Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

the Jordanian authorities had stopped Sami and Rania on the basis that they did not believe they were going to America in order to be married.

As a result Sami and Rania returned to Iraq while our grandmother flew alone on to Cairo, London, and New York.

From time to time, Zaid would call to tell us that everyone was fine. Jiddo’s hip was getting better. Alia was taking care of the fruit trees. There was no mention of air-raid sirens, or cruise missiles

Iraq themselves had there not been a war on. Ostensibly, the call was to wish us a Happy 1991, inshallah, but then Sami went on to say that he and Rania were not going to be married, after all. He did not sound disappointed. Instead, he sounded perfectly sanguine:

When he got home he went into my bedroom, where my grandmother’s suitcase was

He sat her down on my bed and took her hands in his. Then he told her that Ahmed, her husband of fifty-seven years, had had an embolism that morning, and died.

How old is your niece? asked Denise. Three. And you think she’d like an abacus? the customs officer asked. I shrugged. The customs officer and Denise both pondered my face for a moment and then the officer began prying at a piece of tape.

Sitting very erect, she opened her folder and took out a small stack of paper that she tapped vertically into alignment. Then she explained that she was going to ask me a series of questions, my answers to which she would write down and give me the opportunity to review. If

but soon enough I regretted my impatience, because when we finally did move on it was into more sinister territory.

You have never told a law enforcement officer that your name is anything other than Amar Ala Jaafari? No.

And now you’re returning to London for the first time in ten years? To see some friends? To meet up with Alastair Blunt,

The night I attended, the girl playing Anfisa had taken a morning-after pill at lunchtime and at the moment of her entrance at the top of Act 3 was in the bathroom retching into a toilet. Consequently, Maddie opened the act alone, accounting for both actresses’ lines, the most crucial information being distilled into a riveting monologue premised upon (a) Anfisa having been too tired to complete the walk from town, where (b) a great fire was raging, traumatizing Olga such that she was hearing voices and talking to people who were not actually there.

That night, when Lieutenant Tuzenbach returned to our suite with a bit of pumpkin-colored makeup still collaring his neck, I learned that Maddalena Monti had had her pick of the semester’s leading roles and was already hobnobbing with the seniors bound for graduate school in Los Angeles and New York.

thought she was beautiful in the way some girls are beautiful despite having bypassed pretty entirely. It was a fickle beauty, undermined in an instant by her sardonic mouth, or by her eyebrows arching to angles of cartoonish depravity.

But in time I came to think that in fact Maddie more than anyone suffered her tendencies toward the mercurial,

That night, I kneeled beside my father in the mosque and thought about what it would be like to accompany a girl I had not got pregnant to her abortion.

Why was I there? I was eighteen. I had had intercourse with only two girls, each of them once, both times with a condom employed so successfully that we might have been shooting a video for educational purposes. Maybe for this reason I felt faintly censorious of Maddie’s condition—but then of course even the most conscientiously donned condom does not always stay on and/or intact.

A kind of symmetry

Much later, when Maddie emerged, holding her coat, she looked smaller all over, though I couldn’t imagine why she should have. I’m starving, she said.

Who’s Bob Monkhouse? A British comedian my dad likes. Still alive, I think. And he tells this joke that goes: When I was a kid, I told everyone I wanted to be a comedian when I grew up, and they laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.

Pretty funny

Two years later, when Maddie told me that she too wanted to become a doctor, I laughed. I laughed with the haughtiness of a ballet mistress informing a dwarf that she will never be a prima ballerina.

My reaction to this was febrile indignation. And

I’ll want to be a doctor because I’ve been reading William Carlos Williams

Maddie was the artist; I was the empiricist.

Then I walked to the Office of Career Services, feeling, I suppose, like a man slinking off to a strip club even as his beautiful wife awaits him in lingerie at home.

and a stipend of one hundred pounds a week. I applied. Three weeks later, a man unforgettably named Colin Cabbagestalk phoned to say that if indeed I was still interested the position was mine. Something in his voice, hasty yet cagey, led me to think I had been selected from a candidate pool of one.

