Running the Rift (51 page)

“I'm fine,” Jean Patrick said.

He followed Bea up the path. “We'll stay outside. They have put the bodies in the rooms as a reminder of what happened, room after room of mummified corpses; it is too much,” she said. Wind rippled through the thick grass fertilized by the dead. A sharp odor filled Jean Patrick's nostrils, and he sniffed the air.

“Do you recognize it?”

He did, then. “Yes.” It was the smell of death.

They stopped beside a row of stones. “When I first came here, the scent terrified me,” she said. “Now I can't live without it. I come here and take it into my lungs, and then I know for a while that, yes, I am still among the living. It's like breathing the blood of my country, this country I still love.”

Jean Patrick did not understand, but he stood beside her, and after a little while, the odor melted into him, became a part of him, too. They stared out at the grass, a snapping field of green. Jean Patrick took Bea's hand. “Umukunzi wanjye,” he said. My sweetheart.

“How beautiful to hear those words once more. It's what my parents called each other, even after so many years of marriage.”

“I don't know how many times I have asked you to marry me.”

Bea's gaze followed the whipping grass. “Seventeen, I think.”

“Before, I thought I would ask you forever, until you said yes. Now, I will only ask you this one time more. Will you marry me? I knew then, and I know now—whatever you say—there will never be anyone else for me.”

Bea held his hands against the deep hollow where her collarbones met, where the gold cross flashed against her scar. “Jean Patrick, I have a child.”

“How wonderful! Boy or girl?”

“A little girl. Gabrielle Miseke. Gabby. She was born on January fifteenth, 1995. I cannot tell you if she is yours.”

For a moment, a thought he couldn't quite form itched at his mind as
he tried to take her words inside him. “Miseke, the Dawn Girl who laughs pearls,” he said, buying time until his shock cleared. “Mathilde loved that story. We read it over and over.” The thought clicked into place. “Gabby! The name on the paintings in the bedroom where I was,” he said. “The room is hers, then.”

“I had to wait until I knew that I could tell you, that it was something that could be between us. Can you forgive me?”

“How can you think there is anything to forgive?”

“It was a long time before my child received her Rwandan name. When she was born, there was only darkness in my life. More than once, as I stood at the sink to bathe her, I thought, How easy it would be to hold her under until she ceases to breathe. But in my heart I always believed she was yours, and I could not snuff out the last light of your life. Nor could I give her up.” Bea took a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed at her cheeks. “As soon as I allowed Gabby's smile to reach me, it became obvious what she must be called. She swept night from my life as dawn sweeps night from the world.”

Bea looked out toward the hills, the distant forested slopes. If her gaze kept going, it would find the swamps where he had hidden. A little girl rolled a metal hoop down a path, and sublime peace transformed Bea's face. Jean Patrick knew it was Gabby Miseke she watched.

He gathered her to him. If he could have opened his skin, tucked her inside his beating heart, he would have done so. He rested his chin on her hair. “You have not answered me. You have not said yes or no.”

Bea's cheeks were wet and glistening, her eyes, a mineral, polished black. “You understand—I can't leave my work. There are not so many social workers in Rwanda, and my AIDS group has become my family—my sisters. I will never abandon them.”

“Of course.”

“And I don't expect you to come back here. We have no Harvards or MITs in Rwanda—not yet—so I don't know how it can work.”

“None of that matters. There is always a way if you search for it. We have both learned this lesson, I think.”

A shadow of pain passed across Bea's face. “There is one more thing.
Since finding you again, I knew I could have Gabby's DNA tested. I could find out. This question has been like a hook, twisting in my heart, but the answer is always the same: I cannot do it. I cannot let destruction sweep through my life again.”

“There is no question,” Jean Patrick said. “Gabrielle Miseke is my daughter.”

J
EAN
P
ATRICK WAS ALONE
when he awoke in another strange bed, and for a moment he panicked. In his dream, he had been sitting at the table with his family. Something about the room, the house, was not quite right. Proportions were askew, the distances between him and the rest of his family too great to bridge. When he tried to touch them, he found only air, and it unsettled him nearly to the point of terror. It was a dream he visited often.

