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.
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.
That night I had a dream that I was cradling the pelvic bones of the early hominid Lucy before carefully passing them over to the waiting arms of a woman wearing a shama, as well as a thick, black veil that completely hid her face. I awoke with a sense of profound loss and wondered immediately what Sammie’s analyst might have said about the dream. I knew only that it was haunting, and I found myself fantasizing as I climbed into my hammock the following night that the dream would continue when I fell asleep. But it didn’t.
On the seventh night, I was already hanging suspended in my cocoon, and Serena had just slid under her own covers when I offered a tentative, “Serena?”
Her voice was sleepy. Life at Gombe was very physical and though she was a hardy woman, she was quick to point out she was hardly a spring chicken. “Yes, dear?”
“Well, I was just wondering. How would I go about switching my flight to Addis Ababa?”
She turned on her little bedside lamp, and I saw her direct a gratified grin up at me.
It didn’t take Serena long to come up with a plan, though she swore it was Jane’s idea. The two of them had evidently been conspiring by phone. I learned about it when I shuffled out of the bathroom rather late the next morning, having had a nice long soak in the little tub. Serena was on a purple mat doing her morning yoga stretch routine, which she’d informed me had been taught to her by one of Gombe’s previous volunteers, “a blithe spirit named Alison—fantastic energy; I love that girl! She saved me from myself after I fell out of a tree observing Freud and his sister Flirt.”
It was a little odd watching the not-so-spring-chickeny Serena easily contort herself into a series of complicated yoga positions while she prattled on as if the two of us were chatting on a couch. For the first time since my arrival at Gombe, I found myself missing Siri Sajan, and the only thing that stopped me from getting down on the floor and joining in was that I’d be crowding Serena. As Nana would have put it, her little house wasn’t exactly the Ritz.
As soon as Serena informed me that Jane Goodall had suggested that their friend Melkamu Berhe would be the perfect guide to get me from Addis Ababa to Tikil Dingay, I flopped onto Serena’s cot and objected that this was asking too much—of Jane and Melkamu.
Lying on her back with one bent leg and then reaching both arms above her head with fingers outstretched like stars, Serena rejoined, “Don’t even think about it. On Jane’s part, she’s been following your career with great interest ever since the initial brouhaha about your father and his Cacklers. As for Melkamu, Jane was good enough to intervene when the university seemed inclined to refuse him admission because of a—well, a rebellious adolescence.” She paused, both arms midair on their way back to her sides, and looked past me, her expression pensive. “It was his time as a volunteer at Gombe that turned his life around. Like your Amir, he made a connection with one of our chimps. Kanoodle.” Her arms landed and then floated up again for another reach over her head. “Who I’m afraid fell victim to the simian immunodeficiency virus.” She turned her head toward me, and I saw a tear travel across her pale cheek. “I hate to tell you this, Fleur, but the chimps are dying at younger and younger ages, too much of it thanks to that bloody SIV. Which you probably know crossed the species barrier to become HIV thanks in great part to the hunt for bushmeat.”
I nodded sadly. Now that I’d seen the chimps at Gombe, watched them feed and groom their families and play with their young, eating bushmeat struck me as just this side of cannibalism.
But Serena was moving on. “In his grief, Melkamu couldn’t bear to attach to another chimp, so he transferred his attentions to the terrible deforestation around the park. The human birth rate in this part of the world is way too high, and Gombe absorbed a tremendous number of refugees from wars in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As soon as he graduated, Melkamu became a part of TACARE, our community-centered conservation program, and now he teaches other young people who are preparing to join us.” She lay with her knees bent and touching at an angle, her hands on her belly. “He’s also on the Board of Roots and Shoots.”
“Roots and Shoots?”
“Yes,” Serena effused, rolling to her side to rise gracefully. She sat beside me on the bed, brushing a silver lock back from her eyes. “A part of Jane’s determination to bring crucial environmental, animal, and humanitarian issues into public consciousness. This one’s really wonderful—aimed at engaging young people in activities that are both fun and meaningful.”
