Why would you say such a thing, she finished to herself.

  Flustered, Ndoli got up. Emma stayed sitting.

  “And me, how would I be if I was in the schoolyard?” she asked suddenly, while Ndoli, not knowing whether he wanted to leave or stay, wandered aimlessly around her.

  He stopped, taken aback. Then he sat down again with his back to her. She leaned against him.

  “Tell me!” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he answered slowly. Then, surprised by his own meanness, he added, “I don’t see you at school.”

  “Oh, I see…” Emma murmured unhappily. She straightened up so that she was no longer touching him. “So I don’t belong at school?”

  He panicked, not knowing what to say. Finally he leaned back timidly until he felt her back again. She stiffened at first and he froze. Then she leaned against him. He remained rigid, afraid that she would move away again.

  She began to rock her shoulders lightly from side to side. He rolled his muscles against hers, raised his head and silently thanked the trees.

  Emma turned around suddenly, put her arms around Ndoli’s shoulders and kissed him noisily on the cheek. Then she got up and left him sitting in front of the low wall.

  THE RETURN

  20.

  Emma came around the side of the building that housed the clinic and headed toward the reception area. The door was always open.

  A little girl was sitting sideways on an oversized chair, swinging her legs back and forth, her eyes locked on a map of Rwanda that was tacked to the opposite wall. The other walls were covered with posters. One showed a mother nursing, another a baby sleeping beneath a mosquito net, and a third portrayed a smiling couple beside a couple sick with AIDS.

  Two women were having a lively discussion across a small desk. One of them was holding a paper that she kept trying to show the other woman.

  Rooted to the spot in the doorway, Emma was reminding herself why she had come, when the old man appeared.

  “Hello, Emma. I’m glad you came.”

  He looked impressive in his light-colored suit. For some reason she thought that he must be very strong.

  He was beside her in two strides, placed his hands on her shoulders and whispered, “Everything is going to be all right, I promise you.”

  The old man led her into his office. She sat down on a metal chair, gray like almost everything else in the room. He sat facing her, their knees almost touching. When she stiffened, he smiled, shifted his chair back and leaned toward her.

  That’s when she noticed the hollow and the funny bump at the base of his skull. She quickly lowered her eyes, clasped her hands together and wondered once again why she had come.

  But the old man was right. Everything was okay. He talked a lot. As for Emma, she didn’t say another word after she asked him where he was and what he had done in 1994.

  Ndoli had told her that the old man had suffered as much as ten men. He convinced her that she could talk to him because he was one of the survivors of the genocide.

  Then Emma talked to Mukecuru, and that had finally made up her mind.

  “I believe he’s a good man,” the old woman said. “Listen to him at first. Watch him closely. See whether he deserves your trust. You’re the only one who can decide.”

  On the way back from the clinic, Emma thought about the old man’s story. His life had been unbelievable. He had survived the many massacres that the Tutsis had suffered. In 1963 they hunted him down; in 1973 they cut his throat, treated him, then hunted him down again; in 1990 they put him in prison and tortured him; in 1991 he was beaten before he managed to get away and hide; in 1994 he was captured and left for dead. All because he was a Tutsi. Now he was scarred but still standing, his dignity intact.

  Unlike Ndoli, he was able to hold his head high…

  Emma was shocked that she would even think this. She had no right to compare the actions of a man with those of a seven-year-old child in the hands of cold-blooded killers. She was torn as she thought about how Ndoli’s life was at a standstill. She felt tenderness, then pity, then guilt for having come out of it better than he had. And in the end she felt ashamed of the feelings that Ndoli had stirred up in her.

  For the rest of the day she tried not to think about her own past. Then at dusk she took her place beneath the big tree and tried to remember the face of her mother. But she couldn’t. Mostly she just heard a muffled noise, murmured cries. The bark at her back became as smooth as a wall and she could feel her body shutting down.

  To pull herself out of it, she raised her head and fixed her eyes on the front of the house, the windows lit up like bright stains on a heavy black curtain. She squinted to make sense of this strange sight, noticed the door, then the little window where she used to spy on Ndoli.

  Only then did she manage to struggle to her feet and run into the shelter of the house.

  Out of breath, she slammed the door and threw herself against it. Her heart was beating so hard she could hear the ground and the walls quiver.

  In the room, Mukecuru startled. Outside the night was black and haunted.

  21.

  Emma went back to see the old man many times. She became used to his gray office. She noticed new little things each time she visited, as if her eyes were just learning how to see. She especially liked the drawings hanging on the wall in a cluttered corner behind a stack of files that seemed to be waiting to be put away. Every time she looked at the drawings, she had an urge to tug on one of the deeply buried files, just to watch the old papers fly apart and scatter on the floor.

  Ever since their second meeting, the old man had been trying to make her tell him her story. But the words wouldn’t come. Emma retraced her life with Mukecuru, but she couldn’t go back any farther.

