The Female of the Species

chapter two

It was fitting that Gray finally do a documentary about Toroto, for in some ways Errol had already made this film. Errol’s great indulgence—it bordered on vice, or at least on nosiness—was a curious sort of mental home movie. His secret passion was piecing together other people’s lives. Going far beyond the ordinary gossip, Errol pitched into history that was not his own like falling off a ledge, in a dizzying entrancement with being someone else that sometimes frightened him.

Naturally, Gray Kaiser’s life was his pet project. Assembling the footage on Charles Corgie had been especially challenging, for whole reels of that material were classified. Twenty-four years is a long time, however, and with plenty of wine and late nights Errol had weaseled from Gray enough information to put together a damned good picture. In fact, for its completeness and accuracy, Kaiser and Corgie promised to be one of the highlights of his collection.

Errol could see her in 1948 at the age of twenty-two, holed up in the back rooms of the Harvard anthropology department, gluing together some godawful pot. It was late, two in the morning maybe, with a single light, orange, the must of old books tingling her nostrils, the quiet like an afghan wrapped around her shoulders—those fine shoulders, wide, peaked at the ends. The light would fill her hair, a honey blond then, buoyant and in the way.

Gray would be telling herself that Dr. Richardson was a first-rate anthropologist and she was lucky to be his assistant, but Gray Kaiser would not like having a mentor, even at twenty-two. Richardson told her what to do. He did all the fieldwork, and she was desperately sick of this back room. She loved the smell of old books as much as the next academic, but she loved the smell of wood fires more, and of cooking bananas; she certainly yearned for the wild ululation of the Masai over this suffocating library quiet.

Padding dark and silent down the well-waxed linoleum halls of that building, a tall Masai warrior came to deliver her.

“I will see Richasan.”

Gray started, and looked up to find a man in her doorway. He was wearing a gray suit which, though it fit him well, looked ridiculous. The man didn’t look ridiculous; the suit did. His hair was plaited in many strands and bound together down his back.

“Dr. Richardson won’t be in for six or seven hours.” For God’s sake, it was three in the morning. Then, an African’s sense of time was peculiar. If you made an appointment with a Kikuyu for noon, he might show up at five with no apology for being late. With a Masai you did not make appointments. He came when he felt like it.

“I wait, then.” The man came in and stood opposite Gray, balancing perfectly on one leg, with his other foot raised like a stork’s. His long face high and impassive, he stood immobile, as he had no doubt poised many times for hours in a clump of trees, waiting for a cheetah to pass in range of his spear. Six or seven hours was nothing.

“Can I help you?”

“No.”

“I am Dr. Richardson’s assistant.”

“You are his woman?”

“I am no man’s woman.”

The Masai looked down at her. “Pity.”

“Not really. I don’t need a man.”

“You are silly fool, then, to shrivel and dry soon.”

Gray couldn’t bear his towering over her any longer. “Won’t you sit down?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll stand.” When she did so the Masai glanced at her with surprise. Gray was six feet tall, and looked him in the eye now. “Anything you want to say to Dr. Richardson will have to go through me first. You want him to do something for you, right?”

The Masai’s eyes narrowed. “Yez … but I wait for Richasan.”

“What is it?” Gray stood right next to him, close enough to make him uncomfortable. “An apartment? Or you want into Harvard?”

“I do not come for myself,” he said with disgust. “For others. These, not even my people—”

“Who?”

The man turned away. “Richasan.”

Gray was beginning to get curious. She tried polite conversation. “How long have you been in the U.S.?”

“One day.”

“What are you here for, to study?”

“Yez …” he said carefully. “I learn this white people.”

“What will you study?”

His eyes glimmered. “Your weakness.”

“You’re a spy, then.”

“We want you out of my country.”

Gray nodded. “I’ve done some work for Kenyan independence myself.”

“The lady has not worked so hard, then,” said the Masai dryly. “You are still there.”

“Well, who in Kenya would listen to a woman?”

“Yez.”

“We’re not the same tribe, you know. As the English.”

“No, you are the same. This becomes clear with Corgie.”

“Who is Corgie?”

The Masai did not respond.

“How do you plan to get the whites out?”

