The Woman and the Ape

by Peter Høeg

  When they trod out of the darkness the ape glanced briefly at Adam and at the rifle. After that its eyes never left Madelene.

  “Why?” it said.

  Adam stared at its mouth, at the point from which the word had issued. For a second or so the lover in him gave way to the scientist. Then he shook his head.

  “This is some kind of hoax,” he said.

  Madelene was not listening to her husband.

  “I don’t want to be left here,” she said.

  A deep furrow appeared in the creature’s broad, smooth-shaven brow. It searched—frantically, fruitlessly—through the useless technical glossary it had gleaned from its keepers in a vain attempt to say something so convoluted that precious few would ever be able to articulate it.

  It gave up, pointed around, in a gesture that embraced the whole house. Then it nodded at Adam and looked quizzically at Madelene.

  “He let me down,” she said.

  Adam moistened his lips.

  “It was a mistake,” he said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  The ape looked out across the park, and beyond, toward Hampstead Heath, which Madelene knew would be its escape route.

  “Shoot it in the legs,” she said.

  Adam lowered the rifle and took aim. The ape ignored him. In its face, a face that Madelene was very gradually getting to know, she saw something new, something quite inconceivable in an animal, nestling like a shadow in the corner of its eye. It was not fear, it was not animal ignorance as to the impending danger of the situation. It was sadness, or possibly despair.

  She stepped into the line of fire.

  “Wait just a moment,” she said.

  Adam looked from her to the ape and back again.

  She walked over to Erasmus.

  “I’ve just had a thought,” she said.

  “Move,” said Adam.

  Madelene did not hear him.

  “You know,” she said, “what I’ve been chosen for.”

  The ape regarded Madelene intently. Both it and she had forgotten everything else around them. And so they did not see Adam raise the rifle. He was no longer aiming at the ape’s thigh. He was aiming at its head.

  “To go with you,” said Madelene. “That’s what I was meant to do. Observe your behavior. Like a zoological experiment.”

  She said it very softly, but there was something in her voice, something heard only occasionally, very rarely, in a woman’s voice when something is vitally important to her and she reaches for it—never forcing it—a kind of music, the music of the spheres, an ultrasonic signal directed straight at a man’s central nervous system. And so too it struck both the ape’s and Adam’s. For a split second they both stood there, vibrating like a couple of tuning forks.

  The next instant a surge of murderous jealousy shot through Adam and out of his index finger, and he pressed the trigger.

  Too late. The white-hot projectile sped out into the world never to find its target. It flew whistling across Hampstead Heath and then, over the Vale of Heath, it began to waver and rotate and lose height, before falling impotently to earth. For by the time Adam fired the ape had already, a moment before, wrapped an arm around Madelene, lifted her off her feet and leapt off the balcony.

  three

  Seven days they were under way.

  The first night brought them to the outskirts of Greater London and after that they traveled during the daytime. To begin with through parks and housing developments, later along ditches and hedgerows and later still along the banks of rivers and through orchards and woods. No human set eyes on them, and even the wild animals they passed, even the pheasants, foxes, badgers and deer, had no time to register them before they were off again, leaving no trace of themselves other than the scent, baffling to animals, of anthropoid ape with a dash of perfume.

  The only living creatures in a position to observe them long enough to see which way they went were the birds of prey that overtook them, dropped out of the skies, drew closer and hovered for a moment in the air. Madelene waved when she saw them, as two motorcyclists or two nuns passing one another will signal to say that while everyone else may be tied down they are free.

  If she could have flown and taken wing with the birds and followed them she would have seen that every single bird was part of a pattern, one among millions of birds all crossing, at one and the same time all over Europe, the same parallel and all with the same purpose in mind: to mate, build nests and have young, and set against this greater design each and every unique and free-as-air bird was fettered and anonymous. But Madelene could not fly and at this point her thoughts barely left the ground, far too taken up was she with being able for the first time in her life to do, brilliantly, exactly as she pleased. She never watched the birds for long and she never guessed that the reason they hung over her and the ape only for a very little while was not because they gave them up as potential prey or gave up trying to understand them. Not at all. It was because the birds had seen that this at once shaggy and smooth-skinned, multiheaded creature was neither hunter nor hunted. It was making its way toward a definite geographical and psychic location. It was migrating, just as they were.

