The Last Great Ape Read online

  “Show me your passports!” he said, shoving the flashlight up to my eyes. “This is the police.”

  I leaned out of the light beam. I couldn’t see his face, but he wore no uniform. I pivoted, seized his wrist with my left hand, jerked his flashlight aside and swung my body against him, aiming the teargas at his eyes.

  “Show me you’re a policeman or I’ll spray,” I said.

  I felt no tension where I gripped his arm. He didn’t struggle to pull away. But stood so calmly in the road he seemed bored. Then he called over his shoulder in a voice devoid of fear. Footsteps. Men dashed around the corner. One was in uniform.

  From a hero to a fool in a single breath. I released the man’s arm.

  “This guy here,” he said to the others, “just tried to attack me with teargas.”

  I could only imagine what Ofer was thinking: Please register “under any other insanity,” Ofir’s complete lack of a brain.

  “Attacking a policeman,” said one officer. “Do you know what this means?”

  I’d given them an opportunity for a bribe for which they wouldn’t have prayed.

  “Mzungu,” said the first officer, “people go to prison for this. Do you attack officers in your country?”

  “I was just protecting myself. You have no uniform. I didn’t know.”

  Every officer surrounding us in the dark shouted in unison.

  “Just get them to the station,” said the first man.

  Ofer and I made eye contact under a streetlight as they escorted us toward a military truck. When an officer pushed him into the truck’s cab, Ofer said, “Maybe we can settle this here.”

  The men roared. “We promise you a night in a Kenyan jail you’ll never forget!”

  I rode in the wagon, seated on a bench and guarded by half a dozen men. The truck rattled and bounced through potholes and seemed to be coming loose from its wheels. My attempt to mount a defense only got me yelled at. I thought of my mother, always ready with uncommon advice: You’ll find your way out and then be happy you were here. I turned and looked through the back window into the cab of the truck. Ofer was chatting with the lone man in uniform.

  The truck down-shifted. We U-turned.

  I looked back at Ofer. He was pointing toward a halo in the darkness: a lit restaurant. The truck braked, throwing the men against me. The uniformed officer leaned out the front window and yelled, “We’re dropping them here.” He shook Ofer’s hand and apologized, and we scurried into the restaurant, The Chicken Licken.

  “Ofer, what the hell did you tell him?” I said.

  Ofer lit a cigarette. “I said we’re Israeli officers. And the man asked, ‘Are you connected to the unit that came with the dogs? That helped in the rescue after the U.S. embassy was bombed?’ And I told him, ‘Of course! You think we’re tourists? We are officers in that unit.’”

  We laughed and I apologized.

  Ofer exhaled smoke and stared at me. “Next time you decide to attack a policeman, you will be the one spending the night in jail.”

  The matatu engine was hot as a furnace. Dust stuck to my sweaty arms and dripped as mud. “Simama hapa,” I called out to the conductor by the door.

  The driver didn’t slow.

  “Stop here!” I said. “Down. In the valley.”

  “There’s nothing, mzungu. It’s just trees. There’s no station,” the conductor said.

  Ofer looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  The matatu crossed the bridge and zipped up the valley’s far side.

  “Stop!” I reached out the window and banged the metal shell of the van.

  The driver braked, and the conductor slid open the door. The Kenyan passengers were shaking their heads, all certain I was confused about getting off a bus in the bush.

  A woman said, “Where are you going?”

  “No no, it’s okay, mama,” I said, crawling over two men to reach the door. “We need this river. We’re following this river.”

  Men shouted at the driver in Swahili and pointed at us.

  “Don’t worry!” I said. “We’re dropping here.”

  Ofer stepped out of the van and wiped sweat from his eyes. Yellow grass grew along the broken tarmac. We fetched our bags from the rear of the van and stood on the narrow road leading to Narok, deep in Maasai country. I stepped away from the van. Ofer walked beside me, uneasy, stroking his scruff and looking back at the Kenyans. The van puttered away with riders hanging out the windows and holding up their hands to see if we would change our minds. Then they disappeared over the hill.

