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.
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