God's Dog by Diego Marani Page A

fireplace. But I never succeed; all I do is get bored. Clearly, I am not the meditative type!
    On the beach at Enkhuizen we ate poffertjes in a bar that was raised on piles. Everything in it smelled of fried food, even the gardenias on the windowsills. For some reason, it was full of English, the kind who wear trainers and baseball caps; they walked as though they were drunk, dazed by too much sun. The dunes were covered with such rich, green vegetation that the effect was almost Mediterranean. At a certain point a group of horsemen came galloping across the beach. Guntur rushed up to them to have a closer look. He said he remembered horses from his early childhood, galloping along beaches just like this. Then his mood darkened.
    â€˜Have you ever been back to Banda Aceh?’ I asked him.
    â€˜No, never.’
    â€˜Would you like to?’
    â€˜No. I’m afraid.’
    â€˜What of?’
    â€˜Of meeting someone who knows me. Of knowing. Perhaps they are still there…’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Father and mother.’
    I would have liked to ask him to tell me more, to find out something about his childhood. But then my own fear of remembering flooded back into my mind. It’s like a safety valve which kicks in whenever I start to delve into my memories, and find myself staring at the only certain image I have of Haiti, though it isn’t even mine; it’s a newspaper cutting with a photo of a child crying amidst the rubble. I still have it, in my missal. Secretly, I have always wanted to believe that that child was me, and I have often tried to recognise myself in that weeping face. But I don’t cry like that, I have never cried like that. It was dusk when we got back to Amsterdam, and all in all we were glad to see its tangle of lights, to hear its raucous din. We’d had enough of the bucolic emptiness of the Markermeer.
    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