects with our Iraqi interlocutors: Saddam Hussein and Sami’s piano, never mind the ten years of music lessons he’d taken from our homosexual landlord downstairs. At any rate, what most of my aunts and uncles wanted to discuss around my grandmother’s kitchen table was the exotic extent of my Americanness: my Brooklyn accent, my Don Mattingly jersey, my pristine navy-blue passport and my embossed City of New York Certification of Birth. This last, of course, meant that I would be entitled to run for the American presidency one day, and while Sami and I practiced juggling oranges with our cousins in the back garden our elder relatives discussed this prospect with all the sobriety and momentousness of a G7 convention. President Jaafari. President Amar Ala Jaafari. President Barack Hussein Obama. I suppose one does not sound so very much more unlikely than the other. And yet, at twelve years old, I knew perfectly well that my parents’ truer hope was that I too would do as they had done, and as my brother looked all but certain to do, and that was to become a doctor. A doctor is respected. A doctor is never out of work. Being a doctor opens doors. Economics my parents also consider respectable, but reliable? No. Ungraspable (my father’s word). And even if one is more likely to ascend to the office of the presidency with a doctorate in economics than with a medical degree under his belt, my mother no longer mentions my eligibility these days, maybe because she thinks the position does not befit a man largely incapable of escaping, except infrequently and accidentally, a consciousness trained on how every action undertaken is later going to make him feel.

  On Christmas, my uncle Zaid and aunt Alia came over with their four girls, who, lined up in their matching red hijabs, looked like a set of Russian dolls. Ten years earlier, the oldest, Rania, had held my diapered bottom in her lap and fed me one by one the rubylike seeds of a pomegranate. She was older now, too pretty to look at directly, as one strains to look at the sun. On entering the kitchen she went straight over to my brother and said: BeAmrika el dunya maqluba! Amrika is America. Maqluba means upside down, and for this reason is also the name of a meat-and-rice dish that’s baked in a pan and upended before serving. El dunya maqluba means the world is upside down, an expression typically employed to describe people or places in a state of high excitement verging on mayhem. My brother laughed. America on Christmas indeed. The world is upside down in America today!: what it brought to mind was one of those illustrations of world peace, or harmony in spite of diversity—people with different-colored faces holding hands like a chain of paper dolls stretching all the way around the world. Only in this instance for once the ones standing on America were the ones with the blood going to their heads.

  According to modern cartography, the antipode of my bedroom in Bay Ridge is a wave in the Indian Ocean, several miles southwest of Perth. But to a twelve-year-old boy traveling abroad for the first time since he was a toddler, it might as well have been my bedroom in my grandparents’ house in Hayy al-Jihad. I shared this room with three other cousins whose parents had emigrated soon after their children were born. (My father and Zaid were the oldest of twelve siblings, five of whom have left Iraq; four remain and three are dead.) To listen to us boys as we lay in our bunks and complained about what we were missing back home was to think we were high-rolling lady-killers serving ten years’ hard time. Ali and Sabah, who lived in London, worried that their girlfriends would be usurped by men of legal driving age. Hussein, who lived in Columbus, was tormented over not being able to watch the Bengals play the 49ers in the Super Bowl, the result of which it would take us ten days to learn. (The Bengals lost.) Today, you could stand in Firdos Square and Google how the Bengals or the 49ers or the Red Sox or the Yankees or Manchester United or the Mongolia Blue Wolves are doing right now; you could check out the temperature in Bay Ridge or Helsinki; you could find out when the tide will next be high in Santa Monica or Swaziland, or when the sun is due to set on Poggibonsi. There is always something happening, always something to be apprised of, never enough hours to feel sufficiently apprised. Certainly not if you are also nursing some nobler ambition. Twenty years ago, however, in incommunicado Baghdad, time crept.

