Tizita

by Sharon Heath

  Assefa deserved a little unfettered happiness. I’d actually caught sight of him the previous Wednesday seated at the Starbucks near his parents’ home and he’d looked like a man with a Do Not Disturb sign on his face. It would be stupid and selfish for me to spoil his pleasure.

  Instead, I told him about my intention to visit Gombe. I could hear the catch in his voice. “Ah. Africa.” Oh dear. I just couldn’t seem to cure myself of foot-in-mouth disease.

  A beep signaled that another call was coming in. “Assefa, can I call you right back? I hate that damned call waiting feature.”

  With an abrupt, “No worries,” he was gone.

  It was Adam on the other line. “Hey.”

  I took a deep breath. “Hey.”

  Unlike Assefa, he noticed immediately that my voice sounded strained. “What is it, Fleur?”

  “Oh, God—I was just telling Assefa that Amir and I are going to visit Serena at the Reserve, and—”

  “What!”

  “She invited me for when Jane Goodall will be there. I’ll have a chance to meet her, and Amir will get to see Lord Hanuman again after all these years.”

  I sensed his mental gears whirring. “Fleur, do you really want to do this?”

  “Yes. Jane Goodall comes right after Einstein and Feynman and Stanley and Frank Wilczek in my list of living heroes.”

  Adam chuckled. “You and your lists.”

  He wouldn’t let me off the phone until I promised about a hundred times to take good care of myself.

  Four days later, I didn’t know if it was taking good care of myself or not that I persuaded Stanley to drive me to the Berhanus for the closest thing I could get to seeing Assefa off. Stanley told me that (a) I was nuts and (b) there was no way he’d expose himself to Assefa’s parents after all the misery he’d caused.

  Cringing with the knowledge of what I knew that he didn’t, I’d replied that (a) it was about time he pushed back against his shaming inner bully, and (b) since I hadn’t been able to take Assefa to the airport the last time he left me, the least Stanley could do was help me get some sort of closure now. Watching my mentor struggle with my request, I tucked away inside my Sly Soldier cupboard the discovery that guilt could be a marvelous motivator. But once we got to the Berhanus’ neighborhood, Stanley insisted on parking halfway up the block on Yolo Street so he couldn’t be spotted. The most I managed to persuade him to do was inch his car forward so I could watch Assefa follow his parents out of their house carrying a couple of suitcases. We were too far away to discern any of their facial expressions—actually, Stanley could see nothing at all, as he’d compressed his tall frame downward and buried his head into his neck like a tortoise below the bottom of the windshied. But refusing to shrink Uncle Bobishly myself, I watched Abeba and Achamyalesh bump along like rag dolls whose stuffing had been stripped. I thought I detected in their slumped shoulders their sadness at having to say goodbye. As for Assefa, once he’d deposited his bags and an overcoat in the trunk of his father’s yellow cab, he walked around the car with the deliberate grace of a panther, not pausing once to look back at the house he’d lived in before opening the rear passenger door and disappearing inside.

  Stanley and I ended up back at the house, sprawling on the living room sofa, his newly bald head up against his grease spot, though he kept sitting forward to throw another handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth. I’d brought them out from the kitchen at his request, noticing for the first time that the package of David’s Original Sunflower Seeds actually read, “Eat. Spit. Be Happy!” Which I pointed out to Stanley, who gave a comic croak, “I like it. The atheist’s answer to Eat, Pray, Love.”

  But his mood darkened just as quickly. He ate and spat as he conveyed its cause. “It seems I’ve turned into a Class-A Asshole lately. I can’t help but observe that I’ve been giving Gwen a hard time over her deafness. Well, more accurately, over her fear of it.” He gave a quick, froggish lick of what must have been pretty salty lips and slid me a sideways glance.

  I waited. I’d noticed the phenomenon he was describing and had wondered about it.

