Number 34 was a large adult male, and I kept coming back to his cage and lingering in front of it, perhaps because after my first few visits, he, more than the rest, was able to return my gaze with the same mixture and degree of apparent curiosity and fear that I was feeling towards him, and he seemed neither enraged by my presence nor intimidated by it. The others, when I looked directly at them, if they came towards me at all, if they did not cower in the corner of their cages or, like autistic children, bang their heads against the bars, leapt at me or bared their teeth in rage or spat. They tried to throw things at me, uneaten food, feces, water bowls, and sent me on my way, frightened and disturbed and embarrassed.
This was before I learned how to approach the chimps — eyes lowered, teeth covered, face slightly canted, as if in deference. It was Number 34 who taught me. From the first, he’d been neither angered by my presence before his cage nor frightened of it. With him, I had a chance to experiment, mimicking his approach to me and afterwards applying it to the others, who gradually began to accept my approach, then, over time, seemed to welcome it. Hello, brother ape. Greetings, sister ape. How are you today? What are your thoughts, brother ape? Is everyone in the chimp house okay? No one sick? No one injured?
I looked steadily at Number 34, and he looked steadily back. He was the boss, I decided, the chief. That’s why he’s given me the time of day and hasn’t been frightened or angered by my dumb lack of ceremony. He’s seen that I’m just an ignorant human, and because I’m not Benji or Elizabeth and haven’t been involved in the capture and transport and imprisonment of him or any of the others, I’m relatively harmless. He was long faced, with a grizzled muzzle and a huge paunch and a habit of pouting with his lips as if about to whistle. His facial expression reminded me somehow of a surgeon, scalpel poised, ready to cut — thoughtful, concentrated, deliberate. I named him Doc.
I suspected that Elizabeth and even Benji had favorites among the chimps and might even have given some of them names. But I told no one about Doc, and gradually over the following weeks I named them all, one by one, even the babies. There was Ginko, a scrawny adolescent male who had a pale, greenish cast to his skin; and Mano, a stubby, tough-looking male whose full name I realized later must be Mano-a-Mano; and Wassail, round bellied and freckled and reminding me of Christmas somehow, one of Santa’s elves; and Edna, a slope-shouldered female with dark, stringy hair who made me remember for the first time in years a crafts counselor I’d had at Camp Saranac the summer I was nine, a kindly woman mocked by all her charges, including me, for her slow speech and low, mannish voice. Their names bubbled into my head as if sent by thought-transference from the chimps themselves, and it was only later that I’d realize I was naming them after people whom the chimps reminded me of, people I’d long forgotten. The names were sounds that for mysterious reasons I liked saying to myself, sounds that were keys capable of unlocking blocked memories, lost sensations, ignored associations.
Words replaced the old file numbers, absorbing the data that made up each chimp’s biography, and just as with a family member or a close friend, the name became the same as the bearer. I knew that I was making a mistake and soon would no longer be able to see the chimps as numbers, as data, and that in time I would want to free them from their cages. But I couldn’t help myself. For my job had lost its tedium, and the edge of despair had begun slowly turning into a cause. An old pattern. It’s how since childhood I have made my daily life worth living, by turning tedium and despair into a cause.
In any case, by the time Woodrow and I were married, I had come to love my job.
“BUT WHO’S GOING to replace me?” I asked him. It was the very first morning after we’d returned from our two-day honeymoon. We were finishing breakfast on the terrace adjacent to our bedroom, and Woodrow had informed me that I might prefer to stay home today, since I no longer had to work. I would not have to give notice that I was quitting; he’d already done that for me. Jeannine refilled my coffee cup and padded barefoot back through our bedroom to the kitchen.
“Not your problem who’ll replace you, Hannah. The woman, Elizabeth, she can fill in for you until the Americans send someone over. They know about the need, I’ve already informed them that you will have to be replaced. They tell me they have some big, rich foundation ready to expand funding for the position, so they can afford to send an American graduate student over soon, which is nice and what they prefer anyhow. One of their own. The new person should be along shortly. A matter of weeks. Maybe days. So you needn’t concern yourself. Nothing will be lost in your absence, my dear.”
“Terrific. Great. Elizabeth is barely literate,” I said. “She’ll screw everything up. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get those records straight and reliable when I first took over, after she’d been ‘filling in’ for the previous clerk of the works? It took months!”
“Hannah darling, they’re chimpanzees. Animals. Animals and numbers, that’s all. Anyhow, what does it matter?” He touched the corners of his mouth with his napkin and stood up to leave. “It’s just a way to keep money flowing from one hand to the other.”
“No, it’s science! Medical science.”
Woodrow looked down at me as if I were a child, and laughed, genuinely amused. “I’ll see you this evening, my dear little bride,” he said, and strolled to his waiting car.
Woodrow was right — the lab was a shabby, inept operation, and it was ridiculous to call it a “lab” and think of the work done there as science, much less medical science. It was the broken-down tail end of an elaborate scam, a way for a pharmaceutical company to gather data that would back up its claims for a product; a way for a university to get funding for professors’ and graduate students’ salaries and brand-new lab equipment, possibly a whole new university department; a way for Woodrow’s underfunded ministry to get a few American health workers and some decent medical equipment into Liberia and paid for by someone else. And it had been a way for me to finance my stay in Africa, avoiding arrest in the U.S., and most important, a way for me to come up from underground.
Everything in Liberia worked like this. No one in the country gave a damn if a system or an organization didn’t work; no one cared if roads financed by U.S. aid weren’t built or buildings never finished or machinery, trucks, buses, and cars never repaired — as long as the money to build, finish, and repair kept moving from one hand to the other. The country was a money-changing station. Corruption at the top trickled all the way down to the bottom.
AND SO BEGAN the period when my life made no sense to me. I stayed home and shopped and cooked with Jeannine and supervised her care of my sons, the care of my house, even the care of my husband, and did little else, and acted as though it were normal, even desirable, to live this way. Time passed quickly, as it does when you don’t question the role you’re playing, when you’re barely even aware of it as a role. Everything and everyone else fits — the script is written, all the other actors know their cues and lines and where to stand, and the play continues without intermission or interruption day in and out, twenty-four hours a day, season after season, year after year, until you don’t even know you’re in a play.
All the while, however, the larger world of Liberia was following a different script. I was little aware of it — oh, I listened to the news, the gossip and rumors, Woodrow’s nightly reports, heated discussions among our friends. But because I was not a Liberian myself, I listened as if they were talking about events in a distant land. Instead, I let myself be caught up in the solidly quotidian details of the daily life of a genteel Americo wife and mother — living like my mother in the fifties and sixties, who, until her daughter managed to get herself onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list, went sweetly and quietly and cooperatively about her proper business — clipping flowers for the table; making lists and menus for the cook, guest lists for parties, travel arrangements for her husband; shopping for curtains, clothing for her children; making doctors’ and dentists’ appointments for her children; enrolling them in uplifting and socially advancing classes.