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.”