by Alice Nelson
Jacob frowned. ‘The child should be at home with his mother, not out late at night. And what if she’s not there after dinner?’
‘I’m sure she’ll be back by then. She can’t stay out all night. Perhaps she just needs some time to gather herself.’
‘If we can’t find her, we’ll have to call the police or Children’s Services.’
Marina stared at Jacob. His mouth was set in a firm line but he looked faintly stricken, as if he knew he had said something unforgivable.
‘I don’t know how you could even suggest that. It’s not like you to be so heartless.’
Marina could barely stop her voice from shaking. For a moment she imagined Gabriel being wrenched from her arms, handed over to an officious social worker or brusque policeman. There was something chilling in the idea that they would deposit him with strangers. She was furious at Jacob, she realised, for even contemplating such a thing. For having understood so little that it was possible to see Gabriel as an anonymous waif. To believe that he was not in any way their responsibility.
Jacob stepped back and held up his hands as if he were admitting defeat. ‘Okay, okay. Let’s just hope she’s home after dinner.’
Marina thought angrily of all the kindness Jacob doled out to his patients, his careful, cultivated empathy. Perhaps that was the problem. His empathy was circumscribed. His care always had a limit to it. He was not required to really feel anything himself. It was a necessary skill that his profession had instilled in him, but what if it had made his heart somehow smaller?
Gabriel was staring gravely up from the table, a look of concern on his face as if he could understand everything passing between them. Marina went to him and kissed him on the top of the head. ‘It’s okay, sweetheart,’ she said to him. ‘You’re coming with us.’
Jacob turned away and went upstairs to get ready for dinner, closing the bedroom door behind him.
On the way to Rose’s house, Gabriel let Ben take one of his hands and he and Marina swung the little boy between them, his legs kicking up into the air. Ben was so kind to Gabriel, and gentle with Constance, too, despite her refusal to speak to him, her blank stare when he greeted her the handful of times he had come across her at the house. Ben simply accepted that they needed to make allowances for her.
Gabriel gave a delighted crooning sound as they swung him, close to laughter. There was such a raw, hungry surge in her love for him. This was what alarmed Jacob, Marina knew. Already this excess of feeling.
After dinner Rose found some old crayons and a sketchbook, relics from Ben’s childhood, or perhaps even Jacob’s. She put a crayon into Gabriel’s hand, curling his fingers around it. She stood behind him, guiding his hand. Then Rose took his hand and placed it down on the paper, drawing an outline of his fingers. The boy stared in amazement at the marks on the paper. Marina thought of Constance printing her name on the form at the Public Assistance office. Her bewilderment at seeing the letters she had formed. Watching the deep concentration on Gabriel’s face as he scribbled, Marina saw the possibility of the child he might have been. The child he might still become. It was easier, that night, not to think of Constance and what she could be doing.
The evening slipped away, darkness falling slowly, impurely. There was always a pallid orange haze to the night in the city. Gabriel climbed on to Marina’s lap and folded himself into her, his thumb in his mouth. Rose sat beside her and touched the child’s hair. ‘He’s a beauty,’ she said, staring intently at his face. ‘A serious little soul.’ From the kitchen Marina could hear the clink of teacups and the low hum of Leah and Ben’s conversation. ‘It’s a long shot,’ Leah was saying. ‘These asylum claims can be so messy. But of course we’ll try. Of course we’ll fight.’ Leah had brought cakes of powdered cacao back from Guatemala, spiced with cinnamon and cloves, and she was making hot chocolate for all of them. It was such a calm encircling, this reconstituted family.
Across the table Marina saw that Jacob was watching her, something guarded and thoughtful in his eyes. Some years earlier they had tried to have a child. Jacob had always imagined that he would have several children, had always wanted a daughter. Months passed and she had not fallen pregnant. It became a consuming disappointment, a cycle of hope and despair. She began to feel exhausted by it, tired of the endless calculations, the enormous effort required. There was nothing explicable about their failure, a doctor told them eventually after rounds of tests and investigations, nothing that was obviously wrong. They would simply need to try fertility treatment and hope for the best. At home she lined up the vials of drugs, the plastic-wrapped syringes. The bathroom felt like a small pharmacy.
