by Simon Pare
“Yes, that’s Kader mounting his mate right now. The Arab world has shafted America this morning. But I think that geopolitics is, erm, quite democratic in this case; they take it in turns.”
Hajji Sadok stared me in the eye and his gaze was clearly to remind me of the respect due to a superior, even an acting director. Suddenly he commented irritably, “This habit of giving them human names is ridiculous. What’s more, they look so like us… In my opinion, it’s verging on blasphemy.”
Still worried, he added, “I hope these stupid apes tone things down. Can you imagine if a group of school kids walk past? Not to mention all the beardy weirdies lurking around the zoo to flush out illegitimate couples. They’ll accuse us of corrupting youth.”
Adopting the neutral tone of a bureaucrat weighing up the pros and cons, I replied, “They’re quite capable of chucking a bomb into the monkey cages or sending us a kamikaze in a hurry to swap his ugly wife for a harem of houris. But let’s not forget the pimps making sure their prostitutes are hard at work in the bushes all over the zoo. They’ll be desperate to jump on our bonobos’ bandwagon! Men in Algiers are so scared of stray bullets and bombings, they’re not as horny as they used to be. Stress is a real downer. Thanks to our bonobos, our hookers soon won’t know what’s hit them!”
I pretended to look pensive.
“Maybe we should ask the procurers to pay something towards the cost of looking after our animals? These Congolese Casanovas are providing a social service, right? Maybe a political one too, if their fine philandering encourages a few beardies to look for a little tenderness behind a bush rather than poisoning our lives…”
Hajji Sadok stared at me with a mixture of amazement and revulsion. He glanced around to check that no one had overheard me.
“You speak like you spit; you take nothing seriously. You’ll live to regret it some day.”
My face must have clouded over because a mocking expression lit up the old man’s.
“I didn’t know you could be so touchy. Got some shame after all, boy?”
“Firstly, I’m not a boy. And secondly, you’re only the second person to accuse me of not taking anything seriously today.”
He burst out laughing.
“But you take that seriously? Well, well, that is progress, boy!”
I deflected the conversation by pointing to what we called the monkey enclosure, a small space separated off from the public by wire fencing and a wide ditch with a series of cages at the back that were open during the day. Having just exchanged something more than a few caresses, the two anthropoids were now sharing some fruit. One of them was chewing on his orange with such languidness that it made me think of smoking a cigarette after sex.
“Anyway, great apes fucking each other up the arse isn’t the only thing in life!” exclaimed Hajji Sadok with unexpected cheerfulness and crudeness. “God created what He wished and who are we to question His decrees. Come on, Aziz, I’m going to have a nose around at the ministry; you take a look at the Addax antelopes and then think about getting ready for the visit.”
He scratched his head and screwed up his face.
“How about slipping a dose of Valium into their grub?”
“Do you really mean that? (I stared at my boss: the old man really did mean it!)The vet will never buy it. He’ll point out that we know nothing about the effects of Valium on these animals and that you are mistaking the bonobos for regular conscripts.”
“Quit your mocking. With the committee members coming tomorrow, tell the keepers only to let the females out.”
I interrupted him.
“But when the females are together they…”
He broke in.
“Yes, but a woman with a woman is much less shocking than a man with a man.”
I stared wide-eyed at him; he’d used the words woman and man instead of female and male. He realised his mistake. Ashamed, he pretended to absorb himself in reading the plaque that explained, in gold letters, that the seven bonobo chimpanzees (Pan paniscus)were a gift from the Republic of Congo to their sister Republic of Algeria as a token of their eternal friendship after the visit of His Excellency the President, waffle waffle waffle…
My prudish boss walked back to his car grumbling that he couldn’t bloody figure out why the Congolese dictator had given our president these kind-of-failed humans instead of some decent animals like those funny lions or elephants.
