Endangered (2 page)

We turned off the paved road and switched to crumbly dirt. Village women, marching with giant plastic basins balanced on their heads, parted as we rolled past. From its spot on its mother's back, a baby wrapped in a bright shawl peered into the window, waving a thin arm when it saw the bonobo. Clément eased by a pickup truck, long broken and rusting in the middle of the road, and then we made a sharp turn into the jungle. Trees closed in on the car as we rattled down a muddy trail. A small painted sign announced we were nearly there.

The sanctuary was located on the former campus of a state school that had closed after it got shot up during one of Congo's wars. After years of lobbying, Mom had finally convinced the government to give the plot to her. There have always been laws against killing or selling bonobos in Congo, but the government had trouble enforcing them before because there was nowhere to place confiscated infants. The sanctuary was a collaboration between the government and the international donors my mother had chatted up.

As we pulled in, crowds of butterflies burst into the air, swirling and settling in flecks of color against a backdrop of vivid green. As I stepped out with the bonobo, he stared at the butterflies passionlessly, but his eyes did dart around as he watched them. I decided this was a good sign and rocked him cheeringly in my arms as I held him close.

“Do you see Mom anywhere?” I called to Clément, nervously scanning the sanctuary grounds. I knew she wanted it to be the
Ministry of Environment that confiscated bonobos, in order to make it clear that it was the government of Congo taking people's property, not her. But I hadn't had that option. That man would have disappeared with this bonobo if I hadn't paid him. The failing heart I cradled in my arms would have stopped. If her life's work was really to take care of these apes, wasn't saving one the most important thing?

“No. She must be in back,” Clément said, sounding as relieved as I was that we wouldn't yet have to face my mother.

I passed along the grounds, black-and-white magpies and long-tailed red birds scattering as I went. I could hear, from afar, the high-pitched cries of the bonobos in their enclosures. When we reached the veterinarian's office, Patrice greeted me warmly. “Miss Sophie, you are back from America?”

“Yes, sir,” I said in English.

Patrice chuckled, then stopped when he saw the bonobo. “
Oh, là là.
On the table,” he said.

He placed a cushion on the operating table, which was really just a desk repurposed from the former school, and I laid the bonobo down on it. Patrice immediately had his grimy old stethoscope out and laid it on the little ape's chest. The bonobo looked alarmed, so I held his hand and stroked his scabby forehead.

“He's cramping, I think —” I started to say, before Patrice raised his hand to shush me as he listened for the heartbeat.

Patrice lowered the earpieces around his neck and sighed. “He's not in good shape at all. A lot of fluid around his heart. Where did you find him?”

The bonobo started whimpering again, so I took him back up into my arms. He resumed his now-usual position, his forehead against the base of my neck. “A man was selling him on the N-1. Do you think he'll be okay?”

“There was another roadblock today,” Clément interjected. “It's an odd sign, no? Have you heard about anything unusual happening in the capital?”

“Go tell the boss,” Patrice said, dismissing Clément with a hand gesture before turning back to the bonobo. “He's extremely dehydrated, and we'll need to get fluids into him as soon as possible if he's to have a hope of surviving. Our IVs haven't been working, but I'm going to put one in anyway and hope for a miracle. Sophie, could you put him back down and hold his hand and make sure he doesn't resist?”

The ape sighed as I pulled him off me. A healthy adult bonobo is much stronger than a human, but this little guy couldn't have resisted me no matter how hard he tried. I stroked his arm to keep him calm as Patrice worked the needle in. He didn't fight at all; I wondered if he was simply exhausted, or if his previous owner had been brutal enough that he didn't dare protest.

“He keeps wincing every once in a while — I think he has cramps,” I repeated. His little face was so like a human's, and no one grew up in Congo without knowing what stomach cramps looked like.

“Fluids first,” Patrice said. He hung the bag on the side of a cabinet and flicked the tubing going to the needle, trying to make the saline flow. His face crinkled as he peered.

“Do you need me to take his temperature or anything?” I asked.

“Maybe you could find your mother and let her know about him,” Patrice said.

