In the Light of What We Know: A Novel Read online

  That’s it, said Nicky. I have a meeting with him. Why don’t you come along for the ride?

  He’s not expecting me.

  Who knows what to expect in this country? Anyway, I’ve taken a fancy to you and won’t hear no for an answer.

  Excellent. When is your meeting?

  Now.

  Oh. I can’t do now. In fact, I’m already late for something else.

  What?

  If I told you, I’d be a terrible spy.

  We’re all going for a drink tonight. Come with us?

  Sounds good.

  I lied about having another meeting. I just didn’t want to meet Touvier. Barely two days in Kabul and already I felt the stir of revulsion, already I confronted the stain of hypocrisy. But it didn’t come to me as a finding of fact, as a revelation in the behavior of others—it didn’t feel like that. Rather, it was a conclusion, a deduction from what I had always known, as if I’d proceeded a small step from footings already laid, like a syllogistic argument, All Cretans are liars, Epimenides is a Cretan, and all that I had done, which I could have done anywhere but in fact was doing in Kabul, was to conclude that Epimenides is a liar.

  In the evening, ten minutes after picking me up, our little convoy, a dozen women and me, pulled up at the gates of the UN compound, an area soaking in artificial floodlighting. Soldiers in blue berets milled about a flank of Humvees by the gates, lighting cigarettes as they laughed, machismo in their sweeping gestures but nervousness, too, in furtive looks to the side. We climbed out of the cars and filed into a prefabricated security booth, not dissimilar to the ticketing booths you might find at the entrance to a public attraction, a castle or the botanical gardens at Kew. Our passports were checked and we were frisked before being allowed to proceed through a narrow hallway into the compound. I have no doubt that my association with this group of Western women sanitized me, and I thought of how a man might feel when, on arriving at the door of a nightclub in New York with several women on his arms, he and his coterie are ushered in ahead of the long line.

  From the right of the hallway there came a hubbub; that way, I assumed, lay the UN lounge and bar. But to the left, leading outside, was a door propped open with a brick. I slipped off toward it, separating myself from the women ahead of me, and came out onto the compound area under the night sky. There were soldiers wandering about beyond, spilling onto the road. An Afghani man was standing by the door smoking. We exchanged greetings and I asked him for a cigarette. I handed him my Bic lighter, telling him that it was extra, I had another. He explained he was waiting for a crate of wine for Mr. Maurice. It struck me as a trifle odd that he was waiting inside the main gates, but I didn’t probe.

  I was, by the way, dressed entirely inappropriately for Kabul. You see that I now wear cargo pants and the like, clothes better suited to travel in out-of-the-way places. But I had arrived in Kabul in a black suit and black shoes and a sky-blue cotton shirt; I had dispensed with the tie, which I kept folded in my pocket—silk ties make strong rope. Wearing a suit had become a habit in South Asia. It cut through a lot of questions. I had taken on the dress of a slightly older generation and projected a rather businesslike persona.

  At Oxford, I never had money for decent clothes. But I was a student, so what did it matter? There’s a funny thing about all those public school boys, the Paulines and Wykehamists: They were so scruffy.

  Zafar made me smile. It was certainly true of me.

  They seemed not to care in the slightest how they looked, he continued. Do you remember Stinky Flowers?

  David Flowers, I said.

  But everyone called him Stinky.

  Because of his last name, I replied.

  But there was in fact something stinky about him. He didn’t wash; I’m sure of it. Is that what an education at a grand English public school gives you? Not self-confidence, but rather a lack of self-doubt, the certainty that the world will welcome you as you are, which is the cream of society, no matter what you look like.

  Not everyone who goes to Eton is like that, I said to Zafar.

  Did you know that there isn’t a drug on earth that works on more than seventy percent of the population? A pharmaceutical drug.

  And?

  Not one drug. Pharma companies consider a drug a success if it’s effective in a much smaller proportion of patients. You’re not going to write off the drug, said Zafar, just because thirty percent of the population don’t fit the pattern.

  It’s not the same.

  Of course it’s not the same. That’s why it’s an analogy. The point is that it’s similar in a relevant respect. I’m not talking about the minority of public school boys. I’m not even talking about the majority necessarily. I’m only saying that there’s this pattern in public school boys that you don’t find in others to quite the same degree.

  That they smell?

  No. Their sense of entitlement, their attitude.

  Zafar, I thought, was right about the attitude to clothes. I fell into the category of carefree dressers at college. It never seemed to matter very much. So long as you had appropriate gear for events—a suit, black tie, white tie, etc.—what did it matter what you wore around college otherwise?

  I asked Zafar why he’d worn a suit in Afghanistan.

  He explained that wearing a suit in South Asia had a normalizing effect.

