Running the Rift

by Naomi Benaron

  “I don’t think so. If she’s in there, she is strong.”

  She stepped from her pagne. Planets and suns spiraled from her body. Then she lay down and drew the pagne over them. Slowly, gently, they made love beneath this bright galaxy. Jean Patrick unwound inside her dark earth. The taut cord of death in his belly uncoiled. He buried himself inside her, seeking the slow, steady pulse of life, its perpetual seed.

  THE CLICK OF a key in the front door startled them both from sleep. Bea dressed and quickly kissed Jean Patrick’s cheek. “Let me go now and see if I can fasten myself together.” Jean Patrick pulled on his sweatpants. He could have drowned in shame. She slipped out the door before he could kiss her back.

  Niyonzima and Ineza were at the table when Jean Patrick came out. They looked up with a single motion, and he knew from their faces that once more, Imana’s ear had remained deaf to them.

  “Everything was going well,” Niyonzima said. He regarded Jean Patrick with pained eyes. “I had a good conversation with the chief—a little joke, a little laugh. I showed him the envelope, nice and fat. He seemed about to take it, but then he told me to wait. When he returned, he said he could not accept the payment.” Niyonzima cleared his throat and folded his hands, one on top of the other. “I am certain he checked a list, and our names were on it.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  THERE WAS A BREAK IN THE WEATHER. The sun climbed into a clear, crisp sky. Bea and her family still slept. Exhaustion had pulled them under. Niyonzima typed in his study. Jean Patrick heard the keys like some crazy syncopation to the voice of RTLM, both coming together through the thin walls. There will be no more Inkotanyi; there will be none in this country anymore. When you see how many of them die, you would think they came back to life. They themselves believe they come back to life, but they deceive themselves. They are disappearing.

  Quietly, Jean Patrick tiptoed to the hall and put on his running shoes. He closed the gate behind him and stepped into the road. “Kare kare mu museke,” he sang softly, a line cast out to his former life, this simple greeting of the dawn. Blue mist hid the hills. Burundi’s mountains floated in a sea of mist. Here and there along the paths, farmers climbed toward the fields. He felt like Rutegaminsi from his father’s book of stories, tunneling through the earth with his mole guide to emerge into a terrible beauty on the far side of the world. He remembered reading the story to Mathilde, time and again, thankful that she never had to emerge into a land like this.

  Checking one last time that his identity card was in his jacket pocket, he set off at a slow jog toward town. He settled into the motion his legs had ached for. Into his Nikes he willed the power of Nkuba, the Thunder God for whom he was named. He imagined tucking everyone he loved beneath his arms and carrying them across the Akanyaru swamps, away from Rwanda and into Burundi, away from this war in which they would almost certainly all die.

  For now, Butare remained a place of safe haven. Little by little, women returned to their plots, men appeared on the trails with bicycles and carts. Streams of Tutsi, filthy and bleeding, poured in from the rest of the country to seek refuge in churches and hospitals. They came from every direction like the walking dead. They were dazed, in shock. Some appeared to have gone mad. Behind them, children with sticks ran to the roadblocks and waited for the action to begin.

  Jean Patrick spotted the convoy from a long distance off. Then he recognized the UN vehicles, flags flying, and his heart hammered. He nearly jumped into the air. They were saved. He ran toward them, praying fiercely. He wondered why no crowds lined up along the streets to cheer.

  But the convoy barreled down the hill. He could make out the faces of the soldiers now, the scowling expressions. He stopped to watch, afraid to come closer. Mixed in with the UN vehicles was a parade of cars and trucks with the flags of their countries taped to the windows. Inside were the whites, looking out on the countryside with dull, shocked stares. He realized the rescue was only for them. They were fleeing, abandoning the fast-sinking ship. Jean Patrick’s excitement fled with them. He saw, relieved, that Jonathan’s imodoka was not among them. A ragged group of refugees jumped from the bush and sprinted after the vehicles, shouting and pleading to be taken in. As the procession stopped for a checkpoint, the refugees swarmed. A few managed to cling to the tailgates.

  “Why won’t you take us?” a mama wailed. “Can’t you see they will kill us all?” She tried to push her baby into the arms of a woman inside a truck. “Mana mfasha—at least take my child.”

  A UNAMIR soldier shoved her with his rifle butt. A second soldier shot into the air.

