by Ofir Drori
“Future is not wearing disposable diapers. End of discussion.”
Vincent and I rode the elevator up into MINEF’s tower a few days after our meeting with the minister. I thought of the street boys I’d once taken to the roof of Planet Safari. When the elevator shook loose from the ground floor, the boys had lunged for the walls. Then laughed as we’d climbed.
The seventeenth floor of MINEF gave views of the Hilton and part of the prime minister’s office in the Stars Building, which was shaped like an hourglass. Off to the left was the other world, the rusted tin roofs of markets and poor neighborhoods.
“Ahh, this is great,” said Denis Koulagna, director of wildlife.
Vincent sat beside me and crossed his legs.
“The ministry welcomes collaboration with NGOs. We really lack the capacity to carry out all the activities of the ministry. Partnerships are very important to us. You need to bring all your files to me so we can start the process of passing through different departments. It will be better if you concentrate on giving us the information you gather so that we, here in MINEF, can use it to carry out operations in the field.”
I looked at Vincent and swallowed against the reality that Koulagna had just announced his intention to minimize our role. I was about to state that in the current environment information was plentiful but enforcement was nonexistent when Vincent’s hand rose from his lap. He said, “Director, we will return with a full program.”
Vincent stood, shook Koulagna’s hand and ushered me out.
“Ofi, of course he’s trying to minimize us,” Vincent said in the hallway. “When the minister sent us here, Koulagna probably assumed he had a free hand to block us. Remember, no mistakes. If he won’t approve our program, we go back to the minister.”
Future darted out of the kitchen of Antoinette’s house and tried to stick his finger into an electrical socket. “Future, no!” He’d been stealing the toys of Antoinette’s children. “Tom, with the legal unit, do you have comments on improving procedures?”
“I didn’t read the packet.”
Dan was inspecting his dreadlocks, Ravit gazing at the wall.
“Listen,” I said, checking my anger, “we’re not here to do normal work.”
“Hey, man, it’s cool,” Dan said. “We’ll get up to speed. All of us, man.”
The day Dan told me he was going to get paint for the house, I’d found him near Carrefour Banane playing checkers in a bar.
“Okay. Another question,” I said. “We’re going to save more orphaned apes, and the shelters don’t have space for them. Do you think we should consider eventually having our own shelter? Thoughts?”
Silence. No one even moved.
“Hadar,” I said, “I’d like you to stay here this morning and teach Future’s caretaker more of what you know about chimps. Ravit and Tom can continue to work on the Internet, searching for sister NGOs, finding African countries with functional enforcement. Let’s gather background material from the government on processes concerning the law. And all of you should start writing about your experiences.”
Silence.
Tom cleaned a fingernail. Hadar yawned. They reacted as if I’d been speaking broken Amharic or said nothing at all. Had I insulted them by working on my own during the day, by keeping to myself at night? In the blank stares of the team was a taste of the old doubt I’d felt each time I returned to Israel, that I wasn’t as special as I believed. They didn’t like me; that was clear. I couldn’t believe it had happened in just ten days.
The next evening when I returned from town, Dan was lounging in one of the crescent moon curves of the outer wall of Antoinette’s house, strumming his guitar. Tom was drinking beer. And Future was sucking on a lollipop.
“I don’t want you to pay people to wash your clothes,” I said at a meeting.
“But we help them by giving them money,” Tom said.
“It creates a gap between you and everyone else who lives here.”
“You’re too strict,” Hadar said in a soft voice. “We don’t have to wash our own clothes to save apes.”
“Does someone in Israel wash your clothes for you when you’re twenty-two?”
“My mom,” Tom said and laughed.
“Maybe you forgot,” said Hadar, “but in Israel we have washing machines.”
FUTURE NEAR DEATH
“Come quick, boy, it’s a chimp,” Kalebass said. “You have to take him fast.”
