In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  You sound like a revision aid.

  I read it at school. Maugham can’t give a half-decent explanation for this decision and falls back on speculation. And when the painter himself is pressed, he is, as Maugham says, too lacking in self-awareness, whatever that means, to be able to explain it himself.

  There you go, then. Some things just don’t see the light of day.

  But it’s not a bad book, not at all. You don’t knock a tiger for not having wings.

  I’m not saying it isn’t and I’m not saying there isn’t a book to be written—you can have a go. What I’m saying is that the thing I want to write I can’t write; maybe it can’t be written. You talk about inexplicable decisions, but what about actions that do not proceed from anything that can be called a decision? How can it ever be enough to speak of blind rage? The unspeakable does not bear utterance. And even if the words were there for the discovering, how much pain would I have to overcome to hold the pen steady for long enough? I remember a famous passage in Daniel Deronda: There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.*

  That’s where imagination comes in, I said. Writers use their imaginations. It’s a gift human beings have, and a writer uses it to go to those places hard to reach, those unmapped countries within us. Imagination is a compass—a compass from God, if you will.

  Your English teacher must have been very good. Maybe he’d want you to write.

  Now you’re condescending.

  Zafar gave me a disarming smile.

  My dear fellow, he said pompously, I should be very surprised if your mind, such as it is, did not consider me condescending.

  Whatever.

  You know V. S. Naipaul’s famous advice to the young Paul Theroux? You have to tell the truth. We think we know what he means and in fact we probably do, but only because we know vaguely what Naipaul must think vaguely. He’s saying more than merely that a novel is an experiment in life, which is what George Eliot said; after all, other than metaphorically, it isn’t that at all. A metaphor is useful only for transforming what happens, enriching it in some way. It never tells you what actually happened, how it happened, or why it happened. A fleeting thought might be compared to a ship on the horizon, but surely it’s saying something that a ship on the horizon is never compared to a fleeting thought? When a football manager speaking about the range of talents in his team says sagaciously that when you make wine, great wine, the very best wine, not all the grapes are the same, you know he is speaking metaphorically—unless he happens to have a gig running a vineyard on the side. But what he is actually talking about—the right way to compose a football team—remains unproven, remains untouched by the metaphor. If metaphors increase our understanding, they do so only because they take us back to a familiar vantage, which is to say that a metaphor cannot bring anything nearer. Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.

  Listening to Zafar, I could not help thinking that perhaps Emily was right. Far from expecting too little of writing, Zafar expected too much, but only because he expected too much of human thought. His language sounded somehow constructed, even more so than it had done all those years ago. I see now, of course, that what he was talking about were things that had long preoccupied him, some old, some more recent, some that happened in 2002, six years earlier, and that they had preoccupied him with good reason. It is little wonder, for instance, that he was concerned with human motivation for action, which he went on to discuss, since the very thing he asked of himself had to do with his own motivation for the actions he came to take.

  If the province of science is how?, continued Zafar, then the rigor of life, the predicament of living in the world, is contained in the question why? Wittgenstein said that when all the questions of science have been answered, all the problems of life will still remain. That may be, but it is equally true that when all the work of art is finished, when we have been blinded by every metaphor under the sun, not one question of how? or why? will have been touched. Tell the truth: First you have to find the truth, and there’s no guarantee that you can. But it’s even worse than that. What science is now making plain, in a way we once dimly suspected but could never say for sure or to what extent, is that we don’t know the half of our own minds. It seems the least reliable thing a person can say about any of his actions are the motivations that he himself ascribes to them. Naipaul’s advice cannot be dismissed, but the best to be said for it, which is the best that Theroux can do—because he’s human—is that it enjoins Theroux to root out any conscious dishonesties, and if he’s lucky a few unconscious ones will come out in the tangle. Peanuts.

  Why not think of a book in the same way you think of a map or a translation? It’s not perfect, far from it, but it’s something.

  A ringing endorsement. I had a friend who used to see a therapist, and she said something about the experience that’s stayed with me. Just being able to speak about some dreadful things, she said, and seeing that the therapist wasn’t falling apart from hearing them was helpful. What struck me was that I could imagine someone else saying that being able to speak about dreadful things and seeing that the therapist did break down in tears was helpful. It seems to me that this is the big difference between writing and talking. When you talk, you get to see the effect, and maybe it’s witnessing the effect that matters to you and not just framing your thoughts in words. We learn about the weight of things by seeing how they affect others. Why would you want to leave a broken person alone with a pen?

  I’m running out of arguments, I said to him, and frankly I’m not sure it’s worth forcing this. I don’t agree with most of what you say. I don’t think your position is quite as reasoned as you seem to think it is—

  For fuck’s sake, what’s with this writing nonsense?

  Zafar’s face changed. We were in a restaurant, in Holland Park, where no one shouts unless it’s at a waiter.

  Has it occurred to you that I might not want to write, that I might actually want to talk. I’m not telling you to read. All you have to do is listen.

