The Woman and the Ape

by Peter Høeg

  “But perhaps you can make one?”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  Out of its pocket the ape drew the sheet of paper given to it by Bally. He pointed to the bottom line.

  “This place here,” it said. “Pick me up there, in this van, before sunrise, after we have slept two times. And you’ll have taken the first step toward having a friend for once in your life.”

  “That would be breaking the law. There’s a hunt on for you two.”

  The ape’s eyes gleamed, with a cocky, streetwise glint that would have elicited a nod of recognition from Madelene.

  “But then,” it said, “with you people nothing’s for free.”

  At this point an amazing thing happened. Across Alexander Bowen’s face there traveled a spasm which might possibly have formed the beginnings of a—albeit inhibited and strained but nonetheless, in a sense, sincere—smile.

  “I can see,” he said, “you really are beginning to get the hang of things around here.”

  seven

  The full moon had always gone to Madelene’s head. Formerly it had made her long to wander, to drink a quart of pure alcohol, to have three lovers in one night. Now it made her transparently happy.

  She lay on the double bed in Johnny’s mobile home and every fifteen minutes the moonlight shook her gently so she could reassure herself that Erasmus was lying beside her.

  The tenth time she woke up he was gone.

  On the other side of the panel, in the cab she could hear the deep breathing of Johnny and Samson. Even the dog had not heard him leave.

  Over the minutes that followed, she suffered a relapse, a de facto physical slide back into an insecurity she had forgotten. In rapid succession she was presented with those sides of herself that she had in past months started to believe she had put behind her: the searing jealousy, the stupefying anger, the bitter vindictiveness, the porous self-pity, the bleeding vanity. Every one of the multitude of masks assumed by her self-loathing presented itself—as if for a party, a jet-black midnight feast, they presented themselves.

  Once they were all assembled Madelene made them a speech, a speech that was very short but conclusive.

  “He weighs over three hundred pounds,” she said. “The way I figure it, if he loves me he can live with the lot of you too.”

  She had made her speech soundlessly and with eyes closed. Now she opened them. The van was empty. The guests had vanished. Through the glass roof fell a blue cone of moonlight.

  The light was cut off by Erasmus’ shadow.

  There was no sound to be heard, all Madelene was aware of was a faint rippling of the mattress and quilt. And there he was.

  She did not open her eyes. She did not say a word. All she did was to put out a hand and run her fingers through the thick coat. Deep inside, for the first time in her life, she came to terms with the fact that even the one you love you cannot ever fully understand.

  eight

  The two hundred people who had gathered on that Friday afternoon in late July to take part in the inauguration of the New London Regent’s Park Zoological Garden and to hail its new director were far fewer than the assembly hall was capable of holding, but they had been selected with great care. Not one of them had been invited as an individual in his own right. They had been invited because they happened to represent hundreds or thousands of others, or because they had control over copious quantities of capital, or a copious measure of political and administrative power, or real estate, or knowledge, or because they tended to crystallize public opinion. And each and every one of them symbolized some significant aspect of society’s stance vis-à-vis animals.

  In attendance were representatives of the Corporation of London, Her Majesty’s Government, the twelve largest animal protection organizations, the British society of zoological gardens, the European society of zoological gardens, the safari parks’ association, the natural science faculties of Britain’s universities, investors and sponsors, the veterinary police, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the British association of zoological museums, the association of practicing veterinary surgeons and the World Wildlife Fund. The royal family was represented by Her Royal Highness Princess Anne, patron of the Royal Zoological Society.

  Twenty-two specially invited journalists and three specially selected television stations were to convey the afternoon’s events to the nation, and not only the nation but every corner of the globe, since it was not only the British who rejoiced that afternoon but the world at large.

