Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

Hoffmeier’s Antelope

UNCLE WALTER HAD HIS OWN theory of the value of zoos. He would say, eyeing us all from the head of the table: “Zoos ought to make us humble. When we visit them we ought to reflect — mere humans, mere evolutionary upstarts that we are — that we shall never have the speed of the cheetah, the strength of the bear, the grace of the gazelle, the agility of the gibbon. Zoos curb our pride; they show us our inadequacies …”

Having launched on this favourite theme, he would proceed inexorably to elaborate it, cataloguing joyously the virtues of animal after animal, so that I (a precocious boy, doing “A” levels), for whom zoos were, in one sense, places of rank vulgarity — tormenting elephants with ice-cream wrappers, grinning at monkeys copulating — could not resist punctuating his raptures with the one word: “Cages.”

Uncle Walter would not be daunted. He would continue his speech, come to rest again on the refrain, “Show us our inadequacies,” and, leaving us free once more to gobble his wife’s rock cakes and lemon-meringue pie, lean back in his chair as if his case were beyond dispute.

My uncle was not, so far as I knew, a religious man; but sometimes, after declaiming in this almost scriptural fashion, his face would take on the serene, linear looks of a Byzantine saint. It made one forget for a moment the real uncle: popeyed, pale skinned, with stains of tobacco, like the ink smudges of schoolboys, on his fingers and teeth, a mouth apt to twitch and to generate more spittle than it was capable of holding — and a less defined, overall awkwardness, as if the mould of his own features somehow constricted him. Every time we visited him for Sunday tea — in that cramped front room laden with books, photos, certificates and the odd stuffed insectivore, like a Victorian parlour in which “enthusiasts” would regularly meet — he would not fail to instil in us the moral advantages of zoos. When he came at last to a halt and began to light his pipe, his wife (my Aunt Mary), a small, mousy, but not unattractive woman, would get up embarrassedly and start to remove plates.

He lived in Finchley and was deputy keeper at one of the mammal houses at the Zoo. Martyr to his work, he would leave his home at all hours for a quite different world. After twenty-five years of marriage, he treated his wife like something he was still not quite certain how to handle.

We lived in the country not far from Norwich. It was perhaps because I regarded myself as closer to nature than Uncle Walter that I felt obliged to sneer at the artifice of zoos. Near our house were some woods, vestiges of a former royal hunting forest, in which you could sometimes glimpse wild fallow deer. One year, when I was still a boy, the deer vanished. About every six weeks we used to travel down to London to see my grandparents who lived in Highgate. And the weekend would always be rounded off by a visit to my uncle, who would meet us, usually, at the Zoo, then take us home to tea.

I scorned London, for the same reason that I despised zoos and remained loyal to my rural heritage. In fact I liked animals — and couldn’t deny my uncle’s knowledge of them. At the same time I developed interests which were hardly likely to keep me in the countryside. I took a degree in mathematics.

It was on one of those Sundays as guests of Uncle Walter that we were first introduced to the Hoffmeier’s Antelopes. There were a pair of these rare and delicate animals at the Zoo, which, just then, to the great joy of the staff (my uncle in particular) had produced a solitary issue — a female. Neither adults nor young were as yet on view to the general public but we were ushered in on a special permit.

Rufous-brown, twig-legged, no more than eighteen inches off the ground when mature, these tender creatures looked up at us with dark, melting eyes and twitching flanks as Uncle Walter enjoined us not to come too near and to make only the gentlest movements. The new-born female, trembling by its mother, was no bigger and more fragile than a puppy. They were, so Uncle Walter told us, one of a variety of kinds of tiny antelope native to the dense forests of west and central Africa. The particular species before us had been discovered and recorded as a distinct strain only in the late forties. Twenty years later a survey had declared it extinct in the wild.

We looked at these plaintive, captive survivors and were suitably moved.

“Oh, aren’t they sweet!” said my mother, with a lack, perhaps, of true decorum.

“Er, notice,” said Uncle Walter, crouching inside the pen, “the minute horns, the large eyes — nocturnal animals of course — the legs, no thicker, beneath the joint, than my finger, but capable of leaps of up to ten feet.”

He wiped the spit from the corner of his mouth, and looked, challengingly, at me.

The reason for my uncle’s attachment to these animals lay not just in their extreme rarity but in his having known personally their discoverer and namesake — Hoffmeier himself.

This German-born zoologist had worked and studied at Frankfurt until forced to leave his country for London during the nineteen-thirties. The war years had suspended an intended programme of expeditions to the Congo and the Cameroons, but in 1948 Hoffmeier had gone to Africa and come back with the remarkable news of a hitherto unidentified species of pygmy antelope. In the interval he had made his permanent home in London and had become friends with my uncle, who started at the Zoo more or less at the time of Hoffmeier’s arrival in England. It was by no means a common thing, then, for a serious and gifted zoologist to befriend a zealous but unscholarly animal keeper.

Hoffmeier made three more trips in the next ten years to Africa and carried out intensive studies of the “Hoffmeier” and other species of forest antelope. Then in 1960, fearing that the already scant Hoffmeier’s Antelope, prized for its meat and pelt by local hunters, would be no more within a few years, he had brought back three pairs for captivity in Europe.

This was the period in which blacks and Europeans killed each other mercilessly in the Congo. Hoffmeier’s efforts to save not only his own skin but those of his six precious charges were a zoological feat with few parallels. Two of the pairs went to London, one to Frankfurt, Hoffmeier’s old zoo before the rise of the Nazis. The animals proved extremely delicate in captivity, but a second, though, alas, smaller generation was successfully bred. The story of this achievement (in which my uncle played his part), of how a constant and anxious communication was kept up between the mammal departments at Frankfurt and London, was no less remarkable than that of Hoffmeier’s original exploits in the Congo.

But the antelopes stood little real chance of survival. Four years after Uncle Walter showed us his little trio there remained, out of a captive population that had once numbered ten, only three — the female we had seen as a scarcely credible baby, and a pair in Frankfurt. Then, one winter, the Frankfurt female died; and its male companion, not a strong animal itself, which had never known the dark jungle of its parents, was rushed, in hermetic conditions, accompanied by veterinary experts, by jet to London.

So Uncle Walter became the guardian of the last known pair of Hoffmeier’s Antelopes, and therefore, despite his lowly status, a figure of some importance and the true heir, in the personal if not the academic sense, of Hoffmeier.

“Hoffmeier,” my uncle would say at those Sunday afternoon teas, “Hoffmeier … my friend Hoffmeier …” His wife would raise her eyes and attempt hastily to change the subject. And I would seem to see the chink in his none too well fitting armour.

I was to live with him for some four months (it would be more accurate perhaps to say, “those last four months”) when I first came to London after taking my degree. This was only a short while after my Aunt Mary’s death following a sudden illness. I had got a job at the North London Polytechnic, and while I found my feet and looked for a flat it was agreed between Uncle Walter and my family that his home in Finchley, now half empty, should also be my own.

I accepted this kindness with misgivings. Uncle Walter welcomed me with morose hospitality. The house, with its little traces of femininity amongst the books and pipe-stands, was imbued with the sense of a presence which could not be replaced. We never spoke about my aunt. I missed her rock cakes and lemon-meringue. My uncle, whose only culinary knowledge had been acquired in preparing the diet of hoofed animals, ate large quantities of raw and semi-cooked vegetables. At night, across the passage-way that separated our rooms, I would hear him belch and snore vibrantly in the large double bed he had once shared, and, waking myself later in the night, would listen to him mutter solemnly in his sleep — or perhaps not in his sleep, for he wore now the shrouded look of a man wrapped in constant internal dialogue with himself.

Once, finding the bathroom light on at three in the morning, I heard him weeping inside.

Uncle Walter left before I woke to start his day at the Zoo; alternatively he worked late shifts in the evening — so that days passed in which we scarcely met. When we did he would speak coldly and shortly as if attempting to disguise that he had been surprised in some guilty undertaking. But there were times when we coincided more happily; when he would fill his pipe and, forgetting to light it, talk in that pedantic, pontifical, always “dedicated” way, glad to have me to debate with. And there were times when I was glad — since Uncle Walter had procurred for me a free pass to the Zoo — to slip from the traffic, the blurred faces of a city still strange to me, into the stranger still, but more comfortingly strange community by the banks of the Regent’s Canal. He would meet me in his keeper’s overalls, and I would be led, a privileged visitor, required to wear special rubber boots, into the breeding units closed to the public, to be shown — snuffling disconsolately at their concrete pen — the pair of frail, timid, wan-faced Hoffmeier’s Antelopes.

“But what does it mean,” I once said to Uncle Walter, “to say that a species exists which no one has ever observed?” We were talking in his front room about the possibility of undiscovered species (as the Hoffimeier’s Antelope had once been) and, conversely, of near-extinct species and the merits of conservation. “If a species exists, yet is unknown — isn’t that the same as if it did not exist?”

He looked at me warily, a little obtusely. In his heart, I knew, there lurked the slender hope that somewhere in the African forest there lived still a Hoffimeier’s Antelope.

“And therefore,” I continued, “if a thing which was known to exist ceases to exist, then doesn’t it occupy the same status as something which exists but is not known to exist?”

My uncle furrowed his pasty brows and pushed forward his lower lip. Two nights a week, to make a little extra money, I was taking an evening class in Philosophy (for which I had no formal qualification) at an Adult Institute, and I enjoyed this teasing with realities. I would have led my uncle to a position where one might still assume the existence of an undiscoverable Dodo.

“Facts,” he replied, knocking his pipe, “scientific data — sound investigatory work — like Hoffmeier’s for example”—in a jerky shorthand which betrayed unease. I knew he was not a scientist at heart. Well read enough, privately, to pass for a professional zoologist, he would never have done so, for he liked, as he put it, to work “with” not “on” animals. But science, nonetheless, was the power he called, reluctantly, guiltily, to his aid whenever his ground was threatened.

“Science — only concerned with the known,” he flung out with a pinched, self-constraining look; though a glint deep in his eye told me that he had already fully pursued and weighed my arguments, was open, despite himself, to their seduction.

“Whatever is found to exist or ceases to exist,” I went on, “nothing is altered, since the sum of what exists is always the sum of what exists.”

“Quite!” said my uncle as if this were a refutation. He settled back in his chair and raised to his lips the glass of frothy stout that stood on the arm-rest (Guinness was my uncle’s one indulgence).

I wished to manoeuvre him towards the vexed question of why it was that — if we were prepared to admit the possibility of species that might never be discovered, that might live, die and vanish altogether, unrecorded, in remote forests and tundra — we should yet feel the obligation to preserve from oblivion, merely because they were known, creatures whose survival was threatened — to the extent, even, of removing them from their natural habitat, transporting them in planes, enclosing them, like the Hoffmeier’s Antelopes, in antiseptic pens.

But I stalled at this. It seemed too sharp an assault upon a tender spot. Besides, I really felt the opposite of my own question. The notion that creatures of which we had no knowledge might inhabit the world was thrilling to me, not meaningless, like the existence, in maths, of “imaginary” numbers. Uncle Walter eyed me, moving his pipe from side to side between his teeth. I thought of the word “ruminant” which in zoology means “cud-chewer.” I said, instead of what I had intended: “The point is not what exists or doesn’t, but that, even given the variety of known species, we like to dream up others. Think of the animals in myth — griffins, dragons, unicorns …”

“Ha!” said my uncle, with a sudden piercing of my inmost thoughts which jolted me, “You are jealous of my antelope.”

But I answered, with a perception which equally surprised me: “And you are jealous of Hoffmeier.”

The plight of the two antelopes at this time was giving cause for anxiety. The pair had not mated when first brought together, and now, in a second breeding season, showed little further sign of doing so. Since the male was a comparatively weak specimen there was fear that the last chances of saving the animal from extinction, at least for another generation, were empty ones. Uncle Walter’s role during this period, like that of other zoo officials, was to coax the two animals into union. I wondered how this was contrived. The antelopes when I saw them looked like two lonely, companionless souls, impossibly lost to each other even though they shared a species in common.

Yet my uncle was clearly wrapped in the task of producing an offspring from the creatures. Throughout those weeks after my aunt’s death his face wore a fixed, haunted, vigilant look, and it would have been hard to say whether this was grief for his wife or concern for his issueless antelopes. It struck me for the first time — this was something I had never really considered, despite all those Sunday teas as a boy — that he and my aunt were childless. The thought of my uncle — lanky and slobbery, fingers and teeth stained indelibly amber, exhaling fumes of stout and raw onion — as a begetter of progeny was not an easy one. And yet this man, who could reel off for you, if you asked, the names of every known species of Cervinae, of Hippotraginae, teemed, in another sense, with life. When he returned home late on those March evenings, a dejected expression on his face, and I would ask him, with scarcely a trace, now, of sarcasm in my voice, “No?” and he would reply, removing his wet coat, shaking his bowed head, “No,” I began to suspect — I do not know why — that he had really loved my aunt. Though he hardly knew how to show affection, though he had forsaken her, like a husband who goes fishing at weekends, for his animals, yet there was somewhere, unknown to me, in that house in Finchley a whole world of posthumous love for his wife.

My own love-life, in any case, occupied me enough at this time. Alone in an unfamiliar city, I acquired one or two shortlived and desultory girlfriends whom I sometimes took back to Uncle Walter’s. Not knowing what his reaction might be, fearing that some spirit of scholarly celibacy lurked in the zoological tomes and in the collection of taxidermies, I took care to ensure these visits took place while he was out, and to remove all traces, from my front bedroom, of what they entailed. But he knew, I soon sensed, what I was up to. Perhaps he could sniff such things out, like the animals he tended. And my exploits prompted him, moreover, to a rare and candid admission. For one night, after several bottles of stout, my uncle — who would not have flinched from examining closely the sexual parts of a gnu or okapi — confessed with quivering lips that in thirty years of marriage he could never approach “without qualms” what he called his wife’s “secret regions.”

But this was later, after things had worsened.

“Jealous of Hoffimeier?” said my uncle. “Why should I be jealous of Hoffmeier?” His lips twitched. Behind his head was an anti-macassar, with crochet borders, made by my aunt.

“Because he discovered a new species.”

Even as I spoke I considered that the discovery might be only half the enviable factor. Hoffmeier had also won for himself a kind of immortality. The man might perish, but — so long at least as a certain animal survived — his name would, truly, live.

“But — Hoffmeier — zoologist. Me? Just a dung-scraper.” Uncle Walter reverted to his self-effacing staccato.

“Tell me about Hoffmeier.”

Hoffmeier’s name, Hoffmeier’s deeds sounded endlessly on my uncle’s lip, but of the man himself one scarcely knew anything.

“Hoffmeier? Oh, expert in his field. Undisputed …”

“No — what was he like?” (I said “was” though I had no certain knowledge that Hoffmeier was dead.)

“Like—?” My uncle, who was preparing himself, pipe raised to stress the items, for the catalogue of Hoffmeier’s credentials, looked up, his wet lips momentarily open. Then, clamping the pipe abruptly between his teeth and clutching the bowl with his hand, he stiffened into almost a parody of “the comrade recalled.”

“The man you mean? Splendid fellow. Boundless energy, tremendous dedication. Couldn’t have met a kinder … Great friend to me …”

I began to doubt the reality of Hoffmeier. His actual life seemed as tenuous and elusive as that of the antelope he had rescued from anonymity. I could not picture this stalwart scientist. He had the name of a Jewish impresario. I imagined my uncle going to him and being offered the antelope like some unique form of variety act.

I asked myself: Did Hoffmeier exist?

My uncle, poking his head forward oddly, in one of those gestures which made me think he could see my thoughts, said: “Why, he used to come here, stay here. Many a time. Sat in that armchair you’re sitting in now, ate at that table, slept—”

But then he broke off suddenly and began to suck hard at his pipe.

I was having no luck in my attempts to find a suitable flat. London grew more faceless, more implacable, the more I grew accustomed to it. It did not seem a place in which to be a teacher of maths. My philosophy lectures became more esoteric. I gave a particularly successful class on Pythagoras, who, besides being a mathematician, believed one should abstain from meat and that human souls entered the bodies of animals.

Four weeks after my talk with Uncle Walter about Hoffmeier, things took a sudden bad turn. The male antelope developed a sort of pneumonia and the fate of the pair and — so far as we may know — of a whole species, seemed sealed. My uncle came in late from the Zoo, face drawn, silent. Within a fortnight the sick animal had died. The remaining female, which I saw on perhaps three subsequent occasions, looked up, sheepishly, apprehensively, from its solitary pen as if it knew it was now unique.

Uncle Walter turned his devotion to the remaining antelope with all the fervour of a widowed mother transferring her love to an only child. His eyes now had a lonely, stigmatized look. Once, on one of my Sunday visits to the Zoo (for these were often the only occasions on which I could be sure of seeing him), the senior keeper in his section, a burly, amiable man called Henshaw, drew me to one side and suggested that I persuade Uncle Walter to take a holiday. It appeared that my uncle had requested that a bed be made up for him in the antelope’s pen, so that he need not leave it. A bundle of hay or straw would do, he had said.

Henshaw looked worried. I said I would see what I could do. But, for all that I saw of my uncle, I scarcely had an opportunity to act on my promise. He came home after midnight, leaving a reek of stout in the hall, and sneaked straight upstairs. I felt he was avoiding me. Even on his off-duty days he would keep to his room. Sometimes I heard him muttering and moving within; otherwise an imprisoned silence reigned, so that I wondered should I, for his own sake, peer through the keyhole or leave behind the door a tray of his favourite fibrous food. But there were times when we met, as though by accident, in the kitchen, amongst his books in the front room. I said to him (for I thought only an aggressive humour might puncture his introspection) didn’t he think his affair with the female antelope was going too far? He turned on me the most wounded and mortified look, his mouth twisting and salivating; then he said in a persecuted, embattled tone: “You been speaking to Henshaw?”

He seemed conspired against from all sides. One of the things that distressed him at this time was a proposal by the Council to build a new inner link road which, though it would not touch his own house, would cleave a path through much of the adjacent area. Uncle Walter had received circulars about this and subscribed to a local action group. He called the council planners “arse-holes.” This surprised me. I always imagined him as living in some remote, antiquated world in which the Zoological Society, august, venerable, was the only arbiter and shrine. So long as he could travel to the warm scent of fur and dung, it did not seem to me that he noticed the traffic thundering on the North Circular, the jets whining into Heathrow, the high-rises and flyovers — or that he cared particularly where he lived. But one Saturday morning when, by rare chance, we shared breakfast and when the noise of mechanical diggers could be heard through the kitchen window, this was disproved.

My uncle looked up from his bowl of porridge and bran and studied me shrewdly. “Don’t like it here, do you? Want to go back to Norfolk?” he said. His eyes were keen. Perhaps my disillusion with London — or maybe the strain of sharing a house with him — showed in my face. I murmured non-commitally. Outside some heavy piece of machinery had started up so that the cups on the table visibly shook. My uncle turned to the window. “Bastards!” he said, then turned back. He ate with his sleeves rolled up, and his bare forearms, heavily veined and covered with gingery hairs, actually looked strong, capable. “Bastards,” he said. “Know how long I’ve lived here? Forty years. Grew up here. Your Aunt and I—. Now they want to …”

His voice swelled, grew lyrical, defiant. And I saw in this man whom I had begun to regard as half insane, a grotesque victim of his own eccentricities, a glimpse of the real life, irretrievably lost, as if the door to a cell had momentarily opened.

I began to wonder who my true uncle was. A creature who was not my uncle inhabited the house. When not at the Zoo he retired ever more secretively to his room. He had begun to remove to his bedroom from his “library” in the corner of the front room certain of his zoological volumes. He also took, from on top of the bookcase, the framed photographs of his wife. At three, at four in the morning, I would hear him reading aloud, as if from the Psalms or the works of Milton, passages from Lane’s Rare Species, Ericdorf’s The African Ungulates and from the work which I had already come to regard as Uncle Walter’s Bible, Ernst Hoffmeier’s The Dwarf and Forest Antelopes. In between these readings there were sporadic tirades against certain absent opponents, who included the borough planning committee and “that shit-can” Henshaw.

The fact was that he had developed a paranoiac complex that the world was maliciously bent on destroying the Hoffmeier’s Antelope. He was under the illusion — so I learnt later from Henshaw — that, like children who believe that mere “loving” brings babies into the world, he could, solely by the intense affection he bore the female antelope, ensure the continuation of its kind. He began to shun me as if I too were a member of the universal conspiracy. We would pass on the stairs like strangers. Perhaps I should have acted to banish this mania, but something told me that far from being his enemy I was his last true guardian. I remembered his words: “The speed of the cheetah, the strength of the bear …” Henshaw phoned to suggest discreetly that my uncle needed treatment. I asked Henshaw whether he really liked animals.

One night I dreamt about Hoffmeier. He had a cigar, a bow tie and a pair of opera-glasses and was marching through a jungle, lush and fantastic, like the jungles in pictures by Douanier Rousseau. In a cage carried behind him by two bearers was the pathetic figure of my uncle. Watching furtively from the undergrowth was a four-legged creature with the face of my aunt.

The attendances at my philosophy classes fell off. I devoted two lessons to Montaigne’s “Apology of Raymond Sebond.” Students complained I was leading them along eccentric and subversive paths. I did not mind. I had already decided to quit London in the summer.

My uncle suddenly became communicable again. I heard him singing one morning in the kitchen. A thin, reedy, but strangely youthful tenor was crooning “Our Love is Here to Stay.” He had changed to the afternoon shift of duty and was preparing himself an early lunch before heading for the Zoo. There was a smell of frying onions. When I entered he greeted me in the way he used to when I was a Sunday guest, just grown into long trousers. “Ah Derek! Derek, me lad — have a Guinness,” he said, as though there were something to celebrate. He offered me a bottle and the opener. There were already four empties on the draining board. I wondered whether this was a miraculous recovery or the sort of final spree people are apt to throw before flinging themselves off balconies. “Uncle?” I said. But his sticky lips had parted in an inscrutable grin; his face was contained and distinct as if it might disappear; his eyes were luminous, as though, should I have looked close, I might have seen in them the reflections of scenes, vistas known only to him.

I had with me a file of students’ work in preparation for my afternoon’s maths classes. He looked scoffingly at it. “All this—” he said. “You ought to have been a zoo-keeper.”

He wiped his mouth. His long sallow face was creased. I realized that nowhere could there be anyone like my uncle. I smiled at him.

That night I had a telephone call from Henshaw. It must have been about one in the morning. In a panic-stricken voice he asked me if I had seen Uncle Walter. I said no; I had been teaching at the adult institute, finished the evening at a pub and come home to bed. My uncle was probably already in bed when I came in. Henshaw explained that a security officer at the Zoo had found various doors to the special care unit unlocked; that on further investigation he had discovered the pen of the Hoffmeier’s Antelope empty. An immediate search of the Zoo precincts had begun but no trace was to be found of the missing animal.

“Get your uncle!” screamed Henshaw maniacally. “Find him!”

I told him to hang on. I stood in the hallway in bare feet and pyjamas. For one moment the urgency of the occasion was lost in the vision I had of the tiny creature, crossing the Prince Albert Road, trotting up the Finchley Road, its cloven feet on the paving stones, its soft eyes under the street-lamps, casting on North London a forlorn glimmer of its forest ancestry. Without its peer in the world.

I went up to Uncle Walter’s room. I knocked on his door (which he would often keep locked), then opened it. There were the books scattered on the floor, the fetid remnants of raw vegetables, the shredded photos of his wife … But Uncle Walter — I had known this already — was gone.