Lost in the Jungle (30 page)

‘Around eight the next morning the mayor showed up with the raftsmen. This was the seventh day since I’d lost you. He promised that the raft would soon be ready to go. I arranged to send payment for his expenses by way of the priest from La Paz, and he took my word for it. At two that afternoon he came back and said that they wanted to wait until the next day to set out, as it was raining. That day one of the village babies died from a stomach disorder, and everyone was sad and gloomy. I, on the other hand, was thinking about how lucky I was to have been saved. I was still alive, but what about Yossi? You might have drowned. You might have broken a leg or a rib. I didn’t want to think about it. You hadn’t drowned. You had certainly been swept along with the raft and made it to Rurrenabaque.

‘We left in the morning of the eighth day on a trip that the raftsmen said would take a day and a half. It was pouring rain and very cold on the raft. The
balseros
decided to pull over to the side and look for some kind of shelter from the rain, though we were drenched anyway.

‘“Let’s go on,” I begged them.

‘“We won’t get any farther than Santa Rosa today in any case and will spend the night there. So there’s no reason to be in such a big hurry,” one of them replied.

‘We did finally set out again and arrived in Santa Rosa that afternoon. There was a group of thirteen young men there, who were very kind and friendly and got my spirits up. They were maintenance men, getting a summer camp ready for French tourists. We decided to spend the night there.

‘The next morning I counted off the ninth day. The two
balseros
and I were once again on the river. By now I no longer deluded myself that I would find you in Rurrenabaque. My two raftsmen, who were experienced professionals, had a difficult time manoeuvring the raft through the treacherous passes. It was obvious that you wouldn’t have been able to do it on your own.

‘Rurrenabaque is on the banks of the Beni River. We reached it that afternoon. The Beni is much wider than the Tuichi and looked mild and placid, but the
balseros
told me that it is dangerous too. I clambered ashore and headed straight for the navy base. The CO was in a meeting with his senior officers, so I had no choice but to try to tell his secretary in my broken Spanish what had happened to me. She didn’t understand a word. Two Swiss priests who served in the area came over when they heard that a man had been saved from the jungle. They had another Swiss, who spoke English, with them. He translated what I said into German, and the priest then translated into Spanish, and that was the way my tale was told to the secretary. I asked her to place an urgent call to the Israeli embassy in La Paz, but she couldn’t do so as there were no direct lines, and I had to wait for the commandante to get out of his meeting.

‘The priests took me to their parish. For the first time in weeks I had a good hot shower. They gave me clean clothes and fed me. The nuns tried to console me for your loss. They told me that the Tuichi was known as a particularly dangerous river.

‘“Your friend surely drowned, and even if he did make it out of the river alive, his chances of surviving in the jungle were slight.”

‘No one in the entire town offered me any hope of finding you alive, but I just wouldn’t believe it.

‘On the tenth day a plane from La Paz was supposed to come in at eight in the morning, and I went to the terminal to wait for it to land. The priest, Father Fernando, had filled out officiallooking papers, testifying to what had happened and allowing me to fly without a passport. I waited until five-thirty, but no plane ever showed up. I was upset, for I wanted to get to the Israeli embassy in La Paz. The navy office in Rurrenabaque hadn’t even sent the embassy a telegram as they had promised me they would. I was raging. I had wasted an entire precious day doing nothing.

‘The following morning one of the nuns awakened me excitedly. A plane was about to land at any moment. She had a truck standing by. By quarter to nine I was airborne.

‘When I arrived in La Paz, I headed straight for the American embassy. I knew that I had to hurry to the Israeli embassy, but I needed some kind of identification. The consul listened apathetically to my tale. He simply remarked that I was lucky to be alive and offered his consolations on the death of my friend.

‘“But he’s not dead,” I insisted.

‘“Of course he is. How could he possibly have survived alone in the jungle? Just thank God that you’re alive, and get yourself home to spend Christmas with your family,” the consul replied.

‘“And what if I was lost in the jungle? What would you do? Wouldn’t you even send a party out to look for me?” I yelled.

‘“We would notify this country’s foreign office and your family,” he answered.

‘“And what if it was your son or brother out there in need of help?”

‘He didn’t reply. Before I stormed out of his office, I asked him to prepare a new passport for me and to notify the Israeli embassy that I was on my way over. Afterward I found out that he never even bothered to make that simple phone call.

‘I arrived at the Israeli embassy. I spoke into the microphone at the entrance, explaining in broken Spanish that I had just come from the jungle and that an Israeli friend of mine was still lost back there. I was aware that I was being observed on closed-circuit television. A door finally opened, leading to an inner room. A security man scrutinised me from behind a plate of bulletproof glass. Then he took from me, through a slot in a window, the documents that the navy office and Father Fernando had given me, and finally I was allowed to enter.

‘The consul listened carefully to my story. I kept emphasising how urgent it was to get a helicopter and start looking right away. Then I spoke with the ambassador and went through it all again. I told him that my brother had a white-water business in Oregon, and I asked him to call your parents in Israel and get them to help pay the expenses of bringing my brother, together with the necessary equipment, to Bolivia in order to go looking for you. The ambassador promised to do all he could and asked me to call him back that afternoon.

‘At two that afternoon I placed my call to the Israeli embassy and was informed that on Monday morning they would have a meeting with the Bolivian air force and that I should come to the embassy then.

‘I went straight to the Rosario Hotel, and the desk clerk there told me that Marcus hadn’t been back yet. I didn’t yet think much of that, for I had never agreed with Karl’s estimate of how long it would take them.

‘I went over to the Jewish old-folks’ home to try to find some Israelis who would be willing to come help me look for you, but the place was empty. No one but Grandma was there, so I just left a note.

