Lost in the Jungle (32 page)

‘First of all, call home,’ the consul instructed me.

The secretary got a line for me, and soon I heard my father’s voice.

‘Dad, it’s me, Yossi. I’m all right. I’m safe now.’

My father’s feelings came over the phone with his voice. ‘Don’t you ever do anything like that again,’ he said sternly, and then my mother was on the line. She was crying. ‘I can’t stand it any longer. I want to see you. Come home. Yossi, come right home.’

‘Everything’s all right, Mom. I’ll be home soon. There’s nothing for you to worry about now.’

We all calmed down a bit, and I swore that I wasn’t lying.

‘Honest, I’m not injured, and I’m not sick. Everything is just fine. I’m sure that you had a worse time of it than I did.’

The old-folks’ home was practically deserted. The consul had given Kevin permission to stay there. Grandma looked over our papers and showed us to a room.

‘You don’t have to go through your spiel, Grandma. I know the rules.’

She obviously didn’t recognise me.

A letter had arrived by express mail. It filled in my story as experienced on the other side of the ocean.

Kevin was already involved with preparations for a second search party. He was determined to go looking for traces of Karl and Marcus. This time he decided to go properly equipped: a shotgun, ammunition, suitable clothing, medicines, and people to help him. He got the five hundred dollars that Marcus had left with his friend Roger.

I was torn with indecision. I was terribly eager to go along with Kevin, but I wasn’t sure that I was capable of it, especially since my feet were not entirely healed.

The consul became furious when he heard that I was even considering going back into the jungle.

‘I’ll shoot you myself before I’ll let you do it,’ he said in a rage. ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you no consideration? If you don’t care about us, at least think about your parents.’

Kevin gave me another good scolding and didn’t want to hear about me going along. Some Israeli friends volunteered to go with him instead. I was so thin and weak that I would have been more of a burden than a help. I accompanied them to the airport, and saying goodbye was one of the most difficult things that I had ever done. We planned to meet in Brazil as soon as we could. Neither Kevin nor I had given up on completing our travels in South America.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Kevin on my way back from the airport. The cab pulled out onto the highway and then wove through the maze of city streets. Passing cabs honked, and buses filled beyond capacity sped by, leaving a trail of black exhaust. The sidewalks were crowded with people: ragged beggars alongside elegantly suited men, loudmouthed vendors, and filthy street urchins. A stench rose from the sewage that ran down the gutters. A big city, overcrowded, noisy. People, thousands of them – good people, lovely people.

Tears ran down my cheeks. The cab driver noticed and gave me a worried glance. I tugged at my nose once or twice and throatily commented,
‘La vida es bonita. ¿No es,
señor
?’

‘
Si,
señor,’ he agreed, ‘life is beautiful,’ though he was probably thinking, ‘I swear, these gringos are absolutely
locos
.’

Kevin’s second rescue mission was both arduous and disappointing. Only one of the Israelis stuck with him to the end, and their two Bolivian guides often called on
them
for help.

They started out from the village of Ipurama, which had been Karl and Marcus’s destination. They progressed along the Ipurama River, searching its banks for signs of them. Within a few days they had made it down to where the Ipurama flows into the Tuichi, the place where our party had split up. From there they started back, painstakingly searching both banks of the river.

They never found a single trace, any sign at all that Karl and Marcus had passed that way: no campfires, shreds of clothing, broken branches, faeces, or footprints. Nothing. It was as if the two of them had vanished into the jungle air.

I later met up with Kevin in Brazil, in Salvador, the capital of Bahia. I had been cared for solicitously by my uncle in São Paulo. My feet were almost entirely healed, and the enormous quantity of steaks that I had downed had gotten my weight back up and cured my anaemia. We went to Rio de Janeiro together for Carnaval. Then Kevin returned to the United States, and I went home to Israel.

A few months later I flew to Oregon, where I met Kevin’s wonderful family. Then I went to visit Marcus’s family in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. It was a difficult meeting. They wanted to know every detail of our trip and Marcus’s disappearance. I told them the whole truth, keeping nothing back. We cried together.

As a final gesture Marcus’s father held a sort of rite of absolution. He thanked me for coming to see them and for telling them all I could about their son. He ordered me to stop feeling guilty and asked me to pass that message on to Kevin too.

While it seemed that Marcus’s father had given up hope, his mother, a devoted spiritualist, harboured not the slightest doubt that her younger son was alive: if he were dead, she maintained, he would have contacted her from the other side; he would have found a way to tell her goodbye. I knew what she referred to, as I remembered Marcus had told me once about the telepathic communication he’d had his entire life with his mother.

