Running the Rift (2 page)

Mama joined him. She held a tray of urwagwa, and the banana beer's sweet, yeasty tang tickled his nostrils. “Are you tired? You can go to bed if you want.”

He shook his head. He thought of his father sitting in his chair on Friday evenings, drinking urwagwa and eating peanuts. He could almost reach out and touch the glitter of salt on Papa's lips.

“He must have been writing his talk for the meeting,” Mama said, stroking the journal's skin.

Jean Patrick read.
Everything in the universe has a mathematical expression: the balance of a chemical reaction, the Fibonacci sequence of a leaf, an
encounter between two human beings. It is important
—the sentence ended there. Jean Patrick envisioned a noise in the bush, his father putting down the pen and peering through the window. It seemed at that moment as if not only his father's words but the whole world had stopped just like that: midsentence.

T
HE MEN WERE
still drinking, some sharing bottles of urwagwa through a common straw, the women still replenishing empty bowls, when Uwimana came with the coffin. A procession of Papa's family from Ruhengeri followed. Dawn, ash colored, came through the door behind them.

“Chère Jurida,” Uwimana said. He held Mama's hand. “Whatever you need, you can ask me. You know François was my closest friend.”

A line of people formed to say good-bye. Mama sat by the coffin, her family and Papa's family beside her. The women keened.

“Are you going up?” Roger pressed close to Jean Patrick.

“Are you?” Neither of them moved. “We can go together,” Jean Patrick said.

Papa was dressed in an unfamiliar suit. Dark bruises discolored his face, and the angles his body made seemed wrong. Jean Patrick could not reach out to touch him.

“That's not your dadi anymore. Your dadi's in heaven,” a small voice said. Jean Patrick looked down to see Mathilde, Uncle's daughter, beside him. She wedged her hand in his. “When my sister died, Mama told me that. I was scared before she said it. I came for Christmas—do you remember? You read me a book.”

Of course Jean Patrick remembered. Since she was small, Mathilde had had a hunger for books and loved to listen to stories. When Uncle's family came to visit, she would rush to Papa's study, dragging Jean Patrick by the hand. She would point to a tall book of folk stories on the bookshelf. “Nkuba, read me the one about your son, Mirabyo, when he finds Miseke, the Dawn Girl.” It was always this same one.

Even before Jean Patrick could read the complicated text, he knew the story well enough to recite it. “Some day, like Miseke,” he would say, “you will laugh, and pearls will spill from your mouth. Then your umukunzi,
your sweetheart, will know he has found his one love.” Each time he said this, Mathilde released a peal of laughter. “You see?” Jean Patrick would say, pointing to her lips. “Pearls! Just like your Rwandan name, Kamabera.” And Mathilde would laugh again.

“You have to tell your papa you love him,” she whispered now, “so he'll be happy in heaven.” She stood on tiptoes and peered inside the coffin.

Jean Patrick looked at Roger, and together they approached the coffin. They knelt down to recite Papa's favorite words from Ecclesiastes.

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom—”

Jean Patrick stopped. If he spoke the word
grave,
tears would stain his Sunday shirt.

U
WIMANA CANCELED CLASSES
on the day of the funeral, and all the teachers and students from Gihundwe escorted the coffin to the church. Cars packed with people wound through the streets, followed by crowds on foot. Children ran on the paths in a cold, drizzling rain. Mud splattered their legs and shorts.

A brown kite swooped from a branch; its sharp cry hung in the mist. Jean Patrick wondered if Papa's soul had wings, too, like the paintings of angels in church. Mist rose from Lake Kivu. Fishermen emerged and disappeared in a gray space that belonged to neither water nor sky. Long-horned cattle grazed in the green hills. As the procession passed, farmers watched from their fields. Some signed the cross; others stretched out a hand in farewell.

Instead of the chapel at Gihundwe, where Jean Patrick's family worshipped every Sunday, they went to Nkaka Church. The harmonies of the choir and the steady beat of drums poured through the open doors. All the pews and chairs were filled. Behind them, people stood shoulder to shoulder. Above the coffin, the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood onto her open robe. The whiteness of the Virgin's skin, her wounded heart, the reverberating drums and clapping, combined to fill Jean Patrick with terror. He shut his eyes and tumbled back in time until he arrived at the moment when he had lain warm inside his bed and wished his father a safe journey. He undid the wish and told his father instead not to go.

