The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  “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.

  2

  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.

  “Richasan make this picture. My people want to kill him with steel. They think this camera, it take the soul away. Ridiculous. I have worked this camera. Ridiculous to think a man could take your soul.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Gray quietly, with a slight smile. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  The Masai looked down at her with new interest, though he didn’t press her to explain. “So I stop the killing of Richasan. I help with his work. He teach me English. My English excellent.”

  Gray shrugged. “It’s all right.”

  “My English vedy, vedy excellent,” he reasserted with feeling.

  “Your English is very excellent.”

  “Yez.”

  “No, I mean you left out the verb. You said it wrong.”

  The Masai answered angrily in his own language.

  “You’re quite right,” said Gray. “To outstrip a foreigner in one’s home tongue is weak and easy. But you were being arrogant, and I don’t think I deserved that kind of language.”

  The Masai stared at her and said nothing, as if doubting his ears. Gray had responded in Masai—correct, intelligible, and beautifully spoken. As he was silent, she went on, “If you were more comfortable in your own language, you should have said so.”

  The Masai stared, and she was concerned she’d angered him—Masai were easily offended. Still, she went on, enjoying the language she so rarely got to use, its lilting, playful, vowelridden sound: “And I don’t think I bear the least resemblance to a hyena, in heat or not.” Hyena, “ol-ngyine,” she took care to pronounce just as he had.

  The Masai began to laugh. He extended his hand over the table and clasped hers. “Good, Msabu.” His grip was strong and dry. “Vedy, vedy good, Msabu. Hassatti. Pleasure, big pleasure.” Hassatti took a seat opposite Gray. “How you learn Masai?”

  “Richasan.”

  “Msabu must like my people,” he said with satisfaction.

  “You’re a powerful and magnificent tribe. Straight. Angry. You bow to no one. I’ve studied and admired you a great deal.”

  “So why you treat Hassatti from so high? Change his English?”

  “What I admire I also embrace. I also bow to no one, even Masai.”

  “Ah.” Hassatti nodded. “Now tell Hassatti. In America United States, this woman is different thing? Yez?”

  “I’m different. Yes.”

  Hassatti’s brow rumpled. “Richasan, he do not warn me of this…Why Msabu has no husband? Your father ask too many cows?”

  “I strike my own bargains.”

  Hassatti reached out and touched Gray’s fine honey hair, pulling a strand toward him across the table and running it between his fingers with a smile. “Eight, ten. Beautiful fine strong cows. Barely bled.”

  “I’m very flattered, but why don’t you just tell me why you’re here?”

  “It is man’s business.”

  “I’ll strain my brain.”

  “You want twelve?” asked Hassatti, incensed. “Twelve cuts Hassatti’s herd in half—”

  Gray held up her hand. “I don’t judge by wealth but by what you consider a man’s business.”

  That seemed to make sense to Hassatti. “I come in kindness,” he said loftily. “These are not my people.”

  “That’s admirable.”

  So encouraged, Hassatti stood and strode about the small room. Gray watched him with pleasure. There was nothing like the unabashed self-glorification of a Masai warrior, even in a gray suit. Hassatti switched completely to Masai, and told his story with style and drama, as he might have to a gathering in his own kraal. Gray could imagine the fire flashing up shadows against the mud-and-dung walls, the long faces row on row, huddled in their hides, baobabs creaking in the wind.

  “When the sea washes forward over stones and withdraws again,” he began, “sometimes cupfuls are caught between the rocks and the water remains. So the Masai washed long ago over the peaks of Kilimanjaro into the highest hills, the deepest creases. A small party got separated from their tribe and caught in a pocket, with the hills reaching steeply on all sides. Tired and lost and with no cattle, they erected their kraals and remained cut off like a puddle.

  “As a puddle will grow scummy, dead, and dark with no stream to feed it, so did
this people stagnate and grow stupid. Their minds blackened and clouded, and they no longer remembered their brother Masai. Caught in the crevices of Kilimanjaro, these warriors had sons who dismissed the talk of other tribes as superstition. They called themselves Il-Ororen, The People, as if there were no others. With no cows to tend, they scraped the soil like savages; the clay from the roots and insects on which they fed filled their heads, and their thoughts stuck together like feet against earth in the monsoons.

  “Meanwhile, the Masai had forgotten about the Puddle, leaving this obscure tribe for dead. My people had greater troubles: a scourge of pale and crafty visitors infested the highlands. As we discussed, Msabu, they still do. Forgive, Msabu, but white like grubs, haired like beasts, they played many tricks, trying to trade silly games for the fine heifers of the Masai. These grubs tried to herd and fence my people as we do our cows, making rules against the raids on the Kikuyu with which a man becomes a warrior. The white people liked to show off their games like magic, but the wise of the Masai were not fooled. Hassatti has learned,” he said archly, “to work the dryer of hair. Hassatti has flown in the airplane.

  “Yet the Puddle was lucky for a long time. Your people, Msabu, did not discover them. The trees and hills obscured their muddy kraals. Arrogant and dull, Il-Ororen continued to think they were the only humans in the world. Imagine their surprise, then, Msabu, when one of your own warriors landed his small airplane in the thick of this crevice and emerged from its cockpit with his hat and his clothing, with all its zippers and pockets, and his face blanched like the sky before snow—”

  “Hassatti, when was this? What year?”

  Hassatti looked annoyed. To place the story within a particular time was somehow to make it tawdrier and more ordinary. “Nineteen hundred and forty-three, perhaps,” said Hassatti, “though the boy from whom this story was taken is an idiot of the Puddle and cannot be trusted. Who knows if he can count seasons.”

  “Sorry to interrupt,” said Gray. “Go on.”

  “Well, the wise Masai of the highlands always knew what your people were—clever, but often weak and fat; with no feeling for cows, but good with metal. Granted your women store their breasts in cups and your men grow fur, but you copulate and excrete; you bleed and die, though—excuse, Msabu—not often enough for Hassatti’s tastes. All this my people could see. Yet Il-Ororen of the Puddle had grown superstitious and easily awed. With the constant looming of the cliffs on all sides, shadows played over their heads and made them fearful. When the white warrior stepped into their bush they quivered. They imagined he was a ghost or a god. They bowed down and cast away their spears, or ran into the forest. They had eaten clay for too long and their smiths made dull arrows, their women made pots with holes; their minds would hold no more cleverness than their pots would hold water. They had forgotten how to raid and be warriors, since there was no one from whom to steal cattle, and their boys were no longer circumcised.”