Among the Russians(76)
The blond Russians take boat-trips and choose souvenirs or turn prawn-pink on the beaches. A castle moulders by the sea, its turrets stripped to stone thumbs, and fig trees exploding through its ramparts; but hidden inside, a slum of huts decays in beaten-out tin or plaster walls, with dogs asleep in the dust. Some hint of the ancient world remains in a broken sea-tower turned into a restaurant; it rests on the ruins of Greek Dioscuria, whose acropolis lies under the waves.
An imperious old lady in a huge but faded straw hat—a lady escaped inexplicably from the pages of Chekhov or history—seated herself beside me in the restaurant. Lifting a lorgnette to unblinking blue eyes, she ordered everything expensive on the menu. She might have been dining by the Promenade des Anglais. It occurred to me, when I looked at her, how rarely in Russia I had wondered who anybody was. Everybody looked too much the same (although they were not.) But now I wondered. Was she, perhaps, a leftover Golitsyn or Shuvalov? Then the lorgnette was turned on me.
‘You are Polish,’ she said. It was a fact, not a question. ‘We have something here which you don’t have in Poland. The Institute of Experimental Pathology. It is the only interesting thing in the town. See it.’
‘What’s there to see?’ I imagined contagious diseases.
‘Baboons.’
I stared at her. But by now the lorgnette was glaring down at the flotsam of stones fallen into the sea below us. We were seated, I suppose, on all that was left of ancient Dioscuria—a vagabond British writer and a Russian grande dame from…but I never did discover. Because the next moment the waitress had returned to say that salmon was off.
The face of the ex-duchess (or whoever she was) compacted into a frown, then she struck the floor three times with her blue parasol, as if to summon a regiment of Cossacks, and announced: ‘Nothing works in this absurd town. The trains don’t work, the hotels don’t work. And now the restaurants’—and she rose to her feet and marched away.
I took her advice about the baboons. The Institute of Pathology, where artificial sarcoma was induced in 1948, kept two thousand monkeys for experiment. They were constantly injected and studied—the helpless battlegrounds of germ and antibody—and their cages covered a whole hillside. It was their business to save human life. They broke out in artificial cancers and leukemia, and died wretchedly.
In one of the laboratories I found an assistant who showed me round—a girl with a Tartar moon-face and buttery skin. Her job tore her between distaste and dedication. She loved the animals, but her mother had died of a carcinoma. We wandered between the cages under the trees. I had never seen such a hill-load of monkeys, and was awkwardly conscious of how human they seemed. They rested their heads gloomily in their hands, and peered back at us under shifting brows. When young they clung to their mother’s teats with a raw pathos, flinching from the sun in the circle of her arms. Older, they engaged in random matings and grotesque wars. In some cages they sat on wooden benches, like criminals, each one inked with its number on a rear leg; and higher up the hill the observation rows for monkeys already injected fell suddenly quiet, or empty.
Most were baboons and macaques. But there were tiny, moss-coloured monkeys too; delicate russet and cream West African monkeys which gorged on dishes of rice and boiled eggs; and beautiful, restless death’s-head apes, patrolling their bars on elastic legs. Finally we emerged on terraces where the fallen trees were stripped even of their bark; they glared like stone. The baboons had chewed away all trace of vegetation. ‘It used to be luxuriant,’ the girl said. ‘Palms, shrubs, grass—and now look what they’ve done!’ Now they sat in long, gloomy battalions—flea-picking, feuding, masturbating. Within two years they had turned their false paradise into desert.
We loitered opposite the blotched red faces of macacus speciosus. ‘These ones respond well to cancer,’ the girl said, ‘if you can say such a thing. And the baboons and brown macaques are good for leukemia.’ Her voice filled with those palatal caresses which give Russian its peculiar soulfulness. ‘Poor darlings, they suffer a lot. They get treated, of course, but they die. We will haven’t found the answers. But look at the sphinx mandrill! How beautiful he is! He just paces and paces. Look at his exquisite fingers!’
Cancer and heart disease were on the increase, she said, even in placid Sukhumi, where another institute was studying the Caucasian mountain people, the longest-lived on earth, some of whom reached 140 years of age. She peered unhappily into the cages. ‘Sometimes a disease may not develop for years after its injection. More often it gets passed on to the babies by urine or saliva, poor souls, or perhaps by heredity.’ She had no children of her own, and regarded the prettier monkeys with unashamed maternal tenderness: but they were already injected with death.
‘I often spend my lunch hours here. But sometimes I’m too sad to look at them.’ Her eyes moistened even as she spoke of it. ‘Listen to the macaque rhesus singing! The baboons bark like dogs, but these ones are more like birds!’ We listened. Alarmed by tourist groups, they emitted jungle chirrups and coos. The Georgians teased and ridiculed them, but the Russians fed them illicitly on olives, and sentimentalized over them. The women’s chatter flowered into affectionate diminutives, until every other word ended in a -chik or a -nka. Even the girl talked of apelets and mini-monkeys.
‘The baboons always have a dominant male. I think that’s beautiful! [She laughed.] He’ll eat first, then the sub-dominant male, and finally the women.’ It sounded like Armenia. ‘But the strange thing is that they vary so much. Some dominant males even let the others eat first, which I think very courteous of them.’