The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  The taste of the lake became so sweet and fresh that I closed my eyes to drink. I took one step and then a thousand more. My legs moved on their own until I no longer noticed I was moving. The landscape passed through me as I passed through it. For as many days as I could walk, there was land. If I’d started my journey with the aim of getting away from the civilization I knew, here there was nothing to get away from. Whether I moved one kilometer in a day or fifty was irrelevant.

  In the emptiness I began to hear my voice, as stars shone clearly over a town that had been stripped of its lights. My voice was not louder but unmuffled, uninterrupted—for days—and listening to myself was as reassuring as being sung to in a language I was beginning to understand.

  I found I was looking back on my life, on all the choices I’d made. The mistakes and anger and lost chances were like knots unraveling. I understood the conflicts with my sister Mor, who because of the attention I got had been doomed to follow and had lacked the room she needed to grow. I understood the conflict with Ofer, whose love for me and mine for him were far more dear than any difference in direction; with girlfriends, who I’d needed to love me so I could love myself. With each step I released more angst and insecurity, and I forgave others as I forgave myself. Could I live beyond judgment, full of empathy? Could I live as wisely in foresight as in hindsight and cast off the pettiness and prejudice of the ego?

  I found that I was singing aloud. “Ode to My Family” by the Cranberries and Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” Was this dangerous? To be singing, dancing, laughing as I walked? Could there be a tribe of one? Or was I delusional, narcissistic?

  I reached Lolelia, a fishermen’s camp, four days after a man said I would arrive in two hours. Beyond the camp, pebbles onshore were so beautiful that I stopped and stared as if looking at gold or some rare mineral no one was around to claim. I thought of the field near my flat in Tel Aviv where in childhood I regularly found creatures I’d never seen: a centipede, a mole, a butterfly with red wings. One afternoon in high school, bulldozers flattened the field, scraped it to the dirt. Men planted Japanese trees in uniform rows, saplings with purple flowers and painted, white trunks. A steamroller packed down the earth so hard around the trees that nothing else grew. I never passed that way again but took the long way around, by road.

  I knelt onshore and reached for a glittering stone. Was it possible to travel beyond the wreckage of the world and bring back fragments that did remain? Could I search for and return with old seeds?

  I fumbled over my shoulder into the top pouch of my backpack and removed my diary. I leaned against a rock, using the pack as a cushion. The cover of the fifty-two-shilling notebook was as soft and worn as old hide, its inner staples rusted. I flipped through stories I’d written from street children in Nairobi, notes on aperture settings for photographs of moonlight and lanterns, plans for an adventure in DRC, thoughts before the journey: “… Whatever happens, I’m writing it all.” I flipped to a Samburu legend about a woman who cut the rope that connected earth to god, to names and stories of dozens of friends like Celine Jot Achai who’d said, “The best moment of my life was when I got a letter that said I was accepted to school.” I reached the description of a naked Turkana boatman I’d thought might strike me with his paddle and of a warrior who hesitated to take a balloon I’d blown. When the wind lifted the balloon from his hand and the balloon hovered at his nose, he ran off and did not return.

  I put the notebook away. Just as quickly I grabbed it again, drew a line and wrote a kind of letter to my family: “When I first arrived here my life began—a different way of life. Everything is more intense—sorrow, joy, fear, excitement. But this is the only way I can live. I accept the risk. If I’m no longer with you—I have lived a beautiful life and have been fortunate to have fulfilled a dream. The life of a man is not measured by time but by action. I have touched, seen and experienced enough for a full and satisfying life. Lots of love to everyone. Me.

  “I want you to try … to do something with all the images I’ve captured and the experiences I’ve written down in this book. At my funeral I want played at full volume, ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ by Pink Floyd. I’m sure I’ll enjoy it. I want to leave you only happiness and joy. Thanks, Ofir.”

