The Anthole

Prologue

Bethlehem 2000, a child was born. A child’s world is a small world, as small as its mother’s womb. The child knows only this, there is no other world for it. It holds onto the umbilical cord, oblivious of the world mother walks through. It does not see what it is that feeds the cord that brings it life. The essence of life is but a little cord inside the womb not the mother. Instinct however pushes the child out of this world into a new one, with waterless, cold and alien hands circling round its head, and a painful scissors cutting the cord free. The child screams in terror. This must be a great step for any child. Its world is inverted, what was outside is now inside, and what was hidden is now visible. The child clings to its mother. It takes nine months to leave the womb, but it takes many years to leave mother.

A child’s instinct however is to seek a new world, thus all children leave their parents, the hand that feeds them, in order to create new families. This is fundamental to survival. Man is an explorer.

This is easy to say, but it does hold frightful implications for mankind. The child seeks new pastures, like eating one cake and looking for another. Man is but an intelligent form of parasite.

Having said this, I will now go on to my story. It is based on a country divided into two people, a sort of Gaza strip, but not Gaza. There is a lot of political turmoil and tension between the two, like in many parts of the world today, but there is no reference to any specific country, nor any specific man. What follows is fiction.

Part 1

My Private Logbook

My name is Omar.

My interest in ants was a highly spontaneous affair. Having graduated, and not wishing to be caught up in a year of military service, I entered university. The local one did not offer many options. There was a Law affiliate, a diploma in Economics, and the University was known for its Masters Degree in Geography, Anthropology and Natural Biology. It seemed that Anthropology would do for me. It was close to where I lived and I did not have to travel to study as many unlucky students had to. My position was not really different when I finished the course. Military service again loomed largely in my life. I got to know that voluntary civil service would further postpone the militia nightmare, but what would the state do with an anthropologist. Luckily, thanks to a slight ‘mistake’ from the mayor’s side, and a bottle of Brandy, it was believed that having graduated from the local university, which had a natural biology course, I must naturally have some knowledge of the nature of ants. So I got the job. I told myself that the study of human behaviour might be better understood through a study of ant behaviour.

So I found myself working at the ant lab, next to the old drunken ex-general with an amputated leg, who was supposed to be studying scorpions, which were kept in a big dirty tank. No one knows when the last scorpion had been seen, but there were rumours that in a drunken frenzy, the general had opened the lid and put in his leg for the scorpions to feed on. They did. Rumours play a vital role in human life and run like wild fire. I locked the door every morning and conversed with the ants.

My predecessor in the lab had found a way of pigmenting ants yellow and putting them in a glass aquarium to study the building of ant hole architecture. He died after eating mashed potato. He was a little blind, you see and never saw that the ants had built a skyscraper in the mash and somehow it disagreed with him and he died not out of food poisoning but out of a heart attack. I was given a clean aquarium, which had been used for examining deformed octopuses, filled it with pristine soil, purified by explosion, a method known to snipers and guerrillas supported by the state. I went down to the canteen, caught an ant in a crack as it tried to get at a little drop of coffee, and Adam, as I called it, was coloured yellow. In the garden, I found some twenty ants, coloured them yellow, placed them with Adam, threw in what was left of my eaten apple, half my sandwich, sealed the lid and left Adam alone with his Eves. That was the nature of my job. To report at 8:00 am, collect the keys to the ant lab, lock myself in, scribble and scrawl down notes.

My interest was solely to track the ants’ progress. It became extremely difficult to trace Adam. Eves and Adams had multiplied possibly daily. The soil in the aquarium, which had been flat and brown, started changing shape. A hole appeared somewhere in the middle and a little molehill came out of the flattened soil. The ants could easily be taunted out by the smell of food, if ants could smell. I feed them anything, fruit remains, sour potatoes, stale bread, old chocolate...........

In other words I got into the habit of carrying a little plastic box with me and it worked like a little waste bin. The expense of running the ant lab was therefore only in obtaining recycled food. It was like love, me and my ants. They would carry off anything into their hole. Big or small. They could scramble over the flesh of an eaten apple. A hundred squirming spots of life on rotting fruit. They would break small pieces away and a whole trail, a caravan of ants would proceed home, in a very orderly manner, in a way that humans never would. When a fruit was unbreakable, then the whole team of ants would surround the prize, and try to push it gradually day by day. An ant or two was lost in the process. For them, it looked like a gigantic rock, as essential to their life as it was heavy and dangerous to transport. After a whole 48 hours the apple was swallowed up by the hole. I imagined that inside it would be set up like a pedestal. A Stonehenge.

I lived alone, in a little studio flat. I did not have much. No T.V., no stereo, just the basics and my dreams. Every morning I woke up at 7:00 am, it was still dark and sometimes very cold. I was at the tram stop by 7:45. There was a little quiosque which sold everything from tissues to bubble gum, magazines, toys, photo albums, cigarettes, (I didn’t smoke,) and tram tickets, (which I bought everyday as I didn’t have a pass, as all those who hadn’t done military service.) There were also several food items, (for emergencies, like an empty waste food box,) and clothes and odds and ends. Basically anything which had sold once and might sell again. I bought tram tickets, a couple everyday, one to take me to the ant lab and one to get me back. The quiosque was a kaleidoscope of wares for sale, a glass cage. Someone sat inside. I never saw her face, but her voice was sweet. It said, “Good morning,” to me and I said “Good morning,” to it, and she would slide two tickets on a plate specially for such business. I placed the money and I would watch her nail bitten hand retrieve it.