“Mr. 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?”
Yakulovich hesitated, visibly, and the quietness was prolonged. Julia could hear the monkeys, clacking their teeth in their cages outside. The old man glanced at the darkening window and back at his guest. His mouth was shut and his lips were thin. His wisps of remaining gray 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, Julia Kerrigan, 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 that 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, as dryly as possible: “How?”
He set the teaspoon down.
“The idea that we enslaved women from Guinea or some other 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 accustoming 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 semidarkness. “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 vagina 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 semiproud of something very secret. Dying to tell, yet still 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 and 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 and waved the fruit at the squatting 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 door, into the brightness of the compound lights. Its 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 subadult, 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. It 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, brightly. “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.