David and I caught the next van to Abong-Mbang and arrived after dark. My frustration that Kalebass had given to the hunter a symbolic amount of $10 was overwhelmed by how the chimp was actually a baby gorilla. I snuck him into our hotel room under a towel, and we waited as Kalebass searched for transport back to Yaoundé. The gorilla’s black face shined in the light of the overhead bulb. He watched us as we watched him. To sit with the tiny ape was to be in the presence of a mind that knew another world. He carried within him the quiet of forest life, a calmness that made Future seem epileptic.
David walked to the bathroom. He’d doctored the torn elbows of his blue dress shirt with electrical tape. He’d told me that when he returned to the U.S. he might move to an Indian reservation to write and teach.
The gorilla whimpered and moved off after David on his fists.
“Come here, Life,” I said and grabbed a milk-filled Coke bottle.
David sighed. “We don’t have to call him ‘Life.’ We’re saving an orphan gorilla, for Christ’s sake. Let’s call him Jack like Kalebass does.”
Twenty-four hours later, we found a vehicle and stuffed the ape, screaming, into a box, then taped it closed. David dumped one of Jack’s turds out of his boot and followed me downstairs. In the front seat of a battered sedan sat the driver and a man in a coat. Jack screeched in the box inside the closed trunk. The dented clandeau was of a kind that plied the dirt tracks between villages, often carrying a bushmeat buyer who returned to town with a trunk full of smoked animals.
The chef du poste at MINEF had refused to provide us documentation to transport the gorilla. He’d said, “What’s in it for me?” So David and I were committing the same crime LAGA was meant to stop: possession of an endangered species. With a dozen roadblocks separating us from Yaoundé, we were vulnerable to all the policemen and MINEF officials who knew that badgering foreigners, especially those dumb enough to move contraband, was a lucrative trade. Worse, if we were caught, the ministry might use it as an excuse to end my ever-tenuous project in Cameroon.
The taxi couldn’t idle, and the engine stalled a few meters from the hotel. The screams of the baby gorilla filled the silence.
“Don’t let the engine die,” David said in French. “Keep it running.”
The driver revved the engine, revved it again.
Half an hour into the darkness outside town, the road was blocked by a jackknifed rig. Three dozen logging trucks idled in smoky light along one side of the road, all loaded with massive trees. Silhouetted drivers prowled between trucks with flashlights, a seedy scene of industry on a clay road through the forest. Our driver revved the engine again and again to keep it from stalling and to mask Jack’s screams. The man in the passenger seat in the coat shifted anxiously, glanced over his shoulder at us, his nervousness that of someone contemplating a crime.
“Should we head back to town and try to move in the morning?” David said.
I didn’t respond.
“I’m covered in Jack’s scabies,” he said, itching his face.
After an hour we were moving again and ahead of the logging trucks, our dim headlights barely able to tunnel into the darkness as we rattled and rocked like a horse-drawn cart pushed down a mountainside. My head wobbled with exhaustion. I fell asleep, woke; David was the only friend I would have allowed myself to drift off beside in such a moment. I shot awake. The man in the passenger seat swung around to look at us.
“Don’t fight sleep,” David said. “I can stay awake all night. But I’m afraid if we both pass out we’ll end u
p getting robbed and left somewhere in the trees.”
The driver revved the engine and held two cigarettes out the window as we rolled up to a roadblock. The policeman grabbed the cigarettes and waved us through, and a boy dragged nail-studded boards from the road. My head snapped back, and I woke. The men in the front seat were speaking their tribal language. The driver handed cigarettes to the policeman at the next roadblock so there would be no questions. I pulled my camera into my lap, and the man in the passenger seat spun around with a flashlight and shined it on my hands.
“Damn,” David whispered. “I should have known; he is the one afraid of us.”*
Jack was no longer screaming when the lights of the dashboard and the headlights died. The car coasted to a stop. We opened the doors and stood in the road, the silence like that of a world missing electricity. I could just see David’s profile in the starlight as we pushed the taxi through the mud. We laughed, because there was little else to do.
“Amen,” I said, when the driver got the engine started.
“Are you a Christian?” said the passenger in English.
The car was shaking.
“Are you a Christian?” he said a second time.