  They were rejoicing because this inauguration was a touching demonstration of unity. A demonstration of how a group of well-to-do citizens and property owners, a national administration and the population of a city—in the midst of what was otherwise, in many respects, a heartless civilization—had seen reason and endowed the world and themselves and the wild beasts with a place of refuge. Internationally speaking, it was an occasion as uplifting as any sports event, though with none of the nationalistic aggressiveness of sport. And so on this day the world rejoiced; from Tristan da Cunha to Spitsbergen it was a day that had been awaited as eagerly as the start of carnival in Rio, and with a touch of the emotion aroused by the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day or the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  All this London knew, knew that on this day it had the rostrum to itself—hence the deliberate downplaying of the festivities. Like a coquettish little model well aware that no one will steal her limelight, the city paraded itself before the eyes of the world wearing a quiet smile and a ravishing yet understated outfit, for the benefit of the endangered species.

  * * *

  The mood of irresistible optimism in the air had penetrated even into those places where people live by expecting the worst; penetrated to the core of the Metropolitan Police Special Task Force, which had the job of guarding the assembly hall. With the result that—by showing the invitations and other proofs of identity procured for them by Susan—Madelene, Johnny and Bally experienced no difficulty in passing through the first two checkpoints in the security cordons set up by the police around Regent’s Park, Primrose Hill and Albert Terrace.

  For the first time in their lives Johnny and Bally were in evening dress. They looked and felt like two Antarctic penguins banished to the tropics, and the weather this afternoon was indeed tropical. The sun blazed in a cloudless sky, and alongside the two men Madelene, in the dress she had borrowed from Susan, resembled an Amazonian parakeet, bright-hued and glossy-plumed.

  The entrance to the hall itself was manned by two security guards and a woman who greeted every guest personally, ostensibly to bid them welcome, but in actual fact to verify the identity of each one.

  This woman was Adam’s secretary.

  She recognized Priscilla and stood stock-still.

  “He says he doesn’t know you,” she said. “I’ve just asked him. He’s never heard of you.”

  “That’s what they all say when they’ve been having a bit of a fling,” said Madelene. “What does yours say?”

  The secretary backed away, one step at a time.

  “I live alone,” she said. “I have done so for several years.”

  Then she halted and summoned up all her courage.

  “You can’t threaten to go to his wife now,” she said.

  The two security guards were closing in. Madelene leaned forward.

  “Look at me,” she said.

  The secretary looked at her. Madelene took off her sunglasses. The secretary felt a wave of heat wash over her, different from the meteorological heat of the day—a warm front carrying with it a smell of burning—as from a sauna.

  “There is no Priscilla,” said Madelene. “There never has been. There’s only me. Madelene Burden. I have to get in. It’s a matter of love. Can’t you tell by looking at me?”

  The two guards had arrived. Bally and Johnny stood rooted to the marble floor.

  The secretary pulled back her shoulders.

  “We’re so pleased to see you,” she said. “P
lease go on in.”

  The guards moved off, the secretary stepped aside, two glass doors opened. The way was clear.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, by the curb on Albany Street overlooking Gloucester Gate sat an ambulance from the Holland Park Veterinary Clinic. At the wheel sat Alexander Bowen, wearing a blue coat over his dress suit. In the back of the van, on the cot, knelt Erasmus, still attired in T-shirt, jacket, karate trousers, and sunglasses.

  “There’s a roadblock,” said the doctor. “We’ll need to produce some form of identification. And you don’t have any.”

  His voice was thick, his hands shook. He had not been this scared since he took his finals.

  “Could you please switch on the light on the roof,” said the ape. “The one that flashes and says mee maw.”

  The doctor switched on the flashing light and the siren.

  “If you would be so good as to drive very fast.”

  Light flashing, siren blaring, the ambulance pulled out into the road, heading straight for the entrance to the New London Regent’s Park Zoological Garden.

  A policeman stepped out into the middle of the road and signaled to them to stop.

  “I’ll lose everything,” said the doctor.

  Erasmus removed his sunglasses. His voice was almost passive in its calmness.

  “You’re carrying a sick ape,” he said.

  Bowen rolled down the window.

