God's Dog (10 page)

20 May

Guntur had never told me that he is a great skater! He has even done the Elfstedentocht – all two hundred kilometres of it. When there's no ice, apparently, you train on rollers. Today I followed him on my bike, and by the end I was more exhausted than he was. I haven't done any serious sport since I left the academy; all I have done is wear myself out doing weightlifting. I should take up fencing again. I'm always telling myself to join a club, then laziness gets the upper hand.

22 May

Today was the start of the new herring season, as we learned from the papers yesterday. Guntur and I were not going to miss the opportunity of a first tasting. We went to supper on a restaurant-barge belonging to a friend of his from Friesland who makes his own beer and who spends more time drunk than sober. A tankard of wheat beer with maatjes herring, the sun setting over the Singel and a wind bearing the sweet scent of grass: it was perfect. To crown it all, Guntur seemed so happy. That man has a kind of ebullience which strikes me as typically eastern, and which must be linked to his capacity for amazement. Nothing seems to dishearten him. He does everything with a kind of lightness which is very refreshing. I myself always feel that I am in the firing line, that I've spent my whole life in the trenches; I see an enemy in everyone who doesn't share my views. That is what I've been trained to do, it's true; that is my trademark. He too was trained as a soldier, of course, but he sees things with more detachment. All in all, for Guntur nothing seems important; at times I find his freedom of thought positively frightening. He makes me feel that, were I to be set free, I wouldn't even dare to leave my cage. Where would I fly to, in this empty, senseless world? I need a mission. When all is said and done, it isn't even a question of faith. Sometime I actually wonder whether I have any faith at all. As my guardian in Bologna used to say to me, ‘Salazar, you don't believe in anything except your own survival. But we shall put your defects to good use – along with your good points.' I wonder what they are.

25 May

Guntur has an amazingly thorough knowledge of the Christian tradition. I don't think I know anything like as much about Islam. He claims that Islam was founded not by Mohammed, but by a sect of monotheistic Christians, Jews and Arabs. It is no coincidence, in his view, that Saint Mark's Gospel is contemporary with the writings of Ibn Ishaq. But then he is syncretism incarnate! Though I'd be interested to hear what an imam thinks of his interpretation of Islam. All in all, I do feel that the Islamic mindset is more inclined than the Christian one to skate over differences. According to their teachings, our prophets were holy men; we treat theirs like so many Bedouin.

27 May

Today, coming back from prayer, Guntur and I walked through the Vondelpark.

‘This year the camellias will still be out when the rhododendrons come into flower!' he said, with childlike glee.

‘It's been a cold spring, so the blossom lasts longer. Look at the Japanese cherry, how frothy the petals are. But if the wind gets up then they'll all fly away, together with the rain. You'll see, it will be as though there'd been a heavy snowstorm. One day I must show you my bulb collection; I grow them in the university greenhouse; I've even managed some cross-breeding.'

28 May

Guntur's laboratory is in an old building on the Nieuwe Diep Basin. The windows look straight on to the canal embankment, but to the right of it there is a strip of land occupied by an old disused greenhouse, separated from the entrance by a brick wall; and that was where we left our bicycles, chained to some railings. As we went in, a violent storm was brewing over the Jimeer; the dark sky was flecked with strips of grey and orange, and there was a rumble of distant thunder out at sea. In the restaurant, Guntur had started to tell me more about his experiments. At one point he had looked at the wall clock as though he were waiting for some particular moment in time. Now he had switched on the computer and opened the safe where he kept his data banks. He linked up the hard disk and started the programmes. His large room on the ground floor is crammed with various kinds of apparatus and oddities of the kind he likes to surround himself with, including an old barber's chair.

‘When I started studying mirror neurons I immediately felt that I was standing at a door that would give me access to a new scientific dimension. Mirror neurons alert us to the existence of an empathy that is all pervasive: they are found in men and monkeys, but we are also discovering them in other animals. So why should they not also exist, in other forms, in plants? Perhaps mirror neurons are fragments of a unity which once suffused all creation. In part, we humans function in the same way as all other beings, and the more contact there is between us, the more we interact. In a word, we think together! And perhaps every being is capable of some form of thought. So your Teilhard de Chardin was right when he talked of a noosphere. The whole subject has begun to interest me deeply: mirror neurons might be a step towards the scientific proof of the existence of God; of intelligent design, do you see? The world on its way back to a journey towards the divine!'