  It might have looked as though it was the ape who chose their route and it may even have seemed that way to the creature itself. But in fact—as is so often the case—it was Madelene, the woman, who with the minimum of almost passive, but nonetheless unremitting, intuitive obstinacy dictated their course.

  That first night, in the still dusky light of dawn, while she waited, the ape had broken into a department store, with practiced ease, and helped itself to two air mattresses, two sleeping mats, two extra long goose-down quilts, two sets of bed linen and a large backpack in which to carry all this comfortably. The first time it made up beds for them on the mats, in a tall oak on the edge of suburban St. Albans’ botanic gardens, Madelene—noticing that it had had the nerve in the gloom of the department store to grope its way to bedclothes of especially soft, long-fibered Egyptian cotton—realized that besides being a large anthropoid ape it was also an arrant freeloader and from that moment on she steered them in one particular direction.

  At a crossroads, having divined the wording on a road sign from some distance away, she made an imperceptible decision. When they left the shadow of a forest and had to choose which way to go next, she came up with an all but invisible suggestion based on a tenuous understanding of the four points of the compass. She compared—virtually without herself being aware of it—the names of the villages they passed with a cartographical snippet in her head.

  Erasmus ate, she discovered, between twenty and twenty-five pounds of fresh fruit a day, preferably supplemented by nuts and raisins, hopefully by honey, better still by three quarts of heavy cream. And preferably these provisions should be easily obtainable, within easy reach—in a refrigerated warehouse, for instance, or a parked long-distance truck. And it did not care for cold water. Like Madelene, it had a profound and possibly neurological, genetic need for a hot bath every day.

  Having once grasped this fact, Madelene understood also that they would have to keep to the outskirts of villages and other built-up areas. On that first night of their journey she had felt that they had the whole of England at their feet. Now she took yet another step toward understanding the nature of freedom. She realized that they would have to walk a line, a tightrope, between, on the one hand, the destructiveness of technological civilization and, on the other, Mother Nature’s exasperating lack of creature comforts. That right from the start there had been only one course for them to take: to a place where one could stay under cover and have one’s food served up, a place that could accommodate both their congenital yearning for freedom and their congenital laziness. She had spent eighteen months caught up in a torrent of zoological information. She knew that in the whole of Britain there was only one such place.

  When, on the sixth day, they reached the fringes of the town of Chatteris, she made the crucial choice. Had they
turned east, as any Homo ferus or any honest-to-goodness wild animal would have done, they would have ended up in the most out-of-the-way, the most desolate, the most isolated spot in England, in the impenetrable marshlands of Bedford Levels. Instead Madelene led them northward. Toward St. Francis Forest, the London Zoo’s private wildlife reserve, the largest zoological breeding and research center in Europe.

  * * *

  Throughout their journey Madelene had given Erasmus lessons in both English and Danish and the ape had learned fast—not as a child learns, since children learn under great pressure from the need to express themselves, but playfully, effortlessly. On the seventh day they traveled in silence, with no language lessons, no behavioral studying, no waving to birds. Late in the afternoon they crossed a high wall, exactly like so many others and yet significantly different, and on the edge of a wood, overlooking a grassy plain, they halted. Madelene’s inner compass was now spinning wildly and erratically. They had arrived.

  A gray boulder meandered across the plain, coming their way.

  “That thing there,” the ape asked, “climb trees?”

  Madelene shook her head.

  “Eat people?”

  Madelene had been brought up in the suburbs of a large city and for a moment there was some doubt in her mind. Then she shook her head once more.

  “That’s an elephant,” she said.

