Running the Rift (50 page)

When she had finished, Bea folded her paper napkin and set it beside her empty plate. “I'm so glad for this chance to eat with you again,” she said, “since our last meal together was interrupted.”

Jean Patrick had been drinking water when she spoke up; he could barely swallow it. Where could he begin? “Yes,” he said. “I believe it was.” He set down the glass, and the ice clinked loudly against the side.

“I booked you a room in a hotel near my apartment. It's a nice place and not very dear.”

Jean Patrick nodded. His skin went cold and then hot.

“I am happy to take you there if you want, but you are welcome in my home.” Bea took a deep breath before continuing. “I have an extra bedroom, but my cousin and her daughter have been living with me while my cousin attends university. They've gone to stay with friends, but the bed is small.” She smiled. “I think your feet will be in the air at the far end of it.”

“Knowing you were in the next room, I would make my bed on cold ground,
rock was my pillow, too,
” Jean Patrick said, quoting the Bob Marley song to keep the mood light.

They got up from the table, and their arms brushed. Bea did not take hers away. Outside, in a corner behind a shop, he pulled her close and held her, and she, too, held him. The sound of a radio from a passing car, loud and intrusive, made him jump. But it was not RTLM, and no one leapt from the shadows to kill him.

Jean Patrick stood at the window of Bea's apartment and looked out onto the Kigali night. Lights blinked like dirty stars against the black horizon. Hôtel des Mille Collines rose like a beacon of promise out of the ghost of war, windows bright. Car horns honked, tires clunked over potholed streets. Much of the rubble had been cleared; everywhere there was scaffolding and construction as a new city, fresh and scrubbed clean, without history, was birthed from the annihilation of the old.

In the room where Bea had led him to rest, he had felt like a giant bumbling around among the pieces of miniature furniture: a little desk neat with pens, crayons, and paper; a matching chair; a small dresser on which a collection of perfumes, pomades, and creams were aligned, the only evidence of a grown woman in the room. The child's drawings were tacked on the walls, and Jean Patrick wondered at her age; they were bold with color and possessed a sophisticated sense of design. Remembering Ineza's paintings, he smiled; the cousin must be on her side of the family. Like a true artist, the little girl had signed her work: Gabby.

He had slept a bit, fitfully, in the cramped bed, and he wondered how a mother and child could sleep there together night after night. When he woke, he had taken the box with the cross from his socks and put it in the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. He fingered it now as he stood and from a distance watched the people of Rwanda go about the business of living.

Bea came and stood beside him, not quite touching, although her heat touched his. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Aye! Lunch has not yet moved from my stomach. Are you?”

Bea shook her head. “Shall I make you tea? Juice?”

“I don't need anything,” Jean Patrick said. “I brought you a present.”

He placed the box in her hand. She was still wearing her high-necked blouse, and when Jean Patrick moved to touch the collar and expose her
skin, she recoiled. “What's wrong?” He felt her tremble, a slight movement of the air between them. “What is it?”

Bea took his hands and moved them down to his side. Then slowly she undid the top buttons of her blouse. Stepping from the shadow into the light, she pulled the collar down and tipped her chin slightly upward. Jean Patrick saw it then, the dark keloid like a smile across her throat. It left him without breath.

“Come. I will tell my story first,” she said. “And then you will know if you still want to tell me yours.” She led him to the couch, and he sank into the shabby fabric. He held on to her hands so he would not give in to the urge to press his own hands to his ears.

“The soldiers and Interahamwe had just burst through the front door when I ran inside,” she said. “Mama and Dadi were already dead, lying on the floor in their last embrace. Selfishly I regret that I did not get to say good-bye, but I'm glad because in their moment of death, they thought that I had escaped with you, that I had a chance for life. What I will tell you next I remember little of, although lately it comes back of its own accord like bits and pieces of shrapnel rising to the skin's surface. Most of this story comes from Claire, who rescued me and nursed me back to life when I was past dead.”

Bea paused to drink some water. Out of the corner of his eye, Jean Patrick caught the glass bird she had written of in her letter. It twirled a slow dance on its tether. The silence in the room hummed in his ear.

“I was wild. I ran back outside, into the yard. I suppose I had decided to run after you; I don't know. The Interahamwe caught me and tore off my clothes.”

Jean Patrick's hand had come up without his mind's knowing it. He would have spoken then, begged her to stop, but she put a finger to his lips.

“A police officer came after them and fired a shot in the air. It was someone I knew. He said he wanted me for himself, so he sent the rest of the men to search for you while he had his way.” She smiled then, merely a slight upturn at the corners of her mouth. “Claire said I fought like a lioness. She said I grabbed his machete and nearly succeeded in killing him. That was when he cut me.”

“My Bea.” Jean Patrick took her hands and kissed them. “I can imagine
how you fought.” He stroked her hair, and she collapsed against his shoulder. “This policeman,” Jean Patrick said, “did I know him?”

Bea sat up. “What does it matter? He is probably dead now. I am past hating him; I feel nothing.”

She didn't have to answer. Jean Patrick could see the man's gold-capped teeth, watch him put out his cigarette in the crumbs of their pastry at the Ibis, hear him tell Bea that Niyonzima had been in an accident. Had he materialized at this moment in the room, Jean Patrick could have killed him with his own two hands.