As he talked, Guntur had his eyes not on me, but on the computer screen where his data was coming up. Now he gestured to me to come closer, as he brought several photographs of a monkey up on to the screen.

‘This is Django, a young adult chimpanzee we brought back from the forests of Kibele. I started by doing transcranial magnetic stimulation tests, and nuclear scanned encephalographs, in order to locate the mirror neurons. So far, so unremarkable: we already know that chimpanzees have mirror neurons in the inferior parietal lobe and frontal cortex. But Django had another apparently sensitive area – I could see vaguely on the scan but had difficulty bringing it into focus. From the reactions to the neuronal stimuli, I began to suspect that it was a sort of Broca's area proper to the chimpanzee. In the human brain, Broca's area is the one concerned with speech. Do you see what this means? That chimpanzees too are capable of speech, or at least they've got the brains for it! I carried on stimulating the area in question, and getting Django to do exercises which I hoped would make it more responsive. Until, one day, the incredible happened: I was adjusting the apparatus when I suddenly realised that Django's usual grunts were now interspersed with clearer sounds; intermittent ones, but definitely phonetic. I taped the lot, and played it back a thousand times. It was then that I made my great discovery: Django speaks Swahili!'

Wide-eyed with emotion as he told his tale, Guntur seemed to be keeping the air down in his lungs, as though afraid of running out of breath. Usually so mild, his face, now drained of colour, was twisted into a grimace, his eyebrows suddenly more prominent so that he resembled a mask in an ethnographical museum. He carried on:

‘He speaks ready-made phrases, mangled and incomplete, but it's definitely Swahili! He must have learned them from the scientists who reared him in Nairobi. Django was born on a nature reserve and has always been in touch with human beings. I wrote to a neurolinguist from the University of Leyden whose name I was given by an imam. Professor Aren De Smet will be coming to see Django next week, but for now the whole business is completely hush-hush. I haven't mentioned it to anyone, apart, obviously to this same neurolinguist from Leyden, who is completely trustworthy and an observant Muslim. Do you realise what atheists would do with this discovery? If Django can speak, then he must have a soul. Does that mean that every living being has a soul? And, if so, what is the difference between life and matter? We have to find out more, and get there first.'

As he was speaking, Guntur took a bunch of keys out of the safe.

‘Come on, let's go and see Django. Then you can make up your own mind.' I followed him through a gate, then down a wrought-iron staircase leading into the basement, from which the greenhouse was entered through a passageway beneath the boundary wall.

‘You'd better stay on this side of the terrarium, you'll be able to hear him well enough from there. He doesn't know you, and he might take fright,' said Guntur as we went into the greenhouse. It had begun to rain, the drops were drumming on the glass and blurring the outlines of the tugboats riding at anchor on the quays of the Nieuwe Diep. The art nouveau building was divided into two by a grille, leaving the chimpanzee ample space to move around on the side nearer the water, from which it was separated by panes of thick glass. The interior of the enclosure was fitted out with ropes and raised walkways, and there was a sandpit in the middle of the concrete floor. The space was crossed by a channel containing a stream of running water, flowing out into a drain. I took up my post behind the terrarium and watched Guntur as he walked forwards towards the cage among the flowering plants. The chimpanzee was sitting on the ground, his back against the grille; he turned his head as he heard Guntur's voice.

‘Habari ya jioni, Django! Habari yako?' I heard Guntur repeat. The chimpanzee seemed intrigued by the showers of rain against the glass; he was looking around him as though puzzled, surprised that he could hear the rain beating but could not see it fall. After some coaxing from Guntur he finally bounded up to the first walkway, which was some two metres above the ground, where he stayed, huddled, fixing Guntur with an alert but distant look. He seemed somehow sad, perhaps even worried. He grunted, yawned, dug around in his fur with his nails until he found something which seemed to be annoying him, removed it and put it in his mouth. He sat still for a few moments, looking listless, then suddenly turned his head to look at Guntur. Now his eyes really did seem to be saying: ‘What do you want from me?'

