Monkey Wars

by Richard Kurti

  “But it wasn’t just Tyrell,” retorted Twitcher. “You said it yourself—they all knew what was going on. Every single langur took food from Tyrell, sent their young to join his army, cheered his victories. They were all collaborators; now they have to answer for it.”

  “How?” asked Papina with disarming simplicity. “With another massacre? Is that really what Fig died for?”

  “I didn’t fight just to forgive!” cried Twitcher.

  “We fought so that truth could prevail,” said Mico. “And it will. Each and every langur needs to confess their role in Tyrell’s regime, acknowledge they were wrong—”

  “Talking!” Twitcher spat the word out with contempt. “Is that it? Just talking!”

  “He held them in his sway!” Mico insisted. “You can’t imagine what it was like to be caught up in that rush of power.”

  “You broke free. They didn’t.” Twitcher pointed out of the window indignantly. “Which is why they’re guilty.”

  Papina looked anxiously from Mico to Twitcher. Now that the pressures of battle were lifted, the cracks of old rivalries were opening up again. “I share your anger,” she said, trying to ease the tension, “but I don’t think it’s going to help.”

  She swung over to one of the windows and looked pensively out across the lawns where groups of langurs were huddled together. “Look at them. It’s like they’ve woken from a dream. A nightmare. Monkeys question—it’s what we do. We question and we test; we break and we discover. It’s messy, but it’s what makes us what we are. Tyrell made them forget that.”

  Papina turned back to the rhesus. “If we storm out there and punish, kill, exile, their instincts will be to fight back. But if we give them the space to see what they’ve done, to understand how they betrayed themselves…” She looked at Twitcher. “To win the war we needed to believe that all langurs were guilty, but to win the peace we need to believe that most of them are innocent.”

  She sat down, letting her words do their work, and one by one the monkeys started to tap the ground with their fists. Tentatively the support grew until the room reverberated with the sound of thumping.

  There were notable exceptions—Twitcher sat immobile and silent; Cadby crossed his arms defiantly, refusing to join in the applause; young Joop also sat in silence—he too felt that the war would not be finished until more langur blood had been shed.

  For now, though, the dissenters would have to remain silent. The majority of rhesus favored reconciliation, so that became the new policy.

  —

  The argument had rattled Mico. There was so much to sort out—food supplies, living quarters, security, education—all of which depended on rhesus and langur living together peacefully.

  “Can this really work?” he asked Papina as they walked across the Great Lawn.

  “Whatever we do, it has to be better than Tyrell’s cruelty,” she said calmly.

  “We may just have replaced order with chaos.”

  “Stop!” Papina looked at him, her eyes dancing with conviction. “Don’t talk like that. Now we can dare to hope—and that’s progress.”

  “You can’t eat hope,” said Mico.

  Papina laughed. “You’d be surprised how long it can keep you going.”

  As a surprise, she had prepared Tyrell’s old room at the top of the summer house tower for the two of them and, without another word, she took Mico by the hand and led him there.

  It was beautiful, dressed with fruits and flowers, scented with spices, the floor covered with fresh palm leaves.

  As Mico and Papina lay together that afternoon, the rest of the world faded away….There was nothing but the two of them.

  —

  Mico woke with a start. He could tell from the background noise of the city that it was the dead of night, but for the first time in many moons he didn’t feel tired.

  Gently he disentangled himself from Papina’s embrace, took a refreshing drink from the water bowl, and gazed at the carved map on the wall where Tyrell had laid out his vision of the city without humans. Now that the regime was toppled, you could see the map for what it really was—a deluded work of insanity.

  How could anyone ever have taken it seriously? But they had. The entire langur troop followed Tyrell way beyond the realms of reason.

  Just to reassure himself that the city remained unmolested, Mico walked to the window to breathe in the sticky night air.

  A mist hung above the rooftops diffusing the lights and bathing everything in a surreal glow. It was strange to look across the skyline and not fear what was out there, to enjoy the view without planning an escape route. Peace would take some getting used to.

  Then just as he turned back, Mico saw a movement down on the lawns. He peered into the gloom…and gradually his eyes started to make out figures sitting silently under the night sky. The more he stared, the more monkeys he saw…family after family…the whole troop of langur monkeys had gathered and were all staring up at him, as if in a trance.

  “What are you waiting for?” Mico called down to them. His question was met with silence, as if none of them dared speak.

  “Tell me!” Mico called out, now starting to feel a little unnerved. “What are you waiting for?”

  And then an anonymous voice from deep in the crowd replied, “You. We’re waiting for you.”

  The crowd of monkeys all murmured their agreement.

  Mico was puzzled. His eyes ran across their faces, the masses of white eyes blinking up at him.

  Then a cold shiver ran down his spine, as Mico realized that all these monkeys, silent and obedient, were waiting to be led.

  As he stared at the passive faces, he saw that they wanted to be told what to think, how to think, when to think. They wanted to be told right from wrong. They wanted to be given a set of rules carved in stone that they could meekly follow.

