I close my eyes, and on memory’s stage, all the vanished things reappear and take their place. Here are the big coffee plants, covered with red berries, greeting me at the entrance again. I love walking barefoot on the carpet of dried-grass mulch all around them. The path is lined with yellow flowers, lovingly tended by Jeanne. Just by the house, the banana trees grow strong on the beans’ cooking liquid: they bear the most succulent varieties – the kamaramasenge, the ikingurube. My mother has saved up the nicest bunches, waiting for vacation to come, when we’ll be home again. A tall cassava tree serves as an awning before the front door. My mother is waiting for me on the threshold. She’s tied on her finest pagne, the one she wears for Mass. We give each other a long embrace, as custom dictates, as if to fill each other with the warmth of our bodies. She leads me inside, and I hear the familiar bubbling of the sorghum beer fermenting in the big jugs. We walk into the dark room. My mother hands me a straw. I thrust it into the sparkling liquid. I’m home.
It’s not easy, but I find a way through the ibihehaheha, those bushes whose hollow stems we use as straws. They’ve taken everything over. Then the thicket turns less dense, I cross a patch of bare land: this is our old field. Its edge is still marked by an umucyuro, whose leaves are good for skin diseases. We always took great care to spare them when we were clearing brush. I realize that I’m following a very visible path, evidently still used. I even come across a field of sweet potatoes and papaya plants. And suddenly I find myself at the entry of an enclosure hidden up to now by a hollow in the terrain: the main house, rectangular, made of pounded earth, and then a few smaller huts, cruder, perhaps stables or children’s shacks, the yard carefully swept. A friendly-looking woman comes toward my husband, who’s walking ahead, but when she catches sight of me behind him she lets out a cry and runs off. I can still hear her in the banana grove, on the slope of the Gikombe valley, wailing again and again: “Yebabawe! Yebabawe! Karabaye! – It had to happen! It had to happen!”
I see a little girl crouching in the narrow band of shadow at the foot of the big hut’s wall. I ask her: “Who is that woman? Why did she run away?” She doesn’t know her, she’s a neighbor who’d come calling. And then, without my having asked her anything, she goes on: “You know, I’m twelve years old, I was too little during the war, I didn’t see anything.” She breaks off there. A man has appeared in the doorway, and now he’s coming toward us. I recognize him at once: yes, that’s him, the neighbor my mother invited to “my party” in 1986. I ask him who used to live next door. No one, he first insists: “On the other side of the road, yes, there were people there, that was Munyaneza’s house, but no one ever lived next door to me.” What about Cosma? He’s never heard of Cosma. Then he corrects himself: oh yes, of course, Cosma, but when that happened he wasn’t there, he was in the Congo.
“Listen,” Emmanuel says to him, “this is Cosma’s daughter in front of you, do you have anything to say to her?”
A long silence. He hesitates.
“Yes, that’s Cosma’s daughter, now that I see her, I can certainly ask for her forgiveness …”
I stand glued to the spot, half-paralyzed, stunned by these words. Another long silence, and then I search in vain for some way of encouraging him to go on, to tell me what I’ve so long wanted to know … But it’s already too late, he’s gone back to his denials, I’ll get nothing more out of him.
“Listen, I never killed anyone, they went up there to Rebero, I didn’t kill anyone. It was around four in the afternoon when they left, I remember. I didn’t kill anyone. Have you ever heard anyone say I did? The family died on Rebero. They were old. No one died here. I never met his children, except for that day he married off his last daughter …”
I’m no longer listening. Was it him who murdered my parents, who’d at least played a part? Was it someone else? I’ll never know.
But I don’t give up. I don’t want to leave without some sort of sign. I feel like I have to show I’m still here, still alive. Have I carried out the mission my parents entrusted me with thirty years before? To live, in the name of all the others. I who had no choice but to be a good Catholic schoolgirl, I begin to hope that the spirit of the dead – the umuzimu – will appear in the brush, in what’s left of the banana grove, and give me an answer.
Here in the midst of the thicket, I believe I can make out the spot where we gathered in the evening, the hearth with its three stones set in the wide, flat clay dish – the urubumbiro – shaped by my mother. My father is there reading his Bible by the light of the hurricane lantern. Near the hearth, the three of us, Jeanne, Julienne, and I, are pressed in around Mama, listening to her stories. And indeed, under the intertwining branches, I find a little pile of gravel and stones. As if driven by an unknown force, I sweep away a few pebbles. A black snake slithers out from the stones, then disappears into the tall grass. And I who am terrified of snakes, I find myself not crying out, not fleeing as fast as my legs will carry me. Fascinated, my eyes are glued to the serpent’s coils as it makes its silent way among the dried branches.
I walk to the pickup, my thoughts endlessly going back to the snake. Strangely, the sight of it seems almost to have comforted me and brought me a feeling of peace. This isn’t the deadly snake coiled in the banana grove. It isn’t the snake whose name the Hutus spat at us as an insult. Nor is it the serpent in my father’s Bible, the one they showed us in church, wrapped around the branch of the tree in paradise. This is the snake my mother knew all about, she who knew so many things that the missionaries’ oppressive teachings forbade her to pass on, but that sometimes, poking out through a sentence or a gesture – often addressed to me – revealed a whole world hidden beneath the lessons of the catechism: “Before,” she would say, “before the white people came, every enclosure had its own familiar snake, and it was respected because it alone knew the way to the land of the spirits of the dead, and when we saw it we thought it was a sign of their good wishes.”
I would so like to think that this snake was a sign sent by all those who perished, that they were telling me I hadn’t betrayed my family, that I’d had to follow the long detour of exile for their sake, that I’d come back to answer their call and shoulder the memory of their sufferings and their deaths. Yes, I am indeed the one they called by her Rwandan name, the one given me by my father, Mukasonga, but now, deep inside, like the most precious part of me, I hold what’s left of the lives and the names of all those in Gitwe and Gitagata and Cyohoha who will never be properly buried. The murderers tried to erase everything they were, even any memory of their existence, but, in the schoolchild’s notebook that I am now never without, I write down their names. I have nothing left of my family and all the others who died in Nyamata but that paper grave.
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Cockroaches Page 12