In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  As pleasant as it is to see you, he said, I’d prefer not to have you called to my rooms again. Do you understand?

  I nodded and left, though I was not quite sure what he meant. Perhaps it was naïveté on my part—perhaps even a willful naïveté, to which I was blind—but I sincerely believed that while he was not endorsing what I had done, he knew, in the wisdom gained from years as dean, that simply forbidding me was not going to be enough, that if privacy could not be guaranteed, the next best thing would have to do—I must not be caught again. Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

  One day I saw a message, a piece of folded paper pinned to the notice board, for one Rebecca Sonnenschein. The pin had been perfectly centered in the letter o, probably without conscious thought but perhaps guided by the porter’s unconscious eye. I noted that none of the letters of the name hung below the imaginary line. There was no y or g or p or other such letter. I never took down that message in order to read it; her name was enough.

  That name, Rebecca Sonnenschein, evoked in me a time and place of intense romance, of intellectual illumination. Sonnenschein spoke to my mind of learning and culture, of Jewish learning and culture, which consisted for me then, as it does today, of the higher sensibilities and the rejection of the baser trends found elsewhere in the European psyche. To me, Sonnenschein contained the distillation of all that was good and true of Europe, emerging in my mind from romantic shadows falling across ill-lit cobbled streets between rows of elegant houses with high ceilings and tall shutters, the sound of a piano and violin performing a duet over the cold air. For two days, I sat in the junior common room and I waited for a woman with a Jewish look, a stereotype, and the sound of an American accent—Rebecca Sonnenschein just had to be American.

  There she was, ordering a jacket potato in the pantry. A week later she would take me out to lunch at Brown’s. When I explained to her that my budget didn’t extend to eating out of college, she said she would treat me. I was very poor in college. I didn’t feel it as poverty. Supper in college was subsidized and, besides, there was always a particularly cheap Danish salami at the Co-Op supermarket, slices of fat with flecks of pink meat, hummus, and bread rolls. All this kept me clear of poverty, but when I reflect on what I didn’t have and on what others must have had then—on what Emily had had—I see that my experience of college had been limited by a relative poverty. No college-organized reading weekends with other students in the hills outside Florence or in the Scottish Highlands. No holidays abroad, no skiing, no expensive restaurants—all restaurants were expensive.

  At lunch, Rebecca recommended the chicken Caesar salad, at twelve pounds and ninety-five pence, I observed, enough Danish salami for two weeks. Rebecca Sonnenschein introduced me to many things: She made me unafraid of fierce debate; she made me feel that in my encounter with the world, it was within me to set many of the terms, if not all; she introduced me to sex, to mad, wild sex; she taught me that a gym can be fun and she put me onto salads; and through her I saw that some people have no use for the political borders of countries. But above all the things she did for me—and I’m quite serious—Rebecca Sonnenschein showed me that difficult questions can have simple answers. I once asked her why she loved me. It is an insecure question, even, I think, when we tell ourselves it is born of mere curiosity. We were sitting in my room, both reading, she on the bed and I in an armchair. What, I was ultimately asking myself, was this beautiful American Rhodes Scholar, a graduate student, doing with this homeless Bangladeshi?

  She looked up from her book.

  It’s your money and your passport, sweetheart, she replied, flashing me a smile with her bright American teeth before returning to her book.

  * * *

  I listened to Zafar’s narrative with a mix of feelings. Our conversation had taken us away from where he’d begun, his first meeting with Emily’s family (although I was certain he’d return to this story). I had gained the impression of hearing one digression upon another. But despite the lack of design, which such an apparently haphazard account might suggest, I sensed that there was some underlying theme or movement. I came to see that his stories ran together, like the rivers of his boyhood coming from the mountains and forests and the plains, a long way from their sources but ultimately joined together in one song, a harmony of place and time.

  I have never had much difficulty with feeling at home. The nearest I have ever come to an identity crisis was on reaching border controls at the airport, before a flight, to discover that I’d forgotten my passport. I have wondered why I had not spotted it before, why I had never grasped that the question of belonging governed the interior life of my friend. Certainly he never discussed it, but had he also restrained every sign? That is the context in which I see him standing in the post room, reading the messages on the board. The matter of where one belongs is something I had understood to be significant in the lives of others, but they were strangers, people I had read about. And yet here it was in someone not only familiar but who was to me, all those years ago, someone whom I had always thought of as my equal, even my better.

  I don’t think I can fault myself for not having seen where his searching might lead to, the fraying and unstitching of a human being—all that was too far away then, in our younger days. Perhaps I couldn’t understand because in our youth we are condemned to see in others no one but ourselves.

  It was of course mathematics that framed our first meeting as students. Both of us loved it—or her; Zafar used to say, “I’ve been with the mistress”—though for me there was never quite the same passion that there was for him. I remember once coming to him with a problem whose solution had eluded me. He did not instantly offer an answer but looked out the window and seemed to have turned far away. While my friend seemed to me to be struggling, I hit upon an idea that might have been, I thought, the beginnings of a proof.

