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

  The analogy with biography lends itself, if not because of the subject, then because of the process. There is something like an archive from which I’m drawing. There are my own memories of conversations and events, and then there are the recordings I myself made of talking to him. But there’s something more personal. Coming down for breakfast one morning, I found a plastic bag on the kitchen table full of them, dozens and dozens, notebooks of all kinds, bound in leather or cloth or glued, most of them no thicker than a checkbook, each of them small enough to have been tucked into the pocket of a coat or cargo pants. They were numbered, though not by the same writing implement, some by pencil and others by blue or black ballpoint. I took them into the study, where slowly I began to read them. Slowly, I say, because they were not easy reading. They were dense, not merely accounts of events but also the record of ideas and thoughts and readings, excerpts from books and annotations to excerpts. Coming back to them, again and again, I found descriptions of incidents interlacing the ideas, connecting one idea to another. Strikingly, I saw only fully formed and complete sentences, no orphaned phrases or even scratch marks, no crossings out.

  I have absorbed more of them than I was aware of doing so at the time, their content and form so fused that their influence on my reading self, long after I had laid them down, was to direct me toward their subject matter and, moreover, to condition my mind to look for the kind of questions that Zafar’s own had asked. They are lessons, though nothing in them shows any intention to be regarded as such, unless they were intended as lessons to himself. In particular, his notebooks contain certain long, freestanding passages, and in trying to find a way to characterize those passages, I am sent to the dictionary, where I am reminded that the word essay connotes such words as effort and attempt and it is therefore all the more apposite to consider here one such essay, on the subject of the influence of one writer on another, which begins with an observation Zafar evidently had while reading an interview with a writer. My friend observes that when a writer is asked which authors have most influenced her, it’s often another question that she answers: Who are her favorite authors? (Zafar referred to the writer as she.) The implicit overarching question is: What or whose books is your book like? The writer’s answer is of course limited to the influences she perceives, but there are problems in the way influence itself is measured or understood. Imitation or similarities in style or even content may be how influence is perceived by a reader, but such things may not capture the greatest influence one writer has on another. When Dick Fosbury introduced his flop, he was imitating no one. Until then, a high jumper would not have survived a Fosbury flop because raised soft landing areas were yet to be introduced and a Fosbury flop would have ended in a broken neck. The influence of former jumpers on Fosbury could not be found in Fosbury’s imitation of anyone. Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it. One writer can change another writer’s writing self. Such influences are perhaps harder to measure, but surely they have much greater impact and, in Zafar’s opinion, are much more interesting.

  My license to order his account according to my own design comes indirectly from Zafar himself. In his notebooks, in a passage reflecting on the narratives we impose on our lives, he writes that when the ancients saw clusters of stars in the sky, they joined them up in an order that evoked a shape they already recognized, something that held a meaning for them, and into this configuration they read properties of the celestial night. Our memories do not visit us in chronology, and the story we form by joining up the memories involves choices with the purpose of making a whole and finding a pattern.

  Perhaps I write then with some vague aspiration that the process can illuminate me to me, a kind of eavesdropping on oneself, eavesdropping in the way Zafar might have meant, as if writing is the manifesting of a hope to catch oneself in the middle of things. But even in making this observation I am already giving in to a tendency to get ahead of myself, for it was only afterward, only after reviewing everything, including my conversations with Zafar and certain conversations with my father—much of which will surely find its way onto these pages—that I have felt moved to begin the present undertaking.

  The foregoing, this little reflection of mine, has swelled to excess and yet I feel it is only the beginning of something, something shorter, I hope. What I am saying is that my friend has had a great influence on me, in the mind and therefore on the page, the measure of which may yet grow, I think.

  Where, then, did Zafar begin, if not in Kabul? His account started out on something much earlier, another journey, one in his boyhood, a horrifying journey by train returning to Sylhet, the area of Bangladesh where he was born. My friend’s account began at the very root—that I do understand—of what was to come much later.

  * * *

  In my childhood, said Zafar, there were small signs along the way, which I only dimly perceived without ever understanding, that the people whom I called my mother and my father were not my biological parents. I have always sensed that in the emotional gulf between me and my parents there lay some or other meaning, but a more refined concept than that remained beyond reach for some time. I acquired the belief that the feeling had something to do with the huge cultural and social leap I had made in one generation, away from my father’s life—that of a peasant as a young man, then bus conductor in London, then waiter. I had moved away from a life with few choices into my own life, one that was breaking loose with unimagined possibility, even in my boyhood.

  Wresting myself from the given order of things, I was engaged in something unnatural and subversive, not merely against my parents but also against the expectations of the world, which were apparent to me as clues left by adults to be pieced together. I saw one mother who made a point of talking to my teacher, Miss Turner, when collecting her blue-eyed boy at the end of the day. The two women might laugh about something or other, or Miss Turner might ask how the boy’s piano lessons were coming along. And then the following day, when Miss Turner spoke to the boy in the classroom, I heard in her voice the subtle note of deference that told me everything I needed to know about the world and its expectations.

