The Blasphemer: A Novel (29 page)

Andrew feels a stab of hunger. His eyes are stinging. A yawn. It will be no good his going to Adilah’s house yet, the redcaps will be waiting for him. He will have to lie low for a few days. He checks his pocket watch with a tap of its face. Five thirty. From his elevated position he can see through the milky half-light that a camp has been erected in the field on the outskirts of the town. Some fifty bell tents are visible through an early morning mist. It is an American Expeditionary Force camp – a Stars and Stripes is flapping from a pole. There are dozens of horses in a corral, swishing their tails, breath pluming from their velvety noses. He can also make out dark shapes. Sleeping giants. Heavy artillery guns on their way up to the Front.

The cold is biting into his bones. He can smell woodsmoke and realizes that it isn’t mist but smoke from still-smouldering fires. Ash is floating on the breeze. He watches an arrow of barking geese spiral down towards a pond beyond the camp and, in an echo of the noise, hears a bugler sound the reveille. Breakfast time. He feels in his tunic pocket to see if he has any iron rations left and finds his wallet instead. The picture of Dorothy is still in it, unseen for more than a year. He replaces it guiltily. Whatever they had done in bed together, it hadn’t been sex. He knows that now. And whatever it was he felt for her, it had not been love. Love is what he has found with Adilah. She has caused some chemical change in his brain. She is his single thought during the day, and when he sleeps at night he dreams of her. He pats his breast pocket and feels his dog tags. Once he has put these on he feels his army identity return. It is dawn, a significant time for a soldier. He breathes deep and savours it as though it is his last.

The sound of a woman crying in pain rises from the square. When Andrew peeps over the sill, he freezes. The scar-faced major is dragging Adilah by her hair. She is trying to stand but keeps stumbling. The major will not let her get her footing. He is carrying
a pistol in his hand. When she trips and falls on her face, he presses the muzzle of the gun against her head and shouts: ‘Up! Get up, you bitch! Get up, or I swear I’ll put a bullet in your head!’ He pulls on her hair again, making her whimper. She crawls on for a few yards but, unable to get her balance, staggers again. She is sobbing. Andrew screws up his eyes and sinks his teeth into his fist. He looks down at the square again. Adilah is kneeling. The major is standing over her, holding the pistol to her head. He has an arm stretched out. ‘Up! Up!’

Andrew turns away, presses his back against the wall and draws his knees up to his chin to make himself as small as possible. He can still hear Adilah. To block her out, he presses the palms of his hands against his ears. He can still hear her. He looks over the sill again, down to the square. The major has his pistol pressed against Adilah’s head. At this moment Andrew knows he is going to pull the trigger. He also knows that he would rather surrender his own life than watch Adilah die. The ache of fear that has defined him for so long lifts from his heart. He understands what he must do. There can be no cowardice. He stumbles towards the stairs, half falling down them because his legs have gone to sleep. Five seconds later he is standing outside the building with his hands above his head. ‘Enough!’ he shouts. ‘Let her go.’

Keeping his arm straight, the major raises his pistol so that it is pointing at Andrew’s head. Without looking at Adilah he presses his boot against her shoulder and pushes her to the ground. As he walks towards his prisoner, his gun still raised, he puts a whistle to his mouth and blows.

London. Present day. Five months after the crash

THE LIGHTS IN THE AUDITORIUM OF THE GREAT HALL DIMMED AND
simultaneously rose on Daniel standing in one corner of the stage. He was at an intricately carved walnut lectern that was as old as the college itself. When the coughing and murmuring subsided, he waited a further thirty seconds so that the silence could deepen, a speaker’s trick.

‘Some of you …’

He stopped.

This was not part of the technique. His thoughts had liquefied; could not find a grip in his mind. He felt dazed, waiting for them to cool and harden. He was aware of the students in the front row looking at one another; noticed the red light of a camera. Was it pointing at him? Yes, he remembered, this lecture was being broadcast live as a webcast. He tapped his notes. Smiled.