  “This is an emergency,” he said. “An ape. It’s dying.”

  The policeman stuck his head through the window and peered into the back. Bowen closed his eyes. When nothing happened he opened them again and looked in the mirror.

  Erasmus was laid out on a cot, covered by a white sheet and with an oxygen mask over his shaven face.

  The policeman stepped back.

  “We’ll give you a motorcycle escort,” he said. “I hope you make it.”

  Accompanied by the police motorcycle, the ambulance negotiated the second roadblock, inside the Outer Circle.

  “You’re learning,” said Bowen. “That honesty gets you nowhere.”

  He waved the motorcycle away and carried on slowly past the assembly hall. The doors were closed. Outside stood Adam’s secretary, the two security men and a number of uniformed police officers.

  “Inside there are two hundred of the most influential people in Britain,” said Bowen. “You’ll never get in.”

  He drove around the corner and stopped. When he opened the rear door, Erasmus stepped down onto the pavement clad in a blue coat, green surgical apron and surgical cap. In his hand he held a foam extinguisher; into his pockets he had shoved an assortment of gleaming instruments.

  “I’ve dressed up as a doctor,” he said.

  Alexander Bowen relieved the ape of the fire extinguisher, took off the apron and removed the instruments.

  “The key to impersonating a scientist,” he said, “lies in striking a balance between making use of all the means at one’s disposal and not appearing conscious of that fact.”

  He removed the surgical cap from the ape’s head.

  “Now,” he said, “you look like a senior physician. More than most senior physicians do.”

  Erasmus took Bowen’s hand in his own.

  “I would like to say thanks for now,” said the ape. “In case there isn’t another time. You have taken the first steps toward making a friend.”

  It was walking away when Bowen stopped it.

  “The DNA analysis,” he said. “There was something else.”

  The doctor clenched the surgical cap between his fingers.

  “I didn’t want to tell Burden’s wife—sorry, ex-wife. I know what she would think. Here’s science passing another turd. And taking it for a sacred pearl. But I will tell you. You see, it’s very difficult to tell the difference between the brains of the larger apes and our own. The chimpanzee brain looks exactly like ours. But, all things being equal, what one can say is that the more convoluted it is, the bigger the neocortex, the more intelligent the animal. Your brain, I noticed the minute Mrs. Burden—sorry, your friend—showed me the scans, is the most convoluted ever seen. With the largest frontal lobe. The greatest volume. Now, I know we’ve had no chance to talk about your life. Probably never will have. All the same, I want to tell you that you … that is to say your ancestors, your race, after breaking away from us a million years ago on the shores of Lake Turkana, traveled northward. And after that you outstripped us. We had it all wrong. Burden, his sister and I. We thought we would learn something about one of those hominids which came before man. But you are not what went before. If anything, you are what comes afterward.”

  nine

  That afternoon, Adam Burden was not representing himself either, appearing instead as a symbol of the historic compacts arrived at between the general public, the royal family, the zoological world and the investors, all of whom had made this new zoo possible. He personified the myth that exceptional people enjoy exceptional success. And—his wife having been kidnapped and presumably murdered by a crazed ape—he bore the stigmata of the self-sacrificing man of science, bore them meekly, as Livingstone his malaria at the Lualaba, as Darwin his failing health following his circumnavigation of the globe.

  Circumstances can make a person greater in size than they actually are, and Adam had grown—Madelene noted this the minute he strode out and across the rostrum. He was no longer just a strikingly handsome man. Responsibility had rendered him charismatic.

  On reaching the lectern, looking out across the footlights at the upturned faces and the black cameras and television monitors behind which sat millions of spectators, he swelled even further. At that moment he caught sight of Madelene.

  He turned pale, as though suddenly drained of blood, and would have keeled over had not a hand gripped his arm and held him upright. At his side stood Andrea Burden. She put out her free hand and cut the switch on the public-address panel. She and Adam were still in full view. But now they were out of hearing range.

