by Peter Høeg
“20,500 chickens per day,” she said. “To feed London. 5,800 pigs. 1,520 head of beef. 6,000 sheep. According to the Meat and Livestock Commission. Each day the city consumes four million pounds of animal protein. London could be regarded as a monstrous machine for the processing of domestic animals. That, however, is not how I see it. Because the slaughterhouses are only one small part of the story. If we look beyond basic sustenance, the first group we come to are the working animals. In Greater London there are at least 5,000 watchdogs registered with security firms. At least 5,000 horses in service as drays and hacks. 4,000 racehorses belonging to fifty different stables, 2,000 police and cavalry mounts, 3,000 greyhounds, 3,000 homing pigeons. Then there are the animals that satisfy other needs. The Office for National Statistics estimates that down below us there are a million dogs, one and a half million cats, five million cage birds (species unspecified), two million small rodents (guinea pigs and the like), and a number of reptiles and fish at which we can only hazard a guess. Not forgetting those animals in scientific research laboratories—private and public—and pharmaceutical plants, the livestock kept on city farms, at the veterinary colleges and so on. A group which, in the Greater London area, is estimated to amount to ten million animals, ranging in size from shrews to musk oxen. And all of this, all of these twenty million–plus living creatures are not even the half of it. The other half are what might be termed the animal lumpen proletariat of the city. The stray dogs, the wild cats, that band of semi-wild animals which strive to adapt to the city biotope: foxes, pigeons, house mice, seagulls, rats, insects. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the zoos and aquariums.”
Andrea Burden had moved across to the glass, her back to Madelene. Now she turned to face her.
“London is not just an organism that processes animals. There is far more to it than that. Our biologists calculate that this city contains more than thirty million nonhuman creatures, representing 10,000 separate species. They put the animal biomass at 350,000 pounds per square mile. Do you know what that tells us?”
Madelene shook her head.
“It means that not only are there more animals in London than in any British oak wood, or anywhere else in the British Isles for that matter. It means there is a greater incidence of animal life here than, for example, in Mato Grosso in the dry season. London is one of the largest habitats for nonhuman creatures on this earth.”
Madelene looked out across the city, down into her now empty glass and out across the city again.
“So what?” she said.
She did not mean to be rude, but explicit politeness takes energy and Madelene was running on empty.
“Now let me see you out,” said Andrea Burden.
She helped Madelene out of the chair. The carpet beneath her feet had acquired a muddy cast.
“But we humans,” said Madelene, “we matter too, don’t we?”
“We made a choice. Animals were brought here. It’s the victims that concern me.”
Andrea Burden put the gin bottle in a brown paper bag and handed it to Madelene.
“Take the bottle for the trip back. It was lovely to see you. Be an angel and call before you come next time.”
Madelene steadied herself against the doorpost and scanned the face opposite her. It struck her that the other woman had set her a test. And that she had failed it, without ever having worked out on what question she was being examined.
“You forgot something,” she said. “The animals the behavioral scientists work with.”
Adam’s sister gripped her arm, ready to throw her out. Already her gaze had grown distant.
In Madelene’s mind five images converged on one another: London, the ape, Adam, Priscilla and the coldness of the face before her. They ran together and burst into flames.
“Actually, what I came to say was that I had a very strict upbringing,” she said. “I’ve always had a terrible problem with any kind of wrongdoing. I can’t sleep at night. Get throat infections. It’s the ape. At our place. What with Adam’s position. It was you who brought it. The boss of this splendid establishment. With never a word to the veterinary authorities. I might have to go to the police. That’s what I came to say.”
Prior to this, Andrea Burden’s movements had been fluttery and spasmodic. The first time Madelene met her she had taken this for the mark of a ditherer, but she had since learned to liken it to a prizefighter bobbing and weaving around his opponent. Now she was still. She had no time to regain her balance before Madelene was on her again.
“Or maybe I should go straight to the papers. I haven’t been able to eat for days. I kept hoping someone would give me an explanation.”
They were back beside the window and there they stayed, on the brink of the urban abyss.
Andrea Burden lowered her head.
“I would like to invite you to London Zoo,” she said. “Tomorrow. Before the workmen arrive. Would seven o’clock suit you?”
“I haven’t been to a zoo since I was a child,” said Madelene.
They walked back to the door. Andrea Burden opened it; the suit was waiting in the outer office.
“About the papers,” said Andrea Burden, “and the police?”
Madelene kept her in suspense for a moment before answering.
“We’ll have to talk about that tomorrow,” she said. “At the Zoo.”
eight
At first glance there was nothing remarkable about the way in which Adam Burden ate dinner. Closer inspection revealed that it adhered to a set of rules which represented the culmination of a four-hundred-year-long process of evolution in upper-class table manners. He received the food with a caress, parted it, conducted steaming-hot mouthfuls into his discreetly exposed innards, gently coerced corks out of slender bottle necks, dabbed his lips delicately with a napkin which materialized in his hand, then vanished without trace into his lap, that no meat juices would smear the gleaming glass held by the stem alone to prevent the throbbing pulse from affecting the temperature of the wine. When it was all over and Mrs. Clapham had taken away the dishes and laid bare the tablecloth, the white linen offered no clue as to what had gone before.
