‘What you teach them?’ he said. ‘How to wipe their behind?’
The class was a fiction-writing class: I taught it each week. There were twelve students who sat around tables arranged in a square. The classroom was on the fifth floor: at the start of term it had still been light at that hour, but now it was dark outside, and the windows showed us our own reflections etched in glare against an eerie backdrop of overblown, dirty yellow clouds. The students were mostly women. I found it hard to attend to what they were saying. I sat in my coat, my eye continually drawn to the window and to the strange cloudscape that appeared to belong neither to night nor to day but to something intermediary and motionless, a place of stasis where there was no movement or progression, no sequence of events that could be studied for its meaning. Its yellowed formless components suggested not nothingness but something worse. I heard the students speaking and wondered how they could believe in human reality sufficiently to construct fantasies about it. I felt them glance at me often as though from a great distance. Increasingly they were speaking, I realised, not to me but to one another, building among themselves the familiar structure that I had accustomed them to, in the way that children, when they are afraid, will retreat to the rules and regulations of what they have learned to regard as normality. One of the students, I noticed, had taken the role of leader: she was asking each of the others in turn for their contribution. She was acting my part, yet there was something wrong with her execution of it: she interfered unnecessarily; instead of proceeding by instinct the students were becoming self-conscious and halting. One of the two men in the room was trying to talk about his dog. What was it about this dog, my understudy asked, that he thought was so interesting? The man looked uncertain. It’s beautiful, he said. My understudy made a gesture of frustration. You can’t just tell me it’s beautiful, she said. You have to show me that it is. The man looked quizzical. He was somewhere in his forties, with a small, slightly elfin appearance: his large head with its domed, wrinkled brow on his neat, diminutive body gave him the appearance of a strange elderly child. My understudy urged him to describe the dog so that she might be able to see its beauty for herself. She was a loud-spoken woman arrayed in a resplendent series of coloured wraps and shawls, who wore a great quantity of jewellery that clanked and rattled when she gesticulated with her arms. Well, the man said doubtfully, she’s quite big. But she’s not heavy, he added. He paused and then shook his head. I can’t describe it, he said. She’s just beautiful.
I asked him what breed the dog was and he said it was a Saluki. They were Arabian hunting dogs, he added, greatly prized and honoured in Arab culture, to the extent that traditionally they weren’t regarded as animals at all but as something midway between the animal and the human. They were the only non-human creatures, for example, that were permitted to enter an Arab tent. A special hole would be dug for them inside, in the sand, to lie in as a bed. They were beautiful things, he repeated.
I asked him where he had got this dog and he said that he had bought it from a German woman in the south of France. She lived in a house in the mountains behind Nice, where she bred only Saluki puppies. He had driven down there overnight, all the way from his house in Kent. When he arrived, stiff and exhausted from the journey, she had opened the door and a shoal of Salukis had run down the hall in her wake. They were big dogs already, even at only a few weeks old, but they were fleet and light and pale as phantoms. They had engulfed him, there on the doorstep, pressing their narrow faces against him and feeling him with their paws – he had expected to be knocked over but instead it had felt as though he was being stroked by feathers. She had trained them – there were nine – with an extraordinary scrupulousness: in the sitting room various snacks had been laid out for him on a low table and the nine beasts – unlike any other dog he had encountered – arranged themselves dignifiedly around it, making no attempt to snatch the food; at feeding time their nine bowls were placed in a row and filled, and they would wait for the signal to eat before beginning. Whenever their trainer passed, the nine long, elegant noses would lift in perfect synchronicity and follow her movements like nine compasses.