In the Light of What We Know (52 page)

Now you’re insulting the whole of England.

The name’s Tomaso.

You say potato.

You’re nothing like my Indian friend at Oxford.

How many times a day do you forgive someone his ignorance?

Is that an apology?

I’m sorry, Tomato.

And at that, Tomaso emptied his glass over my shirt. He thrust it in my direction and the wine came flying out. A few drops made it to my face.

That was unnecessary, I said.

You asked for it, he replied.

I wish I could tell you I had a witty comeback. The ones I formulated came too late and they weren’t so witty after all. I suppose I could have tried to justify myself, but where to begin? And why bother?

I looked down at my shirt, looked at Tomaso, looked at Emily. Somewhere in the room must have been Tomaso’s girlfriend.

Silly me. I’ve spilled wine on my shirt, I said and left the room. When I returned, the two of them had gone.

*   *   *

If Zafar’s story had meant to convey what it was he liked about Emily, I didn’t get it. Searching now for clues, I find myself asking if he had meant to suggest that there was a certain romance about being with her, the Tuscan hills, making love under the stars, the remove from his childhood, a certain glamour in a certain life. It sounds shallow to me, too shallow for my friend, I would have thought, but my instincts settle there. Perhaps he himself saw a shallowness in that, and that is why his little aside never meets the mark of answering my question. I did in fact press him on the point, though his answer seemed to me a touch disingenuous, which only returns me to my own conclusion.

Good times, he said, are interesting times.

By such a standard, the incident with Tomaso, I said, must have been a great time.

His answers were unsatisfactory, but I left it there. And then there was the sex. Of course, I was uncomfortable listening to this—for reasons I’ll come to very soon—but what struck me above all else as he discussed the sex was that he was prepared to do so. Men don’t talk like that, not the men I know. And perhaps because of that, I had the thought that Zafar would not be staying very much longer. I had the thought that such openness evidenced a disconnection with the regular world, that he had abandoned the cultivation of a self to suit the society of his fellow men. I looked at him and saw that he would never have a job again, never return to the treadmill, never pay a mortgage and make a home and raise a family. He had slipped off the wheel.

17

My Brother’s Keeper or Betrayal

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

—William Blake

Whenever he related his experience with Emily, Zafar’s demeanor changed and a darkness gathered about him, so that age and weariness showed in the features of his face. More or less everything he told me about his time with her was news to me. Sometime in 1997, we began to meet less and less frequently and, since the period coincided with a substantial increase in work for me—business in the mortgage market spiked, and the prospect of making partner quickly loomed in sight—our friendship waned. Time then seemed to move so quickly that I did not gauge the absence of friendships very well. Meena was also busy; having found her feet in finance, she’d set off at a sprint. I believed our relationship was content and strong and we could draw on that contentment to sustain us through the long working days of separation.

And so it was that a year passed without our meeting, Zafar and I, and then another. Such regrets as I have are few; I am not an old man, but even if there had been time enough to accumulate regrets, I do not think my constitution works that way. My circumstances have also helped, I daresay, for I don’t think I ever faced the prospect others face of regretting bad decisions that took them down the road to financial burden or ruin, lives ruled by mortgage repayments and school fees, that seem to be the lot of so many people. True enough, I’ve not been immune to financial difficulties. But they were—they
are
—the difficulties of someone with good fortune.

However, I do now have regrets about that time of my life. I’m not so presumptuous as to imagine that if I’d remained a presence in his life, he might not have declined as he evidently did in that time. What is the word for it? I say
declined
, but what was it? A descent? Collapse? Unraveling, unstitching, falling apart, breaking down?

*   *   *

I want to give an explanation, but there is no reason. I told myself afterward that perhaps I was consoling Emily, but her demeanor did not warrant such a view. There was no obvious distress in want of relief. Where there is nothing that can amount to an explanation, I am left only with the possibility of stating what happened. By that, I do not mean what Zafar would have meant, for to him, it must be apparent, what happens is as much in the mind as in the exercise of the body and its limbs. Our thoughts and feelings, the emotions and instincts that drive us on, these were to Zafar no less the stuff of the drama we enact than our actions that are easily described if not explained.

