Running the Rift

by Naomi Benaron

  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.

  THE 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.

  THREE

  “WE’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.

  THE 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.

  Jean Patrick had expected a big man, but the runner stood not much taller than Roger. Jean Patrick wondered if he was umutwa, one of the pygmy people who sold milk and butter in clay pots to families that didn’t keep cows. The momentary disappointment vanished as he watched the runner move, flowing rather than walking from one place to the next, as if his muscles were made of water. He wore sunglasses. His shirt snapped in the breeze, zebras and lions racing across the shiny fabric.

  “Muraho neza!” the man said to the class. “I�
��m Telesphore Dusabe, a marathon runner representing Rwanda in the Olympics. I am blessed to be here in Cyangugu to talk to you today.” Jean Patrick asked him to write his name on the board, and he copied it into his notebook, framed by two stars on either side.

  Telesphore spoke about running barefoot up and down Rwanda’s hills. “We call our country the land of a thousand hills,” he said, his face lit from the inside as if by a flame, “and I believe I have conquered every one.” He talked about the lure of the Olympics and a feeling like flying that sometimes filled his body when he ran.

  Jean Patrick raised his hand. “Did you say sometimes?” he wanted to know. “What about the rest of the time?”

  “Smart boy,” Telesphore said, and he chuckled. “I will tell you a secret. Sometimes it is all I can do to go from one footstep to the next, but for each such moment, I make myself remember how it feels to win.”

  Jean Patrick felt the man’s eyes on his face alone, and his body tingled. How it feels to win, he repeated in his head. He wrote the words in his book of sums.

  “We’re going to have a race,” Sister said, taking two thick pieces of cardboard bound with tape from behind her desk. She slit the tape and held up a poster of Telesphore breaking the finish-line ribbon at some official meet. “And the winner will have our runner to watch over him.” She smiled. “Or her.”

  Telesphore lined up the students in the dusty schoolyard behind a starting line he drew with a stick. “According to age, youngest first,” he said. That put Jean Patrick two rows from the back and Roger in the back. Telesphore brought two wooden blocks from his bag. “This is how we start a race,” he said. “Now take your marks.”

  Jean Patrick wanted the poster. He wanted it more than he had wanted anything in a while. He heard the sound of the blocks clacking together, and for the second time that day, some small balance tipped inside him. When he stretched out his legs and sprinted toward the far end of the fence, passing one student and then another, the earth his bare feet touched was not the same red clay as before Telesphore began his talk. When he reached the far end of the fence three steps in front of Roger to claim first place, he understood that the earth would never feel the same again.

  “Look at that lean! A natural!” Telesphore shouted. He pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead and pulled Jean Patrick closer. “What is your name?”

  “Jean Patrick Nkuba.”

  The runner squinted into the sun, and a field of wrinkles mapped his eyes. “No wonder, then. Do you know who you are named for?”

  “The god who brings the thunder,” Jean Patrick said.

  “Yes—Nkuba, Lord of Heaven, the Swift One.” Telesphore touched Jean Patrick below the left eye. “I see it there: the hunger. Someday you will need to run as much as you need to breathe.”

  Sister brought the poster and gave it to Telesphore. Balancing poster and cardboard on his knee, he wrote with a flourish, To our next Olympic hero, Jean Patrick Nkuba. He signed his name, Telesphore Dusabe, in a large, scrolling hand.

  Jean Patrick took the poster and looked out toward the hills. The storms of Itumba were behind them now, the days sparkling and polished by the rains into a brilliant blue. In the steeply terraced fields, women harvested beans and sorghum. The berries bowed the stalks, decorating the lush landscape with necklaces of red beads. Soon the rains would dry up completely, and Iki, the long dry season, would warm the young plants cultivated during the rains, coax them to grow tall and strong. Now it was four more days until Jean Patrick’s time in the house at Gihundwe would come to an end, but he would not think about that. Instead he looked at the runner’s face and felt his words as truth—a prophesy.

  FOUR

  THE LAST THING JEAN PATRICK did was to roll up his poster of Telesphore Dusabe, wrap it in two layers of paper, and tie it with string. He looked around the bare room. All traces of his family’s life had been swept away like the dirt Mama cleared with her broom.

  Outside, bees hummed in the acacia. Mama had picked the last ripe tomatoes and beans, a few chili peppers, from her garden, and it was the time to sow a new crop of beans and squash. It had always been Jean Patrick’s job to help his mother, but for the first time he could remember, they had not knelt in the earth to plant. Like the house, the garden looked bare—already forgotten. Jean Patrick hefted his knapsack and tucked the family’s radio under his arm. He followed Mama through the door and closed it behind him.

  Jacqueline, Zachary, and a few students from Gihundwe were helping Uwimana and Angelique pack the family belongings into his truck.

