André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs

Nor did his newly acquired understanding stop there. Majnoun found, as he walked in High Park, that he could easily recognize the intent behind words he overheard. He was amazed, for instance, to hear a woman say to the man beside her

— I’m sorry, Frank. I just can’t go on anymore …

her words an attempt to comfort and wound at the same time. How complex and vicious humans were! And how strange to suddenly appreciate the depths of their feelings. Whereas previously, he had thought them stunted, clumsy and unwilling to grasp the obvious, Majnoun now realized humans were almost as deep as dogs, though in their own particular way.

Wishing to see if he would understand Nira in this way, he returned home.

He had not been gone long, two hours at most. The back door was still unlocked. He stood on his hind legs, pushed down on the handle’s metal thumb-piece. The door opened and he went in. There, as if waiting for him, was Nira.

— Jim, she said. I thought you’d left us.

Majnoun caught every nuance. He caught her contrition, her worry, her affection for him, her sadness, her relief that he had returned, her confusion at speaking this way to a dog. It was, of course, impossible for him to respond to so many nuances at once.

— I have been called Majnoun for much of my life, he said. It is the name my first master gave me and it is the one I prefer.

He spoke clearly and Nira understood. She was so used to understanding him without words, however, that she did not at first realize he’d spoken. She had the odd but fleeting sensation that Majnoun had entered her consciousness in some new way.

— I’m sorry, Majnoun, she said at last. I didn’t know.

+

Hermes’s gift to Majnoun was precious and unprecedented, but it was also something of a burden. From being a dog who knew English fairly well, Majnoun became one who understood all human languages. Walking in Roncesvalles, he sometimes had to stop himself from listening to conversation in Polish, say

— Te pomidory są zgniłe!

or Hungarian

— Megőrültél?

Hearing other languages was like hearing new rhythms, melodies and reasons. At times, he found himself so transfixed that Nira had to call him from his reveries.

— Maj, come on. We’ve got things to do.

(Majnoun’s favourite human language was English. There was no doubt about that. This had little to do with the fact he’d learned English first. It was that English, of all the languages he experienced, was the one best suited to dogs. A dog had to think differently in English, yes, but the sounds and rhythms of English were those that best mimicked the rhythms and tonal range of a dog’s natural tongue. One pleasant consequence of Majnoun’s love for English — pleasant for him and for Nira — was his taking up of poetry. With Prince’s poems as his model, Majnoun ‘wrote’ the same way Prince had, memorizing his poems. Then he’d recite them to Nira.

In China, where wild dogs are eaten,

I am dismayed to be in season.

I curse men who think of me as food

and dream of rickshaws, and lacquered wood.

Or again:

If rackabones eat up the sky,

if words spring out of rock,

my soul will wind down

and life run out the clock.

On the other hand, when Nira asked him which language he liked best, Majnoun did not say English. He could not. As far as Majnoun was concerned, the language of dogs was more expressive, more vivid, easier to understand and more beautiful than any human speech. He tried to teach her Dog, but, to his surprise, their efforts foundered on Nira’s inability to tell the difference between a bark of pleasure and a call for attention, a crucial distinction in canine speech. Nira was disappointed. The only phrase she learned passably well was ‘I will bite you,’ not something you could say to just any dog. She would have liked to speak to him in his own tongue, but the truth was: Majnoun could not abide her accent and was not unhappy when she stopped trying.)

Majnoun’s decision to speak was not, at first, welcomed by Nira. True, their friendship was restored when Majnoun returned home and spoke. But it was unsettling to speak English with him. The two of them had evolved a lovely, wordless communication in which silence, the turn of a head or a hesitant nod were all meaningful. Now she had to deal with those things as well as words and, in the beginning, she found Majnoun more arduous to comprehend, though her understanding was deeper. More than that: Majnoun’s speaking brought what Nira thought of as ‘procedural problems.’ They both agreed it was best if Nira alone knew of his ability to speak. But as they grew more comfortable with each other, one or the other would, in public, forget their compact and ask a question or comment on something. When it was Nira who spoke to Majnoun, there was naturally less confusion than when Majnoun spoke to her. Majnoun’s voice was lower than Nira’s, so bystanders who heard his voice had trouble deciding whence exactly the words had come. This confusion brought unwanted attention.

Then there was Miguel. Miguel did not particularly like Majnoun. He’d preferred Benjy and he resented the closeness Nira and Majnoun shared. Majnoun understood all of this and forgave Miguel because Miguel’s feelings were, as far as Majnoun was concerned, honourable. Still, it was clear that Miguel might not have Majnoun’s best interests in mind, that he might not protect Majnoun the way Nira would. So Nira and Majnoun agreed that it would be best if they did not speak in front of Miguel. This meant that, at times, Miguel’s presence made the two feel awkward. It made Nira feel as if she were betraying her husband’s trust, while Majnoun felt he was betraying the pack leader.

In the end, it took Nira some time to feel at ease with Majnoun’s English. Once she was accustomed to it, however, his presence became so precious to her that the fact Majnoun was a dog ceased to signify. It stopped occurring to her that he was not as she was. Really, what did it matter that Majnoun was a dog while, for instance, they sat together by the Boulevard Club watching the willows move?

(Willows were for both of them a source of fascination. Though he knew better, Majnoun had always thought the trees were a subtle kind of animal, deceptive and imperious. To the very end, part of him still believed it. He could not contemplate the swaying branches without wishing to bite them. Minus the desire to bite, Nira felt something similar. For her the trees were like mammoths in leaf: ancient, slow, the last of something imperial, though of course they were not. They were only trees.)

Perfect understanding between beings is no guarantor of happiness. To perfectly understand another’s madness, for instance, is to be mad oneself. The veil that separates earthly beings is, at times, a tragic barrier, but it is also, at times, a great kindness. In fact, the only beings to achieve ‘perfect mutual understanding’ are the gods. For the gods, any emotion or state of mind — madness, anger, bitterness, etc. — is pleasurable, so understanding is neither here nor there. Hermes knew all this. As the god of translators, he was also the god of mis translation and mis understanding. It was he who, in a manner of speaking, muddied waters that became too clear or clarified those that had grown murky. But if there was ever a being who could be made happy by the gift of understanding, it was Majnoun. The more Majnoun understood of Nira, the more grateful he was that he had returned to what was now, undoubtedly, his home.

+

Two years passed.

As he grew older and more statesmanlike, Majnoun came to appreciate Nira in the best way possible: through the things that she loved. Her films, for instance. How deeply she admired Cléo from 5 to 7, Days of Heaven and Tokyo Story! Tokyo Story above all. One afternoon, Nira sat with him and they watched the movie together. It was the first time Majnoun had watched any film all the way through. It wasn’t that he was not interested in films. It was that he could not stand to see so many distant worlds without being able to smell them. Worlds were not real without their odours, so movies and paintings were inevitably a disappointment. But Nira so loved Tokyo Story that he sat still for the two hours it took to watch it.