Our Lady of the Nile (2 page)

For a long time, the photos of the unveiling ceremony of Our Lady of the Nile lined the long corridor where visitors, or parents who had requested a meeting with Mother Superior, were asked to wait. Now there was only one photograph still hanging: the one with Monsignor the Vicar Apostolic blessing the statue. Only traces of the others remained, the slightly paler marks of rectangular frames on the wall, there behind the hard wooden sofa – no cushion in sight – on which the unfortunate pupils summoned by the fearsome Mother Superior never dared to sit. Yet the photos hadn’t been destroyed. Gloriosa, Modesta, and Veronica found them one day when they were asked to clean the room at the back of the library where the archives were stacked. There, under a heap of old newspapers and magazines (
Kinyamateka
,
Kurerera Imana, L’Ami, Grands Lacs
, etc.), they found the photos, slightly discolored and warped, some still covered by a sheet of broken glass. There was the photo of the administrator making his military salute before the statue, and the soldier behind him dipping the Belgian flag. There were the photos of the
intore
dancers – slightly blurred because the inept photographer tried to capture
their impressive leaps in midair, which caused their sisal manes and leopard skins to be wreathed in a ghostly halo. Then there was the photo of the chiefs and their wives in all their finery, but most of these dignitaries had been crossed through with a wide stroke of red ink, and the faces of others masked by a question mark in black.

“The chiefs’ photos have suffered the
social revolution
,” said Gloriosa, laughing. “A dash of ink, a slash of machete, that’s all it takes … and no more Tutsi.”

“What about the ones with a question mark?” Modesta wanted to know.

“Alas, they must be the ones who managed to flee! But now that they’re in Bujumbura or Kampala, those big chiefs have lost their cattle, and their pride. They drink water like the pariahs they’ve become. I’m taking the photos. My father will tell me who these whip masters are.”

Veronica wondered when she, too, would be crossed out with red ink, on the annual class photograph taken at the start of the school year.

The pupils of Our Lady of the Nile make their great pilgrimage in May, the Virgin Mary’s month. Pilgrimage day is a long and beautiful one, and the lycée spends many months preparing for it. Prayers are given for good weather. Mother Superior and Father Herménégilde, the chaplain, announce a novena and request that
every class relay each other in the chapel to ask the Holy Virgin to chase off the clouds on that given day! After all, it’s quite possible in May: the rains become less frequent as the dry season approaches. For a whole month now, Brother Auxile has been rehearsing the hymns he’s written in honor of Our Lady of the Nile. Brother Auxile is the resident handyman, peering into the oily entrails of the electric generator, or the engines of the two supply trucks, cursing the drivers, and the servant-mechanics, in his Ghent dialect. He plays the harmonium and conducts the choir. The Belgian teachers were urged to take part in the ceremony, as were the three young Frenchmen posted here in lieu of military service. Mother Superior hinted, gently but firmly, that as it was a solemn occasion, they should wear a jacket and tie, instead of those ugly trousers they call blue jeans, and that she was counting on them to behave respectfully and set an example for the pupils. Sister Bursar spent a good part of the night in the pantry, setting aside items for the picnic: corned beef, sardines in oil, jam, Kraft cheese. You could hear the jangle of the huge bunch of keys attached to her leather belt. She counted out just enough crates of Fanta for the pupils, and a few bottles of Primus lager for the chaplain, Brother Auxile, and Father Angelo from the nearby mission. For the Rwandan Sisters, the teachers, and the school monitors, she put aside a demijohn of pineapple wine, the specialty of Sister Kizito, who jealously guards the secret recipe.

Of course Mass is endless that day, with hymns, prayers, and
dozens of rosary recitations, but best of all is the wild laughter of the girls as they race and romp about, sliding down the grassy slope. Sister Angélique and Sister Rita, the school monitors, blow the hell out of their whistles, bellowing: “Watch out for the ravine!”

Mats are laid down for the picnic. It’s not like in the refectory, it’s more chaotic, everyone can sit however they like, they can squat down or stretch out, their mouths smeared with jam. The school monitors raise their arms to the sky in defeat. Mother Superior, Sister Gertrude (Mother Superior’s Rwandan deputy), Sister Bursar, Father Herménégilde, and Father Angelo all sit on folding chairs. The teachers are also allowed chairs, but the French teachers prefer to sit on the grass. Sister Rita serves the men beer – only a Rwandan woman could have such good manners. Mother Superior of course refuses the Primus she’s offered, and Sister Bursar reluctantly does the same, making do with some of Sister Kizito’s pineapple wine.

