Running the Rift

by Naomi Benaron

  “Congratulations,” Uwimana shouted. He danced over to Jean Patrick and grasped his hands. “First place! Your science score was in the top three percent in the country. Math: fifth percentile. Welcome to Gihundwe.”

  Jean Patrick was afraid if he moved the wrong way or blinked too many times, the news would hop back into Uwimana’s mouth. “First place,” he repeated. “Are you sure?”

  Mama and Uwimana laughed. “I heard it with my own ears,” Mama said. She had to shout to be heard above Papa Wemba’s raucous tune. Jean Patrick fell into a chair and let out his breath as if he had been holding it for weeks.

  “What’s this?” Uncle Emmanuel stood by the door, pulling off his rubber boots.

  “First place!” Aunt Esther sang, pulling Jean Patrick up for a dance.

  Emmanuel leapt like an Intore dancer. “What did I tell you, eh? I knew you earned those shoes. You make every Tutsi proud.”

  “Papa is smiling today,” Mama said.

  “And there’s more good news.” Powdered sugar drifted onto Uwimana’s suit jacket. “The new préfet de discipline is starting a track team. I told him about you, and it turns out he’s a big fan of your brother’s. He used to watch him play football on weekends with the Inzuki.”

  “Did you know Roger’s the best player in his school? He’s in Kigali, playing for a club.”

  “Of course I know. Your family is like our own.”

  It was true. Uwimana and Angelique had been a constant presence, bringing books and clothing, coming for tea. How often had Uwimana stooped in his baggy suit to play with Zachary and Clemence? How often had Angelique come to the house after her work, still dressed in her doctor’s white coat, to bring medicine and take care of them?

  Jacqueline and Mathilde danced through the door, hips swaying. Mathilde threw up her hands, first fingers pointing at the ceiling. “Wabaye uwa mbere! You’re number one!”

  Jacqueline kissed Jean Patrick’s cheeks. “A neighbor boy came running out to the fields to tell us.”

  “Me, I never doubted it,” Mathilde said. She took Jean Patrick by the wrists and spun him around. “My brother is the smartest boy in all Rwanda,” she sang. Then suddenly she stopped, and tears tumbled down her cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?” Jean Patrick wiped her tears with his palm.

  “I don’t want you to go away.”

  “Little Sister, I never will. I’ll be just there, down the hill.”

  Uwimana clasped Jean Patrick in his strong embrace. “Welcome back,” he said.

  JEAN PATRICK TOOK Papa’s journal from his shelf and sat on his bed. He let the book fall open where it would, as if Papa himself had chosen the entry. Although he could pick out themes, this particular page, like many, was filled with scientific terms and formulas Jean Patrick couldn’t comprehend. Soon he would begin to decipher them. The thought filled his heart with pride.

  He turned to the final entry. Once again, he imagined the scrape of Papa’s chair, saw him search the darkness outside the window for the source of the noise that had interrupted his thoughts. He saw him rest the pen on the page, the pen he would never pick up again.

  “I did it, Papa,” he said. He listened for a whisper, a rustle of leaves. Only silence responded. He closed his eyes and inhaled the journal’s smell of musty paper, the same scent he remembered from when his father held him.

  Beside the journal was a powdered-milk tin where Jean Patrick kept Roger’s old watch. The day Jean Patrick had finally beaten him running, the watch had been his prize. Jean Patrick thought Roger would be mad, but instead he clapped him on the back. “Here,” Roger had said, fastening the watch on Jean Patrick’s wrist. “You’ve earned it.”

  The strap was frayed, the face scratched, but it still kept track of his progress. Thirty seconds to the cypress trees, three minutes to the rock shaped like a bird, eighteen minutes to school—all his times recorded on the back pages of his notebook. Tonight, he thought, I’ll write Roger and tell him the news. He zeroed the timer and put on a warmer shirt. Right now, he was going out to break his own record.

  JEAN PATRICK SPRINTED as hard as he could up the ridge. Halfway, he had to stop, hands on his knees, lungs emptied. A reddish haze hung in the air and coated the brush. A blue turaco exploded into flight, its beak a flare of red and yellow. A bell tinkled in the clearing. It was Papa’s inyambo steer, watching him with sleepy eyes, a clump of grass between his teeth. The beast dipped his head, horns radiant in the sun. Jean Patrick jogged to him and stroked the quivering skin. With a flash of understanding that took his breath, he saw that his father lived in all that surrounded him, and that every breath of wind contained his father’s blessing.

