Monkey Wars (42 page)

“What are you waiting for?” Mico called down to them. His question was met with silence, as if none of them dared speak.

“Tell me!” Mico called out, now starting to feel a little unnerved. “What are you waiting for?”

And then an anonymous voice from deep in the crowd replied, “You. We're waiting for you.”

The crowd of monkeys all murmured their agreement.

Mico was puzzled. His eyes ran across their faces, the masses of white eyes blinking up at him.

Then a cold shiver ran down his spine, as Mico realized that all these monkeys, silent and obedient, were waiting to be led.

As he stared at the passive faces, he saw that they wanted to be told what to think, how to think, when to think. They wanted to be told right from wrong. They wanted to be given a set of rules carved in stone that they could meekly follow.

Nausea rose from the pit of Mico's stomach as he sensed the utter futility of his victory. He had brought a tyrant down, only to find that at the deepest level, the langur didn't want freedom at all.

The corruption wasn't just Tyrell or his henchmen; it was the weakness in the monkeys' own hearts.

The tyrant's dying words rang, painful and shrill, in Mico's ears:
Kill me, and someone else will rise up to take my place.
…

“No. NO. NO!” He staggered back from the window, gripped by panic.

“Mico!”

He spun round and saw Papina standing in the gloom.

“What's wrong?” she said, clasping him. She could feel him trembling, as if he had a fever. “Talk to me!”

“It's not over. It'll never be over,” he whispered.

“Shhh. Calm down,” she said, stroking his brow. “Everything's going to be fine.”

He looked up at her, his face creased with a terrible sadness, and shook his head. “Tyrell was right: monkeys are born to be led.”

He slumped down in shame.

Gently, firmly, Papina put her hands around him, lifted him up and looked into his eyes. “You're wrong, Mico. You have to be.”

“They don't want freedom—”

“How can they want what they've never had?” she insisted. “Freedom is the thing to live and die for. It was strong enough to bring down a tyrant.” She cradled his face lovingly in her hands. “Trust me, once the langur taste freedom, they'll never want to lose it.”

Mico put his arms around Papina and held her tightly, hoping from the depths of his soul that she was right.

There was one langur who held his nerve as the python stalked the cemetery—B
reri.

Hiding under a tombstone, he waited until nightfall when the snake was so gorged it could barely move; then he scrambled up an old vine, vaulted over the wall and scampered off into the labyrinth of backstreets.

If he'd been wise, Breri would have chosen to disappear and live out his life as a lone exile. But there was anger burning inside him now, anger that his brother had destroyed a great empire and stolen his life.

Breri refused to accept that everything was lost. He would not take the outrage of this massacre meekly. He would be avenged on Mico and all his accomplices.

Maybe, by some miracle, other langurs had survived. And maybe they shared his rage….

A few streets away, a young female langur sat huddled in the shadows of a derelict statue of some long-forgotten colonial leader. In her arms was a newborn infant, a male who looked just like his father.

Hister had been betrayed by everyone. All she had now was this baby monkey, and she gazed at him with pure, untainted love. She didn't know what the future held for him. But as she looked into his big round eyes, innocent of all the troubles that had condemned him to be an outcast, Hister vowed that her son would not grow up scavenging in the slums.

But she also knew she could do nothing on her own. She needed to find like-minded souls to help her.

Mico sensed the change just after dawn. The air had suddenly become dry and crisp; all the heaviness had gone.

The monsoon was finally over.

He looked out of the window. A brilliant blue sky arched over the city; there wasn't a cloud in sight. It was as if they'd all fled in the night.

Mico smiled. Maybe this time the rain clouds had gone forever.

Maybe there would be no more storms and floods.

Maybe.

“Why monkeys?”

It's the question I get asked all the time by students who have read the book.

Let me explain, because although the road to a dark, violent fable about monkeys was long and complex, as I write this I also realize it was very rational.

It all began with my father, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1922. For centuries Vienna had been a bastion of learning and culture, home to the brilliant Mozart, Beethoven, Zweig, Freud and Wittgenstein. But in March 1938, the Nazis marched in and Vienna became enemy territory for my father and all Jews. Not only did the Nazis want to annihilate Jews, they wanted to create a totalitarian empire.

My father's parents managed to get him a transit visa, and when he was sixteen he escaped and became a refugee in Palestine.

My grandparents were not so fortunate.

On June 2, 1942, they were put on Transport 24, prisoner numbers 727 and 728 on Train 205, and deported from Vienna to Belarus. They were murdered by the Nazi regime in the Maly Trostenets death camp.