  In the last flatbed truck was a young girl, two tails of brown hair sticking out from her head. She was crying. Clutched to her chest was a carrying case with wire mesh, and a little dog peeked out from inside it. She caught Jean Patrick’s gaze and held it. The convoy started up again. Imbazazi, the girl mouthed, forgive me, over and over until she faded into the haze of distance. Jean Patrick wondered if this was the only word of Kinyarwanda she knew.

  THE MIST SHREDDED and then vanished, and Jean Patrick turned onto the trail to the arboretum fields. When he reached the first field, he lifted onto the balls of his feet and sprinted to the top. He trotted back down, then fast up, as hard as he could push. Again. And again. He recited the names of the minerals he had studied for geology class, the names he would be writing today for his exams if Rwanda had not spun away from the Earth’s common axis.

  Beryl. Cinnabar. Lepidolite. He continued until he had no breath left in his lungs, no choice but to collapse into the grass. He bathed his face in it and let the chocolaty perfume of freshly turned earth fill his nostrils. Flopping onto his back, he watched the sky, the bright, shattered clouds. The sun warmed his face. He dreamed of peace.

  JEAN PATRICK WAS startled awake by a truck rattling along the road, axles squeaking. He rolled onto his stomach, pressed into the ground. The engine whinnied closer. The casual chatter of men drifted from the open window. The truck, filled with soldiers, came to a stop directly above him. In the bed, the Tutsi cargo. Jean Patrick wiggled deeper into the grass and held his breath. Doors slammed. The tailgate clanked down.

  “Move, Inyenzi, move! Tugende!”

  From his hiding place, Jean Patrick heard the thud of feet hitting the ground. A moan as someone fell. There were nine shots, one resonant in the echo of the last. A bird started from the bush. It was a green-headed sunbird, rare in this part of Rwanda. Captivated, Jean Patrick shifted to follow its flight. The bird wheeled into sunlight, a metallic glint of wings and tail feathers. Pyrite. Chalcopyrite. Fool’s gold.

  JONATHAN GREETED JEAN Patrick at the door when he returned, shadows as dark as ink stains beneath his eyes. “Come and sit,” he said. “We have something to discuss.”

  Niyonzima looked up from his tea. “Jonathan has a plan to help us. Our préfet was removed from office today. I’m sure he will be killed, if he’s not dead already.” He poured tea from the thermos and motioned to Jean Patrick to sit. “A man sympathetic to the government’s program has taken the préfet’s place, and so the situation is suddenly urgent.”

  “That would explain the convoys I saw,” Jean Patrick said.

  “Susanne is sick. She can’t stay any longer,” Jonathan said. “The last convoy leaves tomorrow. The skeleton staffers, the holdouts who planned to stay but couldn’t make it.”

  Jean Patrick thought of the line of somber faces, the little girl’s plea for forgiveness. “I understand. We’ll all miss you.”

  “Wait,” Niyonzima said. “Hear him.”

  “We want to take you and Bea with us.”

  With their tails between their legs, the whites will leave, the RTLM announcer said on the day the prime minister was murdered. Everything had come to pass as RTLM had predicted.

  “Thank you for your offer,” Jean Patrick said, “but the soldiers will never let Rwandans into the convoy. I saw them today, pushing Tutsi away with their guns.”

  A faint smile lifted the cor
ners of Jonathan’s lips. “I’m building a compartment in the imodoka’s trunk. It will be cramped, but if you and Bea don’t fight, you can manage.”

  “No,” Bea said. “I’ve changed my mind. I can’t leave. If we die, we die together.” She took Jean Patrick’s hands. “But you go. Our last hope here is gone.”

  Ineza rocked Bea and stroked her hair. “My daughter, do you remember what you once said when I asked you who would carry on the fight if Dadi and I died?”

  “Yes, Mama. I remember, but that was a very long time ago.”

  “I will ask you the same question again. If we all die, who will tell the world what happened here? Who will bring justice for all these unjust deaths?” She held Bea’s hands to her cheek as if cooling a fever. “You are our voice—our future. Your father and I want nothing more than for you to carry our lives forward. You must go with Jean Patrick.”

  With her mouth slightly open, Bea turned to her parents and then to Jean Patrick. The silence was so thick he could have shaped it between his hands.

