by Peter Høeg
“They did the work. Their children don’t lift a finger; they have control of a monopoly. When the London Zoo was founded it was their own private property. These days it’s all we can do to cover the day-to-day operating costs. They’ve lulled themselves to sleep but they’re going to wake up to discover that it’s too late.”
* * *
This speech, which Madelene had remembered even though she did not understand a word of it, lay one and a half years in the past. Since then she had visited the Institute once, had been given a tour of the construction site and attended a dinner where the seating plan for the guests of honor had been arranged in strict pecking order, where she and Adam, as the director and his wife, had sat at the head, a dinner which she had gotten through only because she had been drinking before she got there and had continued to drink heavily throughout the evening.
Now, for the first time, she walked through the glass doors unaccompanied.
A woman darted out to a desk and barred her way, nippy as a terrier. For a split second Madelene was ready to turn and run. Then she remembered that today she was someone other than herself.
“I’m from the Meat Marketing Board Research Center,” she said. “We have an inquiry regarding the arrangement of an animal’s teeth.”
The receptionist backed away. Behind her sunglasses Madelene understood her perfectly. They had both had too brief a schooling. They were surrounded by people who were cleverer than they and liked to flaunt their cleverness. And the words “research center” and “inquiry” acted upon them both like a command that could not be ignored.
The woman made a telephone call, then yelped out a name and a floor. No sooner had Madelene taken her first few steps toward the elevator than the woman had forgotten all about her, with the watchdog’s instant indifference to anyone who has received its master’s seal of approval.
* * *
The man who invited Madelene to take a seat at a large desk wore his white coat like a cloak, and it was by this way of carrying himself that Madelene recognized him. He had sat a little—but only a little—farther down the guests-of-honor table than she and Adam.
She placed the eyeliner sketch in front of him.
“We have a problem,” she said. “We’ve been given this and they can’t put a name to it, so they’ve sent me to you…”
“Why me?”
Madelene rapidly and judiciously surmised that this doctor’s most prominent feature was his vanity.
“Back at the Center they say you’re the best,” she said.
“Do they indeed? Don’t tell me they still remember my root-canal job on Roberto?”
“Not a day goes by without its being mentioned.”
“It was the right tusk. I had to use two five-quart bucketfuls of chloramine just to clean it out.”
“It has long been the stuff of legend,” said Madelene.
The veterinary odontologist picked up her drawing, glanced at it and let it drop.
“I will not be made a fool of,” he said.
Madelene removed her sunglasses and leaned toward him.
“It was sent to the Center,” she said, “and they can’t make head or tail of it.”
Suspicion niggled at the doctor.
“You’re not by any chance a vet yourself, are you? Or a dentist?”
Madelene smiled, warmly and dumbly.
“Office messenger,” she said.
The doctor relaxed.
“Of course, one cannot be certain,” he said. “Not with such a poor drawing.”
His fingers drummed on the sheet of paper.
“Molars, small molars, conical canines, incisors and diastema. All of which points to a chimpanzee.”
“But?” said Madelene.
“I could go along with there being four teeth too many. One extra small molar on each side. We’re always coming across mutations. Even though evolution is tending toward fewer teeth. In a pinch I could even let the front teeth pass. But why the chiseled edges, like knife blades, rather than masticatory surfaces? And the dental arch, it’s too rough, wouldn’t you agree?”
Madelene nodded.
“That kind of curvature would be inconceivable in an ape; it’s humanoid. I’ll tell you one thing. You’ve been taken for a ride. Somebody has taken advantage of your ignorance. You’ve been sent the dental chart of a nonexistent creature.”
Madelene sat back in her chair, took out her little bottle and sipped.
“Medicine,” she said. “Asthma. I have all these allergies.”
Slowly she got to her feet.
“Is any record kept of animals that have been stolen or kidnapped?”
“Newsletters. All zoos of any standing exchange a daily newsletter. Every theft is put on record.”
The doctor was starting to freeze into the attitude in which she had found him.
“Doctor,” she said, “what would you say if, even so, you were faced with an animal with just this set of teeth?”
“I would point out that there had to be some misunderstanding.”
“And what if it was actually lying there with its mouth open and teeth like the set in that diagram?”
The brow above the desk creased, reluctant to budge, annoyed at being forced off its empirical pedestal.
“Until it was proved otherwise I would most certainly assume that there was talk of a hoax.”
Madelene smoothed her skirt and smiled a wide, gummy smile.
“Doctor,” she said, “how many teeth does a human being have?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Well, I’m going to go back to the Center and have a look at my teeth, just to make sure there’s no talk of a hoax.”
The doctor looked away.
“You can borrow a mirror from the toilet here. But there’s no need. I have already remarked on your dentition and occlusion. They are quite normal.”
* * *
Out in the corridor Madelene stood for a while tuning in to the building. It had Adam’s dynamism; it was young, intensely businesslike, ambitiously efficient. It was a place where anyone with no good reason for being there might easily feel in the way. In an attempt to stifle this feeling she took a drink from the bottle. As she was wiping away her tears she noticed Adam’s name and title above her head. She had stopped outside his office.