U
WIMANA HAD PROMISED
that Jean Patrick's family could stay on at the boarding school until a new préfet was found, but every day Jean Patrick waited for a man in a pressed suit to walk up the path and claim the house from them. In his dreams he heard the new préfet say, I am taking your father's job. Get out of my house.

It was the first clear afternoon since Itumba, the long rainy season, had begun, and sunlight pooled on the floor where Jean Patrick gathered with his brothers and sisters to enjoy the warmth. Zachary pushed the wire truck across the floor. Jacqueline sat in a swath of sun, spooning sorghum porridge into Clemence's mouth. Clemence tried to catch a wavering tail of light on the floor. She giggled, and porridge ran down her chin.

Jean Patrick hid behind a chair. As Zachary went past, he roared like a lion and pounced, waving his hands like paws. At that moment, the window exploded in a spray of glass. Jean Patrick thought it was something he had done until he saw the rock by Zachary's feet. Clemence screamed, and Jacqueline hugged her close. Jean Patrick grabbed Zachary and pushed him away from the window. A second window splintered; the rock would have caught Jean Patrick's head if he hadn't ducked.

“Tutsi snakes!” The shouts were as close as the door. Laughter followed. A rock thudded against the house. Mama burst in, running barefoot across the broken glass, and scooped Clemence into her arms.

“Next time we'll kill you!” The laughter trailed off.

A wild noise filled Jean Patrick's head, and at first he didn't realize it came from his own throat. He burst through the door as the boys disappeared into the bush. He heaved a rock at their backs, grabbed a walking stick that leaned against the wall, and ran after them. Sprinting furiously, the stick clutched in his hand, he followed the fading sounds of their
movement. Stones stabbed his bare feet. At the top of a rise, he shaded his eyes to scan the vegetation below. Nothing stirred. If he saw the boys, he knew he could catch them. If he caught them, he swore he would kill them.

The land poured in rolling folds of terraced plots toward Lake Kivu. Banana groves dotted the bush, leaves shining with moisture. Sweet potato vines, lush and green from the rains, claimed every spare scrap of earth. Jean Patrick picked up stones and threw them, one after another. The women in the fields looked up from weeding and hilling to rest on their hoes.

“Eh-eh,” they teased. “Who are you fighting? Ghosts?”

He pretended not to hear. His legs burned from his effort, and he pressed his hands to his thighs to keep them from shaking. When he caught his breath, he picked up his stick and tore down the path toward home in case the boys had doubled back to attack again. Several times he lost his way on goat trails that petered out in a web of new, thick growth.

A red sunset smoldered in the clouds over the lake, and the day's warmth fled. He hadn't realized how far he'd run; he'd have to hurry to beat the fast-approaching dark. The brush stretched before him, the silence broken only by the calls of tinkerbirds in the trees.
Who-who?
Jean Patrick couldn't tell them. Taking off at a dead run, he crashed headlong into Roger.

“Hey, big man! What do you think you're doing?” Roger held him firmly by the shoulders.

“These guys—they threw rocks—”

“Mama told me. She said you chased after them like a crazy man. Reason why I came to find you.”

“I didn't see their faces, but they weren't from Gihundwe. They had dirty rags for clothes.” Jean Patrick spat. “Abaturage—country bumpkins.”

Roger blew out his breath. “You ran fast. I saw you from a long way off, but I couldn't catch you. What did you think one skinny boy could do against a gang of thugs, eh?”

Jean Patrick shrugged. “I didn't think. I just ran.”

“Superhero, eh?” Roger tapped Jean Patrick's shins. They were scratched and bleeding, his bare feet spotted with blood. “You should take better care of your special gift. You won't get another one,” Roger said.

In the waning light, Jean Patrick couldn't see his face to tell if he was joking.

T
HE SUN HAD
disappeared by the time Jean Patrick and Roger returned. Jacqueline was sweeping glass from the rugs. Papa's office door was open, and Mama stood by the desk, packing papers and books. Jacqueline held out a hand to warn him, but Jean Patrick hurried across the room. A shard of glass burrowed into his foot.

“We'll have to leave now,” Mama said. She had a look of fear on her face that Jean Patrick could not recall ever having seen.

“Why? This is our home.” He sat on a chair to dig at the glass in his foot. Events were happening too fast. Jean Patrick could not keep up in his mind.

