Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,49

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 now. 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.

Home from graduate school years later, I was having dinner with my parents in Bay Ridge when my father started talking about Schiphol, the airport just outside Amsterdam. Specifically, he was telling us about how, in Dutch, schiphol means ship grave, because the airport had been built on land reclaimed from a shallow lake notorious for its many shipwrecks. Dad, I said. I already know this. You told me this when I was twelve. You told me this when we were there, waiting for our flight to Amman. That can’t be right, he said. I only just read it this afternoon. Well, maybe you’d forgotten that you knew it, I said, because I can clearly remember sitting in the terminal, waiting to board, and looking out across the tarmac and thinking about the boats buried underneath. I remember picturing ships like skeletons, with bones like human bones—femurs and fibulae and giant rib cages for hulls.

Huh, said my father.

A moment later I added:

Or maybe it was Sami. Maybe Sami told me about the ships.

At this point my mother held up a hand and said that