  “The thing is, I’m bone tired. I’ve been sleeping poorly ever since ... well, the whole damned thing. You have to admit it’s been an awful year. That horrible accident on New Year’s Day, our God damned know-nothing excuse for a Congress tying up our work, Achamyalesh going missing, the Kangs, the crap with your ... with me ... oh, you know what I mean. Seeing my sister suffer on top of that.” He leaned forward to clank his stainless steel bowl of shells onto the glass coffee table, then commenced picking little pieces of shell off the sofa, his pants and shirt. “I remember her when she was a little pipsqueak. You know, one of those irritating younger sisters who trailed after you wherever you go. Probably why I started burying myself in books. Somewhere she couldn’t follow me. Cute as a button, but I never would’ve admitted it. Didn’t even notice it till much later. Not too many guys her age did, either, as I recall. And the ones who did—well, they treated her pretty badly. Poor Gwen.” He gave a strangled sort of laugh. “Turns out we were both pretty hopeless at relationships.”

  “Are you referring to Doris?”

  He looked surprised and gave a grudging nod. “You remembered. A good-looking woman, and she knew her science. But she was inconsistent in other ways.” Then he made a face. “And yes, she was black. I suppose Gwennie told you. And if she’s been feeding you some armchair psychology about how my feelings about her transferred over to Assefa, then all I can tell you is phooey! The truth is, I’ll probably never understand why those words came out of me, besides the fact that we all probably soak in some of that crap from the world around us. I don’t know about your Sammie’s Jung, but I think the human mind seems pretty capable of keeping secrets from itself. And others, of course.” My belly rumbled in voidish agreement. “I remember when our father died, my first thought was good riddance, but I never voiced it to another soul. Didn’t even remember it until now. Maybe I shoved it into some parallel universe.” He grinned. “See what sleep starvation does to you?” He paused and scratched his head. “The thing is, at my age, going to sleep isn’t the simple thing it used to be. It’s a practice run for the big one. The hours leading up to bedtime are as melancholy as a Sunday night for a school kid. The party’s about to be over.”

  “Over? Don’t say that! You won’t even be sixty-five until June.”

  “Yeah, and my doc tells me I’d better start exercising or I won’t get a hell of a lot older.”

  “Well, then, let’s take a walk. It’ll do us both good.”

  After locking up, I purposely led us to the left so we wouldn’t have to look at the mega-renovation taking place at the Kang’s. I wondered if we’d always call it the Kang’s, even if for the rest of our lives it would stay in the hands of its new residents: a family of red-heads named—don’t laugh—Daniel, Dara, Dylan, Darren and Daisey Delahaney.

  Actually, the first thing I did when we hit the sidewalk was laugh. Besides their ludicrous attachment to the letter “D,” the Delahaneys shared a penchant for political proselytization and had chosen to celebrate their moving-in day by passing out flyers headed, “Stop the Invasion! Illegal Immigrants are Invaders of the U.S.A.!” The fact that Fidel had only become a citizen thanks to a previous amnesty for illegal immigrants probably accounted for Chin-Hwa’s killer’s markedly low profile these days.

  Neither Stanley nor I felt like skipping. If anything, the continued unseasonal heat was enervating. As we drifted past a neighbor’s Tudor-style house with a front yard full of drought-resistant yellow yarrow, curly onion, chamomile, and several varieties of manzanita, Stanley heaved a sigh.

  “What?”

  “They call these years the age of wisdom, but I’ve turned out to be an old jackass. Spent my whole life trying to forward the cause of human progress and in a split second I’m channeling Rush Limbaugh.”

  I squinted up at him. “Now you know how I felt after talking about Grandfather’s balls
in my Nobel speech.”

  “Yeah, but yours wasn’t cruel.”

  “Maybe not, but only because he wasn’t alive. It was still a betrayal.”

  I was relieved that he didn’t try to rebut me. “What can I tell you, Fleur? Look at it like this: life is very fair; it breaks everyone’s heart.” He gave me a bleak excuse for a grin, but oddly, his words were actually comforting.

  Part II

  Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm;

  for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave.

  It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.

  (Song of Songs 8:6)

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Fleur

  OUR JOURNEY FROM Los Angeles to Gombe National Park was uneventful, if you don’t count having to endure four plane flights (to Dubai, Dar Es Salaam, Mwanza, and Kigoma) comprised of a descending number of hours (equaling in total 30 hours and 35 minutes) and a logarithmic ascension of discomforts ranging from economy seats designed for miniature Uncle Bobs to an airliner loo minus toilet paper and seat covers, capped by a boat ride from hell overcrowded with fifty voluble Tanzanians, sizable nets full of smelly fish, and an assortment of cumbersome cargo.

