My Life Among the Apes (7 page)

PAUL HAD KEPT A DISCREET distance from him during the visit, disappearing altogether for long stretches, and only reappeared by his side when he returned to the entrance. As they began their walk back to the station, Paul said, “If you will excuse this suggestion, perhaps you should have something to eat. It has been a long day without food or drink.”

“No, that's all right. I'll have something back at the hotel.” They rode the train and took a cab to the hotel. Bernie insisted on giving Paul money for a ride home. Then he went up to his room and ordered a sandwich from room service. Even after taking a shower, he felt as if his skin were covered in ash. He did not want Sarah to ask him about it. There was a knock on the door and he called, “Come in, I left it open.” The waiter pushed in the cart covered in a white cloth and with a silver lid over his sandwich. In his robe, Bernie walked towards the cart, felt flush, then nauseous, and the ground rolled up from under him.

THE HOSPITAL KEPT HIM OVERNIGHT, not because of the bruise on his temple, but for his low blood sugar and slightly elevated heart rate. “Just to be on the safe side,” the doctor said in English, looking over his glasses. Bernie decided not to call Sarah right away. His health plan allowed for a private room, but he slept fitfully, aggravated by the intravenous drip, vaguely aware of the occasional presence of the night nurse, longing for Ida. He was grateful when the sky began to lighten and finally the breakfast tray arrived. Only after he ate did he pick up the telephone.

It was less than half an hour before Sarah hurried into the room, Paul following behind her. She looked a mess, her face pale and her eyes almost wild.

“Zeyde, Zeyde, are you all right?” She leaned over the bed to hug him.

“Yes, yes, it's nothing. Paul was right, I needed to eat, that was all. You don't have to worry.”

“I want to speak to the doctor,” Sarah said. “Did you see a specialist? You absolutely have to see a specialist.”

To Paul he said, “She takes after the women in the family.”

“Oh, Zeyde, I should have gone with you. I don't know what's wrong with me.”

“No,” he said. “It's good you didn't. That would have been unbearable, darling.”

HE WAS NOT RELEASED UNTIL the middle of the afternoon. They went to a restaurant across the street from the hospital, a real German place, the menu heavy with pork, sausage, and beef dishes, and everything accompanied by
Kartoffel.
But he only had soup and a little fish. Afterwards they took him to the hotel by taxi and although Sarah wanted to stay for the evening, he shooed them out. She made him promise that he would stay put until the morning when she would come to spend his last day with him. “That's an easy promise to make,” he said, smiling at her.

She arrived at his hotel prepared to spend a quiet day in his room, or perhaps to take a little stroll. But he was ready to go out, guidebook in pocket. “I haven't seen the highlights yet. The Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie. What's left of the wall.”

“I don't want you getting tired, Zeyde.”

“So we'll splurge on a cab or two.”

As they walked she took his arm. He felt his heart lighten with the warmth of her. Just her presence made him feel happy. At lunch, she leaned towards him and said, “I like it here, Zeyde. And I feel guilty about liking it. But sometimes I'm uncomfortable, too. I get really spooked. It's like, the things growing here are beautiful, but under the earth there's blood feeding the roots. I feel conflicted all the time. About Paul, too. I look down at my feet, I see one of those little bronze markers, that a Jewish person lived there, the date of his or her deportation, and I think, what am I doing here? When you announced that you were coming and just the idea of you being here freaked me out. And then going to Sachsenhausen. I've been meaning to go myself, I almost did a month ago, but every time I try ...”

She just shook her head. He put his hand — bony, liverspotted — over hers. “I'll tell you something. Something different, I mean. You want to know how your grandmother and I met?”

She looked confused by his change of subject, but she said, “Yes, please.”

“In a dream.”

“Excuse me?”

“I was working in the office of a jewellery store on King Street. One night I dreamed a woman came in. As soon as I saw her I knew that we were destined to be husband and wife. Of course it was just a dream and I didn't think anything of it. But then a month later, I was talking on the telephone to a customer and a woman walked in — the same woman as in the dream. Ida. I didn't tell her though, not until after we were engaged. I was afraid she would think I was crazy.”

