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

  I have, he replied, setting down his glass of wine by the stem.

  In the last year, explained the professor, there was in Berlin a concert, which was of course the year after the coming down of the wall, in fact. Many musicians from East Germany are now in West Germany, the doors to which have suddenly opened to them. A number of such musicians are very good indeed. There was such a feeling of excitement in the German air, so much goodwill toward all men, with reunification now an imminent reality. The political mood added to one’s excitement as a lover of music to hear all these musicians from the East. As I have mentioned to you, I attended a concert that included a performance of … it was Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major by a young German pianist from Leipzig, the city where Sebastian Bach was cantor at St. Thomas, as I expect you know.

  The German people, continued the professor, can be rather earnest about their music, which is not in every instance to be taken for discernment. On this occasion, the whole audience leaned forward and furrowed their brows in the most severely concentrating manner. I felt exactly what you have described. I wanted, so to speak, to shout, The emperor has no clothes! The music was stillborn. It was really quite dead. But, you know, this sort of thing is very common in conservatories. I see it all the time in students. I have under my tutelage one student now, for example, who plays in this way. He is from the southern part of America, from Alabama, I believe, and, I gather, he comes from a devout Baptist Christian family. I have wanted to say to him that he should get out more, that he should live a little. He should get himself fucked, I have wanted to say, as the great Martha Graham said to her dancers, but of course the sexual correctness of the American university being what it is, I have never done so.

  The professor laughed as he spoke.

  Such ratifications as the professor’s, they came later. Until, little by little, experience taught me otherwise, self-doubt permitted no judgment about great art, great music, and such things. If I was right and the young woman’s music was indeed lifeless—if I was right, I wondered, can she herself not hear that her playing is lifeless? It seemed to me an unbearable state to play the violin that way, without emotion, without love and joy.

  Maybe they cannot play with emotion, I suggested to Zafar.

  But there’s a simpler explanation still, which was: What the hell did I know? The wisdom of that German composer, the ratifying, the borrowed confidence, came only years later. What right, I thought, had I to have an opinion about this musical performance, to think it anything less than accomplished? It’s their music, not mine, and they know what’s what. I’d never touched a violin or piano, let alone learned to play either. It seemed an altogether neater explanation. I was ignorant and presumptuous and they weren’t.

  Explanation of what?

  My doubts about my judgment. My doubts weren’t really about the quality of her playing, not even at root about whether I was capable of forming a judgment—anyone can have a gut reaction, which may be as real as it gets—but my doubts were about whether I had a right. Who was I to think I knew good from bad?

  Aren’t you overthinking it? She’d learned how to play an instrument with skill but not how to play music with emotion, I said, rather pleased with my formulation.

  But wouldn’t you want to learn?

  Maybe she can’t. Maybe her emotions are hidden from her.

  She stopped playing, said Zafar, the moment the rest of the ensemble, arriving as a group, entered the hall. I stayed while they rehearsed the Schubert string quintet. I have to say, I couldn’t focus my listening; I was preoccupied.

  At the end, after all the others packed away their instruments and went, the ensemble’s leader and the young woman were left.

  The leader of the ensemble, its first violin, was a tall, thin man, evidently several years older than the others. I supposed he was either a graduate student or a junior fellow. He spoke with an uncertain note in his voice.

  Emily, he said, you play very well.

  Thank you, she replied.

  Those are the first two words I ever heard her say. Thank you. They are terms of politeness. But in all the time I was with Emily, I don’t think I ever heard her say sorry. It bothers me, this does. I can’t even think up the image of her doing so, the sound of her voice making that word. It is easy enough, don’t you think, to imagine someone you know well saying words you imagine them saying. But why can’t I imagine her saying that word, just saying sorry?

  For a long time, I wondered if it was my own mind somehow suppressing every memory of her saying sorry, whether in fact she had said sorry but the apologies themselves had so wounded me that my mind had pushed them beyond the reach of the remembering self—an apology is, after all, an acknowledgment of a harm done.

  Do you really doubt your judgment so much? I asked Zafar.

  Not anymore. I did then, and that’s the nub of it: the disaster it all wreaked not on my judgment but on my ability to rely on my judgment. I lost my bearings.

  You were saying—

  Yes. I had the impression the ensemble’s leader was considering his words.

  You’re a very skillful violinist, he said, which puts you in a position to develop certain aspects of your playing others would have difficulty with.

  Emily gave no response.

  Yes, well, he continued, it might be useful to develop your expressive voice. Obviously this is something longer term. We’ll be great for tomorrow.

  As the young man spoke, Emily was entirely silent and perfectly still. It was impossible, for me at least, to discern her reaction, if there was any. The young man seemed increasingly awkward, and I thought of an adolescent shuffling his feet in embarrassment. Had there been a stone on the floor, he might idly have kicked it.

  If you don’t have plans this evening, we could talk about this over a quick supper.

  The young woman smiled at him.

  That would be nice, she replied.