‘So the twelfth day passed and the thirteenth. Monday finally arrived, the fourteenth day. A Bolivian officer was waiting for me at the Israeli embassy, and he took me to La Paz air force headquarters. We wasted long, precious hours there going over the accident in detail, exactly where it had happened and the events that had led up to it. They listened to my less-thanfluent Spanish and promised that they would do everything that they could, but I had no faith in them at all.

‘The Bolivian officer then took me to navy headquarters, and we went through the whole business again.

‘When I got back to the Israeli embassy, the consul informed my that he had gotten hold of a plane and that the search would begin the next day. Thank God.

‘I went to the Swiss embassy and notified the ambassador that Marcus and Karl were missing and asked him to put in a call to Apolo to find out if they were there. I myself didn’t yet think there was any reason to worry about them, but later at the Austrian embassy the consul gave me a great reason to worry.

‘The mention of the name Karl Ruchprecter caught their attention. The clerk asked me to wait and then showed me into the consul’s office. He was a heavyset, red-faced man, smoking a pipe.

‘“Have a seat, my young friend,” he said. “Tell me what you know about Karl Ruchprecter.”

‘I told him briefly about Karl, what he had told us about himself, and how he had talked us into going along with him on an expedition into the jungle. I told him how he had changed plans because of his uncle.

‘“Uncle?” the consul asked. “What uncle?”

‘“He told us he had an uncle named Josef Ruchprecter, who owns a big cattle ranch in Reyes Province. Karl was supposed to bring him a truck from Chile next month.”

‘I told him the story that Karl had told you, Yossi, that his uncle was a Nazi war criminal and that that was the reason he lived in Bolivia.

‘“Interesting, very interesting,” the consul kept repeating.

‘I told him about the Indian village that we had been supposed to visit, how it had turned out to be farther away then we had thought, so we had to turn around and go back, and I told him how we had rafted down the river, how we had split up from Karl and Marcus, and about the accident that you and I had had on the river. I told him that I had come to report Karl’s disappearance and perhaps to organise a rescue party if no one heard anything from him within the next day or two.

‘I was amazed when the consul laughed. “That’s a good one: help you look for Karl Ruchprecter,” he said. “We’d much rather help him get lost.” And he laughed some more. “An uncle who raises beef cattle? A fugitive Nazi? Karl has such a vivid imagination.”

‘He noticed the stunned look on my face, and this is what he told me: “Karl Ruchprecter is quite well-known to us, but he doesn’t have an uncle in Bolivia. Karl himself is the escaped fugitive. He is wanted by both the Austrian government and Interpol. He’s a professional troublemaker, an instigator. He was involved with radical leftist groups in Europe about ten years ago. He and his friends stirred up a lot of trouble, and the Austrian police were looking for him. He was either lucky or well connected enough to make his way here. Someone must have provided him with a false passport.

‘“We know that he is here, but there’s nothing we can do about it in Bolivia. Now you’ve brought me some really good news: he’s out there in a dangerous jungle without proper food or equipment. It would be nice if he never came back. We certainly aren’t going to help look for him,” the consul told me with a good chuckle.

‘I was angry of course.

‘“And what about the Swiss guy he’s got with him?” I demanded, but the consul just shrugged his shoulders.

‘I was anxious and confused when I went back to the Israeli embassy. The same Bolivian officer helped me to clarify a few details. First he looked on maps and aerial photographs for the Indian village that we were supposed to visit and then made a few phone calls, but he always got the same answer: there is no Indian village, civilised or otherwise, in that entire region.

‘I learned that Karl had the reputation of being a dangerous bastard. A few years ago he talked a young German guy into going into the jungle with him, promising him exciting adventures. The German became sick and weak after a few days and pleaded with Karl to take him back, but Karl refused and just abandoned him. The poor guy managed to make it to a little ranch, where they saved his life.’

A chill ran up my spine. Could it really be true? Karl had seemed like a good guy to me. Marcus had taken to calling him Poppa. Could it be that Karl was a threat to Marcus’s life? I couldn’t bring myself to believe that. Karl had been fond of Marcus; he would never harm him.

‘On the morning of the sixteenth day the flight they had promised me took off at nine in the morning and landed in Trinidad, a town in the interior, an hour later. I waited there until the afternoon, when the pilot of the rescue plane informed me that the weather was horrible and he couldn’t take off. I was asked to come back the next morning.

‘I was at the air force headquarters early the next day, but the unpaved runway at the airport was still wet from the previous night’s rain. The plane still couldn’t take off through all the puddles. The pilot kept telling me there was simply no way anyone could survive seventeen days in the jungle. Especially not in this kind of weather. And especially not a gringo. He didn’t come right out and say, “Your friend is dead,” but he might as well have.

‘Once we were finally up in the air, the pilot told me that an order is an order, so he would fly over the river as he had been told to, but that there was absolutely no point to it, that it was all a dreadful waste of fuel.

‘At first we flew at a reasonable altitude over the river and followed its course, but the mountains soon forced us to go higher. From up there we couldn’t see anything but trees, and the pilot was not careful to follow the crooked path of the river. He flew a straight course over it, and I realised that there was no hope of spotting you, unless you managed to set the whole jungle ablaze.

‘I was more depressed than ever. The pilot made it clear that this was the last search flight he would take me on.

‘I went to the navy headquarters in Rurrenabaque. It was evident that no effort was being made to find you despite all the promises I had received. The commandante was nice enough, polite, full of good intentions, but he explained to me that the navy could not possibly organise a search party, as it was against regulations to take a boat up the Tuichi. The only other option I had, he said, was to find someone who would accept payment for taking me up the river.

‘“Do you know of anyone who might be willing?” I asked.

‘“Come with me,” he said, “quickly.”