In the end, she could not do it. It was a kind of visceral rebellion against the extreme level of intervention required for something they had expected to come easily. It felt wrong to meddle so intensively with their particular fate, as if she would be tempting some form of punishment for such a concerted summoning. It seemed that a child would not be a gift given to them after all. They had each other, the great good fortune of their marriage. Their work. Ben. It had always felt like consolation enough. It did not seem right to want more than all this, so miraculously offered.
Ben carried Gabriel on his back as they walked home, his arms linked through the little boy’s legs. They all walked to the projects together. Jacob followed them up the stairs, his discomfort obvious. This time when Marina knocked on the door of Constance’s apartment the girl answered. She seemed composed. There was no sign of whatever grief or terrible memory had come over her at the museum; it was as if it had never happened. When Marina asked her if she was all right Constance said nothing, once more stared fixedly at the floor as if she had not registered the question. She would not permit it to be spoken of, Marina realised.
Gabriel had fallen asleep, his head resting on Ben’s shoulder. When he woke and saw Constance he began to wail. Ben set him down on his feet and he ran to Marina and clung to her legs, his crying growing louder. She bent down and held him for a moment and he scrambled to climb into her arms, screaming now and flapping his hands in agitation. Constance stood in the doorway of the apartment staring somewhere beyond them. Eventually Marina had to peel Gabriel away from her, wrenching herself free of him. The little boy collapsed to the floor and lay there crying, his whole body heaving. Constance made no effort to comfort him. It was like that first day on the street when she had turned away from the child’s tantrum as if he had nothing to do with her. When they walked away down the corridor, Gabriel picked himself up from the floor and ran after them. The little boy stood at the top of the stairwell, gasping through his sobs, tears pouring down his face. Marina felt her own heart pounding, her hands shaking. She wanted to turn back and go to him. They could still hear his screams as they walked down the stairs. Then the sound of the door closing, and silence.
Back at the brownstone, Jacob came and stood in the doorway of the bedroom as she undressed. She could feel him trying to gather himself before he spoke, trying to weigh up how much he might say.
‘Marina, that scene was appalling. You’re on incredibly dangerous ground here.’
‘What am I supposed to do? They need my help.’
‘But you’re not actually thinking of their needs. You’re thinking of your own.’
‘That’s not true. They don’t have anyone. Would you rather I just abandon them to their fate?’
‘It’s too murky. The whole thing is too murky. Bringing him along to dinner. You can’t just pretend that he’s part of our family for a night. What does that do to him?’
She could hear the strain in Jacob’s voice. How rarely they argued. She used to think that it was a sign of their compatibility, but now she wondered if perhaps it was because they were too afraid to bring any trouble upon themselves.
‘Life is murky. Human relationships are murky. You of all people should know that.’
‘You are doing damage. You have to leave space for her to love her own child.’
‘
But that’s the thing. She’s not capable of loving him. Should he just be sacrificed because it’s unwise for me to love him? Because it’s murky?’
Jacob sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand. She felt so unreasonably angry at him. They sat together in silence for several minutes before Jacob spoke again.
‘Look, I know it’s sad. Of course it’s sad. But you need to examine your motivations. Have you considered that perhaps you’re trying to rescue this child because he reminds you of yourself? I really think it might be good for you to talk to someone about this. I know you’ve never wanted to see a therapist, but it could be really helpful. For lots of reasons.’
Marina pulled her hand away and stood up. Such a look of concern on Jacob’s face as he stared at her. It was worse somehow, this considered, reasonable line of thought, this sensible advice. This professional position. She picked up her book and walked downstairs, standing at the kitchen counter while the kettle boiled. Her hands, she realised, were shaking. She thought of Gabriel’s distraught face at the top of the stairwell, the way that his screams had echoed through the building. Was he still crying now, she wondered? Would Constance comfort him? She could not imagine it. Standing there in the darkened kitchen, Marina felt completely unmoored. She had forgotten, it seemed, how a reasonable adult would act in this situation. How to protect herself and how to protect the child. She sat there for a long time at the kitchen table, staring out at the garden beyond her.
