In the Light of What We Know (15 page)

I remember now a summer day at that Vermont camp, whose days strung together made up the long vacation in my American years, when Crane and I, out in the woods on a trek with the counselor, along with three other boys, aged eight, broke away from the rest, Crane diving into the undergrowth and I following, a follower even then, for an adventure, he said, though I could see it in his face that breaking away was the adventure itself.

Oh, look, I said, there’s a hidebehind.

Where?

Right behind you.

Crane turned and of course he couldn’t see it. My father had told me about the lesser spotted hidebehind, a bird with one wing, which therefore flew in clockwise circles around your back and was really, really hard to see, he said, so you had to be quick like a mongoose, which I knew had to be really, really quick, even if I didn’t know what a mongoose was. My father laughed his face off as I spun on my heels trying to take the bird by surprise. The hidebehind carried on in my world for a while, because I wanted it to, even after my father gave the game away.

It’s gone, I said. No wait, there it is again.

Hey, looky here, Crane said, stopping. He was peering over a patch of dirt.

I’m no fool, I thought, but coming closer I saw the object of his attention, a chipmunk on its side, twitching, and I knew, as did Crane, that the creature was wounded or sick, that the animal was dying.

We should put it out of its misery, he said.

Even though I didn’t know what that meant, there was a part of me that sensed the awfulness of it. It sounded like something a grown-up would say, and I looked at Crane with admiration.

Then Crane lifted his foot and placed it above the chipmunk’s head, letting the sole hover in the air above it. My stomach felt bad. Slowly he brought his heel down, grinding it into the dirt is how I remember the sight, and I can hear now the skull cracking, like peanut brittle. When he removed his foot, the creature lay in a distorted shape, its head sunk into the earth, and, nestled in the dirt and fur, was the ball of an eye.

*   *   *

At the time, any onlooker might have concluded that I was being raised as an American. American is in fact what I was and what I continue to say I am if pressed on the matter. I have an American passport. This point, if I state it matter-of-factly, seems to close out the persistent questions of Europeans.

I know, however, that when I say I’m American, I don’t mean much more than that I hold an American passport. I’m entitled to a Pakistani passport because of my parents, and though I obtained a British passport in order to ease travel within Europe, I otherwise travel on the U.S. one. But such patriotism as there is in me really goes no further: I am not moved when I hear “The Star-Spangled Banner”; I do not feel the urge to leap to America’s defense when I hear Europeans castigate the whole country (despite the obvious foolishness of regarding as homogeneous a continent that runs from California to New York and Montana to Texas—it was put well by a friend, a New Yorker born and bred, who lives there still, when he said that America was fine to visit but he wouldn’t want to live there). Perhaps the closest I come to feeling myself American is when a U.S. immigration officer snaps the navy blue passport shut and hands it back with a smile and with the greeting “Welcome home.” At that moment, I have felt to varying degrees the sensation of a breeze kissing the back of my neck, which might very well be called patriotism. It might ultimately be rather trivial. But I know that such things, small as they might seem to me, are far from trivial to others.

In New York, all those years ago, in another conversation as we idled about in Greenwich Village, I mentioned to Zafar my experience on being handed back my passport at JFK the day before. His reaction startled me. Before I could ask what was going on, he had turned on the sidewalk, hailed a cab, and was climbing in. My friend directed the cabdriver to take us to lower Manhattan, where we caught the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. He said he wanted to show me something there, and since I had only ever seen the statue from Manhattan, I went along with his sudden impulsive turn.

As we pulled away from the port, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center loomed up, and then, when the ferry heaved farther into the bay, with the Manhattan skyline receding in that picture postcard image of New York, I began to feel the combination of romance and longing that such a sight is, I think, bound to arouse in native and visitor alike. The sun was high and the city’s glass skyline gave off specks of dazzling light. The water was calm and it seemed as if lower Manhattan were floating on the surface of the sea. At the stern of the ship, hoisted on a pole leaning toward the foamy wake, was the flag of the United States of America.

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 father, 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.