In the Light of What We Know (42 page)

Zafar didn’t respond.

There aren’t any conversations on it?

I think you’ll find that there are.

But they’re not interesting?

You should be the judge of that.

It was only later that I realized why Zafar was being so shifty. He must have been smiling to himself inwardly, for he would have known, so careful had he been in his choice of words, that he had actually only suggested that I listen to the conversations on the DVR. When I finally did and took the DVR back to its first recording, I discovered that there was nothing on it apart from the conversations between the two of us. As I say, I only figured out all this later. When I confronted his oddly shifty responses, I moved on and tried a different tack.

What about your notebooks? Why not make something of them?

They don’t cover the half of it.

Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good and all that. Glass half full.

Do things by halves?

Can’t they be organized into something?

Do you know Robert Oppenheimer’s words from the Bhagavad Gita?

You’re all over the place. More than I remember you being.

Do you? he repeated.

After he saw the first atom bomb explode? Yes, I said.

Now I am become Death
, said Oppenheimer,
the destroyer of worlds
. Apparently, he was a decent Sanskrit scholar, you know? Not half bad.

Oppenheimer the physicist?

Scientist and Sanskritist, now there’s a bridge. He said he translated it himself. So you have to wonder why he got it wrong. Apparently, a better translation is:
I am Time, who has come forth to annihilate the worlds.
So much more powerful, don’t you think? The Song of the Lord. And not a tautology. More meaningful.

Tautologies mean nothing.

More resonant.

A tautology is nothing more than a tautology.

I got the joke the first time. Maybe the original doesn’t have quite the resonance in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. My notebooks are just notes. When I read them, they call up memories. Without the memories intact, the notes are like queer ciphers. And memories are completely unreliable. Time destroys memory.

But memories are all we have, aren’t they?

How little, replied Zafar.

And how precious. Have you seen
Blade Runner
? I asked him.

Zafar nodded.

Near the end, when Roy the android—

Rutger Hauer.

Yes. Roy the android is defeated by Deckard, and as he prepares to die he says something like: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen attack ships off the shoulder of Orion and something about the Tannhauser Gate, et cetera—I can’t remember the rest.
*
Did you know that Rutger Hauer extemporized those words?

Zafar shook his head.

The point is that in his dying moments the things he describes are things he remembers. They don’t mean anything to you and me, but they’re the things Roy remembers. For my money, the movie’s about what makes an android human. Where’s the dividing line? But then that comes down to the question: What makes a human being human? The answer in
Blade Runner
is memory. However flawed and faulty, however much you get your wires mixed up, the memories are what make you you. Don’t we have to hold on to them?

Writing is what you do when you don’t want to forget.

Exactly. There are ideas in those notebooks of yours, I said. I don’t know how much of it makes any sense, but there’s got to be something there, a thread, questions that preoccupy you. Isn’t that what they’re about?

Read them, he told me. I don’t feel the compulsion to write a book, but maybe you’ll be moved to write something, something about yourself.

No one can tell his own story. Didn’t you say that?

But you disagree. Prove me wrong. Or invent someone to tell your story. Spectators see more of the game than players do.

Why don’t
you
invent someone? I asked.

Look, said Zafar. It was he who now showed exasperation. I don’t know how to get anywhere close to my own life, he said. My drama, like everyone’s, goes on upstairs, in the head. And I don’t think you can write the drama of the mind. All you have are the things people do. It’s always about what they do, and yet the mind is where the battles take place, the tragedies and comedies that rule the day. So we fall back on metaphors, accounts of stuff that happens in flesh between people, the movement of limbs, the actor curling the lips, the vibrations of vocal cords, the rush of air, a painter in a rage flinging paint at the canvas—it’s always the kinetics that steal the show while the governing drama, the theater of the mind, plays out behind the curtain. Shadows in the cave.

Have you read
The Moon and Sixpence
by Somerset Maugham?

No, Zafar replied.

It’s modeled on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. The whole novel stands in the shadow of the protagonist’s inscrutable decision to abandon his wife and children, abandon his life as a stockbroker, and disappear first to Paris and then to the South Seas to … to paint.

You sound like a revision aid.

I read it at school. Maugham can’t give a half-decent explanation for this decision and falls back on speculation. And when the painter himself is pressed, he is, as Maugham says, too lacking in self-awareness, whatever that means, to be able to explain it himself.

There you go, then. Some things just don’t see the light of day.

But it’s not a bad book, not at all. You don’t knock a tiger for not having wings.

I’m not saying it isn’t and I’m not saying there isn’t a book to be written—you can have a go. What I’m saying is that the thing I want to write I can’t write; maybe it can’t be written. You talk about inexplicable decisions, but what about actions that do not proceed from anything that can be called a decision? How can it ever be enough to speak of blind rage? The unspeakable does not bear utterance. And even if the words were there for the discovering, how much pain would I have to overcome to hold the pen steady for long enough? I remember a famous passage in
Daniel Deronda
:
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
*

That’s where imagination comes in, I said. Writers use their imaginations. It’s a gift human beings have, and a writer uses it to go to those places hard to reach, those unmapped countries within us. Imagination is a compass—a compass from God, if you will.

Your English teacher must have been very good. Maybe he’d want
you
to write.

Now you’re condescending.

Zafar gave me a disarming smile.

My dear fellow, he said pompously, I should be very surprised if your mind, such as it is, did not consider me condescending.

Whatever.

