The Woman and the Ape

by Peter Høeg

  There were fifteen police officers inside the hall, all of them armed, and any one of them could easily have shot the new arrival. But none of them did. In these surroundings it was impossible to perceive him as a threat. Adam, the man at the lectern, exuded self-confidence, the invited guests exuded self-confidence, as did the journalists and the policemen. The entire building, the entire zoo, smacked of a torrid, yet perfectly safe flirtation with nature and its savagery, a flirtation one can get away with because everything is under control.

  Adam pulled back a pace or two. The blue man mounted the lectern. He straightened his back, stood for a moment quite still, surveying the gathering. Then he grasped his coat, dragged it off and stepped out of his white trousers. There he stood, Erasmus the ape—naked, hairy, short-legged, colossal—for all the world to see.

  Up to this point the audience had been stunned and confused. Now they understood. This scene that they were witnessing had been staged. It was all part of Adam’s speech. An illustration of the amazing animal-training techniques they had heard of and observed at both London and Glasgow Zoo. An actual “live” presentation of the momentous ape. Not only tracked down and captured by British scientists but also already tamed, broken in and trained.

  There was a burst of applause, wild applause. The policemen clapped, and the journalists, there was no end to it. It subsided only when the ape picked up a microphone.

  “We have come,” it said, “to say goodbye.”

  The members of the audience did not merely stiffen. They lapsed into lifelessness. Their sense of well-being and their view of the world were founded on the conviction that the horrors of this world can be identified, pinned down and kept within bounds. But the beast in front of them spoke a perfect dusky English, and out of the blue, with this language, it hit them where they lived—in the same way as unemployment, as the threat of war, as AIDS, as pollution.

  “Where we come from,” Erasmus went on, “we say that if a … person is on his knees you offer him your hand. If he rejects it you offer him both hands. And even if he rejects them both you still have to help him up. But if, even so, he turns his back on you, then you have to let go of him. I hope I won’t hurt anyone’s feelings when I say that you are on your knees, you are all on your knees. So we decided to try. But it didn’t work out. We were wrong…”

  By now the people in the audience were shivering; in spite of the afternoon heat they were shivering. In their evening suits and capes, beneath their jewels and medals, cameras and handguns, they shivered.

  “We have tried, tried in many different countries at once, and mine was the final attempt.”

  Erasmus swiveled around, slowly he swiveled right around on himself, like a male model at a fashion show. Quite distinctly the members of the audience could make out the operation scars, the bite marks, the still-raw burns and the numerous shaven patches to which Adam’s electrodes had been affixed.

  “I tried to fit in,” said the ape. “We’ve all tried. But things haven’t been working out too well. We’re all agreed that the time is not yet ripe. We cannot do any more. Not this time around. It’s too … difficult. So now we’re going home.”

  There was some movement on the floor of the hall. Up onto the rostrum strode a dean from the University of London. Well known and forever barred from becoming rector by reason of his criticism of the scientific world’s contempt for the notion of global responsibility. He positioned himself alongside the lectern and for a second or so he stood there like that, perfectly still, a tall, gray-bearded man. Then he tucked the fingers of one hand in at his tailcoat lapel, gripped his shirtfront, yanked it up and ripped it off. Beneath it his chest was hairy. Not a human hairiness, though, but off-white in color, wavy and long as a full-bottomed wig. He pulled off his tailcoat, undid his trousers and climbed out of them. Stark naked he stood there now, next to the lectern, wearing nothing but a pair of enormous patent-leather shoes. An ape, a creature just like Erasmus, only larger, older, with silver-tipped hair.

  A woman walked up to take her place beside him—a big woman, a distinguished celebrity, vice president of the Royal Zoological Society, a public figure, spokeswoman for the animal-rights lobby, an intellectual, an advocate of the total abolition of animal testing, the one person who had done more than anyone else to persuade fifty-two nations to take part in the Great Ape Project, which had accorded the anthropoid apes of the world the same legal, economic, moral and social status as mentally subnormal humans. As with the dean, she too stood, for a moment, quite still.

  Out of the auditorium came a scream, heartrending, imploring. It came from her husband. Like one possessed, he struggled to push his way through the audience in order to prevent what was about to happen. But it got him nowhere; people stood as if frozen to the spot, like icicles they stood there, blocking his path.

  The woman drew her dress over her head and tossed it aside. Her face was clean-shaven but for the rest she was longhaired, naked, clad only in a pair of underpants so vast they might have been sewn out of a lugsail.

  Two civil servants from the Ministry of Agriculture made their way to the front of the hall. Although strangers to the two hundred guests, within the Ministry and in government circles they were notorious, singled out and long since ostracized and politically defused for their unremitting, unrelenting, unobtrusive underscoring of the fact that there is no way the question of the survival of wild animals can be dissociated from that of the insatiable, grasping materialism of the world’s wealthiest nations. These two were followed by a policeman, two zookeepers and a television producer, people who until this moment had been quite unknown to the two hundred guests in the hall but whom their day-to-day contacts had long both feared and felt themselves attracted to for their unfathomable, radical integrity—acting as it did as a permanent, nonaggressive reminder that there was something—something or other—very wrong with the world today. People fell back before them and the little procession marched up onto the stage, where they divested themselves of their dress suits, their uniforms, their handguns and press cards, laying them aside. They were all apes.

