The Last Great Ape Read online

  A scream. A hyena? I leapt into the tent. Or my body leapt. Chills washed over me. I pulled my legs against my chest and zipped the tent door. My heart thumped against my knees as I jammed the flashlight against the fabric wall and stared out through the insect screen. I knew the technical terms for the ways adrenaline worked, how in stress mode blood rushed from the digestive tract to the survival systems, how the pupils dilated and hair stood on end. But reading it in books was nothing compared to the power, in a single second, of actually feeling my body seized by fear.

  How naïve I’d been to confuse knowledge and experience.

  A screech.

  I bounded out because I was scared, shined the flashlight in an arc, securing the space again from the nothingness. The beam shook in my sweaty hand. You interacted with these animals during the day. Wait, those animals were diurnal. Break it down, break it into parts, quantify it. The rangers wouldn’t have let me pitch the tent if there were lions in the park. Or had they not really given me permission? Or had they assumed I knew what to do in this place?

  I picked up a sharp rock and found enough comfort to tilt back my head and gaze at the sky. I thought, I’m too fond of stars to be fearful of the night. There were more stars than I’d ever seen, clouds of stars that reached clear to the horizon, as at a planetarium. What had been the point of making grids to learn the constellations? Of memorizing the Latin names of lizards’ bones? Nothing I’d learned had gotten me a millimeter closer to understanding what was out in the darkness.

  A LION’S CLAWS

  All eyes were on me when I unzipped the tent the next morning—a horizon of animals framed by the mountains. Warthogs shot into the grass. A zebra stared, then buried his head in the herd. Neurotic gazelles all pointed one way like weathervanes. I peeled back the tent door for a wider view, and a gazelle leapt sideways and all the gazelles leapt, as if connected by string. Layers of animals filled the savannah in the daily ritual of traveling to drink, to find good grass, half of them staring at my silver tent, which may have looked to them as odd against the landscape as it would have to me just days before.

  I packed and walked, the gazelles slashing across the flats, zebras trotting. Insipid wildebeest squeezed against each other in the distance like a shoal of fish. My destination, again, was no more than the sum of a thousand random steps. Though I was making an effort to keep the black mountain ridge on my right.

  Hours passed. Acacia trees sprouted from the plains. A giraffe browsed in a treetop and I sneaked toward him in the shadows. The bottom of his white orange stomach towered overhead like the belly of a god. When he spotted me through the leaves, he jerked upward, ripping loose from the ground. I fell backwards as the giraffe wheeled like scaffolding in slow motion, his legs lifting high over the savannah as he ran.

  All my life, I thought, I’ve been touching things through gloves.

  When the grass grew thick farther on, it occurred to me I might have crossed beyond the park’s borders. I stopped, listened. The brush whispered in the breeze. I stopped again when the clank of goods in my pack and the rocks grinding under my boot soles overwhelmed whatever I should have been listening for. The land looked like a place in the Mara only Maasai dared walk, where the grass was high enough to conceal a lion’s head. A pair of baboons glided parallel to my path. They’d been watching me. The juvenile crept close, his feet turning inward in his pigeon-toed walk.

  From my backpack, I tore out two buns. The juvenile lunged, seized the bread and sprinted off. A clan of baboons had been shadowing me in the brush. A female appeared, her sharp snout making her seem a cousin to wolves. I jumped; a male had crept around and touched my hand. The female moved closer. Dozens of baboons marched into the open. Some, like scouts, sat to watch, forearms resting on their knees, the land revealing that it could select out the weak. In the Tel Aviv University Library, I’d studied the behavior of baboons, who had highly developed social structures that helped them defend their groups. And helped them attack. And they closed ranks around me.

  I stomped my boots. Baboons scurried behind boulders like fleeing mice. Then returned. A male jumped forward as if to test how close he could get without inciting a response. So much intelligence showed in his eyes and expressions. Was I as alert? When he looked toward the others, I picked up a rock, yelled, smashed it down. They scuttled away in a dust cloud, their asses pink as though diseased. They crept back into formation. When I began to walk, they walked. Does he mean it when he scares us? they seemed to think. We’ll find out.

