In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  Of course she was going to champion me. How many deserving stars can there be in Kensington? she had asked. She couldn’t do otherwise. And of course her mother would resist. Is that what you mean? her mother had asked me. Is that what I’d meant when I said the judges were probably spreading the awards around these days? But how to respond, how to answer a direct question that is obviously unwanted? Uncompromising honesty or diplomacy? They are beautiful, these people, when they speak. Their conversation is a landscape of byways forking at every step, this choice between the direct and the delicate, between what is meant and what is polite, and they are beautiful because they can go the polite way but to the discerning ear make themselves understood.

  The same choice—how to respond, to fight or play, defuse or discharge—such a choice had confronted me at the interview, before Court of Appeal judges, for the very award Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern was now discussing.

  The interview had begun on a light note. I had arrived at the Inn of Court with only a minute to spare and was led straight to the interview rooms, without even time to leave my things at reception. The door was opened and I stepped into a large room with five judges sitting behind a long oak table, all white males. I clutched under my elbows a newspaper, my satchel, and a bottle of water.

  The chairman, with a blazon of white hair and a kindly face, waved me in.

  Do come in, he said, do come in. And do bring in your things, including that bottle of water—at least, I trust it’s water.

  Whatever it is, I replied, it’s purely for medicinal purposes.

  A ripple of laughter went through the panel of judges; the joke had an ingredient judges like, a reference to the outside world but incorporated as inside information, an in-joke, something breaking into the windowless courtrooms.

  That was how it began, and the interview skipped along from there. I fielded question after question, including a couple about my academic background. The chairman mentioned that he knew two Court of Appeal judges who had studied mathematics as undergraduates, and I remember thinking it was splendid of this judge to say so. I believe this good man wanted me to understand that he wouldn’t let an unconventional background stop me and nor should I.

  But one judge remained silent through all this until near the end. This man leaned forward, looking vaguely distressed or perhaps only confused.

  I’d like to ask you a question or two, if I may.

  I nodded.

  I see here that you live in Brixton. My son says he goes to Brixton from time to time, and he tells me that on every street corner there are young men, black men, I might say, but that’s beside the point, many of them selling marijuana. He says it goes on all the time and that it’s part of the culture. It does sound dreadful to me. Now what do you say about that? How does one, in fact, respond to that?

  There are other ways he might have framed his question. He might, for instance, have asked me about policing policy and whether a so-called light-touch approach could be justified. Should the police turn a blind eye and concentrate on greater crimes, or is marijuana a gateway drug and its sale therefore to be checked?

  But he didn’t ask me that. Instead, speaking with a distaste that I was sure the other judges had noticed, he told me about his son’s experience, he told me how black men sold drugs on the street, a part of their culture—did he sneer?—and he asked me how one responds to that.

  It’s difficult—isn’t it?—to know exactly how to respond to that, I said.

  The air had frozen, as if all the human muscles in that room had tightened, save those of the judge who’d asked the question. The one beside him had turned his head toward him, but he had also tilted away, lifting his chin, as if to a put a distance between the two of them. I looked at each member of the panel, one by one.

  As illuminating as an anecdote might be, I said, there’s no substitute for evidence. I’d need a lot more facts before I could even begin to tackle the question of how one might respond.

  A moment passed in total silence, just long enough for the chairman to recognize an opportunity and jump in. Excellent, he said. Absolutely right.

  * * *

  In the drawing room of Penelope Hampton-Wyvern’s home, everything—the lines of every piece of furniture, the ironwork and porcelain of every lamp, the fabric of the curtains, the stately presence of the Bösendorfer, the carved frames of the pictures and photos, even the Bath Oliver biscuits—spoke of an observance of unwritten rules. The presence of these things may appear to bespeak the expression of conscious taste, of desires and choices, but look closely at the preferences. What autonomy of choice do you have if your preferences are so obviously conditioned by your social milieu? Where is your autonomy if what you choose is what you are bound to have chosen?

  I have always felt that choice is a rarity in life, that it lies in wait in the crevices of time, to surprise us when we seem to have the least room to maneuver. The grand architecture of our time on earth bears no choice at all, no trace of will, free or otherwise. Without our will we are born and against it we die. We do not choose our mothers, any more than they choose the children they bear. We do not choose the circumstances of our parents, the home and inheritance, the unearned talents, or the circumstances of our formative infant years when our brains congeal into a steady state and the neural pathways set us on the course of our lives. Most of the time, we heed unwritten rules. They may be rules of culture and conditioning, patterns imprinted on the tender firmament of youth, or they may be the rules knotted into our brains, woven with DNA by our biological parents, but they are all still rules by which we live, by which we are governed. That notion of choice as we move through the world, the free will that we claim so proudly, is only the reflection of the body’s foregone direction, an image in the distorting mirror of ego, a trick of the light.

