Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Did Zafar know what I was thinking? Yes, I saw Emily in that interval. Yes, I did more than just see her. Years had passed, but I remembered exactly when I visited her. That Saturday, my father’s birthday, I remembered Emily telling me that Zafar had gone into hospital on Tuesday the week before. Last Tuesday? I’d asked her. No, the week before , she’d replied. And you waited this long to tell me , I’d thought. And later I’d considered the meaning of Tuesday. Tuesday, a grim day, his father’s day off from work, Zafar had once said to me, though it was no explanation at all, I thought then.

You’re wondering, continued Zafar, how I know what her cycle length was. Ninety percent of women have cycle lengths between twenty-one and thirty-five days. But what’s to say her cycle length wasn’t outside that? Twenty-one days or thirty-five? The beauty is, I don’t need to know; the conclusion is the same. That’s what stress-testing the numbers shows. Though for what it’s worth, I happen to know that it was pretty much twenty-eight days.

I should say sorry, shouldn’t I?

Zafar didn’t respond.

I feel I need to explain myself.

I spent six months grieving for a loss … a loss that … How can an explanation of your actions touch anything … touch the grief, touch the consequences of … the consequences? I didn’t know until more than eight months afterward. I was in hospital when … In hospital.

I owe you an explanation.

You can’t say sorry and offer an explanation, said Zafar. What’s an explanation supposed to do, other than make you feel better? If an explanation is a justification, then why say sorry? And if it isn’t a justification, then it’s a confession in search of absolution. Explanation?

But I shouldn’t have … I shouldn’t …

* * *

We sat silently, Zafar and I. The kitchen still smelled of the Thai takeout we’d had the night before. The housekeeper was scheduled to come the next day. I thought of all the pain Zafar had felt, the pain at the loss of a child, which it so obviously was to him. As he wrote in one notebook, We carry people in our heads, which is where their deaths take place. He had invested so much in the idea of the infant, much more than most men, perhaps. People vary. He’d talked about distributions, bell curves, the randomness that sets you down somewhere on the curve, most people bunched up in the middle, most people, I think, not so invested, some even looking back without one pang of regret or lament, and others, like him, wholly given over. He knew that the child had mattered to him — and wasn’t that what he wanted of Emily? To know that the child had mattered to her. He knew that the child had mattered to him for reasons that gathered from every corner of his identity. If that was the wrong premise upon which to bring a human being into the world, to regard it as anything other than a new and independent human being, then it seems to me to be an argument entirely irrelevant to the pain. Feelings, the very heart of what a man is — they deserve our respect even if they never need to earn it.

How do you feel about it now? I asked him.

Zafar didn’t answer, not right away.

We think of memory as if it were a hard drive, he said, and in some ways that’s what it’s like, but it’s like something altogether different, too. It’s a stage and a director, and over time the play changes, the characters are changed, but it’s a funny play because we lose sight of what those characters once were to us. Memory is not static but a thing in motion, and because we are passengers without a frame of reference, the motion is imperceptible, so that at any given point in time, all we have is a set of memories, a thing of the instantaneous present and not of the past. I read somewhere, some researcher explaining that every time we recall something, our future memory of it changes, as if we rewrite or overwrite the memory with a new memory after each use in an ongoing palimpsest. Which, it strikes me, must make it hard to lose the memory of something whose memory you dearly wish to lose, which is to say that if memory serves us well, sometimes some things are blessedly forgotten. Do you have any cigarettes?

Listening to Zafar, I felt more sorry, more regretful, than I had already. Is that what he was doing, waiting to forget?

I think I have some cigars in the study, I said.

Cigars? Well, why not? Now is as good an occasion as any.

I returned from the study with cigars and also with cigarettes, having remembered seeing a packet on a bookshelf.

The cigarettes might be stale, I said, setting the packet down on the table. I held out a cigar but Zafar declined. He was not looking at me and I realized we had not made eye contact in some time. The realization saddened me.

He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke seep out of his mouth. I had asked him how he felt about it all now. Presently, he picked up his thread.

I ask myself, he said, what am I allowed to hope for?

I saw his eyes take on a look, the dusk of solitude, to borrow my friend’s words from another context, and with the passage of time I watched those eyes retreat deeper into shadow.

I know, he said, that every memory is just a work in progress. But someday, if I make it to that rocking chair on the porch, I hope that all this, the love and loss, that it will all come back as little more than something somewhere long ago.

In Islamabad, when I emerged from the airport onto the outside concourse, I was met by a middle-aged man in an ill-fitting suit holding up a placard with my name on it.

From Kabul, sir? asked the man.

Yes.

This is a courtesy car. I am to take you wherever you wish to go.

A hotel. Anywhere but the Marriott.

I’d read that the Marriott was teeming with the world’s media and the visiting senior officials of multilateral organizations, NGOs, and donor agencies. The rooftop was, as pictures already showed, a crowd of satellite dishes.

Very good, sir.

At my hotel, I left my bag in my room and went back downstairs to the business center, where I logged on to email. I drafted a message to Hassan Kabir explaining that after three days in Kabul, I had the impression that ISAF and UNAMA were too busy to be dealing with small fry like me. I clicked Send, and when my screen refreshed I saw that I had an email from Emily.