  By the time we arrived at Gombe, Amir was a wreck and I was bruised from anxious pinching, scratched on the face by spiky plants overhanging the banks of Lake Tanganyika, and beset with leg cramps—probably from dehydration. I disembarked from our boat with only one further mishap: the leather travel journal Mother had pressed into my hands at LAX somehow leapt out of my purse and into the water, promptly sinking as if it weighed five hundred pounds. But who was complaining? We’d arrived at the Research Center established by Jane Goodall that had revolutionized how we humans view our nearest relatives.

  Amir and I hauled our carefully packed and by now thoroughly battered hiking packs onto the steps of a wide wooden porch fronting a tin-roofed building where the whippet-thin Serena stood, her black hair silver now, but her inky eyes in their dark-framed glasses as buggish-looking as ever. She stepped toward us and hugged a surprised Amir, greeting him with an enthusiastic, “It’s so good to see you again, Fleur.” I thought Amir made a damned fine job of transferring her over to me, given that he’d been suffering horrible stomach pains ever since consuming what I personally thought were some dubious-looking fried plantains from a stand outside Mwanza Airport.

  Not exactly in the mood for company, poor Amir spent his first evening alone in the little tented cabin Serena had reserved for him, his tired brown eyes signaling a deep gratitude when informed there was a decently maintained outhouse nearby.

  For me, there was the heretofore unimaginable relief of peeing in a real toilet, bathing in a small but serviceable tub, sitting cross-legged with Serena on a comfortable mat in the bedroom she would share with me, and being plied with chai tea and cinnamon flavored pancake “cookies” that our server, a young blond ponytailed volunteer named Nikka, told me were called chapatti majis. I realized right then that I had so much to learn about, not the least of which were the origins of the sonance I was hearing from the wilderness surrounding us.

  I said as much to Serena, and she replied enthusiastically, “Oh, yes, of course. I barely register them anymore. A pity. Like you, I was so taken with the cries when I first arrived.” She paused a moment. “Okay, did you hear that? The low crescendo leading up to high-pitched screams?” I nodded. “Those are the chimps’ long distance pant-hoot calls. Each one has a different signature call, and they know each other by them. Sort of like cats or dogs; no two sound exactly alike.” Well, that was true enough. Jillily’s sweet chirrups were a far cry from Midge’s low-pitched moans. Serena gave an impish grin. “You may have noticed that I have a bit of trouble recognizing faces. I know each one of our chimps by the sounds they make and, of course, their smells.”

  But it wasn’t just pant-hoots I was hearing. After a particularly piercing weee-ah-hyo-hyo-hyo, I cried, “What was that?”

  Serena was daintily inserting a forkful of chapatti maji into her mouth. Finishing it, she replied, “It’s a fish eagle. They’re fearsome hunters, though they actually only seek food for about ten minutes a day. They terrorize the red colobus monkeys around here, who are, alas, also prey to our chimps. But you won’t see any of that going on now. The chimps hunt most of their meat in the dry season we get in August and September.”

  I frowned. “I didn’t think chimpanzees were meat eaters.”

  “Oh, but they are. Well, they mostly like fruit, but they hunt the colobus like crazy. Wild pigs and antelopes, too. When Jane first reported her observations of their hunting forays, many anthropologists at the time were skeptical, but as usual, Jane was right.” I registered the reverence in Serena’s voice and silently concurred. I couldn’t wait to meet the world’s preeminent primatologist. “Actually,” Serena continued, pushing back a stray lock of her enviably shiny, silver-white hair, “there’s some debate about why chimps hunt at all, since meat accounts for such a very small part of their diet. Some think it’s for social reasons, perhaps providing the males an opportunity to prove their virility to the females—who are often in estrus. A young man from your own neck of the woods, Dr. Craig Stanford from USC, comes out here regularly to study their hunting patterns. He’s written a book about it. Actually, I believe he’s written scads of scholarly texts about our chimps. You can’t chew on one topic here at Gombe without biting off a load of others.”

  Nikka padded in quietly and offered us more tea, but Serena shook her head. “Alfred, the poor girl needs to get some sleep tonight or she’ll be tortured by jet lag the whole time she’s here.”

