In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  * * *

  In that closed room, Emily looked frightened. No, she was frightened. When you are the cause of someone’s fear, she does not merely look afraid to you. What you see is what you get.

  When someone is scared, we say she’s scared stiff, she’s frozen with fear, she’s petrified, turned to stone. The woman with Maurice must have been somewhat afraid, but she had the presence of mind to make for the door. Emily did not move. She could not move, as if her mind no longer possessed her. And in that fact alone, I felt an engulfing sense of control. She was terrified, and I must tell you the truth: It was exhilarating, and I felt a unity with her. Can you imagine? A unity, the synthesis of threat and fear. Not threat but violence becoming.

  I have said enough. I wanted to tell you something, I thought I would be explicit, make it clear what I did, leave no room to hide, but now I know I can’t. I came this far, down the long river, visiting spurs and detouring to tributaries along the way, but here at the brink of the cliff, where the river meets the sea, I don’t know how to speak the unspeakable. Our actions are always questions, not answers. If it is true that our will is free, how is it that we do things we regret? I know that our day is littered with actions that alter its course, as thick on the ground as all the irrational numbers on the line, and that only in fiction can a single act change a whole life. But how do we do that which in lucidity we would surely conclude could only bring about a fall from grace, a fall from which no penance could raise us?

  22

  Our Scattered Leaves

  In that part of the book of my memory before which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, Incipit Vita Nova [Here begins the new life]. Under such rubric I find written many things; and among them the words which I purpose to copy into this little book; if not all of them, at least their substance.

  —Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

  —John Donne, Meditation 17

  In the first daylight hour of a morning in February 2009, as I lay awake after a restless night and Kensington lay still asleep, I heard the low and heavy sound of the front door closing. With my one ear against the pillow, my other followed the fading metronome of steps outside. I did not run downstairs or even go to the window to call out, for I already knew that this is what would happen and I already understood that no response from me is what he would want. I would miss my friend, of course, and in the weeks that followed I missed him rather more, in fact, than at first I thought I would. He had chosen, for the time being at least, a life of few attachments, without such ties as bind a man to place or person, and it was a choice made in a lucidity that was his own. I smile now at my use of that word choice, for how much would he have questioned that? I myself cannot accept that we are without choice. Our choices may be limited by what is handed down, but within the frame of our circumstances, of our fortunes, good or ill, within a perimeter drawn by inheritance and accident, I believe we choose how to live. If Zafar is right, that belief may be an illusion allowed us by God, or the Fates, or natural selection, looking down on us as parents might look kindly upon the naïveté of a child. But I can let him have that, for who would deny that we are ever more than children in the face of existence?

  Outside, the London sky was slow in accepting the morning sunlight. The traffic was scarcely a trickle. The days, not yet long, were getting longer. The house will be quiet today, I thought, as I lay in my bed, not that Zafar had brought any noise with him. His presence had slipped easily into the sparse workings of my home and the rhythms of my life. What I will not hear now is that beat of one’s own heart audible only in the presence of human affection. His absence will be felt.

  Three months were to pass before I received word from him again, on the only occasion I’ve heard from him since he left. I received a postcard, a card bearing no images. There was my address in Kensington, London, but there was no return address. The postage stamp was Jordanian, and it contained the image of a man’s head and shoulders, something that might have been extracted from something greater. When I searched Jordanian stamps on the Internet, I discovered that the image was of Avicenna, a Persian mathematician and philosopher of the tenth century, a name I remembered vaguely from years ago. And when I looked him up and read about his work, I found that Avicenna had considered ontological arguments for the existence of God some time before St. Anselm had.

  On the reverse side of the postcard, there was a URL, written in his hand, a universal resource locator, a Web page address, one of those tiny abridging URLs that disclose none of the information the true address contains. That was all there was on the card. I typed it into the browser on my computer, and when I pressed Return, the URL called up a photograph.

  * * *

  There are many maps in my father’s house, and they all hang on one wall in the room we call the family room. Now that appellation, family room, seems a touch ambitious. A brother or a sister, one sibling, I think, would have made the name appropriate, brought the name home. I remember Zafar gazing at one map and, on another visit home, without Zafar, I spared a few moments to look at it. The map showed the far northeast corner of India under the Raj, the part of the world that today includes Bangladesh and the neighboring states of India, as well as strips of Bhutan and Burma. I imagine him now focused on a corner of that corner of the world—if a corner can have a corner. I imagine him enlarging in his mind’s eye the place of his birth. I know of course that he had lived in Dhaka in 2001 and 2002, but a remote village and the capital city are worlds apart. And though I have no hard ground on which to base my speculation, the thought pleases me that at some time in those years he disappeared, my friend might have paid a visit to that area of the world, to the place where he had been happiest, as he once said, to the woman who had loved him.