It was not yet light; a candle flickered on the table beside him. Had he been so careless, letting it burn all night? The bed creaked, and Bea sat beside him. Ah, he thought, place and time slowly drifting back to him. I am at the Peace Guest House in Cyangugu. The accommodations had just been completed; the smell of new paint came from the bright walls.

“I better go back to my room,” Bea said, “before someone discovers me and drowns me in the lake for my sins.”

“Eh? I believe those old customs are gone from this country—even here in Cyangugu.”

He blew out the candle, pulled her down, and took her into his arms. Thus tethered, he allowed himself to sleep again, a dreamless sleep like floating in deep water, until the plaintive
cree
of a brown kite over Lake Kivu woke him. Daylight, dank and dull, spilled through the space between the orange curtains. He walked to the door, opened it, and stepped outside, the concrete porch a sudden chill on his bare feet. Rain fell, a thin gauze of it, on the lawn and the plantings of trees, but here beneath the porch roof he remained protected.

“You are lucky,” the concierge had told them. “Last week it was a deluge, but now everything is drying out.”

Jean Patrick sat in the cane chair and looked out over the pleasant yard bordered by the chaos of grass and reeds. Potted plants framed the
doorways of the rooms, and semicircles of blooming plants peppered the grass beyond them. A profusion of orange flowers like overturned cups dripped from tall bushes. Bea had found the guesthouse and made the reservation, and he was thankful. The Anglicans who had built it had wrested a small piece of the former paradise from the devastation that was still all around them.

A steep slope plunged down to the lake, where the silhouettes of the fishermen drew shape out of the fog, the sight familiar and foreign at the same time. He could not quite take in that he was here, seeing all this once more. Suddenly, loss tugged at his heart; he could have fallen to his knees with the weight of all that was gone. He went back into the room and shut the door behind him.

Bea was at the sink in the bathroom between their two rooms, brushing her teeth with bottled water. “There is no water,” she said, her words muffled by toothpaste. She flicked the light switch. “No power.”

Jean Patrick came up behind her and kidnapped her in his arms. He brushed his teeth beside her, and she kissed him with her minty mouth.

“I'll go now,” he said. He put on a shirt and running tights, then changed the tights for shorts and track pants over them. “I don't know if Cyangugu is ready for such modern things.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Yes. I'm ready.”

“You'll run there in this rain with your foot?”

“It's barely wet. A little forward motion will give me time to prepare myself.”

“Ko Mana! You never give up.”

For courage, he held her one last time. He sucked in breath. It felt like a miracle. It felt like he would awaken and she would be gone.

J
EAN
P
ATRICK LOPED
easily down the hill to l'Hôtel du Lac Kivu. With a shock, he saw that it was run-down and dirty, nothing like the palace he remembered. There were still bullet holes in the walls of the building. He walked across the lawn to where the tables used to be, where he had first seen Jonathan with his treasure trove of rocks. Lake Kivu yawned before him. The Rusizi River, where he once hauled fish lines and
dove for his rusty prizes, murmured at his back. Foot traffic crowded the rickety bridge between Cyangugu and the DRC, the country he knew as Zaire. The Interahamwe still crept across the border, back into Rwanda, to stir up trouble. Just last year, Bea told him, five human rights workers had been murdered here.

A pirogue with an older man and two young boys came close to shore. Jean Patrick waved, and they waved back. The words of their songs drifted across the water. Jean Patrick could have sung along; they were still the same verses. He could have been watching himself, Zachary, and Uncle Emmanuel. He had to turn away.

At the docks by the old harbor, a freshly painted hull rested on a wooden framework—a flower of rebirth blooming amid the rusted hulks. There were new brick buildings, too, with bright blue metal roofs. At the fork in the road, he turned right, toward home. His heart pounded, and he didn't know if it was the altitude, the climb, the fear, or some combination of these factors. All along the hillsides, the old homes were gone. There was nothing left but crumbling walls, glassless windows, gardens overrun by vines. The road was steeper than he remembered, or perhaps it was just the difference in his fitness. Ghosts ran beside him. He picked up his pace, but the abazimu matched him stride for stride.

