In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  James again gave me a smile. It seemed to me a warm and generous smile, a boyish smile. But there was more in that smile, and though I could not know what exactly he had in his mind, I did believe then that his little grin acknowledged the distance I would have to cover to go from not shooting to shooting. Perhaps, I thought, it even acknowledged the distance I had covered to meet the Hampton-Wyverns. Not long afterward, however, I would learn that the Hampton-Wyverns had covered that distance already, going the other way.

  James had barely stepped out of the room when Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern leaned forward in her seat.

  You seem like an affable young man, she said. You may consider this out of turn but I must say it. Zafar, be careful with my daughter.

  Of course, I said earnestly. It was exactly what a solicitous mother might say. In point of fact, I was flattered that she thought of my relationship with her daughter as serious, and I was also gratified to think that Emily must have represented it to her in such a way. I wanted to reassure Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern more, but Emily had appeared at the doorway. I could not immediately tell if she had heard anything of what her mother had said.

  * * *

  Zafar broke off there to make us both some coffee, but when he resumed his narrative, he did not pick up where he had stopped. At the time, I thought he was just veering off on another aside. Only later, when he talked about meeting Emily in Kabul, did it become apparent that what he framed in general terms was actually an observation drawn from very personal experience. He would return to the Hampton-Wyverns, but now he wanted to talk about Afghanistan and for that he was laying some groundwork.

  Many years ago Zafar told me about a TV program he had seen in the junior common room at college. It was a time when liberals in the Church of England were condemning the brutality of Thatcher’s economic project. The archbishop of York appeared on the show, and the presenter, Jonathan Dimbleby, said to him: Your Grace, there is a great upsurge of the urge in people for certainty. Their charge is that you offer them not that kind of certainty but doubt. The archbishop paused to reflect. With his hands clasped, as if in prayer, he replied: Has it occurred to you that the lust for certainty may be a sin? This memory comes back to me now as a sign that his more recent preoccupations have actually been some time in the making.

  I have seen serious scientists and mathematicians give talks, said Zafar, and their faces and manner conveyed nothing of the politician’s earnest certitude or confidence, no sign of gravity but of playful levity, as if—I have thought—as if they were a tad embarrassed, as if they didn’t fully accept that anyone else could be interested in what they had to say, or as if they were vaguely uncomfortable with this business of dissemination, a task that is auxiliary to their true calling, which is the inquiry and discovery itself. But now I suspect that this outward appearance may be the natural state of anyone who is in proximity to the truth. The mathematician cannot rely on his authority as a mathematician to carry him one inch of the way. It is not some modesty in the character of the mathematician that tells him so but something in the nature of mathematics itself that reveals the irrelevance of his person. If his mathematics is correct, his written findings are immune to every assault. Authority in the form of experience, authority in the form of worldly wisdom or charisma, such kinds of authority are impotent. The politician’s conviction is a stand-in: Men who want you to know that they are sure in their own minds seldom have the reasons to show on the page. This is what Einstein meant when he said that one author would have been enough.* But it doesn’t stop there. The mathematician knows that nothing empirical, nothing which we are to perceive in this world, can undermine by so much as one whiff of doubt any mathematical claim, and because he knows this, he is free.

  The irony is that scientists are much less certain about what they say than politicians, policy makers, and pundits. The certainty of the kind you see in the face of a politician declaiming on tax increases or hear in the voice of a commentator condemning or endorsing a foreign policy decision, or the certainty you detect in the words of an op-ed writer pontificating on one thing or another—I used to think that they arrived at their certainty after considering an issue in great depth and finding that the evidence fell overwhelmingly in favor of a specific position. You must think me naïve ever to have thought this way. But I did. I used to think that a good argument was the midwife to certainty. If, as I now believe, it is the wish that fathers the thought, then certainty is the lingering imprint of a wish on thoughts and arguments, like DNA retained in progeny, acting invisibly but with visible effects.

  I don’t know who it was that said that the three greatest feats of science in the twentieth century were Einstein’s theory of relativity, Crick and Watson’s discovery of the double helical structure of DNA, and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Few can doubt the impact of Einstein’s mass-energy equation, and if impact be the measure, then relativity gets a place on the podium. As for DNA and the double helix, we may be forgiven a little anthropocentrism, for nothing has ever so teased our lustful hubris as the power to understand and alter what we are. But what of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem? Time magazine included Gödel on a list of its Twenty Greatest Thinkers and Scientists of the Twentieth Century, but the truth is that unlike relativity and DNA, the Incompleteness Theorem has no place in the popular imagination.

