Running the Rift

by Naomi Benaron

  “Mana yanjye, they just left the bodies on the ground?”

  Jean Patrick could have filled the world’s oceans with his grief, but he found not one tear in his heart. Everything inside him had dried and shriveled. “Did you bury them?”

  “By the time we got there, what was left had been scattered by animals. I won’t pain you with details. We dug a single grave for the hillside, but we were not so thorough. I can only hope that someday, you and I will find the right bones so we can lay our family to rest properly and according to custom. That much we must do for them.” Sunlight, dim and dusty, canted through the narrow window and fell across Roger’s face, threading his eyes with topaz. They were Mathilde’s eyes. Jean Patrick had never noticed before. “Will you come back to Rwanda with me?” Roger asked.

  “I can’t. I’m waiting for a visa for the States, which my American professor—Jonathan—is helping me to get. I’ve applied for refugee status, and if I return for any reason, they will deny me.” Jean Patrick waved his hands. “But that’s all part of my long story, which can wait. Spéciose will be back soon, and she will want your news. My tale, she has already heard.” The bones only, Jean Patrick thought, not the raw flesh.

  Roger shook a cigarette from his pack and pushed up from the table. “You can smoke in here,” Jean Patrick said. “Uncle does all the time.” He fetched a cracked clay ashtray. His eyes followed the struck match, the ember’s glow, the two tendrils of smoke rising from Roger’s nostrils. Only then did he ask, “Have you been to Butare?”

  “I have. I thought by some miracle I might still find you there.” Roger studied the cigarette’s glow. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” he said. “I saw Niyonzima’s house, and it is burned to the ground. Is that where you were?”

  Although he knew this to be true, hearing it from his brother was like a grave opening up, possibility falling into it. “Yes. The soldiers and Interahamwe came. I jumped over the wall, and that’s how I destroyed my ankle. Bea was with me, but at the last moment, she turned back.” It was the first time Jean Patrick had torn these words from memory, given them substance and shape. “What I am asking is if there is a chance. Remote. That someone escaped.” In the theory of quantum physics, Jean Patrick had read, a person could be leaning against a wall and fall through to the other side if the molecules simultaneously realigned in just the right way.

  Roger exhaled a thick blue ring of smoke. “I suppose.” But his expression told Jean Patrick he did not believe it. There was an equal chance, the expression said, that they would wake in the morning in their house at Gihundwe, Mama and Papa at their bedside, the past ten years of their lives nothing more than a terrible nightmare.

  “I heard their names announced on RTLM—the three of them—but then, I heard yours, too,” Roger said.

  “Eh? They announced my name on the radio?” Possibility stirred, put a bony finger on the edge of the grave.

  “They boasted of it. We were fighting near Kigali. I had just returned to the truck and put the radio on. They said they caught you at a roadblock. I punched the dashboard so hard my hand was swollen for a week.” He held up his fist to show the scarred knuckles. “But after the shock wore off, a little voice kept telling me it wasn’t so. My brother, he is too crafty, I told myself. Since that time, I knew I would find you again.”

  Jean Patrick said, “The thought of greeting you again has kept me going.” That and the smallest spark of belief that Bea lived.

  The sun had started its descent, its angle now missing the tall window. The topaz was gone from Roger’s eyes. “A funny thing,” Roger said. “When they mentioned Niyonzima’s wife, they said she was Tutsi. Do you know anything about this?”

  Jean Patrick shook his head. “She could easily have been mistaken for one—most likely this happened—but she was Hutu.”

  IN THE EVENING, Roger sat outside with Jean Patrick. The full moon painted a path into the bush. Spéciose brought out a small table and two bottles of ikigage. The sorghum beer was strong, and Jean Patrick’s head spun, although he was only halfway through his bottle. Smoke from a mosquito coil spiraled upward. An occasional volley of gunfire came from the forest. War, it seemed, would never be far away.

  “Do you remember the roof Uncle made for us when we first moved in?” Roger asked.

  “How could I forget? When I think how proud he was of his corrugated metal, and how we joked about it in private, I could crawl into the earth with shame.”

