Running the Rift

by Naomi Benaron

  “What about the old guard and his family? Did you hear any news?”

  “Nothing, but it would have been difficult to catch them by surprise from such a lookout. Probably they saw and hid in the bush.”

  Jean Patrick wanted to believe it, just as he needed to believe his family had survived unharmed. The smallest line on a map separated them from Burundi. He looked out the window into the dusk. Claire and her children picked tomatoes and squash from the garden. A chorus of birdsong came from the trees. All around them, the business of survival went on unchanged.

  “Since you are a guest, you will sleep in my room,” Bea said. “Don’t look so frightened, eh! I will sleep in the study.”

  AFTER DINNER, JEAN Patrick slipped into bed beneath a pile of blankets. He wrapped himself in the scent of Bea’s body, her hair. He listened as she said good night to her parents in the hallway. One door closed and then another. He shut his eyes and tossed from side to side until the sheets tangled about his legs. It was no use. He flicked on the light and walked about the room.

  On wooden hooks behind the door hung a towel, the familiar gold blouse, and a pair of red pantaloons rimmed with lace. He sat on the small, wobbly stool beside her dressing table and examined her possessions. A brush, a hair pick, a lipstick, a row of bottles. A few hairs remained in the brush, and he plucked them and rolled them between his fingers. One by one he removed the stoppers of the perfume bottles and inhaled until he grew dizzy.

  Behind a stack of books, the corner of a picture frame was visible. He knew he shouldn’t, but unbidden, his fingers lifted the picture out. He saw himself, caught as he leaned into the finish line at Nyamirambo Stadium, his face twisted into an expression of exquisite pain. The angle his body made was so far forward he seemed to defy the laws of gravity.

  His heart wrenched, like an actual physical tearing, and with it, the locked gate that guarded the morning’s memory blew open. He set the photograph down on the table. Holding his head between his hands, he wept. Tears fell on the picture, on the table, on Bea’s brush, and on his bare, goose-bumped legs.

  RAIN TURNED THE road to Cyangugu slick, and small landslides of rock and red mud fanned across it. Bea drove with her neck craned forward, face tense with concentration. “I feel like I’m driving underwater,” she said.

  “Since yesterday morning, I have been underwater.” Jean Patrick studied his hands. “What I keep asking myself is why no one tried to stop them. Where were the soldiers, the police?” Bea stared out at the road in silence. “I mean, didn’t Habyarimana give his troops orders to prevent violence? Can’t he tell RTLM to stop their stupid talk?”

  The windshield wipers whined. Bea wiped at the fogged glass with her palm. “The answer to the first question is, of course he didn’t. And to the second: of course he could, if he chose to.”

  They entered Nyungwe Forest. Rain fell steadily; waterfalls tumbled from the rocks. A troop of baboons scampered across the road. They stopped in the undergrowth to regard the car, sitting up on their haunches, before continuing into the trees.

  Jean Patrick laughed. “Shall I pick flowers to feed them?” In the hushed magic of the forest, his heart lightened.

  “How wonderful. You remembered my story.”

  “I remember everything about you.”

  “You can stay dry. I’ve outgrown my childhood fear.”

  “Did you know all these rocks came from volcanoes? Jonathan says the Virungas are oldest—ten million years. Here, in the south, they are only two million years old.”

  “Eh! And how old does he say God is? God, who made all these pretty rocks?”

  “That’s what Coach said when I told him.”

  “That’s one thing we agree on,” Bea said. “Probably the only one.”

  Jean Patrick recalled Coach’s chilly greeting to Bea’s father in the stands at Nyamirambo. “How is it you know each other?”

  “Butare is a small town, the university community, even smaller. Let’s just say we do not look on Rwanda with the same eyes.”

  Jean Patrick stared out at the ancient, crumbling cliffs. Liana stubbornly took hold in every niche. He rolled the names of rocks silently over his tongue: granite, schist and metaschist, quartzite and metaquarzite. Obsidian, the vitreous secret of Bea’s eyes, he saved for last.

  CLIMBING OUT OF the forest, Jean Patrick caught the first glimpse of the tea plantations, like the flash of a sunbird’s wing through the trees. They drew close, and the flash became rolling waves, a sea parted here and there by the red veins of irrigation ditches filled to bursting. Tea pickers bobbed like swimmers, their lower halves submerged, the huge leaf-filled baskets on their backs like floats to hold them up. Rain shimmered on the rows, a delicate lace.

