25
Monkey Business
By Rebecca Jung
It was the 1950s, and our father wouldn’t buy anything made in Russia. He was very strict about this, to the point of refusing to eat Russian caviar, even if it was offered at dinner parties. That’s why, when he came home from one of his business trips while we lived in the Belgian Congo, with a spider monkey on his shoulder, we named the monkey Krushchev.
My sisters and I were thrilled. Our mother was not.
“You’re never around, and I’m here holding down the fort,” my mother said. “And you bring home a monkey? You know, of course, who’s going to get stuck taking care of him.”
“Aw, c’mon hon,” my father said, smiling sheepishly. “I almost got a baby chimp. He had a runny nose and looked so pathetic.”
Even I knew that was pushing it.
My mother said, “Don’t you dare."
But my dad was a sucker for cute animals. He spent most of his time driving on dirt roads carved out of the bush, and he could go miles before coming across a small village of thatched huts. It must have been lonely, so I can understand why he might be tempted to buy the monkeys, apes, and birds that a lot of the Congolese children captured to sell. He was disciplined, I have to hand it to him; but there was something about the little spider monkey that broke his resolve.
So, he bought him.
I’m sure that our Belgian neighbor, Madame Obusier, chalked it up as just another idiotic venture of the stupid Americans who lived next door.
She hated us. But to be fair, she hated all Americans, as did most of the other Belgians in the Congo. They had a lot of complaints, but what topped the list was that Americans spoiled the “help."
Whereas the Belgians called the Congolese singes (monkeys) to their faces, we called them by their first names. At my mother’s request, Sebastien and Raphael, the two man-servants we employed, brought their wives, Feza and Adimu, and their children to our house. While Sebastien and Raphael worked, my mother would sit with the women on the