‘Some of you may have attended this lecture out of curiosity about its title,’ he began again, his voice amplified through speaker panels at the back of the hall. ‘Some of you, those who never check their pigeon holes, may not have been aware that this lecture had a title.’ He paused, looked around at the blank faces and thought: hmm, tough crowd. ‘Some of you may have attended this lecture because you were curious to know what a lecture is.’ There were smiles at this. Can you smile louder please? he thought. At least he
had their attention. ‘The title, for the record, is “Apes or Angels: whose side are you on?” Those of you sitting your finals in a few weeks may be wondering what the hell this has to do with nematodes. Well … everything.’

Daniel clicked a button and an illustration of a nonsegmented roundworm was projected on to a large screen behind him. ‘The nematode, though lacking in biological complexity, is perfectly adapted to its environment. And I mean
perfectly
.’ He made a hard chopping motion, one hand against the other. ‘It
cannot
be improved upon. In fact, over millions of years of evolution, it has reached a peak of efficiency and perfection. A zenith. An apotheosis. If it evolved legs or ears or eyebrows it would go from being a biological success story to a biological flop overnight – species survival to species extinction in one generation. Now, what is the explanation for this perfection? The religious mind doesn’t even
try
to explain it. It gives all the credit to the Big Fella, to God, to Allah. In other words, it gives up, it surrenders, it regresses to childhood fantasy. This lack of explanation is then passed from religious mind to religious mind like a replicating virus. It then reinforces itself through repetition. People believe it because they want to believe it. Priests preach to the converted … And I suspect I am doing the same here.’

He paused again. ‘Is there anyone present who is not an atheist?’ No hands were raised. ‘Good. Although if there had been a believer among you I suspect they would not have raised their hand. That is how peer pressure works. That is how religion works. Our job as scientists is to save religious people from their own ignorance, their own herd mentality. We want to encourage individualism and free thinking. You cannot call yourself a true scientist if you believe in God. As a scientist it is your duty to dismiss religion as the empty, shallow and infantile propaganda it is. As Einstein put it, “The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.” ’

Daniel walked to the front row, feeling intoxicated by what he was about to say, about the perversity of it, the sheer, private
recklessness of it. ‘Imagine I had a vision. I think I’ve seen an angel, say. My first reaction might be to think it was religious. But there are always rational explanations if you look for them. Always. It would almost certainly – we’re talking about a probability of 99.9 per cent here – have been a hallucination brought on by medical factors. You know, dehydration, exposure, sunstroke, hypothermia, medication, that sort of thing. After all, it’s not hard to have a hallucination. Such have been the advances in neuroscience, it is now even possible to reproduce visions in laboratory conditions. Mystery solved.’

A student at the front raised a hand.

‘Yes?’

‘What the hell has this to do with nematodes?’

There was appreciative laughter. Daniel joined in with it. ‘Very good. Nice timing.’ He drew himself up and stared directly at the student who had asked the question. Theatre again. ‘Though a nematode is perfectly adapted to its environment that does not mean it might not try something else, a random mutation, an experiment that will help it. Like the Madagascan frog born with an eyelid on the roof of its mouth.’ Another slide clicked in the carousel. ‘Evolution is capricious. Why else would human embryos develop gills at twenty-four days only for them to disappear almost immediately, then, later, after five months in the womb, grow a coat of hair, only to shed it straight away? Nature likes to try things on. See if they fit.’

He was talking without notes now, pacing back and forth. It felt like an out-of-body experience, as if he were high above the lecture theatre looking down. He was like a god. A zoology god with a room-filling ego. And he knew he had his students with him for the performance. ‘We can be absolutely certain we evolved from apes and that any quirks we have are the result of random mutation. We can be absolutely certain there are no such things as angels because it is not biologically possible for angels to have evolved. They have no physical dimension, after all. No corporeal presence. They are immaterial. Figments of the imagination.’

