Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,79

I arrived in Baghdad the same day its governor Ali al-Haidari and six of his bodyguards were assassinated, sinking my optimism and adding to my growing list of differences between north and south that the latter was much more politicized. Though this made sense: Baghdad was the capital, the situation up north was much more stable, and as far as the Kurds were concerned the election results were a foregone conclusion. Of course, aside from my brother and his driver and Zahra and her relatives, I knew no one in Sulaymaniyah, whereas in Baghdad my parents and I were surrounded by my large extended family, who have always been a pretty political bunch: of my eight aunts and uncles still living in the city, two worked in the Green Zone and three, including Zaid, were running for office. But it was also what one saw in the streets, like the billboard at the end of my grandmother’s road that read: So that we might leave a better country for our children. This appeared over a picture of a ballot box and the date on which everyone should vote, making it somewhat difficult not to interpret the caption to mean: Yes, for our generation it’s probably a lost cause, a hopeless and terrifying mess, but maybe if we vote first our children will still inherit a better country. God is generous.

Indeed, everyone I observed in Baghdad was afraid, much more than the year before. They were afraid of being robbed, shot, stabbed, taken hostage or blown apart by an explosion. They weren’t going out at night. They were changing their paths to work each day. One afternoon Zaid’s driver noticed that a car, the same car, had been in our sight nonstop the whole way from Hayy al-Jihad to al-Jadriya. Sometimes it was ahead of us, sometimes behind, sometimes a lane or two over, but always in our vicinity. Zaid’s driver insisted this was probably a fluke, but all the same he turned off the main road and we drove around al-Bayaa for a while before getting back on track. It worked. Or rather, it turned out we needn’t have worried, or that our casers gave up, or had concluded their reconnoitering for the day. The point is that these things were always on Baghdadis’ minds, much more than the year before. The year before—in late 2003 and early 2004—people had been perplexed. Wary. Conversations had revolved around questions such as: Who are these people and why are they suddenly so interested in bringing us freedom? What do they really want? How long will they stay? By January of 2005, however, the questions at the heart of such discussions had become: Why are they such bastards? Were they planning for things to go like this all along? Or is it really possible they are this incompetent? And: Are they going to let us run our own country even if they don’t like the constitution?

You went to the moon, one of my uncles’ friends reminded me, when he learned I was American. We know you could fix this if you really wanted to.

But I did want to. Didn’t I? Or did I only want it to be done? A week earlier—inspired, paradoxically, by the conversation I’d had with my brother about the seeming futility of just this—I’d renewed my efforts to keep a journal. (A New Year’s resolution, it’s true.) But whenever I sat down with it the following week in Baghdad I was reminded of the moment in The Red and the Black when the narrator announces that in lieu of a political conversation the author had wished to put in a page full of dots. This is because politics in imaginative work is like a shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is deafening but it imparts no energy. It doesn’t harmonize with the sound of any other instrument. (That would show very little grace, warns the author’s editor, and if so frivolous a piece of writing lacks grace it is fatal. If your characters don’t talk politics, this is no longer France in 1830, and your book is not the mirror you pretend it to be. . . .) Well, I too would have liked to substitute every political conversation I had in Baghdad in January of 2005 with a page of dots. But if I had, all I would have had at the end of it was a Moleskine full of dots. And in any case