Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

arrive in Diyarbakir and a driver picks me up. Who is this driver? Someone my brother knows. From Iraq? From Kurdistan, yes. And where does the driver take you? To Sulaymaniyah. Where your brother lives. That’s right.

OUR FIRST HOME IN America was on the Upper East Side, a one-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up in an old tenement building owned by Cornell Medical College, my father’s new employer.

The last time I saw my brother, in early 2005, he said that parents have no way of knowing when their children’s memories will wake up. He

What do I remember? What do you remember of last year? Of 2002? Of 1994? I don’t mean the headlines.

Sami grapples with decaying memory...

I bought a notebook and I started a journal, in which a typical early entry went something like this: ‘School. Kabobs with Nawfal. Bingo at the HC. Bed.’ No impressions. No emotions. No ideas. Every day ended with ‘bed,’ as though I might have pursued some other conclusion to the cycle.

And at least once I wrote some ponderous lines about what life might have been like had I not come back to Iraq.

And after six weeks or so, I quit—put the notebook into a box and didn’t go back to it for twenty years.

I don’t remember ever desiring, never mind contemplating, an alternative life back in America.

asked why he’d started a journal in the first place. Maybe, he said, I was feeling my solitude too keenly. Maybe I thought that by writing things down, inking out a record of my existence, I was counteracting my . . . my disappearance. My erasure.

What don’t I remember? Lots.

You would have thought there was no one less erasable than my brother. A tall and solid man who looks even taller and sturdier in his white laboratory coat, he speaks in a sonorous voice, voices vigorous opinions, and requires an average of four round meals a day.

I said it reminded me of The Incredible Shrinking Man, when Grant Williams climbs through one of the holes in a window screen and delivers his closing monologue to a slowly encroaching still of the Milky Way: So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite . . . smaller than the smallest . . . To God there is no zero! I still exist!

he grinned and brushed unseen particles from his biceps, then lifted his face to scan the clouds fleeting west like an exodus across the Kurdish sky. He looked, in this moment, so much like a creature that exerts its own forces on the world, and not the other way around, that it seemed to me a ludicrous idea, that should he fail to jot down his bedtimes and Bingo winnings, he might disappear. But then he disappeared.

The piano had a plain boxy shape and was made of a dark wood that was nicked all over and turned reddish in the midmorning sun. It was an old Weser Bros.,

I think it was Saul Bellow who said that death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything; what, then, does one make of so much darkness already showing through?

Write this down. A key. Mirror. Black back.

I call it Sami’s piano

Maxwell Fischer, on the other hand, was too unassailably debonair for a nickname. A Bavarian graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, he was a devoutly trim man who took his early-morning constitutionals in paisley cravats that on the pavements of Bay Ridge looked as exotic as if he’d wound an Indian cobra around his neck.

and the ironing a pastel hillock on the bedroom floor. The only thing Shabboot cleaned voluntarily was his answer to Fischer’s violin: a Macassar Ebony Steinway that, at nearly seven feet long, dwarfed the living room

my brother did not like living in America. Almost from the beginning he complained of missing his Baghdadi friends

At home, he became mopey and shiftless,

Sami and Shabboot were sitting hip to hip at the piano, Sami chewing his lip and Shabboot humming corrections, rearranging Sami’s fingers, and jabbing indignantly at the keyboard’s sticky middle D. This is how one would find them nearly every Wednesday afternoon thereafter: in summer silhouetted against the terrace, in winter with mugs of tea steaming up the mottled mirror.

Nor was he ambitious, in any conventional sense. He did not give recitals. He did not perform. For Sami, the aim in playing was simply to play: to match finger to key, one after the other or in their cherrylike clusters, and to enjoy the result as one enjoys listening to a story unfold.

When the officer handed the girl a half sheet of paper like mine the girl turned around to sit down and I saw that she was Chinese.

She says she’s here to learn English, the second officer said. Her family knows she’s here. She got a scholarship from Professor Ken, who arranged for the visa, and when she’s collected her luggage she’s supposed to call this number and Professor Ken will come and pick her up.