I hung around for a good quarter of an hour watching Lucette and her mother, whom Shehera and I had rechristened, giving her the obvious name of Lucy. While her baby was suckling, snuggling up to its mother in a disturbingly human way, the female bonobo (a little under 15 years old if the Congolese diplomatic service’s official papers were to be believed) flashed me a slightly contemptuous look, as if to say: “You lazy git, haven’t you got anything better to do than goggle at the misfortunes of an honest mother and her brat?”
Still clutching her load, she put her fingers through the steel fencing and shook it violently, first with one hand, then both, and finally bringing her lower limbs into play. The baby was thrown off-balance and only just managed to cling on to the hairs on its mother’s breast. The female’s screaming grew to a deafening crescendo before she suddenly broke off, her throat cramped up. Then, with one last exhausted yelp, she crumpled to the floor in the middle of the patio. She examined her chafed thumb. Sucking the battered digit, her eyes wandering, still panting, she scratched the back of the black ball clinging to her breast with her other hand. The newborn baby’s mind must have been full of terrified questions about how the order of her world could have been turned so dreadfully upside down.
The mother ape looked round at the two males, Kader and John, who were picking lice off each other. She thought about getting up, then changed her mind, wedged her baby on one side, placed her fingers on her two labia majora and started massaging her clitoris – without any enthusiasm, as if she were merely passing the time.
I gulped, thinking: “Hey, cousin, if you believe in some bonobo god, this would be the moment for him to show up and remind you that you’re in an Arab country, girl! Worse: Arab and Berber, the stupidity of one added to the stupidity of the other! No more al fresco sex, no more female superiority over men! You’ll soon be entitled to the local holy trilogy – hijab, niqab and idiot imams – from the age of 7 to 77! You and your family would have been better-off if the chief of the Congo had gone gooey over his Swedish counterpart.”
It had only been about a month, we had learned, since the monkeys presented to our president had been deported from their equatorial rainforest home, two months at the most counting the time they’d spent waiting to be freighted from Congo to Algeria. Lounes had made me read the email from a primate protection charity recounting how the monkeys had been ‘kidnapped’ close to a Japanese research station, somewhere between the Congo River to the north and the Kasai River to the south. Ignoring the scientists’ protests, soldiers armed with tranquilliser guns had lured the bonobos by leaving bunches of bananas in the spot where the primatologists usually left dietary supplements. Some groggy monkeys had fallen out of a tree and died. Others had lain in the undergrowth for hours in agony. An old male had succumbed to a heart attack. The surviving anthropoids had discovered the unfortunate consequences of a revival of political affection between African despots.
Thus our new lodgers had never been in captivity before. I was growing quite familiar with the fits of anxiety and rage that seized them at certain times of the day, especially at dawn. Maybe at night they retreated into dreams of tender delousing sessions under the canopy of their native forests and hence found the return to reality when they woke up all the more cruel and unbearable?
These bloody primates were too like real people. And had I, the failed biologist, really dreamed of following in the great Pasteur’s footsteps throughout my adolescence only to resign myself to ending up a mere prison guard for near-humans? I sighed, unhappy that I could find nothing to laugh at in my exagge
ration.
“Sorry, Lucy. If it were in my power, I would open every cage in this miserable zoo. But, well, firstly I’d be out of a job and, secondly, what good would it do you to escape in this crazy country? You’d either get raped to death in the bowels of some police station or one of those fanatics of religious beheadings would tear you apart alive!”
I tapped on my notebook. The female ape looked up as if she were listening to me.
“You’re right not to believe me, my dear: human beings spend a lot of their time lying. It’s true – I was laughing at you, and that’s not good.”
The word ‘lying’ reminded me of what Meriem had said about our daughter. I had a premonition that our discussion was going to be difficult because my sweet, stubborn daughter would probably tie herself up in knots of denial, and Meriem, then I, would get angry, first of all with Shehera and then with each other.
I was overcome with a faint sense of nostalgia for the time not so long ago when, as young parents, and close to tears, we had bent over the small creature we’d just brought back from the clinic. Curfew, bombings and massacres might well be the only tangible reality in Algeria, but in our little abode, Meriem, our still-wrinkled baby and I formed the happiest family in the world.