She put on her sunglasses and walked in.
She entered the outer office. A woman in a swivel chair whirled around to confront her.
Madelene had met Adam’s secretary five or six times and now she was struck by a fleeting sense of being in free fall. Then she filled out her role from within.
“I have an appointment with Adam Burden,” she said.
The secretary smiled—a pleasant, impersonal, pliant smile, as much as to say there was absolutely no way Madelene could have an appointment, since, if she had, it would have been made through her, which was not the case, so there was no oversight on her part, but this she could afford to gloss over.
“I’m afraid Mr. Burden is attending a lengthy and important meeting in town,” she said.
“Is he somewhere where I could reach him by phone?”
The woman’s face turned cold. Her civility, rationed from the start, had run out.
“I’m afraid that is quite out of the question. What was the name?”
Madelene stared at the woman in front of her in fascination. At the impeccability of her dress, her dismissive air of authority. Adam had once said that a great leader saw to it that the people around him never made mistakes. This woman looked incapable of making a mistake. Then she remembered Adam’s dawn retreats, how he could not bear anyone close to him, the doors he erected between himself and the outside world. The woman facing her was just such a barrier. She leaned forward.
“I came to find out what happened to him last night,” she whispered.
The secretary tried to get away by pushing her chair backward; Madelene followed her, closing further and further in until the woman could see her own
reflection in the sunglasses and breathe the alcohol.
“And in the Meat Market no less,” Madelene went on. “What d’you think of that?”
The secretary’s back was pressed up against her word processor, all avenues of escape cut off. She had gripped the arm of her chair.
“You tell him,” said Madelene, “that he’d better have one helluva good excuse, because otherwise I’m going to call his wife.”
On the desk the woman’s hand lighted on a slip of yellow paper with a note in Adam’s handwriting. She held it out.
“Perhaps you would like to call him yourself and tell him,” she said.
Madelene took the slip of paper and backed off.
“Four hours,” she said. “Surrounded by frozen chickens and organic sausage skins. You just tell him that.”
Even in such a tight spot the secretary could still summon up the strength for one last sally.
“And who shall I say called?”
“Priscilla,” she said. “Priscilla from the Meat Marketing Board Research Center.”
And she closed the door behind her.
* * *
Back in the corridor she stopped and gazed blindly into space. Madelene entertained many different feelings for her husband, not all of them unmixed. But her confidence in him had always been absolute. There were sides of Adam and of his life which she could not fathom. But she had always felt sure that, in time, she would get to the bottom of and learn to accept most of them. Now she found herself faced with the first downright lie of her marriage. Adam, she knew, was at home in the conservatory. But he had left a note for his secretary that said “Earp. Vet. Inst.”
Madelene took a sip from her bottle. Then she made her way back along the corridor.
* * *
The veterinary odontologist was sitting just as she had left him. Madelene laid Adam’s note in front of him.
“Doctor,” she said, “there was one question I forgot to ask. The Center is considering doing some work with this institution. Can you tell me anything, in strictest confidence, about this place?”
The doctor looked out the window, across the covered construction site that was soon to become the New London Regent’s Park Zoological Garden.
“I’ve more than enough to do just keeping people in line here,” he said.
“I was so hoping you could help,” said Madelene. “You’re renowned for your contacts.”
The doctor glanced at the paper, then looked out the window again.
“Drop it. Never heard of it. It’s not in London, at any rate.”
Madelene stood her ground. The doctor reached behind him and brought out a hefty-looking reference book.
“The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons’ Annual Register and Directory. Provides a list of all vets and veterinary colleges in the country. Comprehensive.”
He looked something up, closed the book and put it away.
“You’ve been conned again. There is no institution by that name in Britain.”
He regarded Madelene over his bifocals.
“Everywhere you go it’s the same story. We’re up to our eyes in inefficiency and incompetence. And a nice, polite girl like you too.”
Madelene made a tentative attempt to let go of the desk, to see whether she could stand unaided.
“Thank you very, very much, Doctor,” she said slowly. “And that comes both from me and from the Research Center.”
* * *
Madelene walked across London for what might have been an hour before taking a taxi, stepping out as carefully and circumspectly as her condition would allow.
It was not herself she was endeavoring to protect, nor was it the fact that she had practiced one piece of deception and herself been witness to another that occupied her mind. What she was guarding was a new sense of inner worth. For the first time for as far back as she could remember she had stepped out and to one side of herself and become someone else. She was no longer just Madelene. On the fringes of her own being she glimpsed the silhouette of another woman who was also herself. It was this other woman she was shielding as she made her way across London.
* * *
Back in her rooms she removed her face with a cotton cloth and lay down on her back on the bed. She had been absent from Mombasa Manor with no explanation given and no one had noticed a thing. But elsewhere in the city three people had encountered a strange woman, different from Madelene and yet one and the same: Priscilla of the Meat Marketing Board Research Center.
five
When she woke, the clock showed midnight. The air in the room was heavy and humid. She groped around beneath the bed; her carafe was empty. She pulled on a dressing gown, the fabric hurting where it touched, and stuck the carafe in one deep pocket. Dizzy and weak, she embarked upon her journey to the source of the Nile.