  “Those killers stole it. Every scrap of metal gone. When we were advancing, we saw so many Hutu fleeing with heavy, heavy piles of roofing on their heads. They could barely move forward under the weight.”

  Jean Patrick laughed at the image. A dance of looters and killers wobbling and weaving to the borders. He asked Roger if he had been to Gihundwe. He had. Nothing left of the school, the survivors counted on a single hand.

  Spéciose came out with two more bottles. She touched Roger’s cheek. “You have your mother’s beautiful face.” She wiped her eyes. “You’ll have to come in soon; it’s almost curfew.”

  Roger stared into the bush. “Is the fighting near?”

  “It comes and goes,” Jean Patrick said. “Not like Bujumbura, where you fear for your life going to market. But everywhere is dangerous after dark.” He smiled weakly. “At least I’m on the right side now.”

  “Right side? Is there ever one?” Roger lit a cigarette. The match flared across his face. “I brought you something.” Roger fished a bundle wrapped in newspaper from his pack. Inside the layers was Zachary’s Bible, pages curled with dried blood. “Mukabera saved it. She found it clutched in his arms.” He snorted. “Probably the killers knew there was too much deadly sin on their hands to tempt God’s wrath by stealing it.”

  Jean Patrick held the Bible to his face and took the scent of his brother’s blood deep into his lungs. He inhaled the decay, the ferruginous odor of death. Suddenly he was underwater, grief flowing over him like the sea.

  “She found this, too.” Roger uncurled his fist. “Do you recognize it?”

  Jean Patrick examined the Saint Christopher’s medal. “It’s not Uncle’s, but it’s familiar.”

  “Think about fishing.”

  He saw it then, lantern light across a bare chest in the pirogue, the medal flashing and twirling in its gleam. “Fulgence. It used to mesmerize me when he pulled in the nets.”

  “He was one of the killers. Mukabera saw him.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Jean Patrick gave the medal back to Roger.

  “I’ll keep it.” He shoved it into his pocket. “So I can show it to him before I kill him.”

  Weariness filled Jean Patrick’s bones. In this moment, he was too tired for vengeance. But in another moment, everything could change.

  “I’m going to Boston as soon as my visa comes through,” Jean Patrick said. He took a long swallow of beer. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “My muzungu brother, huh!” Roger clapped Jean Patrick’s knee. “Well, why not? There’s nothing for me here. I don’t think they’ll appoint me president in the near future.”

  “You could join the American army.”

  “Fighting is finished.”

  “What about One Shot? Do you know what happened to him?”

  Roger smiled. “He hooked up with some NGO about child soldiers. He’s a big man now, goes around speaking everywhere. They paid for a brand-new leg—he may run his marathon yet. Mana yanjye, he was brave. Someone you could always count on.” He leaned forward and touched Jean Patrick’s scalp, the still-tender wound. “What about this?”

  From the forest came a monkey’s warning cry. Jean Patrick took another swallow of beer and waited for the pain in his ankle to blur. “Coach.” He forced his ankle in a slow circle. “He took me to the arboretum to kill me but then gave me one chance to run. Truly, by that time, I should have been dead, but my body insisted on life. I heard the shot and felt a searing pain in my head. I’m finished, was my last
thought. But then I woke up in his arms.” Jean Patrick tunneled through the dark earth of memory. He wondered if he would ever emerge on the other side of the world. “Until now, I don’t know if he is a good shot or if he missed by accident.” He gave a little laugh. “Maybe someday I will get the chance to ask him.”

  Again, Roger went to his pack. He pulled out a piece of paper and dropped it onto the table. “Bad news and more bad news,” he said.

  Jean Patrick picked up the crumpled, filthy paper and read. Iyo inzoka yizilitse ku gisabo ugomba kikimena ukabona uko uyica. In killing a snake curled around a gourd, you break the gourd if you must, to kill him. It was an old Rwandan proverb, and there was no mistaking Coach’s writing. “What’s this?”

  “We found that in his pocket when we went to his house. He was in the backyard. Like a true soldier, he shot himself in the head.”

