Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,76

parties had killed more than a hundred people and wounded at least as many more, but even this contributed to an incidence of violence less frequent, less pervasive, and less indiscriminate than what had been mounting in Baghdad. And, in Sulaymaniyah, things worked. Not by Western standards, of course, but compared to the rest of the country it was encouraging to see how functional Kurdistan was. Elections for the new National Assembly were less than a month away and the Kurds really seemed to believe that they were part of something momentous. The Kurdish Democratic Party dominated in the two states east, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan dominated in Sulaymaniyah itself, but the Kurdish flag—the Italian tricolore rotated ninety degrees, with a golden burst of sun at its center—flew everywhere. On the rare occasions when I saw the Iraqi flag flying, it was the old one, the pre-Saddam one, the one that doesn’t have God is great written on it. Of course we believe God is great, Sami’s Kurdish driver told me; we just don’t think Saddam should have written it on the flag so that he could pretend to be a champion of the faith.

On the day of the engagement, Zahra’s father Hassan and I went out for a walk. The weather left a bit to be desired: rain every morning, clouds all day, exceedingly early sunsets because we were in a deep valley. But the landscape was stunning—mountains in every direction, and covered with a shrubby vegetation similar to that one sees on the mountains of Santa Monica. In fact it was striking how much Iraq reminded me of Southern California; if the area around Baghdad is like the deserts east of Los Angeles, then Sulaymaniyah would be up around Santa Clarita, where the mountains just start to get big enough to collect snow at the top.

For a man in his sixties, Hassan was an impressive walker. He was also a schoolteacher by trade, and, as far as I could tell, perfectly suited to it. Whenever I asked him a question, even something innocuous like, Is it always cloudy in the winter up here?, he would smile delightedly and say, Aaaahhh, yes, now that is an excellent question, and there is an amazing story behind the answer. Following which you could expect a forty-five-minute disquisition that would begin directly related to your query but then spiral outward to include anecdotes and observations regarding many other intriguing if not entirely innocuous matters as well. Thus in our three hours switchbacking up Goizha we discussed Aristotle, Lamarck, Debussy, Zoroastrianism, Abu Ghraib, Hannah Arendt, and the as-yet-unknown contingencies of de-Ba’athification, Hassan managing even with respect to the more sobering of these topics to display a certain philosophical resilience. At one point I said I’d heard there was a new hotel going up in town, and that this seemed to me a positive sign, and Hassan halted to announce that even if they built a hundred new hotels there still wouldn’t be sufficient accommodation because the number of tourists coming to Kurdistan was going to overwhelm. No no, he said, when I looked at him askance. Don’t think about the present. Think about the future. I wish you were staying with us longer. I’d show you some of the wonderful places we have, in the mountains and the valleys. You’ll see. They’ll come from everywhere.

Think about the future. And yet: if I were to articulate the prevailing impression of the seven cumulative weeks I spent in Iraq between December 2003 and January 2005, it would be to venture that the future meant something very different there from what it means in, say, America. In Iraq—even in the comparatively auspicious north—the future has long been viewed as a much more nebulous eventuality, if indeed one expects to be around for its eventuality at all. Over dinner on the night of his engagement, my brother was trying to explain to his soon-to-be in-laws about New Year’s resolutions. In America, he said, it’s traditional for people to promise themselves they’ll change aspects of their behavior in the coming year. Zahra’s family thought that was crazy. Who are you, they asked, to think you can control your behavior in the future? Well, you know, my brother replied, some things you can control. You can decide you’re going to eat more vegetables. Or that you’re going to exercise more. Or that you’re going to read a little each night before you fall asleep. To which Zahra’s