I felt a sharp twinge of regret. “Serena,” I said, gripping her arm urgently, “you’ve got to promise me we’ll figure out some way for me to meet her, either here at Gombe or if she ever comes to SoCal.”
She smiled slyly. “Hooked, eh? Of course, you will, dear. Though I’d much, much rather you return to us, Jane does come to Los Angeles from time to time.” She rose to extract a pair of colorful shorts and a T-shirt from her little bamboo dresser. “Did you know there’s a Jane Goodall Research Center at USC? Actually, Craig Stanford, the man I mentioned who’s doing that work on chimp predatory ecology, is co-director there.” Seeing the light in my eyes, she added, “Make sure I give you Jane’s personal email address before you leave. That way, you can begin to know her yourself.”
I could almost hear the wheels whirring in Serena’s brain. I was beginning to learn about the power of politics in scientific endeavors—a case in point, P.D.’s entrapment in the web of Congress’ venality. Though Jane herself was a well-deserved superstar, I had to acknowledge it probably wouldn’t hurt to have the youngest Nobelist ever lend her name to one of her projects.
Two days later, and thanks to the concerted efforts of Serena and half the volunteers at Gombe, as well as an environmental science colleague at the University of Dar es Salaam who’d generously offered to meet me at Julius Nayerere Airport to make sure I made my final flight to Addis Ababa, I stood on Serena’s porch and said a series of teary goodbyes. Only Lord Hanuman seemed oblivious to my departure. He was circling around one of the porch posts making a series of raspberry sounds until even Amir became annoyed, shouting, “Oh, give it a rest, you noisy barstard!”
Then turning back to me, and for the fifth time that morning, Amir asked, “You sure you’ve got your passport?”
“I’m sure.”
“And my letter to Stanley?”
“In my backpack. You could have emailed him, you know.”
“Yeah,” responded Amir dubiously, “but if you hand it to him, you can, you know, smooth his feathers a little. You know how he is with you.”
But now Desoto Delumbre came up and shyly offered me a photo she’d taken of me with the village schoolchildren. I looked like a white ghost amid the vital and impish dark faces gathered against a backdrop of bottle green trees. I comforted myself that I was at least a happy looking ghost, my sideways grin even more crooked than usual and my long blond hair skewed every which way.
Nikka was next to step forward and, before I knew it, she’d looped a Masai beaded necklace over my head. I looked down to see its multi-colored beads perched nearly horizontally over my breasts. “Oh, how beautiful!” I exclaimed. She and I exchanged heartfelt kisses on each cheek.
Fred proceeded to stuff a packed lunch into my backpack, and then Serena grabbed me, looking intensely into my face as if she were going to try very hard to remember it. She let me go only to whisper ticklishly in my ear, “You’re going to have to write me all about it. About her. I’ve got a feeling that everything is going to change for you in Ethiopia.” I felt the hairs on my head and arms rise up like tiny soldiers.
Serena let me go and stepped back. I saw Audrey give Lilia a dramatic nudge in the ribs with her elbow, and Lilia pressed something into my palm. I opened my hand to see a tiny wood carving of a naked woman emerging backwards from the rear end of a chicken. The two women burst into bawdy giggles, and I couldn’t help laughing myself. Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t even want to think about what that could be a metaphor for.”
So it was with laughter, rather than tears, that I left Serena’s little house in Gombe, shrieking pant-hoots and hoarse turaco calls chiming in from every side.
My friends walked me to the lake without speaking. Like a visiting dignitary, I was allowed to board the boat first. As the other travelers piled in, I kept moving around the crowd to keep my eyes on my friends. Once the boat began pulling away from the shore, I saw Desoto emphatically pointing toward a couple of women just to the right of where she and the others stood. They were washing dishes in the lake.
As I waved at Desoto and Serena and Amir and all my new friends lined up like schoolchildren at the shore, the dishwashing ladies waved, too, their dresses billowing out like bright yellow and purple and red balloons in the strong breeze.
