In the Light of What We Know (55 page)

So when she says that, writes that, thinks that, does she think I’m not British? Or am I both British and Bangladeshi, the favored two-step of the dancing liberal? You can be both. Who’s to decide what you are? You can decide. And that liberal never for a moment imagines himself to be dancing the same dance of the bigot, the dance of language and labels and names because everything’s in a name—that’s what he decides.

I listened to Zafar without interrupting him, noting the change in his tone and demeanor. He had delivered the story of Suleiman, Crane, and the envelopes calmly, even, I might say, without drama, however horrific that business about Crane might have been. Yet now, as he talked about Emily, he seemed agitated.

This ruck between the liberal and his antithesis, continued Zafar, never touches the thing that the liberal and bigot take for granted, which is the feeling of belonging, his own feeling of belonging and another’s lack of such feeling, which is a question not of what ought to be but of what is, an epistemological question, a hard question, no doubt, but isn’t that the beginning of wisdom, to see how it is?

Is that what Emily thought, that in going to Bangladesh I had made a romantic journey home? But what then had she made of everything I’d told her? What did it mean to her when I told her one rainy afternoon as we lay in bed after making love—I can’t remember how it came about—that I spoke another language from the language they spoke in the capital, Dhaka? I said
the capital, Dhaka
in case she didn’t know, not to save her the embarrassment but to save me the embarrassment. What did she understand then, when I told her that the corner of the country I was born in was once so unsure of joining the rest that it almost didn’t, that I came from a corner
of that corner
that actually voted against joining the rest? What did she make of that?

What could I conceivably have to say about the budget, the spreadsheet? Or was that request just tacked on as an excuse to write to me, now that we had broken up, now that we were no longer in the same country, no longer flesh within flesh but only, merely, still stuck in each other’s heads? Just an excuse to talk, itself a means to be spoken to, to be regarded and not set aside.

I stared at the spreadsheet, I searched its cells for formulas, of which there were none but the obvious subtotaling and totaling. I right-clicked the document icon and pulled up its properties file and saw that its author was one Maurice Touvier, a name I didn’t know. Who was this Maurice? I looked for what I couldn’t see, but the only thing I could imagine she might think
clever
about it was that it was colorful. It had pretty colors. And I thought of another spreadsheet, one I had put together a year earlier, to stress-test dates.

There was the possibility that it was for her own sick entertainment. It wouldn’t have been the first time. There was the chance that because of that jealousy of hers she was playing a little game. So much about power. I asked her mother once if she thought Emily might have a tendency toward jealousy. Penelope laughed. In fact, she shrieked—I’d never seen this ladylike woman ever do that. Emily’s mother, the woman who’d watched her little girl, her eldest child, grow amid the chaos of her parents’ marriage falling apart, as her own sense of guilt expanded. That motherly guilt was so deep that she had come to accede to everything her daughter asked for—every allowance, every dispensation—so that she had come to accept the bitterness with which Emily addressed her as “Mother,” even in a conversation void of hostility, unlike James, who called her “Mummy,” so that Penelope knew the power of a word more powerful than any other, more powerful than “Father.” Emily’s mother, the woman who had stood by and watched her daughter twisting and warping into a machine that shut off any regard for its own motives, a machine that retained a pipeline from motive to action but never, one could begin to conclude, a means for going back to motive and asserting control over it. What, after all, was her own mother’s motive for her actions all those years ago?

She could only remember her own jealousy when she learned of that woman, of Robin, her former husband, and that woman, that woman who now shared her name, which was his name; she could only feel now the jealous knife that cut into her bone—and cut into Emily’s, too, as she told me the story—when the sales assistant at Harvey Nicks, where Penelope had left a pearl-drop earring that had needed repair, had produced instead a diamond necklace for Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, the new Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, just one bloody month after Robin and that woman had married. Oh, yes, Penelope knew all about her daughter’s jealousy.