  There was comfort in mathematics, which teased my mind, drew it in and emptied it of everything. I caught glimpses of a kind of truth. I remember first encountering long division, which was set out in a book as a mere process—something to be done, if not understood. But I could not stop asking myself why it worked. We take much for granted, much that is granted by others, and we’re told to do as we’re told, and we agree. And we must agree. I haven’t the time or, for that matter, the inclination to work out that the earth is basically spherical, but when I see the curve of the horizon from a plane, I believe I have seen something that is consistent with what I have been told is the truth, that the planet is curved like a ball. But how can we know that we’re accepting something that we ought not to accept, without knowledge of the why? In mathematics, the why is everything. How, or rather, why, did this mechanical process of long division work, calculating how many times one number goes into another, working out the remainder, and then the carrying over. Why did someone think it would always work? What was going on?

  On my way to school one dreary morning, a realization blossomed in my mind: the idea of a number base. The idea was never contained in such words, and only later did I learn about other bases such as binary and hexadecimal. I see the connection, but what still eludes me is how the mind can make the journey, how it covers the ground between two ideas; what I do not understand is how contemplation of long division led this organ in the skull to an understanding of number bases. I grasped that when we add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers, w
e are relying on a base of ten to represent them, but this base is entirely arbitrary, of our own choosing. The numbers themselves do not care.

  This was the kind of thinking I had settled into even as a boy and, at the time, I saw in such tendencies of my mind the root of all strife between me and my parents. For a long time I felt, which is to say I consciously thought, that our difficulties were of my doing, my fault, that I had brought upon my parents some grief to warrant their treatment of me—to warrant the violence. I know now, of course, that self-blame is rather common among children in such circumstances as mine.

  There comes a day for most people, I think, when they see their parents through the same lens as they see others, as human beings who stand alone and apart with aspirations for their own lives, and with all the flaws that are laid bare by defeated hopes. Such an epiphany can come in a moment, in a fraction of a second, in which everything is compressed and laid out at once. When it comes, it could, I suppose, be unsettling, as if heaven lifted its veil. I remember learning what Islam teaches: that on the day of judgment no family ties are recognized and that each of us stands apart before the maker, only for himself.

  One such moment that I can remember, though not the first, was on the day I learned I had a place at university.

  In the week before that day, Mrs. Fraenkel tapped me on the shoulder in a busy corridor at school. Mrs. Fraenkel was a history teacher, whose physical appearance always warranted a pause. She seemed forever weighed down by the same gray-and-brown wool pullover, her mauve hair an abandoned nest and so dry it could burst into flames at any moment. Her wrecked teeth, like a mouthful of broken cigarettes, denied her the self-confidence to smile for longer than an instant.

  She never actually taught me, but since candidates for Oxford entrance were a rarity in my school, word of my application must have reached her in the staff room. As pupils filed past on their way to other classrooms, Mrs. Fraenkel, whose fingers and face bore chalk marks, asked me how I intended to get to Oxford for interview. I could hitch a ride with a family friend of hers, she suggested, and explained that her friend’s son, a pupil at a school whose name meant nothing to me then, was also trying for Oxford entrance. I later learned that Mrs. Fraenkel had moonlighted as a private tutor, and I speculated that this might be how she knew this family.

  He’s bright enough but not in your league, she said.

  Perhaps this was the kindest remark anyone could make, anticipating as I now believe it did the anxiety I would feel on meeting these magnificent people, the sort of thing that should be said even if you don’t believe it to be true. In those days, I knew nothing of what I’ve come to know of the upper classes, who seemed to my mind then either fat people in dusty wigs, half recumbent or mounted upon some unfortunate horse, in paintings with gilded frames, or thin people who stalked the globe, gathered loot, and discovered the sources of rivers already long known to unimportant people. With such ideas in my mind, it was easy to dismiss them. But the middle classes—that is to say the intelligentsia, the writers, academics, doctors, and lawyers, and all those whose labor is framed by the transmission of words, written or spoken, but only after years of study—to me these people were forbidding in the particular power they held. They seemed to have a natural, ordained intimacy with what I loved, the world where I was safe, the world of imagination, books, and ideas. When I looked closely at people in the public library, none of them conformed to my idea of the intellectual elite, who never came to the library but had, I believed, shelves and shelves of books at home.

  At seven o’clock on the morning of my interview, I took an hour-long bus journey from Willesden Green to High Street Kensington. At the appointed place, I was picked up by Mrs. Fraenkel’s friend. Inside the car, in the driving seat, was a middle-aged woman who spoke to me in a rich French accent. I smelled perfume. Her short hair followed the line of her white neck, a string of pearls straddled the collar of her blouse, and the slender fingers of one hand held the steering wheel while those of the other rested on her thigh, the tips of the fingers just below the line of her skirt. I cannot remember her name. In the front passenger seat sat her boy, Laurent, I was told. As I settled in, Laurent crooked his head toward me, flashed me a confident and utterly disarming smile, and resumed his conversation with his mother. The car seemed to move without any sound, like mercury over steel, but what I remember most vividly is that I was able to cross my legs.