  At the center of the mathematical enterprise stands this rather awkward result, an extraordinary one that uses mathematics itself not to expound an irrefutable observation about circles or prime numbers or topological invariants and conformal mappings but to say something about the nature of mathematics itself. It is a theorem that denies certainty in the very realm where you might expect it most. Why should that matter? Mathematics is unique in all human endeavor. I might think that a violinist does or does not have a feel for music; perhaps I can have an opinion on that, for what it’s worth, but that opinion is always vulnerable, can only be vulnerable, to one differing opinion. Nothing that is proven in mathematics, however, can be assailed or undermined. You may take it as granted. It is the parent, the lover, the friend you can rely on, imaginary if need be. Mathematics, which doesn’t include the tawdry efforts of statistics or probability, pure mathematics, the product of the human mind turning to face itself, turning into itself, and finding in the realm of necessary consequences, where no contingent fact is to be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or touched—it discloses a beauty that exhausts human comprehension and a certainty the senses can never touch. No other effort in this world can deliver a thing of such exhilarating beauty that is also true in that way, in that way, I say, whose beginning and end are one and the same, which requires no venture beyond the cranial cage, no reliance on the perceptions that deceive or the memory that corrupts, no appeal to anything experienced. Christ in heaven! Can you bloody believe it?

  * * *

  Of course, I was moved by Zafar’s passionate charge for mathematics. I had studied the subject in my own youth, so that what he described sounded echoes in the corridors of my memory. It’s said of mathematicians that mathematics is their mistress, their first love, or the great love of their lives. It is a hackneyed metaphor and, come to think about it, one not uniquely applicable to mathematicians. But in my time, I’ve had enough of a feel for mathematics, have dipped in her shallows if not plumbed her depths, to vouch for the quality of intimacy.

  Zafar moved on to an exposition of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but this took us along yet another digression carrying us further afield. He did not, in fact, lose his thread, and, in due course, he returned to his story of meeting the Hampton-Wyverns and then the narrative of events in Afghanistan (in fact there was only ever just one thread, winding in ways that are now apparent). Even so, I am inclined to skip over the account concerning Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a digression too far, which should not be taken as an indication of anything other than my own need to keep a grip on the twisting and turning of Zafar’s discussion, the ranging back and forth.


  In 2000, how many people knew what subprime mortgages were? he asked me.

  Hang on! How did we get to mortgages? I responded.

  Zafar simply repeated the question.

  Not many, I said, giving up and going along with him.

  And before September 11, 2001, how many do you think had read Ahmed Rashid’s book about Afghanistan?

  Taliban?

  Yes.

  Your point is?

  When a journalist asked Harold Macmillan what he feared most in politics, his reply was, Events, dear boy, events. The event defines everything, changes everything, not just afterward but also before. People can’t bear the unexpected, they won’t let it stand and they’ll change their memories to make what was unexpected now expected. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, men abhor the vacuum in history, the discontinuity wrought by the unexpected, and they’ll go back and fill it out, go back and try to figure out how it happened, try to identify what we didn’t see before, that to which we once were blind but now can see. We go back and revise our understanding of the world, with the benefit of having experienced the event.

  What event?

  Unexpected events. Things we just didn’t see coming. We plan our policies, making predictions every which way. But look at the past, even the written one. What is it but a chain of surprises?

  9/11? The financial crisis?

  External events, events that come out of the blue, said Zafar, changing lives all the time, every year, if not every day. Our choices are made, our will flexed, in the teeth of events that overwhelm and devour us.

  As Churchill said, I added, history is just one bloody thing after another.

  Was that Churchill? asked Zafar.

  Isn’t there a convention that if you don’t know who the author is, you can always attribute it to Churchill?

  I thought it was Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  You can always attribute it to Edna St. Vincent Millay? I asked Zafar.

  No. Millay said, It is not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.

  That’s actually more interesting, I responded.

  But I suppose you’re right. In fact, as Churchill himself said, the false attribution of epigrams is the friend of letters and the enemy of history.

  He said that?

  No, replied Zafar.

  * * *

  Our conversation ended there for the day. It is from this point, I think, that his Afghan account took on a markedly darker hue. If I think now, as I am inclined to do, that this was the moment Zafar began setting out the case for his defense—defense of what happened in Afghanistan, of what he did there—then I am forced to accept that he was no less setting out a case for prosecution, a case to establish the culpability of others, and of me. This is what I think he meant by his references to 9/11 and the financial crisis, and in a narrower way a reference to why and how things changed between him and Emily. It is only once the dust from historic events has settled that people pick their way back across the battlefield to survey the damage, and then rewrite history. Alan Greenspan, that wily chairman of the Federal Reserve, was lauded once, not long ago, as possibly the greatest Fed chairman ever, a master of the markets, manipulating interest rates to perfection. Today, even in the eyes of former acolytes, Greenspan’s reputation is in tatters. Too free and easy with money, they say, always was. Under him interest rates fell and money became so cheap that there was little to give investors and banks pause before putting more and more borrowed funds into riskier and riskier investments. Enter subprime mortgages, mortgages to those who couldn’t really afford them, who would default in due course. But it is only after the event that the eyes of history look back. Who could know that in the hills of Central Asia, trouble was brewing that would spill from the skies of Manhattan? Yet afterward the eyes of the West, if not of the world, and all the thunder of its armory came down on Afghanistan. There are some words in one of Zafar’s notebooks that appear to have been taken down at a museum in Copenhagen (if one is to go by the surrounding notes and observations on that city) and are attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: Life can only be understood backward; the trouble is, it has to be lived forward.

