The Last Great Ape Read online

  Ofer was another rookie, quiet and solitary. Ofer had lost a friend in a bombing of a trempiada, a station where soldiers hitchhiked to and from a remote camp. His commanders refused to let him attend the funeral. So disconsolate was Ofer that he joined the pact Elad and I made to reclaim our lives. We vowed either to be stationed where we could sleep at home with evenings free—kalab—or to be assigned as cooks or drivers who spent one week on the base and one week off—weekweek. We didn’t care that soldiers with weekweek were those the army didn’t want around more than half the time. We called our strategy The Art of War of Weekweek.

  After the professional course, I was stationed in Tel Aviv where the buildings of the base loomed over us like threats. My unit, responsible for communications support for special operations, was unique in that we could not leave the base. Time passed with an impossible slowness. The yelling I endured was generic and impersonal, which only made it worse, and I thought constantly of the Maasai who knew far better why they carried their spears. I slept in bed wearing boots for nighttime shift duty—two hours at a guard post, two hours in bed, two hours at a post. In the helmet pouch of my combat vest I stashed a Swahili phrasebook and the Lonely Planet Guide to Central Africa. I traded for shifts at isolated posts so that I could read about Zaire.

  “I don’t want to be promoted,” I told my commander. “I don’t want you to value what I’m doing. I want to be a good soldier. I want to be a great soldier, but if I’m a great soldier, you’ll promote me, and then I’ll have even less free time. I’m stuck on the base and I can’t even visit my home, which is five minutes away. Do you see a problem?”

  Elad, “The Dwarf,” had hung a noose over his bed when he was fifteen, and he had little trouble convincing his mental health officer he was on the verge of suicide. He was removed from Northern Command and reassigned as a driver, and he spent his evenings making industrial music, playing guitar with small electrified motors and shards of glass. For their ability to wave wands and restore lives, mental health officers were called “magicians.”

  Ofer’s big ears had earned him the nickname “The Bat.” He was also in Northern Command, stationed on Mount Harmon on the Lebanese border, living in tunnels beneath the snow. He spent hours in therapy, honing the ruse of depression and, for his finale in the Art of War of Weekweek, he left a suicide note. But the formulas of army legend had become cliché, and Ofer’s note was one of three found that afternoon in the unit.

  “Ofir, let’s cut the bullshit. I want you to make a list,” said my new direct commander, who had the muscular build of an athlete and the alien ears of a swala twiga. He relayed stories, not of sacrifice to country, but of personal challenge. “Divide a page in two. On one side write what would be good if you go to the psychologist and get weekweek, and on the other, say, the benefits of going to the field in Lebanon. The question is how far can you go?”

  Elad, Ofer, and I were handpicked for daylong officers’ course exams. Elad saw his selection as further proof the army was a farce and he used the opportunity to aim for full discharge, seeking both to fail and to be mentally examined for his answers. After a year of being reduced to an automaton, of feeling drugged by routine and the cumulative agony of pointless tasks, I was as happy as Ofer that the army was now asking us to think, and I cancelled my appointment with the magician.

  The desert landscape of Mizpa Ramon in the Negev imparted a sense of freedom absent within the walls of a military base. In officers’ training, Ofer and I learned to use explosives and fuses, how to treat mass casualties, burns, cut limbs, fractures, battle wounds. A good paramedic is an improviser. Our daily goals were no nobler but they were practical, and for the first time the military was adventurous. We crawled up hills blindfolded. We were woken in the night to run for hours, to trek with twenty-kilogram packs, to carry a member of our unit for thirty kilometers on a stretcher, drills I never ceased to imagine were on the savannah. We learned to pace our walking and to know our range and we studied command, the management of soldiers on the battlefield, philosophy, principles and the ethics of war and self-management for maintaining control in extreme situations. I led my unit of ten cadets in a simulated field exercise, my commander batting my helmet, knocking my head from side to side, as I tried to give orders before we stormed a hill, breathing dust, firing blank cartridges, and I committed errors, both tactical and mental, that led to the theoretical deaths of nearly all my men.