  SIX

  ON THE DAY JEAN PATRICK was to leave for Gihundwe, he opened his eyes to bright daylight, a mountain oriole’s whistle in the distance. He must have slept, although he was not aware of having closed his eyes. All night he kept popping up, checking his folded uniform by feel in the dark, listening to Zachary’s quiet breathing beside him. It would be the last night for a while that he would hear it. Lightly he touched the small knobs of Zachary’s curled spine. Careful not to wake him, he took his clothes, walked out into the cool air, and climbed the path to the house, Pili following close behind as if she understood he would soon be departing.

  In the courtyard, fresh laundry hung on the line. Aunt Esther sat on a mat beside the cookhouse grinding sorghum, a pile of red berries spread before her. Mathilde and Jacqueline swept, the scritch-scritch of twig brooms accompanying the bend and sway of their movements. In the small, rickety stall at the back of the courtyard, Jean Patrick stripped, held his breath, and poured a basin of icy water over his body. Instantly he awoke.

  When he came out, Mama held out a steaming cup. Drops of milk fat glistened on the tea’s surface. “Drink,” she said. The tea was sweet and tasted of flowers.

  Jean Patrick sat in a chair and watched the morning unfurl from the darkness. The mountains glowed red, and the forest canopy turned slowly to green and silver blue. He remembered a page in his father’s journal about the dance of life. Here it was, all around him. He drew it deep into his memory so he could call it back at will.

  Tonight he would sleep in a strange bed. Tomorrow he would wake without Zachary pressed against him or Pili curled by his feet. Mathilde set down her broom and disappeared into the house. He would miss her studying beside him, her feet tracing circles in the lantern’s orb. Who would she ask now to explain a problem of geometry or the meaning of a French phrase? She reappeared at the door with a bundle of cloth.

  “Here—I made this for you,” she said. She thrust the bundle into his lap.

  The cloth held a little red dog, the scent of grass still strong in the fibers. He recognized the fishhook curl of the tail, the attentive half-up, half-down set of the ears. “It’s Pili!”

  “So you won’t be without her.” She grabbed the cloth from Jean Patrick’s fingers and unrolled it with a snap. It became a pair of running shorts.

  “You made these, too?” He held them to his hips. “Eh—so pro!”

  “I saw a pair in the market and copied them. Look inside.”

  Sewn into the waist was a pocket. “What’s this?”

  “So you can hide your money or keep your identity card when you run,” she said.

  Jean Patrick kissed her cheek. “All my big-big money.”

  “When you go to America to run, you will pick it from trees. I heard this.”

  “Then it must be true.” Jean Patrick sipped his tea, curling his tongue around the taste. It was strong, at once bitter and sweet.

  In an hour’s time, Uwimana and Angelique would arrive. They would sit down to the traditional feast to mark a journey and then pile into the truck. They would walk with him through the pine archway, festively decorated for the arrival of new students as custom dictated. The statue of Saint Kizito would greet them as it had greeted Jean Patrick when he was small and went to visit his father at school. Exhilaration an
d fear balanced inside him like the two baskets of a scale.

  ONLY THREE OTHER Tutsi stood at the beginning of class: Noel, a light-skinned boy from Gisenyi; Jean Marie from Gitarama, who stammered as he said his name; and a boy called Isaka, who shouted out, “I come from Bisesero, in the Prefecture of Kibuye.” He was thin as a wire, quick and nervous in his movement. Jean Patrick wondered if Papa had made the Tutsi students stand when he was a teacher.

  The classrooms seemed smaller and shabbier than Jean Patrick remembered. Boys crowded onto the rows of benches, and ink stained the long, scarred wooden desks that they shared. Sounds echoed in the room, every whisper magnified by the cement walls and floor.

  The priest’s scalp shone beneath thinning red hair. A mass of tiny freckles dotted his face. Cloaked in his white robes, he looked like a stork, and when he spoke, a lump moved in his throat as if he had just swallowed a fish. He picked up a stack of books. Before passing them to the boy on the end of the front row, he stroked a cover lightly with his fingertips, a gesture of tenderness Jean Patrick remembered suddenly from his father.