Even then, of course, I had a big hole in my soul – what Meriem called my almost biological cynicism – as well as the touch of craftiness needed to get by in Algiers somehow. In my defence, there was also the blissful love I felt for my wife. The moment I saw her, everything alive within me – my heart, my balls, my brain, my guts – was shaken to the core. I think that Meriem felt the same wonderful pain. In her more sarcastic moments, she would go on about our first meeting: “An unexpected shock in this land of bombings – what could be more normal?”
We sometimes forced a chuckle at how the history of our relationship seemed to mirror the ‘political’ almanac of Algeria. We first caught sight of each other during the great riots of October 1988; we fucked for the first time the night of the coup after the Islamists had won the December 1991 elections; and six months later we decided on a rushed wedding following the announcement of President Boudiaf’s assassination after his return from Moroccan exile to play the role of puppet for a bunch of potbellied generals. Maybe we were scared of having our throats slit or being blown up before either of us could do something with our lives.
We indeed took full advantage of those early years. Our discussions were fierce, but our tenderness turned out to be boundless, and our desire was often fuelled by the ludicrous places and times we endeavoured to satisfy it in. One evening, for example, we were on our way back from a dinner on the outskirts of Algiers. There was very little traffic because the curfew had been only partially lifted. It was raining and the journey was dreary. We couldn’t stand it anymore, so we turned off the road and drove down a dirt track along the side of a wheat field. Meriem had already stripped off on the back seat and I was doing likewise when an old 404 with its headlights on full appeared on the track, which the downpour had turned to mud. A whole family was squashed inside, probably local farmers on their way home. Seeing us in the nude, the patriarch in his chèche turban, his wife wrapped in her haik and their swarm of children were initially stunned, but this quickly changed to indignation.
“How dare you? You’re on my land, you dogs!”
The driver had got out of his car brandishing a club. Panicking, I started the engine while I fumbled with my trousers with my free hand. For a few terrifying seconds, the wheels span in the mud. The 404’s driver was banging on the boot of our car like a lunatic while simultaneously damning us, and any swine that might result from our depravity, to drown in the flaming faeces of hell. Meriem, paralysed with fear, made no move to get dressed. Eventually, with a screech of its battered gearbox, the car leapt forwards and we found ourselves driving like lunatics towards Algiers, squawking with laughter and relief, me with my dick out and her stark naked. “Oh, Meriem…”
Even as I noted down the alterations that needed to be made to the bonobos’ shelter, I could feel the questions “Were we still just as much in love or was our love getting bogged down in a pitiful mire of disenchantment?” sticking in my throat like fishbones.
Before… Now…
“Hey Lucy, could you weave me a magic carpet to take me back to those wonderful times before our doubts?”
Lucy turned her back on me.
“You couldn’t give a damn about your guards’ worries. You’ve got a tragedy of your own to deal with, haven’t you? So who am I supposed to turn to for advice? The only person I’ve got in Algiers is…”
I stood there stupefied for a few seconds, realising that my intonation had changed and that I was actually pleading with an animal for pity.
“Maybe I’ll soon be reduced to asking you to read my cards for me, you pancake-faced witch?”
I felt a stab of anguish. Without Meriem and my daughter I was nothing, just one more idiot in a cruel city that was already crawling with them. When I was a kid, I had dreamed of being a knight in shining armour. All I had become, though, was an individual with no particular qualities, a waverer and a fair coward all in all, whose sole success – which was probably undeserved compared to its importance – was to have met Meriem.
