There were pictures of Meredith as well, of the two of us together in Oxford and New York, images of my mother, of various colleagues, a photograph of me and Bethan taken long after our brief liaison, then pictures of me in the company of the few other women who made up the short inventory of my intimates during those years in exile. And of course, as I came quickly and anxiously to expect, the deeper I delved into the file, there were pictures of Fadia and me together, although these were always discreet, there was no indication we were anything other than student and teacher speaking briefly on Turl Street for instance, or pausing in the Old Schools Quad of the Bodleian Library or meeting for a coffee in the café on the second floor of Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street. I congratulated myself on the public restraint I had shown. No sign of a hand straying to touch her hair, no fingers clasping, no kiss on the cheek. Nonetheless, there was a record of our acquaintance, and this visual record sent me back to the files of phone numbers and internet addresses and I knew from a quick glance that all our communications must necessarily be present there as well. And then I realized that somebody somewhere — Michael Ramsey, surely — must be using facial recognition software to search through an existing archive of images, just to demonstrate to me that I had long been observed and my movements recorded, as if, from the moment of first meeting Fadia that day she came to interview at College, I had placed myself on the radar of whatever entities are entrusted to watch over our security, and for no better reason than because of her relation to three men — her father, her uncle, her brother — who were at the time figures in Mubarak’s government.
What else might yet come? Would I wake on Monday or later that week to find a box outside my door, kindly brought up from the lobby by Ernesto or one of the other doormen, and inside discover a complete record of all my electronic financial transactions over the past decade, a body of evidence that would suggest, if nothing else, a life lived abroad and, more recently, sympathy for this woman who was my student and is now the mother of my son?
I returned to the box, for I had not yet exhausted its contents, and in the final compartment found pictures from this past year, dating from just after Selim’s birth. A sob tore out of my throat as I gazed at them, pictures of my son in his stroller pushed along the uneven Oxford streets, carried in his mother’s arms, meeting with his maternal grandmother in the Grand Café on High Street, being displayed to cooing friends at a picnic under a beech tree in the University Parks, a beautiful child, a boy who looked without question like his father and mother drawn together and distilled into a new and vital image. It was terrible to look upon and I spread all the photos of mother and child out on my long dining room table, arranged so I could see how my boy had been growing in my absence these last few months, he was healthy and happy and no doubt meeting all the milestones as he should, and Fadia, whose face provoked more tenderness in me than I might have expected, appeared happy but also heavy with preoccupation or concern, I didn’t know quite what to call it, a look of thoughtfulness and worry, perhaps only because she was finishing her thesis, or so I suspected, perhaps because of the disappearance of her brother, perhaps because all was not well with her father, perhaps because she knew that one day I would return, refusing to allow my son to carry on living independently of me. And then, near the end of the files, was a single photo showing Fadia on St. Giles, just outside the Taylorian, speaking with Stephen Jahn, and Selim in a pram between them. There was something in Fadia’s and Stephen’s postures that chilled me, as if the inclining of her head in his direction suggested an alliance and the glint in his eye a plot or a purpose. I looked at the photo again, knowing I could not reliably read the situation on the basis of a single image. They might have met by accident, and what appears to be alliance in one moment might in the next, the many unrecorded moments that followed, look like coercion or rejection.
As I was studying these images, feeling the tormenting pleasure at seeing evidence of the ongoing life of my child, and confusion about how Fadia and Stephen might still be in touch with each other, I was conscious of the weight of a gaze upon me, of someone looking, a still point in a field of movement, and when I glanced up and out of my window onto the dark glossy stretch of Houston Street, I saw Michael Ramsey, undisguised, staring up at me, a finger pointing at his chest, his head nodding as he watched me looking at him, as my gaze met his and together, in that shared moment of recognition, I knew that whatever else might be happening, whatever the strange complications my own actions had created in my life and might go on proliferating, Michael Ramsey was somehow trying to help me.
~ ~ ~
And yet, he turned away, and as he did I began to doubt it had actually been him. I watched as the man who might have been Michael spun on his heel and walked west along Houston towards MacDougal, perhaps to the café where we had met a week earlier. Thinking I would phone him, I searched the white pages online, but there were a hundred Michael Ramseys in New York alone. Calling each of them, and on a Sunday evening moreover, seemed preposterous. Then it occurred to me that I could simply ask Peter how to contact Michael, and yet, I knew that even if I reached him he would deny everything over the phone because if he was — or is still — working for the NSA or some other intelligence-gathering body, he would know his own line was being monitored (that must, I imagine, be one of the requirements for such a job, the relinquishing of one’s own privacy for the sake of our national security).
Whatever he was doing, trying to help me or warn me, he had done so in a way, I was certain, that would not be discovered, or could never be traced back to him, or only with considerable effort. It was as though he wanted me to make myself into a victim who was willing to come forward, revealing how I was being watched by my own government for activities that were not, in point of fact, illegal. (Perhaps, I think in this moment, that is precisely what I am doing here, in these pages, revealing my own victimhood.) Michael Ramsey would not help me without first proving to himself that I had broken no laws, which meant that my payments to Fadia must be going to her alone, and that such payments could only, by the most doctrinaire mind, be thought to break any of the laws of America or Britain.
Given the conversations with Meredith and Peter and Susan, I had been considering stopping the payments, though I feared if I did so it would look as though I believed something was amiss in the first place. More importantly, I was afraid that suspending the transfers would jeopardize any relationship I might yet have with my son. It remains my legal responsibility to support my child. To follow one law is to break another. Catch-22. But I have, I remain confident, broken no laws. I do not think I am a fool. Desire undid me, yes, to that I make a full confession, but in trying to correct my failings I have done only what I believed to be legal, to pay for the support of the mother of my child, to pay for the support of my child as his mother has asked me to do. If the account into which I have been sending money to Fadia is in fact not her account but one belonging to her brother, a terrorist, or an account to which he has access, am I nothing more sinister than a dupe?