“Masai—” He raised his chin high. “We like to put the man to sleep with steel, the woman with wood. But the gun … Kikuyu think we best fight with talk. Kikuyu talk so much, this is all Kikuyu know,” said the Masai with disdain. “But this time Kikuyu right. I begin my study already. This white man smart with his gun, not so smart in his head.”

“Don’t underestimate your opponent,” said Gray pointedly.

“We get most whites out with talk. Talk take time. One will not wait. I come to Richasan.”

“Whom do you want to get rid of?”

The Masai folded his arms.

Gray released a tolerant sigh. She went back to her chair, settling in for the duration. “Where did you learn English?”

“Richasan. He come to my country. I save his life,” said the warrior grandly.

“How?” Gray hadn’t heard this story.

“Richasan make this picture. My people want to kill him with steel. They think this camera, it take the soul away. Ridiculous. I have worked this camera. Ridiculous to think a man could take your soul.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Gray quietly, with a slight smile. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

The Masai looked down at her with new interest, though he didn’t press her to explain. “So I stop the killing of Richasan. I help with his work. He teach me English. My English excellent.”

Gray shrugged. “It’s all right.”

“My English vedy, vedy excellent,” he reasserted with feeling.

“Your English is very excellent.”

“Yez.”

“No, I mean you left out the verb. You said it wrong.”

The Masai answered angrily in his own language.

“You’re quite right,” said Gray. “To outstrip a foreigner in one’s home tongue is weak and easy. But you were being arrogant, and I don’t think I deserved that kind of language.”

The Masai stared at her and said nothing, as if doubting his ears. Gray had responded in Masai—correct, intelligible, and beautifully spoken. As he was silent, she went on, “If you were more comfortable in your own language, you should have said so.”

The Masai stared, and she was concerned she’d angered him—Masai were easily offended. Still, she went on, enjoying the language she so rarely got to use, its lilting, playful, vowelridden sound: “And I don’t think I bear the least resemblance to a hyena, in heat or not.” Hyena, “ol-ngyine,” she took care to pronounce just as he had.

The Masai began to laugh. He extended his hand over the table and clasped hers. “Good, Msabu.” His grip was strong and dry. “Vedy, vedy good, Msabu. Hassatti. Pleasure, big pleasure.” Hassatti took a seat opposite Gray. “How you learn Masai?”

“Richasan.”

“Msabu must like my people,” he said with satisfaction.

“You’re a powerful and magnificent tribe. Straight. Angry. You bow to no one. I’ve studied and admired you a great deal.”

“So why you treat Hassatti from so high? Change his English?”

“What I admire I also embrace. I also bow to no one, even Masai.”

“Ah.” Hassatti nodded. “Now tell Hassatti. In America United States, this woman is different thing? Yez?”

“I’m different. Yes.”

Hassatti’s brow rumpled. “Richasan, he do not warn me of this … Why Msabu has no husband? Your father ask too many cows?”

“I strike my own bargains.”

Hassatti reached out and touched Gray’s fine honey hair, pulling a strand toward him across the table and running it between his fingers with a smile. “Eight, ten. Beautiful fine strong cows. Barely bled.”

“I’m very flattered, but why don’t you just tell me why you’re here?”

“It is man’s business.”

“I’ll strain my brain.”

“You want twelve?” asked Hassatti, incensed. “Twelve cuts Hassatti’s herd in half—”

Gray held up her hand. “I don’t judge by wealth but by what you consider a man’s business.”

That seemed to make sense to Hassatti. “I come in kindness,” he said loftily. “These are not my people.”

“That’s admirable.”

So encouraged, Hassatti stood and strode about the small room. Gray watched him with pleasure. There was nothing like the unabashed self-glorification of a Masai warrior, even in a gray suit. Hassatti switched completely to Masai, and told his story with style and drama, as he might have to a gathering in his own kraal. Gray could imagine the fire flashing up shadows against the mud-and-dung walls, the long faces row on row, huddled in their hides, baobabs creaking in the wind.

“When the sea washes forward over stones and withdraws again,” he began, “sometimes cupfuls are caught between the rocks and the water remains. So the Masai washed long ago over the peaks of Kilimanjaro into the highest hills, the deepest creases. A small party got separated from their tribe and caught in a pocket, with the hills reaching steeply on all sides. Tired and lost and with no cattle, they erected their kraals and remained cut off like a puddle.

