Our Lady of the Nile (20 page)

The two
lycéennes
were shown into Mother Superior’s office. Again, Gloriosa recounted the tale of the assault, but in this new version, the details were much worse: the number of Inyenzi kept on growing, and now it was the lycée they were preparing to storm, they wanted to rape all the pupils, and torture them horribly and kill them, the nuns wouldn’t be spared either, not even the whites. Modesta kept quiet: she made herself whimper and cry as Gloriosa had instructed. “Hurry,” insisted Gloriosa, “there’s not a moment to lose, we’re all in danger, the Inyenzi are close by, they’re everywhere.”

Mother Superior made the necessary decisions. She summoned Father Herménégilde, Sister Gertrude, and Sister Bursar for a war council. She sent Brother Auxile to Nyaminombe in his truck, and he returned with the mayor and the two gendarmes.
She assembled the girls in the chapel, and Father Herménégilde made them sing hymns, interspersed with dozens of rosaries, without telling them why. Sister Bursar distributed kitchen knives to the lycée hands, carefully jotting down the number in her notebook, then took command of the brigade posted at the school gates. Night had fallen. Sister Bursar decided to hand out all the biscuits she’d been saving for the next pilgrimage. In the chapel, despite Father Herménégilde’s stubborn insistence on litany upon litany of hymns and rosaries, the spreading rumors finally got the better of him. It was whispered that the President had been assassinated, that the Inyenzi had crossed the lake, that the Russians had given them monstrous weapons, that they were going to kill everyone, even the young women, after raping them first … Many were in tears, some asked the chaplain to take their confession, others hoped, though they didn’t know why or how, that they’d escape the massacre, if not the raping.

The sound of Brother Auxile’s truck was heard. The suspicious guards, fearing that the truck had fallen into an ambush, opened the gates slowly, in spite of the driver’s impatient honking. With some relief, they saw that Brother Auxile had brought not just the mayor and the two gendarmes with their rifles, but also twenty militants armed with machetes.

The war council met again in Mother Superior’s office: present were Mother Superior, the mayor, Sister Bursar, and Father Herménégilde, who’d left the girls under Sister Gertrude’s watchful
eye. As both victim and witness, Gloriosa was invited to attend and recount the attack for the mayor’s benefit: the supposed Inyenzi were now more numerous and violent than ever, and Gloriosa lifted her dress to show them all the scratch marks covering her thighs. Modesta, still silent though now sobbing for real, was led to the infirmary so that Sister Angélique could look after her. The mayor declared that he’d been able to contact the Prefect, who then alerted the army base. The colonel was going to immediately send fifty soldiers under Lieutenant Gakuba’s command. Meanwhile, they placed militants at the strategic points and dispatched a patrol of militants to the shopping district, led by a gendarme. Mother Superior gave the girls permission to return to their dorms and get into bed, but with their clothes on.

They all waited. The night was particularly dark and the mountain was still. The patrol returned from the village. A few dogs stirred, and the mixture of plaintive and furious barking took a while to quell. Soon after midnight two trucks rolled up, packed with soldiers. They immediately took up their positions around the lycée. The young lieutenant in command conferred with the mayor and Mother Superior in her large office. Gloriosa retold her tale, this time adding that she thought she had recognized the voice of one of those who’d attacked them, she wasn’t entirely sure, but it could well have been Jean Bizimana, the son of Gatera, the Tutsi who had a stall at the market. The lieutenant said that the Tutsi were never far from the Inyenzi, and that there was
no doubt that the bandits, who had come from abroad, were now hiding with them. He would send out patrols to search their compounds, taking the militants as their guides. Jean Bizimana would be arrested immediately. “When it comes to the Inyenzi, there’s never a moment to lose,” said the lieutenant.

The operations ordered by the lieutenant were promptly carried out. The patrol chiefs returned an hour later to report to him in the presence of Mother Superior, the mayor, and Gloriosa, who had refused to go and lie down in the guest room they had offered her, even though it was the finest one, Monsignor’s room. Jean Bizimana had been arrested without offering any resistance, amid the screams and tears of his parents, his brothers, and his sisters. The soldiers had interrogated him with the intensity needed to make him give up his accomplices. He admitted nothing. They were going to send him to the huge prison in the north of the country. “There’s little chance we’ll see him hanging around my district again,” said the mayor, laughing.

