Tizita Read online

  Again, she made intermittent little grunt sounds. The bottom of my right foot began to itch horribly, but it didn’t seem right to ask to stop so I could remove my shoe and scratch it. By some miracle, the sensation disappeared several minutes later and I was free to stop pinching my thigh. Just inches above my head, two gorgeous dark brown butterflies swept by, displaying uneven white circles on their wings. The air was thick here, as if with the exhalations of hundreds of hidden creatures. We walked long enough that I began to lose faith that we’d find Lord Hanuman, though I knew I’d never regret coming here. I was mesmerized by a symphony of pant-hoots, grinding cicadas, the bubbling calls of cuckoos, and what I speculated might be the crunch of bushpigs trampling dry leaves. I had to duck my head with some frequency to avoid long clusters of grape-like fruits suspended from eight-foot tall, scrubby trees and nearly got caught a few times by treacherous nooses of leafy vines. I could only imagine what sort of spiders and snakes lived in this dense wood. Adrenaline surged through my body with an enlivening blend of fascination, curiosity, and fear. I decided that—alongside mini-explosions, petting Jillily, and my discovery that dark and light matter are continually exchanged in the cells of the human body—this wild land was a Grade A void filler.

  Suddenly Serena stopped. Amir and I looked around, but saw nothing. We traded a confused glance. Then Serena meaningfully cupped her ear. Listening more intently now, I detected a rustling in the brush and an echoing response to her grunts from somewhere to our left. Pant, pant, pant, grunt.

  This chimp was smaller than the first, and I had to restrain myself from running in the other direction as he wildly flung himself out from behind a stand of vine-entwined trees like a Halloween goblin. Seeing Amir and me standing hesitantly behind Serena, he halted and beheld us with a comical tilt of his head. Then something came over his face that spoke simultaneously of joy and grief. Before we knew it—forget the ritual of bowing and patting—he was all over Amir, vocalizing like the poop-flinging maniac we’d known so long ago. Hanuman gripped his old friend in an exuberant series of hugs and screeches, soft punches and lippy kisses. Tears were streaming down Amir’s face, and I was so overcome I had to look away. But then I sensed a panting at my ear, and soon enough Lord Hanuman was patting the top of my head. I let him hug me tightly, nuzzling my neck, and I felt every bone in my body relax. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised he’d remembered me. He had, after all, groomed my scalp innumerable times back in the day, despite his bouts of jealousy when I diverted Amir’s attention by talking too much about the space-time continuum and emergent five-dimensional black holes.

  There wasn’t much danger of that now. Soon enough it became apparent that Lord Hanuman would attempt to remedy his previous loss of Amir by sticking to him like Velcro. It reminded me of what Assefa had once described to me during his psych rotation as an anxious attachment.

  From that moment forward, Lord Hanuman and Amir communed in the bush, communed in Amir’s tent, and communed everywhere else. Amir reported that Lord Hanuman actually waited beside the outhouse in the middle of the night until Amir emerged from having his pee. As the days wore on, I think we all started to dread the moment Amir would need to leave. And Amir worried constantly over how Lord Hanuman would cope with his loss a second time around.

  I was contending with preoccupations of my own. Despite insisting to myself that I was over Assefa, I wondered how he was getting along in Manhattan, whether his new digs were to his liking, and—especially—what his new roommates were like. Did he ever think of me? I had to confess I hoped so. I really didn’t want to be with him, but missed the ecstatic feeling of being in love with him and the glorious confidence—unwarranted, as it turned out—that he was in love with me and me alone.

  I expressed some of this to Serena on the third day, right after she informed me that Jane Goodall had been forced to postpone her visit to Gombe, having been invited to participate in an urgent symposium on the worldwide threat posed by Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. I was terribly disappointed at first, but now—sitting side-by-side with Serena on a pair of conveniently flat, reddish-brown rocks facing the lake, while a few hundred yards away a young water-slicked otter navigated onto the shore to sun himself on the narrow, lightly-pebbled beach—I found myself relishing the extra time with her. The two of us had enjoyed a long hike that morning, stopping to observe small groups of chimps climbing amid croppings of low trees and vines, happily feasting on the little grapelike fruits of what I’d learned were called lamb’s tail trees. Later, we’d come upon a clearing where a large group of lip-smacking olive baboons, including several nursing mothers, barely bothered issuing a few nervous cough-barks as they ensured we were actually detouring around them. With their doggish faces, broken-looking tails, and rings of yellow-brown and black hairs on their backs, I found them impressive creatures, and said as much to Serena, as we sat hugging ourselves for warmth, a cool wind suddenly coming off the lake to riffle our hair.