  A suit means business, he said. It shuts out certain kinds of irritating interactions that can undermine one’s work. Bangladeshis, and for that matter South Asians generally, are an inquisitive lot, always probing to establish one’s family ties. I had seen the instant slightly deflated, even crestfallen, look people gave when it transpired that I was not linked to any great family—quite the opposite, I was a social nonentity. It seemed to disappoint them: Suddenly their opportunities for gaining favors diminished before their eyes. How different it was, it is, in America. There I might answer curiosity with the information that my father was a waiter, my mother a seamstress, and the response would be utterly different. I know some would call this naïveté, but the persistence of the myth of the clean slate is itself the guarantor of an optimistic faith in human freedom, the capacity to break bonds and forge something new. Even this new president is himself a sign of the underlying spirit of a country that has the capacity to believe in change, unlike the Europe that so fears it.

  But optimism, by its nature, is boundless, brooks no limits, knows no discouragement, keeps going, does not know when to stop. To go from America’s founding belief that it can form an ever more perfect union to a belief that it can reconstruct another country in the image of its hopes for itself—to cover that distance—does not take long: A politician does it before he tells you that he approves this message. Yet this is not news. From pride to narcissism, the road was long ago marked out by corpses.

  * * *

  There I was, within the UN compound in the Shar-e-Naw district, the mansions district, under a black sky, and I wondered what devil had brought me to this place. What was my real motivation. I knew, of course, how I’d come there. I knew, too, who had asked me to go and what each of them had wanted of me. But in those moments, as I stood there puffing on a cigarette, on the brink each time of choking, I wondered again what my own motivation had been. And there was the thought of Emily; there was a good chance she would be there, inside.

  This was the hub. Many UN staffers, as well as others, lived in the various houses scattered about the compound, all behind a wall guarded by soldiers. Everything in the space was accounted for, everything in the service of human beings. Everything lifeless but the priority to protect life. There was no sign of vegetation, neither a tree nor a bush, just stone and brick and whitewashed walls and dust. It was obvious that the building was never conceived as it stood but had metastasized over time, that it had grown here and there, pushed out on one side and later on another, so that the floodlights carved shadows from the corners of the houses, the sudden alcoves and jutting boxes. Above the buildings, condensing
steam bubbled from a vent.

  Some of the Afghani drivers of the cars parked beyond the gates had gathered together while their masters were socializing indoors. They smoked and talked, despite a soldier’s hand-waving remonstrations to move away. I stepped around a corner of the building to recover a moment, a preparatory calm without demands on the senses, only to be met with new sounds, beating music and the jostling strains of raised voices. Laughter clambered out through an open window that released, too, the smoke from cigarettes and the vapors of sense-rattling alcohol. Kabul in the spring of 2002, when the West had barely arrived, yet again, and there was this bar, a den of warm merriment while drivers huddled in the cold outside and men in blue berets scowled at the locals.

  6

  Blood Telegram or Bill and Dave

  The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking … it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”

  —Albert Einstein, “Physics and Reality”

  The earth is home to a creature, a great ape he calls himself, that has taken on the task of explaining the universe, of accounting for all that there is, his world, his social world, his physical world, the fall of empires and apples alike. The creature is now wending his way along the corkscrew path of his evolution, inside a few splintered years hewn from a vast time line not of his own making, a time line that goes back to some soundless bang venting all the nuclear waste studding the voids of space, a time line that goes far forward, beyond the day when this creature’s biological changes will make him as charming to his descendants as his artists’ impressions of the first biped hominid are to him now—a time line that will long outlive the hour his planet perishes in the final blaze of a dying sun. Does it not strike him as disturbing that the explanations of the world he finds are intelligible to him? Has he not paused to consider that if he finds an answer, it is only to a question he is capable of asking? Until he learned better, he said that man was unique among creatures for having language, unique among creatures for having reason, unique for the gift of conscience, unique for conceiving other minds, unique it seemed in every way. The animal’s hubris now persists in his idea that the truth beneath what he perceives, from the cosmic out there and forever to the mundane here and now, and even the man-made, that such ever-present truth as he believes there could be will not exceed his capacity to understand.

  —attributed to Winston Churchill in Zafar’s notebooks

  The first time, said Zafar, that I visited her mother’s home, Emily, her mother, her brother, and I sat in the drawing room nibbling at Bath Oliver biscuits, sipping dusty Earl Grey, and discussing nineteenth-century novels, apparently only the four of us in the house. At that moment I had no reason to think otherwise.

  In a room that took up virtually the entire floor, we were settled into a sprawling arrangement of sofas, enough for us all to maintain a decent distance from one another. The furnishings of the room could have placed it at any time within a hundred years. The salmon and peach upholstery, the fireplace and its brass guard and magnificent stone surround, the pleated pelmet concealing the curtain rails above the mullioned sash windows, the shiny black Bösendorfer piano watching us silently, its fall board shut, its rack empty of sheet music, yet its great lid open pointlessly, like the unfurled sail of a boat on a windless sea. Everything in the room sounded the measures of inherited wealth. On one wall there was a small display of portraits of Emily and her brother as children, and of Fitzwilliam, the border terrier, all three portraits evincing the same weight of brushstroke, unadorned by color, the same regard for light and shade. There were side tables here and there. One beside me bore several stiff white cards, leaning against three vases, invitations to events with words printed in great swirling flourishes, the Lord and Lady So-and-so request the pleasure of the company of the Honorable Penelope Hampton-Wyvern, “At Home” on the next line. The dates for all, I noticed, were past. And there was another table that caught my eye, made of mahogany with an elaborate ivory inlay, which might have looked ostentatious, I thought, if much of its surface had not been covered by images. Beneath the cream shades of a table lamp cast in wrought iron and porcelain and another lathed from dark woods, there were photos in small gilt frames, some old and gray, some in sepia, and a few in color. I took in all the photographic images as one impressionist claim on my senses. Only months later, when I came closer to them, would I look upon one of these photos, a photo of Emily, with, well, nothing short of horror.

