Our Lady of the Nile (21 page)

The procession moved off, walked through the gates guarded by the militants, followed the track along the ridgeline, then proceeded down the path and arranged themselves, class by class, on the slope facing the spring. Suddenly, there was a shriek of horror: the Virgin had lost her head, or rather what was left of it resembled cracked pottery. The Madonna’s face had been smashed, and the shards lay scattered on the platform. Flowers floated on the water
of the basin, which was threatening to overflow, since one of the vases had blocked the drainage channel.

“Sacrilege! Sacrilege!” shouted Mother Superior.

“It’s the devil’s work,” cried Father Herménégilde in turn, making frantic gestures of blessing, as if he were performing an exorcism.

“Sabotage,” muttered the mayor, dashing behind the rocks, his arm soon appearing above the decapitated statue holding a black ball.

“A grenade!” yelled a white teacher, before running up the path, his colleagues close behind, as they climbed the slope with newfound agility.

One of the gendarmes raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired toward the bottom of the hollow, into the spreading ferns, beneath which flowed the stream.

Panic spread among the girls. They jostled and trampled each other, stampeding up the path, oblivious to the orders, pleas, and entreaties of Mother Superior entangled in her long dress, of Father Herménégilde gathering his cassock, of the panting mayor, who brandished the dirty black ball crying: “It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s just clay!” The lycée hands had dropped the large baskets of provisions they’d been carrying, and the cans were now rolling down the hill, to the great despair of Sister Bursar, who’d quickly given up trying to run after them.

All the fugitives gathered in the lycée yard. Everyone caught
their breath. “To the chapel,” ordered Mother Superior, and when everyone had taken their place in the pews, she spoke:

“My girls, you witnessed this ghastly sacrilege. Impious hands – I don’t wish to know whose – have violated the sweet face of Mary, our protector, Our Lady of the Nile. It befalls us to expiate this crime against God. We shall fast. Today we shall eat nothing but boiled beans. May God forgive the person or persons who committed such a sin.”

That’s when Gloriosa slipped out of her row of pews and walked up to the altar steps. She whispered in the ear of the mayor, who then went over to Mother Superior. They conferred quietly together for a long while. Finally, Mother Superior blurted out:

“Gloriosa has something to tell you.”

Gloriosa rose to the highest step before the altar. She scanned her schoolmates, giving several of them a mocking or satisfied smile. As soon as she began to speak, her booming voice made everyone jump:

“My friends, it is not in my name that I ask to speak to you, it is in the name of the Party, the Party of the majority people, that I address these words to you. Our Reverend Mother Superior said she didn’t wish to know who smashed the head of Our Lady of the Nile, but we are well aware that those who committed this crime are our eternal enemies, the executioners of our fathers and our grandfathers, the Inyenzi. They are communists and atheists, led by the devil. They want to burn down the churches, kill the
priests and the nuns, and persecute all Christians, like they do in Russia. They’ve infiltrated everywhere. I’m even afraid that some of them are here, among us, in our lycée. But I am confident that Monsieur the Mayor and our armed forces will know how to get the job done. What I wanted to tell you is that we’ll soon have a new statue of Our Lady of the Nile, and she’ll be a real Rwandan woman, with the face of the majority people, a Hutu Virgin we’ll be proud of. I shall write to my father. He knows a sculptor. Soon, we’ll have an authentic statue of Our Lady of the Nile, a true likeness of Rwandan women, to whom we’ll be able to pray without hesitation, and who will watch over our Rwanda. But as you know, our lycée is still full of parasites, impurities, and filth that render it unfit to receive Our True Lady of the Nile. We must get to work without delay. We must clean everything, down to the smallest recess. No one should be disgusted at such work, for it is the work of true militants. There, that’s all I wanted to tell you. Now let us sing the national anthem.”