The soldiers had ransacked the few enclosures still inhabited by Tutsi. They’d conscientiously ripped open granaries, smashed jars, questioned every occupant, even the children. In vain. The Inyenzi had fled without a word. “So,” said the lieutenant, “two brave young ladies succeeded in putting them to flight. Still, it’s a shame we couldn’t catch a few. But it was a good operation: the Tutsi need constant reminding that here in Rwanda they’re merely cockroaches, Inyenzi.”

Gloriosa stayed in Monsignor’s room for a few weeks – until the pilgrimage, as she’d requested. They couldn’t refuse anything to a girl who had shown so much courage, and whom Father Herménégilde had compared to Joan of Arc in one of his sermons. The two lycée girls’ exploits, Gloriosa’s especially, were celebrated in even the highest echelons of the Party. “Two heroic lycée girls deflect band of dangerous criminals come to sow chaos in our country,” ran the newspaper headline. Gloriosa had become the heroine who had saved the lycée, perhaps even the entire country. The nuns and the teachers took every opportunity to compliment her: the gaggle of schoolmates that clustered around her grew considerably larger, although some avoided chatting with her for too long, for fear of committing some sort of faux pas. Only Goretti kept her distance, allowing herself to covertly express to those of her friends who remained loyal some doubt as to the authenticity of Gloriosa’s exploits.

Modesta hoped that Gloriosa would renounce her intention to mutilate the statue of Our Lady of the Nile, for fear of compromising her newfound fame, but one day in Sister Lydwine’s class, Gloriosa whispered to her, “Don’t forget, Sunday, we’re off to the Batwa.”

The Batwa village comprised a dozen disheveled little huts in the middle of a sparse banana grove. On a well-flattened stretch of
ground, a large blackened circle marked the site of the fire where the clay pots were baked a few days before market. All around stood piles of potsherds, like low, crumbling pyramids.

Seeing the two girls approach, a swarm of squealing, naked children fled, their balloon-bloated stomachs streaked clay white. The village felt empty, strangely silent. They walked along the paths leading to the huts and finally came across a woman molding a pot. From a base made out of a broken pot, upon which sat a pile of clay, she brought forth – coil upon coil – the smooth, rounded belly of a stew pot. The potter was so absorbed in her task that when Gloriosa and Modesta drew near, she didn’t look up. They gently coughed to get her attention. After a while, without ceasing her work or looking at them, the woman mumbled: “If you’re here to buy a pot, they’re not ready yet. They’re drying. Come by the market, I’m always there. Then you can buy as many pots as you want.”

One by one, the kids who’d run off at the sight of the girls came out of their hiding places, drew closer, surrounded them, pressing tight, trying to touch them. Adults, men with beards, and yakking women slowly mixed in with the children. “Tell them to step back, I don’t want them to touch me,” said Gloriosa to the potter, clutching the folds of her skirt. “Get back,” said the potter, as an old man with a pointy white beard emerged from a hut and pushed away the most brazen with his staff. He came and sat down by the potter. Gloriosa explained what she wanted: a
wad of clay, which one of the teachers at the lycée had asked for. The potter and the old man didn’t seem to understand. Gloriosa repeated her request.

“So you want to be a potter,” said the old man, bursting with laughter. “You want to do what we Batwa do. Are you a Mutwa? You’re quite big for a Mutwa!”

“Give me one of those clay sausages,” Gloriosa insisted. “I’ll pay you the price of a whole pot, a jug, a large jug.”

Conferring in low voices, the woman and the old man gave it some thought, now and again glancing up at Gloriosa and Modesta with mocking grins.

“Two jugs,” said the potter at last, “two large beer jugs, that’s my price, and you’ll get your sausage. Twenty francs, that’ll be twenty francs.”

Gloriosa handed the potter a twenty-franc note, which the woman immediately crumpled into a ball and thrust into the knot of her wraparound. She called over one of the children, who went off to pick her a tuft of grass. This she wove into a kind of net in which she wrapped one of the clay coils with which she made her pottery.

“Here,” she said, “but don’t tell anyone what’s in here. Otherwise, they’ll say you’ve become a Mutwa.”

Gloriosa and Modesta hurried away as fast as they could, with a crowd of joyous, shouting, singing, dancing villagers following them as far as the track.

When they were finally alone again, Gloriosa opened the grass envelope and gazed at the clay coil for a long while.

“Look,” she said, “there’s enough here to correct the nose of every Virgin in Rwanda!”

