Gorillas in the Mist (26 page)

“I have not the right words to express what I felt on receiving your long, warm-hearted letter. It is such a relief to know you are still my friend. Thank you, dear Dian … now Doctor Fossey! Congratulations on your Ph.D. You earned it the hard way, having collected your material over years under strenuous and risky circumstances. But I am not happy about your state of health, particularly about your lungs. You are still young and pretty tough, but there are limits to what a body can take. Living ten years like a mountain gorilla and at that high altitude is enough, I should say…. I also fear for your life—not that a gorilla might do you any harm, but that the herdsmen and poachers will try to get rid of you. It is amazing that they have tolerated you all these years.”

On August 17, Dian entered the French hospital at Ruhengeri. Her friend, Dr. Pat Desseaux, X-rayed her hips and lungs. The hip pictures showed severe inflammation of the right joint. The chest photographs revealed a dense pattern of lung lesions that Desseaux feared were indicative of advanced tuberculosis. Deeply perturbed, he told Dian to return immediately to the United States and put herself into the hands of a specialist there.

The prospect of undergoing a major operation did not in itself deter Dian. Anything would have been better than having to endure the torment that was now her lot. She was, however, appalled at the prospect of having the nature of her disease become public knowledge, something she believed was sure to happen if she returned to the United States.

Pat wants me to go home. Home? I don’t have any unless it is here. My God, to end up in a place like the ward in Hope!

Where Dr. Desseaux failed to persuade her, the Spanish surgeon, Lolly Prescada, succeeded.

August 26:
Lolly climbed this
A.M.
Had heard from Pat I was dying. She came up with three porters and tons of medicine, and then she gave me shit!

In Dian’s little living room, Lolly listened as her friend tried to explain her obduracy.

“I’ve likely had it for years. Maybe since I was a kid. I doubt there’s much to do about it now. And there is no way I’m going into a TB san at home. God, they are awful places! Even some of the nurses act as if the patients are untouchables. You must know what I mean—you work with lepers!”

The slight, still-young Spanish doctor proposed an alternative; and she was persuasive. She reminded Dian that a mutual friend, Dr. Jean Gespar, a Belgian cancer specialist who had spent several months in Rwanda, was now back in Brussels.

“Jean will arrange everything for you there, Dian. He is so discreet and so very kind. I shall cable him at once. Nobody need know anything about it. But you
must
go. What would happen to the gorillas if you were to die?”

In the end, perhaps as much to please her friends as from any belief that good would come of it, Dian gave in. It was agreed that she would accept an expense-paid invitation to attend an anthropological conference in Germany in mid-September and would then go on to Brussels.

During the first part of September smoke continued to curl from her chimney as stacks of paper fed the flames. She avoided human contact even more than usual. As the months drew on she packed in desultory fashion but spent much of her time communing with her attendant animals—Cindy and Kima, a duiker named Prime, the giant rats, and, on better days, with her gorilla friends.

At nine-thirty on the morning of September 16 she descended the mountain for what she feared might be the last time.

A Peugeot half-ton “taxi” was waiting to carry her to Ruhengeri airport.

Just
as the taxi pulls into the airport the plane comes in from Kigali with Peter, Fina, and two kids, all dressed up. The pilot wants me to go on board, but I stay in the Peugeot and hide so I barely got a glimpse of Peter. Got on
the plane only when they were gone-it smelled of Fina’s perfume, or of his.

At 5:00
A.M.
on September 17 the Sabena flight from Kigali touched down at Brussels. For Dian it had been “a long, long, long trip with little sleep and lots of pain”—lots of time to dwell, too, on what was behind her and on what lay ahead. However, the arrival at Brussels, where she was to transfer to a Frankfurt flight, was not as grim as it might have been. While slumped in the transit lounge, Dian heard herself being paged. When she went to the gate she was greeted warmly by Jean Gespar and his wife, who, alerted by Lolly Prescada, had driven to the airport at that ungodly hour to reassure Dian that she would be in the hands of caring friends when she returned from Germany. Indeed they pleaded with her to cancel the onward flight and to go home with them to rest until her first appointments with the doctors. Dian refused. For her, it was virtually impossible to welsh on a commitment.