“I'd rather stay here.”

“I was afraid of this. The IV won't work,” Patrice said, scowling at the rubber tubing. “We need to buy new ones, but, you know, they aren't easy to find.” It was one of those things about
living in Congo, that I'd once been used to but now found hard to bear: You find something you like or need and then it gets taken away and no one can promise it's ever going to come back.

Patrice removed the line. “I'm going to do some preliminary tests for diseases. Want to give him a bath in the meantime?”

I lifted the bonobo from the table, gently cut his mangy rope away, and brought him to the sink. He tried to screech, but since his voice was almost gone, it sounded more like a rustle. I made sure the water was nice and warm, and he calmed down once it started running along his body. He balanced on my arm using both hands and one foot, watching curiously as the runoff swirled down the drain. All sorts of things were in it: clumps of poo, crawly mites, more of his hair. He liked getting soaped up, I thought, enjoyed the feeling of my hands on his body; he stared into my eyes the whole time and rasped less frequently. I dried him with a fluffy towel and wrapped him tightly. Only his face showed through. Since he was nearly hairless, he looked almost like a real human baby. Three delicate little fingers protruded from the towel.

He needed to get fluids into him, I knew, and without an IV, we'd have to do it the traditional way. There was milk in a mini fridge in my mom's office, so that's where I headed. I had the bottle in hand and was trying to coax the bonobo to drink when my mom came in from the outside, wiping her hands on a rag. Clément was a few steps behind.

“What happened?” my mom asked, immediately across the room and crouching next to me, her strong hands on my hair, on the bonobo, warmth everywhere.

“He was on the side of the road and he's not drinking, Mom,” I said, my voice teary. “He's going to die if we don't get something into him. I knew I had to do whatever it took to get him to you.”

“This bonobo has lost the taste for milk,” my mom said, her arms still around me. “He must have been traveling for a long time.”

He reached a hand to her face, as if to touch it, then got shy and let it drop. He was immediately in love with my mother. It happened with every bonobo. I'd spent my childhood wishing I was like Snow White, that little birds and other woodland creatures would flock to me if I raised my arms — but whenever I tried they always ran away, and I felt totally rejected. My mother, though — everything she came across adored her.

She was true Congolese, tough and warm, with an amazing broad face from which her soft brown eyes shone. Mom was skilled at charming her way around corruption, which had helped her cut through the endless red tape it took to get the sanctuary off the ground.

I'd started to wonder, though, about what went on underneath. Because I saw her only on vacations, we didn't have the day-in, day-out knowledge of each other that most mothers and daughters have. It's not like she was a stranger; we had too much history for that. But at the same time, I couldn't say I knew her well. Or at least well enough to see her thoughts.

I gave her a big kiss on the cheek. “What are you going to do with him?” I asked.

“Let's keep trying to get him to drink,” she said.

Patrice appeared in the doorway and kneeled beside me and the bonobo, another needle in his hand. “I'm going to send a blood sample to Kinshasa, see what diseases he might have. We'll have to keep him separate from the other nursery bonobos for a few days, until I get it back.” The bonobo barely noticed as Patrice took his blood, he was so fixated on my mom.

“Come,
mon p'tit
,” Mom cooed. “You can drink. Aren't you thirsty, even a little?”

When I put the bottle to his lips, though, he only chewed on the nipple and squeaked.

She sighed.

“What do you think happened to his hand?” I asked, putting my arms around my mom and resting my head on her fleshy shoulder, all three of us a pile of comfort.

There was a flash of annoyance in my mother's eyes — even though she instantly tried to hide it, her instinct was to tell me I was asking a stupid question. Stupid, I guess, because the answer was so obvious. It took her that moment to remember that I didn't live here, that in Congo her daughter was essentially an outsider.

“Superstition,” she said. “Soup with a bonobo finger in it is supposed to make a pregnant woman give birth to a strong baby. Putting another finger in the bathwater keeps the baby strong.”