  This burst of green always told Jean Patrick he was home. Home tugged at his heart, and with it, a murmur of fear. Late last night, Niyonzima had reached a journalist who had passed through Cyangugu and found no sign of violence. Now, Jean Patrick willed it to be true. The tea plantations ended, replaced by the patchwork of terraced hills where women coaxed survival from the land. Bea stopped for a checkpoint. A soldier hitched his pants over his belly and strolled to the car.

  “Good morning,” he said, smiling. He took their cards. “Are you the husband?” He peered at Jean Patrick, and reflexively, Jean Patrick’s heart fluttered.

  Bea released a peal of laughter.

  “No, muzehe. She’s a friend from university. She’s driving me to see my family.”

  The soldier continued to stare. Jean Patrick slid his hands beneath his thighs. Then the soldier exclaimed and struck his palm to his forehead. Jean Patrick’s heart leapt into his throat.

  “Wah! Now I remember.” The soldier chuckled. “Last year—or maybe the year before—you were running very fast, and you fell down. At first I thought you were a thief, but when I came close, I saw you were just a skinny boy, crying. It was just outside Gihundwe School, on a Sunday. I gave you my handkerchief for the blood.” He handed back their cards. “Aren’t you a famous runner now?”

  “Yego, officer.” Jean Patrick remembered him from the day Mathilde died.

  “Félicitations! I thought from your determined face you would succeed.” He shook his head. “Wah! How time passes.” He waved them through and called out, “Best of luck. May the Lord bless you both in everything.”

  Bea rolled up the window. “Is it true you’re a thief?”

  “Let me see.” Jean Patrick scrutinized his card. “Ethnicity: Hutu, no; Twa, no; naturalisé, no.” He traced each strike with his finger to symbolize the strikes on the card. “Tutsi, yes. But I don’t see anything here about a thief.” He tucked the booklet back into his jacket pocket. “I thought Habyarimana promised to abolish these.”

  Bea snapped her purse shut. “He did. Many, many times.”

  As they passed the welcome sign for Gashirabwoba, Jean Patrick scanned the horizon and took in the calm Saturday morning scene. He saw no sign that the flames of Burundi’s fire had licked these hills. A sigh of relief escaped him.

  But he needed to prepare Bea for what she would see. He needed to explain that he did not live in a house like hers, did not have water that came from a tap or light that came on at the flick of a switch. Now he had run out of time. To bargain for a few extra minutes, he let her drive on toward Cyangugu Town.

  They crested a hill, and Lake Kivu appeared, winking like a mythical creature’s eye. “Do you want to know what Jonathan taught us about Lake Kivu’s beginnings?” Jean Patrick strung out his bartered seconds like beads on a length of twine.

  Bea slowed, her half-closed eyes fixed on the water. “He can say whatever he wants. It was formed when Imana punished Nyiransibura. He made her squat in her fields. Try as she might, she could not stop her flow until urine covered the earth.” A glow spread across her face. “That is what my mother told me when I was small, and therefore it is so.”

  “Can we stop here?” He pointed to a muddied patch of grass.

 
“Are you all right? Are you feeling sick?” She stopped the car.

  “I’m fine. I have a present for you.”

  The rain had stopped completely. Sunlight threaded the clouds, and the hillsides in Zaire shone cobalt. Jean Patrick placed the pirogue on the seat between them.

  Bea let out a tiny yelp. “Well, you finally found a good use for this newspaper.” She cradled the carving in her hands, and Jean Patrick thought for a moment she would cry. “How beautiful,” she said. “I can’t believe you bought this for me.”

  A pleasant heat warmed Jean Patrick’s legs. Fog drifted up from the valley, and he rolled down the window to breathe in the cool, rain-freshened air. The story of his life poured out in a long exhalation. He told Bea about his father’s death, his life with Uncle’s family, his love for running, and his struggle to make his way through school. He told her about Mathilde and the pain that filled him when he lost her. He did not tell her of his changing identities or the Hutu card sealed behind a picture of Paul Ereng.