  I think I have the answer, I said.

  Yes, he said. I have three solutions but I’m trying to work out which is the most illuminating.

  For Zafar, mathematics was always about the journey and not the destination, the proof of the theorem, not merely its statement. After all, what does it mean to say that something is true if you can’t show it to be so? I think that in the journey, Zafar found a home in mathematics, a sense of belonging, at least for a while; it is a world without borders, without time, in which everything exists everywhere forever, and I see now what power such a thing might have over the psyche of someone so rootless.

  Meanwhile, an unsettling prospect was forming in my mind. I understood him to say that Emily Hampton-Wyvern’s name might in a superficial way have drawn him to her, as did Rebecca Sonnenschein’s, but his account offered no connection with Emily or, indeed, her name. Rebecca Sonnenschein’s, yes, but how, I asked him, did Emily come into the picture?

  One of the notes that I took down from the message board, replied Zafar, was addressed to you. Inside it was a message from Emily Hampton-Wyvern.

  7

  The Violin or Leipzig

  I saw the hill and the vineyards and the watercourses and I realized that this music wasn’t the same as the stuff the band played, it spoke of other things, it wasn’t meant for Gaminella, nor the trees beside the Belbo nor for us. But in the distance toward Canelli you could see Il Nido against the outline of Salto, the fine red house, set among the yellowing plane trees. And the music Irene played went with the fine house, with the gentry at Canelli, it was meant for them.

  —Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, translated by Louise Sinclair

  The first time ever I saw Emily, said Zafar, not just the name but Emily herself, was an evening years before the encounter at the South Asia Society in New York, before my stint as a banker, and before, still, my time at Harvard, which is to say, before I had been screened, vetted, sanitized by associations, and made presentable. It was in November 1988, during my second year at Oxford, at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin.


  In those days, when I had no money for concert tickets, even for concerts given by university ensembles, I would search the notice boards for performances, and on the day before the first night, I’d go along to the venue to see the final rehearsal, which in the normal course was an uninterrupted run-through of the program and was usually scheduled in the evening, presumably in order to avoid clashes with lectures and tutorials.

  On the evening I first saw Emily, I had made my way from college, down Turl Street and onto the High, in fog-soaked November darkness, and came up to the gate of the church, half expecting the doors to be closed to the public. There were not many venues in Oxford for classical music. Somewhat grander performances were held in the Sheldonian, but otherwise Queen’s College chapel, the Holywell Music Room, and the University Church were the main settings. I rather liked the Holywell Music Room, which I had read somewhere was the oldest purpose-built music hall in the world. It had struck me that the claim was the height of presumption—might there not be a music hall in the Middle East, in India, or somewhere else that was older?—until I was forced to concede my own presumption to think that the author of the claim had meant to say Europe and not the world. Most human disputes, one might speculate, ask us to choose not between arguments proceeding from empirical observations about the world but between competing sets of bare assumptions.

  I knocked on the front gate of the University Church. If the vicar answered, he would let me in—he knew my face—but to anyone else I’d explain that I left my scarf on one of the pews somewhere. Once inside, I would go off to the side and the musicians would begin their business, quickly forgetting me.

  I waited for an answer and then tried the door. It was unlocked. I found a seat not far from the stage, in the shadow of a stone column but with a clear view of the chancel, where the musicians would play.

  If the musicians didn’t arrive immediately, I thought, I could sit and consider again the figure whose body adorns the cross, this fellow who had fascinated me ever since the first encounter in the morning assembly of an Anglican primary school in central London, so that now, more than a decade later, I often came to this church, a short walk from college, to look at him, sometimes even to attend services. The vicar, a terribly nice man whose sermons were sprinkled with the phrase in a very real sense—as if there was any other sense—probably thought I was a lost sheep taking timid steps to return to the flock. Perhaps I underestimated his wisdom. But in those days, when I sat and looked at the crucifix, it was not love that burned in my heart but growing rage. What is the beginning of rage, the beginning of anger? Not dislike, but love. It is possible that rage was always there and that his lordship, Jesus Christ, was only the focus of my rage. That would be in keeping with the fellow’s self-sacrificing character; he might have offered himself for anger, not love, for all the rage that came his way. Have you read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair?

  No, but I’ve seen the movie.

  Throughout the novel, the narrator, Greene’s alter ego, Maurice Bendrix, is angry with God, even when he doesn’t believe in him. His anger magnifies when it transpires that he’s lost the woman he loved. There is a passage—near the beginning, I think—in which he says that love and hatred come from the same gland, that they can even produce the same actions. Well, that’s a novel, a story, but it’s worth a thought that anger is no less God-given than love. That’s the appeal of Catholicism. They have a calculating honesty, the Catholics, marshaling the base resources, far from denying them; the Anglicans with their carrot cakes, their village fetes, raffles for the new church roof, and teas with the vicar—they have no respect for anger.

  You’re not a Christian, are you? I asked Zafar.

  Do you mean: Have I been received into the Church of Rome?

  Well?

  I used to think, said Zafar, that Islam wasn’t there for me when I needed God.