“I hope the stupid baby gets polio,” I said, and surprised myself by even sort of meaning it. I kissed the top of the bonobo's head. I imagined him in his crate, crying against the bars, someone lifting him out only to chop off a finger. Plunging him back into the crate, then pulling him out a few days later to take another. “He looks so sad, Mom. I don't know what happened. He was grinning ear to ear when I found him.”

“They grin when they're happy, but also when they're terrified,” she said. “He was probably scared out of his mind. And now he's not sure whether he wants to bother fighting.”

Patrice corked the blood vial and went for his jacket. “I'll drop this at the clinic when Clément heads back to Kinshasa,” he said. “Can I take the sanctuary van? Are you ready to leave for the night?”

“In a minute,” my mom said. “Will you wait for me?”

Patrice left, and Mom sat there quietly for a moment, stroking both me and the bonobo.

“He'll be okay here when we go back to the house?” I asked.
Her home was a roomy two-story building in a guarded complex in Kinshasa. I was envisioning one particular spot on the floor, a pile of imported Tunisian pillows, perfect to curl up in and e-mail friends. “Who's going to take care of him overnight? One of the guards?”

“Darling,” my mom said slowly, “I need to talk to you about something. What you did today was wrong.”

This was the thing with my mother — she could never admit there was a space between right and wrong. Remaining at the sanctuary had been right, just as coming to America with me and my father would have been wrong. She couldn't be honest with me; she had to present her heart as not so much a compass as a two-way switch.

“I know what you mean, Mom, about getting the ministry involved, but if I'd wasted any time that guy would have —”

“Do you remember when someone threw a rock through our window, back when I first started the sanctuary? You were too young for me to tell you at the time, but that was a wildlife trafficker whose bonobo I'd confiscated. It is very important that we are not the ones to take what people see as their property. We can only provide the place where the bonobos come to live. Do you understand the difference?”

I rolled my eyes. I was nearly fifteen, not ten. “I paid the man, so he can't get mad. And we helped a bonobo.” I held up my hand to stop her from countering. “Mom. I get what you're saying. But this bonobo would be dead or missing another finger by now if I hadn't bought him. He needed to be in your sanctuary. And now he is.”

“I've got calls in to the ministry right now, trying to get them to track that man down.”

“He wasn't that bad,” I said. I remembered his ratty clothing, his calling the bonobo a friend.

My mom's eyes flashed. “He's very bad, Sophie. You made a big mistake by giving him money. I can see you're starting to understand the gravity of what I'm saying, so I won't bring it up again. But you have to be wise about these things. You have to learn when to ignore suffering so that you're strong enough to fight it when the time is right.”

I didn't agree, not exactly, but I didn't fight back because I was ready for lecture time to be over. I wanted to hand the bonobo to a nursery worker who would know how to get him to drink, and then get into that van and head home to dinner, a phone call to Dad as he woke up in the States, and satellite French TV.

“Are you done with your office stuff for the day?” I asked. “I'm ready to go pass out.”

“Yes,” she said, kissing the top of my head and getting up. “It's been a long day, hasn't it?”

“Yes,” I said, standing. I hadn't yet adjusted to the time zone. Or the time. Or the zone. The bonobo whimpered at my movement. Another cramp must have come over him; his face scrunched up all over again. “Make sure you tell whoever's looking after him tonight to rub his belly. It seems to help. And to change the dressing on his blisters. One of them is oozy.”

“You can do it yourself,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “We're taking him into Kinshasa?”

“No. We're staying here. You two can sleep on my office couch tonight, and we'll introduce him to the nursery mamas tomorrow. Then we'll get one of the upstairs rooms set up for us to stay in for the next few weeks. I'll run home tonight, have dinner with your aunt as planned, and bring your clothes and books when I come to work tomorrow. You need to offer him milk at least every two hours. Use my alarm clock.”

“Mom! You're not serious.”

She gave me one of her enveloping hugs, all vivid heat and batik fabric. “He can't roam free in the nursery until he's out of quarantine, and we have so many young bonobos right now that I can't spare one of the mamas to take care of him. I'll stay here, too — there's always plenty for me to do. You will see this through, Sophie.”