Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I am on my knees, he continued, on an empty night street, in a bright city between the desert and the sea, and I remember a story I read somewhere, barely more than a paragraph, a story of uncertain authorship, appropriately enough. No, not remember , but call to mind , because sometimes we draw on what we know — a song, a memory, a poem, an image, or a story — to augment what we feel, to make exquisite our moment of private suffering and perfect it. The story is saccharine, as hokey as a cross-stitched proverb in a square of embroidery hung on the wall of a suburban home. But it reduces me to tears every time, and in the privacy of hurting, the ego and vanity borne back, I call the story to mind. A man is walking with God along a beach and, looking back, he sees two sets of footprints, as is to be expected. But he notices that in places there is only one set of footprints, and he realizes that those places coincide with the most difficult times of his life. Turning to God, he says: Lord, you said you would always be with me, but in my moments of greatest need there is only one set of prints. God replies: My dear child, I have never forsaken you, for where you see only one set of footprints, that is where I carried you.

There are churches in the eastern tradition where they say a version of the Nicene Creed that differs from the one that you hear in an English-speaking Anglican or Roman Catholic church. They do not say We believe . They do not even say I believe . Rather, they say I trust . I’ve heard that the use of the word believe in the English creed only reflects a failure to find an effective translation. At any rate, I cannot talk of believing. I cannot say that I believe in the god whose name shall not be uttered or whose prophet died on the cross or whose archangel commanded an illiterate man to read. I cannot even say that I believe in the one true god. But in that Dubai night, on my knees, not for the first time and most likely not for the last, I wanted to put my trust in Him. The thing of greatest worth that we can give another is our trust. Abraham’s offering was not Isaac; it was trust.

* * *

At four on the following day, when we both should have been at Dubai airport checking in for a flight to London, I got an email from Emily. I’d been sitting at the computer half expecting this — half expecting nothing and not expecting her to show but nevertheless hoping she would.

I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon.

Nothing more, no mention of when in the afternoon, no acknowledgment even to say that she had tried to figure out a precise time but that she couldn’t confirm, no acknowledgment that it might matter to me practically — should I book tickets on the six o’clock flight to London? Will she be there in time for check-in? — no mention of when her flight would depart from Kabul, let alone arrive.

I stared at the message. Could there really be such lack of regard? For she had not even asked the obvious questions: which hotel I was staying in or where to meet me. Had she just assumed that I’d let her know where I was staying, or had she not given it any thought? It is a truism — is it not? — that you can say much about a person’s attitude to you by the questions he or she asks you. And yet she had asked me that important question, one of the most important we can ever ask: Will you marry me? That is a question and not a request, not like saying to someone at a dinner party: Could you pass the salt? What if they only said yes and did nothing but continue their meal and conversation with their neighbor on the other side? Will you marry me? is a question because the answer is a statement about the answerer’s own vision of the future, of the future the answerer wants, something the questioner cannot divine.

And then when tomorrow morning came, I bought an airline ticket. I had told myself and I had implied to her that I’d head back east if she didn’t show that day — Good God! I’d specified the day before that — and here I was reneging on the deal I made with myself, for the ticket I bought was for a flight to London. But what if she’d had cold feet? Or would have cold feet in the next few hours? Were there not signs that her feet were cooling? — if I may take the feet image a step further.

At three in the afternoon, just two hours before my flight, at the last moment an email could have reached me, I found a message from her.

I’ll leave for London tomorrow, she wrote.

And I wondered, as I often did, how else the note might have been written: I’m leaving for London tomorrow.

I used to fantasize about a conversation we never had in which she said: Darling, I’m overstretched and this is what my work diary looks like, and these are the uncertainties I have to factor in. Would you mind if we kept our plans tentative? I’ll let you know as soon as I know I can’t make it. The dream I imagined would fill me with love. In the daydream, I felt wanted, cared about, I felt thought of. Once I met Marcy for lunch in London — this was before I started seeing Emily. Marcy was visiting on business. She had brought Josie with her, who was four at the time, and in fact I had arranged a babysitter so that Marcy could go to her meetings. I arrived with a present for Josie, a toy giraffe, giraffes being something of an obsession of hers. When she took the toy, this child of four said, with her soft brown eyes looking straight into mine and in a voice containing a tiny element of surprise that almost broke my heart, You thinked of me. The daydream I used to have was one in which I felt thought of by Emily. Life is short, as the old saw goes, and there is so little time on this earth, none of it, not one minute, ever to be recovered, the years of the locust restored not here if anywhere, lost time never to be found, time so dear that the respect for another’s time must be the very beginning of respect, so that if a lover can’t give you that first respect, then … well. And even though she failed to show, I caught a flight to London. Perhaps, now that I think about it, I had already coupled my indignity to the indignity of the Afghanis. Though what the hell does that really mean?

* * *

I arrived in the evening and had accepted Penelope’s invitation to stay with her. From there, I called Emily’s father. Penelope had informed him of the engagement, and I half expected an invitation to lunch or drinks, but when none came I asked him if we could meet. The man suggested lunch with him the next day. Because that day would be a Saturday, I expected his wife, the other Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, to be present, not so much because most people aren’t at work on weekends, but because Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern, Robin’s second wife, had no occupation to speak of, so one would have thought she’d arrange her week so that she could spend time with her husband on the weekend. Is it a stretch to imagine that that’s what people in happy marriages do? But when I arrived the lady was out, taking Joseph for a haircut, explained Robin, as he led me down the stairs into the kitchen on the lower ground floor. Joseph was their dog. Until then I had never met Robin without Emily there, too. The dog’s haircut appointment must have been scheduled in advance, I thought. Or not.

We ate in the kitchen at a small round table by the window, where, I imagined, the two of them had their meals, in silence, with little to discuss other than Joseph, adored by the new and childless Mrs. Hampton-Wyvern. We sat at an angle to each other, facing the window onto the well of light outside. The house was like many of the houses in Kensington, the ones I had worked on with Bill and Dave, a five-story stucco building, stairs with half landings. At the back was a private communal garden, shared with the great and the good, the right sort of people. Robin’s house looked like it hadn’t seen a makeover since the 1970s or ’80s. There was Formica in the kitchen and melamine worktops, and the paintwork on the banisters had the encrusted history of one eggshell finish on top of another, every few years, without the care to sand down first, so that the detail of the molding had disappeared under the thickening paint, brushed from memory. I don’t think Robin and his wife entertained people here much; even when I went with Emily, we might all have an aperitif at the house, but we’d saunter over to one of the many fine restaurants in the neighborhood for a meal afterward. Robin wasn’t short of a few bob, as Dave would have said, so that one was left with the impression that the house had never enjoyed a share of whatever love might have moved within it. Perhaps there was not enough to spare.