Madelene had known from the start that she would never be able to match this regular, daily balancing act. When she sat down to a meal she was hungry, usually extremely hungry, to the extent that the food occupied almost all of her thoughts, with whatever was left being focused on spilling as little as possible and—more and more often—on keeping herself from falling off the chair. So there was very little energy to spare for following Adam’s animated conversation. Like a well-mannered season-ticket holder, she had long since learned to applaud in all the right places while her attention was somewhere else entirely.
But not this evening. This evening, though tired, she was all ears. Listening not to what Adam was saying but for the break in the flow of words that would facilitate her own entrance. Because this evening Madelene had devised a role for herself.
“There was a man here today,” she said. “From the veterinary authorities. He was complaining that Clapham had refused to let him in. He wanted to talk to you.”
Adam’s face lost its air of preoccupation. First it went blank. Then a fine veil of fear settled over it.
“And then this woman rang.”
Adam stood up and backed off toward the empty grate. It was a wintertime move, and futile—the fire had been out since April.
“Her name was … Priscilla something or other. She wanted to know whether there were any … animals here.”
By the fireplace Adam froze.
“The birds, I told her. The ones we feed on the grounds. And Clapham’s goldfish. But that’s all.”
Adam leaned his head back against the mantelpiece.
“I thought it best not to mention the ape. I mean maybe it hasn’t been … what do you call it? Reported? If that’s what you’re supposed to do with animals? Or what? Could you tell me, please?”
It took some time for Adam to answer her and when h
e did his voice was hoarse.
“The Washington Convention lists all wild animals under three different headings depending on how great the threat to each species is considered to be. Strictly speaking, animals that appear on these lists must be reported to the Ministry of Agriculture’s CITE office—that’s the body in this country which sees to it that the terms of the convention are observed.”
“Which,” said Madelene, “just hasn’t happened in this case.”
“More often than not the Ministry will contact us. So in a way I represent the controlling body.”
“That’s what scares me,” said Madelene. “That’s why I almost confided in this Priscilla woman, and said, ‘Listen, what if these’—what were they called again?—‘controlling bodies break the law themselves? What then?’”
What was running through Adam’s mind during the long silence that now descended was not the connotation of what Madelene had said. Nor was it the painfulness of the situation. It was at Madelene as a person that he stared. Behind the woman across from him he was trying to catch a glimpse of the individual he had married only seventeen months earlier.
“Five days,” he said. “It’ll be here for another five days. Then it’s gone.”
* * *
Anyone who drinks tends to lose their natural, essential tiredness. In recent months Madelene had been having more and more difficulty in getting to sleep. Nonetheless, that night she took two caffeine tablets and drank three cups of black coffee, wanting to be quite sure she would stay awake. Then she sat down to wait.
At ten o’clock a car drove into the courtyard. From the window she watched Adam come out to meet two men, after which they and Clapham spent the next two hours carrying boxes of various sizes from the car into the garden room. Then the car drove away. At two in the morning Adam emerged and went up to his rooms. Madelene gave him five minutes, then followed him.
When she entered the room it was empty. Adam was in the bathroom. The long table that ran the length of one wall was covered with large sheets of paper and on top of the paper stood a jar containing a huge brain suspended in a clear fluid.
A good many hours had passed since Madelene had put her mind into neutral. Her actions were now guided by decisions taken at another time of day and so she did not stop to think before pulling out the large rubber cork and sniffing the fluid, with the instinctive curiosity that drives alcoholics to comb every new stretch of terrain for any potential reservoir.
The bouquet that rose to meet her nostrils was the repellent, sickly-sweet odor of formaldehyde.
She replaced the cork and straightened up. The feeling that washed over her was not disappointment that the brain had not been preserved in alcohol. It was the fear that this might be the ape’s brain. That, having completed their examination, they had then cut open the skull and removed its brain.
The bathroom door opened and Adam came out. His face was gray with fatigue, his eyes red as an albino rabbit’s.
He stopped dead. Saw Madelene’s hand on the glass, read her thoughts and remembered dinner.
“It’s the brain of a chimpanzee,” he said. “From the Institute collection.”
Remembering her mission, Madelene walked over to her husband and put her arms around him.
“I’m not quite myself,” she said. “But I just wanted to touch you before I went to bed.”
This close, convincing hug was what she had come to give. With it she wiped the exhaustion from his face. With it she erased the memory of that evening’s discord. And with it, as the tips of her fingers ran up over his buttocks, from the clip on his belt she stole his keys.
* * *
She waited in her bedroom for twenty minutes. Then she snuck through the darkened rooms, found the key to the potting shed and garden room on Adam’s key ring and let herself in.
A forest of boxes, lamps and instruments had sprung up around and in front of the cage and this she worked her way through, paying it no heed. She knew that these things were intended for use on the ape and that they would never have the chance to fulfill their purpose.
