Say You’re One Of Them (38 page)

I walk tall and proud in our neighborhood. The bullies all know that Papa will attack anyone who messes with me. Even when he is drunk on banana beer, my tears sober him. Sometimes he even goes after Maman, for making his girl sad. He scolds his relatives when they say that it’s risky that I look so much like Maman. Papa likes to tell me that he wanted to go against his people and wed Maman in our church when I was born, even though she hadn’t given him a son yet. Maman wouldn’t hear of it, he says. She wanted to give him a male child before they had the sacrament of matrimony. Papa tells me everything.

Maman’s love for me is different. Sometimes she looks at me and becomes sad. She never likes going out in public with me, as she does with Jean. She is always tense, as if a lion will leap out and eat us.

“Maman, I’ll always be beautiful!” I told her one day, as Papa was driving us home from a lakeside picnic. Maman was in the passenger’s seat, Jean on her lap. I was in back.

“You could be beautiful in other ways, Monique,” she said.

“Leave the poor girl alone,” Papa told her.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You will when you grow up,” she said.

THIS
TIME
WHEN
I wake up, rays of yellow morning are leaking in through the holes in the door and the torn blinds. They riddle the gloom, and I can see dust particles dancing within them. Our neighborhood is quiet. When I go into the parlor, Papa is moving from window to window to ensure that the blinds leave no space for outsiders to peep in. Maman is standing at the table, straining her eyes as she examines two framed photographs.

One is from my parents’ traditional wedding. It’s ten years old. I was in Maman’s belly then. All the women are elegantly dressed, the
imyitero
draping over them like Le Père Mertens’s short vestment. Married women who have given birth to sons wear
urugoli
crowns. Maman got hers only last year, when Jean was born. There are some cows tethered in the background. They were part of the dowry Papa offered for Maman. But no matter what I try to focus on, my eyes go to Tonton André’s smiling face. I cover it with my hand, but Maman pushes my fingers off. I look at the other picture instead, which was taken last year, after my parents’ church wedding. Papa, Maman, and I are in front. I’m the flower girl, my hands gloved and a flower basket hanging down from my neck with white ribbons. Maman holds baby Jean close to her heart, like a wedding bouquet.

“Maman, Jean is lonely in the bedroom,” I say.

“I hope he sleeps the whole day,” she says, without looking at me.

“Won’t ghosts steal him?”

“He’ll get used to them. Go get yourself some food, Monique.”

“
Oya,
Maman, I don’t want to eat.”

“Then go and shower.”

“Alone? I don’t want to shower.”

She touches my nightie. “You need to shower.”

“Maman, when wizards pee . . .”

“Don’t tell me now.” She looks at Papa. “She needs a shower.”

Hearing this, I raise my nightie to show Maman my swollen thigh, but she slaps it down, saying, “You’ll get a new pair of underpants. Your face will be beautiful again.”

I return my attention to the pictures. I scratch at Tonton André’s face with my nails to erase him from our family. But the glass saves him.

Maman isn’t looking at the photos anymore; her eyes are closed, as if in prayer. I pick up a brass letter opener and begin to scratch the glass over my
tonton
‘s face. The sound distracts Papa from the window and he gives me a bad look. I stop.

“Why did you come down—come
back?
” he says to Maman, searching my face to see whether I’ve understood the question.

I haven’t.

He turns back to Maman. “Woman, why? Return to where you were last night. Please. Leave.”

“Whatever you do,” she says, “do not let my daughter know.”

“She should!” he says, then recoils from the force in his own voice.

My parents are hiding something from me. Maman is very stubborn about it. Their sentences enter my ears as randomly as a toss of the dice on our Ludo board. Papa looks guilty, like a child who can’t keep a secret.

“I can’t bear it,” he says. “I can’t.”

“If Monique knew where I was last night,” Maman argues, “your family would’ve forced it out of her and shed blood.”

As they talk, invisible people are breathing everywhere—at least twenty ghosts are in the air around us. When Maman speaks, the ghosts let out groans of agreement, but my parents don’t seem to hear them.

Papa shakes his head. “I mean, you should never have come back. I could have convinced them . . .”

“We needed to be with the children.”

