Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

As pleasant as it is to see you, he said, I’d prefer not to have you called to my rooms again. Do you understand?

I nodded and left, though I was not quite sure what he meant. Perhaps it was naïveté on my part — perhaps even a willful naïveté, to which I was blind — but I sincerely believed that while he was not endorsing what I had done, he knew, in the wisdom gained from years as dean, that simply forbidding me was not going to be enough, that if privacy could not be guaranteed, the next best thing would have to do — I must not be caught again. Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

One day I saw a message, a piece of folded paper pinned to the notice board, for one Rebecca Sonnenschein. The pin had been perfectly centered in the letter o , probably without conscious thought but perhaps guided by the porter’s unconscious eye. I noted that none of the letters of the name hung below the imaginary line. There was no y or g or p or other such letter. I never took down that message in order to read it; her name was enough.

That name, Rebecca Sonnenschein, evoked in me a time and place of intense romance, of intellectual illumination. Sonnenschein spoke to my mind of learning and culture, of Jewish learning and culture, which consisted for me then, as it does today, of the higher sensibilities and the rejection of the baser trends found elsewhere in the European psyche. To me, Sonnenschein contained the distillation of all that was good and true of Europe, emerging in my mind from romantic shadows falling across ill-lit cobbled streets between rows of elegant houses with high ceilings and tall shutters, the sound of a piano and violin performing a duet over the cold air. For two days, I sat in the junior common room and I waited for a woman with a Jewish look, a stereotype, and the sound of an American accent — Rebecca Sonnenschein just had to be American.

There she was, ordering a jacket potato in the pantry. A week later she would take me out to lunch at Brown’s. When I explained to her that my budget didn’t extend to eating out of college, she said she would treat me. I was very poor in college. I didn’t feel it as poverty. Supper in college was subsidized and, besides, there was always a particularly cheap Danish salami at the Co-Op supermarket, slices of fat with flecks of pink meat, hummus, and bread rolls. All this kept me clear of poverty, but when I reflect on what I didn’t have and on what others must have had then — on what Emily had had — I see that my experience of college had been limited by a relative poverty. No college-organized reading weekends with other students in the hills outside Florence or in the Scottish Highlands. No holidays abroad, no skiing, no expensive restaurants — all restaurants were expensive.

At lunch, Rebecca recommended the chicken Caesar salad, at twelve pounds and ninety-five pence, I observed, enough Danish salami for two weeks. Rebecca Sonnenschein introduced me to many things: She made me unafraid of fierce debate; she made me feel that in my encounter with the world, it was within me to set many of the terms, if not all; she introduced me to sex, to mad, wild sex; she taught me that a gym can be fun and she put me onto salads; and through her I saw that some people have no use for the political borders of countries. But above all the things she did for me — and I’m quite serious — Rebecca Sonnenschein showed me that difficult questions can have simple answers. I once asked her why she loved me. It is an insecure question, even, I think, when we tell ourselves it is born of mere curiosity. We were sitting in my room, both reading, she on the bed and I in an armchair. What, I was ultimately asking myself, was this beautiful American Rhodes Scholar, a graduate student, doing with this homeless Bangladeshi?

She looked up from her book.

It’s your money and your passport, sweetheart, she replied, flashing me a smile with her bright American teeth before returning to her book.

* * *

I listened to Zafar’s narrative with a mix of feelings. Our conversation had taken us away from where he’d begun, his first meeting with Emily’s family (although I was certain he’d return to this story). I had gained the impression of hearing one digression upon another. But despite the lack of design, which such an apparently haphazard account might suggest, I sensed that there was some underlying theme or movement. I came to see that his stories ran together, like the rivers of his boyhood coming from the mountains and forests and the plains, a long way from their sources but ultimately joined together in one song, a harmony of place and time.

I have never had much difficulty with feeling at home. The nearest I have ever come to an identity crisis was on reaching border controls at the airport, before a flight, to discover that I’d forgotten my passport. I have wondered why I had not spotted it before, why I had never grasped that the question of belonging governed the interior life of my friend. Certainly he never discussed it, but had he also restrained every sign? That is the context in which I see him standing in the post room, reading the messages on the board. The matter of where one belongs is something I had understood to be significant in the lives of others, but they were strangers, people I had read about. And yet here it was in someone not only familiar but who was to me, all those years ago, someone whom I had always thought of as my equal, even my better.

I don’t think I can fault myself for not having seen where his searching might lead to, the fraying and unstitching of a human being — all that was too far away then, in our younger days. Perhaps I couldn’t understand because in our youth we are condemned to see in others no one but ourselves.

It was of course mathematics that framed our first meeting as students. Both of us loved it — or her ; Zafar used to say, “I’ve been with the mistress”—though for me there was never quite the same passion that there was for him. I remember once coming to him with a problem whose solution had eluded me. He did not instantly offer an answer but looked out the window and seemed to have turned far away. While my friend seemed to me to be struggling, I hit upon an idea that might have been, I thought, the beginnings of a proof.

I think I have the answer, I said.

Yes, he said. I have three solutions but I’m trying to work out which is the most illuminating.

For Zafar, mathematics was always about the journey and not the destination, the proof of the theorem, not merely its statement. After all, what does it mean to say that something is true if you can’t show it to be so? I think that in the journey, Zafar found a home in mathematics, a sense of belonging, at least for a while; it is a world without borders, without time, in which everything exists everywhere forever, and I see now what power such a thing might have over the psyche of someone so rootless.

Meanwhile, an unsettling prospect was forming in my mind. I understood him to say that Emily Hampton-Wyvern’s name might in a superficial way have drawn him to her, as did Rebecca Sonnenschein’s, but his account offered no connection with Emily or, indeed, her name. Rebecca Sonnenschein’s, yes, but how, I asked him, did Emily come into the picture?

One of the notes that I took down from the message board, replied Zafar, was addressed to you. Inside it was a message from Emily Hampton-Wyvern.