  Nausea rose from the pit of Mico’s stomach as he sensed the utter futility of his victory. He had brought a tyrant down, only to find that at the deepest level, the langur didn’t want freedom at all.

  The corruption wasn’t just Tyrell or his henchmen; it was the weakness in the monkeys’ own hearts.

  The tyrant’s dying words rang, painful and shrill, in Mico’s ears: Kill me, and someone else will rise up to take my place.…

  “No. NO. NO!” He staggered back from the window, gripped by panic.

  “Mico!”

  He spun round and saw Papina standing in the gloom.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, clasping him. She could feel him trembling, as if he had a fever. “Talk to me!”

  “It’s not over. It’ll never be over,” he whispered.

  “Shhh. Calm down,” she said, stroking his brow. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He looked up at her, his face creased with a terrible sadness, and shook his head. “Tyrell was right: monkeys are born to be led.”

  He slumped down in shame.

  Gently, firmly, Papina put her hands around him, lifted him up and looked into his eyes. “You’re wrong, Mico. You have to be.”

  “They don’t want freedom—”

  “How can they want what they’ve never had?” she insisted. “Freedom is the thing to live and die for. It was strong enough to bring down a tyrant.” She cradled his face lovingly in her hands. “Trust me, once the langur taste freedom, they’ll never want to lose it.”

  Mico put his arms around Papina and held her tightly, hoping from the depths of his soul that she was right.

  —

  There was one langur who held his nerve as the python stalked the cemetery—Breri.

  Hiding under a tombstone, he waited until nightfall when the snake was so gorged it could barely move; then he scrambled up an old vine, vaulted over the wall and scampered off into the labyrinth of backstreets.

  If he’d been wise, Breri would have chosen to disappear and live out his life as a lone exile. But there was anger burning inside him now, anger that his brother had destroyed a great empire
and stolen his life.

  Breri refused to accept that everything was lost. He would not take the outrage of this massacre meekly. He would be avenged on Mico and all his accomplices.

  Maybe, by some miracle, other langurs had survived. And maybe they shared his rage….

  —

  A few streets away, a young female langur sat huddled in the shadows of a derelict statue of some long-forgotten colonial leader. In her arms was a newborn infant, a male who looked just like his father.

  Hister had been betrayed by everyone. All she had now was this baby monkey, and she gazed at him with pure, untainted love. She didn’t know what the future held for him. But as she looked into his big round eyes, innocent of all the troubles that had condemned him to be an outcast, Hister vowed that her son would not grow up scavenging in the slums.

  But she also knew she could do nothing on her own. She needed to find like-minded souls to help her.

  —

  Mico sensed the change just after dawn. The air had suddenly become dry and crisp; all the heaviness had gone.

  The monsoon was finally over.

  He looked out of the window. A brilliant blue sky arched over the city; there wasn’t a cloud in sight. It was as if they’d all fled in the night.

  Mico smiled. Maybe this time the rain clouds had gone forever.

  Maybe there would be no more storms and floods.

  Maybe.

  “Why monkeys?”

  It’s the question I get asked all the time by students who have read the book.

  Let me explain, because although the road to a dark, violent fable about monkeys was long and complex, as I write this I also realize it was very rational.

  It all began with my father, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1922. For centuries Vienna had been a bastion of learning and culture, home to the brilliant Mozart, Beethoven, Zweig, Freud and Wittgenstein. But in March 1938, the Nazis marched in and Vienna became enemy territory for my father and all Jews. Not only did the Nazis want to annihilate Jews, they wanted to create a totalitarian empire.

  My father’s parents managed to get him a transit visa, and when he was sixteen he escaped and became a refugee in Palestine.

  My grandparents were not so fortunate.

  On June 2, 1942, they were put on Transport 24, prisoner numbers 727 and 728 on Train 205, and deported from Vienna to Belarus. They were murdered by the Nazi regime in the Maly Trostenets death camp.

  By the time he was twenty-five, my father had resettled in England, where he married and started a family. Not surprisingly, when I was growing up in the 1960s, a strong sense of political morality was instilled in me. My father believed that some governments were right and some were wrong, and that this really mattered, for the stakes were high. Democracy needed to be taken seriously.

  Even though I understood this, a worrying thought nagged at my teenage mind: it’s easy to have a clear sense of right and wrong when you’re a victim, but what if you happen to be born on the side of the oppressors?

  If I had been a child in the 1930s, and my parents had been part of the Nazi hierarchy and encouraged me to join the Hitler Youth, would I have had the insight to see that they were wrong? And more importantly, would I have had the courage to do anything about it? Would I have been willing to sacrifice everything—friends, family, security—for a moral principle? Would I have had the strength of character to disagree with everyone I loved?

  I knew that some people did. Members of the underground resistance in many countries took a stand even though it put them in mortal danger.

  Would I have been one of those?

  The question haunted me, and I felt the only way to try and find the answer was to write about it. I needed to explore the dilemmas dramatically, but I didn’t want to write a specific World War II story because I sensed that the underlying problem was much bigger, much more universal.

  Not sure what the solution was, I parked the idea.

