Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Dornhoff met Penelope Hampton-Wyvern at a bookshop near Campden Hill some forty years ago. Penelope was then a dark-haired twenty-three-year-old, already engaged to be married to Robin. A Swiss nobleman, of the rather pointless Swiss kind, Dornhoff was a graduate student in economics in London. He and Penelope met, he flattered her, she swooned, he made overtures, she blushed, this went on, he persisted, and then she told him she was already engaged. Over the years Dornhoff maintained with Penelope a largely one-sided correspondence of postcards from his exotic UN postings. His hopes might have risen when word reached him of Penelope’s divorce, but when he spoke to her next the optimism would have been deflated by the same cheery affection from her as a sister might bear for a younger brother. The point here is that Dornhoff had information from behind enemy lines, and Emily, now armed with a master’s in public administration, was the soldier of beneficence in search of a just war.

I gave up the delusion, which lasted only as long as the notion of love between Emily and me was tenable, that goodness is what drove her. In its place was an older conviction, released from abeyance. I have an idea that much human misery can be traced to a tiny source, whose true identity remains hidden as it is time and again mistaken for something else. And the mistake is one that is easily made, for the source of misery is the source, too, of greatness, so that pride will not let a man regard the two faces at once. Is that not the Promethean fable, that the fire stolen from the gods will light men their way even while it burns their hands?

I do not trust a man who says he does not care what others think of him. I rather suspect there’s little else he cares about. It’s not just that a person’s fabrications and the carefully woven stories he tells about himself are all begotten of the dark drive to elevate himself into a creature of significance. It’s not just that he will lie through his teeth, as he convinces himself of his veracity, in order to enhance the esteem in which he is held. The root of mischief is that he will organize all his affairs and dedicate his every work to the advancement of his reputation and that this object alone will drive him on. When evil enters the world, do you think it comes with horns and cloven feet, billowing some foul stench?

What others think of him, his place in society, the regard of his peers, is the prime motive of a human being’s every enterprise. Freud never made enough of this. Otto Rank called it the hero instinct, every man’s craving to be a hero despite the universe that mocks him, as if in all its vast splendor it ever spared a thought for another paltry contingency.

Rudiger Dornhoff, having been informed by Penelope that Emily was looking for a job at the UN, had been keeping a faithful eye on the bulletin boards, and when a post was advertised for a temporary contract with a fellow with whom he’d worked on a few projects in Indonesia, a fellow who would no doubt find useful a testimonial for Emily from Dornhoff himself, the Swiss picked up the phone to her.

That was in June 2001, and the fellow looking for a temp was Mohammed Jalaluddin, who, by October, would become recognized as the most senior Afghani at the UN, World Bank, or IMF, and would find himself desired as never before. The future of his country — the U.S. passport didn’t matter for these pressing purposes — would depend on him. The lives of twenty-five million would depend on him. But he couldn’t do it all on his own, and there beside him would be Emily, so very reliable, bright, and, my goodness, never has there walked on the earth a woman so vulnerable to the father figure, a pilgrim from one shrine to another, in search of the ideal.

By March 2002, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan was well established. Land Cruisers were roaring into Kabul; U.S. helicopters laden with UNAMA staff churned the dust at makeshift airfields in outlying districts; and, not least, up and running, pulling pints and pouring shots, was the UN bar in Kabul. Mohammed Jalaluddin, Emily Hampton-Wyvern, and a hundred important people were in place, housed in a compound adjoining that bar. The stage was set.

What had become of us by then was neither fish nor fowl but somewhere in between, skating the surface: Do fish think of the boundary between water and air as a surface, only coming at it from below? We had technically parted. Technically, too, we remained in love, insofar as one can ever know these things. Love was a garland strung with doubts and uncertainty. There were of course small matters, such as my never featuring in her conversations with anyone, something I had gathered over time, sometimes through the looks of sheer surprise in the faces of people who surely would have been bound to know. And there were other things, too, that had kept the relationship in a state of permanent beginning. In her dealings with me, Emily Hampton-Wyvern was the most unreliable person in the world. It confused me at first because in her professional life, by exasperating contrast, she was the pillar of reliability.

It is not the Bible’s only splendid irony that it is to Peter to whom Christ says you will be the rock upon which I will found my Church, so that today the Church of Rome accords to Peter the status of its first pontiff. An irony, because this is the same Peter who, when approached by centurions in the garden of Gethsemane, denied Christ, not once, not twice, but three times before the cock crowed; the same Peter who had earlier insisted, three times, that he would do no such thing. I am reminded of the injunction that you should treat a man as you believe him capable and he will become that person — a ridiculous homily. It seems to me that the picture is somewhat different: not more complex, less so.

* * *

I know that even when I put down all that I have heard, I cannot complete the picture. Zafar, like everyone, I suppose, is to be pieced together out of the fragments that fall about us. I have set out and will set out what I know, but I know so little, in the end, and least of all causes, which my father’s scientist in me longs for. It is no consolation to reflect that every cause itself is an effect, making the search for causes and reasons a fool’s errand.

I am too much an imitator to be a true writer. But if I were writing a novel, rather than simply setting out the facts I know — those that I have been told, those that I have read, and those that come to me through my own experience — then I might have given a thought to hanging upon the bare facts the ornamentation of reasons. That kind of elaboration, on my reading of works of fiction, seems to be the fashion, to tell a story that begins at the beginning, in childhood, and trace out the trajectory of a life that is marked by its very beginnings. Is that psychoanalysis? Whatever its name, the story I would write, were I so inclined, would say something about how Zafar’s childhood formed him; it would set forth incidents that account for the deep alienation he felt (an alienation I would, in the writing, confidently locate in him); it would explain how he came to know that he was two years younger than he had long ago been led to believe; and it would make more of the nature of his parentage, more than the few facts I have at my disposal, which don’t even tell me how he came to know that his father, his true father, was a Pakistani soldier who raped his mother, and that this mother, his true mother, was the young sister of the man who raised him as his own son.

Which last fact really should get a banner headline rather than a buried aside in ruminations on the difficulties I face in writing. And yet what have I now but his notebooks? Notebooks that show an old and recurring interest in the subject of rape in war and rape in Bangladesh during the liberation struggle. Notebooks that record no more than bare sentences containing the facts I’ve mentioned. But think for a moment: Why would he have recorded anything more than that in his notebooks? Certainly not as an aide-mémoire. For how could you possibly forget anything of a conversation in which you learned the shocking truth of your origins?