David sang, “It is a known fact that for many thousand years …”
We stalled again, got stuck in the mud, stalled a third time. A flat tire, added to battery failure, made plain we weren’t reaching Yaoundé in the clandeau. Marooned in the dark, we waited until the logging trucks blocked by the jackknifed rig finally caught up. A public minivan appeared, which we had little choice but to join. David loaded the box into the rear hatchback, and we squeezed into the van, jammed with twenty-two passengers. The mass of bodies was a moving universe of potential bribes and the very reason we’d avoided public transport. A cry rose over the rumble of the van—one of the goats roped to the bus roof, I hoped, and not Jack struggling for air.
Policemen at roadblocks stopped us throughout the night. No one opened the hatchback or inspected the box. Jack had gone silent.
Near the Nkoabang checkpoint on Yaoundé’s eastern edge, a stout middle-aged policeman snatched the documents of the driver and said, “You’re from Central African Republic? You don’t have proper ID. Go into the station.” He checked the ID of the next man and said, “This isn’t even you. Follow the driver. I’ll deal with you later.”
“Where’s your vaccination card?” he said to me.
“I don’t have it.”
“10,000 francs.”
“I’m not paying you anything.”
“Fine. Go into the station.”
I walked around the van and stopped and remembered Jack. I pulled 10,000 francs from my pocket and handed it over, amazed that I had. David walked to the rear of the van to fetch his vaccination card from his backpack, which sat beside Jack’s box. David got his card and closed the hatchback, but it banged against the broken latch, inches from the gorilla, and the door flew open. A man slammed it down three times, then left it up with the box in view, grabbed a wrench and went at the latch like a man chopping wood. The officer walked around holding a flashlight, the box with its large holes a meter from his hand. I thought, If you’re still alive, Jack, please, don’t scream now.
David stepped in front of the policeman and said, “My friend, you’re working too late. This is no time to be in your shoes when you should be in bed with your wife.”
The policeman thumbed through David’s passport. “It can be difficult.”
The driver was back from the station, slamming the hatchback, the box visible, then not, then visible again. The policeman scoped the vaccination card, and David said, “You can see I’ve had so many shots I’ve been emptying my pockets to keep too many doctors in business.”
The policeman traced his finger over a page, shined his light at the truck.
“Too many shots,” David said.
The policeman handed him the documents, and the driver got the door closed.
Near sunrise, we reached Mendong and climbed on foot to the house. We were dragging, our faces gritty with dust. Jack was still warm but hadn’t moved when David touched him through a hole in the box. The gorilla had been closed up more than eight hours when we unlocked my front door.
I set the box on my coffee table, pulled at the tape, yanked it.
“I’m actually stalling a bit,” I said and then looked up. “If something is wrong, just remember, we tried our best.”
I pulled back the cardboard flaps and found Jack looking up at me. I lifted him, took him in my hands, and his head fell backwards. When I got him to my chest, he turned and looked at David, and our relief escaped as laughter.
Just after dawn, David and I walked next door to Antoinette’s house to wait for the volunteers to wake. At the foot of the long wood table, David snapped a video camera to a tripod. I was excited to reenergize the team with the surprise of Jack, to connect the volunteers again to the reason they’d come to Central Africa. Two new volunteers had joined before Kalebass’ call: Natalie, an Israeli, and her German boyfriend, Jens. Dan was still sleeping; I’d told him he could not continue to work with LAGA.
I sat at the head of the table. Hidden under a blanket and holding me was the baby gorilla. Tom woke and took a chair, his notebook in front of him. Hadar sat to my left, her fingernails painted black. I said, “In Abong-Mbang I thought I was going to save a baby chimp, but I got a surprise.” I pulled back the blanket to reveal Jack.
The sublime animal turned his head and measured the faces around him. Natalie, chin in hand, looked away. Tom didn’t react. No one spoke or lifted a hand.
“We had some checkpoints,” I said, filling the silence. “It was a bit scary. Our driver didn’t have the correct identity card. The policeman took him aside and told him, ‘60,000.’ He gave the price. That’s how it is.”