Her faith never diminished. A year later she financed a group of Seventh-day Adventists, who agreed to form a search party. They came back empty-handed, battered, and bitten.

Rainer, Marcus’s brother, believed that Karl had planned for us to separate from the beginning. He suggested that Karl could have hidden food and equipment earlier at the junction of the Ipurama and Tuichi rivers, then engineered our split.

Karl could have led Kevin and me to believe that he was heading up the Ipurama in the direction of the village, but in fact, gone off in the opposite direction, toward the Peruvian border. Karl had done so, in Rainer’s opinion, so that it would appear as if something had happened to them, that they had perished in the jungle. Then Karl could have easily assumed a new identity.

Kevin, while still in Bolivia, met a charming Israeli girl at the old-folks’ home. Orna joined him on his search for Marcus and Karl. As if that drama wasn’t enough for him, Kevin was also falling in love. About a year later Kevin arrived in Israel for a reunion with Orna, and soon after they married. They live happily near Tel Aviv with their two beautiful sons, Eyal and Yuval. Kevin and I are close friends to this very day. I love him like my brother. I owe him my life, for which I will be eternally indebted to him. I admire him for the person he is, a giant of a man. Karl used to call him ‘strong like three men,’ referring not only to his body, but also his special spirit. Kevin will always be a role model for me, for he is one of those rare people of continuously high morals; he never hesitated when immediate decisions or action were needed. Kevin, from the bottom of my heart, thank you, my brother, my friend, forever.

Six years after coming back from Tuichi, I was contacted by an Israeli magazine with an offer to write several articles about South America. This was my first opportunity to return to Rurrenabaque. I found that it had changed. The town was bigger, busier. Settlers from the
altiplano
had flocked there by the thousands. Convoys of trucks, arriving empty, left creaking under loads of mahogany. Saloons had materialised and with them loud music and the stench of urine.

Tico seemed happy to see me and delighted to take me up the Tuichi in his motorboat. The river was as magnificent and wild as before. We set out for San José, still the only settlement on the river, and continued to Progreso, where I had been rescued. It was a less emotional journey than I had expected. In fact, I was surprised how much I enjoyed myself. There was no animosity between me and the rainforest. On the contrary, I felt a strong attraction and was determined to make the jungle a part of my life.

Back in Rurrenabaque I was introduced to an old Hungarian, a refugee from World War II, and though he was drunk when we met, I found what he told beyond compelling. He began by claiming to know Karl well. He hadn’t seen him for some time, but just a few months earlier in Cochabamba a Swiss priest had mentioned that Karl had visited not long before.

Excited, I flew to Cochabamba and found the priest, Father Erich, at a mission just outside town. Both he and Sister Ingrid, a nun who also lived at the mission, confirmed that Karl was alive, living nearby in the town of Santa Cruz. They showed me a photo they said was recent and told me stories of troubles he had caused them. I left bewildered: I wanted to believe, and I didn’t want to believe. In no time I was in Santa Cruz and spent a week doing the best detective work I could but found not a single bit of corroborating evidence.

I had maintained contact with Marcus’s mother and knew that she had never accepted her son’s death. About two years after my return from Rurrenabaque I flew at her request to Schaffhausen to meet with her. She insisted that she had new information to share, information, it turned out, she had received from a clairvoyant renowned for his success in finding lost relatives.

‘Marcus is still alive,’ she told me. ‘That is certain. He lives in Peru on a high plateau with Indians who found him nearly dead and nursed him back to health. He has lost his memory, which prevents his coming home.’ On a map of Peru she had marked a remote Andean community. She gave me the map and asked me to go there to look for him. I agreed.

Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital, is one of my favourite South American cities. I have a friend there, José Ugarte, who happens to be a mountain guide. Looking at the map together, we determined one thing was sure: the clairvoyant couldn’t have picked a better spot. Huanacaran was one of the most dangerous places on the continent, a zone controlled by Shining Path guerrillas. The night before our departure my friend came to my hotel room and, with his eyes fixed on the tile floor, told me he couldn’t go. I didn’t blame him, though it was too late to find another guide.

I remember that night so clearly. Marcus’s mother had made just one request before I left: have faith in her conviction. But I lacked her confidence. The story she told was too far-fetched. That night in Cuzco, however, I knew I had to believe as she did, otherwise it was better not to go. I thought of Marcus, and suddenly I was back in the jungle, where one discovers the darkness in one’s heart. How frightening that can be.
Marcus, your mother can still hear your heartbeat; she can hear your voice singing. Wherever you are, I am coming to take you home, my brother. You know you’ll always live in my heart. Wait for me there, Marcus, I am walking toward you.

