Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,77

mother, an X-ray technician at the teaching hospital, replied: But how do you know you’re going to be able to afford vegetables next month? Or who says there won’t be a curfew tomorrow, preventing you from going to the gym or running in the park after work? Or who says your generator won’t give out and then you’ll have to read with a flashlight until the batteries die and then with a candle until that burns down, and then you won’t be able to read in bed at all—you’ll just have to sleep, if you can?

By contrast: the following day, having driven across town to check out a used Yamaha my brother had seen advertised online, he and I found ourselves eating breakfast in a café next to three journalists, two American and one Scottish, who were telling their driver the plan. First we want to go here. Then at eleven we’ll leave there for here, and then at one thirty we’ll go here. The driver listened with brow-furrowing bemusement. It got better. Oh! said one of the Americans. And on the fifteenth, there’s this meeting that I want to go to in Arbil. Now the driver looked as though he’d been asked to drive to Shanghai and back by Tuesday. Arbil was a ways from here. The fifteenth was a ways from now. In Iraq, when so remote a prospect is raised, a common response is: Well, look . . . God is generous. Meaning: Well, okay, fine. Let’s talk about it when it’s relevant. But if this journalist isn’t in Arbil in two weeks’ time, it’s going to come as a surprise to her. In the interim, she’s going to plan her life as though she’s going to be in Arbil on the fifteenth. If she learns of another meeting somewhere else on that day, she’ll probably say, Oh, I can’t go to that; I’m going to be in Arbil. Arbil is two weeks from now, and 125 miles from here, but meanwhile our resolute American is already then and there in her mind. Well, let us see. God is generous.

The Yamaha was a glossy black baby grand that had belonged to a British woman who’d lived in Sulaymaniyah for thirty years until her husband had died and she’d returned to Shepherd’s Bush. In addition, she’d also evidently left behind this disaffected-looking young man whose biceps implied less interest in the piano he was trying to sell us than in the weightlifting equipment densely arrayed on the Persian rug underneath it. When Sami asked if he might lift the Yamaha’s lid and play a little something to get a sense of its sound, the man gave us a disinterested wave and went back to frying garlic in his kitchen. Unsurprisingly, the piano was out of tune, but instead of discouraging my brother its dissonance appeared to intrigue him like a benign and fascinating medical mystery to be solved: after a brief flurry of warped Mozart he pressed and held down one long note after another, then another, and another, presumably to confirm that each on its own had the purity and resonance of a respectable instrument; only in combination did they jar and jam. Meanwhile, I toured the little room with my hands in my pockets, still thinking about Arbil. I was determined not to contemplate the future or even the past but only what was happening to me right now—which unfortunately can be a little like trying to fall asleep and failing to do so because you cannot stop thinking about how you are trying to fall asleep. A poster of Che Guevara rendered in calligraphic Arabic reminded me that I hadn’t yet rescheduled a meeting with my Argentinian dissertation advisor. A stack of Hawlatis on a ring-stained coffee table conjured the ardent recycler I’d broken up with two months before. Also on this table were an open can of Wild Tiger and a porcelain ashtray made to look like a crumpled Camels pack, completing a sort of Kurdish bachelor-pad tableau that inevitably led to comparisons with my own hermitic home life. But for a few moments there, distracted by the ashtray’s uncanny verisimilitude, I did succeed in not thinking about my singleness, nor about my dissertation, nor about when I was going to learn the results of my latest grant application and not about the long drive to Baghdad my parents and I were intending to make the following day—I was not even thinking about the