by Jemma Wayne
“You don’t want your clothes? You prefer to be an animal?” they laughed and again demanded that she get up and dressed, lashing the backs of her legs with the side of a spear as soon as she put weight upon them.
“Get dressed,” they demanded, and she tried again, fell again, endured their taunts again.
She looked through the muddled mass for Jean, but their faces had merged. Jean, even with his uncommon eyes, was indefinable from the rest.
“Why don’t you kill me?” she eventually managed to whisper.
“We will kill you, be sure of that,” one of them replied. “We’ll get rid of all the Tutsis. But we’ve already killed your whole family today. We’re tired. We need a rest. Besides, your friend Jean wants to wait until tomorrow.”
The one who had spoken moved and slowly Jean, standing head-bent a little behind the rest of them, came into focus. Green and grey. He nodded at her encouragingly, and then, then he did the most extraordinary thing - he winked.
Emily laughed.
Even in her pain, she couldn’t help but laugh at him. Because his winking had always been such a ridiculous gesture to her, and now it seemed more bizarre than ever. He used it to convey what? Conspiracy? Sympathy? Apology perhaps? To remind her of all the times they had spent together? To ask her forgiveness? Did he imagine himself as merciful? An extra day he had given her, his friend, his almost more than friend, one more day of life, and for this he expected her to be thankful? Emily pulled her eyes away from him and slowly trained them down her torn, naked body. This was not mercy. It was merely an illustration of how total and discretionary his power had become.
One of the men threw her clothes at her and painfully she forced her body into the trousers and shirt she’d been wearing. The material felt like lead against her bruised bones, but she clasped it to her, using a sleeve to plug her bleeding nose and dab at the gash on her forehead that was oozing some kind of substance thicker than blood. She felt Jean watching her grimace.
“Stand up,” he told her.
She stood.
“Move,” he said, pointing in the direction she was to go.
She began to move, pain shooting through her legs and hips and into her spine with every step.
“Faster,” someone else demanded.
She pushed herself forward faster, stumbling, continuing, obeying. The will to protest, to defy them, him, had disappeared into the sweet potato field. She no longer possessed any control of her life, no control even of her own body, there was no point in resistance. If he said go, she went now. If he said stop, she stopped. There was nothing left in her head, no plan, no hope, no ambition, no-one to trust, and no family to live for except for Gahiji who had probably perished too. No matter. They would kill her soon enough.
She didn’t know how long she walked for. Her face stung against the air as she moved forwards and somewhere in her left leg a bone crunched. Perhaps they only travelled a few hundred metres, but it felt like many miles before they arrived at a makeshift camp that used to be the government offices. Outside, in a cage-like structure, were a mass of bodies, some lifeless upon sodden red soil, others alive but sitting heads bent upon wooden benches, almost as dead as those fallen untended at their feet.
“One more!” one of Emily’s captors shouted to the two Hutus swinging great masus about the cage, and opened the cage door.
One of the men used a single strong hand to yank Emily inside.
“You’re lucky,” he told her. “We’re almost finished for today. But you can be the last one.” He turned to his friend. “I’m thirsty. We’ll do the rest tomorrow.”
Emily didn’t respond but glanced around to see who ‘the rest’ were. Opposite her was a young mother with two small daughters clasping frantically to her legs. Next to them was an old man, hunched and grey, the kind of man her father would have encouraged her to offer help to. There were no other men. The remaining ten or so people were frightened women and children, some younger than herself, some bleeding, some crying, some looking up at her with a mixture of apology and gratitude. And one woman, on her own, sitting stony still in the corner. At first, Emily’s eyes passed over her as wearily as the rest, but something drew her sharply back. Liquid from the cut on her forehead was leaking into her eyes, but she squinted hard and looked again. She recognised this bruised, naked woman.
Her chest hurt with the incisive intake of air.
Time rolled back.
And in that sudden, surprising moment, Emily was a child again, not mangled, not abused, not in need of anything but to run into her mother’s arms.
Her mother stood up. “I will be the last one,” she declared defiantly.
Emily opened her mouth but the look in her mother’s eyes warned her to stay silent. The top half of her mother’s body was naked, except for a torn headscarf that hung limply around her neck. Emily knew she liked to wear this with the red dress upon which Simeon’s bloodied head now lay. She was shivering and she was stained with blood, but she stood firm and strong and did not show her pain. She looked at her daughter. Her bleeding nose and torn clothes and gashed head, and Emily felt herself flush with shame. Clutching her dirty clothes to her body she wished she could hide what had been done to her, what she’d lost, what she hadn’t been able to protect. She was more naked under her mother’s gaze than she’d ever been with Jean and the other men who had undressed her.
The guard who had spoken to Emily laughed, and grabbed her mother by the chin. “You stupid Tutsi. Don’t you want to come back tomorrow?”
“I will be the last one,” her mother repeated.
Emily’s heart pounded. She opened her mouth again but her mother glared at her sharply. From behind, the other guard jabbed her in the ribs.
“Move,” he told Emily, rallying her and the rest of the captives towards the door. But Emily could not look away from her mother.
