Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

  Before the interview concluded and the theme music with squawking seagulls resumed, Rotblat also recounted how, in 1939, having accepted an invitation to study physics in Liverpool, he’d left his wife alone in Poland because his stipend was not sufficient to support them both. The following summer, after receiving a small raise, he returned to Warsaw to collect her, but Tola had come down with appendicitis and was unable to travel. So Rotblat went back to England alone, expecting her to follow as soon as she was well, but two days after he arrived in England Germany invaded Poland, and all means of contact between him and his wife were suspended. Only after several months did he manage to reach her with the assistance of the Red Cross and make plans to get her out through a friend in Denmark. Then Germany invaded Denmark. Now he tried through some friends in Belgium, and Belgium was invaded. Then he tried Italy, where one of his professors knew a willing convoy in Milan, but the day Tola set off to meet the liaison there Mussolini declared war on Britain and she was turned back at the Italian border. This was the last Rotblat heard of her.

  That evening, when I relayed this story to Maddie, she sounded distant and unmoved. When I pressed her, she remained silent for a moment and then cleared her throat and said something about how, once we know the end of an unfortunate story, it’s tempting to ask why its protagonist did not do better to swerve his fate.

  Or do you think it’s all up to God? she asked a moment later, in a voice that did not invite the affirmative. God’s decision? God’s will?

  And if I did?

  That I didn’t see the end of me and Maddie coming seems impossible to me now. But at the time I had this notion that even though my own feelings for my girlfriend had begun to cool not long after the spectacular prize of her was attained, to part ways on this basis would be as much an act of infidelity toward myself. It unsettled me that the Amar of a year ago could be so inconsistent with the Amar of today, and I suppose that in my determination to pretend, at least, that nothing had changed—that I was not so fickle and vain as to want a woman only until she had been won—I did not sufficiently entertain the possibility that Maddie herself was capable of changing, too. Then, on the last Sunday before Christmas, Sue Lawley announced her castaway that week to be the English comedian Bob Monkhouse. Amazed, I picked up the phone and dialed the many digits that were Maddie, but there was no answer.

  Stormy Weather started up, and I tried her again. Vaughn Monroe, Racing With the Moon. Ravel. Barber’s Adagio for Strings. During You Have Cast Your Shadow on the Sea, performed by Monkhouse and Cast, I tried her a fourth time, my hangover compounded now by my bilious anxiety over why my girlfriend of three and a half years was not answering her cell phone at six forty-five Eastern Standard Time on a Sunday morning.

  What about your book? Sue Lawley asked.

  That would be the complete works of Lewis Carroll.

  What if you could only have—

  One?

  —one bit of Lewis Carroll?

  Well, Hunting of the Snark, I suppose, is my favorite piece of work by Lewis Carroll. But then again, I couldn’t do without the characters in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Now would it be . . . Can I please have the Complete Adventures of Alice?

  I could see why she thought me hypocritical. On the face of it, it’s paradoxical to be so cautious in life, so orderly and fastidious, while also claiming to place one’s faith in the ultimate agency of God. Why give up cigarettes if He has already written you off in a bus accident next week? But theological predestination and free will are not necessarily incompatible. If God has a definite power over the whole of existence, one can imagine this power extending to His ability, whenever He wills, to replace any given destiny with another destiny. In other words, destiny is not definite but indefinite, mutable by the deliberate actions of man himself; Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. God has not predetermined the course of human history but rather is aware of all its possible courses and may alter the one we’re on in accordance with our will and the bounds of His universe. Or, as I’d put it to Maddie the week before: Think of a bumper cars rink. Seated in a bumper car, you’re free to steer yourself in any direction you like, while at the same time your vehicle is connected by a pole to a ceiling that supplies energy to the car and ultimately limits its movements to those predetermined by a grid. Similarly, with his enormous bumper cars rink, God creates and presides over the possibility of human action, which humans then take it upon themselves to carry out. And in so doing—turning left or right, advancing or reversing, slamming into your neighbors or respectfully veering clear of them—we decide what we shall become and assume responsibility for these choices that define us.

