Bible of the Dead

by Tom Knox

  Almost reflexively, Jake took out his camera from his rucksack, and focussed an image.

  Rittisak was edgy and fidgeting. Chemda was anxiously gesturing:

  ‘Come on Jake quick, we need to go.’

  ‘Just a couple more shots, wait, just a few more.’

  He knelt in the dust and grabbed some images; one, two four. Raising his tiny camera to get a wider angle shot, he stepped back; then he looked at the digital image, and realized he hadn’t properly framed the four soldiers who had just walked into the clearing with guns.

  The four soldiers with guns, who were now aiming the guns at Jake and Chemda and Rittisak.

  ‘Chemda!’

  Way Too Fucking Late. How stupid was this? How stupid had he been? So quickly, so easily: they had been captured. The soldiers were smiling, and laughing, waving those guns. One was snapping orders, triumphant. Shouting in Jake’s face.

  Jake reeled at his own idiocy. His rasping stupidity. It was his fault. If they hadn’t lingered for him to take the photos, the soldiers might not have overheard them, marched off the road, and snatched them.

  Rittisak had a gun pointed to his head. Chemda likewise. Jake felt the numbness of defeat. He allowed himself to be handcuffed. Everyone was handcuffed. The soldiers were arguing. Smiling and laughing – yet arguing. The youngest soldier handcuffed them all in brisk and ruthless silence. The apparent captain shouted his order. The youngest soldier shrugged, and shook his head.

  Again the soldiers argued. The captain pointed, with a metal bar in his hand – he was giving it to the younger soldier, and barking his harsh Khmer sentences as he did. A metal bar? In a lonely clearing? Chemda was covering her face with frightened hands.

  The revelation came to Jake like the flush of a sudden and terrible sickness. The soldiers were deciding whether to kill them.

  A bird sang melodiously, somewhere. It was done. The soldier saluted. The arguing ended. Jake could hear a car on the road, and a radio, and a cockerel crowing the tropical morning. He could smell cooking, he could smell woodsmoke and forest and sun-baked garbage.

  This is how it happens, he thought. Not with choirs or angels or poetic drama, but with the smell of garbage.

  Chemda tried to speak; the soldiers ignored her. They pushed Rittisak to his knees, making him buckle and kowtow. They kicked Jake to his knees, too: a foot brutally stamped the back of his legs so he crumpled into a praying position: supplicant in the sunny dust, praying by Pol Pot’s grave.

  The garbage stank.

  He twisted to see Chemda. She was being led to the side, like she was special. Jake knew, with a shudder of quiet despair, precisely how his death was going to happen. He’d been to the killing fields of Cheung Ek. This is how they did it. This is how the Khmer Rouge slaughtered their countless victims, with a primitive and frugal efficiency. Make them kneel down, swing the iron bar, crush the skull from behind, next please. Why waste a bullet on the unperson.

  He could hear Chemda crying. The soldiers spoke quietly now. The decision was made. So they were just doing their job. Rittisak was staring at the sky. Jake stared at Pol Pot’s grave. The incense was still burning. A trail of ants led from the brushwood to the shrivelled apples, to an empty bottle of chilli sauce.

  The soldier approached with a rusty iron bar, a car axle, maybe. He was going to swing the bar and bash out their brains. Jake closed his eyes, waiting to die. Chemda sobbed in the darkness of his mind. He could hear the man giving orders. Yes, that’s it, kill them now. The world devolved to a still silent point in the singularity of his life: here at the end of his life, he thought of his sister, and laughter, and his mother, and sadness, and Chemda, and Mama Brand Instant Rice Noodles gently rotting in the sun.

  Chapter 28

  Monkey lab, thought Julia, what’s that in Russian? Didn’t she write that down somewhere?

  Grabbing her notebook, she turned to the middle-aged man with broken wire-rimmed taped-together spectacles, standing in the desolate, car-less car-park of Sukhumi Railway Station.

  ‘Pitomnik Obez . . . yan.’

  The man nodded. ‘Da! Pitomnik Obezyan.’ His nylon shirt was greasy, his chin unshaved, his tie was stained. His helpful smile was keen.

