In the Light of What We Know: A Novel Page 12

  I felt no tie to America at that moment, as I might have done, nothing in the way of being at home, but instead I stood there as a witness to the overwhelming idea of America, as Zafar has described it.

  On Liberty Island, Zafar showed me what he wanted me to see. Engraved on a plaque is the famous poem written by Emma Lazarus and donated to an auction to raise money for the construction of the statue’s pedestal. Fragments of the poem were familiar enough, but when I stood beneath the statue of Lady Liberty, the embodiment of the hope of freedom, when I read its famous message in one unbroken whole, as if this were where it had first been written, I felt again the tingle I had felt the day before at JFK, and that I feel now from time to time, when an American immigration officer, a Hispanic American or Korean American immigration officer, says, “Welcome home.”

  “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

  With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  I heard Zafar read those words, softly but just audibly enough above the shuffle and murmur of other visitors. When he finished, he looked at me and, in a voice that I am convinced bore a hint of accusation, he said: If an immigration officer at Heathrow had ever said “Welcome home” to me, I would have given my life for England, for my country, there and then. I could kill for an England like that.

  Years later, I would understand what I had not understood then, that in those words there was not only reproof—that was obvious—but there was also a bitter plea. Embedded in his remark, there was a longing for being a part of something. The force of the statement came from the juxtaposition of two apparent extremes: what Zafar was prepared to sacrifice, on the one hand, and, on the other, what he would have sacrificed it for—the casual remark of an immigration official. Hyperbole perhaps, but only if hyperbole means the beating heart taking charge of tired words.

  So now I ask myself this: Can it really be true that everything that was to follow might have been averted by one kind remark from an immigration official?

  At Liberty Island, however, I found myself explaining to Zafar that the U.S. immigration official probably meant nothing very much and that the remark only demonstrated empty American friendliness. Even as I said this, I could hear the ludicrousness of my attempt to apologize—though quite what I was apologizing for, I can’t say.

  Zafar was silent for the next half hour. Back on the ferry, we stood side by side, watching the Statue of Liberty fall back against the New Jersey shoreline. The day was waning and the sun had lowered. Against it, my friend looked possessed of a simplicity unfamiliar to me. I had the feeling of wanting to help him, without any notion of what that meant and paying no heed to his limitless self-sufficiency.

  Did you notice that Lazarus has the Lady herself speak out? he asked me. Remember the passages with quotes about them? It’s the Madonna.

  Is it?

  “Mother of Exiles.” There she is, said my friend, looking out eastward. She’s pleading on behalf of the poor and the meek, for they shall inherit the New World if not the Old. Imagine Christians from Eastern Europe arriving by boat here. What did they think?

  Didn’t one of the exhibits say Lazarus was Jewish?

  She was.

  Weren’t they mainly Jewish—the immigrants from Eastern Europe?

  Jewish visibility says more about Jews than it does about migration patterns from Eastern Europe.

  What do you mean?

  There was a lull in the conversation as Zafar considered his answer.

  I’ve read that in fishing communities throughout the world, the same story is apparently told about dolphins, the benign dolphin is how it’s described, about a fisherman thrown overboard but saved by a playful dolphin that nudges him all the way back to land. But you have to ask: What if the dolphin is just playing, nudging away for fun but with no regard for the direction it’s moving this bobbing creature, the stricken seaman? Who knows? There may be lost fishermen whom the incoming tide would have returned to safety but for the dolphin who playfully takes them off to the setting sun. The only fishermen we ever hear from are the ones brought back to shore. The rest perish at sea. Which is another way of saying we live in the world we notice and remember. Scientists call it the availability bias.

  So I tend to think, I said, that most Eastern European migrants to America were Jews because I know more Jews who migrated here from Eastern Europe than I know non-Jews?

  Or know of, said Zafar.

  Yes, of course! There’s Morgenstern, von Neumann, and Gödel, and all those other Eastern European intellectuals who escaped Nazism and landed up in Princeton. They were all Jews.*

  Not Gödel.

  No?

  Lutheran. He said he was a theist and believed in a personal God. Einstein believed in an abstract God, the God of Spinoza, he said, who apparently reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists and not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.

  And Gödel did as well?

  No. The two of them discussed God, or so it’s thought; no one really knows what they talked about. No, Gödel, possibly the greatest logician who ever lived, believed in a personal God you could talk to, and he said so.

  I was surprised to hear this and, I have to say, Gödel slipped a notch in my estimation. But what I find myself perceiving now is that although Zafar and I never discussed religion, other than in the terms of politics and society and never in the sense of a spiritual enterprise, my friend had evidenced a deeper interest in God, in the figure of Christ as I now know, than I understood then. In hindsight, I see now the pieces of the thread that had gone unnoticed.

  Is your father a believer? Zafar asked me.

  He seems to be. Goes to mosque on Fridays. Always has.

