The Last Great Ape by Ofir Drori

Author:Ofir Drori
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

FEBRUARY 2002

Israel

THE COMPROMISE

Half of winter blew through the door as I stepped into the one-room flat in Tel Aviv that I shared with Rachel. It was hardly warmer inside than out, with cold air seeping in around the windows. I blew my nose and got another taste of the gourds my students had cut apart in class. Just one man in Israel, it seemed, grew gourds like those I knew from Africa. I’d piled them into Dad’s car, dried them, and my students sawed them in half, releasing powdery spirits from the hollow fruits until we were sneezing and coated in dust. The students cleaned the gourds, added back the seeds and sealed the halves with hot glue. Then shook their rattles to Fela’s song, “Yellow Fever,” and learned it was a protest against Nigerian women bleaching their skin to look like white people.

I was teaching about tolerance. With the peace process collapsed, Israel needed the tolerance of men like Mukhtar more than ever. Instead of relying on dry classroom discussion, I aimed to nurture tolerance in my students by building their curiosity, hoping through direct experience they would learn to love and embrace what was different. We played bao and the Ethiopian game tim-tim and cooked ugali and looked at photographs of the Maasai bride to examine the choice of values. We made beaded Maasai necklaces. A people could be loved infinitely more by cooking their food and hearing the sound of their words from your lips.

West Africa had aged me. I’d returned to Israel in early 2001, longing for something protected, something safe. Parked in my father’s car outside the dorms of The Hebrew University, I told Rachel I was ready to build a life with her. In Israel.

“I swore I’d never get back together with you,” she said.

“Rach, just being with you anywhere, at the drycleaners, in the car—feels like home. It’s taken me a long time to understand you’re the most important part of my life.”

“But what happens when you need to go back to Africa?”

“No. I just need to visit for a month or two a year, but my home will be here with you.”

She looked at me with her dark watery eyes. In the awkward silence, Rachel and I couldn’t resist each other. We reached over the gearshift and sealed the compromise with a kiss.

In our dilapidated one-room flat, I showered to wash the rancid gourd dust from my face. Rachel was late getting home; she worked for an Israeli security company. I walked naked until I began to shiver, then dressed, added a coat, Rachel’s fleece, a blanket. I loathed winter. I paced back and forth between small windows on either end of the flat, windows, like gutters and poles I could climb down, now linked to Foday Sankoh and the half-traumatized need for escape routes.

I chose the schools at which I taught and set out to create an army of young activists. I had students write letters to the embassy of Ivory Coast to protest cacao farms that enslaved children.

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