  You misunderstand. Of course we’ll talk—

  Has it occurred to you that you might actually be the person to whom I have to say what I’m saying? Maybe you don’t want to find out why I’m telling you. You have a role, you know, center stage, I’d say. I could equally ask you if you don’t want to listen.

  Of course I’m listening—

  And what the fuck makes you think I want to sit down and write and stew myself in all this shit? Putting things on paper makes things real, hardens them, makes them unchangeable, even before things have made sense. Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I’m not here to fucking entertain you.

  Zafar stopped there. He fidgeted in his seat before picking up cubes of sugar and adding them to his coffee, one after another. The restaurant was empty. The lighting had been turned down.

  I’m just saying … I’m just saying that your reasons seem like dressings for wounds.

  Nice, he replied.

  I don’t remember you being so bleak in college.

  I wasn’t as untrusting. I had faith in the goodness of people, the perfection of love.

  What happened?

  Everything ends. And it’s how they end that leaves the lasting effect.

  That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

  And there I was thinking that’s what children were about.

  * * *

  Zafar had been speaking about the past, but I knew nothing of where he was in the present. There remained also the question: Why had he come here, to the U.K., to my home? And what was he doing these days? No sooner had this last question presented itself to me than it seemed out of place.

  It seemed to me that asking him what he
was doing these days, let alone asking why he had come to my home, was to reduce our history of friendship, or reduce the intimacy that had evolved in the days since he reappeared, as he and I talked in a way we had never done before. It was inappropriate. There remained instead a sense of the present held in abeyance, left at the door, to enter later perhaps. For now, the past had spread through this house, crisscrossing the walls of the kitchen with Zafar’s stories and mine, redecorating a home in the colors of childhood and families and memory.

  There is an observation in Zafar’s notebooks: In our twenties, when a friend tells us his relationship has ended, we ask, Who ended it? In our thirties, we simply say, I’m sorry.

  In that shift is, I think, a change in our attitude to causation, from a belief that causation can be understood to a recognition that at certain times it is useless. Causation is about how things were necessarily true, because this led to that. In our conversations in those wintry days, there was always a quality of longing about them, particularly when they reached far back. Longing for what? When Zafar spoke about the past, I felt the presence of many pasts, the one that was spoken, but also other unlived lives, the lives uncaused, yet imagined. There is not one past but many, and every memory carries the spirit of all.

  * * *

  After a few days of reading from the bag of notebooks, I raised again, tentatively and for the last time, the idea of him writing a book.

  You must be short of cash. A book could give you an income.

  We were in the kitchen. Maria, the housekeeper, had left some pasta marinara for supper.

  Zafar gave me a glancing look, as if to acknowledge my cheek in raising the matter again.

  I have enough, he said. I had more, until last year when my parents nearly lost their house. Northern Rock collapsed at the same time as they came out of the fixed-rate period on their mortgage. They were hammered by the rates at the same time the bank was tightening up on risky loans. I have a little equity in a company that was doing well. Some of the dividend now goes to them to help make mortgage repayments. But I have enough. I don’t spend much.

  What company? I asked.

  I am embarrassed now for failing to express appropriate commiseration for his parents’ difficulties. The small remark about them should have struck me in a number of ways. Yet all my curiosity fixed on the surprising news that Zafar had invested in shares, for Zafar had never seemed to me to have an interest in owning anything, in assets, not even a house. And the remark about his parents was also the first mention of anything recent in his life. Of course, it didn’t tell me where in the world he’d been living, it didn’t tell me what he’d been doing, but I did not take the opportunity in front of me .

  I remember a lawyer friend of mine—actually a friend of Meena’s—explaining to me that in a criminal trial in which the defendant has prior convictions, the prosecution cannot, other than in exceptions, raise those convictions in court. But, the lawyer friend explained, if the defendant in any way claims he has a good character, then those convictions can be raised by the prosecution to rebut the defendant’s claim.

  I don’t mean to liken Zafar to a criminal, but there has always been a certain mystery about him, and it was moments like this one, when he volunteered some information, that opened the door to inquiry. I could have asked him about his parents. I could have asked him when exactly he had heard they were in trouble and how he had heard. I could have asked him where he was at the time. But I didn’t. Instead I asked him what company he’d invested in.

  What company?

  Zafar then told me a remarkable story, which again underlined how little I had really known. In 1994, he explained, he met an extraordinary woman at JFK airport.

  I remember, he said, that the Dow had closed above four thousand just a few days earlier, the first time it had ever done so. There was an exuberance on the Street that was exciting and scary—think of extreme sports. Every banker was charging every meal and cab ride to his expense account, and firms were turning a blind eye. You can tell a firm’s hit a downturn when the row of private cabs waiting outside the building shortens. A couple of months earlier, I’d received my first bonus—which wasn’t as large as you think; I never fought hard enough. I took my first vacation since that week long ago at a holiday camp on the English seaside, arranged by concerned social workers. I spent a week in Panama.

  With this woman?