  “They are pretty regal,” she replied, bending over to pick out a small stone and then weighing it in her hand before standing to fling it across the lake, where it bounced elegantly on the water three times before sinking. “It’s no accident they’re also known as Anubis baboons.”

  “As in the Egyptian god of the dead?”

  “The very same.”

  “I think I need his services now.”

  Serena turned to inspect my face as if it were that of a stranger’s. “Whatever for? Assefa is alive, Fleur.”

  I picked up a stone in an attempt to mimic what Serena had just done. It flipped clumsily onto the beach just a few feet away. We both laughed.

  But I sobered quickly enough. “He is, but I guess my selfishness is so severe that I’ve already moved on to me.” My voice caught a little. “I have to say I feel a little dead inside. I really don’t think I’ll ever love anyone—ever trust anyone—again.”

  “Dear girl, you mustn’t think in such absolutes. It is a quality of the young that is best outgrown sooner rather than later. I’m sure you have people in your life whose affection has proven to be steady.”

  I thought long and hard about it. There was Mother, of course, but I wasn’t sure mothers counted. Sammie claimed it was because mothering was an archetype, but I’m sure Jane Goodall would have more simply summarized it as instinct, ensuring the survival of the species.

  Sammie I felt sure of, but I myself had been at times a seriously faithless friend to her. Stanley had been solid, but what he’d said to Assefa had rocked my sense of him and made me wonder what might someday pop out of his mouth at me. Really, was it that I couldn’t trust others or that I set everyone an impossibly high bar?

  I turned to Serena. “Who do you trust?”

  She looked surprised. “Me?” She squinched up her eyes. “Well, let’s see. My mother and father were terrific people and were unhesitating in their support of their only child’s unorthodox wish to leave comfortable Cirencester for the African wilds. Jane, certainly—she’s like the sister I never had. Chimps. They aren’t saint-like. Or non-violent.” Serena nodded several times, as if in remembrance. “We learned that in the seventies, during the Four Year War.”

  That sounded ominous. “What was that?”

  “Well, starting in nineteen seventy-four, the main group we were studying, the Kasekela community, conducted a series of bloody raids against a smaller group. The Kasekela literally annihilated the Kahama sub-group in order to annex its territory. I’m afraid that over the years we’ve learned it was hardly an oddity. The ancestral roots,” she commented dryly, “of genocide.” Seeing the horror on my face, she added, “But they are exactly who they are, the chimps. No dissemination. No beating around the bush.” She laughed. “No pun intended. There’s something about the honesty of animals that I find very comforting. But still, I have to say that I trust, ultimately, the human race. Despite all the danger we pose to our planet, I see such tremendous goodness in people every day. It’s an
advantage of living here at Gombe.”

  I mulled that one over. I knew that Serena was a central figure in Jane Goodall’s campaign against bushmeat. I’d cringed when she’d explained to me that people pay a small fortune to eat more great apes every year than currently inhabit all the zoos and labs of the world. How could she trust our species?

  Serena put a hand on my arm. “I know what you’re thinking. But during my interview all those years ago with Jane, when I was a dewy-eyed Cambridge post-doc, she admonished me not to expect any creature to behave better than I do in my worst fantasies. She emphasized that reality is far more cruel than we’d like, but if we accept it, we have a much better shot at meeting it with intelligence and compassion. Her words have stood me in good stead for over thirty years. Even,” Serena gave a wry grin, “when the two of us have fought like a couple of she devils over administrative details.”

