The Last Great Ape Read online

  The tourists grumbled about the dust and the potholes, about creeping toward the Maasai Mara to the detriment of daylight, about rushing away from the curio stands. The Mexican held up the plastic handle he spun to rewind his cassette tape without using batteries. “These will do so much for the human race,” he said with great seriousness. “They’re from Mexico.” I pretended to rewind his voice back into his throat.

  Beyond the town of Narok we sliced across plains where zebras stood in high grass. Hills flared in all directions. Red-robed men grazed cattle on distant ridges—Maasai. The farther we traveled, the less likely it seemed we would ever happen upon another town, and I was struck by the power over the psyche of a place so far from home.

  The Maasai Mara was orange in the late-day sun. We stopped within a herd of buffalo. The driver slid back the roof. And everyone climbed onto the seats, our heads sprouting above the truck like giant warts. Behind the buffalo were more buffalo and zebras and gazelles stretching forever in a shifting, uncountable herd, like a massive, singular life form claiming the land—the world before Nairobi, before Tel Aviv in a wetter time. Elephants crossed the road without even glancing at us. I hadn’t understood why my friends had flown off to Disneyland and Pisa in our break between secondary school and the army, and I understood it even less now.

  The next afternoon we stopped at the “lunch station,” an island of dirt marked off under an acacia tree like some magical safe zone. The tourists huddled with their food near the vans as if from fear of being run down by cheetahs. A blond four-year-old girl explored among the trucks, dashing around the African drivers, touching them and laughing. The girl balanced barefoot on one of the boundary poles lying flat in the grass, then hopped and sprinted away. I caught my reflection in the side mirror of the safari truck. I was gangly, in bottle cap glasses with gold frames and huge square lenses that made my nose look thin as a guitar pick. I thought of my army interview two months earlier when I’d sat at the desk of a beautiful woman. She’d said, “I notice you have a gray tooth. Does it disturb you?” This was as close as I’d come in the last year to a date.

  I shifted from foot to foot, starved for sugar, regretting I’d brought no chocolate, not knowing whom to talk to and sure I looked as awkward as I felt. The Mexican, who had a masters in biology, was the easiest of the tourists to approach. He nodded and touched my shoulder as I told him that after the army I planned to devote my life to the academy as a biologist or physicist. I told him I’d volunteered in the zoological gardens of Tel Aviv University where I managed a hundred aquariums and assisted a scientist in his research on water snakes. I said, “I studied the social life of the common lizard at fourteen and I think the agamidae and iguana families arose, not through convergent evolution, as believed, but divergent evolution, and we must do more research on their thyroid bones!”

  The light brought such texture to the clouds that the sky seemed full of faces. Clouds over Israel now seem by comparison to be flat. I gazed across the Mara and imagined that beyond the hills lived isolated tribes, who were herding cattle, hunting, guarding themselves—from us, from me. After Teva, I’d enrolled in an everyday high school and then woken each morning and decided whether to go to class. Often I went instead to Tel Aviv University and rode the elevator up to the library to read textbooks in English. My mother was always thrilled to write “my child was sick” notes. By eleventh grade, I had earned the ire of most of my teachers. Oh, yeah, Ofir is sick again. Near the start of twelfth grade, while driving the family car, I listened to Metallica’s “Jump in the Fire” over and over again to build the courage to cut the safety rope to the education system. I registered as an independent with the Ministry of Education so they would send me exams directly, gambling that I could teach myself as well as my disgruntled teachers. Then I went to the head teacher and said, “I’m not continuing at your high school.”

  Hovering in front of the safari van was a creature shaped like the letter T, a giant black T, like a flying top children spin from their palms. We drove closer. It was a bird! Its long tail hung down like a ribbon as it flew. I stood on the seat alone and snapped a photograph. We found another animal of impossible proportions later in Amboseli, a giraffe gazelle or swala twiga, whose ears stuck out like an alien’s and whose neck was so long in proportion to his body, he seemed to have been assembled by children. Why were animals so interesting not taught in school? How in all the books I’d read had I never learned of a swala twiga? I looked back at the travelers. Only the British girl showed any interest. The animals were as bored of us as the tourists were of anything but the Big Five. We followed the ant trails and worked our way through a traffic jam of a dozen safari vans to a leopard.