The house tried to bar her way with its darkness, its menacing shadows, the sense of human breathing. The courtyard slabs burned the soles of her bare feet and the sky was black. But there was a bit of a nip in the air. She walked across the gravel and turned the handle of the door into the potting shed. It was locked.
Her first reaction was to freeze in the face of this strange new secretiveness. The outer perimeter of Mombasa Manor came under the aegis of the same security firm that guarded the rest of the houses on the road. But as a rule the house doors were never locked. Then she smiled. Like all expedition leaders of foresight, on this her solitary journey she too had laid down her caches.
The potting shed’s large freshwater tank ran through the wall into a trough and in this trough stood row upon row of jars containing water specimens. Madelene shut her eyes, felt around among the water plants and the goldfish and pulled out a jar, apparently no different from all the rest. She unscrewed the lid, took a cautious sip and let out her breath. No chance of any tadpoles developing in this liquid. It was crystal-clear 55 percent ethyl alcohol.
She settled herself on the rim of the stone trough. Above her head the clouds parted and the Milky Way came into view. From the basin came a murmur reminiscent of the fountains and canals of Copenhagen. She drank to herself. She was having a lovely time, what a delightful, cozy Danish-style evening this was, the perfect end to a perfect day.
She thought of the ape. Of how lonely it must be feeling now, with no tiny helpers to sweeten its loneliness. Had anyone ever heard of an animal taking a drink? No. On the other hand, no one had ever heard of Erasmus’ tight dental arch either. And it was never too late to learn to drink, was it? Not when they could teach chimps sign language.
Madelene lay down in the trough. On her knees, with the jar held well above any risk of dilution, she crawled through into the potting shed. She crossed the threshold of the garden room and switched on the light. The windows were masked by inky blackout curtains. The cage looked just as she remembered. But the ape was gone.
She stayed where she was, beside the glass partition, until she was quite certain. Then she unlatched the door and stepped inside.
It is at the very moment of realizing that we are bereft, when the loss bleeds and the awareness of it has not yet begun to coagulate, that the significance of what has been lost strikes us most forcefully. Advancing farther into the empty cage, Madelene realized that she was going to miss the ape.
She had never had a pet. Without envy, without desiring anything of the kind for herself, she had viewed her friends’ Shetland ponies, golden retrievers and hamsters and right from the start she had known that the horse between the legs, the puppy against the bosom and the guinea pig in the bed were substitutes for something else. In silence and feeling nothing but pity, time and again she had witnessed the collapse of a sentimental illusion, with an animal outgrowing its cuddly puppy stage to become large and tediously horny, at which point it was banished from the girl’s bedroom to an outdoor run, there to develop—as a quite logical consequence of its isolation—a psychopathic savagery that would culminate in it biting the mailman and costing the family fifty thousand Danish
kroner in damages plus seven hundred kroner to have it put down.
Now, standing in the cage, she saw that whereas those animals back then were supposed to remind one of something else—of children, of parents, of dolls, of men—the ape in its stoic helplessness had reminded her of herself.
Desolation washed over her. She drank from the specimen jar, in a ritual gesture of farewell, a funeral toast, like an exclusive little wake for a departed friend. As she drank, she wandered slowly across the cage and thus she arrived at the only spot in the room from which the ape was visible.
She parted the branches. It looked at first as though the plants had twined around one another to form a bed beneath the animal; then she saw that it was lying on a woven cradle. Without snapping or forcing them it had drawn branches and leaves together and plaited them into a hammock. The side of this hammock facing the glass was hidden by a screen of grayish brown, withered greenery which merged with the animal’s fur, making it impossible to see the structure from the outside. At the only spot in the room where the vegetation formed a thicket capable of concealing it, the ape appeared to be hovering, around shoulder height, in a masterly piece of camouflage.
Madelene seated herself on a branch.
“You’re even more invisible than you might think,” she said. “You don’t exist at all.”
She pointed at the ape’s teeth.
“Like the bumblebee. It can’t fly; it’s been proved. But it doesn’t know that. So it does it anyway.”
She drank a toast to the bumblebee.
“Would you mind opening your mouth?”
She opened her own mouth wide to demonstrate.
The ape’s lips parted hesitantly; then its mouth opened.
Madelene saw the reddish white maw, the powerful gums, a palate ridged as a seabed, the glint of spittle under the tongue. She saw the two small molars on each side, the chiseled edges of the front teeth, the cone-shaped daggers of the canines, the tightly curved, humanoid dental arch. She saw the original of Adam’s faithfully reproduced dental chart. But all of this she saw in passing, as it were, as one small part of something far more important.
At the moment when the ape opened its mouth it was not only its dental chart that was humanoid. For an instant its whole face seemed human, and not only human in the abstract sense but as human as her own face. And at that instant it imitated her movements, not like some sort of caricature, because there is always something unreal about a caricature, in the grossness of it. No, its imitation of her was totally true to life.
