Lost in the Jungle (31 page)

‘After a five-minute motorcycle ride we were at the house of Tico, the king of the river.

‘“Would you take me to San José?” I asked him.

‘“Sure, I was going there tomorrow anyway,” he told me, “with Father Diego.”

‘I explained to him what had happened. “Would you take me on to Curiplaya?”

‘“I can take you even farther than Curiplaya,” he declared.

‘“Up to San Pedro Canyon?”

‘“Yes, almost. But that’s as far as I can go.”

‘On the morning of the eighteenth day it was pouring rain, and we had to put off leaving for another day. The next day we travelled upriver until evening and set up camp on a pleasant beach. We were back on the river by six thirty the next morning.

‘Tico really is a pro at river navigation. He manoeuvred through the dangerous passes, and when we came to shallows, one of the crew stood up in the prow and hit at the river bottom with a stick, indicating to Tico how deep it was.

‘We arrived at San José at ten thirty, and Father Diego set off up the path to the village. Now we could start searching. Tico told me that he had to be back in Rurrenabaque two days later, so he intended to go upriver until we came to a beach called Progreso and then turn around and head back to Rurrenabaque.

‘“If your friend is still alive,” he said, “then he is most probably near the river, and it is reasonable to assume that we will spot him.”

‘We travelled upriver – Tico, two crewmen, and I – into a stretch of the Tuichi that Tico was less familiar with, and he was very cautious. We went on without stopping, looking right and left. We saw no trace of a campsite or fire. The storm had left its mark everywhere. Once in a while we encountered a flock of large birds swarming around a carcass on the shore. Tico and I exchanged glances. I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to check. I had never in my life been so depressed.

‘Hours passed, and I was beginning to resign myself to the fact that we weren’t going to find you alive. Yes, Yossi, it was very sad. I was already thinking of heading back to La Paz. I thought that I would probably find your brother there, and together we would be able to organise another, more effective search party.

‘The crewmen stopped the canoe; they had spotted some game and wanted to go into the jungle to do some hunting.

‘“I’m paying, and you’re not going to stop. We’re going on!” I insisted.

‘The crewmen looked angry, but Tico understood me, though I don’t think that he harboured any hopes of finding you. Half an hour later they stopped again. They had spotted a fawn that had come down to the river for a drink. Tico took aim and fired, and the fawn dropped to the riverbank.

‘Around five thirty it started to get dark. The canoe was slowing down. I looked desperately at Tico. He shook his head with sorrow and said, “We’ll have to stop at the next shore and turn the boat back. That’s it. I’m really sorry, Kevin.”

‘Then I saw the shore and I knew it was over; tears were choking my throat.
Yossi, how will I lead my life knowing I’ve lost you?

‘The men were turning the boat 180 degrees when suddenly I looked over at the shore and saw a rickety thatched hut, leaning over on one side. All of a sudden someone came out of it.
No, it can’t be Yossi. It doesn’t look anything like Yossi. Yes, it is. It is Yossi!

‘Dear God, there you were, after twenty days, and nobody had believed that you might still be alive. Thank God, thank God, Yossi, my dear friend.’

I hung on every word of Kevin’s tale, awed by his persistence. How would I ever be able to repay him for saving my life?

I was bewildered by the information about Karl. Could it be that the man had fooled us all along? Nevertheless I was eager to see him and Marcus, especially Marcus. I particularly wanted to apologise to him, to be his friend again.

I was in for another unpleasant surprise when Kevin informed me that my parents were aware of my disappearance. Why had they been told? My mother and father must have been going through hell.

The fact that I had been in Progreso rather than Curiplaya was another surprise, which left me completely confused. What kind of a place was Progreso, and where was Curiplaya? If I hadn’t reached Curiplaya, where had I been walking for fifteen days? Had I come close to San José? Had I stood even the slightest chance of making it? Tico answered all my questions.

Progreso was very near the Mal Paso San Pedro. It had been established ten years earlier on rumours of gold to be found in the vicinity. Miners had set out from San José, but the results had been disappointing. The camp they had built had been deserted since then, which explained the impassable state of the trail and the fact that I had encountered no signs of life on my way.

One other thing also became evident: the horrible storm I had lived through was the worst the area had suffered in a decade. Indeed, only because of the heavy rains had Tico and Kevin been able to come this far upriver; the water simply flooded a great number of obstacles that normally would have blocked their way.

The encampment was about thirty miles upstream from Curiplaya. By boat it was a short distance but could take a week to cover on foot. Tico had no explanation to offer as to why Karl had failed to mention Progreso to us. It seemed that he had intentionally lied about the location of Curiplaya.

