In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  What was she looking for? Looking for me? Did she fear I’d been abducted? This was Kabul, after all. Or was it Nicky she had feared? Whatever the motive for breaking in, was it not the act of omission that was reprehensible, the disregard for the gatekeeper in his native land? Did it really not even occur to her to ask him for help?

  I turned to Suaif and shook my head and prayed he’d understand that I wanted then to apologize for everything, for everything that had been done and was going to be done.

  She left you a message, said Suleiman, fishing something out of his trouser pocket.

  He handed me a note in a sealed envelope: Come to supper at the UN compound. 7:30. Please come. I want to show you off.

  * * *

  By noon, the windowpane was fixed with a square of wooden board, and I was in my room, writing in my notebook, when there came a knock on the door.

  I heard you were in town. Remember me?

  Hello, Crane, I replied. Good to see you again. How are you?

  Crane Morton Forrester looked much the same as when you introduced him to me at that party a few years earlier, the same brutal mass, a giant slab of ham that obscured the whole doorway behind him. He wore military fatigues and boots, but covering his chest and shoulders was a great wool jumper, blue and plain. Something about Crane threatened clumsiness.

  What brings you to this neck of the woods? I asked.

  I could ask the same of you, he replied.

  Tourism, I said. I hear they have superb beaches and the girls are to die for.

  You Brits kill me. Crane laughed.

  And you? I asked.

  Just quit the Marines; signed up a couple of years ago.

  Before September 11?

  Yup.

  You were in Operation Enduring Freedom?

  Fuckers had me in the embassy. No action. Haven’t seen squat.

  So you quit?

  Military contracting, that’s where the money’s at. I’m with Blackstar.

  I nodded.

  First learn the ropes, then start my own outfit.

  Sounds like a plan.

  Sure is. Two words, my man: plausible deniability. That’s the beauty of private military contractors. Gives Washington plausible deniability.

  He gave me a beaming smile with a knowing look, as if he’d shared a clever yet simple insight.

  There was movement by the door. From behind Crane’s form, Suleiman appeared. Suleiman himself had to duck in doorways, but next to the huge American with his wide receiving arms, the young Afghani looked narrow and vulnerable.

  There you are, buddy, exclaimed Crane.

  He patted Suleiman on the back, though he might as well have patted him on the head.

  You’ve met Sully? Crane asked me.

  I nodded without engaging Suleiman’s eye.

  Suleiman handed Crane an envelope. Crane took it but gave not a word of explanation.

  Sully’s a Red Sox fan, aren’t you, Sully? Think you got a shot this season?

  Suleiman glanced at me. Was he telling me something? I thought, of course, of the colonel and his request: Find out what’s in the envelopes. And be careful with Crane.

  Baseball can break your heart, Mr. Crane. It’s a game of surprises.

  He’s a philosopher, our Sully, a man with an impossible dream.

  Crane turned back to me.

  Listen, I’ve gotta get going. How about grabbing a beer sometime?

  Sure, I replied.

  How long you here?

  A while.

  Great. I’ll show you around. There’s a lot of action if you know where to look.

  Crane then actually gave me a wink. The second wink I’d received in twenty-four hours.

  Sully knows how to get hold of me, he added.

  After he left, Suleiman pulled the curtain ajar. Crane’s massive frame lumbered across the courtyard.

  That man is disgusting.

  Why was he here? I asked.

  He collects mail here. Always envelopes.

  Where are they from?

  They’re local, dropped off by jeep.

  UN jeeps?

  Unmarked jeeps. Can’t make out anything. Normally the director takes receipt and holds them for him.

  But they trust you with them?

  Not completely. The jeep was just here, and I don’t know if you noticed, but it didn’t leave until Crane stepped out into the courtyard with the envelope in his hands, and Crane always steps out as soon as I give him the envelope.

  Why do you say he’s disgusting?

  I met Crane several months ago, said Suleiman. He was some flunky in the embassy; I got the impression he was an errand boy in Kabul. One day I was here late and curfew was minutes away. Crane happened to be stopping by—to collect an envelope—and he offered to drop me home in his Land Cruiser. It had military markings—the curfew doesn’t apply to them. Crane has been here since the beginning but never far from Kabul. I think his father’s a senator.

  He’s on the Armed Services Committee.

  That’s right. So we’re in Crane’s air-conditioned Land Cruiser and I think he’s been drinking. The air stinks of alcohol. And he starts to talk. He tells me, and forgive me for repeating such words, about this girl he knows just outside Kabul, out west, and how tight she is, how much he likes that young pussy and her tight ass—I am telling you what he said, and believe me, I cannot bring myself to tell you it all in detail. He tells me he loves Afghan pussy. He swears that one time he fainted—dear God, forgive me—he swears he fainted, he came so hard in her ass. He tells me he tries to make it up there every week. The girl’s father knows what’s going on all right, he explains, but they don’t care so long as he sweetens the deal. The father stays away and the mother takes the kids out and he gets the girl and the little Afghan house all to himself. You know, Sully, he says, there’s nothing tighter than thirteen-year-old Afghan ass. I am sitting silently in the Land Cruiser. He goes on Fridays, he says, and stops by the dogfight on his way back. I don’t know what the driver is thinking. He must speak English if he works for the embassy. For all I know, this might be the driver who takes him to the girl. He asks me what I think. And I didn’t say anything, but I will tell you now that my very thought was: Should I kill this son of a pig? What I say to him is that he must be a very happy man. You bet your ass, he says, and laughs. So now you see. It is not enough to destroy the country; they rape our girls and they humiliate our men.