  I went alone. I met Marcy Feuerstein in the airport lounge, where she was trying to calm her three-year-old daughter. The girl took one look at me and was silenced. She was fascinated by me for some inexplicable reason in the way maybe only children can be. I sat near them and smiled at the child, who smiled back. That was the beginning of our conversation.

  Marcy, it transpired, had just left Microsoft and was starting up her own business, as well as raising Josie by herself. She lived in California but had just finished three days of meetings in New York and was on her way back. She talked eagerly about the pitches she’d made to potential investors, and what she said intrigued me. It seemed to me a remarkable, exciting thing, this field she was entering. Even then I knew that my excitement was not really to do with making money. Marcy was attractive—she was beautiful—and there was some flirtation in our conversation, but even that was not at the root of my interest; I don’t think it was. Marcy was starting a business in wireless technologies for corporations, to provide the hardware and software to enable companies to network their firm-wide resources wirelessly. Such technology was almost unimaginable; it was 1994.

  When I was a boy, I was intrigued to read about the properties of light. I read that what we call light is only the visible part of a spectrum of radiation. I learned why the sky is blue and how a rainbow is formed. And then I read about how light is both wave and particle, and I saw a diagram somewhere of the double-slit experiment. I thought about light, and it occurred to me that we cannot see light rays going across our field of vision. I know now that even when we see rays of sunlight shining through the window of a chapel on a winter’s afternoon, we do not see even one single ray of light that makes it to the ground because every ray we think we see is in fact no ray at all but the impression left by streams of light reflected off dust particles and fortuitously sent in the direction of our eyes. The image of shafts of light with dancing motes, so common in words and photographs, remains an illusion, you see. The conclusion of this is that if we look on a ray of light from the side, and the air is free of dust, then the light will in fact be invisible.

  Wireless links, connections without material ties, without constraints that hold you in place, ethereal vines that reach out to you, tethers for the rootless. I didn’t really know how to think about Marcy’s business idea itself; she seemed to have barrels of energy and a riot of ideas, but over the years I’ve come to suspect that the true source of her vitality and drive was a fear of being accused of failing her daughter. I can’t know for sure, because I did not know Marcy before Josie, nor, for that matter, do I know the Marcy in another universe who never had Josie. It was, in any event, the magic of these invisible wires tying people together that thrilled me, as I sat there in the lounge, watching Marcy stroke her daughter’s hair unconsciously while discussing all the issues involved, how to make wireless secure, how to make it stable, the problems of interference, establishing connectivity across different platforms. On the strength of my wonder, I invested in her business and came to receive a small investor’s dividend each year, although now paid from shares in the large tech company that eventually bought her out with its own stock. The dividend is enough for me.

  You never told me, I said. I was annoyed that he hadn’t mentioned any of this to me.

  What for?

  Maybe I would have invested?

  Most British universities weren’t even hooked up to the Internet. Would you have invested in corporate wireless networking systems?

  * * *

  I ask myself now if Zafar had always thought of me as lacking courag
e. I remember seeing him once after he returned from a weekend parachuting. He jumped tandem, he said—it was his first time and perhaps he hasn’t jumped again. He loved it and described it as something like swimming. You’re so high up in the air, he said, the ground seemingly unchanging, that you really can’t tell you’re falling. Seconds that seem like hours pass before the first small chute bursts open, pulling out the main chute, and you feel yourself yanked like a rag doll. I listened to Zafar waxing lyrical, and of course the thought passed through my mind that he hadn’t asked me to come along with him. If I had asked him why, he would have answered—as I knew—with the same question: Would I have come? I suppose I didn’t ask in order to avoid an exchange that would only diminish me.

  * * *

  During that conversation, I continued to push him just a little further on the business of writing. Eventually, after a pause, Zafar began telling me something that I did not immediately recognize as a story.

  Alessandro Moisi Iacoboni was born in 1942 in a village four hours by mule from the town of M___, in a part of Italy where the spoken language is neither Italian nor German but shows the influences of both. Alessandro’s birth came nine months and two weeks after a day in June when an ill-disciplined division of Heeresgruppe C of the German Wehrmacht swept through the village, an incursion that caused a degree of embarrassment in those quarters of Italian society, which had enthusiastically supported Mussolini’s alliance with Germany.

  Who cares about this? I asked, but Zafar merely continued.

  Alessandro’s mother died three days after what was by all accounts a terrible labor. It was this mother who might have kindled in little Alessi the fire of the Jewish faith but, as it was, her death cleared the way for the Catholic nuns of Our Lady of Modena, in the village school, whose influence found no resis—

  What about writing your own story?

  I interrupted Zafar and, as I listen to the recording again, I am rather ashamed that I did so. Listening is hard, as my friend once said, because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world. I can admit something now, which this interruption only evidenced: I have been inclined to force the people around me into boxes. It’s a subtle thing, but to hear someone talk without imposing one’s own expectations, one’s own categories—I’ve never been very good at it. Of course, only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, but listening well is—to stay with the metaphor—the only way to walk a few steps in his shoes. How does someone fail to grasp that, something so absurdly obvious?