  A boy led a flock of goats on the trail above, a stack of firewood balanced on his head. Bea’s shawl fell from her shoulders, and her skin shone against her collarbone. She stared in silence at the boy and then touched the pirogue. “This wood is so smooth,” she said. Her eyes sparkled. He couldn’t tell if it was from tears or the sun’s reflection. “Did you think I didn’t know about your family?”

  “Since I never spoke of them, how could you?”

  “Remember: my father is a journalist, and I am studying to be one. Your friend Jonathan is very proud of you, and it was not difficult to extract information.”

  “You investigated me?” He beamed.

  “Americans are not private like Rwandans. A person’s life is an open book to them.” She turned the key in the ignition. “Are you angry?”

  “How could I be?”

  He took in the sweep of her forehead and the long, delicate curve of her neck, inherited from Ineza. He couldn’t imagine anyone more perfect.

  “I’ve been waiting all this time to meet your family,” she said. She leaned her head out the window to check for traffic. “Shall we go?”

  “We’ve passed it already; you’ll have to turn around.”

  A giddy weightlessness lifted Jean Patrick. The liquid eye of the lake closed behind them. The pirogue rested on the seat, buoyed on the waves of Kangura. The shell-carved fish inside the bilge sparkled in the sun.

  THE PATH WAS steeper than Jean Patrick remembered, channeled by erosion. Despite the grade and the mud, Bea kept pace beside him. She had taken off her sandals and lifted her pagne to her knees to keep it clean. As they walked, the earth sucked them in past their ankles with every step, then released them with a kissing sound. The compound took shape in the hills. When Jean Patrick saw smoke from the cook fire, a thin ribbon in the breeze, he released the last held breath of tension from his body. Passing the forked eucalyptus, he brushed his finger across the charred trunk. He told her about Roger, how close they had been when the lightning struck. “When I touched him, electric current passed between us.”

  Bea brushed her fingers across the scar. “I can still feel it.” She released her pagne, and it swayed about her muddied ankles.

  “And your brother Roger. Where is he now?”

  Momentarily, all thought flew from his head, and he had to think himself back to the present. “Kenya. He has a job in Kenya.”

  There was a new structure, half-completed and roofed with corrugated metal, attached like a bird’s wing to the main house. With a smile, Jean Patrick imagined Uncle boasting to the neighbors, carrying the sheets as if they were made of gold. Glass panes glinted from all the windows. The fishing must be good once more. They stepped through the cypress gate into the yard. Clemence looked up from her game of hoop and stick and stopped midstride. She took Baby Pauline’s arm and flew to greet them. “Jean Patrick is home! There’s a lady with him!” she screeched.

  Mama burst through the door. “Imana ishimwe—you’re safe!” She embraced Jean Patrick and then turned to Bea. Bea stepped into her embrace as if she had been waiting her whole life to do it.

  JEAN PATRICK WATCHED his family through the back windshield until they became specks at the base of the path. The cultivated hills disappeared from view and then Nyungwe Forest surrounded them in its aquamarine veil, dusk settling on the thickly forested slopes. Surrendering to the car’s lullaby, he drifted, half-asleep and half-awake, not wanting to let go of the afternoon.

  A violent jerk whipped his head against the window. Bea’s hand closed around his mouth. “Not a word,” she whispered.

  She had stopped in a small thicket. Ahead, at a bend in the road, men emerged from the brush. They carried machetes and rifles and what must have been RPGs. They were dressed in dark clothes, caps pulled low over their faces, and they melted into the twilight like shades vanishing into mist. After they disappeared, Bea waited a few minutes before starting the car.

  “Who were they?” Jean Patrick’s heart raced. It was as if the forest had opened its mouth and revealed its dark, concealed secret.

  Bea shrugged. “RPF? Interahamwe? Burundi rebels? Who can tell?” Somewhere near, thunder resonated. The storm would hit before they arrived in Butare.

  Jean Patrick fished for something to say to break the silence. “Where are your brothers and sisters?” He was still trying to solve the equation of Bea.

  Bea regarded him strangely. “I have none. I thought you knew. Thinking of it now, I wonder if this was one reason my parents sent me to boarding school in London, because kids used to torture me about it when I was small. One boy threw rocks and threatened me with a stick. He thought I was possessed by a devil because I was an only child.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? It made me strong.” Her tongue against her teeth made a kissing sound. “Besides: all that love my parents have, and only me to take it.” The evening breeze came in, and with it the smell of rain.