  Of course, I’m disturbed by what Suleiman—

  It’s simply not true! I exclaimed, interrupting Zafar. I’ve known Crane since … since fuck. He can be a shit—could be a shit—but this. I don’t believe it. There’s no evidence for it, I said.

  Zafar didn’t respond.

  Is there any evidence? I asked him.

  Why don’t I just tell you what happened?

  I nodded and Zafar continued.

  I listened to Suleiman without interrupting him, listening for what it is he wants to volunteer to me.

  There are bad people in the world, I said to him presently.

  There is bad and there is evil, he replied, and there is only one thing to be done with evil.

  I didn’t respond immediately.

  Do you have a Dictaphone? I asked him.

  There’s one in the office.

  Can you record Crane talking about this?

  Suleiman grinned but just as quickly lost his smile.

  Will I get into trouble?

  I can’t promise you you won’t, but I believe you won’t.

  What did you have in mind?

  Have you looked inside the envelopes?

  They’re sealed.

  His face showed again, briefly but unmistakably, those shadows of fear I had seen when I first met him.

  What are you afraid of? I asked.

  I am not afraid.

  I regretted my question. Young men do not bear their fears well. Moreover, I saw that Suleiman might still be smarting from Crane’s patronizing
gesture, Crane patting him on the back, on the head, as if he were a child.

  What do you think is inside them? I asked him.

  Money. You?

  I’m not sure. How thick are they?

  Maybe a centimeter thick. Not even that, he replied, gesturing with forefinger and thumb.

  How many pages would you say?

  I don’t know.

  Guess.

  Ten or twenty, I don’t know.

  When do they come, the envelopes?

  Mondays and Thursdays.

  Only those days?

  Always Mondays and Thursdays.

  When?

  Noon. Like just now.

  Always?

  Always around that time.

  Never later or earlier?

  Give or take fifteen minutes.

  Are the envelopes brown?

  Sometimes brown, sometimes white.

  Always the same size?

  No. Different sizes.

  Always different?

  Not always. Mostly large.

  We need to find you two minutes. Can you get your hands on a digital camera?

  His eyes widened; I think he only sensed what I was getting at and it occurred to me that his fear might have prevented him from seeing it for himself.

  What are you thinking? he asked.

  Get a camera and I’ll explain.

  * * *

  I saw Suleiman again later that day. He asked me if I’d given any thought to the post of executive director. I hadn’t. He asked if I could, and we left it at that. Clearly, Suleiman and—if he was to be believed—the Afghani trustees thought Monsieur Touvier wasn’t up to the job, or something worse.

  I first came across Maurice’s name a month earlier, when I was in Bangladesh. Emily had sent me an email—not long before her plea by telephone to come and save twenty-five million lives, give or take—with an attachment she asked me to comment on: Your strategic thinking would be hugely appreciated. It was an Excel spreadsheet setting out a budget for a new outfit within the UN, she explained, to coordinate donor aid, which she’d drawn up with someone’s help. That last fact, that she’d been helped, had to be said, I thought. She didn’t know her way around spreadsheets, she knew I knew that, and she wouldn’t want me to think she was passing it off as her own work. It was really rather clever, she said. I wondered if she actually believed that.

  There were tables of budget items and costs, including Land Cruisers, property rental, electric generators, backup generators, computers, printers, office furniture, budgets for staff—local and international (the salaries were wildly different)—all the way down to stationery. What the thundering fuck was clever about it? This was a budget, a simple list of things they thought they needed or things they wanted, they wanted. What could I know of their needs? What could she imagine I might know? I was in Bangladesh applying my legal training to fight corruption in government, in the police, against the rackets in education, the massive government contracts for schoolbooks to primary schools, in a country that had an established civil society with many NGOs and aid agencies, the largest recipient of British aid after India. But she couldn’t know that, could she? She couldn’t know that Bangladesh had the world’s largest NGO, that in fact within a few years that NGO—a Bangladeshi NGO—would be running development programs in Afghanistan, that it already did so in other countries, alongside the likes of Oxfam. She was no expert herself, armed with just a graduate degree in economics from Harvard, legal training, and then a year working for Jalaluddin developing training programs for UN staff, flowcharts, brainstorming sessions, and role playing. What could she know? Not long enough for a budding doctor to get in the same room as a patient.

  But then there was a line near the end of the email, after saying she wanted to hear from me, a throwaway all-important line, a casual remark that had all the weight of the comment that isn’t measured but delivered direct from the unconscious. Not an error, for there’s nothing else that some part of her wanted to say; not a Freudian slip, not when you mean one thing but say your mother. I’m curious to know what it’s like to go back home. That is what she’d said.

