Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,78
drift and worthiness of my thinking—and I suppose another way of saying all this is I was happy.
While Sami counted out a stack of American hundreds, I stepped over a barbell to approach the piano as if for a better look. Behind it hung a large, gilt-framed mirror that did not, when I caught my reflection in it, fail to disappoint, in that like all mirrors it gave back startlingly little a sense of the worlds within worlds a single consciousness comprises, too dull and static a human surface to convey the incessant kaleidoscope within. Invigorated by my new surroundings, my brisk mountain walks and the spirit of possibility that accompanies the advent of a year, I’d been feeling in Sulaymaniyah more attuned to life and richer in potential than I’d felt in a long time—maybe not even since that first summer after college, with Maddie. In Sulaymaniyah, unburdened by routine and inspired by my brother’s apparent tranquility and contentment, I envisioned myself approaching a kind of bifurcation, a meaningful deviation that would steer my life closer to his and our Iraqi ancestry than ever before. Here was the future; here was where one of the most important revolutions of my earthly tenure was taking place, and emboldened by the extra passport in my pocket I wanted to witness it and play a part in its fruition.
This is how I felt. But in the mirror on the other side of Sami’s new piano I didn’t look like a man teeming with so much potential. On the contrary, in my eleven-year-old jeans, a week’s worth of stubble, and a fraying windbreaker from the Gap, I looked rather more like the embodiment of a line I would later read—something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person. A problem, I suppose, that it is entirely up to our imaginations to solve. But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.
Having agreed on terms of delivery, my brother and the taciturn Kurd were now emptying the piano’s bench of its contents. I watched as out came a stack of old sheet music, some composition paper with a smattering of handwritten notes that ended after only a few bars, and a book of poems by Muhamad Salih Dilan. There was also an antique postcard of the Royal Opera House that my brother lodged admiringly into the bottom left-hand corner of the mirror’s frame, and a 1977 copy of The Portable Stephen Crane. This last item was entrusted to me for the inventory’s duration, and, after a bit of idle leafing through An Experiment in Misery, An Experiment in Luxury, and An Episode of War, I landed on this: It perhaps might be said—if anyone dared—that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another. The context was an essay written about Mexico in 1895, but under the circumstances, the grievance felt personal and prescient, and in the car on the way back to my brother’s I said it reminded me of something Alastair had once said, about how the more time a foreign journalist spends in the Middle East the more difficult it becomes for him to write about it. I said that when I’d first heard this it had sounded like an excuse, an alibi for failing to do the hard work of writing well, but that the more time I’d spent with Alastair—and for that matter in the Middle East—the more sympathetic to it I’d become. After all, humility and silence are surely preferable to ignorance and imperiousness. And maybe East and West really are eternally irreconcilable—like a curve and its asymptote, geometrically fated never to intersect. My brother looked unimpressed. I see what you’re saying, he said, as we slowed for a group of teenagers exiting a fast-food restaurant called MaDonal. But wasn’t it also Crane who said that an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways?
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My parents and