  In my self-critique before the unit, I said, “I should have spread my soldiers wider and known the terrain better. Under stress, I got lost.” But I was always getting lost; my inner compass insisted on spinning its own way. Adding to the critique, my bunkmate, Shahar, said, “You’re also not such a glamorous commander.” But we had “space” to make mistakes, and even costly ones were desirable as tools for learning.

  The company was in the field, daytime, simulating battlefield movements, when my friend Assaf accidentally raised an antenna from an armored personnel carrier into a high voltage power line. He was evacuated to the hospital, and the company came together to wait. Anxious cadets walked in circles around improvised tents. Assaf’s training officer was found crying in the grass. When the highest ranking officer of the base appeared, a man I’d seen only once, I knew it would be bad. He said, “It is with great regret that I inform you that at 16:30 Assaf Avni passed away.” My friends grabbed each other and sobbed. The commander looked down, then said, “God gave us a great gift that we forget things. All pain eventually hurts less.”

  Everyone had stopped listening and I thought, Why am I the only one not crying?

  “Continue as usual,” was the word from the magicians. “You don’t need to stop and process this. Continue in your routine. The routine protects you.”

  When I finally got a weekend off, I stayed in my room at home and listened to “Hotel California” for hours, which Assaf had played in the barracks on a guitar missing a string. When my tears finally came, the melancholy was like a drug. And the draw of it I couldn’t explain.

  Summer of 1996, after eight months of officer’s training, I got my rank and was transferred to a colorless world of concrete and sand that made me long for the hated eucalyptus trees. My office I painted peach, outfitted with a bar and three stools and decorated with a print, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus. I played Jimi Hendrix tapes and turned the office into a night spot, Ofir’s Janana Bar, where I served well-sugared instant coffee to my soldiers. The aquarium that I brought in with two leopard geckos finally earned me a commander’s wrath: “You can’t just do what you want! This is the army!”

  My need to be in Africa had grown almost pathological. It hardly mattered that my connection to the continent was as tenuous as the encapsulated revelations of a three-week trip. In Africa, I believed, waited not just the experiences I needed to continue building myself, but my very purpose. Whatever contribution I might make in my life would not be in someone else’s army.

  As an officer, I had to give a fourth year to the Israel Defense Forces, and Ofer and I began holding “Africa meetings” at the Prozac Bar in Tel Aviv. Ofer had taken me to get contact lenses, and my glasses were gone and with it the nickname “The Blind.” On the way to the bar I changed out of my uniform into a velvet shirt and purple bellbottoms. I carried my M-16 on my back and Heart of Darkness in my bag. Ofer, the primary architect of my makeover into coolness, wore black vinyl pants. Both of us wore three earrings. And no one in the Prozac Bar believed we were officers.

  “The meeting has begun at 20:37,” I said, following army protocol. “People present are Ofer and Ofir. Comments?” Ofer had just started to smoke, and his cigarette burned only along the bottom, back toward his throat. I asked if we should register “one badly smoked cigarette” under “any other business.” And I stirred into my Nescafé as many packets of sugar as the water in the coffee mug would absorb—seven.

  “Sabbaba Ugalák,” I said, invoking our language of odd words and cult music phrases. “Third point on th
e agenda: Cheetah attack procedures. If a cheetah attacks, we stand perfectly still. Do we agree?”

  Ofer nearly spit up his beer. “Are you serious?”

  “A cheetah makes false attacks, to intimidate. If we stand perfectly still, she’ll run right by. Now a leopard—not so much, so we ought to move. Write it down.”

  Ofer laughed and wrote it down and told Galit, our waitress, that he planned to make her fall in love with him. Ofer had a vast circle of friends he’d brought me into and was always dreaming up excursions. While stationed in Gaza, Ofer had been in charge of monitoring forty-one kilometers of border with field trackers and radar.

  “Agenda item six,” I said. “If we have a problem with the authorities, we should try to ‘settle’ the problem before reaching the police station. Thieves often pose as policemen. Do we agree?”

  “Indeed, I smell you.”

  “Now, if we hire a plane in Kinshasa and parachute into the jungle, we try to land near a river. Do we agree?”

  Ofer laughed. “We don’t even know how to parachute. Why near a river?”

