In the Light of What We Know (24 page)

The post room was the conduit for the whole of the outside world. Students came in with expectant faces or braced for disappointment. This is where messages were left, messages sent from far and wide, at all hours of the day. All this was long before Oxford received the newfangled Internet.

I would sneak in late at night, said Zafar, in order to read the messages pinned to the board. Not meant for me, but they were my view of other worlds. I would take down those messages and discover in them snapshots of other lives, how life might be elsewhere for others, through a simple message of love, perhaps, from a parent or an aunt. I would learn something of the people I saw walking across the garden quad in jeans and tattered T-shirts, clothes that said everything of the carefree optimism attached to lives unimpeded by need, for what could trouble someone, I thought then, who had family, parents who left messages saying only that they missed their son or daughter? These notes bore single lines from which my mind could draw backward a whole story. The message board was not inert to me, not cork and pin and pieces of yellow paper, but a thronging clamor of sound, some of it mere information, numbers and dates, but much of it the private communication of love.

When I returned a note to the board, I would take care to fold the yellow piece of paper along the existing crease and put the pin through the same hole in the paper. I was careful, listening for the sound of footsteps in the porter’s lodge, on the other side of the internal door, or for the shuffle of feet on the gravel outside. But it was not enough to be careful.

One night, I took down a message for a student called Peter Brooke. The message read simply:
Am arranging Easter holiday in Bermuda. Will you join us? Let us know.
It came from someone who had evidently given his name as Lord Brooke and, even as I heard someone approaching from within the porter’s lodge, I could not wrest myself from revulsion and envy: Why on earth did this person feel it necessary to establish his nobility with a porter?

It is remarkable that station is so important to such people. By then I knew, of course, of the complicity of the working classes. I had understood that rank was important to everyone, even the lowest on the social ladder. I remember Steven, the old man—he must have been in his late fifties by then, if not older—Steven the scout, who cleaned the rooms for students who evidently could not be asked to do it themselves, Steven who could never have been Stephen with a
ph
—how wrong does St. Steven look?—Steven who served lunch and dinner in Hall, too, and called every undergraduate boy
sir
. When I once asked him to call me Zafar,
Yes, sir
, came the reply.
*

I was holding the note for Peter Brooke in my hand when I heard the door handle turn. I fumbled and dropped the pin. The door opened.

The porter looked at me, looked at my hands, and saw that I was holding a yellow note. The note could have been for me, I thought in my defense. But there were never any messages for me and he must have known that, in that small college of fewer than two hundred undergraduates. He pinned another note to the board and left the room, without making eye contact again.

The following day I received my first message on the notice board. It was a summons to the dean’s rooms.

The dean explained that privacy was invaluable in keeping a community together. It was apparent, he said, that I had been reading a message meant for someone else: The porters had not taken any messages for me yesterday. I was rather touched, in fact, that he said “yesterday”; whichever porter had reported me would have told him, I’m sure, that I never received messages in order to establish why he, that porter, was so certain that the message he’d seen me holding could not have been meant for me.

I told the dean what I was doing and why. He did not seem surprised, still less angry, and I felt, as I have often felt in certain English circles, that the parties to the exchange were acting out roles, merely going through motions, while the real content was somewhere else, perhaps hovering in the air between.

As pleasant as it is to see you, he said, I’d prefer not to have you called to my rooms again. Do you understand?

I nodded and left, though I was not quite sure what he meant. Perhaps it was naïveté on my part—perhaps even a willful naïveté, to which I was blind—but I sincerely believed that while he was not endorsing what I had done, he knew, in the wisdom gained from years as dean, that simply forbidding me was not going to be enough, that if privacy could not be guaranteed, the next best thing would have to do—I must not be caught again. Then, as now, I believe that the English use language to hide what they mean.

One day I saw a message, a piece of folded paper pinned to the notice board, for one Rebecca Sonnenschein. The pin had been perfectly centered in the letter
o
, probably without conscious thought but perhaps guided by the porter’s unconscious eye. I noted that none of the letters of the name hung below the imaginary line. There was no
y
or
g
or
p
or other such letter. I never took down that message in order to read it; her name was enough.

That name, Rebecca Sonnenschein, evoked in me a time and place of intense romance, of intellectual illumination. Sonnenschein spoke to my mind of learning and culture, of
Jewish
learning and culture, which consisted for me then, as it does today, of the higher sensibilities and the rejection of the baser trends found elsewhere in the European psyche. To me, Sonnenschein contained the distillation of all that was good and true of Europe, emerging in my mind from romantic shadows falling across ill-lit cobbled streets between rows of elegant houses with high ceilings and tall shutters, the sound of a piano and violin performing a duet over the cold air. For two days, I sat in the junior common room and I waited for a woman with a Jewish look, a stereotype, and the sound of an American accent—Rebecca Sonnenschein just had to be American.

There she was, ordering a jacket potato in the pantry. A week later she would take me out to lunch at Brown’s. When I explained to her that my budget didn’t extend to eating out of college, she said she would treat me. I was very poor in college. I didn’t feel it as poverty. Supper in college was subsidized and, besides, there was always a particularly cheap Danish salami at the Co-Op supermarket, slices of fat with flecks of pink meat, hummus, and bread rolls. All this kept me clear of poverty, but when I reflect on what I didn’t have and on what others must have had then—on what Emily had had—I see that my experience of college had been limited by a relative poverty. No college-organized reading weekends with other students in the hills outside Florence or in the Scottish Highlands. No holidays abroad, no skiing, no expensive restaurants—all restaurants were expensive.