  Later, at the hearings, not one member of the audience would be able to recall how many apes there had been on the rostrum by the end. But they all believed that they had filled the stage, that there must have been somewhere between one and two hundred of them.

  In fact there were twelve. They stood very still and yet they raised a storm that swept through the brains of the guests, a storm of bewildering images of lions, prehistoric monsters, snakes, dragons, rabid dogs, crocodiles and demented mandrills. Their entire childhood chamber of horrors.

  Erasmus picked up the microphone.

  “When we are gone,” he said, “you will forget us. Until we come again. Till then there is only one thing I would ask you to remember. And that is how hard it is to tell, in each one of us, where the part that you call human ends and the part you call animal begins.”

  He jumped down from the lectern and for an instant all twelve apes stood there, side by side. Then slowly they backed away, making for the rostrum steps, and after that they were gone.

  * * *

  For a minute the hall was held spellbound, stunned into immobility by terror and the vague recollection of the ape’s words. Then people began to come to, their first signs of life irrational, devoid of thought and hence totally genuine. They were stricken by grief. They recognized that they had been forsaken, something precious had forsaken them, some great force had withdrawn its protection. They took to milling aimlessly around, like a bunch of toddlers looking for their mommies and daddies; they bumped into one another and only gradually, over a matter of minutes, did their distress give way to rage, to a child’s urge to avenge itself on the adults who have abandoned it. They started yelling, they screamed, like animals they screamed, weapons were drawn, they would give chase, they broke down the doors to the dressing rooms backstage, they raced shrieking along the corridors and through the toilets, they tore up and down the
stairways, but the apes were nowhere to be found.

  Then, amid all this rancorous desperation, the old backbone-of-steel reflex came into play. One man spoke from the rostrum, an evacuation was organized.

  They filed out of the hall, apathetic, like cattle. They bore the marks of what had passed, they were shocked, sick with worry for the future, unsure whether the world to which they were returning would still be there.

  ten

  Even before the last guest had left the assembly hall, every corner of the British Isles, from Jersey to the Hebrides, had been thrown into a fever of activity that lasted for about two hours. Then the nation froze and ground to a halt.

  The initial, frantic stirrings occurred when—on hearing the first, unclear live transmissions and the first alarming rumors—everyone, all and sundry, in the country and in the cities, dropped everything and rushed home. They panicked, they stampeded, they trampled one another underfoot, stole other people’s cars, commandeered buses and forced the drivers to run taxi services. They all wanted to get home, as quickly as possible, whatever the cost, to see whether their husbands, their wives, their children were still there or whether they were actually apes and even now slipping away.

  Once inside they locked the doors, drew the curtains, slammed the shutters, pulled down the blinds and switched on the television.

  There was nothing on the screen but a laconic announcement that all programs had been temporarily interrupted.

  Even the BBC, whose proud boast it was that come hell or high water it would always manage to broadcast and which would have made it a point of honor, in the event of a third world war, for the last person left alive on earth to be a newscaster sending a balanced and well-formulated report on Armageddon into the void—even the BBC had closed down. When the Newsnight team turned up for work, in response to an urgent summons, they had looked at one another and seen that any of them—or all the others—could be apes; that so great was the risk that any move might prove to be a false one, in which case it was better to do nothing and so, muttering inaudibly, they had turned their backs on one another and gone home.

  At eight p.m. the announcement regarding the break in transmission also vanished, and the screen was blacked out, when the power stations that feed London shut down due to staff shortages. One by one they shut down: Dungeness A and B, the French interconnector, Barking in Essex, the coal-fired stations at Kingsnorth and Tilbury. And, deprived of its oxygen supply, the city fell into a coma.

  With the setting of the sun London was plunged into darkness. The last of the traffic petered out, all the shops were closed, the streets deserted and black—pitch black they were, as they had not been since the wartime blackout. Every visible human activity ceased, even crime came to a standstill, paralyzed by a fear greater than greed. For even in the world of cutthroats, ticket scalpers, muggers, pushers, con men and organized prostitution you need to know that your partner, your bodyguard, your pimp, your bookie and, yes, even your executioner or victim is a human being and not an animal.

  Seven million Londoners in four million homes suffered a psychotic identity crisis. They had no access to any information regarding the fate of the remainder of Britain, of Europe, of the rest of the world. They grew suspicious of their own government, their own society. They could not be certain of the identity of their bosses, or their friends. They eyed one another fearfully, tried to remember how their children and their spouses looked naked, wondered when exactly they had first met their wives, frantically they wondered whether she might be an ape or the daughter of an ape. They gazed into the light of the kerosene lamps or candles they had lit and contemplated the most solid and glorious thing they knew—the Crown. They hardly dared entertain such an appalling possibility but, on the other hand, they could not help themselves. Running over a long span of years, coronations and outrageous questions concerning the order of succession, they realized they had no guarantee that they did not have an ape for a queen.

  eleven

  A light swept the night; a solitary car drove through London, at a snail’s pace, past the barricaded shopwindows, through the defunct traffic lights, around cars abandoned in the middle of the road.