  “Bah!” I smashed rocks and waved my arms and they melted away into the brush.

  I was dehydrated and nearly out of water when I spotted, tiny in the distance, the red of his shuka bright against the brown valley, a Maasai warrior.

  “Jambo!” I shouted and the distance swallowed the word. “Habari!” I ran, the bag rattling and hopping on my back. The soil was packed hard, petrified by the sun. Spastic and shouting and out of control, I stomped and sprinted down the side of the valley into the creek bed to a trail where I stopped in front of the Maasai.

  He was smiling, leaning against a spear, one leg crossed behind the other. Wind blew through the landscape as though we were the only men left on earth.

  He reached out and touched the side of my face with the back of his hand.

  The Maasai, forty or fifty years old, watched me in a way that seemed to say we had all the time in the world. Here, he was saying, we are not in a hurry. I felt ridiculous for running, for shouting as though he might have fled, for carrying a massive backpack when all he needed was a spear.

  I reached out and touched the side of his face with the back of my hand.

  The Maasai stood motionless. He was tall and thin, mostly hidden under his red cape, his sandals cut from old tires.

  “Ninaitwa Ofir. Ninatoka Israel.” I’d been practicing my opening statements. “Unaitwa nani?” What’s your name?

  Another minute of silence and he began to speak, not KiSwahili, but KiMaasai, which was full of hard K’s and rolling R’s and quick, almost hidden syllables. Swahili was softer, closer in sound to Arabic. That I did not and could not answer did not stop the Maasai from talking on and on.

  “Kijiji ni wapi?” I said in Swahili; I needed far more to drink than the sips I’d been saving. The village is where?

  With a patience that was almost holy, he continued in KiMaasai.

  I pointed in different directions, said, “Kijiji? Kijiji?” Village?

  He smelled of cooking fires and cattle.

  “Kijiji?” I said and, as his monologue continued, I reached across his field of vision and pointed. “Kijiji?” I pointed as if a brush fire were roaring toward us through the valley. “Kijiji!” I said, “Wewe kulala wapi?” You sleep where? In dozens of variations and tones, miming and pointing in all direction, I uttered a dozen kijijis in hopes of hitting the magical combination that would mean, Let’s go!

  “Ah, kijiji,” the Maasai said and nodded.

  But didn’t move. Before we lost our iota of understanding, I gave one final kijiji and started up the path. He laid his spear across his shoulders and glided by me with long graceful steps, his legs like stilts beneath his shuka, his speed forcing me to double-time. Only in a place where the land stretched out as though leading the way, did it seem possible to walk in silence with a man I’d just met and feel complete comfort.

  His footprints were fragments of tire treads.

  Hours later, the brown rectangles of two villages appeared in the distance. I walked shoulder to shoulder with the warrior, feeling like a king. The blue of the sky was intense and unreal, as in pictures of earth from space. Near the first boma, two boys in shukas walked toward us, making eye contact but keeping their heads down. I extended my hand expecting to shake, but the boys stopped a meter in front of us, bowed their shaven heads, and leaned in, one toward the man, the other toward me.

  I watched the elder for a sign of what to do. When he laid his palm on the head of the boy
in front of him, I did the same to the boy before me. The boys switched places and we repeated. It wasn’t hair I touched, but warm skin, the skull, and I thought of the Shabbat Priestly Prayer at synagogue when my father had placed his hand on my head under his prayer shawl.

  The bigger boy, by responsibility or honor, took my bag. A dry acacia fence lined the mud wall of the village. Goats everywhere shook their tails and baaed. Children with flies dotting their mouths and yellow crust around their eyes paraded forward in overwhelming numbers, all with their heads bowed. The men stood back, bright teeth shining in their smiles, not directing the children, only watching. I touched one head after another, as if I’d been asked to bless a nation. The village back in the Mara seemed now hardly a village at all. I shooed and shooed a fly from my lips until I noticed Maasai kids unbothered by bugs feeding on their snot. The boma was dirty, the ground moist with mashed piles of cow dung. The smell of the soil was soft and warm, a detail, I imagined, that in the life of a child did not change—so that even manure might be loved.

