In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  To eavesdrop on lovers or to recount their words of tenderness is unquestionably ill-mannered, but it is also foolish to expect words exchanged in a mood of tenderness to bear up to the unforgiving regard of an age as cynical as love’s language is naïve. To describe their exchange, our beautiful Italian does not in only two syllables afford the same nuances as the English word mawkish. But to describe it thus is to accept defeat against the cynicism.

  “You think that I am drawn to your weakness,” she said. “This is not true at all. Let me tell you something you may not know. The world is inhabited by three kinds of men. There are the weak, who are only that. There are the strong, who are nothing more. And there are men like you. Moisi, my love, you carry a deep well of strength that is yours, that will always be there. Your tears are the surface of that well.”

  Alessandro had never known such happiness as was his in Vienna. He would never know it again. After a week, the two parted, having laid plans to meet again a week thence in another city of Europe. They exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to speak the next day. The next day, Alessi waited by the phone but no call came, and when he dialed the number, her telephone was always engaged. After a week of trying the same number over and over, Alessi put down the phone. Alessi remembered how she had remained silent about herself and how he had done the same and, for this small mercy, he believed he ought to be grateful, as if seeking to persuade himself that she had carried away no part of him.

  The months passed and then the years, and although Alessi never forgot that week in Vienna, although he never forgot the intensity of feeling in those seven days, although he never forgot the woman, he did continue with life. In his outward form, one might say even that he flourished, for professionally he grew and grew and his scientific inquiries yielded greater and greater insights.

  But here is the unaccountable fact. At a point in time that cannot be located exactly, Alessandro became possessed of a fear, an irrational and unscientific fear, which took hold of his sleeping hours. In a perversion of the original story, Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni came to believe that in the hour of his death he would cry out the name of his lost love.

  He railed against his dreams, for what should it matter what trifling thoughts seize a man in his final hour? What should it matter to the present, to the life in hand, that it might end with a vision of loss? Isn’t a life worth more than that? And here Alessi reminded himself of the people he had helped, the patients who had survived because of his skill, and the physicians and pharmacologists whose understanding he had increased. Was that, he asked, not enough to dismiss all thought—all the dark dreams!—all the absurd fear of the closing mutterings of a dying man in his worn-out brain? Why, he asked above all else, should such an ending be the worst fate he could imagine awaiting him? For that was what it was: the terror of a meaningless end that unravels everything. Such fear and such dreams remained with him to fill out the hollows of his heart.

  Alessandro therefore came to believe that he had to trick this end, must wrong-foot his apparent destiny, that he would have to take matters into his own hands. That was the thought, the contemplation of design, that was to carry him through many years.

  In 1990, Alessandro accepted a chair at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Maryland. Alessi was delighted by America, fascinated by this world within the world, and threw himself into all things American. He watched baseball and football, he bought season tickets, he was crazy for burgers and hot wings with blue cheese dip. He took to wearing a Baltimore Orioles cap on his rounds at the hospital and at the lectures he gave in the medical school. He loved the absurd game shows on television, where ignorance seemed to be celebrated. Five years after arriving, he became an American citizen. For a decade, Alessandro lived in what was apparently a blizzard of good humor, and the truth of it was that America had indeed infused his days with a simple joy. But it was a joy whose greatest achievement was to make bearable certain dark nights in which the old fear revisited him.

  In September of 2001, Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni settled into window seat 12A, next to an elderly gentleman, on a fully booked Boeing 727 at Boston’s Logan Airport. Still percolating in his thoughts were the discussions he’d had at Harvard Medical School in a meeting with collaborators on a research project. In New York he was scheduled to give a lecture at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, before traveling back to Maryland. Shortly after the plane had reached its cruising altitude of thirty-one thousand feet, Alessandro felt a mighty ache in his upper abdomen. He curled over in his seat grabbing his chest. Alessandro knew what it was.

  As he lay dying, Alessandro forgot his chosen fear. He did not think of the woman he had loved in Vienna, he did not utter her name, he did not pine for that loss. Nor, contrary to what some might imagine of men at their end, did he recall childhood, its accumulated tiny humiliations, the wounds that could not heal; he did not remember the taunting of the children, he did not remember the hatred in their eyes, or the occasion he threw his arms around a teacher, who only pushed him away with a look of disgust. He did not remember the nuns, who had shown nothing of the tenderness of Christian love. Such memories, when they come, do not come back vaguely but with the detail of a knife unsheathed. Yet to him then they did not come at all. Instead, Alessandro thought of the postage stamps in his wallet, stamps he had purchased in the various places he had lived, stamps unused, left over, stamps that signified letters and postcards unsent, the words he had never spoken and the people to whom those words had not been said. He thought of those wasted stamps. If you had been watching Alessandro at that moment, as he lay in the aisle of the airplane surrounded by flight attendants, you might have seen a curious smile spread across his face, you might have heard the muffled sound of a muttered word, and if you had been familiar with the accents and dialects of a corner of Italy, you might have recognized the voice of a child born only four hours by mule from the town of M___, for in the hour of his death Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni, like all men, cried out for his mother.