  Jean Patrick felt an empty pit in his stomach. “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “Probably, it is the same old thing—we Tutsi are the snake, and Rwanda the gourd.”

  Jean Patrick nodded. “I can think of no other meaning.” He thought he should feel—what? Rage? Grief? No one else besides Bea had had such an influence on his life, but he could not begin to untangle the web of their long history together. At some point, there would be rage, and there would be grief; he knew that. But at this moment, there was only a dull ache in that place Coach had taught him was the source of all his power.

  Jean Patrick turned to Roger. “What can you tell me now that you would not tell me before? If I had not been beyond feeling or thinking when I was taken to him, the shock of the man in his army uniform with his gun, stinking of blood, would have killed me.”

  “While he was training you, he also trained militias in the forest. Armed them. That’s what I was trying to warn you about when I came to Butare. The killing did not take him by surprise; he was involved in the planning.”

  Coach always disappearing. The locked spare room and the heavy wooden crate beneath the bed. All the whispers Jean Patrick had blocked from his ears, swept from his eyes.

  “And Jolie, his servant—did you find her?”

  Roger shrugged. “Gone to Zaire, most likely.”

  “But I can’t forget that in the end, he saved me,” Jean Patrick said. “I was in and out of consciousness, in his arms, then in the jeep again. I thought he was taking me somewhere else to kill me, but I could not stay awake. I was no longer capable of caring. Next, I woke up in a bed at my friend Jonathan’s house. He and his umukunzi, Susanne, were supposed to have left for Burundi, and they were going to hide Bea and me in the trunk, but the same night, the killing started. After that, they refused to flee. That is the reason Coach found them. Come to think of it, he must have known they were there.” Jean Patrick gave a little laugh. “Coach had a way of knowing everything.

  “Their cook, Amos, was Tutsi, too, and they were protecting him.” Jean Patrick wiped the beer’s sweet foam from his lips. He would have a headache in the morning. “Coach promised a military escort, so Jonathan’s plan was executed after all. Only it was Amos instead of Bea who curled beside me in the trunk.”

  Jean Patrick rose unsteadily from his chair. “We better go in before the rebels come running through. Enough is enough.” In the doorway, he held Roger back. “One request.”

  “Anything.”

  “Will you go back to Butare? Look around? Maybe you could find some news for me.”

  “It is as done.”

  Spéciose and Damien slept. Roger and Jean Patrick walked quietly through the dark house. They lay down together and pulled the blankets close around them. Jean Patrick tucked himself against Roger’s back for warmth, as he had done every night when they were children, when the world was solid beneath their feet.

  1995

  TWENTY-NINE

  AS HE STRAPPED HIMSELF into the tiny seat and looked through the wavering heat at the tarmac, Jean Patrick discovered he was scared. His body vibrated with the crescendo of engine noise, and he felt as squeezed as in any Onatracom bus. As instructed, he tucked the knapsack Jonathan had sent from America under the seat in front of him and pulled the uncomfortable seatback into an upright position. Rwandans always did as they were told, he reflected. His knees pressed into the seat in front.

  The woman in the seat beside him tightened the shawl that held the wailing baby to her breast. She was floaty and tall, a breakable beauty, and when she smiled at Jean Patrick, life stirred in his heart.

  “Girl or boy?”

  “Boy,” she said, untucking the baby’s head from his cocoon to show him. The child’s toothless, wide-eyed fear made Jean Patrick laugh.

  “I know how he feels,” he said.

  “Is this your first time flying?” She rubbed the baby’s nose with hers and cooed to him. Gold bracelets sparked on her arm.

  “Yes, my first time on a plane. I come from Rwanda. Cyangugu.” The plane moved slowly down the runway, the engine’s pitch rising.

  “I’m sorry.” The woman settled back against her pillow and sighed. “Imana ikurinde.” Then she sat up again and held out her hand. “I’m Eugénie. From Bujumbura.”

  It was strange to mention the country of his birth and receive always an apology and a blessing. “I’m going to Boston to live,” Jean Patrick said, returning her firm handshake.