  The man was pointing down the road. Julia followed his gesture, with a reflux of dismay: the streets in front of the station were pot-holed and syphilitic, the pavements cracked and weed-sprouted; this town on the polluted shores of the Black Sea seemed to be like every other town on this polluted eastern shore of the Black Sea, decaying, smelly, depressed, half destroyed by recent wars of irredentism and secession. A post communist ex-Soviet statelet at its worst.

  ‘Da!’ The man pointed, once again: his hand firm and vigorous, his fingernails dirty. He seemed to be telling her to go straight, then right, then up a hill. ‘Pitomnik Obezyan!’

  ‘Spassibo,’ said Julia, putting away her notebook, quickly walking on.

  The weariness was lurking. She was very tired from the flight from Paris to Moscow, the flight from Moscow to Adler, and the train down the grey-drizzled waters of the Black Sea littoral. But Julia was nearing her goal, so a surge of adrenalin was masking that tiredness. She walked quickly into the town.

  The subtropical sea port was chilly and dank, and alienating. Julia wished Alex was here. In the end she had decided to tell him what she was doing, but she had been entirely unsurprised when he had declined to join her. He had said ‘Sweetheart, you are mad,’ and he had tried to dissuade her, but she wasn’t to be dissuaded. And so here she was.

  Maybe he was right, she was mad. She was in Abkhazia. Even the destination was mad.

  What was she hoping to find? The truth? Yes, the truth no one else would try to uncover, the truth about the skulls, the caves, the bones, the cave art, the truth about Annika’s death. Perhaps she would find nothing.

  She passed a brace of cafes where women with ugly leggings sat in the grubby windows staring with expressions of grief at their own babies yowling in plastic prams. A tramp was slumped in the shelter of a broken tram stop plastered with peeling adverts, its glass grimy and cracked. Office blocks that seemed too derelict and window-smashed to be useful nonetheless disgorged workers heading home for the night.

  Julia glanced at her watch. Would it still be open? She so wanted not to stay here a night. The place was demonically gloomy and depressing.

  No. She had to grasp her fears, and defeat them. Remember what the man had said at the station. Top of the hill. That’s what he said, in Russian. Or had he actually been speaking Georgian? Or Abkhazian? Who knew?

  Julia marched on, looking left and right as she did: wary, alone, conspicuous.

  The shame of the place, Sukhumi, was that it must once have been pretty: a crude, demotic but nonetheless charming spa resort, a place celebrated in those idealistic communist summers of fifty years ago, the summers depicted in faded photos of the Khrushchev era, communism under the palm trees, where white pasty Russian workers with their fat happy wives in big black bathing suits had their four weeks’ holiday in the sunny sanatoria of the Black Sea coast, in Yalta and Sochi – and Sukhumi.

  Now only the palm trees remained, trees diseased and old, trees dusty and sad, trees shredded by bullets, or trees just dying a slow death in front of a closed constructivist cinema. Ice cream stands were shut for the winter. One street was dominated by scruffy men drinking beer in a damp yellow tent. The cold of evening approached.

  Her route was taking her straight uphill now, crossing hopeless and rusty tramlines, getting stares from Slavically pale shoppers and darker Muslim and Georgian faces. She paused on a cracked street corner. A noisome smell was emanating from somewhere. The smell of a badly run zoo?

  Her instincts were confirmed. A few yards later she was confronted by a chain-link fence, ripped uselessly in places, and a sign high up on the fence which said, in several scripts and languages, one of them English: Institute of Experimental Primate Pathology and Therapy.

  The gate was open
. She crossed. Lab-workers in dirty white coats passed her as she entered; the staff were leaving the compound, going home for the night, they gave the better-dressed western woman a few suspicious glances, and then just apathetic glances.

  Julia was alone.

  The compound was huge: a large, lush, drizzly and litter-strewn garden full of dusty cypress trees and rusty metal cages where apes and monkeys sat balding and fidgeting; some of the condemned and neglected creatures had numbers tattooed on their pale shaven chests; little monkeys, with the saddest eyes, stared up at the curious stranger, like neglected children discovered in a Romanian orphanage.