  Zafar did not say anything about what he had been doing in those years, the years after he left Afghanistan and before reappearing at my door, so that I am ashamed to see that all that I have learned is what I could already have known, had I made the effort to reach out. I never, for instance, called him or sent a note when he was in hospital, nor went to see him when he came out. It hurts to say for instance.

  My friend once told me something his friend Marcy, mother of Josie, had said to him. He had asked her, rather foolishly, he said, if it was hard bringing up Josie on her own. Marcy had replied that it would have been harder with Josie’s father around. It is what Marcy said next, as reported by Zafar, that now comes to my mind. What was hard, she explained, was not having someone to talk to about Josie, not having someone to make decisions with. Don’t get me wrong, she said (or something like that), I think on the whole I’ve made the right decisions and I’m pretty sure we would have come to the same decisions if I’d made them with someone else. And yet it’s not enough to know that. There’s something about doing it with someone else, she said, something in just talking about it, something about how it leaves you feeling afterward. Decisions seem lighter; everything is lighter.

  There are those who do not talk because they have no one to talk to. And there are those who do not talk because they have nothing to say. To learn that I have been neither, that I held my own hand to my mouth, has been hard. Talking, as my father said to me, is easier said than done. I have been uncertain of so many things, but I never seized the uncertainty as the source of joy that I now believe it to be. I never owned my marriage, never owned my friendships, never owned my relationship to my mother, never owned any of those things that cannot be bought.

  * * *

&nbs
p; It is hard to grasp Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, I think. I never have, not really. I know this because although I have followed the proof—the one I found in the literature that on its face seemed most accessible—at the end I never had, to use Zafar’s words, that sensation of ecstatic relief, of turning a corner and seeing the mountains open up and the valley shine under a golden sky, when heaven lowers a ladder of angels to receive you. That, I think, is what some people have known, at least once: divinity for men.

  This, however, I know about the theorem: that it takes us—to use words not all my own—to the point at which two roads diverge, that we have to choose and the choice is not a happy one. Both roads take us into mathematical realms of simple language stripped bare of human conceit. Down one road is unbearable inconsistency, a world in which black is white and white is black and there is no way to tell them apart, in which—without a hint of exaggeration, with not so much as a touch of hyperbole or melodrama—one equals zero. This leaves us looking down the other road, one no less daunting and hard but that has the merit if not of leading us to the mercy of understanding then at least of delivering us from the torment of contradictions. Along this other way lies another world, also one of simple language. But it is a twilight world, for in its manifold embrace are things that are true, crystal blue propositions, which are as true as a man could ever hope to feel something to be true, yet which things—irony of ironies—the man will never know to be true, not because they merely lie beyond the wit of the creature but because mathematics herself condemns men to ignorance. This is the strangest thing: mathematical truths for which there can never be proof. Zafar’s notes record the descent of hope, having once clung to a childlike dream; I know he knew that mathematics would never answer all or any of the questions of human life and suffering, but the dream was that in her own land, in her own fertile crescent, mathematics would at least yield answers to her own questions and never, instead, mock the traveler with barren wells, never deny him the proof of how those crystalline truths are true at all.

  Zafar had set himself to the pursuit of knowledge, and it is apparent to me now, in a way it was not before, that he had done so not in order to “better himself,” as the expression goes, but in order to lay ground for his feet to stand upon; in order, that is, to go home, somewhere, and take root. I believe that he had failed in this mission and had come to see, as he himself said in so many words, that understanding is not what this life has given us, that answers can only beget questions, that honesty commands a declaration not of faith but of ignorance, and that the only mission available to us, one laid to our charge, if any hand was in it, is to let unfold the questions, to take to the river knowing not if it runs to the sea, and accept our place as servants of life.

  The image my friend linked me to—thereby linking me to him, since he saw it also, like that moon which we all see—is of Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein. The two men are walking in Princeton, New Jersey, on the path from Fuld Hall to Olden Farm. The photograph catches them some way off, two exiles in an alien land. It is a blustery day, the wind tugging at their coats, and we see only the backs of the figures, so that without further information we cannot tell which is the figure of Gödel and which of his friend.