  “It looks like it’s made of rubber and nailed to the tree,” the Frenchman said.

  The Brits pontificated as to why the leopard or some lion wouldn’t just attack us—fear of the truck, fear of the scent of gasoline, fear of our collective size. The driver put an end to their talk when he said, “No, no, the only thing scaring a lion is the red shuka of a Maasai.”

  “Whoever wants to pay three hundred shillings extra can see the nice village, a Maasai boma,” said the driver as he flung open the van door.

  We were just outside the Mara.

  Encircling the village was a mud wall built and shaped by hands, and around the wall was a thorn bush fence. A man in a shuka chatted with the driver in Swahili as we walked toward the village entrance. Heavy earrings pulled the man’s earlobes to his neck as if his ears were tuned to something I couldn’t hear.

  Inside the fence, women in blue checkered capes hurried over in a buzz of shouting. “Hello. Hello. You like?” Jewelry hung from the hands and arms of the chattering, jittery Maasai. People charged from all directions with carvings, knives, necklaces, as if they’d just raided the inner sanctum of a temple. I searched through the mayhem for the village, wanting my bearings in the swarm of hands. Dust. Necklaces. Flies landed on my lips. Sour cow dung roasted in the sun. I wiped sweat from my face and slid through a gap in the throng. Rectangular mud huts with flat roofs faced inward onto a courtyard. The Mexican, bartering for a bow and arrow, said, “I’ll give you 150 shillings. Not more.” A man thrusting circular knives up to my face spoke in a language I didn’t understand.

  Jewelry, on black sheets of plastic, lay on the ground in swirls of color beside cheap daggers with cowskin sheaths. People shouted around the Frenchman. A camera flashed. Women on tiny stools watched as I picked up an earring as big and beautiful as a butterfly’s wing. I caught my breath and let myself imagine that the earring’s beads were from old times, traded perhaps for spices or ivory. I flipped the earring over and found that half of it was made of plastic, yellow lettered plastic that I traced to the margarine tubs where the women stashed their money.

  An old woman pushed armloads of necklaces up to my eyes.

  “Thank you. I don’t need this,” I said as gently as I could.

  I stuck my hand out, and she finally lowered the jewelry so I could see. The world fell away as the old Maasai looked at me in silence. Her eyes were moist. She seemed to be thinking of something—a calf, I imagined, a calf that needed tending. And her face! It was entirely wrinkled, with lines cutting through wrinkles, wrinkles within wrinkles, as though her skin had been cut by water. She wore on her face an entire lifetime of living outside and a map of what her people were.

  The jewelry swung from her forearms as she hobbled toward the Mexican.

  I scanned the periphery. Goats milled near the entrance. Children dashed, disappeared into a hut. A breeze carried the sharp odor of goat dung. And the soil was dung, old dung, with a consistency of dry broken dirt. Shouting villagers behind me went silent. In a ring of Maasai, the Frenchman performed a magic trick with a stick that spurred the men to drop their goods and search the ground for sticks of their own. In one small gesture he transformed the selling into conversation and laughter.

  “We can see a manyatta now, a hut,” the dr
iver said. “You’ll want to take pictures.”

  A Maasai led us deeper into the boma. Children peeked out from doorways. Bowlegged, uncircumcised boys waddled around their grandmother’s knees. A girl darted into a hut. The goats are real, I said to myself. The wrinkles and smells and children are real. We stopped at the door of a mud hut. The red-caped man turned and called to someone. A woman stepped forward, wearing one red and one blue shuka. Her head was shaved. Encircling her neck were necklaces, different from those I’d seen for sale, the patterns of the beads encoded, our driver had said, with her story, age group, family, and who she’d married. She found a rope among the beads and slipped it off her head. On the rope was a brass key. The Maasai man worked the key into a padlock on the door.

  I closed my eyes. How could a traditional hut be locked? Wasn’t a village supposed to be a family? I stepped inside the manyatta with my expectations churning in my stomach like soured food. Ashes, a recent fire; people did live here. But they’d made their home into an exhibit, just another part of the market. I walked out by myself; whatever was real within the village I could not touch.