‘Habari yako?' Guntur repeated patiently until Django, goaded by his insistence, suddenly gnashed his teeth in something approaching a laugh, uttered a laboured ‘Habari yako' in return, then leapt down from the walkway and ran off towards the glass wall overlooking the water, where he stayed, looking out to sea, his head bowed. The clouds, which had been moving off eastwards shortly before sunset, now parted, allowing a ray of sun to light up the iron arches of the greenhouse for a moment and cast Django's squat shadow on to the embankment. A shiver ran through me as I caught a brief glimpse of something human in that animal figure. I followed Guntur along the passageway in silence; back in the laboratory, we stood watching the lights come on along the quays.

‘If Django's speech is nothing more than unwitting imitation on the part of a particularly intelligent animal, then we can send him back out into his pen for children to gawp at. If on the other hand he has a mind of his own, we must learn more about him; we must go to the forests of Kibale and seek out traces of the birth of man!' said Guntur, a slight quiver in his voice.

4 June

There was hardly a soul in the flower market this morning. That was where I had arranged to meet Guntur, after prayers. It was going to be a bright day, but a sharp wind was blowing in from the sea, sweeping away the clouds and showering the city with a rain of petals and leaves, leaving them stuck to window panes, to car bonnets. They carpeted the water in the canals, then the current swept them along in slow drifts which got caught under the bridges and against the sides of the barges. The flower-sellers on the Singel did not seem to be in any hurry to open their kiosks; they stood in huddled groups at the doors of the bars, their numb hands in their pockets. I found Guntur rummaging through a box of bulbs.

‘Look at this,' he said, pointing to a black tuber.

‘If you were to plant this today, in October it would produce a bright red flower. It's dense with life, even though it looks like a lump of dead matter – in fact, just like the planets orbiting in space. We think of them as arid and burnt-out, but they too may hold the seeds of future life. All that they need to do is find the humus which will make them bloom…'

I nodded in agreement, noting that the bulb-seller did not seem to be taking too kindly to Guntur and his rummaging, though Guntur himself seemed impervious to his disapproval; lost in thought, he helped himself to a plastic bag and began to fill it with
odontonema strictum
.

‘Life and death are so closely intertwined. They seem sealed off from one another, but in fact there is much to tell us that this is not the case. All life is redolent of death. I don't think I mentioned this, but Django arrived here with a mate, Mirah, and she too had grown up in the forests of Kibale. She fell ill, and we sent her back to Kenya, hoping that they might be able to treat her, but she died a few months later. And they sent her body back from Kibale, explaining to us that otherwise Django would go mad: he had to see the corpse in order to be able to mourn. Otherwise, he could never have been able to accept her disappearance. Do you see? Even a chimpanzee has a notion of death. In which case, this bulb too knows that it will flower in October and then die!'

The Vicar closed the exercise-book and sat there for a moment, lost in thought. In the ensuing silence, the airy figures on the frescoed ceiling seemed to be peering down at him. After a time he got up from the desk and went over to the large windows overlooking the gardens. The rhododendrons were all in flower; a gardener was cutting the grass, leaving a strip of lighter green on the lawn. The colours of the rainbow shone through the spray of a fountain as though they were blown glass. The Vicar picked up the telephone and said: ‘Send in Kowalski.'

The blinding light almost dazzled Salazar. He tried to shade his eyes with his hand, but realised he could not move it. He tried to turn his head, but felt a sharp stab of pain in his nose. Even those few attempts at movement had exhausted him. He now realised that he was tied to a bed, with several tubes attached to his body, and a drip. Yet he felt as though none of this concerned him; he was filled with a sweet, almost euphoric indifference. Someone passed by his bed, and at last the blinds came down. In the half-light he saw a nun walking away. He had been lying there for a long time, or so it seemed to him. He was dimly aware of voices, saw heads bent over him. It was almost dark by the time he was properly awake. Clear-headed at last, he looked around him: he was in a hospital, but it was not San Filippo Neri. The linoleum was green, and the walls blue. Apart from his bed and a formica chair, there was no furniture, not even a cupboard or a bedside table. White light came in through a frosted glass pane in the door. Through the window he could see a row of modern buildings. Suddenly a neon light went on, and two men came in; Salazar recognised the badge of the guardians of the faith on their jackets. The taller one, a sergeant, who was constantly fiddling with his small red moustache, was now plumped down on the only chair; the other one, a lance-corporal, stood behind him, arms crossed. The door opened again, and a nurse came in, removed the tubes from his nose, disconnected the drip and went out again without a word. When the door was shut, the man with the red moustache asked: