Bible of the Dead

Chapter 28

Monkey lab, thought Julia, what’s that in Russian? Didn’t she write that down somewhere?

Grabbing her notebook, she turned to the middle-aged man with broken wire-rimmed taped-together spectacles, standing in the desolate, car-less car-park of Sukhumi Railway Station.

‘Pitomnik Obez… yan.’

The man nodded. ‘Da! Pitomnik Obezyan.’ His nylon shirt was greasy, his chin unshaved, his tie was stained. His helpful smile was keen.

The man was pointing down the road. Julia followed his gesture, with a reflux of dismay: the streets in front of the station were pot-holed and syphilitic, the pavements cracked and weed-sprouted; this town on the polluted shores of the Black Sea seemed to be like every other town on this polluted eastern shore of the Black Sea, decaying, smelly, depressed, half destroyed by recent wars of irredentism and secession. A post communist ex-Soviet statelet at its worst.

‘Da!’ The man pointed, once again: his hand firm and vigorous, his fingernails dirty. He seemed to be telling her to go straight, then right, then up a hill. ‘Pitomnik Obezyan!’

‘Spassibo,’ said Julia, putting away her notebook, quickly walking on.

The weariness was lurking. She was very tired from the flight from Paris to Moscow, the flight from Moscow to Adler, and the train down the grey-drizzled waters of the Black Sea littoral. But Julia was nearing her goal, so a surge of adrenalin was masking that tiredness. She walked quickly into the town.

The subtropical sea port was chilly and dank, and alienating. Julia wished Alex was here. In the end she had decided to tell him what she was doing, but she had been entirely unsurprised when he had declined to join her. He had said ‘Sweetheart, you are mad,’ and he had tried to dissuade her, but she wasn’t to be dissuaded. And so here she was.

Maybe he was right, she was mad. She was in Abkhazia. Even the destination was mad.

What was she hoping to find? The truth? Yes, the truth no one else would try to uncover, the truth about the skulls, the caves, the bones, the cave art, the truth about Annika’s death. Perhaps she would find nothing.

She passed a brace of cafes where women with ugly leggings sat in the grubby windows staring with expressions of grief at their own babies yowling in plastic prams. A tramp was slumped in the shelter of a broken tram stop plastered with peeling adverts, its glass grimy and cracked. Office blocks that seemed too derelict and window-smashed to be useful nonetheless disgorged workers heading home for the night.

Julia glanced at her watch. Would it still be open? She so wanted not to stay here a night. The place was demonically gloomy and depressing.

No. She had to grasp her fears, and defeat them. Remember what the man had said at the station. Top of the hill. That’s what he said, in Russian. Or had he actually been speaking Georgian? Or Abkhazian? Who knew?

Julia marched on, looking left and right as she did: wary, alone, conspicuous.

The shame of the place, Sukhumi, was that it must once have been pretty: a crude, demotic but nonetheless charming spa resort, a place celebrated in those idealistic communist summers of fifty years ago, the summers depicted in faded photos of the Khrushchev era, communism under the palm trees, where white pasty Russian workers with their fat happy wives in big black bathing suits had their four weeks’ holiday in the sunny sanatoria of the Black Sea coast, in Yalta and Sochi – and Sukhumi.

Now only the palm trees remained, trees diseased and old, trees dusty and sad, trees shredded by bullets, or trees just dying a slow death in front of a closed constructivist cinema. Ice cream stands were shut for the winter. One street was dominated by scruffy men drinking beer in a damp yellow tent. The cold of evening approached.

Her route was taking her straight uphill now, crossing hopeless and rusty tramlines, getting stares from Slavically pale shoppers and darker Muslim and Georgian faces. She paused on a cracked street corner. A noisome smell was emanating from somewhere. The smell of a badly run zoo?

Her instincts were confirmed. A few yards later she was confronted by a chain-link fence, ripped uselessly in places, and a sign high up on the fence which said, in several scripts and languages, one of them English: Institute of Experimental Primate Pathology and Therapy.

The gate was open. She crossed. Lab-workers in dirty white coats passed her as she entered; the staff were leaving the compound, going home for the night, they gave the better-dressed western woman a few suspicious glances, and then just apathetic glances.

Julia was alone.

The compound was huge: a large, lush, drizzly and litter-strewn garden full of dusty cypress trees and rusty metal cages where apes and monkeys sat balding and fidgeting; some of the condemned and neglected creatures had numbers tattooed on their pale shaven chests; little monkeys, with the saddest eyes, stared up at the curious stranger, like neglected children discovered in a Romanian orphanage.

Julia remembered the feeling she got when she descended the steel ladder into the Cavern of the Swelling, in the Cham des Bondons. This was similar: a descent, physical, temporal, and moral, down into one of the world’s darker places.

She passed more cages and enclosures. One contained a pair of forlorn gibbons, another seemed empty – but then she saw, squatting behind a cardboard box, an orangutan – apparently sobbing. A mangy gorilla was hunched in another corner of another cage, next to a pair of wilted chimpanzees, quite inert with unhappiness, smeared with their own filth.

A much smaller cage between these larger enclosures imprisoned a delicate little monkey, a rhesus maybe. It was screaming and gabbling, running frenziedly from side to side, touching one row of bars then shrieking and running to the other side to touch the bars, and shrieking again: like it was electrocuted every time it touched the bars. Half its head had been shaved.

It was surrounded by orange peel and scattered grain, and green-yellow pools of urine.

‘Jesus,’ she said to herself, almost brought to tears. ‘Jesus Jesus Jesus.’

This place was disgusting. Why couldn’t they just keep the animals clean, or let them go?

For the money? Maybe. She had read in her research that the impoverished Abkhazians made money from it as a zoo in the summer: people came to laugh at the shit flinging gibbons.

The main door loomed. Julia reminded herself of her persona, constructed for the email exchange with Sergei Yakulovich. She was a top archaeologist, a friend of Ghislaine. She was writing a paper about his career and achievements, following his tragic end. She would be very honoured to meet an old colleague of Ghislaine, like the great Sergei Yakulovich.

The emails had worked to a point, although she had elicited no direct information from Yakulovich. But he had eventually, after some persuasion, agreed to a meeting. If you really wish to know more about my work, come and see me. I am a busy man.

And so here she was.

On the shores of the Black Sea, in a primate lab, in Abkhazia.

A sign seemed to indicate the main entrance. She pressed a big Bakelite bellbutton and the door opened. A brassy-blonde secretary with blotchy skin and bad teeth sat in reception packing her handbag for the end of the working day; with a friendly shrug at Julia’s pitiful attempt at speaking phrasebook Russian, she showed Julia directly into the Director’s office: a large room with peeling paintwork, a grand wooden desk, two big clumsy telephones, and faded photos and maps on the wall.

The man himself was seated at the desk. Sergei Yakulovich. Onetime editor of The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. The Director of the Institute of Experimental Primate Pathology.

Yakulovich stood as she entered; he smiled shyly and tragically, and shook her hand and swapped pleasantries; he spoke good English, and was proud of it. He spoke even better French and German, apparently, as he informed her. He invited her to sit, as he returned to his seat behind his desk. Julia gazed. With his grubby brown suit and wistful face he looked like a pensionable version of one of his own monkeys.

Julia attempted a question, but she was interrupted by the blonde woman with the snaggly teeth – she was carrying a tray with two tulip-shaped glasses of black tea, and a saucer of scarlet raspberry jam. The glasses tinkled as they were set down. Sergei Yakulovich tapped his watch and smiled at the receptionist, indicating she could go home at last.

She put on her plastic coat and said goodbye.

They were alone in the Primate Laboratory. A cold rainy evening was falling outside.

‘So. Shall we begin?’ The director was stirring jam into his tea as he spoke. ‘I am honoured by the presence of an esteemed scientist from Canada. The reason I would not reply to your emails in more detail is that we get many mischievous requests. Journalists and so forth. I am not a suspicious man but our science here has been caricatured once too often. But you have the manners to come and visit us. So I shall respond.’ A tiny, telling pause. ‘As you can perhaps surmise -’ his sad old eyes looked briefly at the peeling paint of the room, then through a window, at the Abkhazian dusk. ‘We are not the place we were. We are not blessed with so many serious scientific visitors these days. Just sightseers, and those who wilfully misrepresent our work. Work we are very proud of…’ He smiled, suddenly, a pip of raspberry jam lodged between his yellow front teeth. ‘Now. You are writing a paper on my friend Ghislaine Quoinelles? That is correct? Poor Ghislaine. A good colleague. Killed by some… madman I understand? I try to follow the news here, but it is difficult, we have so much to do… in our remote little fortress of science!’

‘Yes,’ said Julia. ‘I’m writing about Ghislaine. As I mentioned in the emails, I am interested in many aspects of his life. How his research intersected with your work, what made you colleagues. Maybe you could tell us what you have been doing here.’

Another monologue ensued. The director had a kind of spiel.

‘This was the very first primate testing centre in the world. We were once the envy of the West. A thousand scientists worked here at our peak. As you can attest, our behavioural and medical experiments put us at the very forefront of the most groundbreaking medical discoveries. We even trained monkeys for space travel. Look.’

The bald director pointed at one black and white photo pinned to the wall behind. The snap showed a pair of fragile, gawky, long-limbed and nervous monkeys strapped into two airline seats, with big grim metal bars to keep them in place. The monkeys wore white headbands giving their names in Cyrillic.

‘Yerosha and Dryoma. Early pioneers of Soviet space fight. Yuri Gagarin’s direct ancestors!’

His laughter was sad.

‘These were the glory days. But then we had… perestroika, and then the Georgian-Abkhaz war. The soldiers stole primates as mascots, some were killed in crossfire. They nearly destroyed us.’ He exhaled, wistfully. ‘Most of our scientists fled to set up a new centre in Adler, in Russia, many monkeys were killed. But I prefer to think of happier times.’

The director waffled on about the palmy days of the institute, when Ho Chi Minh and Brezhnev and Marshall Zhukov and Madame Mao were regular guests, when the scientists would fly to Texas, in America!, to give lectures to the backward westerners. Julia found her senses wandering. The smell of monkey shit was detectable even inside the office. The sound of screaming, of that mad little monkey in the furthest cage, was mercifully muffled.

She nudged the dialogue along. ‘Tell me about the cross-breeding experiments?’

Sergei paused for a moment, and stared straight into her eyes, quite disconcertingly; then he continued his apparently well-worn speech.

‘In the 1920s there was a plan to create a man-ape hybrid. Supposedly this would have become a Soviet superman, so the media has it, in their sensational way – but the truth is Stalin and the politburo just wanted a very reliable worker, with great strength, and a less inquiring and distracting intellect, and perhaps also a soldier who would be, as it were, devoid of conscience, therefore a better and harder soldier, therefore able to replace real men on the battlefield. Thus we could have saved human lives! The idea was humane.’

‘I see.’

‘It was a long time ago. The tests were originally conducted by Ilya Ivanov. You may know of him, an eminent Russian biologist. Around 1900 he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares; soon after this he produced crossbreeds between several different species. This is a picture of him here.’

Julia stared at the wall: at another black and white photo. An old man with a white beard and a white moustache – like Sigmund Freud in his later years – smiled softly back. He had a wise and paternal face.

‘Professor Ivanov commenced these experiments in Africa, then in association with Albert Quoinelles, Ghislaine’s grandfather, at the Pasteur institute in Paris. Then the experiments were moved here to Sukhumi.’

‘How successful were they?’

Yakulovich shrugged, and sipped the last of his tea. ‘He took semen from human males, siphoned or collected from masturbations, and then he injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of that.’