  So he asked her to draw her past instead.

  “Happy or sad events, Emma. Whatever you want,” he said reassuringly.

  “I don’t know how to draw.”

  He insisted, showed her the clumsy drawings that other children had hung on the wall to prove that anyone could pick up a pencil and express themselves. She could see houses and smiling people.

  Then Emma remembered a drawing that she had noticed on her way into the office that day. It was not on display but was waiting to be filed in a drawer.

  It showed a man with two pointy boots hanging from a square body. He had a rifle instead of an arm and it was aimed at a child with huge eyes in a blank face with no mouth on top of a vertical line without arms or feet. A fountain of red spurted from the head of the child and dripped down to the bottom of the page.

  Emma could just see the blood running off the page and over the edge of the desk to form a bright red pool on the floor.

  That’s when she grabbed a fistful of pencils.

  It was her turn to try to tell her story.

  She tried to draw her mother, fought to show her eyes and her smile, but she could only make crude curves and stupid circles. Her mind refused to remember this face, and trying to draw it changed nothing.

  She ended up pushing away the papers and pencils as she settled back in her chair, trembling and hating herself.

  Then the old man calmly asked her if she wanted to try once more to tell him about her life before the genocide.

  She managed to murmur only a few sentences from the far side of the desk, but she stopped trembling.

  During the sessions that followed, Emma made progress. She remembered her grandfather and his mean wife, then took the pencils and drew her father the way she imagined him.

  She smiled the whole time she drew him, and her drawing joined the others on the wall above the stack of old files.

  22.

  Then the day came when the old man asked Emma to draw her most terrible memory.

  She tried again and again.

  She always began by drawing a vertical line to represent the wall that she had huddled against. But that’s as far as she got, scratching out and blackening the short line over and over, her fingers clenched, wearing down the tip of the pencil.

  “I can’t draw the voices, the beating, the crying. I didn’t see anything,” she said one day, discouraged and exhausted. “I can’t do it.”

  The old man did a strange thing then. He walked over to her, tilted his head to one side, and whispered in a low voice, as if he were telling her a secret, “So pretend you are the sofa, and try to tell me what you see. You’re in no danger. You’re just a sofa.”

  Emma’s eyes widened. What an idea…

  After a few moments of hesitation, she hid her face in her hands and tried. She wasn’t able to turn herself into a sofa, but she found herself transported back to the scene, more like a piece of the ceiling, perfectly harmless.

  And she let the voices, the beating, the crying come back, and she pictured the crime in her head.

  What she saw was unbearable. Her breathing speeded up, then stopped. She thought she was about to drown when the old man’s voice broke into her nightmare.

  “Tell me what you see, Emma. Don’t keep it to yourself.”

  She managed to let go a little, took a deep breath, plunged back into the scene and described the horror. It felt so unbelievably real.

  When she came back to the old man, it was as if she had been sleeping standing up. He walked over to her, his hands on her shoulders, his eyes full of compassion.

  “It’s over, Emma.”

  23.

  “You wanted to know,” the old woman said.

  Emma just stood there, frowning nervously.

  She was supposed to return to her home village — her mother’s village — to get a document that would prove that she had in fact been her mother’s daughter, thus a Tutsi and a survivor of the genocide. Then she would be entitled to money that the state had set aside for the surviving victims — money that would allow them to look after themselves and have better lives. And, for the many children and teenagers who had been on their own since the massacres — most of them desperately poor orphans — it would allow them to enroll in school.

  Emma wasn’t yet sure she wanted to go to school, but Ndoli’s stories and their tense conversation behind the wall had made her want to be with young people her own age.

  She looked at Mukecuru. She did want to know where her mother came from and to see the house where they had lived before everything was lost in her broken memory.

  But the journey scared her. She was afraid of going back to the place where her life had stopped. If she was right there, the ghosts would be even stronger than they were in her bad dreams.

  “You’ll find your missing memories there,” the old woman added. She knew how frightened Emma was.

  The girl sat on the little bench, her safe spot in a dark corner of the room.

  “I’ll go,” she whispered. “I’ll go soon.”

  She slid her hands between her knees, her eyes fixed on the ground. Then she rocked back and forth, as if she were calming a baby.

  24.

  The house where she had been born was about sixty kilometers from the old woman’s place. And it was many long months after her talk with Mukecuru before Emma set off along this road for the second time. Back in 1994, she had fled on foot, hiding in fields, sleeping in the bush, nibbling on rotten fruit every few days, drinking dirty water whenever she could.

  This new journey, ten years later, would be very different.

  Before she left, she told Ndoli about her plan. He wanted to go with her, to protect her, he said. But she told him no. She wanted to face her past and get her life back on her own. Besides, the month of April was approaching, the time when she always noticed the first signs of his dark madness returning. She was already uneasy about this trip. She would not be able to be strong enough for both of them.

  One day when she was feeling discouraged and exhausted and refused to spend time with him, he grew impatient, even angry.