  Do you think physicists make God in the image of science?

  I don’t know. Religion is something he does.

  He drinks, doesn’t he?

  Yes. And likes his bacon crispy.

  * * *

  I have thought again of that day in New York, of darting to the tip of Manhattan and jumping on the ferry for Liberty Island. I remember it vividly. But I must wonder why I should have been quite as moved as I was by the words of Emma Lazarus, knowing that I had no claim to the poem’s categories; tired and poor, deprived of freedom—I was never these things. Is there, I have asked myself, a part of me so disingenuous that I can be moved in this way? The thought of those who would have a much better claim, who would be better deserving, embarrasses me a little. But at the end, as I reflect on Zafar’s story, I am left to consider whether the quiet, answered longing I felt in the glow of those words did not evidence something deeper in all human nature, a receding cry in every human heart, when the promise of home peeks into view.

  * * *

  During their frequent visits to the U.S. from Pakistan, either my grandparents would come to Princeton or, more often, we would join them in New York, where they’d take up a suite of rooms at the Carlyle on the Upper East Side. My grandparents had extensive connections in New York society, in the diplomatic, banking, and business circles, and I remember the cocktail parties they hosted as dazzling affairs though the conversation always surprised me with its formality and accessibility. As a child I maintained the expectation that obscure and difficult things would be discussed. My parents circulated in the crowd and were always smiling or laughing, and I marvel now at their tremendous versatility; they were at home among academics and scholars but equally found pleasure in the company of businessmen and political types.

  The women at those parties were very beautiful, and in New York my mother looked beautiful to me in a way I had not seen her before. She was a classical beauty in her day, tall, fair skinned, slim, with long black hair and green eyes. My mother was Punjabi, like my fat
her, but over centuries the sweeping tides of people from Central Asia had left behind a mixed gene pool, the widely differing effects of which can be seen, in fact, in many Pakistanis. I can’t remember exactly when, but at some party or other in New York my mother suddenly looked stunning and remote to me; it unnerved me, and I remember holding her tightly when later I kissed her good night.

  In Princeton, my family had many friends. To my young ears and eyes, the variety of accents and national identities was a source of wonder. And my parents, perhaps inheriting my grandparents’ talent for bringing people together, acted as a focus for social life. My mother’s cooking was legendary, and I remember that quite a few wives sat in the kitchen, watching and learning, while my mother cooked. There was also Sergey. He was a riot. Sergey was a graduate student in chemistry. He was Russian and Israeli, explained my mother, and I remember adding “and American.” My mother smiled, and I remember being rather pleased with myself for my correction. Sergey met my father at the university, I think, but soon he was around at our house all the time. His command of English was probably much better than he let on, but he constantly got things wrong, especially pronunciation, which to a seven- or eight-year-old child was highly amusing.

  My favorite was his pronunciation of the h in words like how or help—he pronounced it like the ch in loch, a wet, rasping sound. I used to taunt him with my imitation: Chello, Sergey, chow can I chelp you? I would say.

  Did you know, he asked me once, that there are eight ways of pronouncing o-u-g-h in the language of the English?

  He proceeded to recite them, while counting each one off on his fingers.

  Yes, he said, there is tough, cough, through, though, bough, ought, and, finally, there is borough—borough the way the British pronounce it.

  I looked at his hands.

  That’s seven, not eight, I said.

  Okay. Seven or eight, what does it matter?

  Sergey loved my mother’s cooking and wanted to learn how to cook “the Asian food,” as he called it, even though in America in those days, and still today, “Asian” is used to refer to people from China, Japan, and other parts of East Asia. I often came home from school, one street away, to find him in our kitchen hovering about her, helping my mother prepare a meal, my father still at the physics department; inevitably she would be laughing. He described her cooking as “chemistry with flavor,” though, in his pronunciation, flavor rhymed with hour, which mystified me until my mother explained that he was rhyming the British spelling, flavour. Why that was an adequate explanation to me attests to Sergey’s eccentricity in my eyes.

  When my mother teased him about his pronunciation, he would threaten to teach her “horrible Russian words and you would not know what you are saying.” My mother had taken up learning Russian around this time—she’s a superb linguist, fluent in French and German, as well as in South Asian languages, of course. Sergey would declaim in Russian—“unspeakable words”—with riveting melodrama. My mother’s hand would jump to cover her mouth and, taking a step back, she would feign horror.

  Sergey was also something of a handyman around the house. He put up shelves and even did a bit of plumbing, replacing the taps in the kitchen sink, as I recall. He helped me make a sled for the winter snow and hung a swing in the garden, a tire at the end of a rope tied to the branch of a tree. Then Sergey suddenly left. I remember asking my father if Sergey was going to bring back my bike, which he’d taken away to mend, to be told that he’d already left for a professorship somewhere. My father was cross that Sergey had failed to return the bike, but within minutes we set off to replace it, and, after my initial distress, I was rather pleased by the whole deal. The new bike was a lot better than the old one, and I remember that my father insisted we also buy a chain and lock for it.