  Her parents met, Bea told him, when Niyonzima covered Ineza’s first exhibit at the National Museum. He had not been happy about the assignment. He had expected excitement and exposés, not dull social events. But the moment he saw Ineza, all his bad humor flew away. “I was a big surprise. I arrived when my father was forty, my mother thirty-six. By then, they had long given up hope. That’s why they called me Bea—their blessing.”

  “They didn’t want a brother or sister for you?”

  “There were complications. Mama almost died, and the doctors told her if she had another child, it could kill her. It was a miracle, they said, we both survived.”

  “As favored as you have been, I guess you have a boyfriend.” Jean Patrick ran his hand along the fabric of his jacket.

  “As my mother told you, I have no child, no husband, no suitor.”

  “What about that policeman who came to talk to you in the café?”

  She pursed her lips in disgust. “You are always jumping to strange conclusions. Don’t give him another thought.”

  The engine thrummed, a slow, steady hymn. In the purplish light, Jean Patrick could just make out the stripes of pale and dark rocks, the abruptly discordant layers. In class, Jonathan had spoken of tectonic upheaval. Rwanda, he said, was a landscape twisted and folded, tied in knots by a history of pressure and heat. Its insides heaved and shifted, disgorging their molten contents.

  “Stop the car,” he said.

  “Again? What’s happened now?”

  He threw back his head and gave a boisterous laugh. “I need a rock sample to take to Jonathan.”

  Bea pulled over. “If there are more soldiers, they could kill us.”

  “It will only take a minute. Come on; I want to show you.” He jogged to the outcrop and held out his hand.

  Bea hiked her pagne. “Claire will kill me, with all this mud.” She picked her way to where he leaned against the wet cliff face. Wild begonias gave off a lemony scent.

  “Give me your keys.” She put them in his hand, and he du
g into a vein of rock, extracting a small, multifaceted crystal. “I think it’s quartz. If I scratched it on the window, I could tell—the glass would scratch, but not the rock.”

  Bea inspected the crystal. “I say it comes from the moon. I’m sure Jonathan will agree.” She turned it around in her fingers, then placed it in Jean Patrick’s palm. She let her hand linger.

  A drop of rain hit Jean Patrick’s jacket, and then another. He closed his fingers around hers. The edges of the crystal were sharp against his flesh. He leaned back against the cliff and pulled her with him. Dampness seeped through his jacket. He put the crystal in his pocket.

  The forest was redolent with evening. Rain spattered the leaves. Bea’s hair swept her shoulders, and he gathered a handful and held it to his lips. It felt slippery and soft, like fine cloth. He tasted her flower-scented soap, the coconut oil she rubbed into her scalp. Touching his forehead to hers, he smelled the sweet milk and pungent tea she had sipped at dinner. Gently, he traced the lines of her jaw and lifted her chin. Then, more gently still, he kissed her mouth.

  EIGHTEEN

  “YOU MISSED AGAIN,” COACH SAID. He clicked his stopwatch. “One forty-nine fifty-nine. What’s wrong with you? Are you sick?”

  Jean Patrick shook his head, and pain knifed behind his eyes. “No, Coach. Just tired.” He turned to hide his cough.

  For nearly three weeks, he had failed to run an A-standard time. For the past week, fighting a cold, seconds attached themselves to his times and would not let go. He couldn’t find his zone. His muscles felt sluggish; his rhythm, off. But it wasn’t the cold. He knew the true cause: Bea was overmuch in his mind. At first, after their kiss, he’d drawn sustenance from the smell of her hair, the radiant heat in the hollow at the base of her neck, the way she tossed a shawl about her shoulders. He had blazed through workouts. Coach started talking about a medal at Worlds.

  The change happened from one day to the next, as if his fibers suddenly forgot how to fire. As if Bea had overloaded his nerves and drained the current. Not knowing the reason, Coach told him not to worry. “These things happen even to the best runners,” he said. But each time he stopped his watch, a knot worked up and down in his jaw. Jean Patrick thought of Samson and Delilah. He wondered if this was what love meant, a slow but steady sap of strength and spirit.