Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,80

my family and their friends and I weren’t characters in an imaginative work; we were real people weathering real lives, in which politics aren’t merely like a gunshot in the middle of a music concert; sometimes they actually are a gunshot in the middle of a music concert, making the urgency one feels in talking about them all the more urgent. Imploringly, as though I had my own line to the Situation Room and the exclusive wherewithal to plead their case, my relatives would describe to me what Baghdad used to look like. They told me that as recently as the seventies it looked like Istanbul does now: bustling with tourists and businesspeople, a thriving cosmopolitan capital in an ascendant Middle East. Before Iran, before Saddam, before sanctions and Operation Iraqi Freedom and now this, theirs too had been a country of culture, of education and commerce and beauty, and people came from all over to see it and be a part of it. And now? Do you see, Amar, this chaos outside our doors, this madness? In the evenings, mindful of the inadequacy of dots, I pored over the books and photographs and letters that my grandfather had saved from his government days, and these too described a Baghdad vividly at odds with what I saw when I dared to step outside—which was a place in which you could not forget about politics for one minute, never mind the time it takes to eat a meal or read a poem or make love. Very little worked. Very little was beautiful. The order and security that undergirded even my unhappiest moments back home seemed here the wondrous luxuries of another world. Baghdad, to borrow four words from If This Is a Man, was the negation of beauty.

Around midmorning on our last full day in Iraq, my father and uncle and I returned from visiting Zaid’s grandchildren to find we had a visitor. My grandmother made some coffee and the six of us, including my mother and Zaid, sat around in the front garden and talked. Like most conversations, this one had its lulls, and each time there was a lull our visitor would attempt to dispel it by saying: This will pass eventually. It was like a nervous tic, repeated maybe half a dozen times in our presence: This will pass eventually. This will pass eventually. At one point after saying it the man looked up and caught the doubtful expression on my face.

I mean, he said, it’s not as though things can continue like this forever, right?

Under the circumstances, this is what passed for optimism in liberated Baghdad: the vaguely morbid notion that things couldn’t possibly go on so very awfully indefinitely. In truth, I found it difficult to endure, and even more so when the pervasive dejection was joined by a creeping guilt: the guilt of an inveterately forward-thinking American counting down the days before he and his parents would be boarding their flights home. But not everyone is fatalist, Zaid tried to reassure me. The political activists are smarter and more sophisticated than they were last year. And last year they were smarter and more sophisticated than they’d been the year before. They see opportunities they’ve been waiting for for decades and they’re moving hard and fast to exploit them. They’re thinking ahead while also being mindful of past mistakes. Their political opponents have chosen violence over competition, which means that if people do make it to the polls, they’ll win, and they’ll write the constitution, and then the game will be theirs to lose unless it’s stolen from them. A nontrivial condition. If the elections really are free and fair, Americans are not going to like the outcome. But assuming it doesn’t get stolen things will only get harder after the constitution is writ.

I must have looked convinced, or at least open to persuasion, because when my mother and father and I had loaded our bags into the car and were coming back up my grandmother’s driveway to say goodbye, Zaid pulled me aside and asked whether I might be willing to consider a job in the Green Zone. A friend of his had been named the government’s liaison to the UN regarding a fledgling economic project and the liaison wanted someone he could trust to keep up with the technical aspects of the initiative and advise over the course of its negotiations with the various parties involved. Not dishonestly, I told my uncle that I