  I could tell from the softening silence on the line that Maddie was not immediately opposed to what I was saying. But I could also tell, by the length of said silence, that diverging views on the scope of God’s will were not really our problem. Our problem was a forty-nine-year-old medical professor named Geoffrey Stubblebine. But never mind. We all disappear down the rabbit hole now and again. Sometimes it can seem the only way to escape the boredom or exigencies of your prior existence—the only way to press reset on the mess you’ve made of all that free will. Sometimes you just want someone else to take over for a while, to rein in freedom that has become a little too free. Too lonely, too lacking in structure, too exhaustingly autonomous. Sometimes we jump into the hole, sometimes we allow ourselves to be pulled in, and sometimes, not entirely inadvertently, we trip.

  I’m not talking about coercion. Being pushed is another matter.

  IN THE LITTLE ANTECHAMBER to the holding room, a large man wearing a fluorescent yellow vest tagged my luggage and swung it like a bag of feathers onto a shelf. A second man, less burly but only just, relieved me of my backpack and frisked me through my clothes. I was allowed to keep what cash I had in my pockets—$11.36, in stale American tender—but not my phone, because it had a camera. While we waited for Denise to fill out a new flurry of paperwork, the man whose hands I could still feel warmly pawing my groin gestured amiably toward a vending machine.

  Cuppa tea?

  No thanks.

  Banana? Cheese-and-pickle sandwich? Crisps?

  These were arranged lemonade-stand-style on the table between us.

  I shook my head. I’m fine.

  Denise handed me a new slip of paper. In you go then. Be quick as I can.

  The holding room was a large space, low-ceilinged and windowless—except for the window through which the guards watched us, and we watched the guards—with seating enough for seventy or eighty people. En route, I’d imagined I might be reunited there with the young Chinese woman who’d flown halfway around the world at the questionable behest of Professor Ken, but in this moment the only other person in residence was a tall black man pacing agitatedly against the far wall. He was wearing a red knit cap and a long cream dashiki and as he moved back and forth between the convex mirror-cameras suspended high in each corner his cherry-topped reflection in them grew and shrank, grew and shrank. I sat down several seats away. A television bolted to the ceiling was tuned quietly to some sort of talk show. One woman was showing another woman how to make a Greek New Year’s cake. This included an elaborate tutorial on where to hide the good-luck coin, followed by how one should cut the cake so as to avoid what was referred to as a serious confrontation over coin ownership. After watching this dully for a while I got up to read the notices taped to the walls.

  Pillows and blankets as well as fire evacuation procedures were offered in eleven languages. Next to a pay phone were numbers for Refugee and Migrant Justice, as well as the Immigration Advisory Service, in English only. Also beside the phone were numbers for the Airport Chaplaincy and community ministers on call: The Reverend Jeremy Benfield. The Reverend Gerald T. Pritchard. Friar Okpalaonwuka Chinelo, Rabbi Schmuley Vogel, Sonesh Prakash Singh. Automatically, my eyes scanned for an Arabic name. Mohammad Usman. Imam Mohammed Usman. Heathrow Comm
unity Muslim Centre, 654 Bath Road, Cranford, Middlesex, TW5 9TN.

  A few feet away, on another folding table with a fake wooden grain, someone had arranged, giving equal prominence to each: a Hebrew Bible, a King James Bible, a Spanish Reina-Valera, and two Qurans (English and Arabic). Affixed to the table beside the Qurans was a qibla arrow, showing Mecca to be in roughly the same direction as the Female toilet. Underneath the table, three prayer mats stood loosely rolled up in a basket like jumbo baguettes, while a respectful yet implicit distance away someone had taped up another sign, this one also in English only: SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR IS NOT ALLOWED.

  The black man sat down and began rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. On his feet were dusty penny loafers, but no socks, and the skin around his ankles had turned the color of ash. The forecast for London that weekend had been for temperatures barely above freezing, and for a fantastic moment I imagined this was why he had been detained: for lack of suitable footwear. After all, the NHS cannot be in the business of hospitalizing every underdressed guest for hypothermia or gangrene. No socks in December, sir? Very well then. Take a seat. Just some general inquiries. Be quick as I can.