“As a puddle will grow scummy, dead, and dark with no stream to feed it, so did this people stagnate and grow stupid. Their minds blackened and clouded, and they no longer remembered their brother Masai. Caught in the crevices of Kilimanjaro, these warriors had sons who dismissed the talk of other tribes as superstition. They called themselves Il-Ororen, The People, as if there were no others. With no cows to tend, they scraped the soil like savages; the clay from the roots and insects on which they fed filled their heads, and their thoughts stuck together like feet against earth in the monsoons.

“Meanwhile, the Masai had forgotten about the Puddle, leaving this obscure tribe for dead. My people had greater troubles: a scourge of pale and crafty visitors infested the highlands. As we discussed, Msabu, they still do. Forgive, Msabu, but white like grubs, haired like beasts, they played many tricks, trying to trade silly games for the fine heifers of the Masai. These grubs tried to herd and fence my people as we do our cows, making rules against the raids on the Kikuyu with which a man becomes a warrior. The white people liked to show off their games like magic, but the wise of the Masai were not fooled. Hassatti has learned,” he said archly, “to work the dryer of hair. Hassatti has flown in the airplane.

“Yet the Puddle was lucky for a long time. Your people, Msabu, did not discover them. The trees and hills obscured their muddy kraals. Arrogant and dull, Il-Ororen continued to think they were the only humans in the world. Imagine their surprise, then, Msabu, when one of your own warriors landed his small airplane in the thick of this crevice and emerged from its cockpit with his hat and his clothing, with all its zippers and pockets, and his face blanched like the sky before snow—”

“Hassatti, when was this? What year?”

Hassatti looked annoyed. To place the story within a particular time was somehow to make it tawdrier and more ordinary. “Nineteen hundred and forty-three, perhaps,” said Hassatti, “though the boy from whom this story was taken is an idiot of the Puddle and cannot be trusted. Who knows if he can count seasons.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Gray. “Go on.”

“Well, the wise Masai of the highlands always knew what your people were—clever, but often weak and fat; with no feeling for cows, but good with metal. Granted your women store their breasts in cups and your men grow fur, but you copulate and excrete; you bleed and die, though—excuse, Msabu—not often enough for Hassatti’s tastes. All this my people could see. Yet Il-Ororen of the Puddle had grown superstitious and easily awed. With the constant looming of the cliffs on all sides, shadows played over their heads and made them fearful. When the white warrior stepped into their bush they quivered. They imagined he was a ghost or a god. They bowed down and cast away their spears, or ran into the forest. They had eaten clay for too long and their smiths made dull arrows, their women made pots with holes; their minds would hold no more cleverness than their pots would hold water. They had forgotten how to raid and be warriors, since there was no one from whom to steal cattle, and their boys were no longer circumcised.”

“So what happened?”

“I will give Il-Ororen this much: the gun is a startling thing, and even the sharp arrows are not much good against it, and the man Corgie made this clear with great swiftness.”

“How many people did he shoot?”

“We do not know. Yet this Corgie is of interest, Msabu, for in my studies the white man does plenty of foolish things, and Hassatti is amazed that the Corgie could fly into the crevice and set up a kingdom as a god and not soon disappoint his disciples, even if they were only Puddle people.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Gray, beginning to get excited, for if Hassatti was telling the truth—that there was a tribe out there that had never been in contact with Western civilization before—then he was talking about an anthropological gold mine. The discovery of the peoples of New Guinea in the twenties had made several careers, and that was supposed to be the last frontier … Gray was on the edge of her chair. “This man Corgie stayed? Didn’t go back and tell anyone?”

“No, he still reigns there. He shoots those who disobey. Hassatti has no respect for such a tribe, superstitious and easily trapped, but they were once Masai and now they are servants to this ungentle visitor, so Hassatti has come to his old friend Richasan so that the Corgie may be flushed out of the crevice and brought to justice.”

“How did you hear about Corgie?”