“I don't believe it! What could it mean?”

He shrugged. “She died in her sleep, you know. In bed, beside me. I've been very lucky in my life.”

IN THE MORNING, THE AUTOMATIC telephone call woke him. Getting out of bed, he felt sore on his left side from the fall. He washed, dressed in the newly pressed suit, and waited for the bellboy to come and fetch his suitcase.

He stood outside the glass doors of the hotel while the doorman walked to the street to flag a taxi. The morning was cold and bright. All that waited for him on the other side of the ocean was an empty house with the thermostat turned down. The driver opened the trunk and put in the suitcase. The cab door was open, but he hesitated a moment longer and, sure enough, he heard Sarah's voice calling. He saw her hurrying across the square, hair loose, looking so wonderfully young and alive. She bounded up the stairs and now she was hugging him hard, her face wet, saying into his ear, “I'm really, really happy you came, Zeyde. I'm just so glad.”

He tried to laugh but found himself suppressing a sob instead. “I am too, sweetheart. But you know what? I never finished the Heinrich Böll. It was good, but it was beyond me.”

My Life Among the Apes

FOR NEARLY A YEAR I lived among the apes. I knew by sight more than two dozen chimpanzees living by Lake Tanganyika in the remote Gombe Stream Game Reserve. Goliath, the alpha male. David Greybeard. Rudolph. Flo. I was among those who first saw a chimp make and use a tool — a twig stripped of its leaves and thrust into the hole of a termite hill. Once a mother held her infant out for me to groom. Once I witnessed a colony of chimps surround a stray member of another tribe and commit murder.

And then I gave it all up.

HOFFSTEDDER IS ON MY CASE again. First, someone in the branch has been using an anonymous blog to write slurs about management. Second, for reasons unexplained, the number of after-hour deposits at our ATM has declined by four percent. Third, a passcard has gone missing.

I am fifty-one years old and have not risen as far as others my age, but I came to banking late, after an unfinished Ph.D. and careers in housing management and commercial liability insurance. The best that I can say about banking is that I like the people I work with (all except Hoffstedder) and I can walk to work in forty minutes.

The staff under me, tellers and assistant managers, are fifteen to twenty-five years younger. They are first and second-generation sons and daughters of India, Pakistan, Portugal, Iran, the Azores. They are inexpensively but sharply dressed. Both sexes wear earrings, but other visible piercings are not permitted while at work. Little indentations can be seen, by an eyebrow, a lip, where a stud or ring has been removed. They spend their lunch hours text messaging their friends. On Monday mornings they look wasted from weekend raves, or whatever it is they do. The younger ones seem to form no permanent relationships but have a lot of sex. They live two worlds away from my own, and I wish them well.

ONE DAY WHEN I was eleven, I came home to find the latest
National Geographic
on the kitchen counter, along with a glass of milk and a wedge of burnt-sugar cake. I opened it and saw a beautiful, young blond woman washing her hair in a stream.

“Don’t disappear with that magazine,” my mother warned me as I slipped off the stool. “Nobody else has seen it yet.”

We lived in the suburb of Willowdale. I had my own room while my older brothers shared one. A desk, a bookcase, a
World Book Encyclopedia
, a telescope. I was short for my age, and overweight. I dreaded gym class. Two girls down the street tormented me every day on the way home. In the evening we watched
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
.

But that night I began to live in the jungle.

MY WIFE, LIZETTE, IS A teacher in a private girl’s school. Even when we met, over two decades ago, her anxiousness made it hard for her to see a movie or attend a party where there might be strangers. Not until after our third child was old enough for Lizette to go back to work part-time did the true panic attacks begin. She had to take a medical leave and endure hours of fitfully successful therapy before the proper dosage of a new drug began to help. Medication has made life more tolerable for her, although I became the one who took our boys to hockey practice and attended our daughter’s piano recitals.

