In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  I did not offer Zafar an answer. Instead, perhaps out of embarrassment, I reminded him that we’d been talking about what turned him to God and before that about Emily.

  In a tug-of-war, he said, two teams of men—teams of boys—pull on a rope against each other.

  I know.

  You know this, but let’s fix the image. What you see is the whole assembly, a line of boys and rope, moving in one direction or the other. When you see the handkerchief, the red handkerchief, in the middle of the rope move in one direction, all you know is that the total pull is greater on that side than on the other. But what you can’t tell is which of the boys on that side is pulling the hardest. You can’t even tell if one or another of the boys is not doing a thing, is unnecessary. You can’t tell whether the winning side would still be winning with one fewer boy.

  My first instinct is to say Eton, I interjected, but that sounds like I’m calling attention to the school I went to, so I say school instead.

  Understood. My point is that a given effect can be overdetermined by causes. A number of things all together sent me looking for religion and I can’t parse them out.

  But why Christianity and not Islam? Actually, I don’t want you to lose your thread—I still want to hear about meeting Emily.

  Did you know, asked Zafar, that relationship counselors advise that the time to work hard at a relationship is when the going is good? The time to work on the roof is the summer.

  Paying into the bank now to draw down later?

  Ah, the banker speaking.

  Is that what Meena and I should have done? I asked.

  I don’t know the answer to that, replied Zafar. But I do know that I didn’t make much of an effort to discover Islam. It would have been a huge effort, of course. For one thing, I’d have had to get past all the drivel that’s published in those books that line the walls of East End shops selling Islamic materials, the shops adjoining mosques in London and elsewhere. Finding interlocutors who could actually speak in a language I understood, whose written word demonstrated a familiarity with the same questions I had, putting aside the matter of answers—that in itself would have required a great labor. Where were they? All this before 9/11. Nowadays, it’s easier. People who know a thing or two about Islam but can also write in English—modern intermediaries—they’re everywhere, and their books can be found, and the Internet makes it easier to find things out. But before 9/11, what did someone like me do? Which, by the way, raises the possibility that some of the young men and women now returning to Islam in droves might be doing so at least in part because Islam has become more accessible through better books and better speakers and not just, as everyone seems to maintain, because they’ve been politicized by the war on terror.

  If you had your time again, you’d go deeper into Islam for answers?

  If I had my time again, I’d believe in reincarnation.

  I chuckled at that and so did Zafar. Religion has never preoccupied me, I have to say. My father’s faith, as I said, was a private affair, my mother abhorred all religion, though she reserved a special venom for Islam, and while I attended Anglican services at Eton, in the end I grew up like many, I think, without acquiring the taste for religion, organized or otherwise. It is perhaps this business of God that I struggle hardest to measure in Zafar’s story and that leaves me contemplating the prospect either that my aptitude for grasping such matters is lacking or, less pessimistically, that such matters as another man’s God and perhaps another man’s love inherently surpass understanding.

  Zafar continued his account, returning to those days at Oxford, though not at first to that evening in the University Church of his first encounter with Emily.

  He explained that in the beginning Christianity was convenient. At Oxford, he said, the Christian Union was organized, reliable, and always welcoming. I used to scan the Daily Information sheet on the college notice board for visiting speakers hosted by them, and I’d go along to some or other church or chapel to hear a Christian speaker. Yet for all the lectures I heard, what I took away was the simplicity of the Christian message of love. I was primed for it, of course—I knew that even at the time—for love had been in short order as I grew up and most of it compressed into a few years in a village in Bangladesh from a woman whose connection to me was denied until it was too late to be acknowledged, too late for the fact itself to give pleasure, not to mention the relief that could come from the explanation.

  Christians have something, I thought, continued Zafar. Christianity, as I say, grasped a fundamental truth of love, namely, that love cannot be earned or deserved. This idea moved me terribly, this God who loved, a break against the lonely tides and the lurking anxiety of a whole life of homelessness. When I sat in those churches and looked up at Christ on the cross, I wondered, despite myself—however much the hallmark image might repel another instinct in me—I wondered whether somewhere ahead on the journey this man might join me; the thought of a companion in him reassured me, if he was indeed what he might yet be. Yet for all the power of this idea, I already knew how far I could not go. I could never believe I had a life in Christ, never think to love others through him. Even as I saw the virtue of forgiveness, I knew that to relinquish my passionate, undirected grievances would be to abandon myself. Whatever company he, He,* might offer, there were lines in the sand. Practical matters stood in the way. I could never, for instance, give myself over to the ritual of Holy Communion, of eating the body of Christ and drinking the blood of Christ, not because of some revulsion at the cannibalistic barbarism but because the metaphor was never convincing even as metaphor. Most of all, when I touched the oak pews and ran my fingers over the knitted covers of the cushions and kneelers, when I gazed at the stained-glass images of English saints, when I considered the words of the Nicene Creed, it was as apparent to me as the alienation that made me, that kept me at the edges of things, that here was a very local rendering of a religion that had come from a part of the world that the proud Englishman could only look down upon. The Christianity before me was English, white, with Sunday roasts and warm beer and translation into the English language. Even the Bible at its most beautiful, the King James version, was in a language that asserted and reassured its readers of their power. Little wonder that schoolboys at Eton could sing of Jerusalem being builded here in this green and pleasant land. Such high praise: a pleasant land. The English Christ was of here and now, immanence on the village green, with barely a word or symbol in the liturgy and ritual transcending northwestern Europe, still less this world or universe, as partisan as the embedded journalist. He was an English God under an English heaven.