  Where the cliffs ended, rocks on the lakeshore yielded to sand. I wandered into the first Turkana village that was not just a camp and I received no welcome. Huts sat on the ground like giant woven baskets. The place, nearly lifeless but filled with people, seemed like an accumulation of all the individuals I’d passed in the shattered settlements, the dourness clashing with my elation from the prior days. I reached a second village similar to the first where fights broke out, even among girls, who shouted, grappled, threw fists. And I left the next morning as soon as there was enough light to see, frightened by the force that had undone the tribe.

  At a kiosk in Eliye Springs stood a man who wore a shirt bearing the face of President Moi, the sole sign there was any government at all for this forgotten place. Days later, when malaria pushed my temperature to forty degrees, I lay on the sand in underwear, and villagers poured buckets of lake water over my shivering body. We waited out the day’s heat, and they took me back in the moonlight for medicine to Kalokol, a town I’d tried to avoid where a paved road reached nearly to the lake like a hand. I drank from the second water tap I’d seen in two months. And I met a fisherman named Frederick who said, “My big brother went to look for a job in the far town and it’s fifteen years and we didn’t hear from him.” I continued north, crossing cracked riverbeds that broke under my toes with a dryness of decades, riverbeds the rains seemed no longer to have use for.

  Two days from the Ethiopian border, I reached Nachukui, a village connected to the others by a sandy track. An escort of excited villagers welcomed me with a warmth I’d felt only once in Turkana, with Elizabeth. The caravan ushered me to the straw house of the chief, and people shouted with excitement when I spoke a few Turkana words. They said, “You must meet Father Albert later. You must meet him.” Two young women rushed through the door of the chief’s hut and with handmade brooms hurriedly cleaned the spotless dirt floor, as if dirt could be cleaned.

  A woman entered in a colorful dress she might have worn for a stroll in Nairobi. “You are welcome in our village,” she said in English.

  “Thank you. Are you the wife of the chief?”

  She smiled. “I am the chief.”

  Words tripped over my lips as I bumbled through an apology.

  She smiled, took no offense. Her name was Esther Apedetamana and she wore her pride in her shoulders. She walked me back across the sand to my own round hut, which had a thatched head of shaggy hair. Esther had won the election over seven others, some of whom had resisted the authority of a female chief. “It was difficult,” she said. “Those who disrespected me—the police came and took them away.”

  Through the afternoon, men and women of Nachukui came to Esther with problems and disputes. She sat back and listened and consulted the elders and offered advice full of compassion. A girl came carrying Esther’s two-week-old son, and she breastfed between visitors. Esther told me, “Tradition keeps a lot of young girls from going to school. I’m explaining to girls now there’s no point in a life of only getting water and taking care of goats. Now they know a woman can be a chief, a doctor, anything.”

  After all the broken communities, I wondered what here had held people together.

  My third day in Nachukui, Esther said, “I’ll name my son Writer Ofir.”

  I walked with Esther and her cradled newborn through the village on Sunday. The sound of drumming rumbled out a church that rose from the sand like a warehouse—concrete walls, a zinc roof. From the doorway, the scene inside was a frenzy of motion. Women in colorful dresses danced wildly in the aisles, their bracelets clanging. Shoeless Turkana grandmothers jumped by the altar, spread their arms and legs in midair, ululated and swung around as they jumped to land each time facing someone new,
the energy infectious enough to make anyone a disciple for a day. Dancing in the middle of the mamas, obscured by flying arms, was a white man with curly blond hair. He jumped as crazily as the Turkana while laughing and spinning in a white gown.

  A robed Turkana signaled to the drummers to stop. Father Albert walked to the pulpit, draped a purple velvet sash around his neck and began a sermon in effortless Turkana.

  Then he noticed me.

  Father Albert moved through the aisle as he spoke to the congregation of fifty or sixty people, and in his words I found the names Sarah, Abraham, and Israel. He paused his sermon to stick out his tongue at two boys who were chatting, and the congregation laughed. From the altar, without changing his tone, he said in English, “I see we have a guest here.” All heads turned toward me, the people smiling as though they’d been waiting to be introduced. “You are welcome in our community,” he said. “From how far away did you manage to find us?”