  “If something goes wrong, like, breaking our legs, we can float downstream.”

  Ofer went quiet. But then a smile crept back across his face. He said, “Okay. Smell you. Being burned by cannibals preparations. What do we do?”

  “No worries. If we’re about to be burned alive, we throw teargas pills into the fire—I stole some from the base—and we disappear. Poof.”

  Ofer ordered another drink. He’d once said he would give his life for me. My girlfriend at the time, Gal, was jealous of Ofer. Shahar called us a married couple. Ofer and I had promised, even after taking brides, to live next door to each other. We vowed at seventy to skydive in wheelchairs. Ofer and Ofir. Ofir and Ofer. We danced with friends at clubs like Echoes and Kat Balu and dreamed that when peace came we would guide the first Israeli tourists into Syria.

  Ofer and I were drafted on the same day and then discharged on the same day in October 1998. A few weeks on, we sat at a table in a mall near an eye doctor’s office. We had appointments for Lasik surgery, as the jungle was no place for contact lenses. Ofer and I had worn our oldest, thickest glasses that day, and we looked like scuba divers. We had the same diopter, minus ten, which meant that without corrective lenses we bumped into walls. As our appointments neared, we nodded in ceremony and pulled our glasses away from our eyes. The mob around us swirled into a blur of colors. The volume of everything seemed to soften. We leaned our heads together and continued to talk. “My brother,” Ofer said, “Kenya will be the dream and adventure of our lives.”

  1998–1999

  … The Point That Must Be Reached.

  KENYA

  THE BUTT OF A GUN

  Our first day in Nairobi, Ofer and I rose at dawn in a dirty room at Hotel Iqbal. Dead traffic lights leaned over buckled sidewalks. Abandoned cars sat in an alley heaped with bricks. A brown eagle glided overhead. The city was humming with so many people that in Israel it would have been a parade. Bus attendants called to passersby, “Kssst kssst,” over laughter, radios and revving engines. Larger coaches were adorned in graffitied names: “Born Bad” and “Prince of Nairobi.”

  The taste of matatu exhaust filled me with joy.

  Ofer and I strolled up the street as leisurely as we would have in Tel Aviv. He swaggered, holding a cigarette at his side with the chic of a man being filmed. When tourist hunters descended telling stories of safaris, Ofer said, “We can see elephants, you say? Here in Kenya? Did they break out of a zoo?” Skyscrapers rose beyond Kenyatta Avenue, though the ubiquitous decay made clear that the glorious era of their construction, when Kenya was the jewel of East Africa, had passed. Further on was the Hilton, a cinema, a man on the sidewalk gripping a billy club. Ofer was feasting on the unending wonder of details in the chaos, my enjoyment channeled through him. I felt cleansed being back in Africa, with Israel swept away and exchanged for Kenya by the impossible ease and completeness of air travel. Ofer pointed at a street boy trying to grab a dog by the tail. A child sold cigarettes and bubblegum, “One bob. One bob.” Ofer gave the boy his half-smoked cigarette and said, “Mister, I’ll come back later for a refund; this cigarette isn’t working.” And the boy laughed.

  Out of the corner of my eye: the man in the blue uniform was waving his billy club.

  “Your girlfriend’s not going to be happy,” Ofer said, looking in the other direction, “when she learns we’re going to the bush for five years. We’re going to drive this whole continent insane.”

  The man swung his club overhead, smashed it down into my shoulder, my back. I dropped to the cement. Wrapped my arms around my head as the blows rained down. From nowhere a soldier charged Ofer with an Uzi. Was it a coup? The man with the club struck me on the back, neck, arms, grunting with each blow like someone I’d betrayed. My cheek was flush to the concrete. The men left us.

  I peeked out from under my hands at Ofer. We stumbled to our feet and ran. Pedestrians with shopping bags were surreally calm. People across the road walked as if it were any day. Ofer grimaced, rubbed his head, checked himself for blood. He said, “They beat us because we’re white.” I stopped and looked back at where we’d been attacked: a black truck parked on the sidewalk, with a windowless back-end, was an armored car; men were moving money into a bank and we’d walked straight into them.

  I clutched my throbbing neck and laughed. “What an experience! Shit!”

