Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

A minute later, through the window, I saw Crane emerge from the office and I stepped out into the courtyard. Crane came over to me.

Why don’t we meet for coffee tomorrow morning at ten? he said.

I saw something decent in Crane at that moment. I think it was a wish, even a need, to be on good terms with people.

I don’t know if I’ve offended you, I said. I’m sorry if I have.

Hell, no! You Brits and your apologies.

How about Café Europa?

You’ve found the expat joints pretty quick, he said.

I pick things up.

See you tomorrow.

Listen, you’re not going to the UN bar tonight? I asked him.

No. Why?

I thought I might go for a drink.

Me and my boys over at the American embassy are watching last night’s big game. God bless the VCR. As a matter of fact, I’m heading there now. We’ll get some beers in before the game. Say, you don’t—

No thanks. Not my thing.

Not your cup of tea, eh? Cricket’s the game for you chaps. Well, cheerio, then! said Crane, giving me a big smile as he walked off. I thought of a large, happy dog. That is how I remember Crane now.

Suleiman was standing on the porch and would have heard everything.

* * *

At nine forty-five the following morning, I was about to set off when the boy whose job it was to clean the rooms appeared at the door. He handed me a telephone message from Emily: I’m coming over in just a minute. I remained in my room. I asked the boy if there was a way to get a message to Café Europa — to Crane — saying I’d be late. The boy didn’t understand.

And then the waiting began. Just a minute, she said. I have to tell you about the waiting, because if there is a proximate cause, it was the waiting. But how can waiting , which is no action, which is the definition of nothing happening, only the interval between things, between two waves of the sea — how can nothing beget something? When I had last left Kabul, only the previous week, I made my way to Dubai, where I received an email from her saying: I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon . That was all. No other information, leaving me in suspended animation. But which flight? Kabul to Islamabad first? Or flying direct to the U.A.E.? But don’t the direct flights come in at Sharjah and not Dubai? But that adds more time because you have to drive to Dubai. So little information to go on, and perhaps that was the point, not to engage any further, to avoid explanations in order to avoid anything that might approach an apology, because to apologize, and accordingly to explain, would be to acknowledge that she was letting me down. It was never a refusal to apologize, for a refusal or anything that appeared to be a refusal implied, let me repeat, a recognition that there was something that arguably required an apology or even an explanation. No refusal but, rather, behaving as if there were nothing to explain, not one word required. Did my failure to confront this make me complicit? An enabler, they call him, the friend who invites his buddy the recovering alcoholic to the pub. I remembered the first time, so long ago now, when she arrived at the Inns of Court, at the library, to meet me for lunch. Two hours late but not a word of apology or explanation. And I made the excuses to myself, not for the lateness but for the failure to explain, for I told myself that she must believe that she is not important enough to me that something even approximating punctuality would matter to me. A contortion to box out the reality, the only self-respecting conclusion, which was the reverse, namely, that I was not important enough to her to be given an apology, let alone to be punctual for. And again and again it happened, in one way or another. Did I do the same to her? I began to ask. After all, I know that there is a wall around me and that I, too, am seldom confronted, rarely taken to task. Did my memory spare me awareness of my own failures to abide by undertakings I had given? Was I also leaving in my wake a litter of broken promises? So it was that my notebooks became diaries, too, recording not just broken commitments but also every representation made by each of us, upon which the other might reasonably rely. For all the tedious familiarity with her unreliability and for all my own deluded accommodations of it, there was hurt and there was anger, as there must be to be disregarded by someone you loved, who you believed loved you, who previous indications — engagement! — suggested loved you. And then there was the other waiting, the waiting I had loved, the seven weeks from the day she told me she was pregnant. It was an active waiting, not limbo but a time for the imagination to take up materials from the landscape of memory and set to work. And at the end of that waiting, nothing. Nothing to justify the waiting. No conversation, no talking, only nothing.

It’s easy to keep a clear head when thinking about something whose existence is outside you, easy to think clearly about mathematics, for instance. But what can be more important to think about than something that is so overwhelmed by emotions that the act of thinking becomes hard? Yet how do you look at something that clouds your vision? I have been full of anger my whole life, and if I’ve seemed to you or anyone as having been as calm as the kind of thinking that mathematics demands, then it is only because the anger had yet to find expression. The lexicographer is always behind the progress of language, his account by definition in arrears.

In that AfDARI guesthouse, I thought of all the waiting I had done and felt something rising in me. Most people have no need to break free of their inheritance. But those who need to break free of their past and have the means to do so will not escape the requirement of violence.

* * *

At ten thirty, I walked over to the gate. The driver and Suaif were standing about, talking. I wanted to be driven to Café Europa, but first I asked them if they’d seen Suleiman.

Suleiman has not come into work, replied Suaif.

Yes, but have you seen him?

He did not come in today, sir. There is a message for you.

What is it?

Your meeting this morning was postponed.

When did he give you this message?

He is not working today.

All right. When did you plan to tell me about this message?

Sir, I was told to give it to you only when you came into the courtyard and not to disturb you with it before.

Did he tell you why he wasn’t coming to work?

No, sir.

I asked the driver to take me to Café Europa.

Suaif interjected: There has been an IED incident in Shar-e-Naw. Americans were killed. A few soldiers. It is difficult to go there now.

Only American soldiers?

And civilians.

Anyone injured?

Five Afghanis. No one else, sir, he added.

Café Europa, is it in Shar-e-Naw? I asked.

Yes.

I want to go there.

It is very difficult, said Suaif.

I insisted and got into the car.

As we approached Shar-e-Naw, we were stopped at a checkpoint and told we couldn’t take the car any farther. I took directions from the driver, asked him to wait, and set off on foot.

First came the sound. People crying, not women but men, a wailing, the sound of cries for God, Hai-Allah , groans, and American voices on megaphones. Afghanis and ISAF soldiers scrambling. Then I turned a corner. If Crane was in that café, there was no way he could have survived. There was destruction everywhere, rubble and dust, boulders of concrete and a crater in front of the wrecked façade of a building, the Café Europa signage still hanging from a corner. I continue to remember that sign, a square of sheet metal with hand-painted text in blue and gold, and have wondered if our eyes are compelled to fix on something incongruous, seeking an emblem of the totality of what we see, of the shattered image that we cannot assimilate. We orient ourselves by metaphor, like that ghostly building left standing after Hiroshima, all of eternity in a grain of sand. This is how we avoid talking about blood and bones, and the shredded ends of limbs, and the head with open eyes, and crying men, grown men, my father’s age, men with beards, lifting wreckage to find the dead. I felt sick, my gut convulsing like a caught fish. But what I remember most vividly is a sensation behind my eyes, an extraordinary pressure pushing my eyeballs out, as if they were no longer mine, as if my body were rejecting them. Did I want to cry or did I want to keep myself from crying? I wanted both.