Gorillas in the Mist (22 page)

The betrothal gifts were a long time in transit and their arrival late in April was an anticlimax.

The ring and watch have come, but he won’t pick them up from customs. He says the duty is too high because they contain gold. He has told the customs to send them back to France. I am so hurt by this, but he will never know.

The incident was enough to propel her into a downward spiral of depression and anxiety.

April 29:
Yesterday he asked if we couldn’t get married in three weeks in the embassy office and send out announcements afterward. Later he said, “I will marry you in your third month of pregnancy.” I know he is backing out.

May 4:
I was really desolated that Peter didn’t come up last night or at least send a note. I guess it’s all over. He doesn’t want me if I can’t have a baby and I guess I never can.

May 17:
I wrote to Peter saying if he wants Fina back to take her. Now I feel terrible about it…. I spent nearly the entire day thinking only of him and got nothing done. If he does not climb this weekend, then I will no longer write to him.

As ever when in distress, Dian turned to the friends who seldom failed her.

I go to Group 4 this morning and find them close to camp, almost as if they were coming to see me. A lovely, sunny day, and I stayed for hours, mainly with Uncle Bert and Digit. All of us just relaxed in the sun. I even slept and woke to find Flossie looking down at me with a worried face as if she thought I wasn’t well. Came home then to catch up on field notes, but was so tired. Had a bath in my new tin tub and sorted out the botanist’s crap. Notes took one hell of a long time. I’m still taking sleeping pills because of Peter. He is about all I am thinking of now and I find work literally impossible.

The next day broke cold and rainy and Dian stayed in. The wood was damp and her fireplace smoked, and in the evening Kima broke one of her precious kerosene pressure lamps. Depressed and miserable, Dian went to bed at 10:30. At 11:00 she heard a tapping on her cabin door, and there, wet and shivering, stood Peter Weiss, come to make amends.

He had brought up a locally purchased watch and a ring in lieu of the ones they had chosen from the catalog. They opened the box, lying in her big double bed together.

The watch is a man’s-it says on the guarantee. And the ring also looks like a man’s. The stone is lovely but the setting is so very ugly and gross. I know he meant the watch for himself but gave it to me out of generosity.

Peter departed at 5:00
A.M.
in order to get to the hospital in time for his rounds. He left Dian feeling exceedingly confused.

He says we will never learn to adjust to one another, which I reckon is like saying good-bye. He was so gloomy, saying that I was going to die before he did! When I said nothing because I was starting to cry, he changed his mind and said, “No, you won’t die first. I will. But you are wasting both our lives staying up here.”

She spent the next month vacillating between hope and despair,
trying to lose herself in her work but living for the occasional notes from Peter. They had reached an impasse. He refused to come up the mountain, demanding that she must come to him.

He says I must come down, but if I do, I’m finished and he has won. He knows this. If I want him I have to give up living at Karisoke, but how can I do that?

Late in June, Peter weakened and climbed to Karisoke, where they had a passionate reconciliation. Dian went to Ruhengeri the next weekend.

Go down to see my Peter and hold him and be held in his arms!
… Well, I went, but he was surly and morose. Wouldn’t talk and when he did we ended up fighting again because I wouldn’t agree to move into his house with him and the kids. Had enough of his abuse, so went to the hotel and spent the night alone.

Dian had suggested several compromises. She offered to spend every weekend with Peter in Ruhengeri or to alternate two weeks in camp and a week in town.

When I get some new students properly trained to keep the poaching under control and to supervise the long-range studies of the groups, I can take off. Perhaps we could go to France together for a month or so?

None of these suggestions was agreeable to Peter, but his desire for Dian was so great that he continued to climb to Karisoke, and his visits were sometimes happy ones.

July 12:
Peter up at 7:30
P.M.
I couldn’t believe it! It was one of the most beautiful nights we’ve ever spent together…. He really swore his love to me even on bended knee, saying, “I love only you—there is no other—you are all to me.” He could not playact like this. He must mean it.

