Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Christians have something, I thought, continued Zafar. Christianity, as I say, grasped a fundamental truth of love, namely, that love cannot be earned or deserved. This idea moved me terribly, this God who loved, a break against the lonely tides and the lurking anxiety of a whole life of homelessness. When I sat in those churches and looked up at Christ on the cross, I wondered, despite myself — however much the hallmark image might repel another instinct in me — I wondered whether somewhere ahead on the journey this man might join me; the thought of a companion in him reassured me, if he was indeed what he might yet be. Yet for all the power of this idea, I already knew how far I could not go. I could never believe I had a life in Christ, never think to love others through him. Even as I saw the virtue of forgiveness, I knew that to relinquish my passionate, undirected grievances would be to abandon myself. Whatever company he, He,* might offer, there were lines in the sand. Practical matters stood in the way. I could never, for instance, give myself over to the ritual of Holy Communion, of eating the body of Christ and drinking the blood of Christ, not because of some revulsion at the cannibalistic barbarism but because the metaphor was never convincing even as metaphor. Most of all, when I touched the oak pews and ran my fingers over the knitted covers of the cushions and kneelers, when I gazed at the stained-glass images of English saints, when I considered the words of the Nicene Creed, it was as apparent to me as the alienation that made me, that kept me at the edges of things, that here was a very local rendering of a religion that had come from a part of the world that the proud Englishman could only look down upon. The Christianity before me was English, white, with Sunday roasts and warm beer and translation into the English language. Even the Bible at its most beautiful, the King James version, was in a language that asserted and reassured its readers of their power. Little wonder that schoolboys at Eton could sing of Jerusalem being builded here in this green and pleasant land. Such high praise: a pleasant land. The English Christ was of here and now, immanence on the village green, with barely a word or symbol in the liturgy and ritual transcending northwestern Europe, still less this world or universe, as partisan as the embedded journalist. He was an English God under an English heaven.

My friend Zafar, his face grave and intent, fell silent at this point, his thoughts carried to some remote region in his cavernous dark eyes. Between the criticisms of religious parochialism, I had the impression of another sentiment, one that isn’t quite apparent in his words as I look over them now but that I felt nonetheless at the time. If his exposition had seemed, on its face, to consist of one rejection after another of Christianity, it also left the impression of a man possessed of strong, even violent feelings, which, one might speculate, is a sufficient basis for religious conversion. That is the Pauline story, is it not?

Tell me about that evening, I said to him, about the church and Emily.

There I was, he said, hidden in the shadow of a column, looking over the pews to the altar and beyond that the cross, contemplating this alien people clutching their God, when the door slammed shut and a shaft of ice-cold air struck me. The first musician had arrived. Violin case in hand, she walked through the aisle between the rows of pews.

I still retain a vivid impression of that young woman moving between the aisles, but I have wondered if it’s an image I have transposed from subsequent memories, as if history has insisted on pushing outward at the beginning, for the fact is that she did not seem at all remarkable to me then. She was pretty, I thought, even beautiful in a way, but not … not arresting. Women change so much in those years between eighteen, when I first saw her at Oxford, and twenty-five, when I saw her next in New York. From this vantage, so many years later, it is possible to absorb that change, to regard it with a scientific eye; at eighteen, women move into the prime of their sexual attractiveness. The heroines depicted in nineteenth-century novels might well have been feisty and strongheaded well into their twenties — things, by the way, which if found in a man would scarcely get a mention — they might even have had a canny awareness of male motivations and even some guile, but they were nothing without the physical bloom of postadolescence that has always been lauded and craved everywhere. At eighteen, Emily possessed this; there was enough beauty for her youth to hold up but not, I think, so much as to endure the passing of it.

She pulled a chair from a low stack at the side of the small stage. Rather than carry it, she dragged it across the floor to center stage. I remember imagining the scuff marks being made on that stage, I remember wondering whether the chair legs had rubber tips, I remember wondering whether she had looked to see if they had rubber tips. And, perhaps, as I recall all this, if I am permitted to read anything into something so small, I might be inclined to think that in that tiny act of omission, of not carrying the chair but dragging it across the floor as she held up her head — so that I can now see she could not have noticed any scuffing or scratching of the floor — perhaps in that act there was contained the whole of her character.

She retrieved a music stand from a cluster in one corner. Her movements seemed to me strangely clumsy, as if I had expected something finer from a violinist. I have seen grace in her, though much later and in other places. I’ve seen her in the bath, for instance. I saw the grace with which she held a bar of soap in her hands, as if holding a dove, I thought tenderly, rousing it from sleep for release into the air. I can see it now. Or the grace in entering a restaurant and taking a seat, the unthinking ease, the movements so slight they barely mark the memory. But I understood only later that her grace was confined, circumscribed within the pattern of household habits, that it was the grace of a woman tended to by comforts, so that when she was taken out of her sphere of convenience by even one music stand with an unfamiliar mode of opening, its limitation was exposed. So much about those people looked like one thing but was actually another. Emily’s grace was not physical grace; she was graceful when she powdered her face but without grace when she opened a car door. Grace, as I have seen it elsewhere often enough, comes from an understanding, which resides in the muscle, of the relationship between the body and the world; it not only recognizes the limitations of the body it inhabits but works with those limitations so that each act shows respect toward the physical world, respect for its dominance, and proceeds from an acknowledgment that the world will not simply do one’s bidding. How easy it is now to read so much into each moment and every careless act.

On the stage, chair and music stand now assembled, she sat down, unzipped a flap in the violin case, pulled out some sheet music and placed it before her. The young woman looked about her and, seeing the piano, she walked over to it, violin in hand. She wedged the instrument under her chin and then, as she held the bow, she struck a key. When she tuned the violin braced in her neck, I noticed that her chin was very slight, disappearing no sooner than it had made its presence known.

She tuned efficiently, methodically, and yet her face gave no expression whatsoever, no furrows that might suggest an intensity of listening. Presently, she finished tuning, went back to her seat, turned a few pages and, returning the violin to her neck, she began playing.

Normally the first musician to arrive for rehearsal sets out a number of chairs and stands. That is what I had seen. Of course, this isn’t true if the rehearsal is for an orchestral piece, but if the program is for chamber music and the stage isn’t set, then the first musician usually gets started on putting out the chairs and the music stands. This young woman hadn’t brought out any other chairs and music stands. And now she was playing a solo piece, which had me doubting that I’d got the program right; perhaps she was to be performing a solo recital.