  “All right,” she said then. “I will do as you ask, Mama. I will go.”

  Ineza insisted on a last dinner together, the traditional meal that always began a journey. She had been in the cookhouse for much of the day, preparing igisafuria, the chicken stew that was Jean Patrick’s favorite meal. The aroma had been teasing his nostrils each time the back door was opened, the momentary pleasure calming his troubled thoughts.

  The power had been off since morning; they ate by lantern light. A few stars shone, the moon’s larger half dangling between them. Jean Patrick and Bea would have to keep to the high bushes on the way to Jonathan’s in order to avoid being seen. Bea held on to her mother’s hand while she ate, neither of them capable of letting go. A tape of Rwandan music played, the sound tinny on Niyonzima’s portable machine. When the scream came from the cookhouse, it took Jean Patrick a moment to realize it was not part of a song. The scream became a wail, a keen.

  Claire burst into the room. “Queen Gicanda’s been murdered. Soldiers broke into her house and took her to the National Museum.” Her face crumpled. “In a truck, like a dog. They just announced it on RTLM.”

  Niyonzima pushed away his plate. “You must leave quickly,” he said. “All of you. If they can kill such a woman, none of us are safe. They’ll be coming house to house soon, as they’ve done everywhere.”

  Jean Patrick let his fork fall from his fingers, the last of his will drained. God had truly abandoned them now. The mwami’s wife murdered, an old woman who had been only a symbol of kindness—it was unthinkable, even in this world that had been turned on its head. The burst of gunfire from the road brought him to his feet, and he tipped over his bowl. A stain spread on the cloth. Sauce and meat slid to the floor.

  “We’re too late,” Ineza cried.

  They heard shots, screams. Then gunfire, continuous, shredded the evening. A grenade blast rattled the windows.

  “Go! Ineza—please, go with them.” Niyonzima took a pocketknife from the bureau drawer. “Take this.” He gave the knife to Jean Patrick and blew out the lantern. “Claire, fetch them the machete and then lock yourself and the children in your hut.”

  “I’m staying.” Ineza’s voice floated in the darkness. “Jean Patrick, take Bea. No arguments.” Outside, above the clamor of drums and whistles, they heard the chant, “Tubatsembatsembe!” Exterminate them all.

  “Mama! Dadi!” In the faint light, Jean Patrick watched Bea move toward them. He was afraid she would fall to her knees. The whistles shrieked, coming closer.

  “There’s no more time,” Ineza said. She kissed Bea and turned away. “God protect you both.”

  Jean Patrick pulled Bea toward the garden. Objects lurched from the darkness. He stumbled into Ineza’s easel, and it crashed to the ground. “We’ll have to go over the wall, into the woods. They’d kill us the minute we came out the gate.”

  The noise became a single stream: screams, gunshots, chants, and whistles mingled together. Trucks moved up the hill—gears grinding, soldiers barking out orders. In the dining room, Ineza and Niyonzima spoke softly. Jean Patrick’s fingers closed around the doorknob, and he led Bea out into the yard. Orange flames lit the hillsides. In every direction, houses burned. He felt the cold grass on the soles of his feet, and he realized they were both in flip-flops. He removed his shirt and cut off the sleeves. He cut the body in half and gave the two halves to Bea. “Wrap your hands,” he said. “Quickly.”

  The trucks stopped one house away, maybe two. Close enough so that Jean Patrick could make out the words to the killers’ song. Umwanzi wacu n’umwe turamuzi n’umututsi. Our enemy is one, we know him, it is the Tutsi. The near, sweet scent of orange blossoms pierced his lungs.

  Bea dropped the shirt, and a cry of anguish came from her throat. “I can’t leave them—I can’t.” Next door: screams and gunfire, then the whistles and drums. She ran back toward the house.

  “Bea!” Jean Patrick bolted after her but slipped in the wet grass, twisting his ankle. She disappeared through the door.

  The truck engines started and stopped. They were in front of the gate. This gate. He picked up the shirt Bea had dropped and put the two halves in the pocket of his sweatpants. The gate shrieked, ripped from its hinges.