I don’t understand why Maman is saying she wants to be with me when she won’t even look my way. I see dirty water dripping down the white wall beside me. It is coming from the ceiling. At first, it comes down in two thin lines. Then the lines widen and swell into one. Then two more lines come down, in spurts, like little spiders gliding down on threads from a branch of the mango tree in our yard. I touch the liquid with the tip of my finger. Blood.

“Ghost! Ghost!” I scream, diving toward Papa.

“It’s not blood,” he says.

“You are lying! It’s blood! It’s blood!”

Papa tries to get between me and the wall, but I get in front of him and hug him. I cling to his body, climbing up until my hands are around his neck and my legs wrapped around his waist. He tries to muffle my shouts with his hands, but I wriggle and twist until he bows under my weight, and we nearly topple over. He staggers and regains his balance, then he releases his breath, and his stiff body softens. He puts his arms around me and carries me to the sofa. He holds my face to his heart, hiding me from the blood. I stop shouting. Maman is grinding her teeth, and there is a stubborn look on her face—maybe the Wizard has fixed her too.

My body continues to tremble, no matter how hard Papa holds me. I tell him about last night, and he consoles me, telling me not to cry. Tears fill his eyes too, then pour down onto me, warm and fast. I’ve never seen him cry before. Now he can’t stop, like me. He’s telling me he will always love me, putting my head on his shoulder, stroking my braided hair. Once again, I’m Papa’s Shenge.

“They’re good ghosts,” he sobs, kissing my forehead. “Good people who died.”

“Papa, I tricked the Wizard.”

“Don’t think of last night.”

He gives me a piggyback ride to the bathroom. He takes off my nightie and tosses it into the trash, then turns on the tap to run the bath. In the walls, the pipes whistle and sigh, but today it feels as if I were hearing blood flowing through the strange veins of ghosts. The heat of the bath sends mist through the room, and Papa moves within it, still sobbing and wiping his tears with the sleeve of his shirt.

When he cleans my face, his hands smell like raw eggs. I reach out and switch on the light; his dirty hands seem to shock him. He washes them in the sink. We’re sweating in the heat and the steam. But when I try to pull back the window blinds, he stops me. In the mirror, my mouth looks as if I’d been dropped on it. I can’t brush my teeth. With warm water and iodine from the closet, he cleanses my lip.

He leaves me to wash myself, tells me that I should not be afraid; he’ll be right outside the door. After the bath, he goes with me to my room, and I dress in a pair of jeans and a pink T-shirt.

Back in the parlor, we sit together, away from the blood wall, my head on his shoulder. I’m hungry. He offers to make me food, but I say no, because I can’t move my mouth to eat.

“Look, we cannot run away from this,” Maman says.

Papa shrugs. “But I cannot do it. How do I do it?”

They’re talking about secret things again.

“You can,” she says. “Yesterday, you did it to Annette.”

“I should never have gone to André’s place yesterday. Big mistake.”

“We owe André our cooperation. He’s a madman now.”

Papa goes to the window and looks out. “I think we should run to those UN soldiers by the street corner.”

“
Ndabyanze!
No way! If your brother doesn’t get what he wants when he returns, he will hurt all of us.”

“The soldiers are our only hope.”

“They? Hopeless.”

“No.”

“My husband, whatever you decide, let our children live, OK?”

“Maman, are we going to die?” I ask.

“No, no, my dear,” Maman says. “You’re not going to die.
Uzabaho
. You will live.”

OUTSIDE
,
THE
MIDMORNING
SUN
is now very bright, and, though the blinds are still drawn, I can see my parents’ clothes clearly now. Papa’s light-brown jeans are covered with dark stains. Maman is very dirty, her dress covered with dust, as if she’d been wrestling on the ground all night. She smells of sweat. I knew that it was a bad idea for her to go out last night; she never goes out at night. She tells me that there are many bad women who do, because Rwanda is getting poorer and poorer.

“Maman, Maman!” Jean shrieks suddenly. He must be having a nightmare. She shakes her head guiltily but doesn’t go to him, as if she’d lost her right to be our mother. I go with Papa into our bedroom, and Jean climbs all over him, but wails for Maman. A muffled sneeze breaks the silence again. A ghost is gasping for air, as if it was being stifled. We hold on to Papa, who has brought holy water into the bedroom with him.