All the girls clapped, the mayor launched into song, and everyone joined in as one:

Rwanda rwacu, Rwanda Gihugu Cyambyaye

Ndakuratana ishyaka n’ubutwari

lyo nibutse ibigwi wagize kugeza ubu
,

nshimira abarwanashyaka

bazanye Repubulika idahinyuka

Twese hamwe, twunge ubumwe dutere imbere ko …

Rwanda, our Rwanda, who gave birth to us
,

I celebrate you, oh you, courageous and heroic
.

I remember the many trials you have experienced

And I pay homage to the militants
,

Those who founded an unshakable Republic
.

Together, in unison, let us forge ahead …

“You see,” said Gloriosa to Modesta as she returned to her pew, “here, I’m already the minister.”

School’s Out

During the month following the attack against Our Lady of the Nile, lycée activities focused on preparing for the triumphant welcome reserved for the new and authentic Madonna of the River. The old statue was unceremoniously removed from her niche. Nobody knew quite what to do with her. To destroy her was perhaps dangerous, for they feared the vengeance of She who had been venerated for so long, and to whom so many prayers had been addressed. Draped beneath a tarpaulin, She was eventually consigned to the maisonette at the bottom of the garden housing the generator. For a long time, they suspected old Sister Kizito of dragging herself on her crutches – when she could – to go and pray before the One whom she’d seen erected above the spring with such solemnity and fervor.

Gloriosa was triumphant. With Father Herménégilde’s militant blessing and steady assistance, she’d proclaimed herself President of the Committee for the Enthronement of Our Authentic Lady of the Nile. They occupied the library, which they’d turned into their headquarters, and which was now out of bounds except with their permission. The telephone, which until then had been reserved for Mother Superior’s office, was now set up in the library. Gloriosa went to class only rarely now. With Father Herménégilde at her side, she would interrupt the other classes without hesitation, to make short speeches, in Kinyarwanda, phrased as slogans heavy with double meaning. She had managed a spectacular reconciliation with Goretti, welcoming her as a committee board member. But Goretti, while approving and encouraging Gloriosa’s activism, had refused the post of vice president Gloriosa offered her, and displayed a cautious reserve in front of the other girls. Mother Superior hardly left her office now, and when she did, pretended not to notice the disorder that reigned in her establishment. When Father Herménégilde came to see her, out of a respect for hierarchy that barely disguised a hint of insolence, to update her on the committee’s activities, Mother Superior merely replied:

“Very well, Father, you know what you’re doing, Rwanda is an independent country, independent … but don’t forget, we’re responsible for a lycée of young women, they’re only young women …”

And then she plunged her nose back into the inventories she’d asked Sister Bursar to provide so she could check them, on the pretext of planning the start of the next school year.

Gloriosa and Father Herménégilde went on a mission to Kigali and Butare for a few days. A giant Mercedes, provided by Gloriosa’s father, came to collect them. Upon their return, they hastily called a meeting of the committee, informed Mother Superior, and announced a general assembly of pupils and teachers in the large study hall. Gloriosa let Father Herménégilde speak first. He revealed that, with the support of the highest echelons of government and the Party, the enthronement of Our New and Authentic Lady of the Nile would be the occasion for a gathering of the elite of the Militant Rwandan Youth, the JMR, who at this very moment were continuing their parents’ glorious social revolution throughout the country. High school and university students would drive up to Nyaminombe in minibuses. Around fifty were expected, students selected from among the best of the militant youth. Tents supplied by the army would be erected on the open land above the spring, for there was clearly no question of housing boys in the lycée, so close to the young women. The ceremony would be both religious and patriotic in nature. He finished his speech in Kinyarwanda, proclaiming that the Rwandan youth would swear an oath to Our Lady of the Nile, who henceforth stood for true Rwandan women. He told them
to always remember the centuries of servitude they had endured at the hands of arrogant invaders, to continue to defend the gains of the social revolution, to tirelessly fight those who remained the implacable enemies of the majority people both outside and within Rwanda’s borders. Then Gloriosa, still speaking in Kinyarwanda, added that it wouldn’t be long before the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile followed the example of those brave militants who rose up in schools and in local government to rid the country of the Inyenzi’s accomplices. The girls of the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, Rwanda’s female elite, would prove worthy of their parents’ courage, and she, Nyiramasuka, would be worthy of her name, of that they could be sure.