There were three of us at the train station: a cook who spoke Quechua, a helper from Lima too broke to say no, and me. The journey was full of surprises. At the first station José Ugarte appeared. He had spent a sleepless night, repenting his decision not to go. Farther down the line, representatives of the military climbed aboard. They briefly checked our documents and destination, then trouble started. The cook was dragged away in handcuffs. At the point of submachine guns the rest of us were taken off the train for interrogation. A gringo escorted by a suspicious-looking little band, well equipped for mountain survival, claiming to be looking for a friend lost years ago in Bolivia! They weren’t buying that. But I guess the calls they made to the contacts I gave them convinced them of my story, since they let us go and even provided a letter of introduction to the mayor of Azángaro, near our destination.

We reached Azángaro and found the station all but deserted. Once a prosperous city, Azángaro had been largely abandoned. Suspicion clouded the faces of those who remained. We couldn’t help but laugh at the derelict municipal palace, where we went to present our letter and seek the mayor’s assistance. No guards, no staff, an empty antechamber leading to a short, echoing hallway. We knocked and opened the door of the mayor’s office, and the man lost not a second jumping out the window at the sight of us. The night before, three officials had been murdered in Asilio, less than fifty miles away. So much for assistance.

We couldn’t find a driver who would carry us to our destination but caught a bus that still made the run partway. José didn’t know the region, but he knew mountains. The second day we reached the point marked on our map. Its pastoral tranquillity belied the terror of the Azángaro locals. Marcus could have lived there, but he never had. No one recognised the man in the photo that I carried. Ultimately we travelled through ten similar communities. Never had a gringo lived in any of them.

Back in Azángaro I sought out the local priest, who ministers to all sixty-eight communities in the province of Azángaro. He had never encountered a foreigner in residence nor heard of hermits living alone in the mountains.

Karl and Marcus’s disappearance remains a mystery. It is difficult to imagine what could have become of them. Karl was tough and strong and knew how to take care of himself in the jungle. He could have survived even without food and equipment. He had had a shotgun, which made it almost unthinkable that they had fallen prey to jaguars or wild boars. The village of Ipurama was only four days’ walk from the point where they’d set out. Kevin had been back and forth over the route without finding a trace of them. What had become of them?

I can think of two possibilities. One is that Karl might have been seriously injured, perhaps in a fall. Marcus, who had been ill, thin, and downhearted, would never have made it out of the jungle on his own. The other possibility is falling trees. On rainy nights, as I had seen, trees uproot themselves and topple over, taking other trees with them. A tree could have fallen on their campsite, crushing them as they slept. To this day the mystery remains.

The rainforest has ever since been a major part of my life. While visiting San José on the Tuichi River, I found out that the situation in the village was desperate; the small, isolated community was struggling for survival, forced to destroy their ancestral lands with their own hands. They had no options for income other than slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting, or working as cheap labour for the loggers and miners, who are in the process of overtaking the region. I met with the community leaders and heard their fears about the steady elimination of the rainforest villages, since the youth are lacking employment and thus forced to leave for the big city. So together, we initiated the Chalalan Project.

The Chalalan valley lies not far from the Tuichi banks, about an hour downriver from San José. It is the most amazing rainforest scenery I’ve ever seen in my life: monkeys hanging from palm trees and a lake surrounded by precious, undisturbed hills. The beauty of the place makes one’s heart sing. So we obtained from the government an official concession of this land to the local indigenous people, and the community of San José declared it a protected area for conservation of nature and development of alternative economic routes for the forest dwellers. A group of volunteers, together with the indigenous community, worked with scientists and designers and engineers to build an ‘eco-village.’ Our goal was to prove that the forest could provide its inhabitants with all their needs and even make them prosper, if only it were treated with respect and that the sustainable use of renewable resources would be far more lucrative than the destructive exploitation of the non-renewable resources.

In July 1998, the Chalalan project finally became reality. It was officially inaugurated as one of the most celebrated ecotourism locations in the entire Amazon. I passionately invested all my faculties and facilities in Chalalan and completely immersed myself in the project.

It was the involvement of the Inter-American Development Bank and Conservation International, both out of Washington D.C., which made it possible. The bank granted us an amazing one and a quarter million U.S. dollars, and Conservation International agreed to take on the execution and provide their technical expertise and much-needed ongoing supervision.