Zafar spoke of the will, disparaging its purported freedom. And though I reject his rejection of the will, I understand the simplicity of his point: Only without invoking the idea of will can we properly speak of causes. If you want to know why a man made a choice, it won’t do to say that he simply chose. Zafar’s exposition therefore stands as an account of causes: the center line in a tug-of-war moves because men pull on the rope. But when we take the will out of the picture, should we not turn then to passions and instincts and drives in finding our causes? In his notebooks, Zafar records a passage from the philosopher David Hume’s
A Treatise of Human Nature
, a well-worn passage, I know:
We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
I cannot pretend that I have reasons or justifications.

I remember the date because it was my father’s birthday, a Saturday in April 2000, and I was driving up to Oxford to visit him for lunch. The roads were uncluttered at ten in the morning, and the skies were clear and blue enough to drive with the cover down. My thoughts drifted in and out of matters of work. We had just completed a string of almost identical transactions on which the firm had made substantial profits, and I was thinking about how the structure might potentially be replicated with other clients and about ways it might have to be tailored. As I drew into Oxford, slowing to the pace of traffic, my phone rang.

Hello, it’s Emily Hampton-Wyvern.

Hello, Emily. How lovely to hear from you, I shouted over a passing truck. It’s been ages.

Where are you? What’s all the racket?

I’m sorry. I’m on the road, I replied. Something was wrong, I thought. Why, after all, would she call?

Zafar’s in hospital.

Good God. What’s the matter?

He’s in a psychiatric hospital.

I said nothing.

He’s in a psychiatric hospital, she repeated.

I was shocked by the news. It’s quite a thing to be hospitalized that way, isn’t it? It’s what doctors do
to
you, because you don’t know better, your mind can’t know better. But shock wasn’t the whole of what I felt. Zafar was undeniably someone I cared about. Someone I admired and in some ways envied. Yet there it was: I was shocked, and yet another part of me was not surprised. Which is not to say that I could see it coming. There was the mystery that surrounded Zafar, that was part of his attraction. I knew nothing really of his childhood, of his formation. What I did know—my brief encounter with his parents—only fed a thesis: He’d seemed self-made, came from nothing, but how far can that go? How feasible is it? Was he a working-class boy who had overreached? Lived beyond his psychic means?—to take some words from his notebooks.

That’s awful. What’s wrong?

Emily did not answer. I assumed she hadn’t heard me. I thought of pulling over, but the road had suddenly become clear.

What happened?

Still there was no answer. It struck me that perhaps she didn’t know.

How is he?

Before she could reply, I added: That’s a stupid question; he’s in hospital.

Are you free this evening? she asked me.

Shall I come over?

Would you?

I’ll be there at eight.

18

The Blood-Dimmed Tide

Mathematics, as applied logic, which nevertheless stays within pure and lofty abstraction, holds a curious intermediate position between the humanistic and realistic sciences; and from the descriptions Adrian shared in conversation of the delight it gave him, it became evident that at the same time he experienced this intermediateness as something elevated, dominating, universal, or as he put it, “the true.” It was a great joy to hear him call something “true”; it was an anchor, a stay—one no longer asked oneself quite in vain about the “main thing.”

—Thomas Mann,
Doctor Faustus
, translated by John E. Woods

Zafar returned to his account of events in Kabul, to Emily and the UN lounge. But if it appears that some time passed before he did so, it is largely the effect of my own reconstruction of our conversations. I did, after all—for reasons I’ve already given—bring forward the Afghan story. And, as I look over what I’ve put down so far, I see that much of the intervening material concerns me and my own life. Yet it’s equally true that my friend didn’t tell the Afghan story from beginning to end without deviation. That’s just not Zafar. He had taken me back to Islamabad in order, I understand, to set the context for his involvement in what happened in Kabul, when he met Crane. But now he took up the scene in the UN bar again, after making his presence known to Emily in the lounge.