“It’s all here in this bag,” said Gloriosa, “everything we need for tonight.”

Gloriosa opened the bag and Modesta saw that it contained a hammer, a file, and a flashlight.

“Where’d that come from?”

“Butici, the mechanic guy borrowed it for me from Brother Auxile’s workshop.”

“Did you give him money?”

“No need. He knows who I am. He was more than happy to help me out.”

“And how are we going to get out of the lycée at night?”

“You’ll come get me from my guest room, since they put you back in the dorm. They won’t refuse you that. Anyway, I’ll ask them to let you come. It won’t be hard to jump the wall behind the Bungalow, I’ve checked where there’s a gap.”

“So you still want to do what you said?”

“More than ever! Now that I’m a heroine, and you too, they’ll say it’s another one of our exploits, and believe me, it will be.”

“You know very well it’s all based on your lies.”

“It’s not lies, it’s politics.”

“We’ll set off when everyone’s asleep,” said Gloriosa. They waited for the lycée to sink into slumber. First there was the hubbub of the girls as they returned to their dorms, followed by the murmur of the last prayer they recited before climbing into bed. The ringing bell and the creaking gates signaled the start of curfew. Half an hour later, the purring of the generator ceased. The watchmen, spear or machete in hand, made their last round, then wrapped up in their blankets at the foot of the gate and fell asleep, despite instructions to the contrary. No lamp shone at Mother Superior’s office window. “It’s time,” said Gloriosa. “Let’s go.”

They scaled the wall at the end of the garden without any difficulty, and enveloped themselves in their wraparounds. “Here, you carry my bag,” Gloriosa told Modesta. “I’ll go in front.” They paused at the edge of the track. The familiar landmarks had vanished into the night. It was as if the mountains had swelled with a thick mass of darkness that filled even the vertiginous drop, at the bottom of which the lake could be glimpsed.

“We’ll get lost,” said Modesta, “switch on the flashlight.”

“It’s too dangerous. There could still be some army patrols or militants roaming around. I really scared them with my Inyenzi.”

They managed to feel their way along the track and reached the parking lot overlooking the spring. The trail leading down to the spring had been evened out and graveled, in readiness for the pilgrimage no doubt. Gloriosa switched on the flashlight. They
rounded the huge rocks, and to their surprise found a ladder leaning against the platform. “See,” said Gloriosa, “we’re in luck, it’s a sign that we’re carrying out a patriotic act: the gardeners who came to clean the shelter and decorate it with flowers have left their ladder.”

Gloriosa climbed onto the platform and, clutching the hammer, the file, the coil of clay, and the flashlight Modesta passed to her, wriggled around in front of the statue and kicked over the vases of flowers, which fell into the spring water pooling in the basin. Balancing precariously on the edge of the platform, Gloriosa dealt the Virgin’s nose such a blow with the hammer that the head of the statue shattered to pieces. She clambered down from the platform and turned to Modesta, who was shivering with cold and worry.

“I’ve broken Mary’s head, it’ll be impossible to fix her nose. But at least now they’ll be forced to replace the statue.”

“And what will happen to us? What a hideous sin!” Modesta whined. “If they ever realize it was us who did that …”

“Modesta, you’re always worrying. I already know what I’m going to do.”

At dawn, the lycée was filled with joyous effervescence. The great day had arrived, pilgrimage day! The girls took out their new uniforms, which had had their first outing for the Queen’s visit, but the patch with the Belgian colors had been gently removed
from the bolero jacket and replaced with one provided by Father Herménégilde, embroidered with the intertwined colors of Jesus and Mary.

Everyone gathered in the yard, in front of the chapel, each class lined up behind the banner that the girls had been embroidering in sewing class since the start of the year. Father Herménégilde blessed them and Brother Auxile handed out stenciled sheets of his latest hymns. Sister Bursar counted out cans of sardines, corned beef, Kraft cheese, and jam, which she packed into large baskets that the lycée hands then hoisted onto their heads. Silence fell when Mother Superior appeared on the chapel steps flanked by the mayor, the two gendarmes – with guns on their shoulders – and all the teachers. She made a short speech reminding them of the history of Our Lady of the Nile, urging everyone to conduct themselves most piously, and, turning to the mayor, she declared that this year they’d be making a special plea to the Black Virgin to bring peace and harmony to the thousand hills of this beautiful country.