  We both fell silent now. I heard the whoo-whoo-whee of a Black Cuckoo, and then a flash of something moving across the beach caught my eye. I squinted and focused in time to see an otter slither back into the water toward a waiting raft of them before they swam away. The lake glistened in the waning sun, and a sudden drop in temperature sprouted gooseflesh across my arms. “I always wanted a sister,” I murmured.

  “Pretty typical for an only child. One thing I’ve learned from the people of Gombe—we are truly one family. In this community, even when a man leaves one woman for another, hurt and all, the two women stay friends. If anything, they even become closer.” She grinned. “The way they tell it, nothing brings women together better than complaining about the foibles of their men. And if it’s the same man, well then, all the better.” She hesitated. “Don’t you want to meet her?”

  Startled, I echoed her words a bit loudly. “Meet her? Meet who?”

  “Oh, please. You know who I mean. Makeda. Meet the one at the other end of Assefa’s wobbling scales. Wouldn’t you just love to see what she’s like?” I couldn’t believe Serena was stirring that particular pot. She went on, “Ethiopia is only a couple of hours away from here by air, you know.”

  Hastily pushing up from my rock to stand and dust off my hiking pants, I told her I couldn’t possibly consider it.

  The following morning, Amir delivered his big news. We were sitting on Serena’s covered porch, a sudden rain clattering vigorously against the tin roof. It was evidently odd that it hadn’t poured until now. Serena commented with a frown that the rainy season at Gombe generally lasted until April, but they’d had an exceptionally dry winter.

  “The same with us,” I replied bleakly. “We’ve been having a heat wave since last Christmas. But God forbid we mention climate change.”

  Serena, Amir, and I were taking advantage of the torrent to linger over our late breakfast of creamy sorghum porridge topped with yogurt and sugar, fried plantains, and generous chunks of sweet potato. Amir kept pausing to slice pieces of ripe banana for Lord Hanuman, and at first I thought he was speaking to the chimp, so he had to repeat himself. “I’m not coming back with you, Fleur. Not right now, anyway. I can’t leave him.” He allowed the happy chimp to touch lips with him and grabbed him in a tickly hug. Wresting free, Lord Hanuman sneakily snatched the rest of the banana and ran across the porch with it, victoriously holding it over his head with a grunty chimp laugh. Amir grinned at him, calling him his favorite nickname for him, “You little barstard,” before turning back to us with an earnest, “Truthfully, it’s not just Lord H. I can’t leave this place.” He paused. “You know I’ll return in a heartbeat once Congress gives us the go ahead.”

  I pretended to be shocked, but I’d discovered the pull of this place myself. I’d been giving little prayers of thanks that Stanley had encouraged me to come. Here in Gombe, it was as if a brokenness in me was beginning to heal, as if the tightly coiled energy in my cells was loosening, light matter replacing its dark counterpart. How could I quarrel with Amir’s decision to linger at Gombe, when I could imagine myself growing fat on maandazi and the spinach and peanut curry called mchicha, and growing happy among these knuckle-walking chimps, who were incessantly goofing around, grooming, and climbing vitex trees with nonchalant alacrity to feast themselves on their favorite purple-black berries.

  The volunteers here comprised a real community. At home, I had my physics team, joined in a common purpose to transform transportation on this planet by manipulating the cellular black holes I’d discovered at fourteen. Given my admittedly rotten managerial skills—I was, after all, only twenty-one now and most of my team nearly a decade older—I’d relied on Stanley to keep us united during this endless political impasse. But Stanley was hardly a miracle worker. We were a socially diverse bunch—Amir with his fixations on soccer and Bollywood dancing, Tom and Katrina with their glued-at-the-hip obsession with each other, Bob with his passion for the ocean, Gunther moping at home most of the time, and Adam 2,983 miles away (but who was counting?). We differed on what to do while Congress twiddled their bigoted thumbs, and we differed on how we liked to spend our now over-abundant spare time.

