Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,66

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 warfare, 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,