  To answer Penelope honestly or to do so diplomatically, that was the question, the choice, before me. My mischievous casual remark—maybe their lordships felt pressured to spread these awards around a little—had now assumed proportions much greater than I’d intended. I was regretting it and was searching for an escape route, a form of words that would draw a line without embarrassing anyone.

  These days, I said, there’s a lot of talk about political correctness, and there are people who say they feel pressured into saying and doing what’s politically correct. It would be presumptuous of me to imagine that the judges would be immune to the pressures that others are complaining about.

  Anyhow, I continued, it’s just an obscure award in a tiny corner of the world—although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to get it.

  I maintained my stupid smile throughout. Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern smiled, too, but Emily did not.

  We had been sitting for the better part of an hour when there came from the hall the shuffle of feet, the tinkle of keys, and the click of the front door shutting. Until that moment, I had assumed, as I think I mentioned, that there was no one else in the house. The sounds from the hall were undoubtedly audible to everyone, yet no one responded, no one acknowledged my puzzlement let alone offered an explanation.

  If I were to trace my concerns at the time about Emily to any particular moment, I could point to a number of earlier episodes that had already seeded a disquiet, but tea that day had the distinction of throwing a new light on her.

  I had at the very beginning taken Emily’s reserve as English feminine modesty. I had already seen something of the way certain English women understated their intelligence, especially where it might show them to be better than or the equal of the men around them, as if such exhibition were lacking in grace. But this, my first mistake, was replaced by another when I began to wonder if perhaps there was something I was saying or doing, or not saying or not doing, that caused Emily to be so unforthcoming about herself and accounted for her furtive absences. From time to time I have thought that somehow I might be responsible for hurtful behavior on the part of those to whom I have given a hold on my heart. It makes one wary. />
  That afternoon, however, it dawned on me that Emily’s secretiveness might be a trait that attached to the whole family, so engrained as seldom to surface into conscious choice, a secretiveness that skirted the field of vision of the family itself. They appeared suddenly as people who had sealed something in a long-forgotten vault, and I remembered an afternoon some years earlier, before I met Emily, when, as a tourist, I visited a castle in Niedersachsen. Specifically, I remembered the swell of emotion, which was to subdue me for the remainder of the day, as I came upon a blue braided velvet rope hung between brass stanchions, cordoning off the part of the castle retained in use by the incumbent aristocrat, his children, and his grandchildren. I stood in the vast hall, by the chrome pillars, my fingertips touching the rope. On the other side there was a huge wooden door slightly ajar. The rope kept visitors within the public precincts of this stately home, but it also rendered those same public areas public, not private, not home. The thought aroused compassion. The selfsame rope, it seemed to me, cordoned off a family, a privileged one perhaps but a family nonetheless, and now these people went about their lives in one corner of the house slowly forgetting—or hoping to forget—the home they had known.

  I wonder now if, in their six stories and endless space, Emily’s family had not cordoned off parts of themselves. Doors opening and closing; the liminal presence of unspoken affairs; the air of good manners in which honest interest in the truth of people seemed vulgar; and above all the exquisite handling of information, its measured withholding and release, like an inch on the reins of a dressage horse—all these things were of the essence to the conduct of their lives, and into this milieu and its ways I was admitted and even welcomed.

  10

  In the Time of the Breaking of Nations

  The spreading of the Gospel, regardless of the motives or the integrity or the heroism of some of the missionaries, was an absolutely indispensable justification for the planting of the flag. Priests and nuns and schoolteachers helped to protect and sanctify the power that was so ruthlessly being used by people who were indeed seeking a city, but not one in the heavens, and one to be made, very definitely, by captive hands.

  —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined—I learned that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world.

  —Graham Greene, The Quiet American

  Zafar is standing outside the UN compound in Kabul. With a pinched flick from his fingers, he sends a cigarette butt flying into the night air, and when it grazes the ground he watches it release flecks and sparks of red. I watched the cigarette disintegrate, said Zafar, embers scattering over the courtyard, as I gathered confidence to take on the main building. The doors opened into a wide lounge area, a very large room with sofas and armchairs arranged in clusters, brightly lit with fluorescent tubes on the ceiling and floor lamps around the edges. I counted five large television screens hanging high on the walls. All set to CNN, they were streaming images of destruction—volume turned down, closed captions on. The place was buzzing with people. There was grave discussion, drinking, too, of course, but the main activity was talk: serious faces leaning forward. Nicky Amory and the group I came with were not in this room. The bar she’d mentioned must be elsewhere, through the archway in the corner, from which music blared, rhythm and blues, or was it hip-hop? And in between the beats an African American voice, a black man’s voice, the only black man in the room, a disembodied black man amid white faces and white forearms, a white mass.

