Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,70

Then he reached up above the visor, removed a pack of Marlboros, peeled the cellophane away, drew out a cigarette, and did not stop smoking for the next six hours.

• • •

My grandmother’s house was smaller than I’d remembered it, whereas my brother was larger. Not fatter. Not softer and wider, as some of us become when we age, but bigger all over, in a solid and proportionate sort of way, as though to save space my mind had shrunk him down by 20 percent.

He was also handsomer than I’d remembered: ruddier in the cheeks and readier with a smile, sprouting long lines around his eyes. When at last my parents and I entered our grandmother’s living room, Sami stood, put his hands on his hips, and grinned at me for a long moment, as if he knew my preconceptions were in the process of being dashed. And what had my preconceptions been? That he would be both more and less the Sami I’d remembered. More boyish. Less boyish. Going a little gray behind the ears. He was going a little gray behind the ears, but this was less uncanny than the ways in which he seemed almost exactly the same. The squareness of his hairline. The singular shadows around his mouth. They unnerved me, these animated relics, but in an oddly pleasant sort of way—as it can be oddly pleasant to pass a stranger on the street and catch a whiff of your high school chemistry teacher’s shampoo for the first time in twelve years. We think we have evolved, we think the dross of consciousness is shed, and then all it takes to splice in a frame from 1992 is a noseful of Prell.

One afternoon we sat out in the garden and while Sami smoked a cigarette he plucked an orange off the grass and tossed it to me for peeling. He’d graduated from medical school a few years earlier and was now a junior doctor at al-Wasati, the hospital for corrective surgery. Prior to the war, the majority of his cases had been nose jobs, breast jobs, liposuction, and hip replacements; now he spent his days staunching rocket wounds, tweezing shrapnel, and swaddling burns. There’d been talk of the Health Ministry funding ear replacements for the men who’d had one or both of their own cut off for deserting Saddam’s army in the nineties, and my brother seemed to look forward to this. After all, he said, if he were reconstructing ears instead of staunching rocket wounds, it would mean the fighting had died down a little. Wouldn’t it?

We were quiet for a while, and then I mentioned the little boy I’d known at the children’s hospital in London, born with what looked like a butter bean for an ear. Putting his cigarette out in the grass, my brother responded wryly: I wish we had only nature’s mistakes to fix.

And yet he seemed mostly serene. Not with the situation, of course, but with his choices in life. Certainly no one could accuse him of doing a job that did not matter. After the invasion, and despite the presence of overwhelmed American troops patrolling the city, al-Wasati had been the only public hospital in Baghdad not plundered to the point of incapacitation. Nine months later, it was still undersupplied and understaffed, as an increasing number of doctors refused to make the commute into town or had fled the country altogether. The day my father and I went to see my brother at work, a drive that in peacetime would have taken twenty-five minutes took us an hour and a half. Somewhere, a tanker had exploded, bottlenecking traffic and burdening the hospital with a fresh influx of casualties. Outside the entrance, a man sobbed as the body of another was loaded onto a gurney. The sobbing man covered his face with his hands. Then he lifted his arms to the sky and cried, Why? Why? Why are they doing this? What do they want? Is it money? Why? Just inside the entrance, another gurney contained a child of about ten, his legs wrapped in blood-soaked gauze and his eyes blinking with an otherworldly sort of resignation. No one appeared to be with him, and as my father and I waited to one side, looking for Sami, a doctor came over to us and pointed at the boy.

Who is dealing with him?

We don’t know, my father replied.

The doctor turned to the rest of the lobby and shouted into the rabble