  The army was in the past. And we were just going to walk, finally, now that I stood on the far side of the barriers to things that were simple and good. Somewhere, days or weeks ahead, the river flowing through this valley would intersect another road, and we would hitchhike from there back to Nairobi. Or perhaps the river on my map was not this river at all. Perhaps this one snaked across the border into Tanzania. I didn’t know and it didn’t matter.

  Thick vegetation on both sides of the bridge fenced off the river, which we could hear but not see. I tightened the straps of my food-filled backpack and stepped off the tarmac into the brush. Ofer groaned, flexed and crashed through the thicket. I ducked and slid sideways to find a path, snapped through a chandelier of dead limbs. The dry pine forest was as impenetrable as a crowd of people holding hands. The murmur of the river led us through an opening in the brush, down an embankment toward sandy exposed ground. We came over a rise into view of our river, and it was hardly a stream. Ofer disentangled a twig from his hair and smiled—to tell me I didn’t know what I was doing.

  I turned and continued the battle with the brush.

  “It’s great fun walking on your savannah,” Ofer said, touching a scrape on his forehead and checking his fingers for blood.

  “Let’s move away from the river,” I said. “Maybe the brush thins out.”

  “Don’t you think we should open the map?”

  “We don’t need a map.”

  Ofer shook his head as Shahar and other cadets had done when I’d gotten us lost.

  “Look, Ofer, we can’t get lost because we’re not aiming to go anywhere, at least not anywhere in particular.”

  I checked the compass to appease him, and we climbed out of the gulch. Quickly, as if we’d gained a thousand meters, the trees grew tall, the walking easy, and the canopy cast a shadow over moist, leaf-covered terrain. Another hundred steps and the vegetation knotted around us, and we crashed through branches trying not to get poked in the eyes. The sound of water came back to us and fell away as we navigated a maze of ravines. With each hour we trekked, I felt further from delivering the villages and the endless savannah I’d promised Ofer. Had I been alone, I wouldn’t have cared that the landscape was ugly and disappointing. It wouldn’t have been. It just would have been new.

  Ofer and I hadn’t looked at each other in at least an hour.

  “Please register under violations of the Geneva Convention,” Ofer said, smiling, “the torture methods Ofir and his African pals dreamed up for our trip.”

  “Listen!” I said, raising a finger.

  Cowbells.

  “Maasai! Say ‘sopa’ when we see them, Ofer, and raise your hands to your chest.”

  We scurried up the gulch as the bells chimed somewhere in front of us.

  Our search for the cattle, though, was as futile as our walking had been. Ditches, trees, ravines—the landscape was a puzzle. Then the joyful cry of cowbells grew clear. Through the leaves, we spotted patches of brown and black. Cows in motion. We ran downhill, flung by gravity toward the herd. I scanned for a red shuka among cattle that were not the small milk cows of Israel but massive, horned animals like those of the bible.

  From the thicket behind us: a roar. A Maasai rushing.

  I raised my hands. “Sopa!”

  He shouted, charged. Ofer and I backpedaled. The old man closed the gap, bent down and raised up with a spear in one hand and a rock in the other. “Sopa! Sopa!�
�� I said, slashing away through the trees, yelling greetings as we barreled on without stopping, and I lost myself in the whirling of my legs as panic and exhilaration merged.

  Ofer stopped ahead of me in a dry creek bed. Huffing, hands on his knees, he said, “Nice people, your Maasai pals.”

  I shouted another greeting into the forest and turned to Ofer. “He’s an old man. Imagine how he felt with us jumping out of nowhere onto his cows wearing these backpacks. He was just shocked, probably a bit afraid.”

  “Are you serious? Afraid? So fucking what? He chased us with a spear!”

  “Ofer, he’s old.”

  “A spear in my back would hurt less because he’s a grandfather? I can’t wait to tell Shahar about your crap.”

  I wanted to return, to face the old man, to find a way to persuade him we’d come as friends. But Ofer and I continued on at a pace just shy of running, over a terrain of ditches slicing in all directions like broken spokes of a wheel. Where the savannah flared out in front of us, Ofer threw down his pack. We unlaced our boots, shook out the debris, and I pitched my tent with the door pointing back toward the woods.

  “You think we’re too close?” Ofer said.