  Ofer glared at me as if he might beat me himself.

  “Where the fuck was the experience in that?” he said. “The guy beat me with the butt of an Uzi. You like being beaten? We could be dead.”

  “We’re alive, no?” I said, still laughing. “We’re okay.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Half a day in Nairobi,” I said, “and we’ve already had our first adventure!”

  Planet Safari sat atop an eleven-story building, an oasis for travelers hustled in by street touts paid a commission for bringing them, and for bringing us; Ofer had to see the Maasai Mara as I had. And he infuriated Planet’s manager, Lucy, by bargaining for the cheapest safari she’d ever sold. Ofer said, “If the Mara’s grass is not well watered, we’re coming back for a refund.”

  “You’re little bandits,” Lucy said and then almost smiled.

  Four green canvas tents were set up on the open-air patio for travelers, who were slicing papaya, sipping yogurt, reading Rough Guides. I felt an ecstasy akin to my first day in Hell’s Gate when I’d bounded from ostrich to antelope—lucky, unconflicted, giddy and young. That evening, after Ofer and I cooked shakshouka for Planet’s employees, I asked the sleepy-eyed night watchman, Paul Muangi, in Swahili where I could get a drink of water because the pipes and the plastic barrels were dry.

  “Mzungu,” he said with a smile, meaning white man, “you should speak in your shalom shalom language; you just asked me for shit. Kunywa, not kunya. We ran out of one, we have lots of the other.” Paul chuckled and swiveled in the boss’s leather chair under a portrait of President Moi. “Go to the roof and see where the water is: in the Hilton’s blue swimming pool. Here? We barely have water for cooking ugali. Oppression of the poor, my friend, oppression of the poor.”

  Across Moi Avenue was the unlit River Road area, and I told Muangi that Ofer and I planned to walk there in the night.

  “No no no,” Muangi said. “You want to get robbed? There’s a reason it’s called Nairobbery.”

  Impatience was a product of the long wait to return. We needed to know what was really out in the dark, to know whether Nairobi’s reputation was deserved and whether we were ready to face it. If Africa were to be my home, I couldn’t choose to walk only where people promised I would be safe. An hour before midnight, Muangi unlocked Planet’s gate, and Ofer and I rode the elevator down with the seriousness of men summoned for an operation in the field. Ofer stretched his stiff neck, rubbed the bruises he’d earned that morning from the Uzi. Buildings in central Nairobi were guarded by askaris, who ca
rried clubs, nightsticks, and whips, and we woke a man sleeping face-down at a table who had a club in his lap. He yanked a great mass of keys from his pocket, fiddled like a jailer for the right one, and opened the door.

  The sidewalk on our side of Moi Avenue had a giant curio shop and Nando’s and the Chicken Inn, a strip of well-lit retail bordering the blackness. Street children moved on the dark side of Moi with bottles of sniffing glue at their mouths, as if they alone were comfortable there. The distant horns of fifty matatus calling for passengers clamored like instruments of the devil’s orchestra.

  We crossed. Islands of light broke the darkness: a light bulb between the bars of a window, one buzzing streetlamp, a flashlight. Shops were shuttered, barricaded by metal doors, locked with padlocks so stout they seemed exaggerations. I could hear Ofer breathing as we marched side by side, fists clenched, boots thudding on the pavement in a feeble warning to anyone near. I could feel that my hardening in the army would not be as much help as I wanted. Ahead in the darkness was an intersection we knew from daytime, to the right a construction zone blocked by a metal wall. I squinted, struggled to see, my night vision so poor after the surgery that my eyes felt wrapped in cellophane. I didn’t want Ofer knowing I was nervous, didn’t want us amplifying each other’s fear—as I gripped the teargas in my pocket.

  Beyond Tom Mboya Avenue, children sang in a saucer of light. I exhaled. Apartments, tangled in fire escapes, rose to the left. Ofer was thinking what I was and we crossed toward the children. From the right five meters off and rushing us was a flashlight pointed at my face, blinding me as to who held it. Adrenaline came, the rush of wind spilling into the chest. I stepped in front of Ofer, rotated the safety cap on the teargas and went straight at the man.