  A grinning Nikka threw me a complicit look before tiptoeing back out again. Serena finished off the last of her pancake and, with a few crumbs lingering at the corner of her mouth, said with a twinkle, “The fish eagles are noisy, but the most ubiquitous birds here are the Peter’s Twinspots—little red-throated finches that hop around us like old friends. You’ll see plenty of them tomorrow morning, but you won’t hear them now; their buzzy chirps don’t stand a chance against the more robust calls.”

  Soon enough, Serena pushed herself up to standing with an impressive alacrity for a woman in her sixties and excused herself from the small room so I could wash up and be helped into my sleeping hammock by the attentive Nikka, who fastened a mosquito net around me while explaining that this was a space-saving way for Serena to entertain guests. I’d never slept in a hammock and never under netting, and it was undoubtedly due to that and an imagination heightened by the newness of this environment that I fell into a deep sleep in which I dreamed I was a white butterfly wrapped in its cocoon. I woke but once in the night, wanting to pee, saw where I was and decided I didn’t really have to. Thank God whatever had irritated my bladder seemed to have slunk off to wherever it had come from. I had no idea how I’d get out of this thing and back in again. But no matter. The soft snoring of Serena sleeping nearby was like a lullaby. All the uncertainties of the past few months had made the earth feel more than a little Swiss cheesy, so I was surprised to feel so safe and cozy suspended mid air, supported by the strong crisscrossed roping beneath me and the solid, reassuring presence of the face-blind but creature-wise Serena.

  I woke to sun and cacophonous sound. Gombe was alive with it, and it had nothing to do with leaf blowers and traffic. Somehow, I managed to disentangle my legs from my cocoon, and still wearing my pajamas, went outside and saw the adorable little Peter’s Twinspots Serena had mentioned the night before. They were busily hopping around the porch in a variety of interesting patterns. I heard lots of pant-hoots and a cascade of cries I couldn’t possibly identify. I left the porch and walked with interest toward a mixed woodland scrub, covered in winding vines and thorny plants and patches of tall, coarse grasses. The air was filled with pungent green smells and splashing sounds coming from the lake. Even the bees seemed to buzz louder here. But the vista looked surprisingly familiar, not unlike
the Santa Monica Mountains, where Adam and I used to hike and debate the merits of the Higgs particle and superstring theory back in the old days.

  I heard a voice coming from behind, startling me. “So you’re finally up. I thought you’d never come out. I’m dyin’ here.”

  I turned to see Amir, dressed and obviously raring to go, eagerly clutching the straps of his backpack. I laughed, but took pity on him, hurrying back to the building and assuring him I’d be ready to go in fifteen minutes if someone could manage to scramble up some coffee and a little something for me to eat. Though I’d slept like a baby, I was a little groggy with jet lag and absolutely ravenous.

  As if she’d been summoned by my imagination, Serena appeared out of nowhere, along with the real Alfred, who bore a tray of just what the doctor ordered: Chai tea with sweet, hot milk and an array of tasty fried treats that Serena identified as half keki and andazi, along with two hard-boiled eggs and a fruit basket of bananas, watermelon slices, and generously swollen papayas. Well aware that Amir was nearly out of his mind with longing to see Lord Hanuman, I did faint justice to the spread, quickly stuffing my mouth with a delectable pastry and shoving two bananas into my backpack with which I fantasized I might befriend a chimp or two.

  Soon enough, Serena was leading the way into the bush. She’d explained before we set out that we needed to defer conversation for later and to observe her example when we encountered any chimps. After about ten minutes of the three of us carefully padding through the dense brush, I was very excited to see a chimpanzee pop out to greet Serena, who assumed a somewhat bent, submissive posture, making soft grunts. The chimp, much larger than I’d imagined, reached out to pat her silver head, at which point she took a few steps forward and actually embraced him. Amir and I exchanged a quick look before the chimp ambled over to my friend and touched his arm and his cheek before turning away. As he disappeared into the brush, I could hear Amir exhale and realized he’d felt as scared as I had that the chimp might take aggressive affront at our presence. Serena looked at the two of us, gave a little grin, and motioned with her head to follow her.