You know V. S. Naipaul’s famous advice to the young Paul Theroux?
You have to tell the truth.
We think we know what he means and in fact we probably do, but only because we know vaguely what Naipaul must think vaguely. He’s saying more than merely that a novel is an experiment in life, which is what George Eliot said; after all, other than metaphorically, it isn’t that at all. A metaphor is useful only for transforming what happens,
enriching
it in some way. It
never
tells you what actually happened, how it happened, or why it happened. A fleeting thought might be compared to a ship on the horizon, but surely it’s saying something that a ship on the horizon is never compared to a fleeting thought? When a football manager speaking about the range of talents in his team says sagaciously that when you make wine, great wine, the very best wine, not all the grapes are the same, you know he is speaking metaphorically—unless he happens to have a gig running a vineyard on the side. But what he is actually talking about—the right way to compose a football team—remains unproven, remains untouched by the metaphor. If metaphors increase our understanding, they do so only because they take us back to a familiar vantage, which is to say that a metaphor cannot bring anything nearer. Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.

Listening to Zafar, I could not help thinking that perhaps Emily was right. Far from expecting too little of writing, Zafar expected too much, but only because he expected too much of human thought. His language sounded somehow constructed, even more so than it had done all those years ago. I see now, of course, that what he was talking about were things that had long preoccupied him, some old, some more recent, some that happened in 2002, six years earlier, and that they had preoccupied him with good reason. It is little wonder, for instance, that he was concerned with human motivation for action, which he went on to discuss, since the very thing he asked of himself had to do with his own motivation for the actions he came to take.

If the province of science is
how?
, continued Zafar, then the rigor of life, the predicament of living in the world, is contained in the question
why?
Wittgenstein said that when all the questions of science have been answered, all the problems of life will still remain. That may be, but it is equally true that when all the work of art is finished, when we have been blinded by every metaphor under the sun, not one question of
how?
or
why?
will have been touched. Tell the truth: First you have to find the truth, and there’s no guarantee that you can. But it’s even worse than that. What science is now making plain, in a way we once dimly suspected but could never say for sure or to what extent, is that we don’t know the half of our own minds. It seems the least reliable thing a person can say about any of his actions are the motivations that he himself ascribes to them. Naipaul’s advice cannot be dismissed, but the best to be said for it, which is the best that Theroux can do—because he’s human—is that it enjoins Theroux to root out any conscious dishonesties, and if he’s lucky a few unconscious ones will come out in the tangle. Peanuts.

Why not think of a book in the same way you think of a map or a translation? It’s not perfect, far from it, but it’s something.

A ringing endorsement. I had a friend who used to see a therapist, and she said something about the experience that’s stayed with me. Just being able to speak about some dreadful things, she said, and seeing that the therapist wasn’t falling apart from hearing them was helpful. What struck me was that I could imagine someone else saying that being able to speak about dreadful things and seeing that the therapist
did
break down in tears was helpful. It seems to me that this is the big difference between writing and talking. When you talk, you get to see the effect, and maybe it’s witnessing the effect that matters to you and not just framing your thoughts in words. We learn about the weight of things by seeing how they affect others. Why would you want to leave a broken person alone with a pen?

I’m running out of arguments, I said to him, and frankly I’m not sure it’s worth forcing this. I don’t agree with most of what you say. I don’t think your position is quite as reasoned as you seem to think it is—

For fuck’s sake, what’s with this writing nonsense?

Zafar’s face changed. We were in a restaurant, in Holland Park, where no one shouts unless it’s at a waiter.

Has it occurred to you that I might not want to write, that I might actually want to talk. I’m not telling you to read. All you have to do is listen.

You misunderstand. Of course we’ll talk—

Has it occurred to you that you might actually be the person to whom I have to say what I’m saying? Maybe you don’t want to find out why I’m telling you. You have a role, you know, center stage, I’d say. I could equally ask you if you don’t want to listen.

Of course I’m listening—

And what the fuck makes you think I want to sit down and write and stew myself in all this shit? Putting things on paper makes things real, hardens them, makes them unchangeable, even before things have made sense. Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I’m not here to fucking entertain you.

Zafar stopped there. He fidgeted in his seat before picking up cubes of sugar and adding them to his coffee, one after another. The restaurant was empty. The lighting had been turned down.

I’m just saying … I’m just saying that your reasons seem like dressings for wounds.

Nice, he replied.

I don’t remember you being so bleak in college.

I wasn’t as untrusting. I had faith in the goodness of people, the perfection of love.

What happened?

Everything ends. And it’s how they end that leaves the lasting effect.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

And there I was thinking that’s what children were about.

*   *   *

Zafar had been speaking about the past, but I knew nothing of where he was in the present. There remained also the question: Why had he come here, to the U.K., to my home? And what was he doing these days? No sooner had this last question presented itself to me than it seemed out of place.

It seemed to me that asking him what he was doing these days, let alone asking why he had come to my home, was to reduce our history of friendship, or reduce the intimacy that had evolved in the days since he reappeared, as he and I talked in a way we had never done before. It was inappropriate. There remained instead a sense of the present held in abeyance, left at the door, to enter later perhaps. For now, the past had spread through this house, crisscrossing the walls of the kitchen with Zafar’s stories and mine, redecorating a home in the colors of childhood and families and memory.

There is an observation in Zafar’s notebooks: In our twenties, when a friend tells us his relationship has ended, we ask,
Who ended it?
In our thirties, we simply say,
I’m sorry.