  I did not have much to say to these people, and they seemed busy discussing arrangements for coaching Laurent. I was informed that he was “a fencer,” not merely that he liked fencing. As we broke free of the suburbs of London, I lost myself in the book I had brought with me, volume one of Mechanisms in Modern Engineering Design by Ivan Artobolevsky, translated from Russian into English in 1975. Some years before I had come across the single volume in a poky secondhand bookshop in Marylebone for the price of two bottles of milk. It was an utter delight, a compendium of designs of lever mechanisms with page after page of beautiful diagrams. The elderly bookseller, who in my imagination was the same Ezra Cohen whose name was etched into the storefront, explained to me that the book had been distributed by the Soviet Union throughout the third world, at knockdown prices as part of their propaganda efforts. When I expressed surprise at how well informed he was, Mr. Cohen shrugged his shoulders. I’m an old socialist and I like books, he said.

  An old socialist who called the Russian effort propaganda, including this, a collection of mechanical-engineering diagrams for building bridges and machines to raise water and irrigate land. I did not stay and talk to Mr. Cohen, for already I was dreading returning home with, instead of milk, a book written originally in Russian and in symbols and diagrams. I have since imagined a conversation in which I stand silently and listen to Mr. Cohen, with all his books around him, talking to me, not about the building of bridges, not about breaking the chains that bind the poor, but instead explaining to me what I have since come to understand, that the idea is the thing and that words can do only so much.

  After the interview, I decided to give myself some time before rejoining Laurent and his mother, and so I took a walk through Oxford, around the Radcliffe Camera (twice), under the Bridge of Sighs, down to Magdalen Deer Park. Everything was as I had seen it in the books at the public library near my home in London, yet now a future at Oxford was more than an idle dream. But there was something new and unexpected.

  As I walked through the streets, one thought returned to me over and over. One thought kept surprising me, springing at me from behind walls and at corners, like some trickster; one thought followed me around the city as I walked through its cobbled streets and along its sandstone walls: I would never again be destitute.

  It was early December, and by midafternoon the light was retreating. I made my way back to the Eastgate Hotel, where Laurent’s mother had ensconced herself for the day. When I arrived, she and Laurent were taking tea by the fireside in the hotel drawing room.

  How did it go? she asked me, as Laurent bit into a scone.

  They’ve given me a place, I said.

  What do you mean? asked Laurent, through a mouthful of scone. His mother looked at him sharply.

  I think the college offered me a place, I said.

  No, said Laurent, they don’t tell you until later by post. First you take the entrance exam, which you did last month, right?

  Right, I replied.

  Then they interview you and after that they let you know by letter.

  One of the fellows—are they called fellows?

  Yes.

  One of the fellows said they looked forward to seeing me next autumn.

  What exactly did he say? asked Laurent.

  Well, she said—she was a woman—that they were pleased to inform me that I had a place to read mathematics at the college and they hoped I would accept, and they looked forward to seeing me next autumn.

  There was then an odd silence as the information seemed to take root. I am not so naïve now, nor
perhaps was I so naïve then, as to remain blind to their incredulity, though at that moment I, too, felt my own disbelief, as I heard myself.

  You must feel overjoyed, said Laurent’s mother.

  I’m happy, I said, but mainly I feel hungry.

  I wasn’t sure I had enough loose change to buy anything to eat in this expensive hotel.

  When I arrived back in London in the early evening, my father opened the door. It was a Tuesday, which was my father’s one day of rest from waiting tables. As a child I walked home on Tuesdays with the thought that my father would be there and that I would probably do something to make him angry. Years into adulthood, I have felt a recurrent anxiety on Tuesdays, which did not ease until these last few years, when I slipped from the cycles of the working world so that one day ran into the next, the weekends ceased to frame the week, and each day became nameless over time.

  At the door, my father said nothing about the interview. I thought then that perhaps he had simply forgotten about it, or that he had not grasped how much turned on that interview. In the kitchen, my mother was chopping coriander leaves while the lid on the rice pan rattled, letting off bursts of steam. She asked me how the interview had gone, to which I replied that the college had offered me a place to study there. She smiled, and in a turn of phrase that I have never forgotten, and whose translation into English I think preserves the sense very well, she said: Good. This will vindicate me in the eyes of the extended family. I sensed that behind this remark lay some vast story and one I already suspected my mind was not equipped to hear without cost. My father simply said: That’s very good. Have you eaten?

  It struck me then that my father might not have forgotten about the interview and that he might indeed have grasped its significance, and that perhaps this was why, at the front door, he could not bring himself to ask me about it.

  * * *

  I don’t know if it was merely the fact of listening to Zafar again after all those years, but I have to confess that his voice and his language sounded beautiful to me. Reading his notebooks and reviewing the recordings have been a pleasure, even lulling me here and there into a state of hypnotic calm, notwithstanding the knowledge of what came to pass and that everything was circling toward violence. In writing this account, I can’t deny that my own language, on the page, beats in places to the rhythm of his, rather like—I don’t mind admitting—the movement synchrony and posture mirroring of couples. Zafar spoke in balanced sentences, apparently crafted, on occasion perhaps sounding rehearsed, though this should not be regarded as a criticism, bearing in mind that he had probably spent most of his life considering the matters he was now setting out.