  14

  The Colonel, the General, the Nuclear Physicist, the Spymaster, and the Novice

  Bring over a poem’s ideas and images, and you will lose its manner; imitate prosodic effects, and you sacrifice its matter. Get the letter and you miss the spirit, which is everything in poetry; or get the spirit and you miss the letter, which is everything in poetry. But these are false dilemmas … Verse translation at its best generates a wholly new utterance in the second language.

  —John Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu

  When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing-room full of dukes.

  —W. H. Auden, “The Poet and the City”

  I can remember at one official function [in West Pakistan] where there was a group of women, wives of members of the elite, and I overheard one laughing to the others, “What does it matter if women in Bengal are being raped by our soldiers? At least the next generation of Bengalis will be better looking.” That was the kind of attitude you found here in 1971, and it is still around today.

  —Patrick French, Liberty or Death

  Tell me about the UN bar. Did you meet Emily?

  I did, replied Zafar.

  And what happened?

  I should tell you first about the supper I had with the colonel and his guests.

  Before you went to Kabul?

  You should know what I’d been hearing in Islamabad.

  And then you’ll pick up the story in Kabul?

  Then I’ll pick up the story in Kabul.

  Listening to Zafar, I was like a child hearing a story at bedtime, interrupting and impatient to hear all its mysteries impossibly revealed at once.

  A member of his staff showed me upstairs, continued Zafar, to a well-appointed bedroom at the back of the house, with its own bathroom off to one side.

  I took a nap—though perhaps I didn’t actually sleep—and I got up refreshed and ready.
After washing and putting on a clean shirt, I stood in front of the mirror and considered whether to wear my tie. The colonel had been dressed in traditional Pakistani costume, so I decided a tie would be inappropriate. I thought of the custom in Iran, where men wear Western suits and shirts but do not wear ties, ties being regarded as the ultimate symbol of Westernization. Such a fine distinction seemed to me comical at that moment when of course I had in my mind the colonel’s observation concerning Gaddafi’s Western military uniform. Forswearing ties looked like a petty and childish act of defiance, and yet there it was, imbued with enormous meaning. I left the tie in my jacket pocket.

  Before opening the doors to the dining room, a uniformed soldier sheepishly asked for permission to frisk me. When he patted a pocket, I took out my digital voice recorder and, responding to his quizzical look, I said it was a phone. These days phones do everything, but in 2002 cell phone technology was just getting going—and this was Pakistan. The soldier rolled his head from side to side, maintaining an inane grin on his face. I moved toward the dining room when he stopped me. Please, sir, he said and disappeared behind a door. He returned carrying a tin, holding its lid open. Please, sir, we will keep phone safe only.

  The guests were gathered in a large dining room, standing about with drinks in hand. They were all men, all older and gray haired, from a generation before mine, more than one generation yet not quite two. The room was made out in an English Victorian mode, but the furniture was all repro, nothing worn or scuffed about the wood, a little too even in tone. On the walls were unremarkable paintings, landscapes was my impression. Dominating the room was a large painting on the far wall: a ship caught in a storm, a galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, below an improbably large moon. The painting was positioned between two vast windows, whose curtains weren’t drawn even though daylight was fast fading. This room was an unloved space, and I could not imagine the colonel dining there alone.

  Ah, Zafar, exclaimed the colonel. Come, come, my boy.

  The colonel was dressed in a dark gray suit, no Nehru collar this time but a double-breasted English cut and a shirt with a high collar. There was no tie but instead an ostentatious crimson cravat.

  We took our seats at the oval table, the colonel directing me to a seat opposite his. There were three other guests.

  Let me make introductions, Zafar. The rest of us know each other. This here is General Firdous Khan, said the colonel, indicating the man on my right, a richly mustachioed gentleman in khaki uniform with immensely broad shoulders and signs of a healthy appetite. I thought of a tank.

  Most pleased to make your acquaintance, said the general.

  Firdous, continued the colonel—and you may call him General Khan—Firdous is a splendid fellow, despite his utter lack of cultural sensibility, which of course does his Pakhtoon brethren proud. He’s actually a three-star general, only three stars, a lieutenant general, you see, but they like to be addressed as General. He will have much to tell you—what is it you know, Firdous? he asked, turning to the general. Anyway, continued the colonel, he can talk to you about something or other, provided we keep him stocked with food and drink.

  Mohammed Ahmed Hassan, said the colonel, gesturing toward the man on my left, who was smoking a cigarette (and would stop only to eat), is with ISI.* He’s a spy and he looks it, don’t you think? Hassan-bhai, welcome, we don’t judge you. Unlike everyone else.