  “I don’t think he’s chasing us. He’s just an old man.”

  “Well, we shouldn’t build a fire,” Ofer said, pacing beside the tent. “If anyone is looking, the smoke and then the light will lead them here.”

  Long ago I’d stolen small pulleys from an army base supply room so I could rig a trip-line around my tent, but they were useless with the trees so far apart. Instead, I lined the perimeter with dry wood. Birdcalls and the soft colors of dusk eased the tension between us. I opened a pack of cookies and handed them to Ofer. Ofer unscrewed his canteen and passed it to me. Leaves rustled over the ground as in a poem. I was energized. I understood now that it was not epic landscapes I’d been after or the welcoming of a Maasai village; what I yearned for from Africa was the shock of the unexpected, even if it came from a club or the butt of a gun.

  “What if he returned to the village,” Ofer said, “and explained that two men tried to hurt him? Wouldn’t they search for us?”

  “That would be a huge misunderstanding.”

  “Well, he might have claimed to be the hero who chased us away.”

  We heard singing later, and I said, “It’s far from here, and remember when we heard the cowbells, how hard it was to find them? And that was in daylight.”

  “Nope. This is their territory. Your pals find us if they want.”

  I unrolled my maroon sleeping bag and lay back in the tent. Ofer’s worries gained traction in my thoughts as the night stretched out through the blackness. What would happen if I unzipped the tent door onto the tips of ten spears? In misunderstandings were shitty deaths. An animal rustled in the brush and I crawled out to scope the ground; the night was empty in the flashlight’s beam. I climbed back into the tent and silently rehearsed my Swahili for a confrontation.

  A scratching on the tent woke me. Chills climbed my back as I slid past Ofer and shined the light outside. Trees stood in the cold like guards, the reach of the flashlight marking the edge of how little was known, the wilds humbling in the messages they gave. The eerie call of a bushbaby traveled into the tent with me as I zipped the door closed. Ofer pulled his sleeping bag over his head. The scratching came again, now inside the tent. We jumped, slung our bags aside—it was a mouse stuck under the nylon floor.

  When I woke at dawn, Ofer was sitting on his sleeping bag with his back to me, the tent unzipped, his legs sticking into the sunlight.

  “Ofer, you’re okay?”

  “We have to talk.”

  I sat up and brushed a fly from my face.

  “This is not for me,” he said. “I won’t go on like this. Being beaten, being arrested, being stressed, being chased, afraid, unable to sleep.” His voice was phlegmy, hoarse. “Maybe you didn’t eat enough shit in the military, but I did. I want adventures, not punishment. I don’t see how you can enjoy this.”

  I said nothing for several minutes, then, “Ofer, this is what I came for.”

  I pushed out of the sleeping bag and walked across the soil to a tree stump. Ofer and I had joked for years that we could read each other’s minds. It was with him alone that I’d considered sharing my life in Africa. And what I saw as a horizon and a challenge was for my best friend an angry crazed man trying to do us harm. Ofer continued his criticism of me, calling the trip bullshit, calling me self-absorbed “like in Israel,” blaming me for misleading him through the long buildup of our supposed common dream; his words hurt in a way only a best friend’s could. I didn’t try to convince Ofer he was wrong. But I refused to be forced to measure my dreams against his anger and disappointment. I refused to be made to doubt my path.

  As we packed in silence, I glanced at his face to see if I could do so without crying. “Ofer, you lead,” I said, forcing the words out and pointing. “The river’s probably over there. Narok should be in that direction. We can get to the road by afternoon and find a matatu. You choose the way.”

  Back in Nairobi, I paced the streets alone to avoid thinking. The pavement and buildings were dirty, dusty, blackened. Lepers begged for coins. Matatus blew soot into my face. I made giant circles, walking the blocks near Planet Safari with my head bowed, and I couldn’t help but think of Erez Shtark, another friend who’d died in the army—in a helicopter crash near the Lebanese border.

  A young Kenyan girl approached me on the street and said, “Are you okay?”

  Her face was so soft against the backdrop of the brutal, buzzing capital.

  “Thank you. But you don’t have to worry about me,” I said and walked on.