He reached the lectern again, stopped pacing and leaned
forward, riding the silence. ‘You may have been reading in the papers about a ring-tailed lemur that has been born in captivity at the Wildlife Foundation in Massachusetts. It appears to have two small dark feathers on its back. In a few days I’m flying to Boston to film it, so I’ll report back on the accuracy or otherwise of this observation. The point is this – Creationists in the Midwest are hailing it as evidence of Intelligent Design, because they say it could not be explained in terms of evolution by natural selection. An “atheist’s nightmare”, they are calling it. Actually, it is a
perfect
example of natural selection. The feathers can easily be attributed to the Darwinian process of crafting fit organisms with no plan, no view for the future and no mechanisms more sophisticated than random genetic shuffling. This is the “crossing over” that occurs in reproductive cells during “random mutation”. There is no intelligent designer, no supreme being, no watchmaker – and even if there was, he would be blind.’

‘I have a question.’

Daniel shielded his eyes to see who had spoken. There was a man standing at the back. He was wearing a long white shirt and baggy trousers, the traditional Muslim shalwar kameez.

‘Yes?’

‘What if you are wrong?’

Daniel looked puzzled. Slowly a smile melted his features. It turned to laughter, a splutter that mounted in intensity. He propped himself against the lectern, doubled up and wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands. Eventually he caught his breath and managed to say, ‘I don’t know!’ before collapsing into giggles again. The sounds of coughing, murmuring and zipping of bags could be heard in the auditorium now and, after a couple of minutes, some of the students began leaving, their seats clattering into the upright position, their embarrassment palpable. ‘Sorry, folks,’ Daniel said into the microphone as his laughter finally subsided. ‘Let’s leave it there for the day.’

A young woman with studs in her lip, nose and brow approached the stage. She was holding a camera. ‘For the newspaper?’The raised intonation at the end of the sentence suggested she was Australian.
He had forgotten he had agreed to be profiled for the college newspaper. ‘Oh right, yeah. Sure. Where do you want to take it?’

The rest of the students were now leaving. All except one, who was walking down the steps towards the lectern. ‘
Salaam alaikum
,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind me sitting in on your lecture.’

It was Hamdi, and Daniel could now see he was also wearing a chequered Shemagh scarf and was growing a beard. ‘Not at all. How did you … ?’

‘I just walked in. I was going to tell security that I was a friend of yours, but when I reported to the gatehouse there was no one there.’ He shrugged. ‘So here I am.’

Daniel extended his hand for Hamdi to shake. ‘Glad you came.’

‘You rushing off?’

A tap of the watch face. ‘I do have to be somewhere. But … Fancy a quick drink?’

‘An alcoholic drink?’

‘No, I meant …’

Hamdi grinned. ‘I know plenty of Muslims who drink whisky. The Koran only mentions wine by name. But as it happens I don’t drink whisky either. I could go for a coffee though.’

When they had met at the school, and again later when they had talked on the phone, Daniel had found it hard to concentrate on Hamdi’s voice. Now he noticed Martha’s teacher had a hypnotic loud-quiet, long-short speech pattern, as if his batteries were running low, or he was experimenting with an unfamiliar language. There was little consistency in the way he placed emphasis: it was always on the first syllable of a word, but the word could be anywhere in the sentence.

They walked to the refectory where Hamdi found a seat while Daniel queued up for skinny lattes and cream cheese bagels. An inchoate thought was beginning to take hold: that if he could get a sample of Hamdi’s DNA he could have it profiled in the university’s lab. It might answer a question that was nagging him. The problem was how to extract it. A hair follicle? Some chewing gum he spat out? There might be enough of a saliva trace on the
rim of the paper cup. ‘I bought you a bagel as well,’ he said when he returned to the table.

‘Thank you,’ Hamdi said.

‘You don’t have to eat it. I needed something. Always feel ravenous after a lecture. Now, I didn’t answer your question.’

‘My question was ridiculous.’

‘No, it was a good question.’

‘It made you laugh.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened. I sort of lost it. Didn’t mean to be rude. God knows what the students thought.’

‘Scientists like yourself only understand the world in terms of questions that have an answer.’ Hamdi paused but did not take a sip of coffee. His androgynous face was empty of expression and a dark sheen on his eyelids made him look as if he was wearing eye shadow.

‘What if I am wrong, you asked. Well, I’m not wrong. I have certainty.’

‘Just as the believer in God has certainty? I am a believer, by the way. I raised my hand in that lecture when you asked if anyone was a believer, but you could not see me at the back.’