Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,65
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