  * * *

  When darkness fell they lit a fire in the fork of a tree and watched it flare up before dying down into glowing embers as fires are wont to do when the wood is dry and piled on top of half a dozen fire-starting blocks. After that they propped themselves up against one another on the two air mattresses, which were spread on a flat, solid and comfortable base of spruce branches. The twilight hour, the teaching hour, was upon them.

  Like their journey, their language lessons had followed—without their being altogether aware of it—a quite specific route. From the personal pronouns they had sallied forth into the surrounding world’s forest of nouns, moving on from there into ever more abstract linguistic territory. But just at this juncture Madelene woke up to the fact that there was something they lacked, something important which they had come to quite naturally in a roundabout way. What they lacked was the body, the human anatomy.

  She ran the tips of her fingers along the sole of one of Erasmus’ feet.

  “Foot,” she said.

  The animal jumped and they both laughed. A little and near-soundless laugh, much like people giggling before the altar—the last brief burst of self-consciousness before the moment of truth.

  Madelene slid her hand up to the ape’s knee.

  “Calf,” she said.

  Erasmus did not answer. She placed her outstretched palm on its chest and ran it downward. The creature’s body remained motionless. But directly below its navel its member rose to meet her. Madelene wrapped her fingers around it. It was white and at first sight almost unreal. It had the smoothness of ice, or of a cool breeze against a cheek, but at the same time, beneath this elusive softness, there was a rigidity as substantial as fired granite.

  Madelene looked up. She placed her other hand on the ape’s face and felt the same thing there. The skin was pale, quite fine, transparent. Beneath and across it she could sense the microscopic, fast alternating surges of feeling, the thready, capillary trees of blood. And underlying this fragility was something else—its pulse, the solid urgency of its arousal.

  She nodded in the direction of its penis.

  “Cock,” she said.

  The ape stretched out an arm, laid the back of one hand on her leg, then eased it under her dress. Madelene felt the warmth of its hand in her crotch but it did not touch her. It looked at her inquisitively.

  “Pussy,” she said hoarsely, enlightening him.

  Without taking her eyes off the ape’s she lifted up her dress until her breasts broke free. Slowly the ape leaned forward, bent his head as if in some ritual salute and took a nipple between his teeth.

  It straightened up and they looked into one another’s eyes as no living creatures are ever given to looking at one another. Then it took hold of her panties—very gently with hands that had no difficulty differentiating, even in the pitch dark, between satin-weave cotton and plain mercerized—and pulled them off. Madelene slid backward, still in slow motion, and the ape came after her.

  They kissed one another only fleetingly. The potential lip-smacking, familial quality of a kiss would in this case have been but a digression. Madelene was very soft, very warm and very ready to clench him between her thighs. But just at this point Erasmus stopped and for a second Madelene thought it was a misunderstanding.

  “Come on,” she said.

  Nothing happened; impatiently she pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked at the ape.

  The combination of the flickering light from the embers and the dense shadows made it hard to read the ape’s expression accurately. Nonetheless, as far as Madelene was concerned there could be no doubt. What she saw in its eyes was not simply lust, not merely the beast in him, not only naïveté. There was something else there too, the subtle sadism of the street-wise kid. The animal had not stopped because of some misapprehension. It was holding her at bay.

  She tried to get out of it, of course she tried to get out of it. She waited for disgust to flood through her from top to toe. But it never came. Something else came instead—more desire, a need, pressing, beyond all question of pride and submission.

  “Please,” she said.