  She could see that he was shattered by her rejection. His eyes glazed over, his jaw became rigid, and he staggered off as if he were drunk.

  Emma felt badly, too. She had a nagging feeling that she was punishing Ndoli, that she had abandoned him. During a long sleepless night, she tossed and turned, upset that she had hurt him so much.

  He was her only friend. Without him she would probably still be battling nightmares.

  The next morning, she decided to leave right away, even though she was upset and exhausted, and Mukecuru suggested that she rest for one more day.

  It was only when she was on her way that Emma remembered the old woman warning her about Ndoli’s fragility and about being careful with the power she had over him.

  25.

  Emma couldn’t relax until the outskirts of town were far behind her. Only then did she look up and pay attention to the men, women and children who were walking with her on the side of the road. She was surprised at how free and easy it felt to be anonymous. For the first time ever, it felt good to be surrounded by people, walking with them or past them, invisible in the crowd.

  Most of her traveling companions were peasants who walked this same road every day. A few were on bicycles harnessed up like horses. It was funny to see men gripping the handlebars, their rear ends in the air as they fought to pedal to the top of a long hill. Some of them gave up and walked up the steeper hills instead, but they still struggled to push their bikes that were weighed down with huge bulging white sacks of grain that looked heavier than a pile of anvils.

  From time to time, the sounds of an old beat-up motorcycle would pierce the silence, belching, farting and hissing wildly. Every once in a while a vehicle surged around the bend — the powerful four-by-fours of the aid workers or white tourists, luxurious black sedans with tinted windows belonging to some important person from the capital, a broken-down van driven by a storekeeper in the village, a minibus or crowded coach running between Kigali and Butare, Rwanda’s other big city.

  Emma liked to watch the way the women would calmly shift aside toward the trees when a car passed, gracefully swinging the colorful umbrellas that protected them from the sun. She shuddered at the unruly schoolchildren who waited until the last second before getting out of the way of the huge engines spewing out oil.

  Then the engine noises would gradually disappear and peace would return to the roadside. And Emma would turn her attention back to the people she passed, trying to imagine what their dreams were like, what their lives were like.

  She overheard a heated conversation between two teenaged boys lying in the grass, their heads leaning against the pavement. They wanted to become soldiers just like an older brother and a cousin who had been recruited by the rebels during the genocide.

  She was touched by the sight of a tiny boy, his forehead creased in concentration as he struggled to keep up with the brisk pace of his mother while he hauled a yellow oil can that was as big as he was.

  After several hours of walking, she decided to take a minibus. She reluctantly handed a few Rwandan francs to the driver, then slid into a spot between two travelers. Her shoulders, her arms, her back, her thighs, her entire body were squeezed in close, unsettling contact with her neighbors. Their clothes rubbed together and their sweat mingled. For a while she put all her energy into holding herself stiff, afraid she would never get out of that hellish box. But in the end she just gave up.

  Once she relaxed, she was able to sneak glances at the people smiling around her. She saw how a sort of good mood was developing among the travelers, in spite of their complaints about the driver or the occasional rowdy passenger.

  There was a big, tough-faced lad who she thought looked mean, until she watched him place his hand on the head of a baby swaddled on the back of its mother so that it wouldn’t be crushed by the sliding doors. She admired an elegant woman until she saw her rudely scold a crippled old man who was trying to sit down to rest his legs.

  Emma realized that every thing and every person had an outside and an inside, and that the two were not necessarily the same.

  She also saw how beautiful her country was. After one of her fellow passengers got off the bus she was able to lean against a window. The countryside unfurled before her eyes like a patchwork of luminous greens stretching into the distance — the cultivated slopes of valleys irrigated by rainwater. As far as she could see, hills poked into the sky, nudging aside the clouds. From time to time little houses popped up like tiny brown islands in a sea of banana groves with their large bright green leaves.

  Emma realized just how little she knew about her own country and how inexperienced she was. At the beginning of the journey, she had been ready for anything to happen, especially the worst. She never imagined she would be surprised by so much, feel so carefree. She could see no signs of the past horror, no scars. She saw nothing on the faces around her that reminded her of the tragedy she had lived through and that had shaped the entire country.

  This journey showed her a Rwanda that seemed to be at peace.

  She could see things with a positive frame of mind — places and people that had looked blacker than hell to her ten years ago.

  And for the first time, she felt strong enough to face the future, as uncertain as it was.

  26.

  A second minibus took Emma to her village.

  By the time she arrived, the energy she had gained during her journey was draining away as fast as the fading daylight. At the small open-air bus depot, travelers were rushing to get home. Some were met by friends and relatives, others by persistent taxi drivers. Those less well-off were leaving on foot or heading toward the mobilettes and bicycles waiting for clients on the side of the road. Emma saw several with loads of luggage precariously balanced on their narrow racks.

 

1 2 3 4 5