  In Princeton, our circle of friends included graduate students and professors, people from the four corners of the world, as I say, and our house was always an open and friendly place. But I see now that in the absence of all things Pakistani, an aspect of my parents’ lives was kept at arm’s length. For Friday prayers, my father did not attend a Pakistani mosque, as he does now on the Cowley Road in East Oxford, for there were none in Princeton, nor did he meet with other Pakistanis to pray. Instead, he would drive to Lawrence, outside Princeton, where a small Arab Muslim community would assemble in someone’s home, an immigrant outpost clustered around one family.

  There were rare episodes when I sensed what might be pictured as a tiny hollow space within me, along some inward edge, a sensation that I have struggled hard to describe in my own mind. To borrow language from my father’s world of physics, a black hole might make its presence felt by its gravitational effects on something nearby. The black hole itself is by its nature incapable of being observed because nothing can leave it, not even light or any electromagnetic radiation. It is the feeling of missing something without conscious awareness of what it is you’re missing, though even this, I think, rather overstates it. Perhaps that’s what friendship can do: the presence of another indirectly giving us better access to the hidden parts of ourselves.

  I remember an assembly at the beginning of the school year when I was seven or eight. The teacher explained that our grade was going to stand up on the stage, and one by one we were to say “Welcome” in our mother tongues. When the teacher asked me to speak in Pakistani, I certainly didn’t know what to say. For that matter, I didn’t even know to correct the teacher and say that Pakistanis might speak Urdu or another language but never Pakistani, just as Belgians might speak French or Flemish but not Belgian.

  We left Princeton for the U.K. in 1981, and my parents slowly began to express again their Pakistani heritage. Then, entering my teens, I sensed their transition, while at the same time I grasped that during the years in Princeton my parents had shut something out. There was, I understood later, a reason for it all—for holding Pakistan at arm’s length: We had been ostracized.

  5

  The Situation in Our Colonies

  And what you thought you came for

  Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

  From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

  If at all.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

  Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

  —John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

  Would you care for a Bath Oliver? said Penelope Hampton-Wyvern.

  In a restaurant in Knightsbridge, Zafar related his first encounter with the Hampton-Wyverns—with Penelope and James.

  I’m sorry? replied Zafar.

  Would you like a biscuit? she asked.

  You should try one, said James—that is, if you haven’t had one before.

  I took a biscuit from the plate. Very nice, I said.

  A bite crumbled in my mouth.

  They’re made, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, to the same recipe William Oliver of Bath confided to his coachman in 1750.

  I’ve never had such an old cookie before, I replied.

  Do you like the books? asked Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

  I’m sorry?

  You were looking at the books. Some marvelous first editions. Trollope, Thackeray, and Eliot among them.

  T. S. Eliot?

  No, George.

  Yes, of course, I said weakly.

  The conversation fell away, as if my error had marked a precipice. Of course it’s George Eliot, I thought. You idiot. Those three were contemporaries. T. S. Eliot came later. And he wasn’t even British—at his end maybe, but not at his beginning.

  Have you read Daniel Deronda? I asked, breaking into the silence.

  The tale of the Jew, replied Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

  Only he discovers he’s Jewish much later, chimed in James.

  These days every man’s discovering the Jew in himself, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern.

  I liked it, said Emily.

  I did not ask what Mrs.
Hampton-Wyvern meant; I didn’t want to risk finding out.

  Wasn’t he illegitimate? said James.

  The Victorians, said Emily, were obsessed with illegitimacy. Bleak House and Little Dorrit and The Woman in White are all about that—illegitimate children with maids and fallen women. It was quite personal for some of these writers—some of them had illegitimate children themselves.

  Oh, yes, now I remember. The Bastardy Laws, said James.

  This drew a smile from everyone.

  Illegitimate children inherited nothing, Emily said.

  Emily sat with her knees pinched together, her hands resting on them, fingers interlaced, and her heels backing up against a foot of the couch. Her elbows were pulled in, almost touching.

  They had no legal standing, continued Emily, unless the father made some specific provision for them.

  Yes, but when he did, said James, it made for excellent drama at the reading of the will!

  Don’t forget, I interjected, the drama of someone trying to bridge the class divide.

  I preferred Middlemarch, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. It’s always nice to learn a thing or two from a novel, don’t you think?

  The Great Reform Bill, which broadened the electoral franchise, said Emily.

  The Act, not the Bill, Penelope pointed out.

  But not to women, added James.

  Even so, the Tories were quite resistant to the Bill, I interjected.

  Yes. I suppose I should declare a family connection of sorts, said Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. A great-uncle of mine, Lord Launceston, was one of the few Tories who supported it.