  On the other side of the room stood a second table, this one more carelessly strewn with secular material: newspapers in English, Spanish, French, and Chinese; a dog-eared copy of Japanese Vogue; two French installments of Twilight; a Spanish romance novel; and a German edition of Eat, Pray, Love. I resigned myself to my earlier position in front of the television. The black man had gone back to his pacing. He was also making noises now: short, intermittent, involuntary-sounding grunts and moans that reminded me of a pianist my brother likes, an eccentric who makes similar sounds when he plays, as though with the effort or ecstasy of his art. The book I’d held on to lay unopened in my lap. The hour of my reunion with Alastair at The Lamb came and went. The Greek New Year’s cake was cut.

  GROZNY WAS THE WORST. Twenty-five thousand civilians killed in eight weeks. Dark winter days dodging shellholes and tripping over bodies tagged with martyr ribbons in Minutka Square. Some of the Chechens not already killed by the bombs were captured by Russian conscripts and herded into cellars while in the streets their mothers wept and pleaded for their release. At night, Alastair and the other journalists slept fifty miles away, in an appropriated kindergarten in Khasavyurt, on tiny cots pushed together to make beds that were still too small. They held handkerchiefs to their noses against the stink of unwashed bodies in a room that remained decorated with children’s drawings and watercolors: bunnies and wizards, butterflies and unicorns, stick-figure families holding hands under a rainbow pouring into a pot of gold. Green grass on the bottom. The sky a firm stripe of blue along the top. You didn’t dream, or remember dreaming; trying to run under the plodding weight of a flak jacket all day was dream enough. Whereas the Chechens: the Chechen fighters seemed only too glad to die. And why shouldn’t they be? A willingness to die is a powerful thing. Especially when leveraged against those who would really rather not die. Starve me, humiliate me, raze my cities and take away my hope, and what do you expect? That I shouldn’t be reduced to fighting you with my life? That I shouldn’t want to be a martyr, the only distinction left me? You, weak man, sucker for Russian mothers and rainbows: go home to your English New Year, to your party crackers and prix fixe with complimentary coupe. We do not need your acknowledgment. We do not need you to ‘bear witness.’ Your ‘empathy’ lacks imagination. Even the Russians are better than you; even the Russians are not too good to drink their Champagne out of dented mess cups, blowing on their fingers and stomping their feet in the piss-riddled snow. For you, this is a novelty. For us, it is a cage. And then the world asks why. Why are they killing each other? Why can’t they sort it out? Why do so many people have to die? But maybe a better question is: Why do so many people not want to live?

  Some Saturdays, when the sun was shining, a few of us volunteers would take a couple of the sick children out to play in one of the public garden squares nearby. My usual companion on such outings was Lachlan, a man of comfortable silences and exceptional trivia. One afternoon we were sitting in Bloomsbury Square, keeping half an eye on our charges, when Lachlan pointed toward the iron railings on the far side of the park and said that the original ones had been dismantled and melted down for ammunition during the Second World War. These new ones were shorter, and unlocked all day; square’s been open to the public ever since. I could not pass Bloomsbury Square after that without wondering where the old iron had wound up. On which fronts. In whose bodies. It was around this time that the avowal to do away with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was accelerating toward its first anticlimax. Blair had declared it time to repay America for its help sixty years earlier and pledged Britain’s commitment to sniffing out all remaining stockpiles of genocidal intent. Forty-eight hours later, Clinton announced that Iraq intended to cooperate; a month after that, UNSCOM reported that in fact Iraq was not cooperating, and lo, the British-American bombing began. I watched the Desert Fox air strikes with Alastair, sitting in our usual spot in The Lamb, whose ceiling had been strung with Christmas bunting and the bar transformed into a lukewarm buffet of mince pies and a faux cauldron of brandy-spiked mulled wine. Throughout its broadcast of the blitz—a final frenzy before the allies would respectfully adjourn in honor of Ramadan—the BBC toggled between footage in two contrasting but equally mesmerizing palettes: one dim and grainy, with palm trees silhouetted against sepia plumes and orange flares, the other awash in the Midori-green of night vision. An explosion over the Tigris abruptly illuminated the water with the innocent quality of daylight. Leave me alone, the river seemed to say, under the fleeting white glare. I’ve done nothing to you. Leave me in peace.

