In the Light of What We Know (69 page)

How long are you here? he asked.

As long as it takes.

Listen, I’ve got to go now, but can we hook up in the next day or two? I want to talk to you about something.

A girl? I asked, half joking.

No! No! No! I’ll tell you later. So long.

Yes. So long, I replied.

Through the window I saw Crane walk across the courtyard to the AfDARI office.

God! You gave me a fright.

Suleiman had appeared from nowhere, announcing his presence with a tap on my shoulder.

Documents? I asked him.

Yes.

Did you take the pictures?

Yes.

The DVR? Where’s the recording of Crane?

Suleiman pulled a flash drive out of his pocket, handed it to me, and was out the door.

A minute later, through the window, I saw Crane emerge from the office and I stepped out into the courtyard. Crane came over to me.

Why don’t we meet for coffee tomorrow morning at ten? he said.

I saw something decent in Crane at that moment. I think it was a wish, even a need, to be on good terms with people.

I don’t know if I’ve offended you, I said. I’m sorry if I have.

Hell, no! You Brits and your apologies.

How about Café Europa?

You’ve found the expat joints pretty quick, he said.

I pick things up.

See you tomorrow.

Listen, you’re not going to the UN bar tonight? I asked him.

No. Why?

I thought I might go for a drink.

Me and my boys over at the American embassy are watching last night’s big game. God bless the VCR. As a matter of fact, I’m heading there now. We’ll get some beers in before the game. Say, you don’t—

No thanks. Not my thing.

Not your cup of tea, eh? Cricket’s the game for you chaps. Well, cheerio, then! said Crane, giving me a big smile as he walked off. I thought of a large, happy dog. That is how I remember Crane now.

Suleiman was standing on the porch and would have heard everything.

*   *   *

At nine forty-five the following morning, I was about to set off when the boy whose job it was to clean the rooms appeared at the door. He handed me a telephone message from Emily:
I’m coming over in just a minute.
I remained in my room. I asked the boy if there was a way to get a message to Café Europa—to Crane—saying I’d be late. The boy didn’t understand.

And then the waiting began. Just a minute, she said. I have to tell you about the waiting, because if there is a proximate cause, it was the waiting. But how can
waiting
, which is no action, which is the definition of nothing happening, only the interval between things, between two waves of the sea—how can nothing beget something? When I had last left Kabul, only the previous week, I made my way to Dubai, where I received an email from her saying:
I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon
. That was all. No other information, leaving me in suspended animation. But which flight? Kabul to Islamabad first? Or flying direct to the U.A.E.? But don’t the direct flights come in at Sharjah and not Dubai? But that adds more time because you have to drive to Dubai. So little information to go on, and perhaps that was the point, not to engage any further, to avoid explanations in order to avoid anything that might approach an apology, because to apologize, and accordingly to explain, would be to acknowledge that she was letting me down. It was never a
refusal
to apologize, for a refusal or anything that appeared to be a refusal implied, let me repeat, a recognition that there was something that arguably required an apology or even an explanation. No refusal but, rather, behaving as if there were nothing to explain, not one word required. Did my failure to confront this make me complicit? An enabler, they call him, the friend who invites his buddy the recovering alcoholic to the pub. I remembered the first time, so long ago now, when she arrived at the Inns of Court, at the library, to meet me for lunch. Two hours late but not a word of apology or explanation. And I made the excuses to myself, not for the lateness but for the failure to explain, for I told myself that
she
must believe that
she
is not important enough to
me
that something even approximating punctuality would matter to me. A contortion to box out the reality, the only self-respecting conclusion, which was the reverse, namely, that I was not important enough to her to be given an apology, let alone to be punctual for. And again and again it happened, in one way or another. Did I do the same to her? I began to ask. After all, I know that there is a wall around me and that I, too, am seldom confronted, rarely taken to task. Did my memory spare me awareness of my own failures to abide by undertakings I had given? Was I also leaving in my wake a litter of broken promises? So it was that my notebooks became diaries, too, recording not just broken commitments but also every representation made by each of us, upon which the other might reasonably rely. For all the tedious familiarity with her unreliability and for all my own deluded accommodations of it, there was hurt and there was anger, as there must be to be disregarded by someone you loved, who you believed loved you, who previous indications—engagement!—suggested loved you. And then there was the other waiting, the waiting I had loved, the seven weeks from the day she told me she was pregnant. It was an active waiting, not limbo but a time for the imagination to take up materials from the landscape of memory and set to work. And at the end of that waiting, nothing. Nothing to justify the waiting. No conversation, no talking, only nothing.

It’s easy to keep a clear head when thinking about something whose existence is outside you, easy to think clearly about mathematics, for instance. But what can be more important to think about than something that is so overwhelmed by emotions that the act of thinking becomes hard? Yet how do you look at something that clouds your vision? I have been full of anger my whole life, and if I’ve seemed to you or anyone as having been as calm as the kind of thinking that mathematics demands, then it is only because the anger had yet to find expression. The lexicographer is always behind the progress of language, his account by definition in arrears.

In that AfDARI guesthouse, I thought of all the waiting I had done and felt something rising in me. Most people have no need to break free of their inheritance. But those who need to break free of their past and have the means to do so will not escape the requirement of violence.

*   *   *

At ten thirty, I walked over to the gate. The driver and Suaif were standing about, talking. I wanted to be driven to Café Europa, but first I asked them if they’d seen Suleiman.

Suleiman has not come into work, replied Suaif.

Yes, but have you seen him?

He did not come in today, sir. There is a message for you.

What is it?

Your meeting this morning was postponed.

When did he give you this message?

He is not working today.

All right. When did you plan to tell me about this message?

Sir, I was told to give it to you only when you came into the courtyard and not to disturb you with it before.

