She had told him, over the course of his visit, the story of how she had learned to breed these extraordinary animals. She was married to a businessman, a German whose work often took him to the Middle East. At a certain point they had moved there on a permanent basis: they lived in Oman, where he pursued his career and where she, having no children and not being permitted to work, had nothing particularly to do. She was not, it seemed, interested in pursuing the activities of an expatriate wife: instead she spent her time lying on the beach and reading novels. The aimlessness of this existence, and yet its inferences of freedom and pleasure, was something she had not consciously troubled herself to analyse; but lying there one day reading, a series of strange shadows, almost like the shadows of birds, had flown before her eyes across the page and she had been compelled to look up. There, running along the sand beside the frill of surf, was a pack of dogs. Their silence and lightness and speed was such that they appeared almost to be some kind of hallucination; but then she saw, walking slowly in the distance behind them, a man, an Arab in traditional dress. While she watched, he made some barely audible sound and the pack of dogs instantly looped back in a graceful curve and returned. They sat at his feet on their haunches, their heads lifted, listening while he spoke to them. That vision, of a near-silent feat of control, and of an almost mystical empathy that nevertheless had its basis in absolute discipline, had struck her at her core: she had gone to talk to the Arab, there in the heat and glare of the beach, and had begun to learn the science of the Saluki.
They were hunting dogs, the student continued, who ran in packs behind a falcon or hawk, the bird guiding them towards their prey. In each pack there were two principal dogs whose role it was to watch the hawk as they ran. The complexity and speed of this process, he said, could not be overestimated: the pack flowed silently over the landscape, light and inexorable as death itself, encroaching unseen and unheard on its target. To follow the subtlety of the hawk’s signals overhead while running at speed was a demanding and exhausting feat: the two principal dogs worked in concert, the one taking over while the other rested its concentration and then back again. This idea, of the two dogs sharing the work of reading the hawk, was one he found very appealing. It suggested that the ultimate fulfilment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion, of the unitary self being broken down, of consciousness not as an imprisonment in one’s own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, a universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level – well, like the German trainer before him, he was both seduced by the idea and willing to do the hard work involved in executing it.
I asked whether he had succeeded in sustaining that vision with his own dog and he was silent for a while, the furrows on his prominent brow deepening. He had returned, he said, to Kent with the dog he had chosen, which he and his wife had named Sheba. The German woman had trained Sheba impeccably – she never gave them any trouble at all – and they stuck rigorously to the two hours of walking they had been instructed to give her each day. On these walks, Sheba could be let off her leash: she came when you called her and never – or not often, in any case – lost her head in pursuit of the rabbits and squirrels that populated the local landscape. She was the object of much notice and attention when they took her out, but at home she was languid almost to the point of stupefaction; she was forever lying on their laps or across their bed, draping her large, silky body over them and resting her narrow face against theirs with what was either neediness or sheer ennui – she was, as he had said, almost human. To be perfectly honest, he knew that Sheba’s potential, her magnificence as a creature, could never be realised in suburban Sevenoaks, where they lived. It was almost as if they had captured her, this rare and exotic item, captured her not entirely through their own efforts but through the long story of possession that was her destiny and that had taken her in successive steps away from who she really was. The German woman, he went on, had described to him the sight of two Salukis bringing down a gazelle between them, with such stealth and harmony it was like music made visible. There weren’t any gazelles in Sevenoaks, obviously; but he and his wife loved Sheba, and would care for her to the best of their abilities.
When he had finished speaking the other students began to pack away their books and papers: the two hours were up. I walked to the Tube station and got on the train. I was meeting a man for dinner, someone I barely knew. He had got my number from a mutual friend. When I arrived at the restaurant he was already there, waiting. He was reading a book, which he replaced in his bag before I could see the title. He asked me how I was and I found myself saying that I was very tired, to the extent that I might not have all that much to say for myself. He looked a little disappointed at this news, and asked if I wanted to hang up my coat. I said I would keep it on: I felt cold. There were builders in my house, I added. The doors and windows were constantly open and the heating had been turned off. The house had become like a tomb, a place of dust and chill. It was impossible to eat or sleep or work – there wasn’t even anywhere to sit down. Everywhere I looked I saw skeletons, the skeletons of walls and floors, so that the house felt unshielded, permeable, as though all the things those walls and floors ought normally to keep out were free to enter. I had had to go into debt to finance the work – a debt I had no immediate prospect of being able to repay – and so even when it was done I wasn’t sure I would feel entirely comfortable there. My children, I added, were away. I told him the story of the Saluki dogs following the hawk: my current awareness of my children, I said, was similarly acute and gruelling, except that I was trying to keep sight of them on my own. On top of that, I said, there was something in the basement, something that took the form of two people, though I would hesitate to give their names to it. It was more of a force, a power of elemental negativity that seemed somehow related to the power to create. Their hatred of me was so pure, I said, that it almost passed back again into love. They were, in a way, like parents, crouched malevolently in the psyche of the house like Beckett’s Nagg and Nell in their dustbins. My sons call them the trolls, I said. The boys were still young enough to see morality in terms of character, I said, as the fairy tales they’d read in childhood had taught them to do. They were still willing to give evil an identity.
He had removed his glasses at the word ‘evil’ and placed them in a case on the table. He had looked slightly owlish with them on. Now he looked like something else again.
I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realise that it was not a product of will but of its opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion. I told him about Tony and his visit downstairs. Tony, I felt sure, had been afraid: talking to the trolls he had been unable either to resist or control them; instead he had found himself placating them by mirroring their hatred, and then had given me an account of his behaviour afterwards that attempted to turn that failure into an act of will and even heroism. But part of him, I saw, had retained what the trolls had said about me. It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil, but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies.
He smiled and picked up the menu.