  Zafar’s answer was less than direct. Meena had remarked on this indirectness the day of his return into our lives. An air about him left one with the sense not to pry, an understanding that he would share only what he volunteered. It was the odd politeness-cum-formality that carried this off, which in our youth I mistook, I think, merely for an aspect of the charm he had and not as a device to keep the distance. Was it not the formality of those Oxford lawns, and the intimation of design, that warned you to keep off the grass?

  But there was another dimension now, something different, edgier. I had witnessed episodes of aggression before, the skinheads on the walk near Portobello Road, for instance, but they were contextual, weren’t they? What was new was the presence of something I won’t try to capture in a single phrase—it was not the threat of aggression. But one sensed it about him even if one might have intuited it in the way of an unknowing creature.

  The ritual, continued Zafar, the recitation of the Koran, the ignorance of the meaning of words, the choreography of standing, kneeling, and falling prostrate, its unthinkingness, all offended my mind, which demanded reasons and explanations. The only book my parents ever gave me was on Eid when I was sixteen. My mother must have picked it up in one of those shops in the East End, where they sell tapes of Koranic recitation, books about Islam, and varieties of calendars with images of the Kaaba, and where the doors to the shops are always left open so that, as you come up the street, you cannot avoid the electrically distorted caterwaul of a Pakistani mullah. The book was written in English and it was about how Islam predicted science. In fact, I think it was actually called How Islam Predicted Science. It was full of the most idiotic assertions.

  But the gift did show that my parents had in one respect understood something, that I needed words. Do you know the story of Muhammad and Mount Jabal al-Nur?

  No.

  About the cave called Hira?

  I know that. Broadly speaking.

  Muhammad was a good man who would retreat to this cave to pray and meditate. And it was during one of these periods of isolation that he was visited by the archangel Gabriel, who commanded him to read from a document. Read! exhorted the angel. Muhammad was illiterate and, trembling before this supernatural apparition, he replied, I do not know how to read. Once again, the archangel commanded him Read! and again, Muhammad answered that he could not read. And the archangel, raising his voice, commanded: Read in the name of your Lord who created, Created man from a clot of blood. Read!

  And Muhammad began to read. The first miracle of Islam was that an illiterate man came to read, so it would be wrong of me to say that Islam did not value the written word. But my God would be a God I could read, one to consider and in a language I understood. Wasn’t meaning, I thought, thought once, the whole point of the divine? I believed that Islam’s response to the pursuit of meaning was not to provide answers but to drill and drum men into forsaking meaning for ritual and habit. I believed such things when I thought that meaning counted for more than the rewards of ritual.

  When people say that religion is only a crutch, I have to wonder what the only means, for I can’t imagine anyone would dispute that a crutch allows us to carry on the business of living, half hobbling but better than without it, while taking the weight off the wound to aid the process of healing. I know that it is invoked only as a metaphor, but it seems to me that metaphors are never only anything.

  When I eventually turned to religion, after the long draw, when I sought out a god, I did so because I needed practical help right away. Religion was never far from me, but it was the defects and deficiencies of my relationship with Emily that finally sent me reaching for the love of God. I found in him, because I wanted to find it in him, what I could not find in Emily, what I had not found in England, in my home there, but what I had known once as a child in my village in Sylhet. Love that is earned or deserved is always suspect; the great observation on which Christianity is founded is that the greatest love cannot be earned or deserved. That is not an ethical rule but an empirical observation, a scientifically testable proposition, and on that rock an entir
e religion has been built, a magnificent cathedral of hope.

  But you say it was Emily that drove you to God?

  Do you know what a tug-of-war is?

  Of course I know what a tug-of-war is! We did it at school, I replied.

  Do you have to hesitate every time you say school?

  What do you mean?

  Don’t Etonians refer to school as college? he asked.

  They call it school, just like everyone else, I replied.

  Just like everyone else?

  Come on. You were talking about coming to God, I said, ignoring the jibe.

  Something rather puzzled me when I was a boy. On the title page or somewhere in the front matter of a book, they used to tell you a bit about the author. More often than not, included was the fact that the author went to this or that school. Mentioning university, I thought, was fair enough: In those days I had the notion that university was where education began and that school was disastrous. Today, mention of anything about an author seems to me to be an act of vanity or a concession to human curiosity. But to mention what school a child or an adolescent went to seemed very strange indeed. Take Down and Out in Paris and London. It says at the front that Eric Arthur Blair went to Eton. The man changed his name for the book cover, but you were told where he went to school.

  I was very slow, continued Zafar. I don’t think it was until I got to college—to Oxford—that I began to understand that those chaps who mentioned their school weren’t talking about education in the sense I understood it, the stuff in books or the stuff you figure out yourself with pencil and paper and a pocketful of axioms. I got wind one day that some people thought I’d been a scholar at Winchester. When someone asked me directly, I remember the look of disappointment on his face when I said I hadn’t, that I’d gone to a state school. Why was he disappointed? After all, I’d got to Oxford and he knew I was doing well there.