  All the men shook my hand. Then old women shuffled over, slumped at the shoulders and leaning on walking sticks like keepers of a pact, their heads held high. Two old mamas took turns pulling my nose and playing with my hair, the world here like one people at home might have imagined existed only in myth, a distant civilization of tall thin figures more alien than kin. The large boy from outside the boma lifted my pack from the dung and led me with several men to a hut, where smoke, solid as a curtain, hit me in the doorway. My eyes burned as I groped over a mud wall fragile enough to break in my hands. Someone took my arm and helped me to sit on a cowskin bed. The hut was pitch-black but for the coals of a fire and a ray of light slicing through the smoke from a tiny window. A woman poked the coals, blew, set a silver pot over fresh flames. I unzipped my pack and handed chocolate bars to the man seated at the fire who seemed to be my host. But he set the chocolates aside.

  As Maasai entered and sat around me, the woman sprinkled leaves into the pot. She removed the leather cap from a beaded gourd, raised the gourd to her eyes and dumped milk into the tea, then spun a stirring stick between her palms. She poured boiling tea into a cup with a broken handle, then to another and back, again and again, to cool it for drinking. My maternal grandma always did the same even though we urged her just to add cold water.

  After two cups of tea, a man led me outside. I drew crisp, smokeless air into my lungs, then held my breath as we dove into another dark manyatta. I sat at the fire in silence, eyes stinging, barely able to breathe air of an atmosphere from a different time. Ugali, a sticky starch made from ground corn, was set in front of me with a bowl of goat meat stew—two common bowls. The man showed me how to claw into the ugali and he laughed when I used both hands to keep my ugali ball from disintegrating. As I scooped food into my mouth, I realized that on my hands were the germs of the entire village.

  I moved from house to house through the afternoon, counting cups of tea until my stomach at fourteen was close to bursting. But at least I was no longer thirsty. And what a paltry welcoming my small family and I could have given a wandering Maasai. And how foolish I’d been for thinking I needed to give a gift to my host—the chocolates—when everyone had been waiting to honor me, a solitary traveler, by sharing. And asking for nothing. Language was artifice. Warmth didn’t necessitate words. What was small talk next to singing? As I lay that night in my sleeping bag on a lumpy bed of sticks and hide, I struggled to measure my obligation to the Israeli Army against the budding individualism I’d inherited from my mother. I thought, My life in Israel and even Israel itself were just specks on an endless horizon. Everything I believed about myself, my family, and other cultures, I’d inherited from my own culture. The lens of my upbringing had been pulled away, and I hadn’t even known it existed. How could I have made a real choice about where I fit in the world when I’d been ignorant of what choices there were?

  I woke late and alone in the manyatta and pawed for my glasses, then laced up my boots, laughing at myself for lacking the confidence to go barefoot when women strolled through the dirt as though walking on carpet. Children gathered outside as I blew balloons, children who were proud to carry water and wood and to tend to calves and who were listened to by their elders when they spoke.

  An English-speaking Maasai was brought from another boma. We helped that afternoon in the herding of cattle and he instructed me on the handling of predators.

  “The lion is coming?” the Maasai said. “Make the shuka big or to hold the bag like you big. Take the bag, put it down, make you so two people. If cheetah come to you, no move. If cheetah run to you, no move.”

  We met a man with scars across his chest, slashing scars from a lion’s claws. In the past, the man said, three or four moran—warriors—left the village and wandered, carrying clubs, knives and spears, sleeping on the ground and hunting for meat, the only time besides periods of great wanting when Maasai culture permitted the hunting of animals. The journey of the moran was the ultimate test of the bush: to find and slay a male lion. Felling a lion with a thrown spear wasn’t the most honorable kill. Nor was distracting a lion and flanking him. The bravest warrior, who if he lived would be known forever for his actions, would kneel in front of the charging lion, plant the dull end of his spear in the ground, the shaft gripped in his hands, blade pointed outward at his face. And he would wait for the lion’s attack, wait for the lion to lunge and impale himself on the spear, as he learned whether he had the courage to hold himself still.