An hour later she flew on to Frankfurt, then to Hamburg, where the conference was being held. Here were no friendly faces to greet her, so she found her way to a “horrid room in a horrid hotel” and collapsed. She spent the following day mostly in bed, pain-racked and depressed.

On the morning of September 19 she rose and went out into the busy streets.

I had the morning to kill and hated it. So I went to the Hermes shop across the street from the hotel and for the hell of it bought a $750 dress! It really is made for me…. Then went to register at the conference where everything went wrong. No one spoke English and I began to be very confused…. I tried to walk home but got lost and had to take a cab.

The purchase of the dress did what perhaps nothing else could have done—it lit a little flame in her heart. Next morning she returned to the conference, still without having established any meaningful human contact. She sat alone through several
scientific dissertations that she would probably have found inordinately boring even if they had not been in German. Near the end of that ponderous afternoon she delivered her own paper on gorilla behavior.

I guess I gave my talk, but I didn’t give a damn what I said. I was just happy to get the hell out of there.

She decided that for the duration of her stay in Hamburg she wouldn’t think about serious matters at all. She had her hair set, then wearing her new dress, went out to set the town on fire.

She encountered two young men, an English anthropologist and a German student. There followed one of the more memorable nights of her life. Her journal notes are succinct, but they give the flavor of what followed.

Oh, what an evening. We bought a big balloon dog from a man on the street-just because it had such a beautiful tail! Had beer and schnapps in a dozen cafés, then went with them into a whorehouse just for fun, and the girls got mad and went after me … met a Great Dane and tried to take him with us into a bar and got chased out … one of the boys got pretty sick…. I was very funny dancing at a beer house … finally took one to his hotel, and the German student took me to mine … into a trance with him, he was so gentle.

Dian was probably still in a trance of sorts when she left Hamburg the following morning.

To Brussels—I think so…. Left hotel in very early hours, after almost two hours sleep, and for first time I am feeling no pain!

She spent the succeeding five days under the aegis of the Gespars, who took her on a seemingly endless round of examinations and consultations and entertained her at small dinner parties. Her lifelong predilection for doctors and for older men sharpened her interest in Jean Gespar, an ebullient and effervescent fellow in his early fifties who radiated empathy and competence. He responded to her admiration, taking her on
excursions through the city and into the nearby countryside to show her his favorite places and to drink wine at his favorite bars.

By September 27 medical specialists had decided that although both lungs were scarred by lesions, there was no indication of active tuberculosis or of cancer. More X-rays were taken and it was finally concluded that Dian had splintered her seventh thoracic rib so badly (when she fell from her window while photographing the giant rats) that a number of bone splinters had been set adrift in the pleural cavity. The doctors proposed surgery …

to sever the main nerve in that region and relieve the pain, and to find out how much more is broken up. When they told me this I cried.

Dian cried from relief.

That afternoon, Jean and his wife and I went down to the big square for tea, beer, and wine. I was wearing my gorgeous new Hermes dress, and we did have fun. It was a lovely afternoon and we spoofed Americans walking up and down the square.

Next morning, after gaily buying yet another new dress, this time a silk creation from Jaegars, Dian entered the hospital in an almost ebullient mood. On the following day surgery was performed.

Jean came in-was I glad to see him, but I was too weak to raise my hand to touch his … he was so kind. I slept most of the next day and again Jean came alone-I held his hand for the first time-he says such nice things. I could dream about him forever.

On October 2,
I was lonely in
A.M.
, then Jean came alone and we held hands and talked and talked and talked with no concept of time passing. Very special good-bye from him that left me glowing.

She had become so engrossed with Jean Gespar, and he with her, that she seemed relatively uninterested in what had been done to her body. She was unconcerned when further X-rays
showed a buildup of fluids in her left lung and a lab report indicated that she had hepatitis. She was alive. She had a new love.