  Which is when I saw Emily. She was sitting in a square arrangement of sofas and armchairs around a sprawling coffee table, every seat occupied by an admirer, each with a drink in front of him. Even though she was facing the main door, she would not have seen me, for Emily’s attention never strayed from the narrow cone of her own field of vision. It is a strange thing, but such little details, knowledge of how another person perceives the world—you pick them up when you spend time with a person. They are inferences, of course, and they could be wrong, but you go with them not because you need to but because you cannot but do so. She was talking, and talking narrowed her perspective even more. I stepped to one side, suddenly conscious of obstructing the doorway. She was explaining something, holding court, her body as still as a village green on a summer’s evening. When Emily spoke she never hurried, never that ripple of urgency a voice has when a speaker knows that others are waiting to speak. On the coffee table in front of her lay her notepad with her lists of things to cover—Emily, the consummate list ticker, every advance marked off, progress by bullet points. We are a species in love with lists. We even live our lives by the lists of others, the orderings of our days: the Ten Commandments, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Four Noble Truths, the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Everything is made simple by lists, made digestible, parceled into manageable units, reducing the complexity of the world into the simplicity of a line. The triumph of possibility, of finding our feet by looking for them, looking downward—the victory of modest means over the terror of a world lying beyond reach, surpassing human understanding.

  And now those slender fingers, fingers that seemed graceless on the strut of a violin, now they pick off the arguments as she makes them to the ring of men. Her face, the picture of seriousness, bears the gravity of the matters at hand. It was a face with a job to do. Where in the world could confidence be demanded more than in the private chambers of their hearts, these white males doing the Lord’s work, liberals with the mission of development, on the side of the angels even as their way to work was cleared by the devil himself? It was 2002 and reports were being written, fact-finding missions were finding facts, and plans were being laid. No effort was spared to make these plans, the plans of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the plans of the provisional government, the plans of NGOs, great plans for the poor Afghanis, the poor bastards—all the world had plans, plans to be implemented for that beleaguered people whom history had dealt such a dreadful hand, don’t you know?

  I see her now, holding forth in her quiet, feminine, and very British way, those men hanging on her every word, her authority in part borrowed from Mohammed Jalaluddin; she represents him, his chef de cabinet in a cabinet of two, and he the most senior Afghani in the international development community. Where is he now? At a meeting with the UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi or perhaps he’s with Hamid Karzai. She is his absent voice and she can be relied on to stay on message as surely as a list can be trusted to hold its course. There she is offering a smile to a fellow, and it is that superb smile of the Empire’s benevolence, an insincere smile though she does not know it. Everyone is now playing the game, and this is the board, this room a square on the board, and because they do not see the rules that they have internalized, because a Hercules aircraft brought them from Spangdahlem, Ramstein, or Brize Norton, because they are all part of history here, in the making, making it, because they are so humbled by the great task at hand of building a nation, of helping Afghanis rebuild their nation, because so many have died—what can be more real? They’re playing the game as it’s always been played: the game of Empire and Ego. See? It sounds like a board game already.

  One or two are jotting down notes. One man takes a sip from a tumbler with ice—whisky, I think to myself, whisky in Kabul—and accidentally dribbles a little onto his shirt. He glances at Emily—first and only at Emily—to see if she’s noticed. He is embarrassed. But has he any shame about drinking whisky in Kabul? Do these people believe it was only Talibs who held to the faith of their fathers? Were the Afghanis merely oppressed townsfolk and they the cavalry? These fucking people. By what right?

  They are the offspring of civilizations that have promoted individual rights, the rights of the self, yet establishing the limits of the private sphere not at the line where skin meets air but outside the body,
not at the point where the fist and another’s nose are separated by a breath of air, not even before the thumping vibrations of the air meet the ears of the natives, thrusting one man’s private sphere, his black man’s music, into the native’s, whose private sphere is his tribe, which, unlike his European liberal counterpart, is more than himself. That’s what my liberal friends have done. And I see them sitting there now. Their repugnance at the unequal treatment of women, their repugnance at the treatment of homosexuals, these could not be accepted as just that: repugnance. They cannot abide Let them be but fight their wars of reconstruction to the banner of Let him be or Let her be. They have built this monument to the European enlightenment, the West’s enlightenment, and they call it human rights, and on that rock they have founded their new humanity, and in its name they act with clear conscience. Bush and the neocons—God bless them—might have wanted their natural resources and strategic positioning, but the liberals were always after their souls.

  I knew Zafar could be very animated. I had seen it when he talked mathematics. But I’d never known him to have any strong opinions on politics, or at least I’d never heard him express such. Yet now he seemed possessed. I still cannot quite say why, but I wanted to interrupt him, perhaps to break his stride, pull him back, keep him from going off the rails. Or perhaps to save myself from becoming too uncomfortable.