  The priest began his lecture, and his complexion turned fiery. Jean Patrick thought of his father’s journal, the pages he would now learn to decipher. Light streamed into the room. Beyond the window, Saint Kizito overlooked Gihundwe from his brick perch, arms open in blessing, the black wood of his skin gleaming.

  THE TRACK AT Kamarampaka Stadium was a dirt path circling the football field. The runners stood barefoot, waiting for the coach to dismiss the football players. A boy kicked a wild shot at the goal, and the ball spun out of play. Jean Patrick watched the coach’s fluid movement as he sprinted to retrieve it. I can learn a lot from him, he thought. He studied each of the runners in turn. Only Isaka, the skinny boy from Kibuye, worried him. That one, he thought, has a lot of energy that could turn to speed on the track.

  A squat, chubby boy came up to Jean Patrick and shook his hand. In the sun, his skin gleamed like blue-black ink. Beneath his nose was a perfectly circular mole, as if God had taken a brush and applied a dot of paint. Jean Patrick inspected his legs; despite the boy’s chubbiness, his calves looked muscular and strong.

  “I’m Daniel,” the boy said. “From Kigali.” When he smiled, a dot of tongue poked out between his two front teeth like a piece of eraser. “Have you run track before?”

  Jean Patrick shook out his legs. The football players had quit, and they lazed at the edge of the grass. “Not track, but I’ve run some. Me and my brother, before he left for secondary school.” He did not want to give too much away in case this boy with the strong legs surprised him. The coach looked up and caught Jean Patrick’s eye. A tingle traveled from his toes up his spine.

  “I don’t like to run. I like football,” Daniel said. He jutted his chin toward the coach, who was now making his way toward them. “After tryouts, he said I was fat and lazy. He said I needed to suffer before he let me on the team. What is that crazy talk, eh?”

  Isaka had joined them. “Me, I don’t want to suffer. I ran a long way every day to get to school. I don’t go fast, just far.” He flicked a clump of earth from his toe. “I ran halfway to Cyangugu from Kibuye to take the test for the government scholarship.”

  Jean Patrick laughed. “Why didn’t you take the Onatracom bus?”

  Isaka shrugged. “It broke down. I started running, and it was a very long time before the next bus came.” A grin spread on his face. “But as you see, I won the scholarship.” A whistle shrilled, and they all jumped. “Hey-yey-yey!” Isaka said. “Here comes Tough Guy.”

  The coach wore white shorts and a blue and green football jersey that still looked crisp and freshly starched after a hard practice. His close-cropped hair accentuated the angular shape of his face, the hard line of his jaw. Jean Patrick recognized the Nike swoosh on his running shoes.

  “Welcome.” The coach motioned them onto the track. “My name is Rutembeza, Gihundwe’s coach and préfet in charge of discipline, so you’ll see a lot of me—especially if you behave badly.” A toothpick wiggled between his teeth, and Jean Patrick couldn’t tell if he was smiling or squinting. “How many Tutsi?” Jean Patrick and Isaka raised their hands. “Good. You’ll be strong for distance.”

  Isaka looked at Jean Patrick and grinned. The coach took a stopwatch from his pocket. “Line up behind here. Let’s go. Then once around to warm up.”

  Jean Patrick took off, quickly passing everyone. Each time he checked, the coach was watching him with that same odd expression. After warm-up, they ran short sprints. Excitement kept him at the front. He kept glancing at Coach, but the tight curl of his lips never changed.

  “Now, four hundred meters: once around the track.” Coach pointed at Jean Patrick. “You.”

  “Me?” Jean Patrick waited for praise.

  “Yes—you. Do you know what pace means?” Jean Patrick opened his mouth to respond, but no answer came to him. The squint or smile passed from Coach’s face. “I didn’t think so.”

  Halfway around the track, Jean Patrick’s chest tightened and strength left his legs. The feeling came out of nowhere, and it took all his will to keep him moving forward. Isaka passed him. Then another boy and then another, then Daniel, the chubby one, went by him with his lazy trot. Jean Patrick tried to respond, but a cramp brought him to his knees.

  Daniel stopped and held out a hand to help him up.

  The coach blew his whistle. “Leave him. Never stop in the middle of an interval. And you—I don’t care if you have to crawl, but get back on that track and finish.”

  Jean Patrick struggled to his feet. Driven half by pride and half by a desire to punch both Coach and Daniel, he limped across the line.