  * * *

  Zafar’s account left me with questions. I wanted, for instance, to ask him if he’d ever mentioned that evening to Emily when he met her years later, when he and Emily were seeing each other. As it turned out, he would later address this himself. Our conversation had brought us past the midnight mark, and I saw in his face that my friend was overcome with tiredness. Nevertheless, I could not but ask him, if only for a stopgap until a full answer came, about that parenthetical remark, that he had finally turned to religion when he needed urgent help. What had prompted his appeal to religion? But his answer only raised in my mind more questions, which would have to wait.

  Religious conversion, said my friend, is an act of destruction. Turning to God can save your life, but, in the process, it can annihilate your soul.

  He rose from his seat and, wishing me a good night, he pulled the study door shut behind him. Left to my own devices, I faced the melancholy in the room, and I asked myself if it was his or mine.

  8

  Poggendorff and Purkyně

  When I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had “labs” at home, and we would do various “experiments.” One time, we were discussing something—we must have been eleven or twelve at the time—and I said, “But thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Bernie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in a car?”

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “Good. Now, tell me: How did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?”

  So I learned from Bernie that thoughts can be visual as well as verbal.

  —Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

  After passing through the lens, light traverses the main part of the eye, which is filled with vitreous humor (“glassy liquid”), a clear, gelatinous substance. After passing through the vitreous humor, light falls on the retina, the interior lining of the back of the eye. In the retina are located the photoreceptor cells numbering approximately 126 milli
on. A feature of the retina is the optic disk, where the long threadlike parts of the cells conveying visual information gather together and leave the eye through the optic nerve. The optic disk produces a blind spot because no receptors are located there. It is a remarkable thing that in the very center of our field of vision there is a blind spot, a disk of nothing, nothing seen, nothing registered, a region of darkness where we might least expect it, if we ever notice its absence, which we do not.

  —Neil R. Carlson, Physiology of Behavior

  In 1896, from his observatory in Arizona, Percival Lowell discovered a pattern of scarring on the surface of Venus. The arrangement of lines resembled the spokes of a wheel radiating from a hub. Lowell believed he saw features of the terrain, “rock or sand weathered by aeons of exposure to the Sun.” The spokes appeared “with a definiteness to convince the beholder of an objectiveness beyond the possibility of illusion.” His research, including his findings of canals on Mars, fired the imagination of a generation. H. G. Wells cited Lowell’s work as inspiration for The War of the Worlds.

  Yet Lowell was alone in seeing these strange markings and, in time, with more advanced telescopes, his claims were discredited. But what did Lowell see? The problem was resolved a century later when an optometrist and amateur astronomer pointed out that Lowell had “stopped down” his telescope—reduced the exit aperture—to the point of unwittingly turning it into an ophthalmoscope. What Lowell actually saw was the network of blood vessels on his retina. Believing he’d found evidence that man was not alone, Percival Lowell had in fact been gazing into his own eye.

  —attributed to Winston Churchill in Zafar’s notebooks

  As Zafar gave his account of tea with Penelope Hampton-Wyvern, I let him speak uninterrupted. But I could barely conceal my discomfort in those flashing moments when rage took hold of him. I could not recall having seen anything like it in him before. Even when, those years ago, he struck down the neo-Nazi in that cobbled mews in Notting Hill, his manner and conduct—the quiet, unassuming South Asian of his own description—had shown restraint and control which, while in its own way alarming, had evidenced no deep well of anger. But in the course of merely recounting tea with the Hampton-Wyverns, even where there was no prospect of physical violence, when he was talking to me, he seemed to be raging against some unseen enemy and spoke of such things as class, privilege, and networks with shocking ferocity.

  A few days later, once the dust had seemed to settle, I tried to broach these subjects. We were sitting in a café in Bloomsbury, next to the window, looking onto the British Museum. I brought up his meeting Penelope, but the conversation didn’t seem to be moving.

  Do you see what the little girl is doing? he asked.

  Zafar was watching a child sitting with her mother. The little girl was eating chocolate cake.

  The girl’s putting the spoon on her plate, he continued, then breaking off a small piece of cake and putting it on the spoon. Watch this—

  The girl lifted the spoon, but when it was hovering in front of her face, instead of doing what you’d expect with the utensil, she picked off the crumbling piece of cake with her hand again and popped it into her mouth.

  How cute is that? he asked.

  Don’t we choose to be victims? I asked.

  A young waitress in a short skirt finally brought us our coffee. I moved the voice recorder away from the mugs. That device had quickly slipped into the rituals when we sat and talked, signifying a reassuring continuity, a means of keeping track, at a time when things were changing, things were breaking, when further changes looked certain to come.

  The British class structure is terrible, isn’t it? I added idiotically, like an incompetent chat show host, trying to provoke a guest.

  Zafar was looking out across the road. High above the main entrance of the museum, the Union Jack fluttered from a pole. The door to the café opened and cold air blustered in behind an elderly couple complaining about the weather.

