In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  The road headed back north, and as we crossed the river I looked out onto the ribbons of silver twisting across the water, and I felt I was witnessing a time I would remember. But as the city’s murmur rose about us, her hand slipped away. Her hand slipped away, and I knew that this child would follow me all the days of my life.

  Am I not entitled to grieve? Am I not entitled to my emotions? Are we to be held responsible for the deepest feelings over which we have no dominion? In any civilized criminal law, our state of mind alone is never enough to condemn us: There has to be an act. But does morality judge us for our feelings?

  You don’t have to justify anything to me, Zafar.

  This is what I was asking myself. And by not saying anything before, I believed I had lost the right to speak afterward, the right merely to express my feelings, which were not about regret but were in the nature of mourning.

  * * *

  Do you know what a period is made of? Actually, do you know what a tree is made of?

  A tree?

  To be precise, do you know where the stuff a tree is made of—where that stuff comes from?

  Is this a trick question?

  There’s nothing misleading in the question.

  It gets its nutrients from the ground, I said.

  A tree is mostly made of wood and wood is mostly carbon, which is why it’s burned for fire. Where does that carbon come from? Trees take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and breathe out oxygen. Photosynthesis strips out the oxygen—the dioxide—in carbon dioxide and releases it into the atmosphere, but what about the carbon? The carbon remains in the tree and the tree grows. In other words, trees grow out of the air.

  I did not know that.

  I read a story somewhere in which a woman said that when she was an adolescent coming into puberty, her mother, Boston Irish, explained to her that a period was the body crying because a child was not being born.

  That’s horrible.

  Do you know what a woman’s period is? What the stuff is?

  Isn’t it the placenta?

  It’s the endometrium. The placenta is formed only when a woman is pregnant. The endometrium is a membrane lining the uterus. It keeps the walls of the uterus from sticking together.

  Well, there’s something else I didn’t know.

  Nor did I, but six months after the termination I did some research. I told you that I asked Emily if she’d heard from you. We were in a cab. We were on our way to a restaurant, and while rooting about for her powder kit, she let slip she hadn’t spoken to you since I was in hospital. Let me tell you what happened in the restaurant.

  Near the end of the meal, Emily’s phone rang and, as always, she stepped away to take the call. I sat sipping the coffee, with an eye out for the waiter to ask for the check. At the next table were two women, in their midthirties I guessed, though I didn’t see them face on. They were sitting not opposite each other but at an intimate right angle, with me behind them. I overheard only a snippet, when one woman said with urgency in her voice: You know you have to decide soon. You can’t take the pill after nine weeks. They just don’t let you, and after that things get a lot more complicated.

  Because of overhearing that, I did some research and some arithmetic. It came down to knowing how to count and knowing where to begin counting.

  * * *

  Emily had had a medical abortion. She said it herself, that’s what it means to have an ultrasound and a pill one day and another pill two days later, and there was no reason for her to lie about that. And I was there when the cramping started, when she holed herself up in the bathroom. I’ve thought about why she didn’t lie at that moment, when I asked her what had happened in the clinic, and it seems plausible enough to me that she was preoccupied when I asked, too preoccupied to think through the ramifications of what she was sharing. And perhaps she was implicitly relying on a man’s ignorance of the workings of a woman’s body, not to mention the ins and outs of such medication.

  When she told me she was pregnant, I calculated she must have been seven or eight weeks into the pregnancy, and by that reckoning she would have been fifteen weeks pregnant when she had the termination. But in the U.K. in 2000, doctors couldn’t prescribe the abortion pill for pregnancies over nine weeks. So she was lying to me about the gestation.

  Couldn’t she have simply been mistaken?

  Only if she was mistaken when she told me but not mistaken when she spoke to the doctor. Even if she was only mistaken, the question arises why she didn’t correct my misapprehension on any of the many occasions it was manifest.

  Of course. I see.

  The next question is: Why would she be lying about the gestation? First, she couldn’t have got pregnant after I came out of hospital. For one thing, one week after I came out she told me she was pregnant. That’s almost certainly not long enough to get pregnant and miss a period in order to find out you’re pregnant. You see, the window of fertility is roughly speaking a six- or seven-day interval centered on the fourteen-day mark.

  What fourteen-day mark? I’m not as smart as you; you’ll have to go slowly.

  You’re smart, all right. You just haven’t given it as much attention as I have. Fourteen days after LMP.

  LMP?

  The first day of a woman’s last menstrual period.

  Okay. I’m lost, I said.

  If she missed her period, continued Zafar, took a pregnancy test, and told me she was pregnant all on the very same day, she would have had to have become pregnant at least ten days before that day. But I was in hospital until seven days before she told me. Put another way, if she and I had had sex the day I came out of hospital and she got pregnant as a result, she couldn’t know for at least ten days, at the earliest, that she was pregnant, which means she wouldn’t have known for at least a further three days after she actually told me. Do you see?

  I assume you’ve worked the numbers.

  Actually, that’s exactly what I did. I put together a spreadsheet to stress-test the numbers.

  Are you serious?

  I’d be stupid not to. I had to be sure.

  So you got her pregnant before you went into hospital?