She unlocked the cage and remained in the doorway for a moment, looking at the animal. She was never going to see it again and so she tried to imprint its image on her memory, to take a mental farewell picture.
The ape was eating. It ate absorbedly, egoistically, as Madelene herself had always dreamed of eating, with every sense other than those of taste and smell suspended, stripped of all mannerliness and with that same lack of fear that had, from the beginning, seemed like a question aimed at her, a question that, she now realized, had been asking: How do you really want to be? And to this question her heart had answered: I want—in some way—to be like you.
“I’ve come to let you out,” she said.
The ape rose. It placed its fists on the ground and pushed itself into a position which, while erect, still left it on all fours. From there it kept on going, relinquished its hold on the ground, straightened its back, lifted its head and clasped its hands across its chest.
Madelene had been aware that the ape had—to some degree and in a way she did not understand—been learning from the people and goings-on around it. Even so, she was staggered. For a moment they stood there, quite still, she and the ape face to face. Then she turned toward the grille and opened first it and then the conservatory door. They stepped out into the park.
The wind had risen. In a cold, midnight-blue sky it chased the clouds across the face of the man in the moon. The ape bent its head back, seeming to drink in the wind and the moonlight.
Madelene crossed to the wall, set her carafe on the top and clambered up after it. The ape materialized alongside her.
This was as far as Madelene had planned. She would now pick out an escape route for the ape, it would set out for home and she would be left standing in the moonlight, smiling, shedding a tear, looking wonderful and drinking one for the road.
She was, at this point, sitting a couple of yards above the ground. Suddenly, just as she raised her hand, she shot up another sixty yards. She grew to the height from which, in the House of the Animals, she had viewed London. She saw the city not with human eyes but with those of a bird. But this was by no means an objective view. It was a vision. And what she perceived was that the freedom she had been so eager to plot out for the ape no longer existed.
What she had seen from that building in Aldgate was a city that stretched to the ends of the earth. And even though she knew that to be impossible, that even this wilderness of inhabited stonework petered out somewhere or other, the principle of it went on forever. What mattered was not the city itself, since that too was only one small dot on the face of the earth. What mattered was the principle of the city—modern civilization per se. Madelene saw that there was no longer any end to that; it had totally enmeshed the globe. There was no longer any outside for the ape at her elbow. Any zoo, any game reserve, any safari park whatever was now contained within the bounds of civilization.
Everyone—even someone who has read as little as Madelene had done—takes for their own the dream of terra incognita, the unknown, unexplored world. For one painful moment this dream was bathed in the light of reality; then it dissolved. Madelene knew that this was now beyond her reach forever. From now on there was no quest for the Golden Fleece, or the jewels of Opar, the center of the earth, the Promised Land, lost horizons, El Dorado, Atlantis, the Islands of the Hesperides or simply the land of milk and honey.
She turned to face the ape.
“There’s no such thing as outside now,” she said. “If there’s any freedom to be found it’ll have to be on the inside.”
Over the past few days she had been reminded of her childhood longing, not for some image of bliss, but for bliss itself. Not for herself—her own sober common sense was, in spite of everything, too strong for that—but for the ape. She had grown more and more convinced that she could save it by helping it to make the break for freedom.
Now she abandoned this last illus
ion.
There is nothing pleasant about abandoning the protection afforded by hopes and daydreams and Madelene shrank from it like a hermit crab forced to leave its whelk shell. There was a hopelessness to her situation that would have prompted stronger characters than she to contemplate a speedier form of suicide than that offered by alcohol and Madelene was struck, momentarily, by the thought of jumping to her death.
A split second and the thought was gone. Not only because it dawned on her that she was not on the thirteenth floor but only a couple of yards above the ground, but to a much greater extent for another reason. Those alter egos who had taken their place beside her over the last couple of days found the thought that they should suddenly be snuffed out quite unacceptable.
It felt as though yet another woman had settled herself beside her on the wall. Turning toward her, Madelene saw that this was Responsibility. A figure both as neutral and as undeniably present as the moonlight and the wind and the smell of earth.
Madelene slid down the wall, the woman followed her, then the ape. They walked back the way they had come. Once inside the cage Madelene locked the door behind them.
“It’s not like when we were little,” she said. “You can’t just run away from home. It’s too complicated now. We need more time.”
She peered through the glass, across the electronic landscape. She saw the anesthetic apparatus, trolleys loaded with monitoring equipment, a white box on wheels resembling a twin-size coffin, a hydraulic chair connected to a huge machine that looked—with all its electronic purposefulness—like a domestic version of the electric chair.
“They’re coming to get you,” she said, “and it’s going to be worse than it’s ever been before.”
She put out her hand and the ape took it. The palm of its hand was as big as a shovel but, contrary to what she had expected, it was soft as silk.
“I’m going now,” she said. “But I’ll be back for you.”
This was not some ritual prognosis, like a wedding vow or a New Year’s resolution. It was an oath of a kind to which Madelene had not been moved in twenty years. It was a fearless declaration of faith with no thought for the future, such as a child will make to an irreplaceable playmate.