  Apart from the lighting, the only other traces of modernity were tiny white speakers mounted on the wall above the white bespoke bookcase that was seamlessly merged into the wall, which was to become, as I’ve explained, the subject of conversation with Penelope. It was this bookcase itself that commanded my eye the longest, enough to register its form and to recall how I spent the summer vacation before college.

  I began that vacation working at the same restaurant as my father, waiting tables alongside him. The plan was to earn a little money to help the family, as during the previous Christmas and Easter vacations, but on this occasion my father hinted that I might also get to keep a portion of the pay to supplement the bursary that was to see me through college. In those days, a means-tested award from the state meant that nothing, not one penny, would have to come out of my parents’ pockets; tuition and maintenance expenses would be covered. But after one week at the restaurant, everything came to an end.

  The staff referred to my father, who was the head waiter, as “the Major.” Though my father was never, as far as I know, a major in any army, the proprietor, an old man who had fought for the British in Malaya, and whose son had served in the Indian army during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War, had given my father a rank and title that fitted his sturdy frame and the authority of his voice.* I think that for the old man, as for all men whose wars have made them, time pivoted on an hour when he was tested.

  Down in the kitchens, at a small round table in a corner, against jute sacks of rice, drums of vegetable oil, and tubs of ghee, beneath a fluorescent tube, where staff took turns to grab a half hour for lunch, I sat with my father and the head chef, each of us with a plate of rice and the “staff curry” of mutton and stray vegetables, eating with our hands.

  Between mouthfuls of food, with particles of rice trickling from his mouth, the head chef gave me some advice.

  I hear you’re going to university, he said.

  Yes, I replied.

  A good man, your father, he said. Not many of our people send their children to university.

  He lifted another handful of rice and curry to his mouth before he continued.

  They all want their boys to go into this dreadful restaurant trade, he said. But what good can come of it?

  The chef had no children of his own.

  I hear, he added, it will be expensive for your father. You must work hard to fulfill his hopes just as he is working hard to pay for your tuition.

  My father did not say a word and neither did I. But later, after midnight, as we returned home, he suggested that I might want to think about doing something other than waiting tables that summer.

  I did not express any emotion then, when my father made his suggestion. I simply did not feel anything I recognized as anger, and even if I had, I knew of nothing in him to appeal to. But when the head chef praised my father for an unearned credit that my father then failed to deny, I did feel something. I now know the meaning of the flash of tensing in the muscles across my chest, the name of the quickening of breath and pulse. I know also that the only anger I was aware of in those days was my father’s, my mother’s, too, as she goaded him on, and that I had always been holding back an anger—the anger I owned—that was only growing. For a long time, including the day I met Emily, I believed that decent people did not wish to cause suffering. This I now know not to be true. I know also that within me
a rage was building, gathering mass and momentum from the varieties of injustice, with each humiliation—humiliations we shrug off because, we say, we’re better than that, better than them. But how arrogant is it really to think we’re above anger? Arrogant and incorrect. In fact, my true self always knew better. That self was acquiring the psychological means for wreaking utter violence. The fury, in fact, was never far away.

  That night when my father suggested I look for work elsewhere, I accepted his suggestion without debate. And so it was that I came to work on the renovation of houses. In July 1987, on a day not nearly as warm as it was bright, I took a bus from Willesden Green to Kensington, uncertain what it was I hoped to find there, but like the economic migrant who travels to the West, I thought vaguely that opportunities abounded in the streets of the affluent royal borough. Besides, I wanted to see more of Kensington. I had been there once, that winter when I hitched a ride to go to my college interview in Oxford. Kensington, I had thought then, seemed a world away from Willesden.

  When I arrived, I walked through the streets, through its many mews and lanes, and I saw scaffolding and boarding and Dumpsters in the roadside, mounting with the rubble of construction, so many that they might all have submerged themselves beneath my senses had I not been specifically looking. I saw numerous renovation projects, and so I knocked on doors and asked if there was any work. No, mate, and Nothing here, mate, came the reply over and over. And then I changed my tack. I’ll work for you for nothing, I said, and if after a week you like my work, you can pay me whatever you think is right.

  * * *

  I joined Bill and Dave, carpenters—chippies, they called themselves—from opposite ends of Essex, two giants in tough canvas shorts, pockets full of tools, and leather belts studded with clasps for mallets, chisels, and screwdrivers. One wore a red Arsenal shirt. Bill and Dave were working on the renovation of a five-story Georgian house on a crescent-shaped terrace.