It’s rare to see an actual pilgrim mingling with the pupils, since Mother Superior aims to keep at bay any unwelcome guests who might, on a “devotional” pretext, be drawn by the sight of such a gathering of young girls. The mayor of Nyaminombe district, where the lycée is located, has prohibited access to the spring at Mother Superior’s request. Even the government minister’s wife, who invited a few girlfriends along in her Mercedes to dote on their pious daughters, has a hard time persuading the police officer to lift the barrier. But there’s one visitor Mother Superior
can’t keep away, and that’s Monsieur de Fontenaille, the coffee grower. The girls are a bit scared of him. People say he lives alone in his large dilapidated villa. Most of his coffee bushes are going to seed. Nobody knows if he’s deranged or a white witch doctor as he goes about organizing digs to search for bones and skulls. His old jeep ignores the paths, jolting up and down the mountain slopes. He always breezes in, mid-picnic, sweeping off his bush hat in a theatrical gesture to greet Mother Superior, exposing his shaven head: “Please accept my deepest respects, Reverend Mother.”

She struggles to hide her annoyance: “Good day, Monsieur de Fontenaille, we weren’t expecting you. Please, don’t intrude on our pilgrimage.”

“Like you, I’m here to honor our Mother of the Nile,” he replies while turning his back to her. Slowly, he circles each mat where the girls are eating their lunches, stops near one of them, unconsciously adjusts his glasses, searches her face while nodding, pleased with himself, and begins to sketch her profile in his notebook. She’ll lower her gaze, as well-brought-up girls do, to avoid his piercing stare, then look away, yet some of the girls can’t help slipping him a sly smile. Mother Superior doesn’t dare intervene, for fear of causing an even greater scandal, but she follows the old plantation owner’s movements with apprehension. At last, he trundles to the little pool brimming with water from the spring, takes a handful of scarlet petals from one of his many jacket pockets, and throws them into the headwaters of the Nile. Then he raises his arms to the sky three times, palms spread,
arms wide, and mumbles some incomprehensible incantation. As soon as Monsieur de Fontenaille returns to the parking lot and we hear his jeep begin to stutter, Mother Superior stands and declares: “Come, young ladies, let’s sing a hymn.” The girls sing in unison, some of them gazing wistfully at the dust trail from the retreating jeep.

Upon returning to the lycée, Veronica opens up her geography book. It’s quite tricky to follow the course of the Nile, she has no name to start off with and then there are too many. She seems to have multiple sources, she hides in a lake, resurfaces, turns white, then gets lost in a swamp, while her Blue brother appears somewhere else. She’s easier to keep track of near the end, where she flows in a straight line, with desert on either side, lapping at the foot of the pyramids – the big ones – before spreading chaotically into the delta, and finally gushing into the sea, which is far bigger than the lake, so they say.

Veronica realizes that someone is peering over her shoulder, staring at the open page of the textbook with her.

“So, are you looking for the way back to where your people came from, Veronica? Don’t worry, I’ll pray to Our Lady of the Nile that the crocodiles carry you there on their backs, or rather in their bellies.”

Veronica would be forever haunted by Gloriosa’s laugh, especially in her nightmares.

Back to School

Our Lady of the Nile: how proudly the school stands. The track leading to the lycée from the capital, winds its interminable way through a labyrinth of hills and valleys and ends, quite unexpectedly, in a twisting climb up the Ikibira Mountains – which geography textbooks call the Congo-Nile range, for want of any other name. The lycée’s imposing main building comes into view, and it almost feels as if the peaks have eased themselves aside to make room for the school, there on the edge of the opposite slope, at the bottom of which you glimpse the sparkling lake. The lycée sits on the mountaintop, glinting at the schoolgirls, a palace that shines with their impossible dreams.

The construction of the lycée was a spectacle that Nyaminombe won’t forget in a long time. Not wishing to miss a thing, the normally idle men abandoned their jugs of beer in the bar, the women left their fields of millet and peas earlier than usual, and at the sound of the beating drum that announced the end of class, the mission-school children ran out and scrambled through the small crowd watching and commenting on the work in progress, to be in the front row. The more intrepid pupils had already slipped out of school to line the track, watching for the dust cloud that would announce the arrival of the trucks. As soon as the convoy reached them, they ran behind the vehicles and tried to grab hold. Some succeeded, others fell off and barely missed getting run over by the next truck. The drivers hollered in vain, trying to shoo away the swarm of daredevil kids. Some stopped their vehicles and stepped down, and the kids would scamper off, with the driver pretending to chase them, but as soon as the truck started off again, the game began anew. The women in the fields lifted their hoes to the heavens in a gesture of powerlessness and desperation.