I still find myself frustrated and angry that we cannot go on holidays, or to the theatre, or to a dinner party. Two years ago I conceived the idea of visiting France for my fiftieth birthday, but of course we could not go. I fantasize about going on my own (and having an affair with a beautiful woman), but along with the fantasy comes guilt and shame, which results in my treating Lizette with an excessive delicacy that annoys her.

FOR MY SCIENCE PRESENTATION THE year I was eleven, I chose Jane Goodall’s research on primate behaviour. I stood before the class and talked about how as a young girl she had written down her observations of birds and animals around her home, then as a young woman how she had become secretary to the famous paleontologist Louis Leakey, who was looking for someone to study chimpanzees in the wild. I spoke of her findings: how chimps slept in nests that they made by bending branches down with their feet, how grooming was an important form of social interaction. I passed around photographs.

Two photographs I kept to myself. One was Jane Goodall washing her hair. The other was a close-up of her in profile looking into the face of a chimp. Her own eyes blue, her lips slightly parted. That night in bed, I imagined writing to Jane Goodall and telling her of my admiration for her work. At the same time, I modestly pointed out something that she had missed but that I noticed from the photographs, an observation about the way chimpanzees communicate with gestures. I sent the letter to her care of the offices of the National Geographic Society and in a short time I received a telegram which the delivery man read while my family stood by the door and listened.

BRILLIANT OBSERVATION STOP HAVE UNFILLED ASSISTANT POSITION STARTING IMMEDIATELY STOP YOU ARE URGENTLY NEEDED STOP PLANE TICKET ARRIVING TOMORROW STOP JANE GOODALL

My parents and my brothers stared at me in stunned amazement. Finally my dad said, “Well, son, you better get packing.”

I EMAIL A REPORT ABOUT the missing passcard to Hoffstedder. Our newest and youngest teller, Kate Sulimani, accidentally took it home. Her boyfriend hid it as a prank and when Kate found out and demanded it back, he couldn’t find it. They think it ended up in the recycled trash but as its destruction can’t be proven I have taken the precaution of recalling all the passcards and ordering replacements with new codes.

Hoffstedder’s reply is two words: “Fire her.” I write back, explaining that this is Kate Sulimani’s first job out of community college, that staff members have occasionally forgotten to leave their passcards, and that she understands the gravity of her error.

He writes back again. “I said fire her.”

I have no choice but to call her into my office. She leaves in tears. When I come out to get a coffee, the other tellers will not look at me.

Before Christmas two months ago, Kate Sulimani drew my name. At the party she gave me a tie. You have to look very closely at the pattern to see that it is made up of little Homer Simpsons. I happen to be wearing that tie today.

I bring my coffee back to my desk and look for something to put it down on. I find the scrap of newspaper that I ripped out of the
Globe
a few days ago, the notice that Jane Goodall is coming to give a talk. She is on a fundraising mission for a group that wants to build a retirement sanctuary for old research chimps. Tickets are fifty dollars.

AT HOME I LISTEN TO a phone message from our older son. He isn’t coming home from school this weekend after all. I put the phone down and look for his brother to shoot some baskets until I remember that his band is having a rehearsal in the drummer’s garage. Our daughter is at her boyfriend’s. Lizette comes downstairs and as I open a bottle of Zinfandel, she starts chopping vegetables.

At the stove, Lizette says, “I see that Jane Goodall is coming to town.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She hasn’t phoned you?”

“Very funny.”

“Maybe we can go.”

“Really, it’s okay.”

THE FOLLOWING WINTER I BEGAN studying for my Bar Mitzvah. Some kids I knew developed an intense fervour about their Jewishness. They started wearing yarmulkes.

I was thinking about chimpanzees in the context of evolutionary theory.

On the day of my Bar Mitzvah, I wore a double-breasted suit with a light pink shirt and a blue tie. The synagogue was crowded with guests for me and also for a girl named Denise who was having her Bat Mitzvah. She read her portion flawlessly as was required, while I stumbled three times and the rabbi made me stop and repeat each word correctly.

Denise gave her talk first and then it was my turn. I was supposed to give an explanation of my Torah portion and draw from it a moral lesson. But I began by leaning into the microphone and quoting an earlier biblical passage:
And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Essau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man.