  And finally, let me introduce you to the least among us, a chap on whom you needn’t waste too much time since he’s barely sober, I daresay, though sobriety would, in his case, hardly guarantee lucid conversation. Dr. Reza Mehrani is a distinctly shifty sort. No, not because of his Irani ancestry—we are modern people here—but because he’s a scientist of some description concerning himself with atoms and suchlike. They call him the god of small things. Rumor has it he’s also a first-class bridge player, but since we play only chess in this house, I’ve no idea why he’s here. How is the lovely wife? And remind us what in God’s name she sees in you.

  Ricky, said General Khan, pass the bloody whisky.

  Khan outranked the colonel by a notch, but rank gave way here to a leveling informality. Ricky, evidently, was the colonel’s nickname among friends. The men obviously had a shared ancient history. In fact—and I’m getting ahead a little—over the course of the conversation they slipped into Urdu here and there, and when they did, they used the very informal second person form of you. English has lost something of value, I think. It’s still there in German, in the informal du, in the French tu, and in the Spanish tú. English used to have it in thou, and it remains in the Lord’s Prayer: thy will be done, thine is the Kingdom.*

  Even before I said anything, I became rather self-conscious. There was of course the unfamiliarity of my circumstances—the middle of 2002 in a staging post for a war to avenge the destruction of the towering icons of America, and I am in Islamabad, the guest of a Pakistani colonel—but this in itself was not the cause. I might, instead, have been uncomfortable to be in the presence of the Pakistani military, men of an age to have sullied their hands in 1971. But even that was not on my mind. It was a rather trivial matter, now that I consider it. These men had rather thick Pakistani accents and I was conscious of my own voice, its decidedly educated English sound. To my mind’s ear—I had barely spoken—it already sounded out of place, even false and presumptuous.

  Before bringing in the food, an orderly went around the table with a jug of water and a large bowl, and every man washed his hands. The meal was a surprisingly simple affair of two meat curries and dhal with a platter of rotis and a bowl of rice, and the men were oddly restrained in the portions they served themselves, even the general, his girth notwithstanding. I thought of the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in Britain, among whom it is apparently a matter of statistical record that the incidence of heart disease and diabetes significantly exceeds the British national average. I met a doctor once who worked at the Royal London Hospital in the East End and who explained to me that there was a growing consensus that Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in Britain were eating too much and eating the wrong kinds of food, too many fats and sugars.

  As I watched these men eat, while I myself ate, I thought of animals driven by the instinct to survive. You may speculate that this attitude—seeing animals—came from some kind of alienation, a rupture with society. My own understanding was more prosaic. The news wasn’t making sense to me. Which is to say, I had difficulty following the arguments. One argument, underpinning so much then, ran as follows: The Taliban had harbored Bin Laden, Bin Laden headed Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda had executed the attacks. But there were matters of proof, not necessarily conclusive proof, but a requirement that these steps be borne out in evidence. Bin Laden’s proud owning of responsibility was to come two years later, for instance. And even if the evidence was there, even if such evidence was to be found, there remained the question of whether it all amounted to an ethical justification for the actions now being undertaken. However, if I were to tell you that in the very first month I opposed the war, then I’d be every bit a liar as the liars who take us into wars. My emotions ran high when I recalled the collapse of the towers. America had my heart and she had been wounded. Geologists apparently call our geological era the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. It made more sense to me to think of the private goals of beasts, each alpha male, from the Blairs and Bushes to the Cheneys and Rumsfelds, consolidating his power and securing his personal material future with the unthinking frightened herds following. I had no time for conspiracy theories.

  The men ate quickly, as soldiers might, tearing off chunks of bread and mopping up sauces. They didn’t touch the rice, and I speculated that it might have been put out for my benefit; I was Bangladeshi, after all, from a people who ate rice—I’d never seen roti in my village—and whose land was a checkerboard of rice fields. I served myself a scoop.

  All the men ate with their hands, save the colonel, who used a spoon. It wobbled a little as he raised it, his fingers no l
onger obeying him to the letter. Perhaps my eye lingered on this a moment too long, for the general commented: If you play chess with Ricky, he’ll get you to move his pieces.

  I smiled embarrassedly and engaged my food. Only much, much later did I perceive the art in the general’s remark.

  The conversation moved in desultory fashion through family matters, births, deaths, and marriages, the business ventures of some or other child and the educational achievements of a grandchild. It was all, I later understood, a deferral of the real topic, the U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan. In those days, that must have been the only talk of the town.

  Afterward, we washed our hands and, carrying the idle conversation with us, moved to the lounge, where the colonel had received me earlier. We settled into armchairs and sofas. I noticed that the pieces on the chessboard, on the table in the corner of the room, had moved, a defeated few now standing at the edge of the board. A game had been played, though at my distance it was not possible to tell if it had resulted in a victor.

  You’ve been very silent, Reza-bhai, said the general. What is ticktocking in that cranium?

  Mehrani looked around the room.

  Drones, he said, letting the one word hang melodramatically.

  Mohammed Hassan, the ISI official, exhaled a plume of smoke that drifted across Mehrani’s face. I wanted to laugh, and for a few moments my whole being was dedicated to restraining the muscles around my mouth and my eyes.