Later that night she lay in bed awake beside Jacob, listening to the soft rush of his breath as he slept. She knew that some part of what he had said earlier was true. When Gabriel had turned away from his mother and clung so fiercely to Marina, she had felt a tiny glimmer of satisfaction. She could not deny it, this small thrill that the child had chosen her to love over Constance.
Harlem
August, 1997
In one of the books that Marina had taken out from the library about the Rwandan genocide, there was a line she could not stop coming back to. ‘In villages all over the Bugesera, fathers threw their children into the river as a last gesture of love.’ Running from the Hutus with their machetes, spears and clubs, mothers and fathers had chosen to drown their children to save them from slaughter. Singing as they went, the assassins wore manioc leaves like crowns in their hair. ‘They laughed with all their heart. They struck with swinging arms. They cut anyone, without choosing.’ The words were lined up on the page like some kind of terrible poetry, but still she found it hard to believe that such things could be written. That such things could be done.
In the last weeks of the summer Marina began to read about Rwanda. In a carrel at the library on 96th Street she read as if everything written about the genocide must be known, as if this was the only way she could enter the terrain of Constance’s life. A hunger for details. The lists of names, the numbers slaughtered in each region. People trying to explain or analyse what had happened, their words wrenched forever into horror. The words of the survivors all had the same stunned quality, the same sort of bewildered disbelief. The Hutus became obsessed, one woman said, with burning the photograph albums left behind in looted houses, so that the disappearance they sought was truly complete. ‘To be safer,’ she said, ‘they tried to kill people and their memories, and in any case to kill the memories when they couldn’t catch the people.’ Such a profound eradication had been sought, such a vigorous erasure.
Marina would look up and find that hours had passed, that the sun had shifted or summer rain had begun to fall without her noticing. It was terrifying to her to read this way, leaving everything behind. At the end of the day she would walk slowly home through the ordinary living of hazy August streets, and they would seem mysterious and full of violence to her. The smell of hashish, the hot blasts of air from the subway grates, the scratchy blare of a radio, papers plastered to a bodega wall. All this carrying on through those terrible months in Constance’s country, and still here now.
Rwanda. Even the country’s name was like a code. A word that had to be murmured, the long, low sounds of it running along the tongue. Constance had given her nothing to piece together, no hint of a narrative. Only the name of her town typed on that piece of paper, the birthday that someone in an office far from her home must have invented for her: there were rarely ever official records of births and deaths, Leah told her, so dates were estimated. Officials in refugee camps guessed ages by looking at people. Some could say that they had been born in the time of the rains, or in the dry season, so the month of their birth would be estimated based on seasons. The true date of Constance’s birth would never be known.
Marina knew that Constance had come from a part of the country called Nyamata. It was a place of hills and marshes. Small churches perched on hillocks, fields of yams and pale-green banana groves, gardens planted with beans. High flowering hedges and mango groves. Mud roads thronged with bare-chested boys poking goats with long sticks. One of the pictures showed a straggling soccer field, a pair of slanted goalposts.
After the president’s aeroplane was shot out of the sky and the killing started, thousands of people in Nyamata town ran to the parish church. ‘It’s part of Rwandan custom,’ one of the voices in a book of survivor testimonies explained, ‘to take refuge in God’s house when the massacres begin.’ Throughout the book were these gracious notes of explanation. ‘Umunzenze are giant trees. The masu is a big club studded with nails. There had always been killings and house-burnings in the region, but each time we told ourselves that it would end no worse than usual.’
The small villages of Constance’s district were framed by marshland waterways and papyrus swamps. The bogs of Butamwa, the Akanyaru River, the swamps of Nyamwiza, Lake Cyohoha and the Murago marshes. For the weeks of the genocide, many Tutsis from Nyamata hid in the swamps, concealed by the thick reeds, the cold mud. At night, when the killers had gone home, these Tutsis wandered among abandoned huts, crept into empty houses to hide. To rest. To eat what they could forage. And the next day at first light, the same again.