  He ran to the base of the garden wall, wrapping his hands as he went. Ashen light illuminated the broken glass. He took a breath, a running start, and leapt. The cloth on the left hand held. Glass sank into his right as deep as bone, the flesh there new and barely healed. From inside the house, he heard gunfire and then a woman’s scream, abruptly silenced. Ineza? Bea? He could not tell. He bit his lip and vaulted over but did not quite clear the top. Glass opened his ankle as he jerked free and tumbled. His body twisted, and he landed awkwardly, all his weight on his weakened leg.

  “There’s a cockroach hiding here. Catch him,” someone shouted.

  Jean Patrick got his bearings and tried to sprint for the forest’s cover, but his right foot wobbled and dragged as if not quite attached to his leg. He tumbled down the steep slope, feet tangling in the vines. Behind him, the earth erupted. He felt the pressure wave against his eardrums and then its oscillating aftermath.

  He went down onto hands and knees and crawled, his ankle wet with blood. When he reached the forest, he pulled himself upright and looked back toward Cyarwa. Flames rose from the houses, a brightness like planets and stars, a heaven upside down. He forced himself to turn away. Smoke was heavy on his skin and in his eyes, acrid and oily in his lungs. Stopping beside a fallen and rotted tree trunk, he began to dig, pounding and clawing with a rage that welled up from his core. Soil, leaves, and blood mingled. Like a rat, he burrowed inside the hole and waited for the silence of the grave.

  THE MOON WAS still out when Jean Patrick emerged, its fierce geography blotted by the passage of fast-moving clouds. Watery light turned leaf and branch shadow into spilled blood. Clotted blood stuck his legs to his pants, coated his arms. He pulled up his sweatpants and saw fibers of torn calf, a cord of tendon, shiny and white. With what remained of his shirt, he bandaged his wounds.

  Walking was difficult. His swollen ankle offered no support, and he couldn’t push off with his right foot. He tripped on a log and fell. No. Not a log—a body, eyes level with his own, wide with final terror. The boy’s hand was raised to his head, fingers splayed across his crushed skull. He was naked except for a sock. Jean Patrick scrambled to his feet. The ground was littered with bodies, as if they had all fallen suddenly into a nightmarish sleep. Dizzy and weak, he stumbled deeper into the thickness of eucalyptus and pine. By a combination of walking and crawling, he headed in a direction he believed would lead him south to the border, to Burundi.

  Stars blink, not planets, Jean Patrick said, over and over, thinking of anything to avoid thinking of Bea. The moon’s light diffused through the clouds. He had neither stars nor planets to guide him. His uncle had taught him the constellations, pointing out the heavenly bodies as they wheeled acro
ss the night sky while he and Uncle fished. He tried to bring them to mind, dredge them up from his childhood. Only the hunter surfaced, tipped onto his side in equatorial laziness. In other places, he runs across the night chasing the bear. Here it’s too hot, so he just sleeps. That’s what Uncle told him. But in this terrible darkness, even the lazy hunter had fled.

  Time doubled back on itself. Direction lost meaning. Jean Patrick listened for a night bird, a bushpig, a monkey’s warning cry, a rat scurrying through leaf litter. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. He shivered, suddenly cold. The smell of pine cut his nostrils. He crushed a carpet of pine needles, vines, and wild begonias beneath his feet. Pain cracked his skull.

  HE FOUND THE trace of a footpath, but then the moon set, and he had to crawl to follow the faint trail. A frantic trill burst from the trees around him. At first he thought it was wood pigeons, confused and singing at the wrong time. Then shouts and chants rose above the whistles’ din; “Tubatsembatsembe!” they whooped, a wild song of celebration.

  Hand over hand he hoisted himself into a densely branched tree. The rough bark pierced his wounded palm. Above him was an abandoned monkey’s nest, and he curled inside its stink. Held in the cradle of interwoven branches, he watched in silence. The Tutsi ran before their pursuers, mute and ragged, the young and the old dragged by the hand or abandoned to fate. Women carried babies in their arms, some clearly dead. Torchlight turned night into an unnatural day.

  The killers wore banana leaves around their necks, and capes of banana leaves draped their shoulders. Gray paint, ash, and mud masked their faces. Even so, he recognized a guard from the university, a farmer he used to greet in the fields, the shopkeeper who had sold him the pirogue. They carried nail-studded clubs, machetes, and spears; the Interahamwe had guns and grenades, cans of petrol strapped to their backs.