  SQUEEZED AGAINST THE tailgate in the back of the school truck, Jean Patrick stared out at the traffic and wished he could disappear. The boys’ chatter burned his ears. Daniel squatted beside him on the wheel well. “Hey. I’m sorry if I got you in trouble.”

  Jean Patrick shrugged. A packed green bus honked and passed them. Painted in blue on the rear was the saying IMANA IKINGA UKUBOKO. God shields us from danger. A chicken scurried out of the way, squawking a saying of its own.

  The truck pulled into Gihundwe. “I’m next to you in the dorm,” Daniel said, his tongue peeking from between his teeth. “I saw you put your things away—so neat. My papa’s in the army, so you’d think I’d be orderly, but sorry—I am not. I have three sisters, and my sloppiness drives them crazy. Maybe we’ll have to draw a line between your bed and mine to keep my sloppiness away from your good order.”

  In spite of himself, Jean Patrick laughed. “Maybe we’ll put up a fence,” he said, jumping down from the truck. Still rattled by his failure, he did not pay attention and landed with one foot in a rut. His ankle gave, and he stumbled.

  A firm hand held him up. “Are you all right?” Coach’s grip tightened on Jean Patrick’s arm.

  “I’m OK, Coach. I’m sorry about what happened on the track.”

  “I’ve made that mistake myself. It humbles you.” From Coach’s look, Jean Patrick saw there was nothing accidental about the choice of words. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Jean Patrick Nkuba.”

  The coach took the toothpick from his mouth and grinned. “Of course! Roger’s brother. He’s a good footballer. Why don’t you play football? Running has no future in Rwanda. You have to go to Kenya or Tanzania for that.”

  “I want to run in the Olympics.” The words slipped out. After his performance, they seemed silly, but Coach didn’t laugh. The sun slid below a ridge of clouds. In his wet clothes, Jean Patrick felt the evening breeze go right through him.

  “You’re shaking. You should towel off and put on dry clothes.”

  Jean Patrick started back toward the dorm, but Coach stopped him. “You’re good,” he said. “I can see that. You have a lot of heart. But you also have a lot to learn. Pace: I want you to say that word in your sleep.”

  The muscles in Coach’s jaw tensed and relaxed rhyth
mically. That’s a smile that could cut you in two, Jean Patrick thought, as easily as wish you good morning or good afternoon.

  1991

  SEVEN

  JEAN PATRICK TUCKED HIS IDENTITY CARD into the pocket of his running shorts and zipped his thin jacket. When Mathilde began the tradition four years ago of sewing these pocketed shorts, she could not have foreseen how handy the design would become. She could not have predicted the checkpoints, the soldiers and policemen with their hands out demanding indangamuntu—identity papers—and harassing anyone with a high forehead and narrow features, anyone tall and skinny, what people thought of as Tutsi.

  “Are you ready?” Jean Patrick whispered.

  “Two seconds, eh?” Daniel said. “Let me sleep two seconds more.”

  Jean Patrick poked at the lump of blanket and sheet. “Two seconds more and we won’t get back before someone is up and catches us.”

  Behind the chapel, they squeezed through the gap in the wall and started off down the path. It was just over a kilometer to the start of the hilly forest trail; by now, they knew the pace they kept, and they knew the ground well enough to run in darkness. Only the occasional crack of a branch, the rustle of a small animal through the undergrowth, broke the silence. They kept an easy tempo, Jean Patrick shaking out his fingers, tapping into the signals from legs and lungs. He felt good. At the trailhead, they stopped to recuperate before the start of their intervals.

  “Are you going to take it easy, my friend?” Daniel put a hand on Jean Patrick’s shoulder. “You’ll need to save some energy for later.”

  “I’ll be all right. I’ll catch you on the way back. Don’t forget to run.”

  “Be mindful,” Daniel called after him. “My papa says soldiers everywhere have orders to arrest anyone they consider suspicious.”

  Jean Patrick did not need to be reminded. He zeroed his watch and took off. There was no moon, but he knew every rut and root by heart. Letting the sound and rhythm of his footfalls fill his head, he tried to push out all thoughts of his current troubles. Today the burgomaster was coming to Kamarampaka Stadium to watch him race. If he won, he hoped such an important person could help him with his Olympic dream. Perhaps keep open one of the doors that were closing for all Tutsi.