By the time he was twenty-five, my father had resettled in England, where he married and started a family. Not surprisingly, when I was growing up in the 1960s, a strong sense of political morality was instilled in me. My father believed that some governments were right and some were wrong, and that this really mattered, for the stakes were high. Democracy needed to be taken seriously.

Even though I understood this, a worrying thought nagged at my teenage mind: it's easy to have a clear sense of right and wrong when you're a
victim,
but what if you happen to be born on the side of the
oppressors
?

If I had been a child in the 1930s, and my parents had been part of the Nazi hierarchy and encouraged me to join the Hitler Youth, would I have had the insight to see that they were wrong? And more importantly, would I have had the courage to do anything about it? Would I have been willing to sacrifice everything
—friends, family, security—for a moral principle? Would I have had the strength of character to disagree with everyone I loved?

I knew that some people did. Members of the underground resistance in many countries took a stand even though it put them in mortal danger.

Would I have been one of those?

The question haunted me, and I felt the only way to try and find the answer was to write about it. I needed to explore the dilemmas dramatically, but I didn't want to write a specific World War II story because I sensed that the underlying problem was much bigger, much more universal.

Not sure what the solution was, I parked the idea.

Yet as I grew up and carved out a career as a screenwriter, time and again I found myself being drawn back to the old moral dilemma. I would find myself in script meetings where powerful film producers had strong opinions. These powerful producers are used to having the last word, and they often surround themselves with people who give them unqualified support. This doesn't mean, however, that the producers are right. Sometimes the one who writes your paycheck wants to revamp the project in completely the
wrong
direction.

What does the writer do? If you protest you risk being fired. If you follow the leader you knowingly head in the wrong direction. I quickly realized that wherever there's a hierarchy—in government, business, finance and teaching, for instance—p
eople face similar choices.

In peace or war, in countries around the world, the underlying problem persists: what is the difference between strength and power? Is it better to compromise or to resist? When the powerful are weak but the strong have no power, the problem becomes most acute.

Still I didn't know how to write about all this. If I wrote about war or business or politics it would become a specific story about a particular segment of society rather than about the underlying philosophical problem.

I parked the idea again.

After I became a father, I felt a new urgency to the quest to find an answer. Watching my son negotiate the harsh politics of the playground motivated me to try and explore the problem of strength and power in a way that young people could enjoy and comprehend. It seemed important to try to make my son understand how individual decisions made on the most personal level can ultimately be connected to global events.

The issue I wanted to write about was getting bigger and bigger, but still I had no idea how to explore it. A direct philosophical study would be too dry; I wanted to take the reader on a journey
through
the problem, so that he or she could experience the difficult choices that would have to be faced. I wanted the reader to understand the sacrifices that would have to be made.

Then, thirty years after the original problem troubled me as a teenager, the answer came into my life: a colleague told me a true story about the ongoing struggle between rival monkey troops on the streets of Kolkata.

I was instantly intrigued. I realized that if I went back up the evolutionary tree, I could write about
all
humans by writing about
none
of them. By writing about monkeys, I could tell a story that cut across all the specifics of culture, time and place.

I came up with my plan and launched into the research, learning about the different species of monkey, the reality of their lives and their battles on the streets of Indian cities.

I had to push at the limits of what monkeys can do, but I always tried to root their behavior in reality. Some monkeys do use tools and weapons. They have complex troop hierarchies and know about fierce loyalty and bitter rivalry, and their troops have both ambitious leaders and passive followers. As I watched documentaries like
Project Nim
and read scientific studies about monkey psychology, I was continually amazed at the similarities between humans and monkeys.

By the time I'd finished the novel, I felt that I had really explored the problem that had first troubled me as a child.

But did I have an answer?

The question was put to me directly by a bookseller after a signing session: What would I have done in Nazi Germany? Would I have had the courage of my convictions? Easy to write a story about courage, but have I actually got any?

I hesitated. How can we really know until we're put in that position?

“I hope I'd have had the strength to do the right thing,” I answered, then immediately realized what a weak answer that was.

Then I thought about Mico and Papina. How would they have answered the question?

Having been through the epic journey of
Monkey Wars,
having fought and lost, and sacrificed and loved, perhaps they would answer that the best way to fight tyranny is to stop it taking root in the first place.

We need to be perpetually vigilant, to defend freedom of speech and democracy, to encourage dissent and the free flow of information, to stand up to intellectual bullying as much as physical bullying, and to be unafraid of being the lone voice.

It's not the easiest path, but it's what made Mico and Papina heroes. I'm happy to take my lead from them. I hope you will too.