Jens, who looked like an Amish carpenter, said, “fifty thousand is fifty dollars?”
“It’s one hundred dollars,” I said.
Only Hadar reached out to touch Jack. The other volunteers sat frozen.
The silence at the table was the sound of failure.
I glanced at David, whose expression told me what I didn’t want to admit: when it came to the volunteers, there was no team at all.
“The gorilla will need vaccinations,” I said to say something. “His belly is very swollen. I think he has worms. But generally I think he’s okay. His stool is fine.”
“He has worms?” Hadar said. “That means that he needs to have the same surgery Michelle did?”
“What?”
“In the zoo, remember?”
“That was not worms. That was a tumor.”
“Oh, okay.”
David turned off the camera and walked out of the house.
I closed my eyes and thought of Mom reading to me as a child the only book about a boy with my name. It was called Hot Corn. In the story, Ofir rallied neighborhood kids while beating a drum and shouting “Hot corn! Hot corn!” As the crowd followed him and grew, kids sang, “Hot corn! We’re going to have hot corn.” But Ofir had no hot corn to give; he’d just thought it was a great idea. “Boo, Ofir, bad boy! Where is the corn?” And the children ostracized him. Each time my mother read me the story, she skipped the part where Ofir had no hot corn. She even crossed through those pages with a pen to ensure no babysitters read them to me.
“The volunteers have completely disengaged,” I said to David. “With Jack, they weren’t connected to him or me. We’re gone two days and it’s so obvious. They think I’m an asshole.”
“No. To see this magnificent creature and not move their elbows off the table—”
“Had I brought him on the second day, it would have been different.”
“They had Future on the second day,” David said. “A gorilla—Jack is majestic. He’s sitting at the breakfast table and how do they respond? They don’t.”
“Listen, they’re in a country they don’t like. Jens doesn’t even know the currency—”
<
br /> “Ofir, I’m just talking about passion.”
“But if their passion for working with me was destroyed—”
“They just got here. And no offense, but I’m sure that if they really had passion, you couldn’t just crush it in two weeks.”
“David, you’re looking at it as proof they were never LAGA material, that they shouldn’t have been here to begin with.”
“While you’re building things, the theoretical volunteer isn’t very valuable.”
“I told you I’ve been battling the anger I felt for them,” I said. “Anger they didn’t share my commitment. But listening to you now, I realize how it’s completely my fault. Their emails made me so optimistic. One story of a baby chimp led to six plane tickets, six people sponsoring themselves. I thought they were already connected to the cause. But I didn’t connect them to anything, like when I traveled to Kenya with Ofer. I never should have brought six volunteers at once. I didn’t give positive feedback. I wasn’t sensitive. Natalie and Jens just shut down; I overwhelmed them in forty-eight hours.”
“You’re making this about you, and it’s not,” he said. “I don’t agree they’re activists in non-activists’ clothes. Dan’s a great guy but he was never going to fight at your side. When you said you didn’t want him smoking pot, he said okay, he’d just do it elsewhere. Hadar got out of the taxi with a suitcase full of designer shoes! Jens, a fighter? Are you kidding?”
“Look, poor soldiers are a reflection of their officer. I could have sent any one of them to a village and given them a small challenge, told them to teach something to kids for a week. To work in the fields. Sleep in a hut. They would have come back changed; you know the power this continent has to do that to people. I don’t care how lost someone is, how closed off. It may sound irrational and I haven’t figured out exactly how, but you just have to find a way to put a match in someone’s hand.”
Sheri Speede, an American veterinarian who ran a small sanctuary near Belabo, had been telling me that by keeping Future I risked his being unable to re-assimilate into a family of chimps. I’d tried my best to keep him wild, as my mother would have done. But Sheri didn’t like that he often imitated me by walking on two legs. I said, “Sheri, so you have a spot for him now. Okay. But there are so many chimps in shelters. Future is important as an ambassador. Look how many volunteers he brought here. We can rescue other apes to fill the space you have. I want his life to mean something.”