“It’s OK, it’s OK,” Papa says, looking around and sprinkling the holy water, as if he has come to console the ghosts, not us. Together we listen to the ghost’s raspy breathing. The breaths come further and further apart. They stop. Papa and the other ghosts start to sigh, as if the ailing one had died a second death. There are tears in Papa’s eyes, and his mouth is moving without words. He is commanding ghosts, like the Wizard, but without a stick.

Someone begins to pound on our front door. Papa quickly hands Jean to me. “Don’t open the door!” he hisses to Maman, in the parlor, then turns to me. “And don’t take your brother out there!” He stays with us, but his mind is in the parlor, where we can hear Maman pushing aside the table, opening the front door, and whispering to people. We hear chairs and tables being moved. Then there’s a grating sound. On the roof, I can hear big birds flapping their wings for takeoff. Then quiet. The people must have left, and Maman is alone again in the parlor.

Somebody wails in a house down the road. Jean begins to cry. I pat him on the back and sing for him in a whisper. He’s licking his lips, because he wants food. Papa takes us into the parlor and offers Jean the remains of the oatmeal. He chews the cold chunks hungrily. “Young man, I told you to eat the whole thing in the morning,” Papa says. “You children are a burden to us!” He gives me bread slices and milk from the fridge. I soak the slices and swallow them without chewing.

A mob is chanting in the distance; it sounds like it’s making its way toward our house. Papa goes to the window. Another voice begins to wail. A third voice, a fourth, a fifth, a child’s—it sounds like my friend Hélène. Before I can say anything, Papa says, “Shenge, forget about that Twa girl.”

Hélène and I sit next to each other at school. She’s the brightest in our class, and during recess we jump rope together in the schoolyard. She’s petite and hairy, with a flat forehead like a monkey’s. Most of the Twa people are like that. They’re few in our country. My parents say that they’re peaceful and that when the world talks about our country they’re never mentioned.

Hélène is an orphan, because the Wizard fixed her parents last year. Mademoiselle Angeline said that he cursed them with
AIDS
by throwing his gris-gris over their roof. Now Papa is paying Hélène’s school fees. We’re also in the same catechism class, and Papa has promised to throw a joint party for our First Holy Communion. Last year, Hélène took first prize in community service in our class—organized by Le Père Mertens. I came in second. We fetched the most buckets of water for old people in the neighborhood. He said if you’re Hutu you should fetch for the Tutsis or the Twa. If you’re Tutsi, you do it for the Hutus or the Twa. If you’re Twa, you serve the other two. Being both Tutsi and Hutu, I fetched for everybody with my small bucket.

“We can’t take her in,” Papa says, and shrugs. “And how does this crisis concern the Twa?”

Suddenly, Maman yanks the table away from the door again and unlocks it. But she doesn’t open the door, just leans on it. More choked cries crack the day like a whip. There are gunshots in the distance. Papa approaches Maman, his hands shaking. He locks the door and takes her back to her seat. He pushes the table back against the door.

Maman stands up suddenly and pulls out the biggest roll of money I’ve ever seen, from inside her dress. The notes are squeezed and damp, as if she had been holding on to them all night. “This should help for a while,” she says, offering the roll to Papa. “I hope the banks will reopen soon.” He doesn’t touch the money. “For our children, then,” she says, placing the money on the table.

I tell Papa, “We must give the money to Tonton André to pay him back.”

“
Ego imana y
’
Urwanda!
” Maman swears, cutting me off. “My daughter, shut up. Do you want to die?”

Her lips quake as if she had malaria. Papa pulls his ID from his back pocket and considers the details with disgust. He gets Maman’s card out of his pocket too. Joining the two together, he tears them into large pieces, then into tiny pieces, like confetti. He puts the scraps on the table and goes back to his security post at the window. Then he comes back and gathers them up, but he can’t repair the damage. He puts the pieces into his pocket.

EVENING
IS
FALLING
.
MAMAN
walks stiffly across the room and kneels by the altar. Papa speaks to her, but she doesn’t reply. He touches her and she begins to sob.

“By this, your Shenge’s crucifix,” Maman says, getting up, “promise me you won’t betray the people who’ve run to us for safety.”

He nods. “I promise . . .
ndakwijeje
.”