“There was a boy of the Puddle who had two brothers. They had been playing on a sacred square of dirt and made the Corgie angry. I know this seems ridiculous to you and me, but this boy spoke of some area of their compound that was worshipped and made perfectly flat, marked with mysterious lines he believed to be about the stars. His brothers disrupted the surface of this square and were killed; the boy, too, had been party to the gouging of the sacred flatness, and fled the village, climbed the cliffs, forded rivers, and finally wandered into my own kraal. It took him much time to talk at all, for he was frightened of the Masai, as he was of this Corgie—he supposed the Puddle to be all the world’s people. I did not blame him, either, for fearing the Masai. We are a great and strong people raised on meat and blood, and he was weak and scratched dirt and ate ants. He huddled in the corner of my hut for some days and would not speak, and no one of us could say where he was from. He was stunted, and had none of the earrings, markings, or clothing of my people. Though old enough, he was not circumcised. He would not eat the meat or milk we put before him, but when our backs were turned he would tear the insects from the ground and the roots from the trees.

“We thought he was a savage, but when he spoke at last he did not speak Swahili or Kikuyu, but a garbled tongue with words we recognized. With these and pictures, we pieced together his story. We might not have believed it but for the occasional rumor we Masai ourselves sometimes heard of a warrior who got lost in the far bush and returned telling tales of a gnomish clan in the wrinkles of the mountains who offered him no meat and no milk and no wife to share, but shut him out of their compound. And when this boy first saw white people in our midst, he screeched like a flamingo and hid in my hut. To this day I do not believe I have convinced him that your people are not gods. Forgive, Msabu, but the fallibility of your people seems so self-evident to me that I have to conclude the boy is a complete dwarf in the head.”

“Why have you come to Richardson? Why didn’t you go after Corgie yourselves?”

“Would that we could, Msabu. It pains Hassatti, but for the Masai to take action against a white man is dangerous. It is best for a tribe to discipline its own.”

Gray nodded. Richardson would be salivating if he were here. He’d be on the phone already, chartering a plane to Nairobi.

“Hassatti …” said Gray slowly, “you know how it is customary for boys to go out on the plains and slaughter a lion that’s been killing Masai cattle, and when he returns with the tail and paws he’s considered a man?”

“Yez.”

“Any man—or woman, Bwana—wants to pass such a test, Masai or not. I have yet to pass my test. I want to, desperately. Dr. Richardson has passed many. He is ol-moruo, an old man, now. Let me have Corgie, as you would send a young warrior to kill a beast when the elder has killed several.”

Hassatti looked at her hard. “You? Go after Corgie?”

Gray’s face flushed and her heart beat. “I am very tall,” she said simply, “and very strong and very brilliant.”

Errol could see it, hear it; he liked to play this moment over in his mind: I am very tall and very strong and very brilliant. Her ears scarlet, her eyes that piercing blue-gray.

Hassatti kept looking at her. “Perhaps—Richasan should decide.”

“Dr. Richardson wouldn’t trust me, and he never will. He will never believe I’m that grown up, just as your father will never believe you’re a man.”

“Ah.” Hassatti nodded and smiled. Gray was only twenty-two, but she already understood how much psychology crossed cultures. Fathers condescended the world over.

“Richardson may never let me hunt my lion,” said Gray. “Will you?”

Hassatti shook his head with incredulity, reached over, and touched her cheek. “Ol-changito,” he said. “’L-oo-lubo.”

He had called her a wild animal; an impala, though translated literally “’l-oo-lubo” means “that which is not satisfied.”

Gray replied, “Ol-murani.”

Hassatti shook his head. “E-ngoroyoni.”

“Ol-murani o-gol,” Gray reasserted.

Hassatti shook his head again and smiled. “E-ngoroyoni na-nana.”

There was a conflict of interpretations here. Gray claimed to be a warrior, as Errol knew she saw herself. “Ol-murani” was an old joke with her, though they both knew it was no joke, not really. Yet Hassatti had called her something else, and wouldn’t take it back.

“You have,” said Hassatti, “a great deal to learn, ’l-oo-lubo. And as long as Msabu claims she is ol-murani o-gol and not e-ngoroyoni na-nana, she will not understand what even such a clever antelope must master.”

“And what is that?”

“To pour is to fill, Msabu. Ol-changito, to pour is to fill.”