“Before the Interahamwe left, they poured petrol inside the house and started a fire. By some miracle, I lived. Claire was hiding in the shadows. They had told her to go, but she didn't. She bundled her children in blankets under her bed so they would not hear, and then she waited. The instant the men went on to do their business elsewhere, she dragged me to the cookhouse and put poultices on my wounds to stop the bleeding. Then she put me in a wagon like a sack of sorghum, covered me with clothes and sacking, and she and her two children pushed me to her sister's house. I remained there until the war's end, hidden in the grain room. Had her sister's husband found out, he would have killed the three of us. Every morning, I heard him leave to do his work, his killing.”

“Mana yanjye, that tiny woman dragged you in the night? Through those wild mobs fueled on urwagwa?”

“She risked her life for me, and I owe her mine. She coaxed me back more than once from the arms of death. It was she who gave me the courage to continue, to step out into the air and seek the living.”

“What happened to her?”

“She came to the UK with me, she and the children. My aunt—my mother's sister—found the money for all of us somehow. She is studying to be a nurse.”

“And you, Bea.” Jean Patrick floundered about to come up with the words, only a few to string together, but he could not.

“That is the second miracle,” she said, jumping in to save him, “if AIDS is what you mean. I have been tested and retested. I escaped unscathed.” There was that smile again, barely more than an illusion of the light. “As unscathed as one can be.”

Bea lay back against his shoulder, and he felt the warmth and wet of tears. “There is one thing more I want to ask you, a silly thing,” he said.

“I will tell you whatever you ask,” she said. “I am sorry to have to speak this truth to you. You're not angry with me?”

“Shh,” he said. “Shh. It is you who should be angry with me.” She lifted her head to respond; he kissed her lips to quiet her. After such a drought, once more he drank in her salt. “My brother said when RTLM added your names to their lists, they announced your mother as Tutsi.”

“I also heard this—from Claire,” Bea said, sighing. “How much time and effort it must have taken to discover such a stupid, meaningless bit of information.”

“It's true?”

“It was a secret only our family knew; her father was given a Hutu card as a favor before she was born. But, yes, she was Tutsi.”

J
EAN
P
ATRICK SAT
with Bea for some time without moving, feeling the rise and fall of her breath against his chest. He was wrung out. What was anything he had suffered compared to this? He turned over words in his mind, dug them up from the earth, but none stayed. The lights coughed and sputtered and then failed. Through the window, Jean Patrick saw Kigali drown in darkness.

“Some things never change,” he said. “I see even General Kagame cannot bring forth light in this country.”

“He is not God,” Bea said.

“There is one more question,” Jean Patrick said. The darkness gave him courage.

“And I have one more answer.”

“Do you think what happened was because of me—because I was in your home?”

Bea answered without hesitation. “If you had never walked into our lives, it would have been the same.” She stood and lit a candle. “So will you tell me your story now, or have I frightened you away?”

“How long have you been trying to scare me off? Have I gone?” They both laughed softly, and this seemed to bring them back among the living. “I will tell you ejo, if you want to hear.”

“Will that be
ejo
hashize, yesterday, or
ejo
hazaza, tomorrow? Do you remember when you asked me that?”

“I believe it was the first time I asked you to marry me,” Jean Patrick said. “And I believe I am still waiting for my answer.”

Bea brought the candle close. “We have a long drive tomorrow, and I'm afraid you will not sleep in that tiny bed. Will you stay in my room?” She held out her hand to him, and he took it.

Jean Patrick emerged from a deep sleep and for a moment did not know where he was. A white fog of mosquito netting surrounded him. He rolled over, and warmth greeted him: Bea's warmth. The world came back thickly and slowly. Gently he touched an arm, a leg. Rising onto his elbow, he kissed the scars on her breast, her belly. He lifted the gold cross and kissed the dark rope of scar at her throat. Bea awoke, and they held each other. It was all they had done, and it was all he needed.

“I want to make one stop on the way to Cyangugu,” Bea said. She cupped his chin in her hands. “When I dug through the remains at our home, I found some bones and a few trinkets: a melted spoon, a bracelet of Mama's, a fountain pen of Dadi's. Bits and pieces of paintings and books. Last April, during the time of mourning, I brought everything to Murambi to be buried in the mass grave there. I find it difficult to pass without stopping.”

Jean Patrick's hands grew clammy. He blew out a long breath through his lips. He had thought that a good night's sleep would help to clear his mind, but it hadn't. On his arrival, he had been thrown into a fast-moving current, and he couldn't remember how to swim. “That will be fine,” he said. “I imagine there are others I knew who are buried there. I can pay my respects.”

B
EA PARKED AT
the base of the Murambi Genocide Memorial. It had been raining, but now a ghostly sun was visible behind the thinning clouds. Jean Patrick looked out across the terraced hills, the flat-topped acacia. The land came back to him in a mixture of sharp recollection and blurred dream. Gravel pathways led up the hill to a collection of buildings
that before the genocide had been a school. Bea told him that more than forty thousand people had gathered here for protection. Most did not survive. The French, she said, had been charged with their protection but did nothing to save them. She touched his arm. “You don't mind? You're OK?”