Julia repressed a shudder.

‘And what then?’

Yakulovich shook his head. A wary expression crossed his face. ‘This is a very detailed analysis of my work? I thought we were here to discuss Ghislaine?’

‘Er, yes, of course.’ Julia was flustered. ‘I was coming to that.’

The director gazed at her, and said:

‘It is rather curious. Just a year ago another friend of Ghislaine came to visit me?’

‘Who?’

‘Marcel Barnier.’ His eyes had a certain sly brightness. ‘Yes yes, another great French expert on cross breeding, and a good friend of Ghislaine Quoinelles! Look, I have Barnier’s card here, he came to visit us just a year ago, to talk. I knew of him through Ghislaine’s work in China and Cambodia.’

The director was proudly flourishing Barnier’s card. Julia took the card from his hand. She examined it. Her soul was sickening but she was determined to remain calm.

‘Do you mind if I write these details down, Mister Yakulovich? Barnier would be an interesting person for me to talk to. About Ghislaine.’

‘By all means. Barnier is a very clever man, a veteran like me, determined that the best of communist science should not be discarded by history along with the less good aspects.’

‘OK.’ Julia felt the time had come. ‘About Ghislaine. There’s one particular question I thought you might be able to help with. I mentioned it in the emails, but as you say you needed to meet me to talk.’

‘And here we are. Please ask.’

‘The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. Do you remember it?’

The Director frowned, and shrugged, and said:

‘Not so much. A little. It was… just some minor journal in the late 1960s, sympathetic to our Marxist-Leninist principles.’

‘But you were the editor!’

‘Was I indeed? Aha.’ Yakulovich’s smile was still slightly stained with jam, ‘Yes, I believe I was the token Soviet! Da! I did no real work for them, it was an honorary position. I may have read some of the contributions.’

She felt her hopes revive. Tentatively.

‘So you might recall a particular essay, something you might have selected, got peer reviewed – by Ghislaine Quoinelles, when he was very young. In the early 1970s. As essay on guilt and conscience?’

A pause. A heartbeat of a pause.

‘Well now.’ Yakulovich sighed. ‘I don’t know. We would have welcomed an essay from Ghislaine Quoinelles of course, simply because of his name. His patronym? His surname I mean.’

‘His grandfather?’

‘Yes yes! Ghislaine was the grandson of Albert Quoinelles, who was a true comrade in arms! A communist, and also a great scientist, a specialist in our field. So yes if Ghislaine Quoinelles sent us an essay maybe we would have read it with interest. This is true.’ He hesitated, delicately. ‘But this magazine published many essays, I believe. And… I am trying hard, but I am afraid I cannot recall this particular essay.’

‘But -’

‘Please! Do not chastise me! I can barely remember my wedding anniversary, as my wife will confirm, let alone an essay written fifty years ago. Hah. My friendship with Ghislaine developed later, in the later 1970s.’ The smile was now entirely mirthless. ‘So is that it? Is that all you came to ask? It is perhaps a long journey for so few questions.’

Julia sensed she was failing. And yet she also sensed, paradoxically, that she was clueing into something. Ghislaine’s essay was, for now, a cul de sac. But what was this about Barnier? Marcel Barnier was the man in the photo. Why was he here?

It seemed the pieces of the puzzle were scattered, but they were somewhere here, or hereabouts.

‘Mister Yakulovich, why did Barnier want to talk with you?’

‘He wanted to know how far our work had proceeded by the 1970s. We discussed what the Chinese wanted from us, and so forth.’

‘How far had it gone, your work?’

There was a long long pause. The old man glanced at the darkening window, then back at his guest. His mouth was shut and his lips were thin. His wisps of remaining grey hair hung lankly to the side, uncombed. But then he shrugged, in a beyond-caring manner.