  Also on the television that night was an item about how the House of Representatives had voted to impeach Clinton on two counts. This time, when the sniggering about his foreign policy calendar started up, I said nothing.

  Beside me, Alastair too said little, and drank with a darker determination than usual. By then I’d begun to wonder whether, at some point in the previous decade—in Rwanda, maybe, or Grozny, or perhaps so gradually that you could not pin it on any one abomination—the man had, as they say, lost his mind. He did not still seem to be without it; it was as if it had been taken away from him temporarily, for safekeeping, and then returned some time later with a stern warning to use it for only innocuous thoughts. This, I imagined, was why he was there, watching things unfold from a pub in Bloomsbury rather than from the roof of some Baghdad hotel. I asked him why night vision was green.

  Phosphor, Alastair replied. They use green because the human eye can differentiate between more shades of green than any other color.

  You could write a book, I said, a long moment later.

  Alastair inhaled and watched the foamy residue of his lager slide slowly down the inside of his glass. When an answer came to him, he looked relieved. It was not a real answer, but it would do.

  There’s an old saying, he said, about how the foreign journalist who travels to the Middle East and stays a week goes home to write a book in which he presents a pat solution to all of its problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine or a newspaper article filled with ‘ifs,’ ‘buts,’ and ‘on the other hands.’ If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all.

  Well, I said, you wouldn’t necessarily have to solve anything.

  No, said Alastair, picking up his glass. And neither do you.

  That no live chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear arsenals were found that winter seemed only to fan the Manichean panic. Against this backdrop, melting park railings down into cannonballs and rifleshot seemed quaint to the point of inducing nostalgia. Certainly, as I sat in sunny Bloomsbury Square, listening to the song thrushes tweeting overhead, it did not seem likely that the spires surrounding us now would ever be drafted into combat. Then again, had someone suggested that steering commercial airplanes into enemy skyscrapers might be an effective means of modern war
fare, I suppose I would not have thought that very likely either.

  One day a little boy with a bandage taped to one ear came over to ask if we had anything to eat. I gave him a HobNob.

  Raining crumbs from his mouth, the boy announced: I’m eating a biscuit.

  So you are, said Lachlan.

  I love you, said the boy.

  I love you too, said Lachlan.

  The boy watched the pigeons pecking the ground for a moment before turning to me.

  I’m eating a biscuit, he said.

  I see that, I replied.

  I love you.

  I nodded. I love you too.

  Three or four times these lines were repeated to us—I love you and I’m eating a biscuit—until, having finished the HobNob, and perhaps having finished loving us as well, the boy ran back to the pigeons, who scattered lamely.

  Presently, my little Arabic-speaking friend came over, eyeing me slyly. I offered her a HobNob, which she declined.

  Turning to Lachlan she said carefully, in English:

  My daddy wants me to be a boy.

  . . . Say again?

  Baba says I’m a boy!

  Then, abruptly, she turned on a heel and darted away.

  Blimey, said Lachlan. What was that?

  I’ve no idea. Do you know what’s wrong with her?

  Lachlan shook his head. Only that she’s younger than she looks.

  Sometime later, we would learn that the little girl had a rare form of something called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Normally, a stimulant called adrenocorticotropic hormone, or ACTH, is produced by the pituitary gland and carried by blood down to the adrenal glands, which sit atop the kidneys. There, ACTH announces the need for cortisol, a steroidal hormone having many essential everyday functions. But cortisol doesn’t come spontaneously into existence; it derives from precursors that enzymes convert into cortisol. In a body affected by CAH, the key enzyme is missing, causing the assembly line to break down just before cortisol is made. The result is a buildup of precursors—but never enough cortisol. And since it’s the presence of cortisol that suppresses the dispatching of more ACTH, the pituitary gland sends out more and more ACTH, stimulating the adrenal glands such that they swell to an abnormal size.