Everyone was amazed to see no smoking pyramids of baking bricks, no procession of farmers carrying bricks on their heads, as they did when the
umupadri
asked the faithful to build a new church annex or when the mayor summoned the local people on a Saturday to help with community projects, such as enlarging the clinic or his house. No, this was a real white man’s construction
site in Nyaminombe, with real white laborers, fearsome iron-jawed machines that ripped and gouged the earth, trucks carrying machines that made an infernal racket and spewed cement, foremen barking orders in Swahili at the masons, and even white overseers who did nothing but look at large sheets of paper they unrolled like bolts of cloth from the Pakistani shop, and who went crazy with rage when they called the black foremen over, as if they were breathing fire.

Of all the lore surrounding the construction site, the most memorable is the story of Gakere. The Gakere Affair. People still recount it today, and it always raises a laugh. The end of each month was payday in Nyaminombe – the thirtieth, a perilous day. Perilous for bookkeepers, subjected to the workers’ often violent complaints. Perilous for the day laborers who knew that the thirtieth was the only date their wives remembered: they’d not be in the fields but waiting in the doorway of the hut to take the banknotes their husband handed them; they’d check the amount, tie a piece of banana fiber around the paltry wad, slip it into a little jug, and hide it under the straw by the bedside table. The thirtieth was marked by all kinds of quarrels and violence.

Tables for the bookkeepers were set up beneath awnings, or under shelters made from straw and bamboo. Gakere was a bookkeeper, and it was he who paid the day laborers. He was a former deputy chief of Nyaminombe, who had been purged like so many others by the colonial authorities and replaced by another deputy
chief (soon to be mayor), who was a Hutu. Gakere was hired because he knew everyone, all the local hired hands who didn’t speak Swahili. Bookkeepers from the capital were hired to pay the others, the real builders, who’d come from elsewhere and did speak Swahili. Everyone queued at the bookkeepers’ tables – come rain (usually) or shine – and there was always shouting and shoving, complaints, arguments, and recriminations. The heavies who guarded the construction site kept order, whacking the recalcitrant workers into submission with their sticks – the mayor and his two gendarmes didn’t want to get involved, neither did the whites. So Gakere settled beneath his shelter with his cash box under his arm. He sat down, placed the little box on the table, and opened it. The cash box was full of banknotes. Slowly, he unfolded the sheet of paper, a list of names of all the workers he had to pay, workers who’d waited hours. He began the roll call: Bizimana, Habineza … The laborer approached the table. Gakere pushed the few notes and coins owed toward him, the laborer pressed an ink-blackened finger next to his name, and Gakere muttered a few words to him as he marked the list with a cross. So for an entire day, Gakere was again the chief he had once been.

Then, one payday he didn’t show up: no Gakere, no cash box. It was soon known that he’d run off with the little box stuffed full of notes. “He’s gone to Burundi,” people said. “Crafty Gakere, he’s fled with the Bazungu’s money, but how will we get paid now?” Gakere was both admired and condemned: “He shouldn’t
have taken the money intended for the people of Nyaminombe, he could have figured out how to take the money from somewhere else.” But, in the end, the day laborers did get paid, people stopped begrudging Gakere, and no more was heard of him for two months. He’d abandoned his wife and his daughters, who were questioned by the mayor and closely watched by the gendarmes. But Gakere hadn’t told them of his dishonest plans: rumor had it that he planned to use the money to take a new wife in Burundi, a younger, prettier one. And then he returned to Nyaminombe, hands tied behind his back, two soldiers escorting him. He had never reached Burundi. He’d been afraid to cross Nyungwe Forest, because of the leopards, the big monkeys, and even the elephants who hadn’t roamed the forest for years. He’d traveled the entire country with that little cash box under his arm. He’d tried to cross the large swamps in Bugesera, and lost his way. Burundi wasn’t far but he’d wandered in circles through the stands of papyrus sedge, without ever reaching the border, which, it’s true, wasn’t marked. They eventually found him, on the edge of the swamp, thin and exhausted, his legs swollen. The banknotes were nothing but a spongy mass floating in his water-filled cash box. They tied him to a post by the site entrance for a whole day, to serve as an example. The workers filing past didn’t curse or spit at him, just lowered their heads and pretended not to notice. His wife and his two daughters sat at his feet. One of them would get up from time to time, wipe his face and give him a drink. Gakere was
convicted but didn’t stay in prison very long. He was never seen in Nyaminombe again. It could be that he reached Burundi at last with his wife and daughters, but without his little box. Some wondered whether the Bazungu had cast a spell on the banknotes, whether those wretched notes had made poor Gakere spin like a top, and that was why he never managed to reach Burundi.