‘Journalists always like to ask about this. Usually I never reply, ever, it is so very controversial. But you are a scientist, a fellow scientist, I can trust you. You have made the effort of visiting us. I can be much more open, as we are on the same team! Nyet? The same side, yes?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘And we are also alone now! – the laboratory has closed for the day. So let us be frank and open and transparent, as scientist to scientist!’ He sipped his tea and grinned. ‘This is how science proceeds, is it not? The scientific method, the open exchange of data. And I am proud of what we achieved here.’

Julia was desperate for him to get on with it. She wanted the truth, she could feel the truth near at hand yet obscured, like a shadow passing behind baffled glass.

Picking up and toying with his teaspoon, he continued.

‘We had a little more luck with impregnating human females. Eventually.’

‘Luck?’

‘At first there was no success at all, with the artificial insemination of primate sperm into humans. We faced complete failure. So we asked ourselves: Why the failures? We decided that artificial insemination itself was part of the problem, that we needed actual coitus to produce viable embryos.’

Julia ignored the revulsion inside her; she smiled falsely and asked:

‘Coitus, you mean actual… sex?’

‘Yes! Intercourse! It is well known that artificial insemination between humans has less chance of producing viable offspring than actual intercourse. We do not know the precise reasons for this, but intercourse acts as an ovarian stimulant, vaginal peristalsis is greater, all sorts of complex chemical and anatomical processes take place in sexual congress which surely aid the successful fertilization of eggs and the creation of viable embryos, so it was speculated that we should try coitus across the primate human barrier.’

She asked, dryly as possible:

‘How?’

He set the teaspoon down.

‘The idea that we slaved women from Guinea or Guyana or some old French colony is absurd. No. We had volunteers.’

‘Women volunteered for this?’

‘Why not?’ Sergei laughed a high, wheezing, old man’s laugh. ‘The women were not expecting to… bring up their half-breed babies, just go to full term, parturition. I have letters here in my desk,’ he slapped the wood, ‘from women happily and bravely offering themselves, they were good young communists in the good old days. They were happy to lend their wombs to Stalin. Or Khrushchev. Or even Brezhnev.’

‘What happened?’

‘We realized it was a question of accustomizing the primate rather than the human. The woman can of course rationalize her situation, and lubrication can be artificial, but the primate has to be aroused. We experimented on denying apes sexual outlet, that is to say, denying them mating or masturbation, then giving them olfactory stimulation with human pheromones, then allowing them to copulate with a fitting receptacle, a human female shaped doll. This was promising. So then we moved on to primate-human couplings, to coition with the live subjects, the human volunteers.’ He smiled wistfully in the semi darkness. ‘We also learned from the Romans, yes it is true! They used to have a spectacle at their great circuses where they would herd virgin Christian girls, girls condemned to die, into the Colosseum. The girls’ genitals were drenched with the urine of chimps and mandrills, then the Romans would unleash a troop of sex-starved apes into the arena, and the beasts would rape the girls to death. Of course, the depravity is distasteful. But also very useful! Why should we not learn from this?’

His face was pale with sincerity. ‘So we realized we could maybe drench the vaginas of a female human volunteer with some chimp or orangutan urine and that could work. And we came close, we were coming close, we achieved fertilizations, which were swiftly followed by abortions. Who knows what we might have achieved if we had been given just a few more years.’ He sighed. ‘But there it is. We ran out of money and time, after that came Gorbachev and the war and here we are, helpless, feeble, impoverished. No one wants our science. That is why it is good to meet you. A real scientist with proper perspective, not this modern, sentimental hysteria.’

Sergei Yakulovich paused. Like a man semi-proud of something very secret. Dying to tell, yet wary.

‘Would you like to see the last of the donors, the ape who came closest? Then we can conclude our discussion of Ghislaine Quoinelles. Poor Ghislaine.’

Julia said: ‘Why not.’ Even as the puzzle dragged her further in, her mind yearned to escape. This ghastly place. She wanted to burn it down.

The Director pushed back his chair, and led them through the offices. He stopped at a cupboard, opened a door, it contained guns, or maybe stun guns; and cattle prods, and rope, and neck irons. Yakulovich selected an electric prod.

