In the present, Rabih may be living in one of the safer, quieter corners of the globe, with a wife who is fundamentally kind and committedly on his side, but in his mind Beirut, war, and the cruelest sides of human nature remain threats forever just out of his line of sight, always ready to color his interpretation of the meaning of a pile of clothes or an organizational erosion in the cutlery drawer.
When our minds are involved in transference, we lose the ability to give people and things the benefit of the doubt; we swiftly and anxiously move towards the worst conclusions that the past once mandated.
Unfortunately, to admit that we may be drawing on the confusions of the past to force an interpretation onto what’s happening now seems humbling and not a little humiliating: Surely we know the difference between our partner and a disappointing parent, between a husband’s short delay and a father’s permanent abandonment; between some dirty laundry and a civil war?
The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion.
By the time Rabih gets back from his trip to England, Kirsten has reverted to some of the habits she indulged in when she lived on her own. She’s drunk a beer while having a bath and eaten cereal from a mug in bed. But soon enough their mutual desire and capacity for closeness reasserts itself. The reconciliation starts, as it often does, with a little joke which puts its finger on the underlying anxiety.
“Sorry to have interrupted you, Mrs. Khan. But I think I used to live here,” says Rabih.
“Definitely not. You must be looking for 34A, and this is 34B, you see. . . .”
“I think we once got married. Do you remember? That’s our child, Dobbie, over there in the corner. He’s very silent. Kind of like his mum.”
“I’m sorry, Rabih,” says Kirsten, turning serious. “I’m a bit of a bitch when you go away. I seem to be trying to punish you for leaving me, which is ridiculous, because you’re only trying to pay off our mortgage. Forgive me. I’m a bit of a nut job sometimes.”
Kirsten’s words act like an immediate balm. Rabih is flooded with love for his slightly inarticulate and very unself-righteous wife. Her insight is the best welcome-home present she could have given him, and the greatest guarantee of the solidity of their love. Neither he nor she have to be perfect, he reflects; they only need to give each other the odd sign they know they can sometimes be quite hard to live with.
We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.
Universal Blame
For their third wedding anniversary Rabih surprises Kirsten with a weekend trip to Prague. They stay in a little hotel near the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius, take photos of themselves on the Charles Bridge, talk of life back at home, reflect on how quickly the years are passing, and visit the Sternberg Palace to have a look at the early European art. There, Kirsten pauses before a small early-sixteenth-century Virgin and Child.
“It’s so awful what happened to her adorable baby in the end. How could anyone get over that?” she asks pensively. She has an endearing way, Rabih muses, of thinking even the most basic things through afresh for herself. The painting isn’t, for her, an object for dutiful academic analysis; instead it’s a prefiguring of a parent’s most grievous tragedy, and as such, it earns from her a sympathy no less lively or immediate than that she might offer to someone whose son had just died in a motorcycle accident on the road to Fort William.
Kirsten is keen to visit Prague Zoo. It’s been a long time since either of them has spent any time around animals, save perhaps for the occasional cat or dog. Their first thought is how very strange all of the inmates look: the camel, for one, with its U-shaped neck, its two furry dorsal pyramids, its eyelashes that might be coated in mascara, and its set of yellow buckteeth. A free brochure gives them some facts: camels can go ten days in the desert without drinking; their humps are filled not with water, as common wisdom holds, but with fat; their eyelashes are designed to shield their eyeballs during sandstorms; and their liver and kidneys extract every drop of moisture possible from the food they eat, causing their dung to be dry and compact.
All animals are distinctive, because they have evolved to thrive in very particular environments, the leaflet goes on. That’s why the Malagasy giant jumping rat has such big ears and strong hindlegs and the redtail catfish of the Amazon sports a camouflaging sandy band across its midriff.
“Of course,” Kirsten interjects, “but these adaptations aren’t much use when your new habitat is actually the Prague Zoo, where you’re living in a concrete hotel room with a meal delivered to you three times through a hatch and there’s no entertainment except for the tourists. You just grow fat and tetchy, like the poor sweet melancholic orangutan, designed for a life in the forests of Borneo—and not holding up too well here.”
“But perhaps humans are no different,” adds Rabih, a little put out that a hominid should be receiving so much of his wife’s sympathy. “We’re also saddled with impulses which were probably sensible when they evolved in the plains of Africa, yet which give us nothing but trouble now.”
“What sort of things?”
“Being super alert to noises in the night, which now just stops us sleeping when a car alarm goes off. Or being primed to eat anything sweet, which only makes us fat, given how many temptations there are. Or feeling almost compelled to look at the legs of strangers in the streets of Prague, which annoys and hurts our partners. . . .”
“Mr. Khan! Using Darwin to get me to feel sorry for you for not having seven wives and yet another ice cream . . .”
It’s late on Sunday evening by the time they finally land, exhausted, at Edinburgh Airport. Kirsten’s bag is second off the carousel. Rabih has no such luck, so while they wait, they sit on a bench next to a shuttered sandwich shop. It’s unusually warm for the time of year, and Kirsten idly wonders what the weather will be like tomorrow. Rabih gets out his phone and checks. A high of 19 degrees Celsius and sunny the entire day: remarkable. Just then he spots his bag on the carousel, goes over to collect it, and adds it to their trolley. They board the bus back into the center of town just before midnight. All around them, similarly worn-out passengers are lost in thought or dozing. Suddenly remembering that he has to send a text to a colleague, Rabih reaches into the right pocket of his jacket for his phone, then looks in the left pocket, then stands up a little in his seat to check the pockets of his trousers.