Farther on, swaths of forest had been cleared, and new buildings emerged from piles of bricks, concrete, mud, and metal. They were crowded and square, arranged in neat rows. Imidugudu, Bea had called them, adding to the many meanings of the word that of subsidized housing. He stopped to rub the dull ache from his ankle before continuing up the grade.

Far in the distance, Jean Patrick could pick out the ridges of Gashirabwoba. He must have logged a few thousand kilometers, running up and down them. He recalled the words Uncle had told Mama on that first night inside his house.
You've come back to Gashirabwoba now. Here, we live up to our village name: Fear Nothing
. During the genocide this had been so. Roger told him that some Tutsi gathered in the grove of eucalyptus where meetings were held and fought off the Interahamwe, only stones for weapons, for nearly a day. They held their ground fiercely until the Interahamwe retreated and returned with grenades.

A
T THE MAIN
dirt road where he used to catch the bus, Jean Patrick stopped. He could not distinguish one path from another. He turned a slow circle, disoriented and confused. Houses—his landmarks—were missing, and unfamiliar ones had sprouted up. Then he spotted the forked eucalyptus, blue and shimmering, rising above the forest canopy. The trail, overgrown now, where he had raced Roger and finally won appeared like a faint pencil mark in the undergrowth. The earth was slippery as he began to climb, but not liquid enough to suck in his shoes; he remembered days when mud swallowed all. He stopped to kneel and touch the earth. When he stood, his fingers were stained with rust, and a rubiginous circle remained on his knee. He was home.

The landscape of his childhood took shape before him, but as in his dream, it was off kilter and disjointed, overrun by high, wild grasses. The fence formed by cypress trees had disappeared without a trace. As he passed the spot where he guessed it had been, his skin grew cold. He was terrified he would step on a loved one's bones with the sole of his shoe.

One foot in front of the other, he climbed. A gnarled and scarred mango with tiny, unripe fruit survived, but the jacaranda that had once provided shade for their house now listed at a dangerous angle, naked and leafless. His family home was a blackened skeleton, vines crawling through the bones. Not one building stood. It had stopped drizzling, but a heavy mist remained, transforming the silence into something unearthly.

In the midst of the destruction, someone had scratched out a new plot in the old garden. Maize and sorghum, a few tomato vines and peas and spindly cabbages, pushed through the rubble and stones. Jean Patrick shivered. Did an umuzimu—a ghost—live here amid the ruin? A sense of violation and then of anger stirred in his chest.

An old woman approached, leaning heavily on a stick, and behind her, two small children pulled a goat by a string. She paused to greet Jean Patrick. “Mwaramutse,” she said. The children pressed close and stared at him with sad, rheumy eyes.

“Mwaramutseho, Grandmother.”

She peered intently at him. She was familiar to Jean Patrick, but he couldn't place her. Suddenly she cried out and pressed her fingers to her heart. “Ko Mana! It's not possible! We heard you were killed.” She held
her thin arms out to him and smiled a toothless smile. “Do you not know me?”

He shook his head, again unsettled by the suspicion that she was an umuzimu emerging from the earth to meet him.

“I'm Mukabera.” She paused. “Your neighbor.” Covering her face with her hands, she wept.

“Mukabera!” He stooped to hold her, palms resting on the sharp wings of her shoulder blades. Her musky, unwashed odor surrounded him. “Roger told me how you helped us. I have held you in my heart all these years.” Her throaty laugh, the racy banter, the gifts of blue eggs and fat ducks, her joyful spirit and her courage, were still there, he had to believe, behind the frangible skin. “I feel blessed to thank you face-to-face. I still have Zachary's Bible, the one you saved.”

“You must come and have tea,” Mukabera said. She exhaled a sad breath. “It's not like old times—we have nothing. But something to drink I can offer you.”

“Of course I will come.”

She chuckled, fanning a small spark of her old fire. “From afar I thought you were a fancy tourist who had lost his way. A black muzungu.”