by Ofir Drori
Lightning crashed. The sky darkened. And the arms of the storms merged. As lightning flashed again and again, I let go of rationalizing—that storms were inevitable over a high peak on the plains, that the existence of the Womo for the Achipawa was a survival mechanism. A few raindrops fell and then a billion. I wrapped my camera in my shirt, rescued a lens that fell to the ground. Timothy and I sprinted downhill as lightning ripped across the sky in sequence, a series of explosions. Bolts flashed one after the other, illuminating the view in front of us as we dashed toward a hut, the power of the storm echoing the power of their surviving. At that moment I couldn’t say that the Womo hadn’t brought the storm. And the singing of the Achipawa back in the caldera grew louder, loud enough, I understood, to hold back the great foe, modernity.
Timothy left his field, his family, and his church to lead me for two and a half weeks through the land of the Achipawa. Except for friendship, there was little I could give him in return. Of course he asked for nothing. In the man was a goodness as rare as anything I’d ever experienced. On the day I came to say good-bye, Timothy said, “If I have done something wrong to you and I know it, please, I’m sorry. If I have done something wrong to you, not knowing, please, I’m sorry.”
FEBRUARY 2002
Israel
THE COMPROMISE
Half of winter blew through the door as I stepped into the one-room flat in Tel Aviv that I shared with Rachel. It was hardly warmer inside than out, with cold air seeping in around the windows. I blew my nose and got another taste of the gourds my students had cut apart in class. Just one man in Israel, it seemed, grew gourds like those I knew from Africa. I’d piled them into Dad’s car, dried them, and my students sawed them in half, releasing powdery spirits from the hollow fruits until we were sneezing and coated in dust. The students cleaned the gourds, added back the seeds and sealed the halves with hot glue. Then shook their rattles to Fela’s song, “Yellow Fever,” and learned it was a protest against Nigerian women bleaching their skin to look like white people.
I was teaching about tolerance. With the peace process collapsed, Israel needed the tolerance of men like Mukhtar more than ever. Instead of relying on dry classroom discussion, I aimed to nurture tolerance in my students by building their curiosity, hoping through direct experience they would learn to love and embrace what was different. We played bao and the Ethiopian game tim-tim and cooked ugali and looked at photographs of the Maasai bride to examine the choice of values. We made beaded Maasai necklaces. A people could be loved infinitely more by cooking their food and hearing the sound of their words from your lips.
West Africa had aged me. I’d returned to Israel in early 2001, longing for something protected, something safe. Parked in my father’s car outside the dorms of The Hebrew University, I told Rachel I was ready to build a life with her. In Israel.
“I swore I’d never get back together with you,” she said.
“Rach, just being with you anywhere, at the drycleaners, in the car—feels like home. It’s taken me a long time to understand you’re the most important part of my life.”
“But what happens when you need to go back to Africa?”
“No. I just need to visit for a month or two a year, but my home will be here with you.”
She looked at me with her dark watery eyes. In the awkward silence, Rachel and I couldn’t resist each other. We reached over the gearshift and sealed the compromise with a kiss.
In our dilapidated one-room flat, I showered to wash the rancid gourd dust from my face. Rachel was late getting home; she worked for an Israeli security company. I walked naked until I began to shiver, then dressed, added a coat, Rachel’s fleece, a blanket. I loathed winter. I paced back and forth between small windows on either end of the flat, windows, like gutters and poles I could climb down, now linked to Foday Sankoh and the half-traumatized need for escape routes.
I chose the schools at which I taught and set out to create an army of young activists. I had students write letters to the embassy of Ivory Coast to protest cacao farms that enslaved children. We discussed Jane Goodall’s prediction that gorillas and chimpanzees would soon disappear from the wild, an impending tragedy that echoed the slow death of natural lands, the extinction of cultures, and the tenuousness that allowed the Achipawa to exist at all. I taught at Teva, where I’d gone as a boy, and lectured at Tel Aviv University. I spoke about child soldiers for Amnesty International, telling Archie’s story. Teaching three days a week left long stretches of time for Rachel. We camped out and tubed down the River Jordan and ate breakfast once a week with my parents at their flat nearby. We spent evenings sometimes with Ofer, who worked for a cell phone company. Rachel and I shared many tender and beautiful days mixed with days of frustration.
