Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,75
arms. Then they dragged him to a seat, forced him down, and perched on either side of his body in an attempt to subdue its fitful writhing. Every now and again the black man would endeavor to wrench free of them with a violent sideways jerk; then he would collapse, head back and palms facing the ceiling, and in this position looked something like a martyr awaiting the stigmata.
The guards seemed uncertain what to do next. One and then the other glanced in my direction, as if to gauge whether I might be sufficiently trustworthy to fetch a fifth party. Meanwhile, the muted television scrolled a headline about an apartment that had exploded in Yevpatoria. A state of emergency had been declared in the Marshall Islands and Suzuki was considering production cuts amidst the financial crisis. Funny, I thought, how when you’ve been involuntarily subtracted from the world its problems begin to seem less the random luck of a mostly innocent people and more the consequences of their own had-it-coming stupidity. And so we remained: me sipping my Evian by the door, the guards holding fast to their unpredictable Nigerian. Until Denise, for whom I’d begun to feel an almost filial affection, returned at ten past five with a cold curried-chicken sandwich and a redhead named Duncan who was going to take over my case because Denise’s own shift was up.
AT FIRST, SULAYMANIYAH DID not seem to me all that different from Baghdad. The nearest usable airport was a fourteen-hour drive and at least one international border crossing away. Slightly older than middle-aged men waddled around with their heads down and their hands clasped behind their backs, prayer beads dangling from three fingers. Most of the electrical power was being produced by backyard or rooftop generators. There was running water for only half the day, so as soon as it came on people started filling the gigantic drums they’d placed on their roofs just for that purpose. Practically everyone smoked. Actually, that might be the entire list of similarities.
Among the differences was language, for one. Our first morning there, walking in search of a money changer, my father and I got as far as a block before I noted how eerie it was that we could read all of the signs well enough to make out the letters and their pronunciation, but neither of us had a clue as to their significance. Both Kurdish and Arabic are spelled phonetically, and the alphabets are basically identical—although Kurdish, like Persian, has a handful more letters. So we were looking for a bank, or a money changer, and hoping that the words in Kurdish for bank or money changer were cognates with the Arabic, but we didn’t find one until Sami’s Kurdish driver came and took us to one. The word for bank is the same, but the word for money changer is not, and while I have never learned the etymology behind this minor asymmetry I can imagine it represents centuries of cultural and ideological dissidence.
Another difference: security. There’s a fork in the road not far from Dohuk. Bear right and before long you’re on the outskirts of Mosul. Bear left and you remain well inside Kurdistan. Waving an American passport around would have yielded very different results, depending on which way we went. We went left. This was not without cost: the drive to Sulaymaniyah from Zakho, on the Iraqi-Turkish border, took about nine hours that way. If we’d cut the corner and gone down to Mosul and then across to Kirkuk, it would’ve taken about five. That’s if we would have arrived at all. My grandmother and cousin came up via Kirkuk and it was of considerable concern whether Hussein would be able to carry both his American and Iraqi passports without the wrong one being glimpsed on the wrong side of the Kurdish border.
A year after my last visit to Iraq, we were in Kurdistan for my brother’s engagement to Zahra, a recent University of Baghdad graduate who’d grown up in Sulaymaniyah and persuaded Sami to take a job at the teaching hospital there so that they might start a family in the relatively peaceful north. Short of returning to Bay Ridge and establishing his own practice over the Irish ophthalmologist’s on Fourth, my brother could not have made my parents much happier with this news, and I too felt a certain precipitous relief. Eleven months earlier, a double suicide attack at the offices of Kurdistan’s two main political