Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

If Glyndebourne was a harmless social venue, which is no small if , the UN bar in Kabul was the antithesis. What the people in the bar were doing wasn’t just getting together for a few drinks in a familiar setting. It wasn’t just hip-hop in the background, the press of bodies, the lingering stares, the offers to buy a drink disguising and disclosing other intentions; it wasn’t even what I overheard in every snatch of conversation, that human drive to seek out agreement, to approve and concur, that craving for the fellow feeling of a shared view of the world that might actually come from nothing more than wanting to be liked.

A beautiful young woman — and I mean beautiful —stood with a drink in hand. In the clouds of smoke, her lips seemed to tremble. She had poise and grace and legs all the way to Tuesday or Christ Almighty or the ground, whichever is the longest. You could have taken this woman, this almost imaginary creature, for one of the models gliding about Union Square in New York, a lingerie model, not the brittle-boned, concave clothes hangers of catwalks. Such women frightened me off: Imagined women can satisfy only the imagination. Behind her was a man talking to another woman, though he kept glancing her way. As for the man actually talking to the model, who might or might not have had her attention, he looked uneasy in the company he was keeping, as if his jacket was a size too small. The model, I thought, was the kind of woman Emily would be careful not to be seen beside, a woman who could reduce her.

I looked for the group I came with. Nicky was on the other side of the room, curled into a sofa, talking to Sandra, a middle-aged Korean American woman I’d been introduced to in the Land Cruiser.

Zafar! We thought we’d lost you. Sandra had you pegged as the disappearing sort, without so much as a goodbye, but I said you were a proper gentleman.

Putting on a cockney accent, I said: A proper gentleman.

Nicky had a wonderful smile, bursting with true pleasure, a bright, uncomplicated smile, a smile that sang affection, as any fool could tell. Emily never smiled at me like that. Yes, I think there was genuine tenderness in Nicky’s smile. And yes, she flirted with me, but it was bounded flirtation. She had told me not long after we met — forty-eight hours in Kabul contained so much time — about her wonderful husband, a jazz musician, and her two little boys, a house ruled by wild men.

I think few women can pull it off. It requires a particular skill. Of course, there’s no skill in laying down a boundary; on the contrary, I would have thought a married woman with two children would have to work hard if she wants to avoid mentioning family in response to any question that so much as touches on the personal. But Nicky had the skill to build the wall true and strong without putting the flirting in the shade.

Sandra’s leaving the U.S. because of Bush.

Canada? I said, turning to Sandra.

Vietnam. Our youngest is adopted — he’s Vietnamese — and we’re thinking we might take him back there, you know, his roots and so on.

She knocked back the last of her drink.

How the Star-Spangled Banner did George come between you and Uncle Sam?

Sandra grinned at me and got up.

What are you drinking? she asked. Evidently, she thought my question was rhetorical.

No, no. Let me, I said.

Stop that! What are you having?

I think the drinks are subsidized, said Nicky.

They are when I’m paying, said Sandra.

Whisky, I said.

Nicky?

I’m okay, replied Nicky. She was holding a glass of white wine, still half full.

Sandra disappeared into the thicket of people. Nicky lowered her voice.

What did you find?

What do you mean? I asked.

Oh, come on. You disappeared.

I smiled at her.

Do you wonder what we’re doing here? I asked.

I know what the Americans are doing here. They want blood. Somebody has to pay.

I mean all this development and reconstruction. What’s it really about?

I met you only this afternoon and I know this about you: You think people never say what they mean. The truth is, nine times out of ten what they say is all they mean.

What’s it really about?

It’s about development and reconstruction.

Nicky was on a fact-finding mission with a women’s microfinance NGO, lending small amounts to women who want to organize themselves into small enterprises.

We can do some good here, she continued. This is a miserable country, Zafar. I don’t need to explain that to you. It needs help. Isn’t it that simple?

Is anything that simple?

I sat down beside her on the arm of the sofa. She seemed absorbed, and I wondered if she was thinking what I was thinking, if she was going back over her own words and considering them again, their meagerness, their vagueness, and that the exculpation was always that the country needs the help that people like her were ready to provide.

It was then that I noticed Emily approaching us. What did Emily see? She saw me with an attractive woman.

Nicky greeted her with that boundless smile.

I’m Nicky, and this is Zafar.

Emily extended her hand to offer that limp handshake I had seen before, and I could now feel Nicky’s confident grip closing around it.

Emily turned to me and I think we both said hello at the same time. If Nicky was observant, she would have noticed that Emily didn’t extend her hand to me. But when I thought about it later, it occurred to me that even if Nicky had noticed, she might have assumed Emily didn’t want to embarrass this South Asian man, a pious Muslim for all anyone knew, who might not shake hands with women.

I still don’t know what to make of that bizarre moment, what possessed us to pretend we had never met before, what thought or calculation had passed through her head or through mine, which would have had to have been unconscious in me, for I did what seemed to be ordained, without premeditation, reflection, or design, as if here in Kabul, Afghanistan, I was in a new world, one far away, and we had all taken on new clothes, in order to become unrecognizable, in order to discard our former selves and reinvent the people we were, in a land where people were not people, not even actors, but pieces on a game board.

You know, Richard Feynman likened research in physics to watching a curious game unfold on an eight-by-eight board of alternating black and white squares, trying to figure out its rules — but watching it, he explained, under odd constraints so that you can only view one corner of the board, and there notice things and try to discover the rules behind them. You might notice, for example, that a bishop — a tall wooden piece that evokes the image of a bishop — only stays on the same-colored squares, but then later suddenly grasp that the bishop can move along diagonals only, which is a deeper rule and one that explains the earlier observation, too — and so it goes on, this scratching away at the corner, unearthing rule after rule, trying to discern the patterns and rules of the game.

Afghanistan, too, had become a game, but it wasn’t chess, not as we know it, not even the game of chess that is played in Asia, with its differences that confound you (the king, or rajah, that does more than stupidly wait) and similarities that deceive you, but an altogether different game in which the players fight to set down the very rules. It is possible that in that moment, when Emily looked at me and said hello, when her hand remained hanging limply from her arm, having shaken or been shaken by Nicky’s hand, when the smile I wore was as much for myself as it was for her — it is quite possible that in those moments I had some premonition of violence, of the only thing that could disturb the polite games, of what I was capable of doing. Before I looked it up, I thought the origins of the phrase turning the tables lay in Christ’s fit of rage in the Temple, at the house of prayer being made into a den of thieves. But apparently it owes more to board games. Either way, it would be apt.