“Move,” the guard prodded again, this time with the butt of his masu, and Emily’s mother nodded, firmly. Obediently, Emily moved.
“You stupid Tutsi,” she heard the first guard laugh again, enjoying himself now and roughly dragging her mother forwards. “Okay, let’s have you today then! You can be the last.”
Emily glanced back. The guard was raising his masu, the huge club almost luminous against the dying sun, its nails catching the very last of the light.
She blinked.
Her mother’s beautiful arms pushed heroically against the soil.
She blinked again.
There are times when it becomes impossible to believe in one’s own existence, in the reality of what the eyes have seen. In the instant of her mother’s death, Emily felt the last drops of life drain from her body. Her limbs felt hollow. This was her moment of paralysis.
“Keep moving!” The guard nearby lifted his club but the elderly Tutsi man shuffled forwards to take her arm and pulled her on. Emily let her feet follow his tug. It was irrelevant which direction she moved in now anyway. It was all fleeting and cursory and a way to kill time before it killed her. Tomorrow, they had said. They would kill the rest tomorrow. They had promised. She looked forward to it with all the emotion inside her, which was nothing.
“How did you escape?” Lynn interrupted.
“Do what you want,” Emily murmured.
“Emily? Come back,” Lynn urged.
“I can’t. Everything’s dark. There’s a body on top of me.”
“No, you’re here in my sitting room. In London. That’s enough for today.”
“My mum died.”
“I know.”
“She wouldn’t come back tomorrow.”
“She couldn’t watch you die. She was your mother.”
“But I watched her. I saw. They smashed her. Then it was so dark. The compound was inside. I couldn’t see the sky. Everybody was crying. I was cold.”
“Emily, stop.”
Lynn’s voice was faint and far away. It had lost its authority. There were stronger voices calling her name. Emilienne!
Emilienne! That one! Emilienne!
Jean was standing over her, his eyes not green nor grey but dark and wild as two other men pulled her to her feet. It was night still. The old man removed her head from his shoulder, looking down in apology. All the prisoners were silent as she was dragged away.
In a small room, bright with fluorescent lighting too dazzling for her bruised eyes, a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder ordered that she be flung into the chair opposite his desk, then slowly lit a cigarette before leaning forward to flick the ash onto her hand. She flinched but did not cry out. The pain was mere dust on the ground. Leaning back in his chair the man surveyed her. He was short and broadly set, with a small forehead that made his eyes seem menacing even when he smiled, his grin revealing gaping holes where front teeth should have been. Now and then he laughed obscenely, and Jean and the two others at the back of the room laughed with him.
“How old are you?” the man queried eventually, after he’d stared at her battered body for a long time.
“Thirteen,” she whispered.
“Thirteen. Hmm,” he rolled the number around his mouth. “So shall we see what’s underneath these dirty clothes?”
Panic gripped her. The only words she could find however were the truth.
“It is your choice,” she answered.
He smiled, titillated, and leant forward again so that his face was next to hers and she could smell his foul breath.
“Sir, the guns,” Jean chimed in.
Now the man spun towards him, and as if outraged by the interruption he glared at Jean hard, then walked around the desk to Emily where he placed a heavy hand suggestively on her shoulder.
“You wait outside,” he told Jean deliberately, slipping his hand beneath the neck of her shirt. “I will get to the guns when I’m ready.” Jean cast his eyes down and obediently left the room. As soon as the door was shut, the man released her, grabbing her roughly by her arm and yanking her to her feet. Droplets of spit flew from between the gaps in his teeth into her face as he spoke to her. “Where are the guns?” he demanded.
Emily felt her legs shaking. Speaking felt dangerous but remaining silent was worse.
“What guns?” she murmured finally, and at once the man’s face was up against hers, his hand clasping her jaw so that she couldn’t look away.
“The guns from your brother,” he snarled menacingly. “The one who is with the rebels. Jean told us. Your brother sent guns to your family. We cannot lose these. You will tell us where they are hidden. Where are they?”
“There are no guns,” Emily replied, in a voice that was barely audible.
“What?”
“There are no guns.”
Before she could even see it coming he had punched her in the stomach and she fell gasping to the ground, the force of his blow knocking the air out of her small frame and at the same time somehow reigniting all the pain from her previous injuries, so that her whole body throbbed and pulsated. The man returned casually to his chair and smoked his cigarette while she writhed before him on the ground. Finally she caught her breath and mockingly he cupped his ear for her confession. But she had none.
“There are no guns,” she spluttered from her knees.
“Where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
Calmly, the man signalled to the two others at the back of the room and one of them stepped forward to kick her hard in the stomach. Again she doubled up, winded and wheezing, but now her mind began to race. It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t think. Only hours before she’d had a family and went to school and was a child with dreams. Now this insanity replaced everything and removed all sense.
“Tell me the truth,” the man was demanding, but there no longer seemed to exist a truth. Only murder. Murdering and murdering and getting away with it. And not just by a few. By so many. Even Hutus like Ernest and Jean. Even neighbours and priests and friends. And almost more than friends. Yet they were the same, weren’t they, wasn’t that the truth? They were all Rwandan, they were all people, weren’t they? Mama, why must I be a Tutsi? It was only a name. It couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be humanity. A confused haze enveloped her.