‘Don’t worry, we won’t need it, he is too old, but we have rules on safety.’

It was dark outside, but harsh lights illuminated the laboratory compound. Yakulovich was bumbling along in his brown suit, humming a tune. He paused at the cage of the sobbing orangutan.

‘Boris!’ he crooned through the cage bars. ‘Boris! Boris u nas posetitelyei!’

The old man found a key in his pocket, he opened the cage door.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Julia.

‘No, no, it is no problem. I want to show you that we are still treating our primates well, they are not unhappy, they are friendly. And the friendliness is key, they need to be accustomed to humans, to like us, and trust us – the reason we managed to mate Boris with human females is that he trusts humans – from birth he was trained to like us, therefore the coitus could take place.’ Sergei found a mandarin in his pocket, he waved the fruit at the squatted creature. ‘Boris, moi drug, ya prinesti plody!’

The ancient orangutan unhunched the long arms from his hairy face. His streaked eyes gazed from the dark depths of his prison. Then the ape shambled with painful slowness across the cage to the open cage door, into the brightness of the compound lights. The orangutan’s eyes expressed a sadness deeper than anything Julia had witnessed. A black black sadness, unfathomable, like coal mines of sadness. Sergei Yakulovich was stroking the ape’s forehead.

‘See, perfectly tame. Of course very old now. No longer interested in the girls!’ The Director laughed. ‘But before, when he was sub-adult, he was our most promising ape, he fertilized three human wombs, we came closest with him. But that was before everything was shut down. Such a tragedy.’

The orangutan looked at Yakulovich. He was sniffing. The ape was sniffing the air. The ape turned its wide sad face and sniffed at Julia. Sniffing in the direction of her face, her stomach. She inched away.

The ape inched forward.

‘Do not worry,’ said Yakulovich, ‘Boris is not a threat.’

Julia was gazing in disgust at the ape’s groin. A small erection was visible.

The Director gazed quizzically at Julia.

‘Miss Kerrigan, you have strong pheromones? Perhaps you are pre menstrual? This is an unusual reaction. He is reacting to you.’

She shook her head.

‘Please. This is disgusting.’

He bridled. ‘But why? What is so disgusting?’ His ex pression was an uncomprehending sneer. ‘This is just science!’ His expression affronted. ‘If you are offended by this then you should talk to the Chinese.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

Yakulovich shrugged: ‘Exactly what I say? The Soviets sold all our data to the Chinese in the 1980s, when we were too poor to defend ourselves. Indeed I asked Barnier what had happened to our research, how it had progressed in the east. He could not be explicit, he refused. But this is what Barnier told me.’ The Director sighed, expressively. ‘Barnier said simply this: the Chinese took it much further. Who knows what they did, Miss Kerrigan, who knows. The Chinese! They are entirely without scruple, they are the new Roman Empire, who will govern us all!’

Sergei Yakulovich turned back to his favourite prisoner, and stroked the orangutan’s forehead. Crooning in mumbled Russian. Julia stared at the bleakness. The drizzle was falling again, the stench of shit was pervasive, the orangutan was stroking his scarlet penis, and the little rhesus monkey was still shrieking, running to one side of the cage, and screaming, and running to the other side, and screaming. Julia gazed at the sad eyes of the orangutan. Sad and crying, yet guiltless. There was no conscience there: just suffering.

Suffering. And libido. And rage.

Shoving Yakulovich aside, with brutal force, the orangutan jumped from the cage. Julia had barely a second of warning, she backed away and began to run. But the ape had her, it grabbed at her neck and pulled her to the floor. She tried to struggle free, writhing on the damp ground, skidding her heels against the rain and urine and concrete, but the animal was enormous: huge, and pungent.

Now she could feel the inhuman hands ripping up between her legs. Ripping her panties away. Julia gasped.

And the little monkey was still screaming, running across the cage, and screaming.