Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

That afternoon, however, it dawned on me that Emily’s secretiveness might be a trait that attached to the whole family, so engrained as seldom to surface into conscious choice, a secretiveness that skirted the field of vision of the family itself. They appeared suddenly as people who had sealed something in a long-forgotten vault, and I remembered an afternoon some years earlier, before I met Emily, when, as a tourist, I visited a castle in Niedersachsen. Specifically, I remembered the swell of emotion, which was to subdue me for the remainder of the day, as I came upon a blue braided velvet rope hung between brass stanchions, cordoning off the part of the castle retained in use by the incumbent aristocrat, his children, and his grandchildren. I stood in the vast hall, by the chrome pillars, my fingertips touching the rope. On the other side there was a huge wooden door slightly ajar. The rope kept visitors within the public precincts of this stately home, but it also rendered those same public areas public, not private, not home. The thought aroused compassion. The selfsame rope, it seemed to me, cordoned off a family, a privileged one perhaps but a family nonetheless, and now these people went about their lives in one corner of the house slowly forgetting — or hoping to forget — the home they had known.

I wonder now if, in their six stories and endless space, Emily’s family had not cordoned off parts of themselves. Doors opening and closing; the liminal presence of unspoken affairs; the air of good manners in which honest interest in the truth of people seemed vulgar; and above all the exquisite handling of information, its measured withholding and release, like an inch on the reins of a dressage horse — all these things were of the essence to the conduct of their lives, and into this milieu and its ways I was admitted and even welcomed.

Zafar is standing outside the UN compound in Kabul. With a pinched flick from his fingers, he sends a cigarette butt flying into the night air, and when it grazes the ground he watches it release flecks and sparks of red. I watched the cigarette disintegrate, said Zafar, embers scattering over the courtyard, as I gathered confidence to take on the main building. The doors opened into a wide lounge area, a very large room with sofas and armchairs arranged in clusters, brightly lit with fluorescent tubes on the ceiling and floor lamps around the edges. I counted five large television screens hanging high on the walls. All set to CNN, they were streaming images of destruction — volume turned down, closed captions on. The place was buzzing with people. There was grave discussion, drinking, too, of course, but the main activity was talk: serious faces leaning forward. Nicky Amory and the group I came with were not in this room. The bar she’d mentioned must be elsewhere, through the archway in the corner, from which music blared, rhythm and blues, or was it hip-hop? And in between the beats an African American voice, a black man’s voice, the only black man in the room, a disembodied black man amid white faces and white forearms, a white mass.

Which is when I saw Emily. She was sitting in a square arrangement of sofas and armchairs around a sprawling coffee table, every seat occupied by an admirer, each with a drink in front of him. Even though she was facing the main door, she would not have seen me, for Emily’s attention never strayed from the narrow cone of her own field of vision. It is a strange thing, but such little details, knowledge of how another person perceives the world — you pick them up when you spend time with a person. They are inferences, of course, and they could be wrong, but you go with them not because you need to but because you cannot but do so. She was talking, and talking narrowed her perspective even more. I stepped to one side, suddenly conscious of obstructing the doorway. She was explaining something, holding court, her body as still as a village green on a summer’s evening. When Emily spoke she never hurried, never that ripple of urgency a voice has when a speaker knows that others are waiting to speak. On the coffee table in front of her lay her notepad with her lists of things to cover — Emily, the consummate list ticker, every advance marked off, progress by bullet points. We are a species in love with lists. We even live our lives by the lists of others, the orderings of our days: the Ten Commandments, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Four Noble Truths, the Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Everything is made simple by lists, made digestible, parceled into manageable units, reducing the complexity of the world into the simplicity of a line. The triumph of possibility, of finding our feet by looking for them, looking downward — the victory of modest means over the terror of a world lying beyond reach, surpassing human understanding.

And now those slender fingers, fingers that seemed graceless on the strut of a violin, now they pick off the arguments as she makes them to the ring of men. Her face, the picture of seriousness, bears the gravity of the matters at hand. It was a face with a job to do. Where in the world could confidence be demanded more than in the private chambers of their hearts, these white males doing the Lord’s work, liberals with the mission of development, on the side of the angels even as their way to work was cleared by the devil himself? It was 2002 and reports were being written, fact-finding missions were finding facts, and plans were being laid. No effort was spared to make these plans, the plans of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, the plans of the provisional government, the plans of NGOs, great plans for the poor Afghanis, the poor bastards — all the world had plans, plans to be implemented for that beleaguered people whom history had dealt such a dreadful hand, don’t you know?

I see her now, holding forth in her quiet, feminine, and very British way, those men hanging on her every word, her authority in part borrowed from Mohammed Jalaluddin; she represents him, his chef de cabinet in a cabinet of two, and he the most senior Afghani in the international development community. Where is he now? At a meeting with the UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi or perhaps he’s with Hamid Karzai. She is his absent voice and she can be relied on to stay on message as surely as a list can be trusted to hold its course. There she is offering a smile to a fellow, and it is that superb smile of the Empire’s benevolence, an insincere smile though she does not know it. Everyone is now playing the game, and this is the board, this room a square on the board, and because they do not see the rules that they have internalized, because a Hercules aircraft brought them from Spangdahlem, Ramstein, or Brize Norton, because they are all part of history here, in the making, making it, because they are so humbled by the great task at hand of building a nation, of helping Afghanis rebuild their nation, because so many have died — what can be more real? They’re playing the game as it’s always been played: the game of Empire and Ego. See? It sounds like a board game already.