That should have been the beginning and the end of it, but of course it was not. Not for me, who is every bit a part of an age, a West, that identifies pathology in the strong emotions, in jealousy, hatred, and rage. Could she really be jealous? This gentle English flower, this model of restraint, the very embodiment of moderation and measure, projecting an image of calm judgment and good sense, never adding emphasis, never making a dramatic gesture with the hands, never raising her voice. Emily was a woman without strong opinions on anything unless a strong opinion would further her professional interests. How could she be jealous of me? What on earth did she fear (as if fear might prompt it)? She had men falling about her like fruit from a tree, no, from an orchard of trees, an orchard in an earthquake, all there for her picking. But she’d wanted me and I was so flattered—couldn’t she see I was flattered? Wasn’t that enough to head off her jealousy?

*   *   *

Suleiman had one of the AfDARI cars drop me off at the UN compound. He didn’t ask me how I’d be getting back, and I think now that he must have assumed that before the curfew I’d be offered a ride back by my hosts or that I’d be staying with them overnight. For my part, I gave it no thought.

I asked for Emily at the main gates, and one of the guards went inside. The sounds of the bar spilled out onto the road, everything starting a little earlier, everything moved forward in the day because of curfew or maybe because the morning light here is intensely bright. Seven in the evening and there are cars parked outside, not all with UN markings, and the drivers are gathered again, smoking cigarettes. A few minutes later Emily appeared, coming from across the courtyard, her image outlined by the floodlights behind her. As she drew closer, she came into clearer view, but as she passed the bar exit, just at that moment when she might have made eye contact with me, she looked back, as she would have done, I thought, if someone had called out from behind her. I heard nothing. Her half-turned figure stood motionless for all of a moment; she was wearing a fitted shirt, narrowing below her shoulders and cinching her waist. What disturbed me was a sarong she wore below that, tightly wrapped around her, so snug against her body. Its deep red and amber colors reminded me of a summer dress I had bought her, a flimsy thing that bared as much as a summer dress can do—like a good essay, I remember a teacher once explaining, large enough to cover the important areas but small enough to be interesting. How I imagined her in that dress, glancing back at me over her shoulder. Imagined, I say, because she could not have carried out‚ let alone carried off‚ that simple gesture, for there was no levity, no play, in her. A summer dress for the woman who otherwise dressed conservatively, who dressed to make her indistinguishable from the career-driven, besuited, independent modern woman.

But that sarong in those circumstances, holding her body, in that country, at that time, it offended me as much as a summer dress had delighted me in Hyde Park and on the stairs to her bedroom. I was mortified. Once again, and not for the last time, I felt I wanted to apologize to someone, to the Afghanis here and there, the drivers waiting by the gates, the attendants, the cleaners and cooks, the staff, the servant class.

But even as my indignation grew, my feelings pulled me in another direction. I felt the same sweeping tenderness for Emily that I’d felt the day she first wore the summer dress I’d bought for her, when we took a turn in the park in the glow of a warm evening in London.

That perhaps is the sum of it all, so far as that woman went—goes—that I always felt besieged by inconsistencies, not in her but in me, in my feelings for her, that those feelings split me asunder to leave me partitioned into people who hated each other, and to side with one was to scorn the other. You ask if I loved her and I tell you that I did but that I hated her, too. Paul Auster quotes the
Memoirs of Chateaubriand
in
The Book of Illusions
—in fact, the protagonist, Zimmer (from A to Z, Zimmer’s an alter ego of Auster), translates the work—and in the passage that Auster himself translates, the French nobleman writes:
Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.
Does Auster mean that a man’s lives run consecutively or concurrently, that he is condemned to live again and again, or that he is many and that his sentences run concurrently, alongside each other,
placed end to end
? In which sense? In the sense that each life within him rises as the last one falls, or in the sense of a man going forward as many selves contained in the same, standing shoulder to shoulder? I have thought it was the latter. I thought, as I still do, like the long-forgotten rabbi, that it is the tension between half brute and half angel that is the cause of a man’s misery. I hated Emily for the same reasons I loved her; the two feelings sprang from one well, so that a dress brought forth love and a sarong hatred. I hated myself, too, for loving her, for loving her for that which I hated about her. It is because of this continuing state of civil war that every act of love by one part of you is an act of betrayal to another part, and so it was, it had to be, that I was destroying myself by simply being with her and therefore having to take sides against myself.