  My friend Zafar, his face grave and intent, fell silent at this point, his thoughts carried to some remote region in his cavernous dark eyes. Between the criticisms of religious parochialism, I had the impression of another sentiment, one that isn’t quite apparent in his words as I look over them now but that I felt nonetheless at the time. If his exposition had seemed, on its face, to consist of one rejection after another of Christianity, it also left the impression of a man possessed of strong, even violent feelings, which, one might speculate, is a sufficient basis for religious conversion. That is the Pauline story, is it not?

  Tell me about that evening, I said to him, about the church and Emily.

  There I was, he said, hidden in the shadow of a column, looking over the pews to the altar and beyond that the cross, contemplating this alien people clutching their God, when the door slammed shut and a shaft of ice-cold air struck me. The first musician had arrived. Violin case in hand, she walked through the aisle between the rows of pews.

  I still retain a vivid impression of that young woman moving between the aisles, but I have wondered if it’s an image I have transposed from subsequent memories, as if history has insisted on pushing outward at the beginning, for the fact is that she did not seem at all remarkable to me then. She was pretty, I thought, even beautiful in a way, but not … not arresting. Women change so much in tho
se years between eighteen, when I first saw her at Oxford, and twenty-five, when I saw her next in New York. From this vantage, so many years later, it is possible to absorb that change, to regard it with a scientific eye; at eighteen, women move into the prime of their sexual attractiveness. The heroines depicted in nineteenth-century novels might well have been feisty and strongheaded well into their twenties—things, by the way, which if found in a man would scarcely get a mention—they might even have had a canny awareness of male motivations and even some guile, but they were nothing without the physical bloom of postadolescence that has always been lauded and craved everywhere. At eighteen, Emily possessed this; there was enough beauty for her youth to hold up but not, I think, so much as to endure the passing of it.

  She pulled a chair from a low stack at the side of the small stage. Rather than carry it, she dragged it across the floor to center stage. I remember imagining the scuff marks being made on that stage, I remember wondering whether the chair legs had rubber tips, I remember wondering whether she had looked to see if they had rubber tips. And, perhaps, as I recall all this, if I am permitted to read anything into something so small, I might be inclined to think that in that tiny act of omission, of not carrying the chair but dragging it across the floor as she held up her head—so that I can now see she could not have noticed any scuffing or scratching of the floor—perhaps in that act there was contained the whole of her character.

  She retrieved a music stand from a cluster in one corner. Her movements seemed to me strangely clumsy, as if I had expected something finer from a violinist. I have seen grace in her, though much later and in other places. I’ve seen her in the bath, for instance. I saw the grace with which she held a bar of soap in her hands, as if holding a dove, I thought tenderly, rousing it from sleep for release into the air. I can see it now. Or the grace in entering a restaurant and taking a seat, the unthinking ease, the movements so slight they barely mark the memory. But I understood only later that her grace was confined, circumscribed within the pattern of household habits, that it was the grace of a woman tended to by comforts, so that when she was taken out of her sphere of convenience by even one music stand with an unfamiliar mode of opening, its limitation was exposed. So much about those people looked like one thing but was actually another. Emily’s grace was not physical grace; she was graceful when she powdered her face but without grace when she opened a car door. Grace, as I have seen it elsewhere often enough, comes from an understanding, which resides in the muscle, of the relationship between the body and the world; it not only recognizes the limitations of the body it inhabits but works with those limitations so that each act shows respect toward the physical world, respect for its dominance, and proceeds from an acknowledgment that the world will not simply do one’s bidding. How easy it is now to read so much into each moment and every careless act.

  On the stage, chair and music stand now assembled, she sat down, unzipped a flap in the violin case, pulled out some sheet music and placed it before her. The young woman looked about her and, seeing the piano, she walked over to it, violin in hand. She wedged the instrument under her chin and then, as she held the bow, she struck a key. When she tuned the violin braced in her neck, I noticed that her chin was very slight, disappearing no sooner than it had made its presence known.

  She tuned efficiently, methodically, and yet her face gave no expression whatsoever, no furrows that might suggest an intensity of listening. Presently, she finished tuning, went back to her seat, turned a few pages and, returning the violin to her neck, she began playing.

  Normally the first musician to arrive for rehearsal sets out a number of chairs and stands. That is what I had seen. Of course, this isn’t true if the rehearsal is for an orchestral piece, but if the program is for chamber music and the stage isn’t set, then the first musician usually gets started on putting out the chairs and the music stands. This young woman hadn’t brought out any other chairs and music stands. And now she was playing a solo piece, which had me doubting that I’d got the program right; perhaps she was to be performing a solo recital.