  Julia remembered the feeling she got when she descended the steel ladder into the Cavern of the Swelling, in the Cham des Bondons. This was similar: a descent, physical, temporal, and moral, down into one of the world’s darker places.

  She passed more cages and enclosures. One contained a pair of forlorn gibbons, another seemed empty – but then she saw, squatting behind a cardboard box, an orangutan – apparently sobbing. A mangy gorilla was hunched in another corner of another cage, next to a pair of wilted chimpanzees, quite inert with unhappiness, smeared with their own filth.

  A much smaller cage between these larger enclosures imprisoned a delicate little monkey, a rhesus maybe. It was screaming and gabbling, running frenziedly from side to side, touching one row of bars then shrieking and running to the other side to touch the bars, and shrieking again: like it was electrocuted every time it touched the bars. Half its head had been shaved.

  It was surrounded by orange peel and scattered grain, and green-yellow pools of urine.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said to herself, almost brought to tears. ‘Jesus Jesus Jesus.’

  This place was disgusting. Why couldn’t they just keep the animals clean, or let them go?

  For the money? Maybe. She had read in her research that the impoverished Abkhazians made money from it as a zoo in the summer: people came to laugh at the shit flinging gibbons.

  The main door loomed. Julia reminded herself of her persona, constructed for the email exchange with Sergei Yakulovich. She was a top archaeologist, a friend of Ghislaine. She was writing a paper about his career and achievements, following his tragic end. She would be very honoured to meet an old colleague of Ghislaine, like the great Sergei Yakulovich.

  The emails had worked to a point, although she had elicited no direct information from Yakulovich. But he had eventually, after some persuasion, agreed to a meeting. If you really wish to know more about my work, come and see me. I am a busy man.

  And so here she was.

  On the shores of the Black Sea, in a primate lab, in Abkhazia.

  A sign seemed to indicate the main entrance. She pressed a big Bakelite bellbutton and the door opened. A brassy-blonde secretary with blotchy skin and bad teeth sat in reception packing her handbag for the end of the working day; with a friendly shrug at Julia’s pitiful attempt at speaking phrasebook Russian, she showed Julia directly into the Director’s office: a large room with peeling paintwork, a grand wooden desk, two big clumsy telephones, and faded photos and maps on the wall.

  The man himself was seated at the desk. Sergei Yakulovich. Onetime editor of The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. The Director of the Institute of Experimental Primate Pathology.

  Yakulovich stood as she entered; he smiled shyly and tragically, and shook her hand and swapped pleasantries; he spoke good English, and was proud of it. He spoke even better French and German, apparently, as he informed her. He invited her to sit, as he returned to his seat behind his desk. Julia gazed. With his grubby brown suit and wistful face he looked like a pensionable version of one of his own monkeys.

  Julia attempted a question, but she was interrupted by the blonde woman with the snaggly teeth – she was carrying a tray with two tulip-shaped glasses of black tea, and a saucer of scarlet raspberry jam. The glasses tinkled as they were set down. Sergei Yakulovich tapped his watch and smiled at the receptionist, indicating she could go home at last.

  She put on her plastic coat and said goodbye.

  They were alone in the Primate Laboratory. A cold rainy evening was falling outside.

  ‘So. Shall we begin?’ The director was stirring jam into his tea as he spoke. ‘I am honoured by the presence of an esteemed scientist from Canada. The reason I would not reply to your emails in more detail is that we get many mischievous requests. Journalists and so forth. I am not a suspicious man but our science here has been caricatured once too often. But you have the manners to come and visit us. So I shall respond.’ A tiny, telling pause. ‘As you can perhaps surmise –’ his sad old eyes looked briefly at the peeling paint of the room, then through a window, at the Abkhazian dusk. ‘We are not the place we were. We are not blessed with so many serious scientific visitors these days. Just sightseers, and those who wilfully misrepresent our work. Work we are very proud of . . .’ He smiled, suddenly, a pip of raspberry jam lodged between his yellow front teeth. ‘Now. You are writing a paper on my friend Ghislaine Quoinelles? That is correct? Poor Ghislaine. A good colleague. Killed by some . . . madman I understand? I try to follow the news here, but it is difficult, we have so much to do . . . in our remote little fortress of science!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘I’m writing about Ghislaine. As I mentioned in the emails, I am interested in many aspects of his life. How his research intersected with your work, what made you colleagues. Maybe you could tell us what you have been doing here.’