It is not implausible to think that my parents would have been relieved to learn I was in love with a lapsed Catholic bound for medical school in New York; a Muslim girl would have been preferable, of course, but at least with Maddie I was unlikely to join their only other child halfway around the world anytime soon.

It was not until Labor Day of that year that I bought my first cell phone, a Motorola the size of a shoe, and which had to be held out the window to get a signal, if there was a signal to be got at all.

our guest felt comfortable asking whether I agreed religion stymies intellectual curiosity. On the contrary, I said. I consider seeking knowledge a religious obligation. After all, the first word received in the Quran is: Read!

Well, I said. Your problem with religion is virtually every faithless person’s problem with religion: that it offers irreducible answers. But some questions in the end simply aren’t empirically verifiable.

Or: Is it true because I see it, or do I see it because it’s true? The whole point of faith is that irreducible answers don’t bother the faithful.

The faithful take comfort and even pride in the knowledge that they have the strength to make the irreducible answers sincerely their own,

Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.

The bioethics council operated out of the basement of a Georgian town house in Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square,

But Bloomsbury I found deeply gloomy. When I ran, I would watch the indifferent pavement flowing under my feet and feel overwhelmed by the immense distance I’d put between myself and home. And although I liked the content of my work—I spent my weekdays editing newsletter articles on animal-to-human transplants, stem cell therapy, and genetically modified crops—the staff’s median age was at least fifteen years older than I,

The Are you ready? questionnaire that accompanied my application to volunteer at the local children’s hospital threw into doubt a number of long-held presumptions:

Are you emotionally mature and have the ability to deal with difficult situations and be sensitive? Are you a good listener? Are you reliable, trustworthy, motivated, receptive and flexible? Are you able to accept guidance and remain calm under pressure? Are you able to communicate well with patients, families and staff? This sheet of paper was succeeded by something called an Equal Opportunities form, seeking confirmation of my gender, marital status, ethnicity, educational background, and disabilities, if any.

For the interview, I got a haircut and bought a tie. A

my induction was scheduled for a Saturday that happened also to be Halloween.

making myself useful as I saw fit, my first thought was that there was something sort of comical about having to pass five weeks of police checks in order to stand in a room full of children dressed as cats, clowns, princesses, bumblebees, ladybugs, pirates, superheroes, and, yes, policemen. My second thought was that I had never felt so out of place in my life.

I was not of use to no one that day. About an hour before the end of my shift, a woman wearing an abaya appeared in the doorway holding the hand of a little girl. This girl looked about seven or eight,

When the costumes came off, you saw the iniquity of illness more clearly. You saw its symptoms, or rather the invisibility thereof, and you could not resist trying to predict the poor child’s chances.

Microtia, Latin for little ear, or Ollier disease, a hyperproliferation of cartilage that could turn a hand as knobby and twisted as ginger root.

Practically speaking, I was doing this for professional reasons, to get a feel for the hospital setting and to work on my bedside manner, but in truth I found it so emotionally draining that all I seemed to be working on was my desire for a beer.

and I kept one eye on Alastair as I said this, for I’d already understood that he was a shrewd and independent thinker and I was anxious not to preclude myself from aligning with his opinion. But

To be fair, Alastair probably spent the first several of our evenings together taking me for a tedious newcomer.

wasn’t long after I’d slid over that it became apparent Alastair knew quite a bit more about contemporary Iraq than I did.

Still, a certain spirit of fellowship had been established, and soon while the others carried on about cricket or the barmaids’ backsides Alastair was telling me about his various stints not only in Baghdad but in El Salvador, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Beirut—where, while I’d been a teenager in Bay Ridge, alphabetizing my baseball cards and taking the PSATs, he’d been dodging Hezbollah and smoking hashish in the old Commodore Hotel.

It was more that my new Saturday nights, quintessentially British and brimming with camaraderie, felt like whatever I’d been running to, which no longer needed to be found.

The first Desert Island Discs castaway I ever heard was Joseph Rotblat,

the eight records he’d take with him if banished to a desert island—