At this juncture Dian badly needed a friend in camp with whom to talk. For a time after Kelly Stewart’s return she had confided in her, if somewhat uneasily. However, even that tentative relationship had been damaged almost beyond repair when, during this period of wild mood swings, Dian opened
and read some of the letters flowing between Kelly and Sandy Harcourt. The contents of Harcourt’s letters had shocked Dian by the vehemence of his dislike, which she characterized as “real hatred.” Since she could find no obvious explanation for this enmity, she concluded that Kelly might have been fostering it, perhaps out of jealousy.

She stopped opening the mail only when it became obvious that the younger woman knew what she was doing. Rather than confront Dian and risk a fight, Kelly drew a padlock on the back of a letter to Sandy before she sent it up to Dian’s cabin to await the biweekly mail porter.

This was sufficient to shame Dian into leaving the mail alone; but for weeks thereafter the two women kept their distance, communicating solely by means of notes, and then only when strictly necessary. However, as the summer wore on, Dian was driven to seek Kelly’s company again, if only for the relief of being able to unburden herself of her confused feelings and desperate doubts about Weiss. Kelly seemed to be a sympathetic listener, although Dian would unfailingly note in her diary after these confessionals, “I talked too much.”

The strains and stresses of the affair were beginning to tell on her in other ways. She had trouble keeping track of the date and at one point discovered she was in the wrong week in her diary.

I’m really mixed up. My head isn’t worth shooting.

She found she was continually losing things—she misplaced her pistol and spent the better part of a week searching for it, only to discover it “in drawer with all my papers—kind of where I thought I’d put it.”

On a hazy, portentous mid-September day Dian descended the mountain and drove in her combi to Kigali airport to pick up Peter, who had been to France for a month’s vacation. They drove back to Ruhengeri to find Fina waiting outside Peter’s house, hysterical and determined to have a showdown.

She had all the kids with her, except Joseph, who was with us, because she’d been living in the house looking
after them. While they and the neighbors all watched, she came after me with a club, then Peter went for her. I’ll never get over it. She was screaming and so was he. I retreated and yelled at his men to stop her and help him. She was a crazy woman. He really must have suffered because she nearly killed him before his men drove her off. We went into the house. I asked who was going to guard my car. He said not to worry, but then she took her club and broke all the glass in the windshield, while holding Sophie in her other arm. Then I don’t remember much. He went out to lock her in the storeroom and get the police. While he was gone she broke all the storeroom windows and tried to climb out. I was watching her and also trying to hide in the house. Sophie was running around after me, crying and screaming. The other kids hid in the bedrooms. Peter came back with two police and they took her off. All the neighbors were watching but no one helped him.

About 3
P.M.
he went to the prison and let her go, saying she had to leave town. I couldn’t believe he would let her go like that. I took the car to the garage and had a new window put in.

Guamhogazi, Dian’s chief porter at the time, was posted along with a
zamu
or watchman to protect the car. Dian spent the night with Peter.

I had a horrible nightmare and woke up screaming. Next day we climbed the mountain together. I took only one and a half hours, which isn’t bad for me, but he was angry at me for being so slow. Even Saturday night he wasn’t any good-we only did it once in the morning. He acted as if I was the problem. I remember Fina’s big boobs and nipples in the yellow T-shirt and yellow pants and her beating him, and little Pierre shoving me away when I tried to stop him from watching. Yves just disappeared and didn’t come back.

I couldn’t get Peter to talk or smile or anything. I know
something is on his mind other than not being able to make love, but what it could be I don’t know…. He says we’ll get married if I insist on it and also repeated that he only wanted to get married before if I got pregnant. Now he doesn’t think I can and doesn’t seem interested. I’m really sure he doesn’t love me anymore.

I know now I will never get married.