  Erasmus entered her with a kind of sensitive ruthlessness, along the golden mean between pain and sensual delight, and as he did so, she bit his earlobe, gently but deeply, until on the tip of her tongue she felt the first metallic hint of blood and her nostrils were filled with a scent, a savanna of scent, a continent of scent, of animal, man, stars, glowing embers, air mattresses and burnt rubber.

  four

  St. Francis Forest was established by the first Duke of Bedford in the seventeenth century in an attempt to re-create the Garden of Eden. The duke was a devout man; he named his park after the patron saint of animals and laid it out in strict accordance with the few, vague directions afforded in Genesis and the detailed description given in the Divine Comedy—in the twenty-eighth canto of the Purgatorio—of the garden outside which Virgil leaves Dante and in which he meets Beatrice. Like all the great gardens in European history, it was founded on the idea that nothing, and especially not nature, is good enough as it stands. What the duke and his successors had in mind was not a mild adjustment of the landscape; what they had wanted to construct was a machine, a horticultural machine designed to seize the awareness of the visitor and turn his thoughts to God. It had been their wish to create a drug of a garden, a landscaped hallucinogen.

  This was, of course, a preposterous idea, not to say blasphemous, since any god whose work is deemed to leave that much room for improvement obviously cannot be omnipotent, at best he may be a great—though not infallible—landscape gardener, and, as one might expect, this scheme failed. In an endeavor to stick as closely as possible to the Bible, in which we are told that the effect of Paradise is so elevating that the lion and the lamb graze there side by side, the duke introduced a number of wild animals to the park. Just when it seemed that his enterprise was to be crowned with success, at the point where he had been hand-feeding fourteen Judaean lions with roast potatoes for thirty-one days and was about to declare these wild beasts to be tamed and converted to vegetarianism, they betrayed the trust shown in them and ate him. Over the next four centuries the park underwent numerous changes of ownership and extensive restructuring—under the supervision, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, of the renowned landscape gardener “Capability” Jones—and at the time of its purchase by the Royal Zoological Society in the early 1970s it epitomized quite perfectly—with its rolling luxuriance, its lakes and streams, its groves, its exotic flowers and trees, its rockeries and perfumed Persian rose gardens—what people look for in
a Paradise.

  It had, by that time, a reputation so bad that for two hundred years its owners had found it impossible to recruit workers locally. It had been hit by so many floods, droughts, lightning bolts, forest fires, cases of Dutch elm disease, fire blight, attacks of red admiral caterpillars and heart-rot fungus and the park’s owners were similarly plagued by such an endless succession of human natural catastrophes that the very earth seemed to be against them. It was as though the land itself were an enormous creature, a buried whale which, when people scratched its back, shook itself to throw them off. Just as there are children who are extremely difficult to raise, and areas of the human psyche which are very hard to control, so intractable was St. Francis Forest that some inexplicable form of geographical and biological anarchy appeared to reign there. The last owner managed, shortly after the Second World War, to see the gardens completed and for a few fleeting moments he thought that he had gotten the better of the place. Neither his wife running off with the gardener nor his daughter running off with the gardener’s son could make him give up. Not until the whippet his wife had left behind them had a litter of mongrel pups by the gardener’s mongrel dog did he perceive that what he had been experiencing was not a lasting victory but merely the momentary check of the pendulum at the outermost point of its swing and that ahead of him lay the downturn. The following day he put the park up for sale.

  St. Francis Forest met with success for the first time as a game reserve. It became the first breeding ground outside of Africa of the mountain gorilla, the first breeding ground outside of the Russian taiga of the Siberian tiger, the first hatching ground outside of Australia of the penduline owl. During the seventies and eighties it boasted the most impressive results ever of any zoo or wildlife park in the breeding of certain endangered species. These results were reported to the general public, which formed the impression that the wild animals in St. Francis Forest had found an Eden, a place even better than their place of origin, that they lived a life of mild-mannered zoological ease. This too was the reason given publicly by Adam Burden, on his appointment as head of the Institute of Animal Behavioral Research—under whose auspices St. Francis Forest came—for the park to remain a restricted area. The reason no outsiders were allowed access, explained Adam—no representatives from animal protection agencies, no research scientists who had not first been approved and sworn in and, under no circumstances, journalists or representatives of the public at large—was so as not to disturb the park’s distinctive air of high zoological spirits.