Did he tell you why he wasn’t coming to work?

No, sir.

I asked the driver to take me to Café Europa.

Suaif interjected: There has been an IED incident in Shar-e-Naw. Americans were killed. A few soldiers. It is difficult to go there now.

Only American soldiers?

And civilians.

Anyone injured?

Five Afghanis. No one else, sir, he added.

Café Europa, is it in Shar-e-Naw? I asked.

Yes.

I want to go there.

It is very difficult, said Suaif.

I insisted and got into the car.

As we approached Shar-e-Naw, we were stopped at a checkpoint and told we couldn’t take the car any farther. I took directions from the driver, asked him to wait, and set off on foot.

First came the sound. People crying, not women but men, a wailing, the sound of cries for God,
Hai-Allah
, groans, and American voices on megaphones. Afghanis and ISAF soldiers scrambling. Then I turned a corner. If Crane was in that café, there was no way he could have survived. There was destruction everywhere, rubble and dust, boulders of concrete and a crater in front of the wrecked façade of a building, the Café Europa signage still hanging from a corner. I continue to remember that sign, a square of sheet metal with hand-painted text in blue and gold, and have wondered if our eyes are compelled to fix on something incongruous, seeking an emblem of the totality of what we see, of the shattered image that we cannot assimilate. We orient ourselves by metaphor, like that ghostly building left standing after Hiroshima, all of eternity in a grain of sand. This is how we avoid talking about blood and bones, and the shredded ends of limbs, and the head with open eyes, and crying men, grown men, my father’s age, men with beards, lifting wreckage to find the dead. I felt sick, my gut convulsing like a caught fish. But what I remember most vividly is a sensation behind my eyes, an extraordinary pressure pushing my eyeballs out, as if they were no longer mine, as if my body were rejecting them. Did I want to cry or did I want to keep myself from crying? I wanted both.

I’ve heard it said that a sign a person is in shock is that he or she fixates on something trivial. The woman who’s just heard her husband was caught up in a fatal traffic accident becomes obsessed with the lack of milk in the house, even when the police officer has said he takes his coffee black. I cannot claim I was in shock: I was too possessed of my faculties of reason for that, too much already concerned with precisely when various things had happened. Besides, to claim shock would be too cheap and easy an excuse for what was to come. Certainly, if I had been a better man, I would have been thinking then of Crane, making more of an effort to find him, I would have looked upon the carnage and reflected on man’s inhumanity to man and all the rest of it. But instead, shock or no shock, my mind had fixed on a problem of timing. Could it really be that I had escaped certain death, perhaps by a matter of minutes, simply because I had waited for Emily, and Emily had been late? She knew I was already in Kabul. Flights in and out were infrequent, and when she left me in Islamabad, I was, as far as she knew, getting the next day’s flight. How did she know I was already here? And did she know more? Did she … did she know about the bomb? How could she? Or was it just her tardiness that had saved me? The very thing that I had detested, the quality of her character that caused me so much anguish, the plain disrespect in missing the appointed time, time and time again, and without a word of explanation let alone apology. I always hated myself for waiting, hated myself for not making something of having waited. Until then, it had left me feeling sullied, ashamed instead of being angry with her. And now I was not prepared to accept that she had dillydallied and therefore I had lived. Not prepared to accept that a combination of her lack of respect and my self-demeaning waiting could have saved my life. At that moment, I would sooner have accepted that she’d had some conscious hand in it all. And because my mind had fixed on her responsibility, it had grasped that timing, as in all things, was of the essence. What took place and when? Who knew what when? A chain of events leading back to what?

I approached a soldier to ask what time the bombing had happened, but he didn’t seem to understand.

Get back! he replied, an American. He added something in fragmentary Pashto before repeating the English slowly.

My friend is in there, I shouted.

I don’t care if your mother is in there. Get back! he yelled, this time gesturing with his assault rifle.

*   *   *

Back at AfDARI, I asked Suaif if anyone had asked for me or if anyone had left a message with him.

Miss Emily? asked Suaif.

Anyone.

No, replied Suaif.

She didn’t show up?

Please?

She didn’t come here?

No, he replied.

Suaif’s answer had me wondering if perhaps Emily had had no intention of showing up. Could it be that all she’d wanted by sending me the message was to delay my going to the café? And there, once more, I was making allowances for her. Even then.

Is there a phone in the office? I asked.

Maybe she called, he responded.

Is there a phone in the office?

Yes.

Is there another phone here in AfDARI?

No.

I crossed the courtyard and entered the AfDARI building. The door to Maurice’s office was shut. I knocked but there was no answer. I walked in to find Maurice and the woman he’d been screwing. She was putting on her coat.

Do you mind? snapped Maurice.

No, I don’t. Is this your handwriting? I asked him, showing him the note about Emily coming over.

I beg your pardon.

Is this your handwriting? I repeated. I was furious with this man, to a degree that cannot be explained by the little that I knew of him. What I was after was whether there was anything else in the exchange between him and Emily that wasn’t written down, anything that could help me figure out what had happened, and how it was that I’d managed to evade the bombing by minutes.

Get out, shouted the Frenchman, raising his hand and pointing to the door.

I gripped the man’s hand and pushed it back on the wrist. My fingers interlocked with his, and even in those circumstances, or because of them, it felt strangely intimate. Maurice let out a yelp and his knees buckled as I pushed his hand back past his shoulder and with my free hand pulled his elbow toward me. With his other hand he gripped the edge of the desk to stop himself from going over altogether.

I pulled open a drawer, rummaged about, took out a notebook, opened it, and held it at an angle to the light from the window. The message from Emily was written on the same notebook.

Who called? I asked Maurice.

The woman made to move for the door.

Did you expect me? I asked, turning to her.

I repeated, Did you expect me?

No, she replied meekly.