I knelt in the apartment before the refrigerator. Time in the bush had made refrigerators forever like boxes of jewels. I gulped a cold Coke. Paced the room. Looked out the window at a view blocked by the roof of another apartment. I aimlessly opened the refrigerator again. I thought, Where in this life, in the well-constructed days, was the risk of being broken open? A memory uncurled, of a viper Mor and I had caught as kids and kept in an aquarium. We’d put our noses to the glass, causing the viper to fill her lungs and strike. Mor and I had held the viper’s head down and petted her back day after day until she became docile. She stopped striking. And one morning we put a rat into the aquarium for her to eat, and the rat started gnawing on her back, feeding on the snake. The viper didn’t move. So Mor and I let her go in the field.
Back at Planet Safari, not long after leaving the Achipawa, I was playing guitar in the closed office in which Paul Muangi slept. A beautiful young German woman walked in, shut the door, and watched me play. A few minutes later a man entered, looked at the woman, then at me and figured I was trying to serenade his girl—when I just wanted to be left alone. With my path out of the room blocked, I asked the guy why he’d come to Africa.
“To write a book.”
“Nonfiction?”
“Fiction.”
“I don’t know why you’d write fiction. I’d just write my adventures the way they happened.”
He cocked his head, thinking I was either a fool or full of myself. “Adventures?”
His name was David McDannald. Within five minutes, it was clear he was long past ready to ship the girl back to Germany and didn’t care at all whether I’d been wooing her. David had left a job in New York with Goldman Sachs to live in a trailer on a West Texas ranch. He was a veteran traveler and had come to Africa on a one-way ticket. Our first conversation spanned six hours, and by the end of it we were friends.
David and I understood each other’s quests and frustrations so well that I could tell him things I could not tell Ofer and Elad. After I moved in with Rachel, I wrote to him and revealed feelings I was barely able to admit to myself. December 20, 2001, I wrote, “Hey, Daudi, I really really miss you, man. I haven’t opened my email for ages. I was stressed because of problems with Rach, growing bored of teaching and lecturing and feeling that I don’t have the same vision for the book on children’s games [and children’s interviews that I’d actually begun to work on in earnest], like I don’t have the same belief in its success. I’m stressed simply because I’m not in Africa.” There was magic in what Rachel and I did together, in what we did for each other. I wrote later to David, “As for Rachel, I don’t want to talk about it right now but I don’t think it will work. Soon Africa will do its job of dividing me from the people I love and everything will be fine.”
“You call yourself a writer?” David wrote back. “You write the same story again and again and pretend when you start you don’t know the ending! Something important has kept you in Israel. Hide from it and it will plague you when you’re back in the bush. As for me, I’m pretty well plagued. Half a year in New York and I’m already thinking of breaking my lease and flying to Ghana.”
The prospect that I might leave again for Africa hung over Rachel and me like a s
word. Or I hung it over Rachel like a sword. A quick trip I’d made to East and Southern Africa to compile more children’s games had not slaked my need to be there. Some days, I thought of taking Rachel back with me. She labored to make me happy, asked again and again about my writing, encouraged me to take my camera everywhere, to photograph the ocean at night. My problems, my frustration over leaving my own path—the death of the urge—became our problems. Rachel and I fought, but she was incapable of becoming angry with me and instead grew to believe that she’d failed, that she couldn’t make me happy, that she couldn’t rescue me from our old vow always to be angry at places like Tel Aviv. She finally said my problems were “unsolvable” and she closed herself off. I loved her so deeply, though, that the thought of leaving, of actually going, seemed as impossible and painful as tearing off an arm. Talk of marriage had been so common that I never flinched when Rachel joked about getting pregnant.
The door opened. The air that blew into the apartment with Rachel cut through the blanket and coats I wore.
“Hi, honey,” she said.
She was radiant, her teeth glowing like pearls, her black hair covering half her face. She said, “There was a horrible traffic jam because of the rain.” She kissed me. “I’m exhausted.”