  I stood so I could be seen and I described my trip and then spoke of the River Jordan and the Sea of Galilee, hoping the stories would color his sermon. As Father Albert translated my words into Turkana, I realized how special was our communal conversation, the way he and everyone got to know me all at once, blurring the distinction between public and private. When the service ended, I walked outside to find that my backpack had been brought from my hut and placed in the bed of Albert’s pickup.

  Father Albert leaned back on the rear legs of a chair and propped his feet on a table in his house. A guitar sat against the wall. Warm light shone through the window. He struck a match and lit a cigarette.

  “Jesus was the biggest hippie of all,” he said through a cloud of smoke while looking at the match. “My friends and I used to be a group of hippies. Long hair, girls, music, drugs. We left Spain and rambled in Europe. I wasn’t even eighteen. We were influenced by the sixties, idealistic, searching for something new, writing songs to change the world. It was great fun but we had no direction, and the drugs and girls pushed the ideology aside. Then I met Father Paco.”

  Albert had blue eyes and the look of an aging rock star.

  “Most of the guys didn’t want to hear about Christianity or even see old people. They gave him a hard time. But Father Paco was persistent. He kept on talking about what we might do with our ideals and in the end he got our attention. The old guy managed to convince many of us to follow him, then placed us in different spots. And we’re all still hippies, Catholic Fathers around the world.”

  Father Albert and I talked into the night and drove the next morning through the village. Everywhere, people waved and rushed to the pickup, chatted with him in Turkana. When we happened upon two arguing men, Father Albert stepped down from the truck and crushed out his cigarette on the door. He listened to each man argue his case and then spoke like a kind of roving judge. We drove on, delivered building materials to a site where fifteen men were wielding hoes and shovels. I grabbed a bag of concrete from the pickup and handed it to a Ugandan, a teenager like half a dozen others who’d come to Father Albert from missions all over Africa. Father Albert had an abundance of projects in Nachukui—a school and water wells—and he paid a day’s labor sometimes with bags of wheat and ugali powder.

  “I can’t let them become dependent on me,” he said. “We need to get them back to fishing. They need nets big enough so they can fish together.”

  In the evenings at his mission, Father Albert led discussions and showed films, like Bird on a Wire, and he didn’t hide the sex. He seemed eager to expose the Turkana to more than Christianity, and he encouraged the teenagers to talk to me. He said, “Ofir is different from you. Ask him questions.”

  “Where do you pray?” said the Ugandan.

  Hesitant to answer, I looked at Father Albert. “I don’t. I don’t pray.”

  Father Albert nodded, letting me know it was all right, then two girls asked why I didn’t pray.

  “I don’t believe in God.”

  “So what do you believe in if you don’t believe in God?” the Ugandan said.

  “Well, many things. Values, I—values I find, that I believe in, maybe even some values that I have in common with you, but without—”

  “So,” the Ugandan said, interrupting me, “if you think you have found something else, something good, why are you selfish in hiding it from others?”

  I asked to borrow Father Albert’s guitar one night and I went down to the lake to think. That I’d met him at the end of my journey in Turkana made it feel like fate—when he had so much to teach and was helping a community to thrive. I envied him. In all the years since my first trip to Kenya, I’d focused on building myself, while Father Albert seemed to have done that by building the lives of others. He made me feel small.

  Later, smoking a cigarette, Father Albert came to sit beside me because he knew I had things I needed to share. I said, “I wish I could stay here and do what you are doing. I want to stay but, you know, I don’t believe in God.”

  He ran a hand through his long blond hair and blew cigarette smoke toward the heavens. “A river must have its source, Ofir. You can’t have a piece of river.”

  The back of the pickup filled with children as we bumped and skidded over rock and sand. Father Albert cut the engine, pulled off his sunglasses and crushed his cigarette on his shoe sole. He climbed onto a boulder perched over a small pool in the rocks beside the lake, stripped, and dove headfirst. Children pulled off their clothes and followed him in.

