Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

He looked me up and down but returned to my face and lingered on it.

A writer?

A good guess, I said.

Somehow I was flattered. It was pleasant to be regarded as a writer, and, I thought, something of an improvement on lawyer.

Your turn, he said.

Toby was wearing jeans, a white shirt with double cuffs, brown moccasins, and an expensive watch.

I have no idea.

You can do better than that.

You don’t do anything.

Toby laughed.

That’s not far off the mark, he said.

Then quickly changing the subject he said, You noticed the women?

Don’t they want to be noticed?

Again Toby chuckled.

No, he continued, I meant you saw how they all looked at the women coming in.

I was warming to Toby.

Except one, he added.

Oh, yes?

Yes, that woman over there. He motioned with his head. She didn’t turn at all.

He took a sip of his drink, a martini.

Spoke to her earlier. She’s Emily Hampton-Wyvern, you know.

Ah, I said. Apparently it was a name one was supposed to know.

Huge flirt.

Really?

Yes, kept staring me in the eye. Funny she didn’t look at the other women.

Why’s that?

Well, you’d expect a flirt like that to size up the competition, wouldn’t you?

Apparently, I thought, I was bound to know her name but not know her in person. Was I merely among them but not of them?

I was conscious of race but as an awareness of difference, sometimes uneasiness, sometimes an irritation with others for their failure to see beyond it. In social situations, though, the ruling emotions had nothing to do with race and everything to do with things these people might not have noticed at all, but for those signs I leaked from every pore, the betrayal of my own doing. Race never undermined me from within; it was rather the invisible things coalescing that brought on a private humiliation. The invisible possessed my heart with shame.

For a long time, I didn’t want to believe it to be true; I couldn’t bear the thought that it might have some objective reality, that there was something in the essence of my self that divided me from them. Either I was imagining it or I was behaving in a way that caused it — and of course, I thought, I could change my behavior, I will change my behavior. It wasn’t the lack of Jermyn Street shirts or the wrong haircut or anything so superficial that put the distance between me and them, I thought, but it was rather something else they saw. They saw the way my eyes moved, my eyes watched, they saw through the scholarship boy who’s always afraid he’s going to trip up so he grabs every piece of information around him, every gesture, and reads every sign — because reading is what he does. They saw that none of it came naturally to me but was arranged by an effective mind, and because it was arranged and considered, measured and oblique, they saw the workings of design, the sweat of labor, and not the effortless charm of superior origins.

* * *

I listened to Zafar attentively without interrupting him, much as I wanted to. I had no clear question but only a vague uneasiness with this unfamiliar face — or, rather, faces — this fluctuation from crystal clarity of exposition to a barely restrained fury. Anger is not an emotion I’ve had much truck with, not in family life and not even at work, where, contrary to the popular image, the trader and banker is more egghead than hothead. Anger makes me uncomfortable; anger, when it shakes off the authority of a human being and breaks out, is disturbing. And that is what the anger of my friend felt like to me, a man whom I had thought the model of self-possession. I had seen him angry, properly angry, only once before. We were riding the subway in New York, the uptown number 2 train, standing in the aisle. Zafar was looking down at a young man, dressed like a corporate lawyer or banker, who was reading from a wad of papers. Seated next to him was a young black man in baggy jeans and a loose-fitting bomber jacket. His frame stretched across two seats, though for all his sprawling recumbence he looked uncomfortable. Zafar was peering down at the papers of the lawyer type: the words Innocence Initiative were printed at the top of the page and below them Case Evaluation . Even I knew that Innocence Initiative was a nonprofit that took up cases of miscarriages of justice.

Is that what I think it is? Zafar smiled at the man.

The young man nodded and smiled back at Zafar.

But Zafar’s face turned nasty.

What the hell do you think you’re doing reading this in public, in full view of people on this train?

Zafar was shouting and the whole carriage was looking.

You shouldn’t be reading it here, you goddamn idiot. Do you know who I am? I’m a partner in a law firm* and you better hope my date this evening goes well because that’s just about the only thing that’ll make me forget to call your boss and have your silly little ass tomorrow. Do you understand?

The poor man was visibly shaking.

Now get off the train, said Zafar.

The ferocity of the attack was frightening and, rather foolishly, I thought I might be next in the firing line.

So who’s the date? I asked, attempting humor.

Zafar gave me a look of disappointment.

I admire your respect for confidentiality, I added meekly.

You really think that’s what gets me, breach of fucking confidentiality?

Isn’t it?

I tell you who that guy is. He’s some new associate at a corporate law firm who gets to jack off from doing a bit of pro bono work. If he’d been sitting there reviewing merger docs for Citibank, I wouldn’t have said a thing. But he wouldn’t have read Citibank docs in public. The case files of convicts, that’s different. He thinks so little of those sad bastards that he doesn’t care tuppence about their confidentiality and he thinks no one else does. That’s what gets me. Want to sit down?

Zafar installed himself in the newly vacated seat. The young man in baggy jeans had shrunk to one space, freeing up another for me.

* * *

I looked at him now, discussing a party that sounded like any of a number of parties in West London I’ve attended over the years, agreeable enough though ultimately inconsequential, and I began to understand another Zafar, older than the one I had known, someone who had been emergent all the while.

You were at that party, by the way, he remarked. You came in shortly before I left and introduced me to Crane Morton Forrester.

Of course. Crane came in that morning, I said.

I remembered it fairly well. I had thought that Crane would like Zafar, though had I been asked why, at the time, I might not have answered very convincingly. The two men, Zafar and Crane, had little obviously in common. But knowing what I now know, I wonder whether I had unconsciously perceived something that they both shared. Crane became a soldier, and a soldier, like my grandfather, is a man of violence, socialized and conditioned to be aggressive, but in his heart a man who might have been first in his tribe to venture onto the plains to hunt and first to defend the tribe at home. Though I might not have been able to put it into words, it seems likely that I sensed both men’s inclination toward survival.

Crane joined the Marines, I said, remembering a conversation I had had with his father before he did so.

He died in Afghanistan, I added. It was in the news — his father’s a senator.

I know, said Zafar. I know.

* * *

In her mother’s drawing room, Emily was championing me because she knew the West London set intimately, she knew its ways, its connections, and she knew how it gathered into itself its own, sprinkling them with the blessings of privilege. And she knew how it could be otherwise. A year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had opened her eyes, she said in not so many words. How could it not? How could anyone so British remain unaffected by the encounter with people who ate, drank, breathed, and swam in ideas. People did not flow to that city in some continuum of unthinking tradition — Eton and Oxford — but answered the summons of ideas and learning, a call to prayer for the honest, people who showed no deference to breeding, manners, or detachment. They didn’t care for detachment. Ideas and learning should excite, should make you angry or elated, and why not show that?