  Yet as I grew up and carved out a career as a screenwriter, time and again I found myself being drawn back to the old moral dilemma. I would find myself in script meetings where powerful film producers had strong opinions. These powerful producers are used to having the last word, and they often surround themselves with people who give them unqualified support. This doesn’t mean, however, that the producers are right. Sometimes the one who writes your paycheck wants to revamp the project in completely the wrong direction.

  What does the writer do? If you protest you risk being fired. If you follow the leader you knowingly head in the wrong direction. I quickly realized that wherever there’s a hierarchy—in government, business, finance and teaching, for instance—people face similar choices.

  In peace or war, in countries around the world, the underlying problem persists: what is the difference between strength and power? Is it better to compromise or to resist? When the powerful are weak but the strong have no power, the problem becomes most acute.

  Still I didn’t know how to write about all this. If I wrote about war or business or politics it would become a specific story about a particular segment of society rather than about the underlying philosophical problem.

  I parked the idea again.

  After I became a father, I felt a new urgency to the quest to find an answer. Watching my son negotiate the harsh politics of the playground motivated me to try and explore the problem of strength and power in a way that young people could enjoy and comprehend. It seemed important to try to make my son understand how individual decisions made on the most personal level can ultimately be connected to global events.

  The issue I wanted to write about was getting bigger and bigger, but still I had no idea how to explore it. A direct philosophical study would be too dry; I wanted to take the reader on a journey through the problem, so that he or she could experience the difficult choices that would have to be faced. I wanted the reader to understand the sacrifices that would have to be made.

  Then, thirty years after the original problem troubled me as a teenager, the answer came into my life: a colleague told me a true story about the ongoing struggle between rival monkey troops on the streets of Kolkata.

  I was instantly intrigued. I realized that if I went back up the evolutionary tree, I could write about all humans by writing about none of them. By writing about monkeys, I could tell a story that cut across all the specifics of culture, time and place.

  I came up with my plan and launched into the research, learning about the different species of monkey, the reality of their lives and their battles on the streets of Indian cities.

  I had to push at the limits of what monkeys can do, but I always tried to root their behavior in reality. Some monkeys do use tools and weapons. They have complex troop hierarchies and know about fierce loyalty and bitter rivalry, and their troops have both ambitious leaders and passive followers. As I watched documentaries like Project Nim and read scientific studies about monkey psychology, I was continually amazed at the similarities between humans and monkeys.

  By the time I’d finished the novel, I felt that I had really explored the problem that had first troubled me as a child.

  But did I have an answer?

  The question was put to me directly by a bookseller after a signing session: What would I have done in Nazi Germany? Would I have had the courage of my convictions? Easy to write a story about courage, but have I actually got any?

  I hesitated. How can we really know until we’re put in that position?

  “I hope I’d have had the strength to do the right thing,” I answered, then immediately realized what a weak answer that was.

  Then I thought about Mico and Papina. How would they have answered the question?

  Having been through the epic journey of Monkey Wars, having fought and lost, and sacrificed and loved, perhaps they would answer that the best way to fight tyranny is to stop it taking root in the first place.

  We need to be perpetually vigilant, to defend freedom of speech and democracy, t
o encourage dissent and the free flow of information, to stand up to intellectual bullying as much as physical bullying, and to be unafraid of being the lone voice.

  It’s not the easiest path, but it’s what made Mico and Papina heroes. I’m happy to take my lead from them. I hope you will too.

  GRAY LANGUR

  With bodies measuring up to thirty inches, and tails another forty inches, the langur are large, athletic and strong.

  According to Hindu legend, a langur monkey was once caught stealing mangoes from a giant’s garden in Sri Lanka. As punishment, the giant set his tail alight. Although the langur escaped, his face and hands were burned, which is why although their fur is gray, the langur have black hands and faces to this day.

  The langur eat leaves, fruit, and buds and flowers, along with insects and tree bark. Living in medium to large groups, langur troops will usually have one dominant male, but things can get pretty bloodthirsty….

  Sometimes adolescent males who have been expelled from the main group form a bachelor pack that returns to harass the troop.

  If the bachelor pack manages to kill the troop leader, they can get locked in a bloody power struggle, killing the infants of the previous leader, then killing each other until only one dominant male remains alive.

  RHESUS MACAQUE

  Smaller than the langur, rhesus monkeys have brown or gray fur and pink faces. They are mainly plant eaters but do supplement leaves and roots with insects and small animals.

  The rhesus are notorious for moving from rural areas into the cities, where they pilfer and beg food from humans, sometimes becoming a serious nuisance.

  Rhesus troops can be very large, up to 180 individuals, and their social hierarchy is matriarchal. They interact with each other using sounds (coos, grunts, warbles, screeches), facial expressions (the “fear grimace” and the “silent bared-teeth” face) and gestures.

  BARBARY APES

  Even though the species is often called the Barbary ape, it is in fact a monkey. It’s found in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and Morocco, in parts of Libya, and most famously on the Rock of Gibraltar, where the Barbaries often invade human settlements. (In the novel, they came from far-off lands, where they had terrorized humans.)