The subtropical sea port was chilly and dank, and alienating. Julia wished Alex were here. In the end she had decided to tell him what she was doing, and she had been entirely unsurprised when he had declined to join her. He had said, “Sweetheart, you are mad,” and 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 cafés where women with ugly leggings sat in the grubby windows staring with expressions of grief at their own babies yowling in plastic strollers. 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 for a night. The place was demonically gloomy and depressing.
No. She had to grasp her fears, 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 pasty white Russian workers with their fat, happy wives in big black bathing suits had their four weeks’ vacation 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. The cold of evening approached.
Her route was taking her straight uphill now, as she collected 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 it that said, in several scripts and languages, one of them English: Institute for Experimental Primate Pathology and Therapy.
The gate was open. She went in. Lab workers in dirty white coats passed her as she entered; the staff were leaving the compound, going home for the night, and 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 terrible 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, into one of the world’s darker places. And yet a descent she wanted to make. To find out the truth you had to go into the caves.
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 a 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 there, and shrieking again, like it was being 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 e-mail 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 honored to meet an old colleague of Ghislaine, like the great Yakulovich.
The e-mails had worked to a point, although she had elicited no direct information from the man. 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 bell button and the door opened. A brassy blond secretary with blotchy skin and bad teeth sat in the reception area 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 for Experimental Primate Pathology.
Yakulovich stood as she entered; he smiled shyly and tragically, shook her hand, and swapped pleasantries. His English was good, and he 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 blond 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 honored by the presence of an esteemed scientist from America. The reason I would not reply to your e-mails 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 willfully 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!”