  HELL’S GATE

  Naivasha seemed as arbitrarily located as a matatu stand, a town built around a place in the dirt where vehicles stopped. Kenyans strolled the unpaved roads, the men in Western clothes, their belts pulled tight as balloon knots, the women in colorful, puffy-shouldered dresses, kicking along in high heels too small for their feet. Shops were made of concrete and sheet metal, the businesses within revealed by the murals that adorned them: on the Duka ya Dawa was a painting of cough syrup pouring into a teaspoon, on the Kinyozi a mural of scissors and a man with a triangular hairdo.

  It was my sixth day in Kenya, and I’d begun my journey again, by matatu. I was headed for the wilds alone. I sat on the public bus waiting for empty seats to fill and thumbing through my pocket notebook to where I’d written the names of safari and rafting companies. I drew an X across the page. I drew an X over information on jeep rentals, an X across the location in Nairobi of the Thorn Tree where travelers clipped notes for each other, for the safari had revealed how far greater were the freedoms I sought. I left my bag on the seat and climbed off the bus, which looked like one of the wrecked lorries along the Jerusalem highway dating to the war of ’48.

  A man smiled at me as a truck stormed up the road.

  “Jambo,” I said, greeting him.

  Swahili raced out of his mouth like a rabbit shooting through the grass.

  I said, “I’m just learning.”

  “Where do you come from?” he said in English. “What are you doing?”

  Two more men stopped to talk and teach me lines of Swahili. I skipped to a grocery shack made from rough-cut boards and bought a deck of cards and a packet of balloons while thinking of how the Frenchman had disarmed and charmed the Maasai sellers with his magic trick. Back in the bus, I played cards with a Kenyan guy my age, and within minutes I learned to count in Swahili and was laughing at the vocabulary words I’d cut from Lonely Planet and glued into my notebook, the Swahili for custard apple, guyaba, squid. X. When the bus was full of Africans, a woman climbed on with a baby and a piece of luggage that was a white grain sack. I gave her my seat; participate, I told myself. And I leapt down to the road. Two ladders ran up the back of the bus, and a boy scurried up and down one of them, loading luggage onto the roof, shouting what had to be the names of villages around Lake Naivasha. I climbed midway up the second ladder. The boy and I slapped hands. He banged the roof with his palm. And the bus puttered out of the station, the ladder trying to pull free from my grip as we accelerated up the road. Air rushed into my open mouth, because I couldn’t stop smiling for the joy of having finally arrived in Africa.

  I slept at Fisherman’s Camp on the lake and trekked alone to the boundaries of Hell’s Gate National Park. I had my tent. I’d brought food—Nice biscuits, buns, and a dozen Cadbury chocolate bars. The landscape beyond the park entrance was so gray and barren compared to the Mara, that I was surprised to see gazelles. They were watching me. When I realized there was no reason not to, I veered off the gravel road toward them. I paused and pretended to graze, then rotated my head. The gazelles were delicate and nervous, with curious black eyes. Their ears twinkled. And they ran.

  I tiptoed toward a warthog with tusks jutting from his mouth like the legs of a half-swallowed frog. I crept up to a hartebeest, his horns black and crooked as daggers ruined by fire. He glanced up, put his nose down, then looked over again, as though torn between fear and flirtation. Dik-diks, antelope, and ostriches came toward me, not like images from a textbook, but like characters, like individuals. Elated, I bounded from tree to rock to animal, zigzagging away from the road until I lost all sense of where I was, the landscape more wondrous with each hour I roamed.