Everyone in the hall applauded. Only Monsieur Legrand dared utter a feeble objection:

“But how will we complete the school program, what with this big celebration coming up? Isn’t there a risk of being refused certification and losing a whole year?”

Father Herménégilde answered him with extreme courtesy, saying that the foreign teachers – friends – had nothing to worry about, for none of it concerned them anyway. The lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, which was considered the best in the country, had nothing to fear, and would be crowned with the national certification of its end-of-year exam, just as it was every year.

“It’s coming, Virginia, you do realize that? Don’t think we’ll escape it just because we’re in a lycée for the privileged. On the contrary. We’re their biggest mistake. And they won’t be slow to correct it. Gloriosa has engineered the whole thing: that business of the phantom Inyenzi, the attack on the statue, the Hutu’s new Madonna. It’s all in place. All that’s missing is the JMR gathering. And they won’t come singing hymns to Mary, they’ll come with fat truncheons, with clubs, maybe even machetes, to honor Their Lady of the Nile. I suppose the new girls have properly understood what’s going to happen to us. But if there are any still clinging to their illusions because they can’t get over having been accepted into the lycée for future ministers’ wives, then they must be warned. Discreetly. It’s too dangerous for us all to get together. Imagine the plot: a Tutsi meeting! And when the time comes for us to flee, we’ll each have to go our own way. Some will get caught, but some will manage to escape, I hope.”

“Listen,” said Virginia, “I’m not leaving the lycée without my diploma. Give up so close to the diploma? Never. If you knew how much this means to my mother, the dreams she’s built upon that piece of paper. When I think of all those girls who were just as smart as us, maybe smarter, and were excluded by the famous quota. They had to resign themselves to simply being farmers, poor women farmers, all their lives. It’s partly for them I want to get this diploma, even if it probably won’t be very useful in Rwanda. After all, it’s not the first time we’ve been threatened,
it’s our daily burden. Let’s wait to get that diploma, and if we have to leave, I’ll figure out a way.”

“I’m not so sure. You know, they’ve started to hunt Tutsi bureaucrats and students across the whole country. Soon it’ll be the turn of the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, why would we escape it? The purge will end with a bang at the lycée of the female elite. You know what awaits us. Have you forgotten what we’ve already suffered and what they’re promising every day will happen to us? In 1959, half my family fled to Burundi as refugees. In 1963, three of my uncles were killed, though my father escaped – in Kigali, they didn’t do as much killing as they’d have liked to because of the people from the United Nations – but he was sent to prison with loads of others, he was beaten to a pulp, and when they let him go – because the President wanted to show the whites just how peace loving he was – they made him pay a colossal fine, his taxi and truck were impounded, and to top it all off, they made him sign a document confessing he was a spy and an Inyenzi accomplice. My father’s frightened: that document is still with State Security. Because of that, now they might kill him.”

“If they kill our parents, they’d better kill us too. You know what happened when we took refuge at the mission? There were many orphans, their mothers and fathers had just been massacred. Well, the Prefect came to say there were some Hutu families willing to adopt them, and he used such fancy words in front of the missionaries, like Christian charity and community spirit, that when my
father repeats those words, they make him angry and my mother starts to cry. Anyway, they shared out the orphans: boys went to work the fields, and the young women, well, they were very popular, you can imagine why! When, as Gloriosa has promised, the JMR get here – and we know what for – there’ll still be time for us to hide, and try to join our families, then cross over to Burundi.”

“I’ll go to Fontenaille’s, he’ll protect me, he won’t let me fall into the hands of rapists and murderers. I’m his Isis, and anyway, nobody except you knows I go there.”