  But here at Gombe, and despite their obviously self-reliant natures, volunteers and staff gathered together every evening for shared dinners of fish stew, manioc, pumpkin, various masalas and spicy rice dishes—often enjoyed with the gin-like Konyaki or Burundi’s finest Primus beer. Jane herself was a vegetarian, so there was always a fine assortment of beans and greens, producing the inevitable flatulence that everyone good-naturedly ribbed each other about. I loved that the ones who didn’t cook automatically cleared up. Everyone competed at telling the funniest or most original or even the most heartbreaking stories of the day’s observations and mishaps, but underneath all the crowing and teasing, this was a tribe rooted in a mutual love of animals and a reverence for the beauty and wellbeing of our planet.

  In the five days we’d been here, Serena—besides listening to my moaning about Assefa and Makeda and my broken heart—had taken me on a grand tour of the reserve’s twenty or so mud and cement buildings. The rest of the group was just as generous with their time. Fred Tambliss, who hailed, he told me, from Baltimore, took me deep enough into the thick forest beyond the beach to see the famous Sparrow, Gremlin, Samwise, and Siri, along with a host of other chimp family groups grooming and nursing and foraging. His video camera forever at the ready to document the displays and distances of some of the hundred or so chimps of Gombe, Fred was kind enough to avert his aim from me as I clumsily struggled to climb over fallen branches, slipping and sliding on the wet leaves now that the daily rains had finally come.

  Nikka introduced me to the hills above Kahama, where the chimps took delight in tossing orangey-red Mshashai berries into their wide mouths like popcorn. Nikka was the one who gave me a peek at the infamous Frodo, who she swore had calmed considerably since the day he’d killed a human baby in 2002. Needless to say, I preferred to give him a very wide berth and was glad to come back down to the grassy valley. Much more pleasurable were my swims in the soft waves of Lake Tanganyika with Nikka and her two best pals Audrey and Lilia, both of them potty-mouthed girls from Australia who spoke with surprising tenderness of pulling on yellow latex gloves and using plastic scoops to transfer the thick olive dung of chimps suspected of carrying SIV into specimen tubes, hoping against hope that their favorites wouldn’t come back positive, which would make them vulnerable to all sorts of autoimmune disorders.

  It was actually Audrey who’d pointed out to me my first Livingston’s Turaco, a gloriously iridescent green bird hiding in the wide canopy of a tree, its almost pointy comb reminding me of Bob in his hair product days, though its reddish beak and red eye markings were more like Mother’s Chanel Infrarouge lipstick.

  Perhaps my favorite of the young women was a very bright undergrad from Harvard, who told me she’d carried a placard next to Adam at the March Against Monsanto in Boston the previous year. Her name was Desoto Delumbre. She’d been born the oldest child in a large Spanish family, had studied at Harvard, and was here to
do volunteer teaching at the one-room schoolhouse in the next village, accompanying the children of Gombe there by boat each morning, where she was learning enough Swahili to help their overtaxed primary teacher. She’d actually invited me to join her one day. Though I’m typically a bit wary with children in groups, I had to admit these kids were adorable, and I laughed myself silly watching them play an African version of Duck, Duck, Goose after their lessons. I helped Desoto cook the children’s lunch, a giant batch of porridge, on a charcoal stove outside the schoolhouse, and with aching arms I swore to myself I’d bring Dhani some sort of gift when I got home again to thank her for all those huge and hugely complicated Indian dishes she’d made in bulk for our family over the years.

  It was on the boat trip back that Desoto confided in me about her conversation with Adam on the march. “I happened to mention that I’d first gotten interested in anthropology when I was a middle school student in the Independent Honors Program at Reed.”

  I turned to her excitedly. “You’re joking.”

  She smiled shyly. “I’m not. Actually, that’s exactly what Adam said. When he asked me if I knew you, I told him I didn’t, but I’d seen you play Jennyanydots in the school play and thought you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen.” I felt my cheeks go hot. She gave me a surprisingly penetrating look. “He couldn’t stop talking about you. I assumed he was your boyfriend?”

  I knew the latter was a question, rather than a comment, and I responded with a hearty, “No. Never.” But now I felt a stab of guilt that I hadn’t made contact with him once we’d safely arrived here. But surely he would have contacted Stanley, with whom I had, albeit grudgingly. I’d felt a certain reluctance to connect with anyone back home since we’d boarded our first plane.