  * * *

  I met Mohammed and Sila Jalaluddin, said Zafar, in the summer of 2001 in Washington, D.C., where the husband had been a midranking World Bank official. Beginning in the autumn of 2001, Afghani-born professionals working in public policy or international development, numbering a few scattered across the globe, were drawn into the incipient reconstruction efforts after the American invasion of their mother country. Mohammed Jalaluddin’s career had until then been trapped in the doldrums of D.C., in no small part due to his reputation as a difficult man, but it was now carried up on the wind radiating from the crashing Twin Towers that lifted everyone in his business. He, like so many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people. What else explains the implacable set of the lips? They peddle an august wisdom safe in the knowledge that it can never be proven false. They know that such advice, bought and paid for in good money and in the kind of honors and offices they crave, will only be tossed into the maelstrom of conflicting political demands and corrupt claims, in which their advice will lose its identity, so that disappointments and failed outcomes only exonerate them and justify each new contract for further service.

  But no one works alone, not even the most curmudgeonly, not when a job has tasks to be delegated. On a day in June 2001, Penelope Hampton-Wyvern received a telephone call from an old paramour, one Rudiger Dornhoff, an ex-UN staffer, who had heard that a former colleague was looking for a junior consultant to hire. Emily had taken a degree in public administration from Harvard, but her grades fell some way short of the triple-A rating for the elite young professional program. So, like many aspirants to UN jobs before her, she sought a route in through the many unguarded passages known to insiders. Consultants under contract are never subject to the same degree of scrutiny.

  I never met Dornhoff, continued Zafar. I know some facts, but I have speculated about the rest. He was retired, but, having no family to mind, he remained at his former employer’s side, like an old sheepdog, and offered his services as a consultant on projects in which he had once been involved.

  Dornhoff met Penelope Hampton-Wyvern at a bookshop near Campden Hill some forty years ago. Penelope was then a dark-haired twenty-three-year-old, already engaged to be married to Robin. A Swiss nobleman, of the rather pointless Swiss kind, Dornhoff was a graduate student in economics in London. He and Penelope met, he flattered her, she swooned, he made overtures, she blushed, this went on, he persisted, and then she told him she was already engaged. Over the years Dornhoff maintained with Penelope a largely one-sided correspondence of postcards from his exotic UN postings. His hopes might have risen when word reached him of Penelope’s divorce, but when he spoke to her next the optimism would have been deflated by the same cheery affection from her as a sister might bear for a younger brother. The point here is that Dornhoff had information from behind enemy lines, and Emily, now armed with a master’s in public administration, was the soldier of beneficence in search of a just war.

  I gave up the delusion, which lasted only as long as the notion of love between Emily and me was tenable, that goodness is what drove her. In its place was an older conviction, released from abeyance. I have an idea that much human misery can be traced to a tiny source, whose true identity remains hidden as it is time and again mistaken for something else. And the mistake is one that is easily made, for the source of misery is the source, too, of greatness, so that pride will not let a man regard the two faces at once. Is that not the Promethean fable, that the fire stolen from the gods will light men their way even while it burns their hands?

  I do not trust a man who says he does not care what others think of him. I rather suspect there’s little else he cares about. It’s not just that a person’s fabr
ications and the carefully woven stories he tells about himself are all begotten of the dark drive to elevate himself into a creature of significance. It’s not just that he will lie through his teeth, as he convinces himself of his veracity, in order to enhance the esteem in which he is held. The root of mischief is that he will organize all his affairs and dedicate his every work to the advancement of his reputation and that this object alone will drive him on. When evil enters the world, do you think it comes with horns and cloven feet, billowing some foul stench?

  What others think of him, his place in society, the regard of his peers, is the prime motive of a human being’s every enterprise. Freud never made enough of this. Otto Rank called it the hero instinct, every man’s craving to be a hero despite the universe that mocks him, as if in all its vast splendor it ever spared a thought for another paltry contingency.

  Rudiger Dornhoff, having been informed by Penelope that Emily was looking for a job at the UN, had been keeping a faithful eye on the bulletin boards, and when a post was advertised for a temporary contract with a fellow with whom he’d worked on a few projects in Indonesia, a fellow who would no doubt find useful a testimonial for Emily from Dornhoff himself, the Swiss picked up the phone to her.

  That was in June 2001, and the fellow looking for a temp was Mohammed Jalaluddin, who, by October, would become recognized as the most senior Afghani at the UN, World Bank, or IMF, and would find himself desired as never before. The future of his country—the U.S. passport didn’t matter for these pressing purposes—would depend on him. The lives of twenty-five million would depend on him. But he couldn’t do it all on his own, and there beside him would be Emily, so very reliable, bright, and, my goodness, never has there walked on the earth a woman so vulnerable to the father figure, a pilgrim from one shrine to another, in search of the ideal.

  By March 2002, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was well established. Land Cruisers were roaring into Kabul; U.S. helicopters laden with UNAMA staff churned the dust at makeshift airfields in outlying districts; and, not least, up and running, pulling pints and pouring shots, was the UN bar in Kabul. Mohammed Jalaluddin, Emily Hampton-Wyvern, and a hundred important people were in place, housed in a compound adjoining that bar. The stage was set.