The Female of the Species

“That really does comfort you, doesn’t it?” Errol laughed. She was amazing.

Errol hoped Gray had gotten this eccentricity out of her system, but the following afternoon she proved otherwise. They were sitting in a circle of several women, all of whom had been girls between sixteen and twenty when Corgie ruled Il-Ororen. Now they were in their fifties like Gray, though Gray had weathered the years better than this group here—their skin had slackened, their breasts drooped, their spines curved. Still, as Errol watched these women through the camera lens while Gray prodded them about Charles, their eyes began to glimmer and they would shoot each other sly, racy smiles in a way that made them seem younger as the interview went on, until Errol could see clearly the smooth undulating hips and languorous side glances that must have characterized them as teenage girls.

“It was the men who believed he was a god,” one of them claimed in that peculiar Masai dialect of theirs. “We weren’t so fooled.”

Another woman chided, with a brush of her hand, “He was your god and you know it! I remember that one afternoon, and you were dancing around, and you were singing—”

“I was always dancing and singing then—”

“Oh, especially after!”

“Now, why did you suspect him, though?” Gray pressed.

“Well.” The first woman looked down, then back and forth at the others. “There were ways in which he was—very much the man.” She smiled. “A big man.”

The whole group broke down laughing, slapping the ground with the flats of their hands. “Very, very big!” said another. It took minutes for them to get over this good joke.

“Yes,” said one woman. “But if that makes him the man and not the god, then you give me the man!”

The interview was going splendidly now, yet when Errol looked over at Gray she was scowling.

“No, no,” another chimed in. “Now I have said years and years Il-Cor-gie was not ordinary. He was a god? I don’t know, but not like these other lazy good-for-nothings who lie around and drink honey wine all day and at night can’t even—”

“That’s right, that’s the truth,” they agreed.

“I’m telling you,” she went on, “that the next morning you did feel different. You could jump higher and run for many hills and you no longer needed food.”

“Yes! I felt that way, too! And it was a proven fact he made you taller.”

“What do you mean it was a proven fact?” asked Gray.

Errol looked over at her so abruptly that he bumped the camera and ruined the shot.

“Well, look at Ol-Kai-zer,” said one of the women, smiling. “She is very, very tall, is she not?”

They all started to laugh again, but cut themselves short when Gray stood abruptly and left the circle. Errol followed her with the camera as she stalked off to a nearby woodpile. The whole group stared in silence as Ol-Kai-zer bore down on a log with long, full blows of an ax until the wood was reduced to kindling. Panting, staring down at the splinters at her feet, Gray let the ax drop from her hand. Her shoulders heaved up and down, and her face was filled with concentrated panic. Her cheeks shone red and glistened with sweat. She would not look at Errol or at the women, but at last looked up at the sky, her neck stretched tight. Then she walked away. This was Gray Kaiser in the middle of an interview and she just—walked away.

“Did we offend Ol-Kai-zer?” asked a woman.

“No, no,” said Errol distractedly, still filming Gray’s departure. “It’s not you …” He turned back to them and asked sincerely, “Don’t people ever do things that you absolutely don’t understand?”

The women nodded vigorously. “Ol-Kai-zer,” said one, “was always like that. Back in the time of Il-Cor-gie—we never understood her for the smallest time. Then—yes, she was always doing this kind of thing, taking the big angry strides away.”

“I did not like her much then,” confided one woman in a small voice. Her name was Elya; this was the first time she’d spoken.

“Why?” asked Errol.

Elya looked at the ground. She was the lightest and most delicate of the group; her gestures retained the vanity of great beauty. “Back then—it was better before she came. Il-Cor-gie became funny. It was better before her. That is all.”

“He did get very strange,” another conceded.

“But you know why Elya didn’t like her—”

Elya looked up sharply and the woman stopped.

“He did, during that time remember, have us come to him almost every night.”

“Especially Elya—”

“Shush.”

“But he was not the same,” said Elya sulkily. The passing of so many years didn’t seem to have made much difference in her disappointment.

“Yes, that is true,” said the woman. “He was hard and not as fun and you did not jump as high in the morning.”

“He was far away,” said Elya sadly.

“Not so far, and you know it. You know where he was—”

“She bewitched him!”

“It is a fact,” many murmured. “She took his big power away. That is why he ended so badly. It was all her fault.”

Errol had this on film, and wondered how Gray would feel when she got this section back from the developers. She’d already confided to Errol that it was “all her fault,” and might not enjoy being told so repeatedly as she edited this reel.

Meanwhile the hunter was stalking the trail Gray and Errol had just hiked down the day before. Perhaps he paused by the same tree where Gray had thrown down her pack, picking up flung bits of sod and finding them still fresh, to quickly walk on again, completely silent as he so often was, and dark enough to blend in with the mottled shadows of late afternoon.

After putting away the camera, Errol found Gray in the hut where they were staying.

“Why did you walk off like that?” asked Errol.

“I felt claustrophobic,” said Gray.

“How can you feel claustrophobic in the middle of a field?”

She didn’t answer him. Instead, she said after some silence, “I’d like to take a shower.” She lay flat on her back, staring at the thatch ceiling. The hut smelled of sweet rotting grass and the smoke of old fires. It was a dark, crypt-like place, with a few shafts of gray light sifting from the door and the cracks in the walls. Gray’s palms lay folded on her chest like a pharaoh in marble. Her expression was peaceful and grave, yet with the strange blankness of white stone.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Errol.

“I would like,” she said, “to have warm water all over my body. I would like,” she said, “at the very least, to hold my hands under a tap and cup them together and let the water collect until it spills over and bring it to my face and let it drip down my cheeks.” She took a breath and sighed.

But Errol had never worried about her. “Gray?”

“I feel absolutely disgusted and tired and stupid,” she said in one long breath, and with that she turned over on her side and curled into a small fetal ball, with her arms clasped around her chest, no longer looking like a pharaoh at all but more like a child who would still be wearing pajamas with sewn-in feet. In a minute Gray had gone from an ageless Egyptian effigy, wise and harrowed and lost in secrets, to a girl of three. It was an oddly characteristic transition.

Errol wandered back outside, calm and relaxed. His eyes swept across the village of Toroto, the mud and dung caking off the walls, the goats trailing between the huts, the easy African timelessness ticking by, with its annoying Western intrusions—candy wrappers on the ground, chocolate on children’s faces, gaudy floral-print blouses. In spite of these, Errol could imagine this place just after World War II, and it hadn’t changed so much. It was good to see this valley at last, with the cliffs sheering up at the far end, and good to finally meet Il-Ororen, with their now muted arrogance and wildly mythologized memories. All this Errol had pictured from Men without History, but the actual place helped him put together the whole tale; so as the sun began to set behind the cliffs and the horizon burned like the coals of a dying fire around which you would tell a very good story, Errol imagined as best he could what had happened here thirty-seven years ago.

chapter two (#u673c00cf-37da-516e-823e-cc616eabb94f)