  A black ridge stretched into the distance like a wall protecting some older world. I scrambled up loose shale on the pathless mountain, through rock and brush, feeling the constant urge to laugh as animals shrank below me on the plains. Wind shot up the cliff wall, caught my backpack and twisted me. I pressed my stomach to the rock and waited for the updraft to blow itself out. An eagle circled against the moon, which lay on its curve like a half-closed eye. The wind brought a sense of isolation that engulfed all but the sound of my climb—rocks clinking, tumbling down, my boots sliding in the gravel as if they were too big for my feet. I reached the flat mountaintop with the ascent burning in my lungs and I lay on my stomach, eyes over the cliff edge. Giraffes below were barely more than motionless dots, and the landscape swept into the distance and disappeared into a haze of sandy air. I was amazed at the thought of who in the past had seen the same. And I was amazed at how much world there was beyond Israel. Our culture was so strongly rooted—who were we? We were Israeli and we were Jewish. It was a religion, a nationality, and a place of birth. This was old skin and I wanted to slough it off.

  I bent the stems of my glasses around my ears to keep them from slipping down my nose. The entire face of the ridge, with its bald rock and pitches of gravel, was a blind spot, and I couldn’t see how to get down. Panic tightened in my throat as I circled and searched. An hour passed. Whatever I’d noticed on the way up I couldn’t remember. I didn’t even know which side of the ridge I’d climbed. The wind was raw and uncontained, hissing with the sound of a great emptiness. The sun was dropping, my breathing fast, nausea as sharp as the realization that I hadn’t been ready for this, that my boy-ness could not so easily die. I tightened the backpack straps, swallowed, and descended into the dead space, my body sideways, gravity pulling me, the ground slowly slipping away.

  A head-size boulder broke free and vanished below.

  I scuttled back to the ridge top, panting. An updraft, like an insult, slung sand into my face. I gripped a boulder and closed my eyes. One innocent step after another and the buses, gravel roads, and towns beside the lake had disappeared. Let me down! I wanted to say to Hell’s Gate. I was just following interesting things.

  Heels dug into the gravel, my right hand bleeding, I descended again. An antelope stood below me in the flats. I gripped shrubs, grass, rock. The mountain held the afternoon’s heat, and I thought of the warm Shabbat plate on which my father cooked his weekly Jachnun. I looked down again at the antelope that was not an antelope but a man, and where the slope finally flattened I barreled toward him.

  There were two Africans in the khaki uniforms of park rangers.

  “Habari yacko, rafiki?” one of them said, calmly, smiling. How are you, friend?

  “Mzuri sana,” I said. “Habari za leo?” Very fine. How are you today?

  I dropped my pack. My legs were trembling, sweat dripping in my eyes. They asked in English what I was doing in Kenya and in the park, and when I described my trouble descending from the peak, it was clear they saw me, not as a lost boy looking for help, but as a man who’d walked off a mountain.

  Instantly, they gave me back my breath.

  “Can I just put my tent here?”
I said. “With the animals?”

  One ranger shrugged as if no one had ever asked.

  “Ehh, I think so,” said the other ranger. “Why not?”

  I said good-bye and walked on and realized I’d forgotten to ask them where I was.

  A rain shower swept in without warning. I yanked my tent from its cinch sack, snapped the poles straight and fed them crosswise through the seams of the silver nylon. The ground was rocky, dotted with shrubs. A grass as tough as agropyron elongatum pierced the tent floor with its blades. Rain drummed on my twenty-dollar supermarket tent, which shuddered with me inside it. A rumble followed the shower into the distance and was gone.

  The sun fell behind the mountains, prolonging dusk, and a chill seeped out of the shadows. I wrote a postcard to my grandfather Moshe and ate a chocolate bar, my bare feet sticking out of the tent, the soil broken and cool under my heels. The sense of remoteness, both magical and frightening, which had been contained in the wind on the mountaintop, settled over the plains.

  The darkness began to sing, screeching, cooing, clicking. A short cry—from a small-lunged animal. A rasping—likely an insect. A bird whistled overhead. A voice seemed to call to me. Close, now farther away, now on the opposite side. One creature moving in circles or several. A cry, distressed—infant or animal. The night grew massive around the tent. I climbed out and fanned the flashlight, shaking, scanning the brush for eyes. The screeching and clacking continued as though I didn’t exist, the thorny terrain nearly as brutal on my feet as a field of glass. Littering the bare ground were acacia roots and dust-filled fragments of wood that might have come from trees fifty years dead. I lined branches around the tent, a perimeter of loose wood to knock together under a predator’s paws.