“Where are they?”
“There are no guns,” she tried again.
Another kick to her stomach. Frantically Emily tried to inhale but no air made it beneath the surface. She started coughing and blood shot from her mouth.
“Please, there are no guns,” she pleaded. It was true. If she’d had a gun, by now she would have used it, but they hadn’t heard a word from Gahiji since he’d left to join the rebels. Even Jean knew that, but Jean had told the men they were hiding his rifles, that she knew where they were. Why? To make sure they killed her quickly? To rid himself of her presence, of his guilt? But why go to such trouble? She would be killed the following day in any case. It didn’t make sense. Then suddenly, as the man moved to kick her again, it hit her: Jean had done this to save her.
“There are guns, there are guns,” she reversed desperately, protecting her stomach with her hands. “But they were moved. I can’t remember where. I can’t think straight. Maybe I can remember after I rest.”
The man who had been kicking her lifted his foot again but the one in charge halted him. “Take her to the end cell,” he commanded from behind the desk. “These guns are expensive. They will be helpful. We’ll let her think about it for a while.”
Perception, it seemed to Emily, was an unwilling victim of suffering. As she continued to gasp for breath and they dragged her away, she tried to process her surroundings, to hook her survival to at least one hallway or building or blade of grass she could recognise and so use as an anchor. But time and space had become as illusory as everything else she’d thought was certain. When she was thrown into the cell, the thud could just as easily have been a movement of the floor as of her body, or she could have been lying on a wall somehow, or not lying at all, or not awake but dreaming, or not alive but dead, like all of the other people she knew and loved.
When she woke, she didn’t know how many hours or days she’d been asleep for. Wracked with an urgent thirst her throat felt like sandpaper. When she tried to stand up a stabbing pain shot down her left hip and on lifting her jumper she discovered that her entire side had turned green. The cell stank. When she looked around she realised that she had soiled herself. A final indignity. It struck her with mere indifference. The emptiness inside her had now taken firm root. Nothing mattered.
At some intangible moment after that a guard entered the cell and placed a cup of water and a hard muffin on the floor. He held his nose at the stench in the room and looked at Emily in disgust, as if her example confirmed his worst expectations of what it was to be Tutsi. She wasn’t embarrassed. There no longer existed such a thing. Impervious to his disdainful gaze she reached for the water and raised it to her lips, only then discovering that at some point during her unconsciousness, her jaw had locked. Jammed shut like a prison door. Gasping now for the water tauntingly before her she battled on, her struggle seeming to amuse the guard who snickered behind his hand. Finally however, after tilting her head all the way back, she managed to pour the liquid through the small, crusted opening of her mouth, and keeping her chin to the sky, it trickled down her sandpaper throat. Water turned into fire, but she swallowed, and glared defiantly at the guard. If only her stomach had been as stoic, but bubbling at the sudden influx of water, her insides exploded, and moments later filth ran in brown, gushing liquid down her legs, soaking through her trousers. The guard laughed. Emily lay her head on the floor and slept again.
For weeks she survived this way. Every time a glass of water was provided she drank it, and every time her stomach ran. The men took to throwing the food they gave her into the cell from a distance, anxious not to be close to her mess. Emily stopped smelling it. Her head throbbed all the time, the gash above her eye no longer seeping but crusting over and adding to the noxious air. When she lay on the floor she
could feel her ribs and hips protruding into the hard ground. Gradually however, somehow, she began to grow stronger. Every now and then the man who had ordered her to be locked in the cell appeared and asked her in a cursory way where the guns were. But he seemed not to be able to bear the stench that surrounded her and didn’t enter her cell to press for an answer.
Mostly she slept. Her dreams were filled with visions of her mother, naked, defiant, and of herself saying nothing, and of her father’s smashed glasses, and the empty sleeve of Rukundo’s blue shirt, and Cassien’s arms and legs turned to stumps, and her not helping him, and Simeon’s broken skull, and Ernest and Jean with machetes in their hands. Sometimes, when she opened her eyes she still saw these images, like ghosts leering in front of her, or clouds taking unearthly shapes, too distorted a vision to interpret or construct a story for.
She must have been in the cell for almost a month before Jean appeared in the flesh and not only in these nightmares. His hair was messy and longer, his face flushed as though he’d been working in the sun, and he seemed to have grown even taller since she saw him last, or else she had shrunk. He looked healthy. When his eyes met hers they betrayed all his disgust at the sight of what she had become; but there was a reservation within his down-turned gaze that made her wonder if a small part of this aversion was reserved for himself.
“The killing’s almost over,” he told her from the doorway in a tone somewhere between triumph and apology. Still she felt only emptiness.
“Who is left?”
“In our village, so far as we know, only you,” he replied, then, smiling ridiculously, as if he was still allowed this privilege, he added, “nobody will want to kill you now. You are famous. People are saying it would be a curse to kill the last one.”
The last one.
One.
Infinite absence of another. Infinite loneliness.
Emily didn’t smile back and Jean’s face dropped. He ran a weary hand through his hair and disordered it. She said nothing.