Tico didn’t believe that I could have reached San José on my own. The natives did cover that distance in a few days but only during the dry season, when streams could be crossed. During the rainy season, and with my meagre provisions and equipment, it was hard to believe that I would ever have arrived in San José. That I had survived at all for so many days was cause enough for wonder.

The sun shone down on a lovely day, but it was damp in the canoe, and a chilly breeze blew against us. All along the riverbank I saw flocks of vultures swarming over the carcasses of animals, victims of the flood.

We made rapid progress, and Kevin pointed out Curiplaya as we passed. We made only one stop, to buy dried venison from some hunters. Kevin and I chewed on it all the way, and he remarked that dried meat was fabulous when you had some good beer to wash it down.

We came to the junction of the Tuichi and Beni rivers in the late afternoon. The Beni is one of the three principal tributaries of the Amazon, and the sight of it was impressive. A short while later we reached Rurrenabaque, a maze of wooden houses tucked amid the foliage. The houses closest to the river were raised up on sturdy pilings.

Tico bade us a brief goodbye near the Hotel Berlin, a wooden building with a spacious courtyard. Kevin carried me up to the hotel and set me down on a lounge in the yard. A crowd of curious townspeople gathered around me. ‘
El desaparecido
[the lost one],’ they murmured. All of them had seen the sad-looking gringo who had come to search for his poor, lost friend. They stared at me as if they were seeing a ghost, and in truth I did look like some kind of ghost: emaciated, unshaven, dirty, and dressed in tatters.

A crowd followed us to navy headquarters. Kevin carried me into the office. I asked to telephone my parents as soon as possible, but the commandante wasn’t in any hurry. He insisted upon hearing what had happened to me, and as he listened, he filled in forms with my name and passport number. He was about forty years old, pleasant looking, and kind, wearing blue work clothes, void of the formality and arrogance that characterises many South American military men. He referred me to his unit’s doctor and promised to call the Israeli embassy in La Paz in the meantime.

The doctor, a cheerful, bespectacled man, informed me that he couldn’t possibly examine me until I had had a thorough scrubbing. The shower, behind a partition in the patio, wasn’t really a shower at all. A conscript ran to a faucet to fill a pail with water, set the pail down next to me, lathered my body, and poured bowlfuls of water over me until the pail was empty, and then went back for another pail.

The doctor checked my blood pressure and took my pulse. He checked my hair for lice and with a pair of tweezers pulled off the remaining leeches. He said my feet were in horrible condition and gave me a cream to use. He advised that I rest and eat well and promised that I would soon be back in good health. I told him that I suffered from painful headaches, and he gave me some pills.

The doctor and the nurse who assisted him insisted that I tell them what had happened to me, and I was forced to repeat, in brief, all that I had been through. The nurse brought tea and rolls, and she and doctor listened attentively to my story. I changed the subject only once.

‘Doctor,’ I asked, ‘would you mind if I ate your roll?’

They burst out laughing.

‘Of course not. Bring him some more rolls,’ he instructed the nurse.

Kevin was waiting for me in the office of the commandante. They had notified the Israeli embassy that I had been found. I felt a lot better knowing that they would inform my parents and put their minds at peace.

We went back to the hotel. I was wearing the snow-white dress uniform of the Bolivian navy but was barefoot. In all of Rurrenabaque, in all of Bolivia, there wasn’t a single pair of shoes to be found in my size, twelve and a half.

We settled into our spacious room. Kevin draped the mosquito nets that the hotel provided over our beds. We sat up all night talking, weighing various hypotheses concerning the failure of Karl and Marcus to turn up in La Paz. We couldn’t wait to unmask Karl. He had taken us into the jungle, feeding us a lot of lies, conjuring up an Indian village. If Marcus hadn’t insisted so stubbornly that we turn back, we certainly would have gone on and run out of food. Karl had also misled us regarding the river, his false information almost costing us our lives. And if that didn’t suffice, we now knew that he was a wanted criminal as well.

But what had he wanted from us? Why had he bothered making up a cock-and-bull story about a Nazi uncle? Why had he lied about the ranch and the truck? What had been the point of it all? It hadn’t been for money: he spent more than we paid him. We hoped that we would be able to get some answers once we were back in La Paz.

Afterward we grew silent, each lost in his own thoughts under our mosquito netting. Kevin dozed off, but every hour or two I would startle him out of his sleep, screaming, ‘Hurry, Kevin, fast!’

He knew the problem without being told and leapt up, heaved me over his shoulder, and ran for the bathroom. The enormous amounts of food that I had consumed had upset my digestive system, and I had a terrible case of diarrhoea.