On November 2, Dian and Kelly Stewart were chatting outside Dian’s cabin when they heard what sounded like a yell. “It’s only an owl,” Kelly said. They listened and heard it again. Clearly it was someone screaming. Several possibilities flashed through Dian’s mind: it could be Fina on the rampage or it could be an avenging poacher. Anything seemed possible since several American students working at Jane Goodall’s research center in Tanzania that summer had been kidnapped and held for ransom by political outlaws.

Taking no chances, Dian pushed Kelly into the cabin storeroom, locked the door for safety’s sake, and ran for her gun. Just then Basili came pounding across the meadow, shouting his lungs out. There was another fire. Some outdoor clothing Kelly had hung up too near the stove in her cabin had ignited, and the blaze had already spread to the cabin walls and roof.

I let Kelly out, then I go but can’t help much with hauling water, so go into house and dump it on fire. The place had too much of a head start and the wogs had panicked, wasting precious time doing nothing. We stay up until 3-me until 4:50
A.M.
, trying to save her stuff. I’m finished.

So was the cabin. But the greatest loss was Kelly’s accumulated gorilla data—months of it gone up in flames.

Very shaky a.m. I could hardly move. Kelly really stunned. Had her for breakfast and told her to take a check and go down with it and start buying materials to rebuild cabin. I don’t recall the day clearly…. I’m sick in
P.M.
I really X and collapse. Very bad. No letter from Peter at all.

That night Dian awoke from a nightmare to find herself beating Kima, who had been sleeping on the bed with her.

She was shaking with fear. I feel so badly, and worried about what is happening to me.

So the year lurched ominously toward its conclusion. In December, Kelly Stewart departed for another term at Cambridge, where she would rejoin Sandy Harcourt. Dian was alone at Karisoke with her native staff.

As 1976 began she was trying hard to complete the final revisions on her doctoral thesis, but her personal distress was so great she could not concentrate.

I work all day, little stopping, on Hinde’s suggestions but can’t get it right. There is no end to it…. Kima acting rather lonely…. I’ve never felt so alone in my life.

She found herself crying over small irritations or just from fatigue. She began drinking more. Her diary entries became erratic, sometimes just a scribbled word or two, sometimes nothing at all. She was slipping more deeply into the slough of depression.

January 23:
I write a horrid letter to Peter. I am so fed up with everything.

By early February her diary had degenerated into indecipherable scratchings made with such violence the pen all but pushed through the paper. She had somehow injured her arm, and the pain was keeping her from sleeping.

Arm so Bad. Can’t sleep. Awake all night. Fuck the world. No Peter.

Gradually the writing began to improve, although the entries remained terse.

February 10:
No good-can’t sleep anymore at all-arm is much much worse.

February 11:
Not well. Reading for thesis discussion.

February 12:
Have Nemeye spend night up here tending fire so can stay awake to complete thesis.

A few days later her handwriting began to return to normal, although her frame of mind seemed only marginally improved.

Bad hail storm. Kima so sick. I go down. My arm so bad decided must go to Ruhengeri. First time off mountain for months, but Peter was in Gisenyi and didn’t return till 6:30 so I just had to sit and wait in his office. He seemed glad to see me and was very gentle. Gave me a bath. I cried most of the night.

The following day Dian had her arm X-rayed at the Ruhengeri hospital and found she was suffering from an acute case of tendonitis.

I went to pick up X rays and then to Peter’s office, where everyone was after him — everyone. A nurse from Uganda was there with a girl with bilharzia and a little baby dying from a cracked skull. I started crying again when I saw the baby. Peter is so respected-beloved-I was so proud of him and ashamed of myself.

Slowly she pulled herself together and got back into the routine of the camp, once again trying to compensate for her aloneness by seeking contact with the gorillas.

Out to Group 5-fantastic contact. All silverbacks came near us. Puck takes camera lens after I take pictures…. I took
National Geographic
magazine with me and Puck was really funny looking at gorilla pictures in it-but got
too
funny at end of contact, acting the big fool and beating the hell out of me. He must think I’m as tough as he is. For the first time I wondered about their getting overhabituated.