Abduction (2 page)

“My first lesson's at 10 o'clock. The maths teacher's off ill. Lucky really, because I don't understand a thing he says!”

“We need to talk to you, Shehera. I haven't got time now – we've got a rush on. A committee from the ministry is descending on us tomorrow. And take that earphone out – you'll go deaf!”

I had put on a stern voice, but my charming (and lying) daughter took no notice. She pushed me out of the door.

“You'll miss your bus and your animals will die of boredom without you. Don't forget to give Lucette a kiss from me. Tell her I'll be over soon to teach her about DMS.”

‘DMS' stood for ‘Daddy, Mummy, Sweetie', Shehera's first words, and the only ones she had uttered for so long that we had worried that she might be retarded… until, overnight, our daughter had decided to chatter more than a flock of magpies in spring.

I had smiled and Meriem, disheartened by my attitude, had shrugged and reminded me not to forget to invite my vet colleague to Shehera's birthday lunch, which we had put back to the weekend.

As I left the building, I had almost walked straight into the widow from the sixth floor. She'd aged terribly, in her veil and her black gloves. I had said hello to her. Head down, she had mumbled a reply. I had been told that, at the beginning of the troubles, some night-time visitors with sawn-off shotguns had threatened her with the ultimate punishment if she didn't change profession. Ever since then, the too-beautiful bigot, terrified and desperate to make amends for her bad habits of the past, never left the local mosque. From time to time, however, howling children, spurred on by some jealous wife, would fling oaths at her as she passed. Recalling her once eloquently jiggling buttocks, I caught myself thinking, “What a waste! All those dicks in distress while a magnificent backside that Mother Nature and Darwin put so much passion into sculpting grows wrinkly from lack of use…”

I had bought a newspaper and some mints from Moh, the limbless man who spent summer and winter in front of a makeshift shelter halfway between the bus stop and the zoo's ticket office. Torso balancing on a crate mounted on casters, he had called out an offhand “Hello, doctor! Are you doing all right?” to which I had replied, “Yes! And yourself? And may I remind you that I'm not a doctor, unfortunately!”

I never went any further because the man's unfailing good mood made me uncomfortable. It was as if I could hear him saying,
Look on my misfortune, mate, and acknowledge how brave I am, as someone who moans at every opportunity yourself! Reckon there's a place with my name on it in heaven?
He was always ready with a joke, stammering out the punch line amid hoots of laughter. I had dropped the money in a plastic box covered in verses from the Koran standing on a table decorated with the same texts. One day when I voiced my surprise, he told me that he had surrounded himself with sacred scripture to keep swindlers at bay.

“As you can see, I can't run or throw stones! So I make do with appeals to people's piety. But Holy Scripture doesn't make any difference because there are as many thieves in this country as flies on a general's turd!”

He had lowered his voice. “My poor mother slipped a Koran into the inside pocket of my jacket to protect me. She brought it back from Mecca, where she paid a lot of money for it. That's what she says anyway. My mother's extremely stingy, but she must be telling the truth because the cover's decorated with gold thread. But if guys round here found out, they'd strip me down to my underwear and nick it!”

I had grimaced. “But you don't mind telling
me
your story about the golden Koran?” Rubbing his nose with his stump, he had retorted, “You're a doctor, not a thief… Well, until proof of the contrary at least!” before bursting out laughing again.

I had reluctantly shaken the hand of the guard behind the counter of the ticket office. He did have two (sticky) hands – as if he hadn't bothered to wipe them after wanking, one of my female colleagues said with revulsion. A little further on, I had chucked a sweet into my mouth, a paltry substitute for the cigarettes I hadn't smoked for some time now. It took me a few more seconds of pity and disgust for the image of the limbless man to fade and to rid myself of the foolish, but persistent impression that the handicapped man's rotten luck would rub off on me.

I went out of my way to greet Lucette, as I had promised Shehera – and there I met my boss, already out and about, and took out my spiral-bound notebook to make him think that I was already hard at work. Some time previously, my daughter and I had watched a documentary containing virtual images of man's ancestors. The film had made a great impression on Shehera, who had claimed that our little female monkey was the spitting image of the computer-generated Australopithecus on the television. She had made me promise to put pressure on my colleagues to officially call her Lucette – the descendant, all the way from prehistoric times, of the venerable Lucy in the film. Luckily, Lounes, a family friend and our zoo's head vet, had agreed to this with good grace, although he doubted whether the real Lucy had been as wild as the modern cousins of hers we had recently welcomed.

The baby monkey eyed me indifferently before resuming its suckling, while the two hairy rascals went about the business that had so shocked Hajji Sadok. The acting Director conspicuously avoided looking at the primate enclosure. I saw that he was afraid that this morning's visitors would be party to the sight of a large male primate fornicating with an ape of the same sex with unrestrained joy.

Catching an involuntary glimpse of the delighted face of the ape being ‘paid' homage by its fellow, Hajji Sadok gave a nervous chuckle, much to my surprise.

“No doubt about it, it's all these bastards ever think about! What did we call them again?”

“Kader and John.”

“And is the Arab the one…”

“The Arab? What do you think the other one is, a Texan?”

“Kader the monkey, I mean…”

“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?