  Another monologue ensued. The director had a kind of spiel.

  ‘This was the very first primate testing centre in the world. We were once the envy of the West. A thousand scientists worked here at our peak. As you can attest, our behavioural and medical experiments put us at the very forefront of the most groundbreaking medical discoveries. We even trained monkeys for space travel. Look.’

  The bald director pointed at one black and white photo pinned to the wall behind. The snap showed a pair of fragile, gawky, long-limbed and nervous monkeys strapped into two airline seats, with big grim metal bars to keep them in place. The monkeys wore white headbands giving their names in Cyrillic.

  ‘Yerosha and Dryoma. Early pioneers of Soviet space fight. Yuri Gagarin’s direct ancestors!’

  His laughter was sad.

  ‘These were the glory days. But then we had . . . perestroika, and then the Georgian-Abkhaz war. The soldiers stole primates as mascots, some were killed in crossfire. They nearly destroyed us.’ He exhaled, wistfully. ‘Most of our scientists fled to set up a new centre in Adler, in Russia, many monkeys were killed. But I prefer to think of happier times.’

  The director waffled on about the palmy days of the institute, when Ho Chi Minh and Brezhnev and Marshall Zhukov and Madame Mao were regular guests, when the scientists would fly to Texas, in America!, to give lectures to the backward westerners. Julia found her senses wandering. The smell of monkey shit was detectable even inside the office. The sound of screaming, of that mad little monkey in the furthest cage, was mercifully muffled.

  She nudged the dialogue along. ‘Tell me about the cross-breeding experiments?’

  Sergei paused for a moment, and stared straight into her eyes, quite disconcertingly; then he continued his apparently well-worn speech.

  ‘In the 1920s there was a plan to create a man-ape hybrid. Supposedly this would have become a Soviet superman, so the media has it, in their sensational way – but the truth is Stalin and the politburo just wanted a very reliable worker, with great strength, and a less inquiring and distracting intellect, and perhaps also a soldier who would be, as it were, devoid of conscience, therefore a better and harder soldier, therefore able to replace real men on the battlefield. Thus we could have saved human lives! The idea was humane.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. The tests were originally conducted by Ilya Ivanov. You may know of him, an eminent Russian biologist. Around 1900 he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares; soon
after this he produced crossbreeds between several different species. This is a picture of him here.’

  Julia stared at the wall: at another black and white photo. An old man with a white beard and a white moustache – like Sigmund Freud in his later years – smiled softly back. He had a wise and paternal face.

  ‘Professor Ivanov commenced these experiments in Africa, then in association with Albert Quoinelles, Ghislaine’s grandfather, at the Pasteur institute in Paris. Then the experiments were moved here to Sukhumi.’

  ‘How successful were they?’

  Yakulovich shrugged, and sipped the last of his tea. ‘He took semen from human males, siphoned or collected from masturbations, and then he injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of that.’

  Julia repressed a shudder.

  ‘And what then?’

  Yakulovich shook his head. A wary expression crossed his face. ‘This is a very detailed analysis of my work? I thought we were here to discuss Ghislaine?’

  ‘Er, yes, of course.’ Julia was flustered. ‘I was coming to that.’

  The director gazed at her, and said:

  ‘It is rather curious. Just a year ago another friend of Ghislaine came to visit me?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Marcel Barnier.’ His eyes had a certain sly brightness. ‘Yes yes, another great French expert on cross breeding, and a good friend of Ghislaine Quoinelles! Look, I have Barnier’s card here, he came to visit us just a year ago, to talk. I knew of him through Ghislaine’s work in China and Cambodia.’

  The director was proudly flourishing Barnier’s card. Julia took the card from his hand. She examined it. Her soul was sickening but she was determined to remain calm.