  At the root of it, was it that? An idea that I’d know about these things because I was going back, like Jalaluddin, the Afghani who lived in New York and D.C., and worked his whole adult life in the U.S., straight out of graduate school, married an American, had American children, and yet came back home to Afghanistan, the authoritative voice with credibility, with legitimacy, because that’s where he came from, so he must know a thing or two, and could be relied upon because he was educated at an American university, from that buffer class of native informants. Was that it? I must know because I was back home, too, in the same part of the world, also at the brink of the British Empire.

  So when she says that, writes that, thinks that, does she think I’m not British? Or am I both British and Bangladeshi, the favored two-step of the dancing liberal? You can be both. Who’s to decide what you are? You can decide. And that liberal never for a moment imagines himself to be dancing the same dance of the bigot, the dance of language and labels and names because everything’s in a name—that’s what he decides.

  I listened to Zafar without interrupting him, noting the change in his tone and demeanor. He had delivered the story of Suleiman, Crane, and the envelopes calmly, even, I might say, without drama, however horrific that business about Crane might have been. Yet now, as he talked about Emily, he seemed agitated.

  This ruck between the liberal and his antithesis, continued Zafar, never touches the thing that the liberal and bigot take for granted, which is the feeling of belonging, his own feeling of belonging and another’s lack of such feeling, which is a question not of what ought to be but of what is, an epistemological question, a hard question, no doubt, but isn’t that the beginning of wisdom, to see how it is?

  Is that what Emily thought, that in going to Bangladesh I had made a romantic journey home? But what then had she made of everything I’d told her? What did it mean to her when I told her one rainy afternoon as we lay in bed after making love—I can’t remember how it came about—that I spoke another language from the language they spoke in the capital, Dhaka? I said the capital, Dhaka in case she didn’t know, not to save her the embarrassment but to save me the embarrassment. What did she understand then, when I told her that the corner of the country I was born in was once so unsure of joining the rest that it almost didn’t, that I came from a corner of that corner that actually voted against joining the rest? What did she make of that?

  What could I conceivably have to say about the budget, the spreadsheet? Or was that request just tacked on as an excuse to write to me, now that we had broken up, now that we were no longer in the same country, no longer flesh within flesh but only, merely, still stuck in each other’s heads? Just an excuse to talk, itself a means to be spoken to, to be regarded and not set aside.

  I stared at the spreadsheet, I searched its cells for formulas, of which there were none but the obvious subtotaling and totaling. I right-clicked the document icon and pulled up its properties file and saw that its author was one Maurice Touvier, a name I didn’t know. Who was this Maurice? I looked for what I couldn’t see, but the only thing I could imagine she might think clever about it was that it was colorful. It had pretty colors. And I thought of another spreadsheet, one I had put together a year earlier, to stress-test dates.

  There was the possibility that it was for her own sick entertainment. It wouldn’t have been the first time. There was the chance that because of that jealousy of hers she was playing a little game. So much about power. I asked her mother once if she thought Emily might have a tendency toward jealousy. Penelope laughed. In fact, she shrieked—I’d never seen this ladylike woman ever do that. Emily’s mother, the woman who’d watched her little girl, her eldest child, grow amid the chaos of her parents’ marriage falling apart, as her own sense of guilt expanded. That motherly guilt was so deep that she had come to accede to everyth
ing her daughter asked for—every allowance, every dispensation—so that she had come to accept the bitterness with which Emily addressed her as “Mother,” even in a conversation void of hostility, unlike James, who called her “Mummy,” so that Penelope knew the power of a word more powerful than any other, more powerful than “Father.” Emily’s mother, the woman who had stood by and watched her daughter twisting and warping into a machine that shut off any regard for its own motives, a machine that retained a pipeline from motive to action but never, one could begin to conclude, a means for going back to motive and asserting control over it. What, after all, was her own mother’s motive for her actions all those years ago?

  She could only remember her own jealousy when she learned of that woman, of Robin, her former husband, and that woman, that woman who now shared her name, which was his name; she could only feel now the jealous knife that cut into her bone—and cut into Emily’s, too, as she told me the story—when the sales assistant at Harvey Nicks, where Penelope had left a pearl-drop earring that had needed repair, had produced instead a diamond necklace for Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, the new Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, just one bloody month after Robin and that woman had married. Oh, yes, Penelope knew all about her daughter’s jealousy.

  That should have been the beginning and the end of it, but of course it was not. Not for me, who is every bit a part of an age, a West, that identifies pathology in the strong emotions, in jealousy, hatred, and rage. Could she really be jealous? This gentle English flower, this model of restraint, the very embodiment of moderation and measure, projecting an image of calm judgment and good sense, never adding emphasis, never making a dramatic gesture with the hands, never raising her voice. Emily was a woman without strong opinions on anything unless a strong opinion would further her professional interests. How could she be jealous of me? What on earth did she fear (as if fear might prompt it)? She had men falling about her like fruit from a tree, no, from an orchard of trees, an orchard in an earthquake, all there for her picking. But she’d wanted me and I was so flattered—couldn’t she see I was flattered? Wasn’t that enough to head off her jealousy?