GROZNY WAS THE WORST. Twenty-five thousand civilians killed in eight weeks. Dark winter days dodging shellholes and tripping over bodies tagged with martyr ribbons in Minutka Square. Some of the Chechens not already killed by the bombs were captured by Russian conscripts and herded into cellars while in the streets their mothers wept and pleaded for their release. At night, Alastair and the other journalists slept fifty miles away, in an appropriated kindergarten in Khasavyurt, on tiny cots pushed together to make beds that were still too small. They held handkerchiefs to their noses against the stink of unwashed bodies in a room that remained decorated with children’s drawings and watercolors: bunnies and wizards, butterflies and unicorns, stick-figure families holding hands under a rainbow pouring into a pot of gold. Green grass on the bottom. The sky a firm stripe of blue along the top. You didn’t dream, or remember dreaming; trying to run under the plodding weight of a flak jacket all day was dream enough. Whereas the Chechens: the Chechen fighters seemed only too glad to die. And why shouldn’t they be? A willingness to die is a powerful thing. Especially when leveraged against those who would really rather not die. Starve me, humiliate me, raze my cities and take away my hope, and what do you expect? That I shouldn’t be reduced to fighting you with my life? That I shouldn’t want to be a martyr, the only distinction left me? You, weak man, sucker for Russian mothers and rainbows: go home to your English New Year, to your party crackers and prix fixe with complimentary coupe. We do not need your acknowledgment. We do not need you to ‘bear witness.’ Your ‘empathy’ lacks imagination. Even the Russians are better than you; even the Russians are not too good to drink their Champagne out of dented mess cups, blowing on their fingers and stomping their feet in the piss-riddled snow. For you, this is a novelty. For us, it is a cage. And then the world asks why. Why are they killing each other? Why can’t they sort it out? Why do so many people have to die? But maybe a better question is: Why do so many people not want to live?
Some Saturdays, when the sun was shining, a few of us volunteers would take a couple of the sick children out to play in one of the public garden squares nearby. My usual companion on such outings was Lachlan, a man of comfortable silences and exceptional trivia. One afternoon we were sitting in Bloomsbury Square, keeping half an eye on our charges, when Lachlan pointed toward the iron railings on the far side of the park and said that the original ones had been dismantled and melted down for ammunition during the Second World War. These new ones were shorter, and unlocked all day; square’s been open to the public ever since. I could not pass Bloomsbury Square after that without wondering where the old iron had wound up. On which fronts. In whose bodies. It was around this time that the avowal to do away with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was accelerating toward its first anticlimax. Blair had declared it time to repay America for its help sixty years earlier and pledged Britain’s commitment to sniffing out all remaining stockpiles of genocidal intent. Forty-eight hours later, Clinton announced that Iraq intended to cooperate; a month after that, UNSCOM reported that in fact Iraq was not cooperating, and lo, the British-American bombing began. I watched the Desert Fox air strikes with Alastair, sitting in our usual spot in The Lamb, whose ceiling had been strung with Christmas bunting and the bar transformed into a lukewarm buffet of mince pies and a faux cauldron of brandy-spiked mulled wine. Throughout its broadcast of the blitz—a final frenzy before the allies would respectfully adjourn in honor of Ramadan—the BBC toggled between footage in two contrasting but equally mesmerizing palettes: one dim and grainy, with palm trees silhouetted against sepia plumes and orange flares, the other awash in the Midori-green of night vision. An explosion over the Tigris abruptly illuminated the water with the innocent quality of daylight. Leave me alone, the river seemed to say, under the fleeting white glare. I’ve done nothing to you. Leave me in peace.
Also on the television that night was an item about how the House of Representatives had voted to impeach Clinton on two counts. This time, when the sniggering about his foreign policy calendar started up, I said nothing.
Beside me, Alastair too said little, and drank with a darker determination than usual. By then I’d begun to wonder whether, at some point in the previous decade—in Rwanda, maybe, or Grozny, or perhaps so gradually that you could not pin it on any one abomination—the man had, as they say, lost his mind. He did not still seem to be without it; it was as if it had been taken away from him temporarily, for safekeeping, and then returned some time later with a stern warning to use it for only innocuous thoughts. This, I imagined, was why he was there, watching things unfold from a pub in Bloomsbury rather than from the roof of some Baghdad hotel. I asked him why night vision was green.
Phosphor, Alastair replied. They use green because the human eye can differentiate between more shades of green than any other color.
You could write a book, I said, a long moment later.
Alastair inhaled and watched the foamy residue of his lager slide slowly down the inside of his glass. When an answer came to him, he looked relieved. It was not a real answer, but it would do.
There’s an old saying, he said, about how the foreign journalist who travels to the Middle East and stays a week goes home to write a book in which he presents a pat solution to all of its problems. If he stays a month, he writes a magazine or a newspaper article filled with ‘ifs,’ ‘buts,’ and ‘on the other hands.’ If he stays a year, he writes nothing at all.
Well, I said, you wouldn’t necessarily have to solve anything.
No, said Alastair, picking up his glass. And neither do you.
That no live chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear arsenals were found that winter seemed only to fan the Manichean panic. Against this backdrop, melting park railings down into cannonballs and rifleshot seemed quaint to the point of inducing nostalgia. Certainly, as I sat in sunny Bloomsbury Square, listening to the song thrushes tweeting overhead, it did not seem likely that the spires surrounding us now would ever be drafted into combat. Then again, had someone suggested that steering commercial airplanes into enemy skyscrapers might be an effective means of modern warfare, I suppose I would not have thought that very likely either.
