The Female of the Species

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.