  We had sex two weeks before I went into hospital. I was in hospital for five weeks. She had the termination eight weeks after I came out. That’s a total of fifteen weeks. She had a medical abortion which, as I say, means that she could not have been more than nine weeks pregnant when she had the termination. In other words, I couldn’t have got her pregnant before I went into hospital and in fact no one could, not before I went into hospital. But we can narrow down the interval even more. Remember, she carried the baby for seven weeks after she told me she was pregnant, and it was one week after I came out of hospital that she told me she was pregnant. Which means she must have missed one period before then—if she’d missed two, she’d have been at least six weeks pregnant when she told me and she wouldn’t have been given a medical abortion four weeks later. If you do the arithmetic, making sure to take account of the fact that she’d missed one period but not two when she told me, and the fact that the clock on a pregnancy formally starts on the LMP, then the conclusion is that she conceived at some time during the second week I was in hospital, give or take a few days. I know what you’re thinking.

  Did Zafar know what I was thinking? Yes, I saw Emily in that interval. Yes, I did more than just see her. Years had passed, but I remembered exactly when I visited her. That Saturday, my father’s birthday, I remembered Emily telling me that Zafar had gone into hospital on Tuesday the week before. Last Tuesday? I’d asked her. No, the week before, she’d replied. And you waited this long to tell me, I’d thought. And later I’d considered the meaning of Tuesday. Tuesday, a grim day, his father’s day off from work, Zafar had once said to me, though it was no explanation at all, I thought then.

  You’re wondering, continued Zafar, how I know what her cycle length was. Ninety percent of women have cycle lengths between twenty-one and thirty-five days. But what’
s to say her cycle length wasn’t outside that? Twenty-one days or thirty-five? The beauty is, I don’t need to know; the conclusion is the same. That’s what stress-testing the numbers shows. Though for what it’s worth, I happen to know that it was pretty much twenty-eight days.

  I should say sorry, shouldn’t I?

  Zafar didn’t respond.

  I feel I need to explain myself.

  I spent six months grieving for a loss … a loss that … How can an explanation of your actions touch anything … touch the grief, touch the consequences of … the consequences? I didn’t know until more than eight months afterward. I was in hospital when … In hospital.

  I owe you an explanation.

  You can’t say sorry and offer an explanation, said Zafar. What’s an explanation supposed to do, other than make you feel better? If an explanation is a justification, then why say sorry? And if it isn’t a justification, then it’s a confession in search of absolution. Explanation?

  But I shouldn’t have … I shouldn’t …

  * * *

  We sat silently, Zafar and I. The kitchen still smelled of the Thai takeout we’d had the night before. The housekeeper was scheduled to come the next day. I thought of all the pain Zafar had felt, the pain at the loss of a child, which it so obviously was to him. As he wrote in one notebook, We carry people in our heads, which is where their deaths take place. He had invested so much in the idea of the infant, much more than most men, perhaps. People vary. He’d talked about distributions, bell curves, the randomness that sets you down somewhere on the curve, most people bunched up in the middle, most people, I think, not so invested, some even looking back without one pang of regret or lament, and others, like him, wholly given over. He knew that the child had mattered to him—and wasn’t that what he wanted of Emily? To know that the child had mattered to her. He knew that the child had mattered to him for reasons that gathered from every corner of his identity. If that was the wrong premise upon which to bring a human being into the world, to regard it as anything other than a new and independent human being, then it seems to me to be an argument entirely irrelevant to the pain. Feelings, the very heart of what a man is—they deserve our respect even if they never need to earn it.

  How do you feel about it now? I asked him.

  Zafar didn’t answer, not right away.

  We think of memory as if it were a hard drive, he said, and in some ways that’s what it’s like, but it’s like something altogether different, too. It’s a stage and a director, and over time the play changes, the characters are changed, but it’s a funny play because we lose sight of what those characters once were to us. Memory is not static but a thing in motion, and because we are passengers without a frame of reference, the motion is imperceptible, so that at any given point in time, all we have is a set of memories, a thing of the instantaneous present and not of the past. I read somewhere, some researcher explaining that every time we recall something, our future memory of it changes, as if we rewrite or overwrite the memory with a new memory after each use in an ongoing palimpsest. Which, it strikes me, must make it hard to lose the memory of something whose memory you dearly wish to lose, which is to say that if memory serves us well, sometimes some things are blessedly forgotten. Do you have any cigarettes?

  Listening to Zafar, I felt more sorry, more regretful, than I had already. Is that what he was doing, waiting to forget?

  I think I have some cigars in the study, I said.

  Cigars? Well, why not? Now is as good an occasion as any.

  I returned from the study with cigars and also with cigarettes, having remembered seeing a packet on a bookshelf.

  The cigarettes might be stale, I said, setting the packet down on the table. I held out a cigar but Zafar declined. He was not looking at me and I realized we had not made eye contact in some time. The realization saddened me.

  He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke seep out of his mouth. I had asked him how he felt about it all now. Presently, he picked up his thread.

  I ask myself, he said, what am I allowed to hope for?