Rachel wore the silver rings I’d bought for her in Addis Ababa. Her San Tropez pants were tight on her hips, and her breasts tugged against the safety pin that had replaced the top button of her thin brown shirt. She wiggled, slid her pants past her knees, pushed them away with a toe and climbed under the sheets, shedding her shirt and bra when we were sealed under the covers and warmed by our breathing. She scratched her nose on my neck in her cute way. Her skin grew cold as I kissed her down the arm to her hand then down the thigh to her ankle. We made love and she flung herself across the mattress like a warrioress who’d fought until she couldn’t move.
“I love you, Ofirusch.”
I was haunted by thoughts of opening my tent at dawn, by Lagos and the savannah and places where the world could be built each day from scratch.
I heard the words leaving my mouth: “Rach, I have to go back to Africa.”
Her body tensed, as if something new had entered the room. I waited for her to cry, to scream, to hit me, to grab and smash something against the wall. She pulled her arms and legs in toward her core and rolled up and off the mattress. Rachel said nothing as she wrapped herself in a robe. She marched to the wall where my books were stacked, scooped them in her arms, opened the apartment door and tossed them outside. She slammed the door. A pile of my clothes she yanked off the tile and dumped outside atop the books. Slammed the door. Rachel grabbed my CDs, a towel, my sleeping bag, guitar and camera and heaved it all outside, making a dozen short trips in succession, each time opening and slamming the door, as if it were a moment for which she’d prepared, for which the strength had been gathered from across the years. I was sitting on the bed, a towel around my waist. When there was nothing more of mine to purge, she came for me, grabbed my arms and pulled me up, put two hands against my chest and drove me backwards across the room. Her face showed no anger or sadness. She pushed me outside. Slammed the door.
I stood for a long time in the cold, listening for movement within, trying to get a view of her through the curtain covering the window. I looked down at the pile of my things, pulled out my jeans and a leather coat and realized the only things she’d forgotten were my shoes. I left it all. None of it mattered. And headed for my parents’ flat, the pavement wet and cold against my feet. I passed the drycleaners and the camera shop and I was as emotionless as Rachel had been. I wanted melancholy, some feeling commensurate with the act of pushing her away again. But I could only think of my horrid timing and my damn shoes.
Four days later, the weather changed in Tel Aviv, and the sun came out when for once I wanted winter. My mind swam with thoughts of marriage, pregnancy, family. Shahar, my bunkmate from the army, called her a “good soul,” called me foolish for leaving her. Elad said, “Stay with Rach. She’s a sweetheart.” Memory and desire tore at my judgment of what I’d done. Had I learned nothing about how it felt to be on the other side of breaking things off with her? If I played guitar outside the door for a day. If I played for two days, a week, a year, if I toiled for seven years like Jacob and the Achipawa boys, would she open the door? Would she marry me?
I climbed the stairs to the flat, high on remorse, ready to lay myself at her feet. There was no answer when I knocked. My dad had come by a few days earlier and gotten all my things. I stepped left of the door and looked through the window. The curtain was gone. The door was open, the flat empty. I pushed in and found nothing but a picture of me, torn, and the silver Ethiopian rings.
Now came the melancholy I’d craved.
I headed for the sea.
The sun was strong, hot on my face, and I sat on the beach, squinting, clawing into the sand. Many times I’d paddled a surfboard out beyond the waves to float and think, where rays of light bounced from everywhere as if the stars had dropped into the ocean. The moment suddenly revealed itself to me, the false edge of the horizon where the sea and sky only appeared to touch, the halves of my life doomed never to merge. As I inhaled the salty air, I realized what people I loved may have already known: there was no choice. There never had been. I would never feel for anyone the love I felt for Rachel. I knew it as surely as my heart was thumping against my ribs. But I had already gone too far. Were I to stay and marry Rachel, I would blame her for untold unfinished journeys and dreams. Self-importance, yes. But mine. The man who could enjoy a parallel life with Rachel in Israel would be someone else. Without Africa I was not Ofir.