  The picture means much to me. Of course it reminds me of my childhood in Princeton, releasing time from the deep eddies of memory. Those were happy years. But it is the austerity of the image that is most affecting, the simplicity of its content. When I look at this picture, I see two people undeterred by time, walking and talking, bumping against each other, as they discuss the things that matter to them and why they matter.

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Eric Chinski and Gabriella Doob at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Paul Baggaley, Kris Doyle, and Kate Harvey at Picador; and Charles Buchan, Sarah Chalfant, Andrew Wylie, and Alba Ziegler-Bailey at the Wylie Agency. To Eric, Kris, Kate, Sarah, and Andrew, I owe a special debt. Discussions with Eric were vital. My thanks to Ivan Birks, Şeyda Emek, Ruth Franklin, Anja König, Lauren Marks-Nino, Sanjay Reddy, Amy Rosenberg, and Melinda Stege-Arsouze. Amy made fine comments on the manuscript. I am grateful to a physician for her clear responses to my questions. I would like to thank the staff and benefactors of the British Library, the New York Public Library, and the Saratoga Springs Public Library. It is a pleasure to record my gratitude to Elaina Richardson, Candace Wait, and the Corporation of Yaddo.

  A Note About the Author

  Born in rural Bangladesh, Zia Haider Rahman was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale Universities. He has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human rights lawyer. In the Light of What We Know is his first novel.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2014 by Zia Haider Rahman

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  Excerpt from the poem “Home Burial” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1930, 1939, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1958 by Robert Frost, copyright © 1967 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Permission granted by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt from “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1942 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Two lines from Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems, translated by William Radice (Penguin, 1985). Copyright © William Radice, 1985.

  Image here © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rahman, Zia Haider, [date]

  In the light of what we know: a novel / Zia Haider Rahman. — First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-17562-2 (hardback)

  1. Male friendship—Fiction. 2. Investment banking—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Global Financial Crisis, 2008–2009—Fiction. 5. World politics—21st century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3618.A3835 I53 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2013038711

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71008-8

  www.fsgbooks.com

  www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks

  * The following year, I read in the press of the arrest and conviction of a number of members of Combat 18, although two of its ringleaders absconded to the United States, where, curiously, they claimed political asylum.

  * Zafar’s discussion of maps continued, but I have chosen to include it here as a footnote. I am reminded of a passage in The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham (an author I rather liked as a boy), in which the narrator states: I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. Having dismissed the passage thus, the narrator goes on, preposterously I think, to state: I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worth while to write this book.

  I will forgo Maugham’s addendum but include here Zafar’s discussion of map projections. I have added two diagrams culled from the Internet, which correspond to diagrams that Zafar himself sketched very crudely in the course of the discussion.

  Have you, Zafar asked me, ever seen the Peters projection?

  I’ve heard of it.

  Have you seen it?

  I don’t think so.

  It’s a version of the map of the world in which areas of landmasses are shown proportionately, said Zafar.

  It’s the one, I interjected, where Africa looks vast. I do remember it.

  Africa looks vast because it is vast. In fact, on Mercator’s projection, which is the most widely used, the one everyon
e’s familiar with, the one that everyone remembers, Greenland appears bigger than Africa, when in reality you could get fourteen Greenlands into the whole of Africa.

  I had no idea.

  It gets better, said Zafar. In Mercator’s projection, Brazil looks roughly the same size as Alaska, when it’s actually five times bigger. Another odd thing is that Finland looks longer, from north to south, than India. In actual fact, it’s the other way around.

  When it first came out in the 1980s, continued my friend, the Peters projection set the cat among the pigeons, precisely because it was obvious that the choice of map projection had political implications for how we see the world. Critics of Mercator’s projection had pointed out its flaws, and they did have something; after all, how many schoolchildren have looked at maps and asked, Which is the biggest country in the world?

  The basic problem of mapping the globe is how to transfer the curved surface of the earth, an oblate spheroid, onto a flat surface. And there’s another complication: If you stand on the earth and start walking in any direction and just keep walking, you’ll never hit any kind of boundary. You can just keep on going around the world. But if you stand on a map, a rectangular piece of paper, and do the same, you’ll eventually hit the edge of the paper. Getting a representation of the curved surface of the earth onto a bounded piece of flat paper, that’s the business of projection.