  She played and I recognized the piece. Bach’s Chaconne. Do you know it?

  I do.

  One of the finest pieces of music written for the violin. Johannes Brahms wrote about Bach’s Chaconne in a letter to Clara Schumann, saying that it captured every emotion possible in a few minutes and that if he, Brahms, had written it, he would surely have gone mad.*

  How did you come to know it?

  Mathematicians like Bach. You must know that.

  Zafar was right in a sense. I read in one of my father’s science journals about a study showing that a strangely disproportionate number of mathematicians rank Bach as their favorite composer.

  Yes, but how did you first hear it?

  I arrived for a tutorial with Professor Sylvester one day. There was classical music playing in her room. As I sat down, she went over to turn it off, but I asked her if we could listen for a minute. After the tutorial, she asked me if I wanted to borrow the cassette. That’s how I found my first ninety minutes of Bach. The Chaconne was on that tape.

  Emily, continued Zafar, played with technical mastery. The violin was in tune, the harmonies were in tune, there were no scratches of the bow, the music was straight and clean. I am not a musician, I have never learned to play a musical instrument, but I’d heard enough music to be able to tell these things at least. What I could not account for then was the emotion I had: I felt nothing. The music was lifeless.

  I have heard musicians speak of phrasing and shaping, I know that they talk about articulation and interpretation, but I do not know what they mean when they use these terms, not precisely, and I knew less then. All I could say was that her music, music that was perfect in its notes, was cold to me, but I doubted my authority; I felt I could not pronounce on these things, that I would exceed my station.

  These rehearsals were fraught with guilt for me but not because of the subterfuge involved. I tell you why I sneaked into those halls. I did not sneak in because these were rehearsals from which the public were excluded; in fact, many of them were open to the public, and there were rehearsals where I saw visitors come and go, sit and listen. I sneaked in because this music did not belong to me and I had no right in it. And because I had no right, there was guilt. I felt treacherous, but of what?

  Of course you have a right! I said with an emphasis that surprised me.

  But that was how I felt. It’s not about passports or naturalization certificates.

  Exactly. It belongs to everyone.

  Do you know Bach’s Prelude No. 1, The Well-Tempered Clavier?

  Not by name.

  You probably do know it. It’s a beautiful piece and quite short. It has a lot in common, I think, with his first cello suite: a geometric simplicity and progression. I heard it once—the prelude—at one of those lunchtime concerts in Hall, and the student sitting next to me asked me what I made of it. I thought he was probably asking me about the performance rather than the composition, and I remember thinking it would be presumptuous to comment on the skill of the pianist when I knew nothing of playing the piano. It’s a beautiful piece of music, I replied. The young man smiled and said that he’d always thought it a trifling thing, a practice piece for children.

  That’s ridiculous, I said to Zafar.

  I now think he was wrong, continued Zafar. But it takes time to overcome another person’s educated confidence. The feeling of entitlement is just that, it’s just a feeling. Just as the feeling that one does not have an entitlement is nothing more than a feeling.

  Isn’t that a matter of choice?

  Can you choose not to love a person?

  Don’t you mean: Can you choose to love a person?

  Well, that would be more relevant to you, wouldn’t it?

  Bach’s Chaconne, you were saying?

  There might be ways to make it easier not to resent another person.

  Chaconne.

  We’ll come bac
k to it, said Zafar.

  But again he seemed to disappear into his own thoughts.

  * * *

  Some years ago, in my first year at Oxford as I recall, a friend of my mother, an actress-turned-director, came to dinner in my parents’ home. The director described tools an actor might use to convey intelligence. It seemed to me that certain character traits come off a person without words, that they just rise from the surface like moisture burned off by the sun, and intelligence, I thought, was just such a trait. I’ve met people whose intelligence is apparent, before sound waves can carry their words—not infrequently, they are a rather laconic sort. But how, I wondered to my mother’s friend, does an actor convey the intelligence of a character, an Einstein or a Newton, whose intelligence might be greater than his own?* The director explained that one device is to have the character appear to drift off into his thoughts.

  Today I regard her thesis with a certain skepticism. There are many reasons why a person might wander off into his or her own thoughts, daydreams, and preoccupations. She might, for instance, be contemplating what color nail polish she should wear for the upcoming ball next weekend. He might be wondering if he switched off the gas on the stove and could be retracing his movements before leaving the house.

  There I was, continued Zafar, sitting in a patch of shadow in the church, she oblivious of my presence, listening to this note-perfect rendering, technically accomplished even to my ear and yet hollow. It made a mark on me. A few years later, in 1991, at a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I asked the German composer Nathanael Sandmann-Hoffmann, a visiting professor of musicology, if he had encountered this.

  Encountered what?

  I asked him if he’d ever heard a piece of music played perfectly, music that he knew was sublime, and yet had been completely unmoved by it. The professor’s face broke into a wrinkled smile, and I thought he was remembering some moment or episode, perhaps once forgotten, that had amused him.