  Uwimana took Mama’s hands in his. “I wish I could change your mind, Jurida,” he said. “The house will be empty until the start of school.” Clemence, bound in a cloth at Mama’s back, made kissing sounds in her sleep.

  Mama shook her head. “I can’t look at those windows without hearing glass break. My brother’s home is our home now.”

  “François believed Hutu or Tutsi made no difference anymore. His students loved him, and his dreams gave us hope. We must hold on to that hope in spite of what happened,” Uwimana said.

  “For my husband’s sake and yours, I will try to keep it alive.”

  Angelique took Mama in her arms and then hugged Jean Patrick, Jacqueline, and Zachary. “Gihundwe will seem so empty without your voices to fill the days,” she said.

  “We’ll come visit,” Jacqueline said. Jean Patrick saw her bite her lip and knew she was not far from tears.

  Angelique knelt beside Jean Patrick and lifted his chin with her finger. “You will come back for secondary school,” she said. “This will be your home again; you must believe in that.”

  “Come, Jean Patrick.” Uwimana opened the truck door. “Sit next to me.”

  “I need to help Roger with the cattle,” Jean Patrick said. He took the radio’s plug and held it to his ear. “Jacqueline—they’re playing your favorite song.” He made clowning faces and mimicked Pepe Kalle until they both laughed.

  “How will you make the radio play at Uncle’s? By Imana’s electric power?” Jacqueline said.

  Jean Patrick wiggled the dials and sang a few words at top volume. “Maybe Uncle will get electricity soon.” He wedged radio and knapsack between two mattresses in the bed of the truck. Then he gave his poster of Telesphore to his mother and said good-bye before he, too, found himself close to tears.

  He stood until the truck became a speck in the red swirl of dust. When even the speck had disappeared, he broke into a run down the road, where life paraded on as if nothing had changed. Men strained up the hill, sacks of sorghum and potatoes draped over bicycle handlebars or stacked in rickety wooden carts. Children herded goats fastened with bits of string, lugged jerricans filled with water, trotted with rafts of freshly gathered firewood on their heads. Women chatted on the way to and from the market, basins filled with fruits and vegetables balanced like fancy hats.

  Jean Patrick had not gone far when a student from Gihundwe hailed him. “We heard you were leaving,” he said. “So sorry.”

  “I’ll be back once I pass my exams. I’ll be a student here,” Jean Patrick said, echoing Angelique’s words. He shook the boy’s outstretched hand and sprinted away, charging the hill until his chest was on fire and spots danced in front of his eyes.

  HE FOUND ROGER in the shade of a banana grove. The cattle lolled beside the trees, tearing off mouthfuls of young urubingo. The inyambo steer stood apart from the rest as if he knew he was descended from the cattle of kings. His arc of horns supported a corner of sky, and his oxblood hide glowed in the sun. On his head were two white patches like countries on a map. He sported a beaded necklace—blue and white like an Intore dancer’s—and bells tinkled when he shook his head. When Jean Patrick was small, Papa used to hold his tiny hand steady while the steer licked sugar off it with his hot, rough tongue.

  Roger looked behind him, toward Gihundwe, his face lost in shadow beneath the brim of Papa’s felt hat. How many Sundays Jean Patrick and Roger had watched as their fa
ther put on his hat, took his traditional carved staff from its place by the door, and said, “Tugende, my sons. Let’s go for a walk.”

  As if reading Jean Patrick’s thoughts, Roger touched the hat’s brim. “Everything is finished now. We’ll be nothing but poor fishermen, running around dirty and eating with our fingers like the rest of Uncle’s children.”

  Jean Patrick patted the steer’s dusty rump. “We’ll still go to school. Papa always said that, and Mama promised. Anyway, Uncle Emmanuel isn’t poor. Look at all his boats.”

  “Eh—stupid! Who’ll pay for our school? Uncle has his own children to worry about.”

  “I’m not stupid,” Jean Patrick said. “You already have your scholarship for Kigali, and I’ll go to Gihundwe. After, I’ll go to college in America. I’ll get a scholarship to run. Everyone does it there.”

  Telling the boy on the path he would be back at Gihundwe, Jean Patrick had doubted himself, but when he heard Roger challenge him, Angelique’s words lodged in his heart as a prize he was determined to claim, whatever the price. He crouched on the grass the way Telesphore had shown the class. “Come on. I think today I will beat you,” he said.

  “You think so?” Roger said. “See that tree at the top of this hill? I’ll give you a head start.”

  “I don’t need a head start,” Jean Patrick said, springing up the trail. He kept his tempo fast, his kick high, the way Roger had told him. The familiar burn settled into his lungs, and he pushed harder toward the ridgetop. He felt Roger at his back. Just to the tree, he told himself. I need to beat him to the tree. He gritted his teeth and dug in deep, but Roger drew even before the last rise and kept pace easily beside him.