  I saw his eyes take on a look, the dusk of solitude, to borrow my friend’s words from another context, and with the passage of time I watched those eyes retreat deeper into shadow.

  I know, he said, that every memory is just a work in progress. But someday, if I make it to that rocking chair on the porch, I hope that all this, the love and loss, that it will all come back as little more than something somewhere long ago.

  20

  The Gospel of St. Thomas

  The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.

  —Kurt Gödel

  Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God—a being capable of understanding.

  —Graham Greene, The Quiet American

  And if it worries and torments you to think of your childhood and of the simplicity and quiet that goes with it, because you cannot any more believe in God, who appears everywhere in it, then ask yourself, dear Mr. Kappus, whether you really have lost God? Is it not, rather, that you have never yet possessed him? For when should that have been? Do you believe that a child can hold him, him whom men bear only with effort and whose weight compresses the old? Do you believe that anyone who really has him could lose him like a little stone, or do you not think rather that whoever had him could only be lost by him? But if you know he was not in your childhood, and not before that, if you suspect that Christ was deluded by his longing and Mohammed betrayed by his pride—and if you are terrified to feel that even now he is not, in this hour when we speak of him—what then justifies you in missing him, who never was, like one who has passed away, and in seeking him as though he had been lost?

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M. D. Herter Norton

  In Islamabad, when I emerged from the airport onto the outside concourse, I was met by a middle-aged man in an ill-fitting suit holding up a placard with my name on it.

  From Kabul, sir? asked the man.

  Yes.

  This is a courtesy car. I am to take you wherever you wish to go.

  A hotel. Anywhere but the Marriott.

  I’d read that the Marriott was teeming with the world’s media and the visiting senior officials of multilateral organizations, NGOs, and donor agencies. The rooftop was, as pictures already showed, a crowd of satellite dishes.

  Very good, sir.

  At my hotel, I left my bag in my room and went back downstairs to the business center, where I logged on to email. I drafted a message to Hassan Kabir explaining that after three days in Kabul, I had the impression that ISAF and UNAMA were too busy to be dealing with small fry like me. I clicked Send, and when my screen refreshed I saw that I had an email from Emily.

  Where are you?

  In Islamabad, I wrote.

  I fired off my short reply and then tried to book a ticket to Dubai. There were no direct flights from Islamabad to Dhaka, or to Delhi, for that matter—I think planes going out of Pakistan were not allowed over Indian airspace. I took down the contact numbers for telephone bookings for Emirates and PIA and checked my email again.

  There was another message from Emily.

  Where in Islamabad?

  It was difficult to answer her. Even then, in those dying days, despite the disgust and horror and the tides of anger, I wanted to tell her where I was, where I could be found, so that she could get on the next flight, I imagined, rush to my hotel in Islamabad, pay the concierge a bribe for the room number—for a surprise, she’d tell him (and was that really why I wanted a hotel other than the security-infested Marriott?). Or maybe she’d ask for the telephone number for the room—to call from a phone in the lounge, she’d say, but instead read off the last four digits and head for the elevator and knock timidly on my d
oor and, when I open it, smile widely, a smile of reflex, and declare her love and so on and so forth. It was the most undignified, reprehensible part of me. And yet the part of me that didn’t want to tell her where I was staying was equally complicit in betraying me, for reducing me in my own eyes, for it didn’t want to tell her not because it wanted nothing more to do with her but because it couldn’t bear the wait, the not knowing if she would come or not. What a tangle of negatives, double and triple. We were finished, weren’t we? Months ago, made good and final when I left for Dhaka, Bangladesh, for who would ever go there other than to put distance between one thing and another, the old and the new, an end and a beginning? But then the planes brought down the towers and everything was fucked-up, clocks unsprung and compass needles sent flying, and who knew where or when they were. I have read that in the weeks afterward, there was a spike in the number of couples getting engaged. I have read that after 9/11, there was a big jump in the number of people deciding to drive rather than take a plane, to get from D.C. to Boston, from New York to Chicago, and apparently more people died in the resulting increase in car accidents in the six months after 9/11, in the increase alone, than in the attacks themselves. The whole thing is irrational, of course, the response to the attacks, the individual human responses and the collective political responses. Emily and I were all but finished, a final finish subverted by 9/11 breaking open the ambiguous days at the end of an affair. What is that line in Larkin’s poem? Specious stuff that says no rational being can fear a thing it will not feel. And here I was wondering how I would respond to her question, what I would write, staring at the screen but feeling the suspension of my fingers above the keyboard.

  You ask if I loved her, and I tell you that I did and I didn’t. I’ve been here over three months, and how often have you spoken of Meena and yet how is it that I know that you wish to be near her? I know because our actions don’t tell the whole story, they never do. It is not that thought is hidden behind the actions but that all the omissions and silences, the evidence of things not seen, must be accounted for if you’re to see anything. Emily stood for something, she rescued me and condemned me in the same gesture. You may say that that is not love, and I would laugh at you for presuming to know what another’s love isn’t and what his love is. Emily was England, home, belonging, the untethering of me from a past I did not want, the promise through children of a future that was rooted, bound to something treated altogether better by the world than my mother, the girl who loved me.