One day a little boy with a bandage taped to one ear came over to ask if we had anything to eat. I gave him a HobNob.
Raining crumbs from his mouth, the boy announced: I’m eating a biscuit.
So you are, said Lachlan.
I love you, said the boy.
I love you too, said Lachlan.
The boy watched the pigeons pecking the ground for a moment before turning to me.
I’m eating a biscuit, he said.
I see that, I replied.
I love you.
I nodded. I love you too.
Three or four times these lines were repeated to us—I love you and I’m eating a biscuit—until, having finished the HobNob, and perhaps having finished loving us as well, the boy ran back to the pigeons, who scattered lamely.
Presently, my little Arabic-speaking friend came over, eyeing me slyly. I offered her a HobNob, which she declined.
Turning to Lachlan she said carefully, in English:
My daddy wants me to be a boy.
. . . Say again?
Baba says I’m a boy!
Then, abruptly, she turned on a heel and darted away.
Blimey, said Lachlan. What was that?
I’ve no idea. Do you know what’s wrong with her?
Lachlan shook his head. Only that she’s younger than she looks.
Sometime later, we would learn that the little girl had a rare form of something called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Normally, a stimulant called adrenocorticotropic hormone, or ACTH, is produced by the pituitary gland and carried by blood down to the adrenal glands, which sit atop the kidneys. There, ACTH announces the need for cortisol, a steroidal hormone having many essential everyday functions. But cortisol doesn’t come spontaneously into existence; it derives from precursors that enzymes convert into cortisol. In a body affected by CAH, the key enzyme is missing, causing the assembly line to break down just before cortisol is made. The result is a buildup of precursors—but never enough cortisol. And since it’s the presence of cortisol that suppresses the dispatching of more ACTH, the pituitary gland sends out more and more ACTH, stimulating the adrenal glands such that they swell to an abnormal size.
Cortisol is required for normal endocrine activity, regulating growth, metabolism, tissue function, sleep patterns, and mood. Untreated, a cortisol deficiency can be fatal, causing hypoglycemia, dehydration, weight loss, dizziness, low blood pressure, even cardiovascular collapse. Also problematic are the symptoms arising from the thwarted cortisol precursors, which include an excess of androgens, otherwise known as the male sex hormones. As a result, a three-year-old boy affected by CAH could develop hair under his arms and acne as bad as his babysitter’s. Likewise, a little girl with it could also exhibit masculine features from an early age: body hair, a growth spurt, even a preference for trucks and tractors over teacups and dolls. When she reaches the normal age of puberty, her voice might deepen, her chest might remain flat, and she might menstruate very lightly, if at all. In theory, few cases should reach this stage of virilization, because earlier signs would have prompted a trip to the doctor, who in turn would have prescribed synthetic steroids to lower the androgen levels in the system.
Sometimes, the problem is even apparent at birth. Instead of having a normal-sized clitoris, a baby having two X chromosomes might be born with an enlarged clitoris that looks like a tiny penis. Her urethra and vagina might have merged toward a single opening and the labia may have fused entirely, resembling a scrotum. Yet an ultrasound will reveal that, inside, she has a perfectly normal uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, and a cervix. In fact, were she to have external reconstructive surgery, she would have everything she needs (save someone else’s sperm, of course) in order one day to conceive. My little Arab friend had been born with ambiguous genitalia, but not so ambiguous that her parents, nor an obstetrician back in Syria, had seen fit at the time to call her anything but a girl. More recently, however, certain other signs, including the increasingly phallic anomaly between her legs, had raised eyebrows at home and she was brought in. Indisputably, her cortisol levels needed to be regulated. But there remained the question of what to do about her gender. Her doctors were of the opinion that she should be given hormone-replacement therapy and perhaps also a genitoplasty and carry on as a girl. Her mother was inclined to agree. But her father had a different perspective. Where he was from, a boy is superior. A boy is prestige. A boy brings you pride. Where he was from, one might even say: Better an infertile man than a fertile woman. In fact, said the father, I always thought she was a boy. It was a mistake from the beginning. She looks like a boy. She acts like a boy. Her life would be so much easier if she were a boy. He’s a boy.
There’s no cure for CAH. It’s a genetic condition whereby the double helix inherits two copies of a faulty gene, one copy from each parent. Usually, the gene is recessive to a dominant counterpart. But if both parents are carriers, there’s a 25 percent chance their child will inherit both faulty genes and express the condition. This leaves a 50 percent chance the child will inherit only one faulty gene (and become another carrier), and a 25 percent chance the child will inherit only normal genes, and be unaffected. Owing to the probability that two partners will have inherited the same mutant gene from a common ancestor, autosomal recessive disorders are especially common among the offspring of consanguineous couples. The closer the relationship, the greater the proportion of shared genes. The greater the proportion of shared genes, the greater the risk their offspring will be homozygous for the shared gene. In other words, autosomal recessive disorders are especially common in certain cultures in which, for enduring tribal reasons—to strengthen family ties, maintain a woman’s status within the hierarchy, facilitate the finding of suitable partners, and preserve a family’s traditions, values, property, and wealth—it is not only acceptable but standard and even encouraged to marry your first cousin.