  In the front seat, between Johnny and Bally, sat Madelene. White-faced, tense, she guided them through a city she barely recognized, through districts she had never seen while sober and which she had never before been responsible for finding a way through.

  But find a way she did, with the blind certainty of a homing pigeon. By the time she gave the signal to stop, in the heart of Mayfair, Bally and Johnny had long since lost their bearings. They had been sniveling for some time, caught betwixt fear of the unwonted darkness and desolation on the outside and fear of the desperation in the woman sitting between them.

  Madelene took them by the hand like children and ushered them across the road, through a gate, up a stairway and through suite after suite of darkened rooms that seemed to lead inward then close up behind them like a lobster creel.

  At last they came to a door. Madelene turned the handle and it led to another door, behind which the sun had not set but burned white-hot in a stainless-steel basin positioned alongside an electric shredder and a pile of kerosene cans.

  Dazzled, they remained standing just inside the door.

  “Come in and have a cup of tea,” said Andrea Burden.

  She was standing by the fire, her arms full of papers in yellow folders. She dropped all she held in her embrace into the steel basin, the files landing like bricks and flaring up like gasoline. The heat of the blaze could be felt all the way to the door.

  “As a child,” said Andrea Burden, “I was very fond of jigsaw puzzles. ‘Sunrise over the Savanna of the Serengeti.’ Seven thousand pieces. The other children never so much as made a start but once you got your teeth into it there was no stopping. Finally, when there were only a couple of dozen pieces left, always of the sky—well, there were three thousand pieces of blue sky, all virtually identical—it became like an obsession. Mother told me that during the war, during the Blitz, people were killed because they just had to see that last piece of the sky. They ignored the air-raid sirens. Ever since the first time I laid eyes on you I’ve had it in mind that you might be such a person.”

  “Where’s Erasmus?” said Madelene.

  “The ape? On his way back, I suppose.”

  “Back where?”

  “Didn’t it tell you? To the forests. Around the Baltic. The Swedish and Finnish forests. This one—Erasmus—was captured on that Danish island farthest to the east, the rocky island, what’s it called again?”

  “They must have had someplace here where they could meet,” said Madelene. “They may still be there. They may not have gotten out of London yet. I had an idea you would know where this place might be.”

  “Does it matter? Do you know what we have here?”

  “She’s in love with it.”

  Beyond this room lay yet another. In the open doorway stood Adam, holding a stack of files.

  For the first time in a long while, perhaps for the first time ever, Madelene saw the man to whom she had been married with perfect clarity. She saw that she had loved him for the unguarded vulnerability that shone out of him at that moment to be extinguished the next moment and supplanted by that painstakingly cultivated indifference which had ruled out any possibility of her love enduring.

  “The country is falling apart,” said Andrea Burden. “I’ve spoken to Toby. The government is to stand down tomorrow. There’s a rumor going around that half the ministers are apes. A commission of inquiry is to be set up. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that there were a thousand apes. In high places. Their intelligence is, of course, indisputable. The chaos they’ve left behind them will have to be cleared up. Steps will have to be taken to ensure that they don’t come back. That they aren’t still here. I have been offered the post of secretary to the commission. Adam is to be scientific consultant. The commission will be accorded legislative status. Pr
ovide an ad hoc government. Ahead of us lies a time of cataclysmic upheaval. One thousand is a conservative estimate. Adam and I estimate it could be more like ten thousand. One hundred thousand is not out of the question. In Britain alone. But what about the rest of Europe! The New World! We have no idea of their breeding capacity, but what if, on a global scale, what if there were…?”

  “Twelve. What if there were only twelve?”

  The heads of everyone in the room turned. One of the windows high up in the wall stood open. On the sill sat Erasmus. Cardinal numbers were still new to him. Wanting to make sure that he had been understood, he held up first ten fingers, then two.

  It was not the ape at which Andrea Burden stared. It was the figure its fingers were underlining.

  “But that’s impossible!” she exclaimed.

  “Ten,” the ape’s fingers reiterated, “ten and two.”

  With an inhuman effort of will Andrea Burden reviewed her strategy.

  “Nobody knows that,” she said. “The confusion will still be tremendous. What about the other countries? Denmark? Sweden? Germany?”

  The ape did not reply. Its face was expressionless.

  Everything fell quiet. No one uttered a sound and yet above the rustling of the flames every one of those present could hear something, a sound not physical but mental: the sound of covert, far-reaching schemes coming crashing down.

  Andrea Burden began to laugh, a manic laugh. Despite the shock to her system, despite the deeply problematic nature of the situation, she laughed, and her laughter was catching, catching as a respiratory infection. Bally started to chuckle, Johnny was giggling, Adam smiled—an uneasy smile but nonetheless a smile—and finally the ape’s face cracked. Even the pyre of paper and kerosene seemed to be laughing along with them, an absurd mirth spread throughout that high-ceilinged room.