2002–PRESENT
LAGA
JULY 2002
Cameroon
“I’M A GAMBLER”
Exhaust blew through Haut Nyong Voyage. An attendant in a blue smock corralled passengers on oil-soaked ground. Young men in slippers loaded sacks of onions onto a bus roof along with truck tires, a one-speed bicycle, and a dozen pieces of plaid Chinese-made luggage that were like zippered plastic bags. My bus, empty but for two men, was parked diagonally in the bus stand and looked as if it hadn’t been driven in years.
I was headed for Abong-Mbang and the jungles of eastern Cameroon.
An older man cooked an omelet on a kerosene burner, a man as dignified and calm as the bus stop was shabby and chaotic. His beige button-down shirt made him look more like the manager of a fine restaurant than a guy perched over a homemade table.
A woman was shouting at the boys loading luggage.
“Mama, don’t do this,” the older man said in English as he scooped Nescafé into a glass. “We’re trying to make the business run. Do you see? These boys load bags every day. Your suitcase will arrive as healthy as you.”
His name was Julius. He was an Anglophone from the region in Cameroon near Nigeria, a village man who’d come to the capital to earn a living. My own trip to Yaoundé had come sooner than I’d expected. From Tel Aviv I’d flown to Nigeria and paddled six weeks down the Niger River, subsisting on cold gari and river water and the fruit villagers piled into my canoe. Unable to fight winds on the dammed Kainji Reservoir, I sold the canoe and moved north to write about Nigeria’s growing religious tension and how Sharia Law was changing post-9/11. In Yelwa, a town festooned with murals, photos, and heart-studded stickers of Osama bin Laden, locals were angry to learn there was an Israeli among them. “What are you doing to the Palestinians?” one man shouted. “All Israelis should be killed,” said another. When people contacted my host to coordinate my killing, I figured it was time to move.
I headed south to Cameroon; Jane Goodall’s prediction that great apes would soon be extinct had grown from a concept into a mission. I would spend a month writing about apes and the bushmeat trade, then return to the human-rights battles on the Nigerian side.
Old Julius looked up after the first bus departed. “Your bus isn’t going anywhere until afternoon,” he said to me. “Come, let me b
uy you a drink at the bar just there.”
I followed Julius through the bus station to a booth guarded by a short wall of blue fence plants. He brushed sand off the bench and motioned for me to sit, then ordered a large Coke and two glasses. Julius had full rounded cheeks and an infectious smile.
“You’re traveling?” he said. “Where is your family? Do you have children?”
“My fiancée—she was basically that—well, she heard one too many times I was going back to Africa.”
I told Old Julius about my reasons for coming to Cameroon, and he nodded when I mentioned extinction. He said, “In my village, northwest province, we had many, many animals. When I was young, elephants were coming through like just another herd of goats. Now? We don’t have animals. In the East, they still have. But three or four vans come from there each day to this bus station, loaded with bushmeat. They are even smoking the meat just behind the station. Just here. In drums. The meat drops early morning. Some goes to a market near. Some goes direct to houses of rich people. But this is just one station. Just a station for Abong-Mbang. There are many stations. Across the road you have two more stations just for Abong-Mbang. I’m sure it’s the same there.”
I asked Old Julius about MINEF, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the government agency charged with protecting wildlife.
“The ministry?” Julius said. “Are you joking? MINEF? MINEF! These people buy bushmeat from this station! Some of them are part of the trade. Laws don’t count in this country, my friend. People in MINEF are making money out of this. More than anyone.”
I’d seen it. I’d spent twenty-four hours at the Nkoabang checkpoint on the eastern edge of Yaoundé, the primary gateway for bushmeat arriving by road from the rainforests of the East. Takam, a MINEF official at the checkpoint, was flattered by my interest in his problems and made a show of swaggering out to the road to flag down a minivan. But his confidence vanished, along with proof he’d ever inspected a vehicle (his job), when he hesitated, mumbled inaudibly to the driver, and climbed onto the roof rather than confronting passengers by searching inside the van. Takam wore a lime-green hat and an unbuttoned shirt with a jersey under it, and he rummaged through the luggage while people in the seats barked, yelled, and banged the windows. The driver inched forward and braked, jerking Takam on the roof, behavior that would have unholstered the gun of a policeman. Takam seemed to have little more authority than a luggage boy.