At lunch, Rebecca recommended the chicken Caesar salad, at twelve pounds and ninety-five pence, I observed, enough Danish salami for two weeks. Rebecca Sonnenschein introduced me to many things: She made me unafraid of fierce debate; she made me feel that in my encounter with the world, it was within me to set many of the terms, if not all; she introduced me to sex, to mad, wild sex; she taught me that a gym can be fun and she put me onto salads; and through her I saw that some people have no use for the political borders of countries. But above all the things she did for me—and I’m quite serious—Rebecca Sonnenschein showed me that difficult questions can have simple answers. I once asked her why she loved me. It is an insecure question, even, I think, when we tell ourselves it is born of mere curiosity. We were sitting in my room, both reading, she on the bed and I in an armchair. What, I was ultimately asking myself, was this beautiful American Rhodes Scholar, a graduate student, doing with this homeless Bangladeshi?

She looked up from her book.

It’s your money and your passport, sweetheart, she replied, flashing me a smile with her bright American teeth before returning to her book.

*   *   *

I listened to Zafar’s narrative with a mix of feelings. Our conversation had taken us away from where he’d begun, his first meeting with Emily’s family (although I was certain he’d return to this story). I had gained the impression of hearing one digression upon another. But despite the lack of design, which such an apparently haphazard account might suggest, I sensed that there was some underlying theme or movement. I came to see that his stories ran together, like the rivers of his boyhood coming from the mountains and forests and the plains, a long way from their sources but ultimately joined together in one song, a harmony of place and time.

I have never had much difficulty with feeling at home. The nearest I have ever come to an identity crisis was on reaching border controls at the airport, before a flight, to discover that I’d forgotten my passport. I have wondered why I had not spotted it before, why I had never grasped that the question of belonging governed the interior life of my friend. Certainly he never discussed it, but had he also restrained every sign? That is the context in which I see him standing in the post room, reading the messages on the board. The matter of where one belongs is something I had understood to be significant in the lives of others, but they were strangers, people I had read about. And yet here it was in someone not only familiar but who was to me, all those years ago, someone whom I had always thought of as my equal, even my better.

I don’t think I can fault myself for not having seen where his searching might lead to, the fraying and unstitching of a human being—all that was too far away then, in our younger days. Perhaps I couldn’t understand because in our youth we are condemned to see in others no one but ourselves.

It was of course mathematics that framed our first meeting as students. Both of us loved it—or
her
; Zafar used to say, “I’ve been with the mistress”—though for me there was never quite the same passion that there was for him. I remember once coming to him with a problem whose solution had eluded me. He did not instantly offer an answer but looked out the window and seemed to have turned far away. While my friend seemed to me to be struggling, I hit upon an idea that might have been, I thought, the beginnings of a proof.

I think I have the answer, I said.

Yes, he said. I have three solutions but I’m trying to work out which is the most illuminating.

For Zafar, mathematics was always about the journey and not the destination, the proof of the theorem, not merely its statement. After all, what does it mean to say that something is true if you can’t show it to be so? I think that in the journey, Zafar found a home in mathematics, a sense of belonging, at least for a while; it is a world without borders, without time, in which everything exists everywhere forever, and I see now what power such a thing might have over the psyche of someone so rootless.

Meanwhile, an unsettling prospect was forming in my mind. I understood him to say that Emily Hampton-Wyvern’s name might in a superficial way have drawn him to her, as did Rebecca Sonnenschein’s, but his account offered no connection with Emily or, indeed, her name. Rebecca Sonnenschein’s, yes, but how, I asked him, did Emily come into the picture?

One of the notes that I took down from the message board, replied Zafar, was addressed to you. Inside it was a message from Emily Hampton-Wyvern.

7

The Violin or Leipzig

I saw the hill and the vineyards and the watercourses and I realized that this music wasn’t the same as the stuff the band played, it spoke of other things, it wasn’t meant for Gaminella, nor the trees beside the Belbo nor for us. But in the distance toward Canelli you could see Il Nido against the outline of Salto, the fine red house, set among the yellowing plane trees. And the music Irene played went with the fine house, with the gentry at Canelli, it was meant for them.

—Cesare Pavese,
The Moon and the Bonfires
, translated by Louise Sinclair

The first time ever I saw Emily, said Zafar, not just the name but Emily herself, was an evening years before the encounter at the South Asia Society in New York, before my stint as a banker, and before, still, my time at Harvard, which is to say, before I had been screened, vetted, sanitized by associations, and made presentable. It was in November 1988, during my second year at Oxford, at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

In those days, when I had no money for concert tickets, even for concerts given by university ensembles, I would search the notice boards for performances, and on the day before the first night, I’d go along to the venue to see the final rehearsal, which in the normal course was an uninterrupted run-through of the program and was usually scheduled in the evening, presumably in order to avoid clashes with lectures and tutorials.

On the evening I first saw Emily, I had made my way from college, down Turl Street and onto the High, in fog-soaked November darkness, and came up to the gate of the church, half expecting the doors to be closed to the public. There were not many venues in Oxford for classical music. Somewhat grander performances were held in the Sheldonian, but otherwise Queen’s College chapel, the Holywell Music Room, and the University Church were the main settings. I rather liked the Holywell Music Room, which I had read somewhere was the oldest purpose-built music hall in the world. It had struck me that the claim was the height of presumption—might there not be a music hall in the Middle East, in India, or somewhere else that was older?—until I was forced to concede my own presumption to think that the author of the claim had meant to say Europe and not the world. Most human disputes, one might speculate, ask us to choose not between arguments proceeding from empirical observations about the world but between competing sets of bare assumptions.

I knocked on the front gate of the University Church. If the vicar answered, he would let me in—he knew my face—but to anyone else I’d explain that I left my scarf on one of the pews somewhere. Once inside, I would go off to the side and the musicians would begin their business, quickly forgetting me.