  “Ofer,” I said the next day at Planet, “we’re still Ofer and Ofir. Let’s have a journey together, a fun journey, and we’ll do the things you want. Three weeks. Then Elad will be here and you can travel with him. And I’ll do what I need to do.”

  Ofer scratched his scruff and smiled for the first time in days. We headed up Moi Avenue to the Chicken Inn, which we’d nicknamed the “Azrieli Center,” after the palatial shopping mall in Tel Aviv. And we ordered chicken and Cokes to cement our fragile truce.

  We turned Kenya into a playground. We outran a brush fire that burned a third of Hell’s Gate, hitchhiked in a Cessna, chased giraffes, skipped from mosque to mosque giving greetings from the Holy Land. But sadness remained, underlying the wonderment and joy of our weeks together. On Lamu island, as we listened to a tape Shahar had made for our trip, melancholy rose to the surface to consume us both. “Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me,” Morrissey sang. “No fault no harm, just another false alarm.” Our brotherhood assumed the dynamic of a failed romance, with Ofer hoping to rediscover our old magic and to continue traveling, while I was closed to it. Until then, I hadn’t realized exactly what I’d chosen by returning to Africa: my journey could be nothing but alone.

  KAKUYA

  The landscape was severe, dissected by mountains and cliffs, a world so broken it seemed a god had taken a slab of stone and smashed it upon the earth. Cutting through the wasteland was a river, the best route I had for going anywhere. I was four days southeast of Narok, hungry, sick, wedged on a tongue of rocks between the river and a cliff so high I couldn’t see the top. The scattered Maasai settlements I’d found could barely feed themselves. Rainwater had leaked one night through the manure roof of a manyatta and pooled on my cowskin bed, turning my sleeping bag brown. I’d woken with a cough and the reminder of the struggle of genes here to survive.

  I tripped, regained balance, skinning my hand where I skidded on the shale, knocking rocks into the river. I’d fallen into the water that morning, twisted my leg in the very place I’d spotted a crocodile. My boots were still sodden, socks bunched at the toes, my travelers checks a damp mass in the hidden inner pocket my mother had sewn into my pants.

  The land dropped away, and the canyon narrowed as the river tumbled into rapids, swallowing the belt o
f rocks on which I’d walked. I sidled across a shelf in the canyon wall, back to the river, as in a stunt my sister and I might have tried as kids while Dad waited at the flat to inspect our wounds: “That might need a stitch.” My pack was so heavy and wet it seemed to be tugging me backwards off the ledge, as if the land disapproved that I’d brought more than my body. The sun disappeared beyond the canyon’s mouth, and fatigue came in errant footsteps, like a loosening of the muscles of the legs. I shook out my tent and pitched it on a pile of rocks beside a tree. A leopard across the gorge that morning had quelled any urge to sleep naked under the stars.

  I gathered wood that had likely traveled the miles downstream that I had. The logs of my fire fell between the rocks as they burned. I knelt beside the muddy river, its surface level with the tent floor, and I drank from my hands. After a dinner of lukewarm onion soup, a hundred calories of powder and salt, I climbed into the tent, clothed against the dampness of my sleeping bag. A beautiful exhaustion descended as I watched firelight playing on the nylon wall. I lay curled in the rocks like an infant. Spooling in my mind were sentences of a letter Ofer had written: “I’m angry at the entire world, angry for a wasted period with you … angry with you because you gave me up.”

  A wave of thunder filled the silence.

  Not rain. It can’t be rain. After a scorching, cloudless day?

  Thunder boomed through the canyon. I shoved away the sleeping bag, seized the rain fly, and scampered out, the wind suddenly whipping, the glowing, misshapen tent as fragile as paper on the rocks. I shook out the rain fly, which was pitiful in my hands, thinner than a tablecloth. The wind nearly yanked it from me as I clipped one of its corners to the tent. The belly of the blackness ripped open, and the storm plummeted into the canyon, pouring down my back, dousing the fire, filling the air with the stench of wet ash. The rain fly snapped in the wind, and I pawed for it in the dark, grabbing a loose corner and lunging through the unzipped door. Lightning flashed as I wrapped the fly around the tent and around my head like a shawl.