*   *   *

In the compound, there was no kiss, no gesture of affection. Why should there have been? After all, we’d broken up, hadn’t we? I’d gone to Bangladesh and she’d already gone to New York. And this was a place of work. A year ago in New York, at the UN, the same. Meeting me downstairs before the security checks, not so much as a peck. Nothing to undermine the professionalism. Or was it because her colleagues thought she was single, available? I hated suspecting and hated even more to see myself as someone even a little suspecting.

The preservation of professionalism. Now that is something I could understand. Even to believe, as I am certain she did, that given the sexual politics of the workplace, an ambitious woman must appear unattached—even this I could understand, I could respect, even if I didn’t agree or disagree with it. It is a rare character, the kind Nicky Amory had, that is able to assert and mobilize her sexuality while deftly enforcing in that same professional space the clarity of her commitment to her husband or her lover, the light touch that moves in two ways. It is a character that instantly wins my undying loyalty. It is self-restraint that applies itself before there’s anything to restrain. Emily just did not have that character. One must not expect too much of others.

Joanna and Philip will be there, as will Maurice, she said.

I didn’t know Joanna and Philip, I’d never heard of them, and as for Maurice, perhaps that was the same Maurice who headed AfDARI. Perhaps she thought I’d know the name from there. But if it was that same Maurice, I didn’t say what I guessed: Maurice was unlikely to show. In the UN bar the night before, Nicky had said that Maurice had cut short her meeting that day and that they’d rescheduled for the next. I’d expected Nicky to drop by when she came for her meeting and, if I wasn’t there, leave a message. She was obviously reliable, just that sort of person. But when I left AfDARI for the UN compound only half an hour earlier, there’d been no message from her. Her meeting with Maurice must have been scheduled for the evening.

What’s for supper? I said instead.

I don’t know, she replied.

So who are they?

Philip went to Winchester, she said.

He’s not here?

The school.

I’m missing the point again, aren’t I?

Maurice was at the Sorbonne.

He’s over fifty?

What makes you think that?

Since 1968, other than an administrative entity, there has been no such thing as
the Sorbonne.

He’s our age.

Anything else I should know about them, so I don’t put my foot in it?

What do you mean?

You know, Philip and Joanna are married. But not to each other.

He’s divorced.

Children?

I think so.

Good friends of yours, then? Not the children, I mean.

Yes.

Nice to have good friends possibly with children.

Zafar, sometimes you say the funniest things.

Well, I’m here all week and don’t forget to tip your waitress.

*   *   *

We were halfway across the courtyard when there was a shout from behind us:
Emily!

It was Crane. He was staggering out of the side exit from the lounge, propped up by someone else. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. He pressed his arms against a wall and crouched over. I heard him vomit. Beyond him, on the other side of the gates, the drivers stood silently, watching.

He’s rather loud, said Emily.

A loud American. Who would have thought? I said under my breath.

Sorry?

What do you want to do?

Let’s get inside, she said.

I hated this place. I hated it through and through. What was I really doing here? Hassan Kabir had asked me to come, but one day in and still I had no message from him or from the staff at Bagram. What am I doing here? As I stepped forward against the contrary impulse within me, I wondered if I had asked the question aloud. Emily was giving me a puzzled look.

From the direction of Crane, out of the darkness emerged the figure of a man, the one, I assumed, who’d struggled to bring Crane out. Crane was now gone, or at least his voice was.