The Gulf Between Us Page 33

  My third child, meanwhile, still didn’t have the faintest idea what kind of person he wanted to be – which seemed to be partly my fault, because his expat childhood had accustomed him to being neither one thing nor the other, not fully at home here in Hawar, nor in what was technically supposed to be his own country. Identity for him was still a dressing‐up box of options – which gave him a sense of opportunity, but it would have been astonishing if it didn’t also leave him with a sense of vertigo.

  Most alarmingly of all, there was a war coming and we had no idea how long it would last or what it would mean for Iraq or the Gulf. The belief that in its aftermath democracy would roll down the shores, knocking down the dictatorships like dominoes, seemed daft to anyone who knew the region. Whether war would exacerbate tensions between sunni and shi’a, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Muslim world and the west – well, those were much more open questions. And if there were to be some clash of civilizations like people kept insisting there would be (and so many seemed to be hoping) Nezar and I would have to accept that we could never be quite sure which side we were on. But that was fine. We’d be OK about that. Pleased, if anything.

  So the future couldn’t be guaranteed – but for me, for now, it was enough to know that I’d be living with Nezar, that I’d be able to spend time in Hawar but also in London or New York, to come and go. When I thought ahead to what being with him would be like, that was the sort of image that came to mind – a constant coming and going, a long conversation, an absorbing exchange that promised we’d never get stuck with habits of thought that stopped us thinking. And this top‐level summit or symposium of ours wouldn’t involve merely words, but also things we couldn’t articulate or even fully understand – feelings, sensations, beliefs and intuitions; things that, like dust motes spinning in sunlight, are invisible to most people most of the time, but there anyway, inevitable, essential and lovely.