I don’t know why I started thinking about my wife’s family, a strange couple made up of her mother, Latifa, and her stepfather Mathieu, a Frenchman as thin as a prickly pear spine who had lived in Algeria for so long that he spoke Arabic like a native, yet never mentioned the period before independence. He had remained in the country even when the wave of assassinations of foreigners was at its peak, taking only two ridiculous precautions that probably fooled no one: firstly, he put on a farmer’s hat every time he went out so as to look as un-European as possible; and secondly he demanded that everyone call him by his chosen Arabic first name, Ali. Once, I thought I could discern the bulge of a pistol beneath his jacket. I had told Meriem, who had muttered that it was just some old handgun with a rusty mechanism and that I shouldn’t tell anyone about it. Possessing none of the habitual expansiveness of the European pied noir settlers, this man made you ill at ease with his silences and his shy, thin-lipped smiles with their occasional, fleeting flicker of sarcasm. Meriem didn’t seem overly keen on her stepfather either and spoke to him in curt, clipped sentences.
I had a burnt taste in my mouth; after several years of marriage, Meriem still held some secrets for me. Everything about her family was obscure to me. It was by a slip of her mother’s tongue that I had learned that Meriem’s deceased father was a revolutionary hero. He had a street in a town in the Aurès mountains named after him.
I had tried to find out more about the exploits that had earned him this honour. Meriem had quashed my curiosity: “My father died fifteen years ago and it was not easy for any of us, so let’s just let him and old stories about the war of independence lie.”
I had been stupid enough to push her, asking, “What did your father die of?” Avoiding my gaze, she had sidestepped the issue with a catch-all expression: “A death willed by God.” I had been taken aback by this somewhat religious turn of phrase that was so unlike Meriem. After this strange exchange, I had given up all hope of her ever revealing how this Mathieu bloke, having appeared from nowhere, had ended up marrying her mother.
The argument awaiting me at home seemed so inevitable that I felt overwhelmed with sudden hostility towards myself. As I dragged myself off to the Addax antelopes’ enclosure, I gave a nervous laugh, trying to fend off the sort of bad mood that I had learned to hide so skilfully from those around me. I was thought of as a constant livewire who even joked the evening he almost died in an ambush dressed up as a checkpoint. The coach bringing us back from Blida had been stopped about twenty miles from Algiers by men in army uniforms. We had immediately realised from the worn-out shoes some of them were wearing and the hairy beards of others, though, that we were dealing with terrorists.
It was in the middle of the electoral campai
gn for a referendum to decide on an agreement establishing an amnesty for all the acts of violence committed over the previous decade; “a sponge to wipe away the blood of all the atrocities by people wearing beards and kepis’ was how the public summed it up, with resigned dark humour. However, it was acknowledged that many Islamist fighters were refusing to hand in their weapons and were bent on seeking to demonstrate this in the bloodiest way possible. That particular day they lined us up along a ditch and told us to give our papers to the ‘brothers’ for checking. My identity card showed that I worked at the zoo – and therefore for the government the bearded men held in such contempt. Of course, this wasn’t my first ‘fake checkpoint’, but my stomach was in knots. My neighbour’s teeth were chattering. The podgy old man had been rambling on about importing sheep from New Zealand for half the journey. He bitterly deplored the fact that, despite being cheap, these animals had been declared non-halal by extreme religious groups because their tails had been docked level with their hindquarters; and yet, he recounted indignantly as we crossed the Mitidja plain, nothing in the Koran or the Sunnah outlawed the sacrifice of animals with shortened tails. He was even thinking of writing a petition to the president of the Algerian High Islamic Council with a request for this disastrous misunderstanding to be officially cleared up.
Despite his fear, the shady sheep-dealer tried to reassure himself by muttering that he knew the local Islamists and that these particular ‘brothers’ didn’t take it out on civilians. “It’s just a routine check, and maybe a small tax while they’re at it,” he said with a grimace. He had been interrupted by screams – an armed man was viciously laying into a young man, calling him a liar, a heathen and a hellhound. With regard to his papers, he was accusing the smartly dressed lad with his pomaded hair and his impeccably pressed white trousers of being in the army or the police. Another beard had come over to them and put his machine gun to the young man’s temple. The latter was protesting that he was an accountant for a private construction company.