On October 2 her doctors told her she could leave the hospital in two days’ time but must spend the next two weeks resting and recuperating. They also assured her that she would be able to return to Karisoke, though not for a month or more.

This was good news, but it posed a problem. She could not return immediately to Karisoke, but she was too poor to stay on in Brussels. The alternative was to take a cheap, standby flight to the United States, where she could visit friends while recovering and try to arrange for some badly needed funding for Karisoke.

The day before her departure, Jean brought her a special pair of Zeiss binoculars—for gorilla watching—and the two made tentative plans for the future. Dian suggested they might meet in Nairobi, whither Jean was bound in a few months’ time on a research project.

On October 6, Dian flew to New York, then on to Washington. She was in a cocky and exuberant mood. Although the incision in her chest was by no means healed and she was still in considerable pain —
I was a basket case by the time I arrived
— she was not about to obey the injunctions of her Belgian doctors.

More urgent matters required her attention. Delivered from the valley of death, as she now believed herself to be, she was brimming with new plans for Karisoke, but in order to implement these she had to ensure support from her major sponsor, the National Geographic Society. To this end she spent her first week in the United States haunting the society’s offices in Washington and reestablishing relationships with such key figures as Dr. Edward Snider, secretary of the Committee for Research and Exploration. Only after Snider had agreed to arrange a funding meeting early in November, and after a Washington doctor had warned her that rest was imperative for her recovery, did she leave Washington to seek the care and comfort of the Henry family in Louisville.

This was a healing time during which she saw old friends; revisited the Korsair Children’s Hospital; had a picnic on the grounds of her old cottage; and stocked up on her favorite junk foods in the local supermarkets. On one of these shopping expeditions she found and bought a small, plush gorilla-which she named Jean.

Rested and invigorated, she flew on to San Francisco for the usual obligatory stay with the Prices. Her record of this visit is notable for its brevity. It was clearly an ordeal during which Dian had to fend off further attempts to persuade her to abandon Africa and return to a sane and normal way of life.

She fled to Chicago for a few days’ postproduction work with Warren and Genny Garst on the
Wild Kingdom
film. While there, Dian interviewed three applicants for research work at Karisoke-David Watts, Bill Weber and Amy Vedder-all of whom would have a considerable impact on her future life.

By November 6 she was back in Washington to present herself before the august Research Committee of the National Geographic, presided over by the Olympian figures of the president, Dr. Melvin M. Payne, and the vice-president, Dr. Gilbert M. Grosvenor. Dian found these two patriarchal gentlemen sympathetic. When she left Washington a few days later, she carried with her the assurance that the society would continue to support her work.

As she boarded her plane for the long and weary flight back to Rwanda, she was content. The gorillas awaited her, and in her handbag rode a furry little toy that was the token and assurance that the times ahead would not be devoid of human passion.

One of the first things Dian did on her return to camp was draw up a “plan for the future.” It committed her to a concentrated effort to finish what she had now begun to refer to as The Book, a determination to shake Karisoke out of its current doldrums by bringing in new students, and a decision to put “X” out of her working life.

Warmly greeted by Ian Redmond and the staff, she was soon
hard at work. There was also time for pleasure. One day near the end of November she took advantage of a rare burst of sunshine and accompanied by Rwelekana, climbed to Group 4.

I had a wonderful contact, especially with Uncle Bert, who was an angel and led the whole group over to my side of a steep ravine I couldn’t cross to get to them. Digit came over last, taking his time as if he couldn’t have cared less. Then he finally came right to me and gently touched my hair…. I wish I could have given them all something in return.

On the way back to camp Dian was startled by a Batwa bursting from cover at the edge of a meadow. He went racing across the opening, arrogantly brandishing a bow and arrows over his head. She took this as a flagrant challenge and set off in hot pursuit, but was in no shape to outrun an agile hunter. Gasping as much with anger as fatigue, she ordered Rwelekana to hasten back to camp and fetch Ian with a gun.