Mama knelt beside him. “Let me.” She cradled his foot in her hands. “We live here by Uwimana's grace. What if someone comes to burn down the house?”

“But Mama, it's only kids. We can't fear them.”

Mama shook her head. “There are things you don't understand. Each time I believe this country has changed, I find out nothing changes. I'm glad your dadi didn't live to see this.”

Jean Patrick didn't know what she meant. “If Papa was alive,” he said, “this would never have happened.”

“There.” A sliver of glass glistened on Mama's finger. “I'm saving Papa's books for you. When you're a teacher, you will have them.”

“I can't be a teacher now.”

“Who told you that? Your father was.”

“Dadi can't help me anymore.”

Mama picked up Papa's journal and held it out to Jean Patrick. Since Papa's death, it had remained open, as he had left it. “Take it.” She removed the pen and closed the book.

Jean Patrick took the journal and pen and went outside. Opening to a random page, he tried to read what was written, but it was too dark. What he needed from his father was a clue, something to help him fit the fractured pieces of the afternoon together.

Before his first day in primary school, Jean Patrick had not known what
Tutsi
meant. When the teacher said, “All Tutsi stand,” Jean Patrick did not know that he was to rise from his seat and be counted and say his name. Roger had to pull him up and explain. That night, Jean Patrick said to his father, “Dadi, I am Tutsi.” His father regarded him strangely and then laughed. From that day forward, Jean Patrick carried the word inside him, but it was only now, after the windows and rocks, after the insults, that this memory rose to the surface.

The first stars blinked sleepily from the sky's dark face. The generator at Gihundwe intoned its malarial lament. If Jean Patrick had powers like his namesake, Nkuba, he could have breathed life into the inert pages, sensed the leather skin stretch and grow into a man's shape, felt once more his father's strong, beating heart. Instead he dug the pen into his flesh until blood marked his palm.
François,
he wrote, his father's Christian name.

“W
E'LL BE LIKE BEGGARS,”
Roger had said, and even though Mama pinched him for it, Jean Patrick thought he might be right. Now the final week of school had come, and he wished he could drag his feet in the dirt, slow time down to a crawl so that they wouldn't have to move to Uncle Emmanuel's when classes ended. Some days he had to force himself to care that he was at the top of his class, bringing home papers to show Mama with hardly any red marks at all.

Roger was waiting for him beneath the broad brim of an acacia tree behind the house. They bent to take off their shoes. A drift of yellow pollen swirled to the ground.

Jean Patrick rubbed at a yellow spot on his school shorts. “Mama would kill us if she saw us going barefoot to school.”

“She would talk so that cows leave their calves,” Roger said. “But she should get used to it when we move to Uncle's.”

“Don't talk like that,” Jean Patrick said, and he pushed his brother. “You don't know.”

He started out toward school at a steady jog, a shoe in each hand. There were five more days of school, six more until he found out whether Roger's complaints came true. That was the day they would pack up their belongings and close the door of the house for the last time. Come September, who would sleep in his and Roger's room? Who would write at Papa's desk?

“We have to hurry,” Roger said, patting Jean Patrick's bottom with his shoe. “Sister said she had a surprise for us today, remember?”

Jean Patrick looked over his shoulder. Since the boys had broken the windows, he watched out for them. Sometimes he thought he caught sight of them disappearing into the brush, vanishing in a curl of cook smoke. It
was silly, of course; unless they wore the same rags, he probably wouldn't know them if they walked up and shook his hand.

T
HE SURPRISE WAS
that a famous runner was coming to speak to the class. Not just any runner—an Olympian. After Sister made the announcement, Jean Patrick could not keep his mind on the path of his studies. For the past few weeks, he hadn't thought anything could lift up his spirits. Not Papa's books, not the igisafuria and fried potatoes with milk that Mama cooked for him, not the songs Jacqueline played full force on the radio. But Sister had managed to succeed where all else had failed. All morning long, his mind traveled back to the runner. His eyes wore out a spot on the window where he searched for the speck that would turn into the runner's fancy auto. Finally, just as he finished his sums, he saw a shape materialize from a swirl of dust. The car was not fancy; it was a Toyota no different from a hundred other Toyotas on the roads. A man thin as papyrus unfolded his legs into the yard, stood up, and stretched.