In the morning we all decided to hide in the marshes. That’s what we did every day, for a month. Each morning we went to hide the littlest ones beneath the swamp papyrus. When we heard the interahamwe arrive, we ran to spread ourselves out in silence, in the thickest foliage, sinking deep into the mud. They stripped her to take the money knotted up in her pagne. They chopped both her arms off first, then her legs. Mama was murmuring ‘Saint Cecile, Saint Cecile,’ but she didn’t beg for mercy. You must understand that we fugitives, although we lived all for all in our evening camp, were forced to live everyone for himself during our flights through the swamp. Except, of course, for the mamas carrying their little ones. I called one of the children to help me. She was a girl of about nine. She replied that she couldn’t help me because they had cut off her arms. In the beginning, deep in the papyrus, we hoped help would come. They found me, holding my child in my arms. That was the rule in the marshes: anyone who was seriously cut had to be abandoned, for safety’s sake.
I heard later that a small number of people committed suicide. Especially women, who would feel their strength fail and preferred the rushing river to getting hacked up alive. They said they were going to rape us, but they used the word ‘marry’. They said they were going to marry us until we stopped breathing. The Hutus would follow the faint cries of tiny children, who couldn’t stand the mud anymore. An interahamwe, when he caught a pregnant Tutsi, he began by cutting into her belly. Not even the spotted hyena imagines that kind of viciousness with his fangs. I saw a nursling sleeping forgotten on his mama, who had been cut down. Soaking wet, we’d set out to hide the children in small groups under the papyrus. We used to tell them to be as good as fish in ponds.
Marina must have read a hundred such testimonies. More, perhaps. The reading left her dazed and sickened, but she could not stop. Later, she found it hard to remember which books she had read and which she had not. Always she found herself searching the accounts, the survivors�
�� words, for stories she might tell herself about Constance. She did not know if the girl had been in the marshes. Some had hidden in the eucalyptus forests, or in abandoned buildings. Others had managed to cross the border to safety in Burundi. Marina had no way to know which story belonged to Constance. The girl would never entrust that knowledge to her and she could never ask.
She photocopied a page of the testimony of a survivor named Innocent. There were times, he said, when he found himself at the genocide memorial at the Nyamata church. ‘Sometimes, when I go to the memorial with a visitor, I look at the skulls lined up on the shelves and catch myself studying little details, like the teeth, as if I were hoping in spite of myself to recognise those of my wife or my son, who were cut down in the church.’
A man standing before a row of bleached skulls, imagining the deaths of his wife and child. How did Constance gather her ghosts, Marina wondered?
At the end of her days in the library, at home Marina would lie down on her bed. On those afternoons she often fell into a thick, oppressive kind of sleep. Waking, the things she had read would come back to her and she would struggle out of sleep, remembering that the voices were not from her dreams, but from the books she had read at the library.
‘When I meet a stranger’s eyes, I fear for my child,’ one of the women said. ‘In my bed, I turn away from the shadows; on a path, I glance back at forms following me.’ In one book there were black-and-white portraits of each survivor. Each face had the same look of mute incomprehension, the same blank stare. It was the look that Constance bore.
Narrowsburg
January, 2000
When the cold came, the stream at the bottom of the valley began to freeze. Once, Sister Vera had walked out on to the ice, all the way down the stream to the small bridge. Constance watched from the banks. She could see the water moving under the ice, a dark-green swirl. In the summer it was a gurgle, as though it were pouring down a drain, but now the flowing was silent. She had been worried that the ice would crack open and Sister Vera would fall through. That she would disappear into all that cold. She had made her way slowly back down the river, her hands stretched out on each side for balance. She knew the strength of the ice, she said. Knew when it would hold a person and when it would not. She knew how to be safe. When she was small she had skated on lakes sealed closed by ice. This was in her own country, where rivers turned to ice in the wintertime, too. People brought lamps at night-time and lit fires on the banks of the lake, Sister Vera told her. It was like a kind of flying, the soaring across the ice in the darkness. It was something so beautiful it made you forget the cold. Still she dreamed of it.