The weather the next day was terrible, and we knew that there would be no plane, but I wasn’t disappointed. It was probably the happiest day of my life. I felt like I was in paradise: the town, the people, the general atmosphere, the lousy weather – just being alive.

I spent the morning sitting with Kevin in the hotel coffee shop. People came from all over town to see us. They had heard about us and came to offer us their best wishes and enjoy the happy ending to our story. Each one brought some small gift: cakes, candies, fruit, souvenir postcards, or a simple, warm handshake. All kinds of characters turned up: farmers, businessmen, army officers, and even a young Swiss, a
mochilero
like ourselves, who had drifted into Rurrenabaque and decided to settle down. He had bought a plot of land a little way up the Beni River. Every day he rowed himself up there in a small boat to till his cornfield.

We ordered cakes and coffee from the hotel restaurant for our numerous guests. The hotel owner herself scarcely left our table and never stopped talking.

Toward noon Tico passed by on his way to the river, and we joined him, poor Kevin toting me on his back. Kevin took pictures and asked one of Tico’s crewmen to take one of us together with his employer.

A strange phenomenon bedevilled both Kevin and me; I had a funny-looking lump on my forehead, and Kevin had one on his throat. I was occasionally seized by a severe pain, as if someone or something were pinching at me from within. Tico noticed it and knew immediately what the trouble was.

‘That’s the
boro
,’ he said.

‘What’s the
boro?
’ we asked, and Tico explained that it results from the bite of a mosquito whose sting deposits an egg under the skin. In time the egg hatches into a worm, and the worm begins crawling around inside the body.

‘You must be joking,’ I said, terrified.

‘No, I’m not joking. Everyone around here gets it once in a while, and it’s not particularly dangerous. Let’s take care of it now.’

I was first. Tico sat me down on the sandy riverbank near the canoe. He and his cheerful brother, Lulo, both lit cigarettes and began blowing smoke right onto the boil-like swelling. It felt peculiar, like something really was moving around inside.

‘The nicotine draws them out,’ Tico explained. ‘In just a minute you’ll see.’

Kevin and Lulo clenched my head, and Tico squeezed the boil between his thumbs. I bit my lip against the pain. Tico squeezed harder and...
plop
, the worm popped out of my forehead. Kevin looked disgusted. One more squeeze, and I, too, could see the worm, resting in the palm of Tico’s hand. It was fat and white with a few black spots, and it was still alive.

Kevin was next, but he was tougher than I had been, and no one had to hold him. They again exhaled smoke onto the boil, and Tico commenced pushing and squeezing. The worm that wriggled slowly out of Kevin’s neck was even larger than the one that had come out of me. It was a repulsive sight, like a long, white strip of fat. The thought that live worms had been eating away at us...

A few weeks later a dozen more worms were pulled from my body, this time by a doctor in São Paulo, who used a knife and a needle.

The next morning the commandante came by early to inform us that the plane to La Paz would be taking off at eleven o’clock. We packed our few belongings and said our goodbyes to the hotel owner, who refused to accept payment for the time we had spent there and charged us only half the bill that we had run up in the coffee shop. A friendly neighbour brought us a bag of mangoes. There is no more delicious fruit in the world than the mangoes of Rurrenabaque.

Tico came to say goodbye, tough as always. I couldn’t find the words to express what I felt for him and promised myself that I would someday come back to visit him. An army truck took us to the airport. The terminal consisted of a single building outside town and a long, unpaved airstrip.

The terminal was crowded. Everyone who held tickets for the previous day’s flight and everyone who had a ticket for today’s was gathered, and since it was obvious that they couldn’t all fit on one plane, a lot of arguments broke out. The next day was Christmas, and they were eager to get home to their families. When the plane made its approach, everyone started shouting and shoving. The commandante led us through the crowd to the door of the plane and bade us farewell. The pilot gestured us aboard.

‘Goodbye, Commandante. Goodbye, Rurrenabaque. I’ll never forget you.’

In La Paz we flagged a cab for the Rosario Hotel. We couldn’t wait to see Marcus. He would go out of his mind when he heard what had happened to us, and he must have a tale of his own to tell. And Karl? We were dying to confront him.

Kevin dashed into the hotel but came out just a few minutes later wearing a grave expression. Karl and Marcus hadn’t arrived at the hotel yet.

‘I can’t believe that all flights from Apolo have been grounded because of the rain,’ he said. ‘We flew in from Rurrenabaque, and it’s just as rainy there.’

What the hell had happened to them? They hadn’t taken a dangerous route, they had been well fitted out with a shotgun, ammunition, a knife, and a tent. What could possibly have happened?

I tottered into the Israeli embassy on my own two feet and received an emotional welcome: hugs, kisses, tears of joy. Everyone was at a loss for words.