  The Maasai stood before me, broad shouldered, chest gleaming in the light, his scars so long and thick he’d almost been sliced in half, and I realized then that what made him who he was was not what he knew but what he had done. And the importance of what he’d done was not that he’d survived his confrontation with the lion, but that he’d looked for the lion and faced the lion when every instinct in his body had screamed to run, to back away, to take shelter. There was nothing he could bring to that moment, no skill, no wisdom from some elder about how to kill a lion. He’d simply planted his spear in the ground and waited, so the lion would either kill him or cut him so deeply he would be forever changed.

  I wasn’t going to the academy to study biology or physics after the army. Not any more. No matter what might happen to me, I was headed straight for the teeth and the claws.

  1994–1998

  Israel

  THE ARMY

  My grandfather Moshe told stories of his life in Iraq, of a Tigris River teeming with fish, of markets overflowing with a hundred varieties of dates and of nomads bringing to Bagdad their buffalo-milk cream. Jews and Arabs had lived in peace on avenues lined with coffee shops and they’d all spoken Arabic. Moshe had worked as the accountant for a fabric merchant and, before commuting each morning to the market on foot, he’d turned toward Jerusalem and prayed in Hebrew. On the rivers of Babylon we sat and cried and remembered Zion. Moshe believed his lineage in Iraq stretched back to the time of Abraham. But when he prayed, he prayed as his forefathers had: for the creation of a Jewish state.

  My mother was born in Iraq in ’49 and three years later moved with Moshe, my pregnant grandmother, and my aunt to newly created Israel. Waiting for them was a bath of DDT at Ben Gurion Airport and a shack at Camp David in Haifa. But for Moshe these were barely nuisances, and little mattered more than that the impossible wish had been achieved. The load of tradition, dragged through the centuries on the backs of Jews, was set down within a new state, the ancient quest completed before my birth.

  More traditional than religious, Grandpa Moshe believed that the country he’d helped to establish was mine to protect, a task to me that was not a warrior’s but a watchman’s. Facing boot camp, I had no choice but to do my part in protecting aunts and elders and everyone who’d done their share. Evading the draft was unthinkable, synonymous with cutting ties to Israel and family. But at eighteen when I arrived at the base in Tel Ha’Shomer, my quest had become not to create or protect borders,
but to erase them.

  My first uniform was baggy enough that my sister and a cousin could have taken shelter in the sleeves. The glasses dwarfing my nose kept me out of combat boot camp and the upper-level courses, and it was impossible to feel a sense of achievement when other rookies faced far greater daily challenges than I. My M-16 was with me always, stuck between the bedsprings and my green mattress when I slept, just beyond the stream of water when I washed in the open showers, the thin strap cutting into my neck as I walked, barrel banging against doorjambs. Commanders delighted in ordering us to refill sand buckets at the fire posts, to whitewash walls, to rake the unending cascade of leaves falling from eucalyptus trees, which seemed to have been planted solely for our torture.

  In a professional course after boot camp, I learned radio communication and encrypted communication for combat. None of it interested me. Nor did it interest a short guy named Elad, who, within hordes of zealous rookies, kept his eyes on the floor as though waiting for world’s end. While mopping the cafeteria one day, I said hello, and Elad glared at me. “The killer got up a bit before dawn,” he said. “Then he put on his boots. He walked up a really long hall. After a while he got to a door. This guy said, ‘Father? Yes, Son. I want to kill you.’”

  Elad frowned when he realized I was still beside him. But then his desire to drive me off morphed into the hunch that I might be a kindred spirit. We started talking about music; Elad played the pickups of his guitar with a nail. “But I have time for nothing now,” he said. “I hate the slave work, not because it’s hard but because it’s useless.” We pushed aside the tables in the dining hall instead of cleaning and squared off for water hockey, for jousting with squeegees and mops, an Olympics that ended with blood and the infirmary.