  Aren’t they all? asked Zafar.

  What do you mean?

  Aren’t all class structures terrible?

  Don’t you think it’s something we can fix? At least the way we deal with it.

  We? Listen to you, the class warrior.

  As individuals, I mean. I’m not talking about class war, I said.

  No one does. The Cold War’s over, socialists scattered to the winds and with them all talk of class.

  Maybe you can’t change the world, but at least you can change the way you look at things and how they affect you.

  The world is what it is and our task is to see it rightly?

  Exactly, I said.

  What if you can’t see things as they are? Zafar asked.

  You learn. Isn’t that what education is all about?

  He said nothing.

  I don’t buy your take on it, I said.

  What’s my take?

  Education isn’t about gaining power. It’s about opening our eyes and letting in the light.

  He did not answer. I thought he was being deliberately obtuse.

  In the street, a young man dashed across the road and, as he did so, dropped something, a phone perhaps. A car drove over it and carried on without stopping.

  Zafar’s gaze went out toward the British Museum, upward, through the leafless trees, toward the bright British flag beating against a gray December sky. His eyes looked still, as if time itself were lingering in the air above him, waiting for an opening. My father had a similar gaze when he was lost in thought, perhaps in some idea of physics or, equally likely I think, in something mundane. My mother used to say he was staring off into space-time.

  Do you know why they fly flags at half-mast?

  Because someone has died? I replied.

  I mean where the tradition comes from.

  No, but I bet you’re going to tell me.

  I bet you ten pieces of cake.

  You want to eat ten pieces of cake? I asked him.

  No. If I win, you have to eat ten pieces of cake.

  Tell me why flags are flown at half-mast. You’ve actually got me quite curious now.

  You’ve always been curious.

  Very droll.

  Pay attention. With the accession of James I in 1603, British ships flew two flags, the English cross and Scottish saltire. But there was another existing convention. When a battle or military exchange had taken place, the victor’s flag was hung at the top with the loser’s just below. The question of which flag should go on top, after a military victory, against the Spanish, say, was resolved by letting English ships fly the cross in the superior position and Scottish ships the saltire.

  But why are flags flown at half-mast when someone dies?

  Flying a flag at half-mast or, to be precise, not halfway down the pole but one flag shy of the top is to make room for the invisible flag of Death, the victor over all men.

  I think Zafar and I both pondered the image for a few moments. Now I saw it differently.

  Why, I asked, were two flags flown after James I became king?

  James I of England was also James VI of Scotland.

  Yes, of course.

  Actually, I say British ships, but there was in fact no Britain to speak of. Given the historical enmity of the English and Scots, James went out of his way to appeal to the English, quite literally. When he traveled from Scotland to assume the throne in London, he stopped off at towns and villages throughout England, ingratiating himself with his new subjects. But here’s the thing. What’s called the Union of the Crowns did not actually mean the union of Scotland and England. There was still no Great Britain. That had to wait another hundred years. James was king of two separate sovereign states. So let me ask you this: If anyone can be described as English, surely the monarch of England is a good candidate?

  Unless he’s German, like the Windsors.

  Ah, you may joke, but James also ruled Ireland. My question is, do you think today’s patriotic Brit is likely to regard his queen as British or n
ot?

  Point taken.

  And yet here was James, king of England, king of Ireland, and king of Scotland. He was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scot, and king of separate sovereign states. So when an English patriot asks if it’s possible to be both British and Pakistani or British and Bangladeshi, it might be worth pointing out that for over a hundred years, the monarch of England had more than one national identity.

  For a while, we sat in silence.

  Do you know Poggendorff’s illusion? asked my friend.

  No. Tell me about Poggendorff’s illusion, I said in sudden good spirits brought on by the instant recognition, a familiar sense, that Zafar wanted to play.

  He pulled out a pen, took a napkin, and drew a straight vertical line before asking me if we should get another coffee.

  I’ll order them—I need the bathroom anyway. Finish your drawing, I said.

  The voice recorder is a way of eavesdropping on yourself. It is the equivalent of a door, slightly ajar, letting you listen in on yourself at a time that is past. One of the surprises contained in the recordings are the tiny things I missed the first time around. Listening to the recording of that discussion in the café, for instance, I realized that with the pretext of wanting more coffee, Zafar might very well have engineered my removal from the table so that he could put together his diagram without giving the game away.

  I returned from the bathroom and, as I settled back into my chair, my friend pushed the paper napkin toward me.

  You’re amused?

  Give me the great illusion—I wait with bated breath, I said.

  That’s good, he said. Now let’s begin with the obvious part, something we can agree on. This diagonal line on the left—which of the two diagonals on the right does it extend to?

  The top one, I answered.

  Of course it does, said Zafar. Now take this other napkin and line it up to check you’re right. Humor me.

  I should have seen it coming. As I brought the edge of the folded napkin against the diagonal in the top left of the diagram, it became apparent that this line extended downward not to the top diagonal, as I had said, but to the bottom one.*