  “We’re going to Boston, too. But from there we go on to Montreal. At least you have some time to get used to the weather before winter. The temperature change is quite a shock.” She smiled again, and warmth spread through Jean Patrick.

  The plane accelerated, the runway a black blur. There was a last jostling bump, and they were airborne. The city of Bujumbura wheeled away beneath them. Lake Tanganyika glistened, a black diamond. What was it Jonathan said? The second-deepest lake in the world? The lowest point in Africa? He remembered that, like Lake Kivu, Tanganyika was part of the East African Rift Valley, the continent of Africa tearing apart in fits and starts along a jagged seam beneath the hot and thinning crust.

  Jean Patrick retrieved his knapsack and took out his Bible. It was a new one, a parting gift from Auntie Spéciose. Zachary’s Bible was in his suitcase, bundled in newspapers and plastic bags. He hadn’t been able to leave it behind.

  Life always moved in a circle, he thought, flipping through the pages for a suitable section to read. He’d spent years trying to lift Papa’s life from the words he had written, but the journal was destroyed before he succeeded. Now he had the Bible that had been passed from Papa to Zachary, and in his braver moments, he tried to face Zachary’s final one, to discover the passage he took comfort from as he awaited death.

  He let the book fall open, and it parted on Isaiah. For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not give their light; The sun will be darkened in its going forth, and the moon will not cause its light to shine. Everyone who is found will be thrust through. He could not read on. Instead he imagined his brother taking comfort from the Hymn of Praise: For YAH, the Lord, is my strength and my song: He has also become my salvation. Therefore with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

  He remembered Zachary as he had seen him at Easter, face rapturous, ribbons of stained-glass light streaming onto his white shirt. He remembered the walk to church—the sun shimmer on Jacqueline’s hair, the dance of flowers on Mama and Auntie’s pagnes—the recollection still sharp enough to cut him.

  Reading brought on queasiness, and Jean Patrick set the Bible on his lap. Tentatively he closed his eyes. Sometimes, without warning, images loomed up before him. Already he recalled those days like fractals of broken glass plucked from his flesh shard by shard. This time, only light from the airplane window played behind his eyelids. He floated in the engines’ thrum. He wondered if they had passed over Rwanda, the infected wound in the elephant ear of Africa.

  It was Iki now, the long dry season spanning July and August. If he could have excised that wound, inserted the normal passage of time, Mama and Aunt E
sther would have been in the fields, harvesting sorghum and maize. Clemence, Clémentine, and Clarisse would have been spread-legged on the ground, the ruby beads of sorghum berries spilling from a blanket between them. Uncle would have been a stork, balanced with his long pole in his pirogue, slapping the lake’s surface. And Daniel? Jean Patrick thought of his friend’s smile, pink berry of tongue between gapped front teeth. He would be preparing for his third year at university, falling daily in and out of love. Jean Patrick tucked his head under his arm and fell into a troubled sleep.

  WHEN JEAN PATRICK AWOKE, darkness bathed the cabin. Eugénie read, illuminated by a halo of overhead light. Her baby played in the lap of the grandmother across the aisle.

  “I put your Bible in the seat pocket,” Eugénie said. “I rescued it from the floor.” From between the pages of her book she removed a photograph. “This fell out,” she said, handing it to him.

  It was a picture of him with Bea that Susanne had taken the day before Easter. She had mailed it to him in Burundi, wrapped in purple paper—purple, the color of the genocide now—and folded into a long letter. At first I didn’t want to send this, but the more I looked at it, the more I knew I had to.

  In the photo, he and Bea leaned against each other and looked out at the camera with the sternest of expressions. It must have been a trick of the fickle light; he saw Bea lift her head and smile. He took the Bible from the pouch and opened it. The page fate chose was in Romans. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. He shuffled again: For he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. As he flipped through the books, it seemed that wherever he landed, he could choose either vengeance or forgiveness. He could not say which he chose for himself. He settled finally on Ephesians: Walk in Unity, Walk in Love, Walk in Light and Wisdom. The day had not yet come when he could live by this message.