  “Before I met Father Paco,” Albert told me, “I was digging in the earth, digging and digging in different places. But they were just barren holes. Father Paco came and showed me a new way. He said, ‘Find a place where you can dig and a tree can grow.’”

  1999

  The Search Upset

  KENYA, NIGERIA, UGANDA

  Kenya

  KISSES AND THE SPOILS OF ACTIVISM

  “Azaria, it’s our son!” Mom called out. “It’s Ofiri! It’s Ofiri! Azaria!”

  “Mom, listen.”

  “It’s Ofiri! Azaria! It’s Ofiri! Wow! Wow!”

  She was screaming so loud, I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

  “Mom, I just got to Nairobi and came straight to call you.”

  “Are you safe?” Dad said. “Is everything okay? You’re not sick?”

  “Yes. Would you listen?”

  My parents wrestled over the phone, and I described the long days beside the lake and how I’d found so much within me that was new, and as I tried to explain everything at once the stories crashed into each other and the Hebrew stuck in my mouth.

  “What were you eating?” Mom said. “We didn’t understand from the postcard.”

  “Did you hear anything I was saying, Mom? Who cares what I was eating!”

  I leaned back against the inside of the flimsy booth. Through a hole in my pants I could see my entire lower leg. “I’ll call later,” I said. “I love you.”

  When I looked up I found a petite woman in a round hat watching me through the booth’s window. She had dark eyes, thick eyebrows. When I climbed out into the call center, she stared at me with an intensity that was almost rude.

  “Where are you from?” she said in perfect Hebrew and then smiled.

  “How did you know I’m Israeli?” That I was felt almost irrelevant.

  “Maybe, sweetheart, because you were just shouting at your mother in Hebrew?”

  “So what are you doing? How long have you been in Kenya?”

  She fiddled with the hat string tied below her chin. “Not long. Four days.”

  “You won’t believe how beautiful Kenya is.”

  “I didn’t really come to travel here,” she said. “I’m going to Kinshasa, to DRC.”

  For a second I thought Ofer might be around the corner telling her what to say. A cute, dark-eyed girl in a funny hat wearing zip-away safari pants and heading for a warzone. Her name was Rachel. If she’d come to Africa for an adventure, she deserved one. “Come with me,” I said.
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br />   A week earlier, I bid goodbye to Father Albert and spent the last of my money on a bus ticket to Lokichokio, an aid camp on the Kenyan-Sudanese border; Father Albert had energized me to take my journey in a new direction, and at the Lodwar bus station I joined a group of nomads from another war-torn world. The three dozen passengers who boarded with bags and suitcases were Sudanese refugees. After short furloughs to search for loved ones and apply for asylum, many having visited Nairobi, they were returning to the camp.

  The bus stopped not long after leaving Lodwar. People craned their necks to look through the windshield and then began to murmur. Standing in front of the bus was a man wearing Kenyan army pants.

  “Everyone out!” he said in English, waving an AK-47. “Bring your bags.”

  I climbed down to the road in my shredded clothes.

  “Line there! Backs to the bus, bags in front!”

  Policemen worked the line. An officer stopped in front of a middle-aged man with tribal markings on his forehead. “What did you have to look for in Kenya?” the officer said. “Show me your papers!” Two men and their commander approached a woman. “Are you trying to hide something? Get the clothes out of your bag! Open it. You think this is Sudan?” The commander stopped in front of me. “Are you playing with us?” he said. “Give me your passport.” And then to the soldiers, “Search him.” He flashed a smile and said, “Ahh, you’re from Israel. Welcome.” Then he added to his men in Swahili, “These are the people who killed Jesus. Search everything well.”

  My underwear, notebooks, and cooking pots flew from my bag in the hands of the soldiers with the exaggeration of theater. After they moved on, I shook the dirt out of my sleeping bag and gathered my things. As our bus pulled away, nearly everyone sighed.

  “Ahh, they’re evil!” said one man. “Kenyan police are hyenas.”