Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

It’s made up, isn’t it, sir? It doesn’t really matter.

The poem doesn’t matter?

No, sir. It’s not really important, the compulsion you talk about. It’s just a way to get the story out.

But doesn’t that beg the question?

Sorry, sir?

Why does he feel he has to get the story out?

I don’t know, sir.

I am afraid that the nuances of poetry, of the ancient mariner, did not strike land that day. It is only now that I can venture the thought, setting the mariner aside for a moment, that what we boys saw in that classroom was something Humphries had brought there with him, a personal preoccupation. We talk about taking work home and can fail to see, as an unformed boy might, that, conversely, into everything we do we bring ourselves and, as Zafar might say, our histories. It was, I’m now quite sure, a personal matter for Humphries, and I cannot now know what it was that made the question of the mariner’s urgency Humphries’s own. The mariner who slays an albatross, thereby bringing calamity upon the crew, is possessed by the spirit of confession. Then I was too young to understand the redemption that comes from giving voice to what the brain seeks to hide from oneself. Only age reveals our drive, our compulsion to say something. Youth has nothing to declare.

All of which is to say that I think that on the question of why it was that Zafar was talking, even about the circumstances of that last day in Kabul and the events of the final hours, in particular the confrontation with Emily (if confrontation is the right word), the root of any explanation must be that very human urge to speak and tell, the impulse that brings the religious to the confessional box and others to the therapist’s couch; even when the urge to tell has competition, including a drive, for instance, to withhold the self-incriminating; and even though there is a reason why we refer to horrors as unspeakable.

Is there something you don’t want to say, something you’ve glossed over? You don’t have to tell me, I said.

As he related the events in Kabul and Islamabad, Zafar had seemed agitated, shifting in his seat, leaning forward, leaning back, a picture of fevered animation. But now a strange calm descended over him. He did not look me in the eye but acquired that faraway look he sometimes had, evidence of a mind considering its memories, perhaps considering what to say, and I felt no urge to breach the silence stretching out over us.

When I came to the last of Zafar’s numbered notebooks and to the final page of writing, I found two entries. Their juxtaposition was disturbing. Each on its own did not have any great effect, but seeing them obviously written at the same time, next to each other — that was unsettling. They are the first two epigraphs to this chapter.

Perhaps as much to temper the effect of the first two as for any other reason, I have included two more, the Simone Weil and the Susan Brownmiller, both taken from an earlier notebook. Zafar would have known that in due course I would come to his final entries. I cannot say if that is why he hesitated to talk at the critical moment, why he moved on so quickly to Islamabad and the final meeting with the colonel. Perhaps he knew those entries alone would speak volumes. But in the end he himself did speak, and he did return to that room in Kabul. In fact, he may never have left it.

* * *

In that closed room, Emily looked frightened. No, she was frightened. When you are the cause of someone’s fear, she does not merely look afraid to you. What you see is what you get.

When someone is scared, we say she’s scared stiff, she’s frozen with fear, she’s petrified, turned to stone. The woman with Maurice must have been somewhat afraid, but she had the presence of mind to make for the door. Emily did not move. She could not move, as if her mind no longer possessed her. And in that fact alone, I felt an engulfing sense of control. She was terrified, and I must tell you the truth: It was exhilarating, and I felt a unity with her. Can you imagine? A unity, the synthesis of threat and fear. Not threat but violence becoming.

I have said enough. I wanted to tell you something, I thought I would be explicit, make it clear what I did, leave no room to hide, but now I know I can’t. I came this far, down the long river, visiting spurs and detouring to tributaries along the way, but here at the brink of the cliff, where the river meets the sea, I don’t know how to speak the unspeakable. Our actions are always questions, not answers. If it is true that our will is free, how is it that we do things we regret? I know that our day is littered with actions that alter its course, as thick on the ground as all the irrational numbers on the line, and that only in fiction can a single act change a whole life. But how do we do that which in lucidity we would surely conclude could only bring about a fall from grace, a fall from which no penance could raise us?

In the first daylight hour of a morning in February 2009, as I lay awake after a restless night and Kensington lay still asleep, I heard the low and heavy sound of the front door closing. With my one ear against the pillow, my other followed the fading metronome of steps outside. I did not run downstairs or even go to the window to call out, for I already knew that this is what would happen and I already understood that no response from me is what he would want. I would miss my friend, of course, and in the weeks that followed I missed him rather more, in fact, than at first I thought I would. He had chosen, for the time being at least, a life of few attachments, without such ties as bind a man to place or person, and it was a choice made in a lucidity that was his own. I smile now at my use of that word choice , for how much would he have questioned that? I myself cannot accept that we are without choice. Our choices may be limited by what is handed down, but within the frame of our circumstances, of our fortunes, good or ill, within a perimeter drawn by inheritance and accident, I believe we choose how to live. If Zafar is right, that belief may be an illusion allowed us by God, or the Fates, or natural selection, looking down on us as parents might look kindly upon the naïveté of a child. But I can let him have that, for who would deny that we are ever more than children in the face of existence?

Outside, the London sky was slow in accepting the morning sunlight. The traffic was scarcely a trickle. The days, not yet long, were getting longer. The house will be quiet today, I thought, as I lay in my bed, not that Zafar had brought any noise with him. His presence had slipped easily into the sparse workings of my home and the rhythms of my life. What I will not hear now is that beat of one’s own heart audible only in the presence of human affection. His absence will be felt.