“I’ll remember that,” said Gray.

“No, you will not,” he assured her. “This is to be understood, not remembered, fleet one. The words have already flown from your head like birds of different flocks to separate trees.

“However,” said Hassatti. “Since ’l-oo-lubo is such a costly creature, and she will not accept the twelve cows, perhaps Msabu will accept from Hassatti: one lion.”

Gray smiled. “And you won’t tell Richardson where I’ve gone?”

“No more,” he said, “than I would show him the food in my mouth.” Hassatti then wrote the name of his tribe and where it was currently located; he drew her a map and gave her the name of his family. “Now you will bring me the paws and tail of Corgie when you return?”

“You mean I should deliver the witch’s slippers?”

“The Corgie wears slippers—?”

“Never mind. I’ll bring you his gun, how’s that?”

“Most of all for Hassatti ’l-oo-lubo must go out and become wise. Then come back and we will talk of becoming Hassatti’s wife.”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be that wise,” said Gray.

“Neither do I,” said Hassatti. “I tell you, Msabu, it will take you a long time, longer than most e-ngoroyoni. Know from Hassatti that this will cost you. It is like when a boy waits too long and becomes all grown before he is circumcised. There is much pain, and slow healing.”

It was five in the morning. Hassatti said he would wait for his friend Richardson; Gray would find an airplane. They spoke in Masai.

“Well, I am about to go,” said Gray.

“Aiya naa, sere! Goodbye. Pray to God, accost only the things which are safe, and meet no one but blind people.”

“Lie down,” said Gray, “with honey wine and milk.”

“So be it.”

Hassatti followed her out the door to watch that long, sweeping stride of hers, listening to the clean click of her heels against the linoleum like the clop of small hooves. Gray never seemed to be walking fast, but she covered ground quickly, like a languorous, leggy animal across the plain. Strange she was not Masai. She had the bones of his own people. Hassatti could see her ranging into the bush, standing spear-straight to meet this ghostlike white man and his many guns. Though he had just arrived in this new country and had much to study, Hassatti almost went after her down the hall, for this was a scene he would have given much to see.

Gray returned that morning to her apartment, having arranged her trip to Nairobi for the following day. She sat at her desk and composed three notes. First, to Richardson, she wrote: “On good advice I am off to become wise.—Gray Kaiser.”

Second, she wrote the man she was dating. Most certainly he wanted to marry her, too. “Dear Dan,” she jotted. “I’ve been called out of town. May be gone for a long time. Don’t hold your breath. —G.”

So you put a stamp on it, Gray, what was it, three cents then? That’s how much it cost you. What did it cost him, though? You didn’t even know. Set on the corner of your desk, it was one more of those easy dismissals of a man who adored you. Ever since she was fifteen, men had been proposing to her, and she’d learned early to whisk them away like so many flies. How many times had Errol himself watched her discard prostrate admirers? He’d enjoyed watching, yet it pained him a little. Errol truly believed she didn’t understand how they felt, and for an anthropologist that was a failing.

The third letter she sent to her father, and it was the one note of consideration she struck all morning. Gray enclosed a copy of Hassatti’s map, just in case she didn’t return. Perhaps Gray feared as Errol did each time they returned to Kenya that ol-changito, let loose on those hard-packed plains, would lope across the white horizon to graze under acacia trees, to bolt between watering holes, to sniff the hard brilliant air and so give up on English and coffee and little efficient notes in the mail altogether.

More likely she knew the situation she was walking into was dangerous. Even Gray now admitted that going on this expedition by herself had been pigheaded. But ol-murani was planning on shouldering her pack and her spear and her wooden club and launching off into the sunset to find her lion … Gray had seen too many Westerns, and you knew she identified, not with the simpering prairie wives, but with the sharpshooters.

Gray took out her tent and began to reroll it to fit into its insanely small bag. So it was dangerous. So he had guns. Gray paused at the thought for one tiny, intelligent moment. She took a breath and kept on going. Fine. Here was a woman who had spent the better part of World War II thinking. Enough was enough. She was tired of having men tell stories about dragging their best friends for ten miles on their backs under fire, all the while Gray feeling abstracted and left out. It was time to begin a life in which actions could have consequences.