  I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom. Whatever my deficiencies in the first three areas, I enjoyed such an abundance of the fourth that winter in Iraq that by the time we returned to New York I had eked out my first and only poetry cycle. What else did I do? Spent hours upon hours juggling, which is to say dropping and picking up oranges in the backyard until I could no longer see them for the dusk. With my father and Zaid I visited our relatives buried outside Najaf, and in the evenings sat at the kitchen table, doodling in the margins of my homework—an inordinate amount of homework, to make up for all the school I was missing—while my grandfather sat beside me, slowly rotating the pages of Al-Thawra. One evening, he looked over to see me adding a few details to a sinking warship. If you’re going to be the president of Amrika, he said, you’re going to have to do better than that.

  With Sami, I went to the Zawraa Park Zoo, where we tossed lit cigarettes to the chimpanzees and laughed at how human they looked when they smoked them. My brother had just graduated from Georgetown, where he’d been president of the Pre-Med Society and wrote a thesis on curbing tuberculosis in homeless populations. Somewhat contrary to this foundation, within a week of our arrival in Baghdad he’d taken up, without any apparent compunction, the unofficial Iraqi national pastime of chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Our grandmother’s roof had a distant view of the Tigris, and as he stood beside me up there, smoking and squinting toward Karrada, my brother told me about how, on hot summer nights in the seventies, he and our parents would carry mattresses up to the roof in order to sleep in the relief of the river’s breeze. It was not warm the night I heard this story; nor was there a mattress to hand, only an old afghan blanket that Sami had slung over his shoulder and carried up from the den. Still, in the moonlight, my brother lay down, patted the space beside him, and as we stared up at the stars together Sami predicted it would not be long before Iraq was glorious again. Pothole-free roads, glittering suspension bridges, five-star hotels; the ruins of Babylon, Hatra, and the stelae of Nineveh all restored to their majesty and made visitable without the supervision of armed guards. Instead of Hawaii, honeymooners would fly to Basra. Instead of gelato, they would swoon over dolma and chai. Schoolchildren would pose in front of the Ur ziggurat, backpackers would send home postcards of al-Askari, retirees would Bubble Wrap into their luggage jars of honey from Yusufiyah. Baghdad would host the Olympics. The Lions of Mesopotamia would win the World Cup. Just you wait, little brother. Just you wait. Forget Disney World. Forget Venice. Forget Big Ben pencil sharpeners and overpriced café crèmes on the Seine. It’s Iraq’s turn no
w. Iraq is done with wars, and people are going to come from all over to see its beauty and history for themselves.

  I once fell in love with a girl whose parents had divorced when she was very young. She told me about how, having learned from her mother what was going to happen—that the two of them and her baby sister were going to move into a new house, across town—she became preoccupied with questions of what you can and cannot take with you when you move. Repeatedly, she went back to her mother for clarification. Can I take my desk? My dog? My books? My crayons? Years later, a psychologist would suggest that perhaps this fixation on what she could and could not take had arisen because she had already been told what they were not going to take: her father. And, if not a father, what should a little girl be allowed to hold on to? At the time, I felt ill-equipped to judge this hypothesis, but I did have my doubts about the validity of the memory itself. I asked Maddie whether it wasn’t possible that she did not, in fact, recall the actual moment in which she asked these questions, but rather whether her mother had told her the story so many times that it had retroactively acquired the status of a memory in her mind. Eventually, Maddie would concede that maybe the memory had, in fact, been born in her mother’s telling. But she also said that she did not see what difference this made, if either way it was part of her story and she was not going out of her way to delude herself. She also remarked that it surprised her not to remember anything at all about the actual moment of separation from her father, despite it being one of her life’s most critical developments. I asked how old she’d been at the time. Four, she said. Four going on five. Being under the impression that my own superior memory would never have excised such an event, I suggested that maybe Maddie was one of those people who don’t remember anything from before they were, say, six. I was very arrogant then. It would not surprise me to learn that when Maddie thinks of our time together she does not remember loving me at all.