ACCORDING TO CALVIN COOLIDGE, economy is the only method by which we prepare today to afford the improvements of tomorrow. Whatever else you think about Coolidge, the statement does seem more or less correct, and when I came across it for the first time shortly after starting graduate school I thought: At last, I’m pursuing a profession befitting of my neuroses.

This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now.

You would be happier, she has been heard to say, if you were more like your brother. Sami lives in the moment, like a dog.

For the record, my brother’s name means high, lofty, or elevated—not traits you’d readily associate with an animal that sniffs assholes and shits in plain sight.

In December of 1988, on the flight to Baghdad from Amman, our parents forbade us from bringing up two subjects with our Iraqi interlocutors: Saddam Hussein and Sami’s piano, never mind the ten years of music lessons he’d taken from our homosexual landlord downstairs.

President Jaafari. President Amar Ala Jaafari. President Barack Hussein Obama. I suppose one does not sound so very much more unlikely than the other. And yet, at twelve years old, I knew perfectly well that my parents’ truer hope was that I too would do as they had done, and as my brother looked all but certain to do, and that was to become a doctor. A doctor is respected.

On Christmas, my uncle Zaid and aunt Alia came over with their four girls, who, lined up in their matching red hijabs, looked like a set of Russian dolls. Ten years earlier, the oldest, Rania, had held my diapered bottom in her lap and fed me one by one the rubylike seeds of a pomegranate. She was older now, too pretty to look at directly, as one strains to look at the sun. On entering the kitchen she went straight over to my brother and said: BeAmrika el dunya maqluba! Amrika is America. Maqluba means upside down, and for this reason is also the name of a meat-and-rice dish that’s baked in a pan and upended before serving.

El dunya maqluba means the world is upside down,

I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom. Whatever my deficiencies in the first three areas, I enjoyed such an abundance of the fourth

With Sami, I went to the Zawraa Park Zoo, where we tossed lit cigarettes to the chimpanzees and laughed at how human they looked when they smoked

My brother had just graduated from Georgetown, where he’d been president of the Pre-Med Society and wrote a thesis on curbing tuberculosis in homeless populations.

Still, in the moonlight, my brother lay down, patted the space beside him, and as we stared up at the stars together Sami predicted it would not be long before Iraq was glorious again.

Repeatedly, she went back to her mother for clarification. Can I take my desk? My dog? My books? My crayons? Years later, a psychologist would suggest that perhaps this fixation on what she could and could not take had arisen because she had already been told what they were not going to take: her father.

Eventually, Maddie would concede that maybe the memory had, in fact, been born in her mother’s telling. But she also said that she did not see what difference this made, if either way it was part of her story and she was not going out of her way to delude herself.

Home from graduate school years later, I was having dinner with my parents in Bay Ridge when my father started talking about Schiphol, the airport just outside Amsterdam. Specifically, he was telling us about how, in Dutch, schiphol means ship grave, because the airport had been built on land reclaimed from a shallow lake notorious for its many shipwrecks.

Or maybe it was Sami. Maybe Sami told me about the ships.

bench. Well, I said. He still could have said it to me. Or maybe he said it on the way back, when we passed through Schiphol again on the way home.

Amar, she said quietly, your brother was not with us on the way home. AS

Denise sat down beside me and spoke quietly, discreetly, while I detected in her eyes a certain frisson. As though she’d been waiting a long time for a case like mine. Maybe I was even her first.

Then, still holding my second passport—

which is to say the only passport I had left—she nodded slowly, comprehendingly, tapped it lightly once on her knee, and stood up and walked away.

The following December, my parents returned to Baghdad on their own. I stayed in Bay Ridge,

They were preoccupied with the news that my brother wanted to marry Rania.

That Rania was our first cousin was not inherently the problem.

The problem was that marrying Rania clearly indicated a broader intention to resettle in Iraq,

What they decided was that their blessing would be contingent on Sami and Rania marrying in New York and Sami earning his graduate degree from an American university. He could study religion instead of medicine if he wanted. He could return to Iraq afterward if he wanted. But if he wanted to marry Rania with full parental endorsement, these were the conditions, and my brother agreed.