Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

* * *

In the compound, there was no kiss, no gesture of affection. Why should there have been? After all, we’d broken up, hadn’t we? I’d gone to Bangladesh and she’d already gone to New York. And this was a place of work. A year ago in New York, at the UN, the same. Meeting me downstairs before the security checks, not so much as a peck. Nothing to undermine the professionalism. Or was it because her colleagues thought she was single, available? I hated suspecting and hated even more to see myself as someone even a little suspecting.

The preservation of professionalism. Now that is something I could understand. Even to believe, as I am certain she did, that given the sexual politics of the workplace, an ambitious woman must appear unattached — even this I could understand, I could respect, even if I didn’t agree or disagree with it. It is a rare character, the kind Nicky Amory had, that is able to assert and mobilize her sexuality while deftly enforcing in that same professional space the clarity of her commitment to her husband or her lover, the light touch that moves in two ways. It is a character that instantly wins my undying loyalty. It is self-restraint that applies itself before there’s anything to restrain. Emily just did not have that character. One must not expect too much of others.

Joanna and Philip will be there, as will Maurice, she said.

I didn’t know Joanna and Philip, I’d never heard of them, and as for Maurice, perhaps that was the same Maurice who headed AfDARI. Perhaps she thought I’d know the name from there. But if it was that same Maurice, I didn’t say what I guessed: Maurice was unlikely to show. In the UN bar the night before, Nicky had said that Maurice had cut short her meeting that day and that they’d rescheduled for the next. I’d expected Nicky to drop by when she came for her meeting and, if I wasn’t there, leave a message. She was obviously reliable, just that sort of person. But when I left AfDARI for the UN compound only half an hour earlier, there’d been no message from her. Her meeting with Maurice must have been scheduled for the evening.

What’s for supper? I said instead.

I don’t know, she replied.

So who are they?

Philip went to Winchester, she said.

He’s not here?

The school.

I’m missing the point again, aren’t I?

Maurice was at the Sorbonne.

He’s over fifty?

What makes you think that?

Since 1968, other than an administrative entity, there has been no such thing as the Sorbonne.

He’s our age.

Anything else I should know about them, so I don’t put my foot in it?

What do you mean?

You know, Philip and Joanna are married. But not to each other.

He’s divorced.

Children?

I think so.

Good friends of yours, then? Not the children, I mean.

Yes.

Nice to have good friends possibly with children.

Zafar, sometimes you say the funniest things.

Well, I’m here all week and don’t forget to tip your waitress.

* * *

We were halfway across the courtyard when there was a shout from behind us: Emily!

It was Crane. He was staggering out of the side exit from the lounge, propped up by someone else. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. He pressed his arms against a wall and crouched over. I heard him vomit. Beyond him, on the other side of the gates, the drivers stood silently, watching.

He’s rather loud, said Emily.

A loud American. Who would have thought? I said under my breath.

Sorry?

What do you want to do?

Let’s get inside, she said.

I hated this place. I hated it through and through. What was I really doing here? Hassan Kabir had asked me to come, but one day in and still I had no message from him or from the staff at Bagram. What am I doing here? As I stepped forward against the contrary impulse within me, I wondered if I had asked the question aloud. Emily was giving me a puzzled look.

From the direction of Crane, out of the darkness emerged the figure of a man, the one, I assumed, who’d struggled to bring Crane out. Crane was now gone, or at least his voice was.

Hello, Emily.

In the half-light, I could see him well enough. But he moved in the shadow cast by the floodlights behind me, my shadow, not Emily’s. When he came close enough, he strained to make out my face. My black hair, dark skin, and dark suit would have made it difficult for this man, I thought — and for Crane, for that matter — to see me. He was blond and handsome, his hair cut short, stubble roughening the edges of his youthful complexion. His khaki jacket was open and its collar was upturned. The pockets of the breast and waist were buttoned down, all four. There is method there, I thought. It was a jacket design with pedigree, tested and proven: Even the clothes have a colonial descent. His shirt collar was open, two, maybe even three buttons, so that a twist of jewelry in the nape of the neck, a gold chain perhaps, caught traces of light. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. Few expat men and women with families would do these development jobs, Hassan Kabir had explained to me back in Bangladesh. Marriages don’t survive the strain. What strain? Let’s be precise about this. The strain of infidelities within a band of danger junkies charged up every hour of the day with power, horny at the threat from dark alien powers, ancient and obscure, and aroused by the power they themselves command, which they could never wield back home in their established democracies.

Zafar, this is Maurice.

Emily introduced me.

I noticed the order because the usual pattern in social situations is for the new arrival to be greeted and then introduced to present company: Hello, Maurice. This is Zafar. But I could make nothing of it. Sometimes, a phallic object is just a phallic object.

Hello, Zafar. Pleased to meet you.

We shook hands, his firm and decisive, mine its usual rather feeble thing. Though I cannot know, I think I have never felt present at the moment a male sizes me up. I am only observing. Which is not to say that it is an unimportant moment. Quite the reverse. When a handshake has a sure and steady grip, it’s filled with the significance of how someone wants to be read, how he wishes to be regarded, even if it comes in the form of ingrained habit.

I’m sorry for the disturbance, he said in an accent that rolled the r into the beginning of a gargle at the back of the throat. Bloody Americans, he added.

He motioned his head in the direction of the gates. Crane was no longer there. Maurice held a bottle of champagne by its neck. Had he just bought it at the UN bar or had he brought it from elsewhere, unbagged, unveiled? In New York, liquor sold off the premises has to be packaged in a brown paper bag, but not here, far from the puritans.

I suppose that’s the price of having a bar, he added, referring to Crane’s behavior.

But who pays? I asked under my breath.

Pardon?

Indeed.

We continued toward one of the residential buildings.

Where are you staying, Zafar?

If Maurice had seen me at AfDARI, he certainly did not recognize me. If he’d been notified of my stay, perhaps he didn’t recognize the name.

I’m staying at AfDARI, I said, in one of the guest rooms.

His brow furrowed and there passed over him a look that lacked a precise definition. It contained puzzlement but also included recognition, a troubled element, identification, and even deduction. Something to do with me being at AfDARI? Was the crux of the anxiety to do with Crane or with Emily or with something else altogether? And in the midst of those fusing facial expressions, I wondered if I had perceived in him a question, too, What did I know? , though nothing of what I perceived could be relied upon, so complete was the confusion, his perhaps but mine certainly.