  “It’s Madelene,” said Adam. “And Bally. And the driver.”

  “They’re ants,” said Andrea Burden. “Industrious. But still nothing but ants.”

  “The press?”

  Under such extreme conditions Andrea Burden’s commanding nature blossomed like a lotus flower. She took her time, took plenty of time. As a coach will fuss like a mother with a newborn baby over a heavyweight champ already knocked near senseless, thereby cajoling him into going out and winning that final round, she stroked Adam’s muscular back and whispered softly, slowly, clearly into his ear.

  “This is England,” she whispered. “They’ll never get to speak to the press. And if they do, Toby will see to it that the papers don’t print it. Toby could stop word of the end of the world from being printed. If it was seen as a threat to national security.”

  Adam shut his eyes for a moment. Then he relinquished his misgivings and his will and sank, so it seemed, at long last into arms he could trust.

  He switched on the PA system.

  “Your Royal Highness,” he said, “ladies and gentlemen, honored guests. Nature is bountiful.”

  The spectators in the auditorium had seen him stagger and had held their breath. At his first words they breathed out. On hearing the sound of his own voice, Adam drew himself up to his full height, sparkling with zoological star quality. His rehearsals in front of the mirror stood him in good stead—the prepared text, his whole choreography of gestures, opened up before him like a highway. He raised his eyes and stepped on the gas.

  “It gives me great pleasure to declare the New London Regent’s Park Zoological Garden—the world’s largest, most modern urban zoological garden—open.”

  The walls and the roof of the assembly hall were of glass, encased by a network of stainless-steel venetian blinds. The blinds had been closed; now they were gradually opened. Behind Adam, beyond the end wall of the hall, the zoo—its enclosures, its jungles, its savanna, its lakes and its cliffs—stood revealed.


  “A pact,” said Adam. “An understanding, between technological civilization and the natural world. Proof that peaceful coexistence between animals and humans is possible. A technological miracle. And yet even this pales when set alongside what I now have the pleasure of presenting to you.”

  A slide was projected onto a twenty-five-by-twelve-foot screen to Adam’s left. A picture of Erasmus, photographed in the Mombasa Manor conservatory, with the plants forming a backdrop and in a light reminiscent of dawn over the rain forest.

  “It is my moving duty today to bring you news of the most important zoological discovery of this century, perhaps the most important ever. A hitherto unknown mammal. More closely related to us than the chimpanzee. A highly intelligent anthropoid ape.”

  Adam had designed his speech as an emotive guided tour. After building up the suspense with his opening remarks and reaching an interim climax with the slide of Erasmus, he intended to explain, in a few restrained phrases, that the reason for his showing them a picture and not the animal itself was that this was the ape which had abducted his wife. He would then have moved on to a résumé of the scientific documentation.

  He did not get beyond his opening remarks. As he opened his mouth and spread his arms wide he became aware of a surge of tension in the hall, a surge that went over his head, directed as it was at something at his back. He turned around.

  Behind the assembly hall lay a building that could have been taken for a large greenhouse but was in fact the section visible from the hall of the magnificent enclosure meant to house Homina londiniensis. On the roof of this building stood a figure in a blue coat. Just as Adam turned, the figure stepped one pace backward, began to run and leapt into the air.

  It was a stupendous leap. With the deep preparatory bound of a trampolinist, the soar of a human cannonball and a suicidal trajectory aiming straight for the glass wall of the assembly hall.

  The landing was as light as a fly’s on a cube of sugar. The man—for now it could be seen that it was a man—hung for a second from the steel slats. Then he scrambled upward like a sprinter on a flat track, up onto the roof, where a row of windows stood open. To augment the organic lightness of the building the structural framework of the ceiling had been left exposed—a hexagonal system of slender steel piping, not unlike the rudiments of a honeycomb. Along these the blue man swung until he came to one of the cables holding up the light fixtures. Down this cable he slid, to the lamp, and from there he dropped. To land right next to the lectern.