He left her with her circle of admiring men, he explained, men ever gravitating toward her, as ripe apples to the soft earth, he said. She now knew that I was here, in the compound, in Kabul. Passing through a low arch, I came into the bar, a cavernous room with plenty of sofas and armchairs, as in the lounge, but with furniture and people packed in and pressed together, and the lighting dimmer. Yet what attacked my senses were the smell and the noise. In several months of working in South Asia, I had not smelled that pungent admixture of alcohol and human bodily odor. It came from another world. The music was loud, the soles of my feet tingling with the vibrations, a volume to muffle the clamor of sexual gambits unbuckling over the scene. It was a scene of horror. This is the freedom for which war is waged, in the venerable name of which the West sends its working-class heroes to fight and die. If the Afghanis had been asked, would they have allowed this blight on their home? Is this what Emily was fighting for?

Men are social animals, we are told, the evidence all around us. I went to Glyndebourne once with Emily and her mother, all of us dressed to the nines. The music was good enough, some or other opera, but it seemed to me that Glyndebourne was as much as anything else a social occasion: picnic hampers bulging with booty from Fortnum & Mason and Harrods, jams, Gentleman’s Relish, and strawberries. Champagne bubbled over the sound of corks popping. A scene from what? An impressionist painting perhaps? Yet what do I know about their art? It was a beautiful summer’s day. Penelope said hello to friends and acquaintances—the brush of cheek against cheek—and so did Emily. I saw two other South Asian faces and wondered if, after years of passing off, I now looked even half as much at ease as they did.

If Glyndebourne was a harmless social venue, which is no small
if
, the UN bar in Kabul was the antithesis. What the people in the bar were doing wasn’t
just
getting together for a few drinks in a familiar setting. It wasn’t
just
hip-hop in the background, the press of bodies, the lingering stares, the offers to buy a drink disguising and disclosing other intentions; it wasn’t even what I overheard in every snatch of conversation, that human drive to seek out agreement, to approve and concur, that craving for the fellow feeling of a shared view of the world that might actually come from nothing more than wanting to be liked.

A beautiful young woman—and I mean
beautiful
—stood with a drink in hand. In the clouds of smoke, her lips seemed to tremble. She had poise and grace and legs all the way to Tuesday or Christ Almighty or the ground, whichever is the longest. You could have taken this woman, this almost imaginary creature, for one of the models gliding about Union Square in New York, a lingerie model, not the brittle-boned, concave clothes hangers of catwalks. Such women frightened me off: Imagined women can satisfy only the imagination. Behind her was a man talking to another woman, though he kept glancing her way. As for the man actually talking to the model, who might or might not have had her attention, he looked uneasy in the company he was keeping, as if his jacket was a size too small. The model, I thought, was the kind of woman Emily would be careful not to be seen beside, a woman who could reduce her.

I looked for the group I came with. Nicky was on the other side of the room, curled into a sofa, talking to Sandra, a middle-aged Korean American woman I’d been introduced to in the Land Cruiser.

Zafar! We thought we’d lost you. Sandra had you pegged as the disappearing sort, without so much as a goodbye, but I said you were a proper gentleman.

Putting on a cockney accent, I said: A proper gentleman.

Nicky had a wonderful smile, bursting with true pleasure, a bright, uncomplicated smile, a smile that sang affection, as any fool could tell. Emily never smiled at me like that. Yes, I think there was genuine tenderness in Nicky’s smile. And yes, she flirted with me, but it was bounded flirtation. She had told me not long after we met—forty-eight hours in Kabul contained so much time—about her wonderful husband, a jazz musician, and her two little boys, a house ruled by wild men.