Jonathan excused himself to take pictures. The president strode off with his guard. Jean Patrick was left at the mercy of a woman who had fastened onto his wrist.
“So you’re our hero,” she said. She had electric-blond hair and wore a pink straw hat. He stepped back to dispel the rising sense of panic her nearness brought. “I didn’t see you run—personally I detest sports of any kind—but I hear you are some kind of Rwandan wonder.” She drew his hand to her lips, and he realized she was going to kiss it. “I admire you Africans,” she said. Jean Patrick steeled himself against the warm, damp mouth and bowed as he had seen abazungu do in movies. As she disappeared into the crowd, he wiped his hand across his pants and went to search for Daniel.
He found him with his father, reclined against a tree. Its yellow trumpet blossoms carpeted the grass. “Finally, you can greet my papa. He’s been waiting all day. Here is Pascal.”
He was a head taller than Daniel, but with the same wide mouth, the same stocky build. Even in his informal posture, he maintained the bearing of a soldier. When he smiled, Jean Patrick saw the familiar gap between the two front teeth.
“I feel I’ve known you since your first day at Gihundwe, from all Daniel’s stories.” Pascal embraced Jean Patrick as a father embraces a son.
A waiter offered them a tray of yellow packages. A red M or W decorated the paper. “These were flown in from Belgium, so let’s see what the fuss is about,” Pascal said.
Jean Patrick sniffed carefully. “What is it?”
“It’s called McDonald’s,” Pascal said. “A kind of hamburger. I hear they’re crazy about them in the U.S.”
The woman in the pink hat held hers high. “Oh my God! When was the last time I had one of these?”
Pascal took a bite and shook his head. “I do not understand how Americans think.”
Jean Patrick sampled the unidentifiable meat garnished with sweet red sauce. He didn’t see what the fuss was about. “I better learn to enjoy these if I’m going to Atlanta.” He washed the tasteless bread down with Coke.
The first peals of thunder echoed in the distance, competing with the American music that thumped from the speakers. Storm clouds hurried across the sky. The breeze picked up, and Jean Patrick zipped his jacket. A flurry of cups and McDonald’s wrappers blew across the yard. Partygoers danced. Jonathan discoed beneath a tree with a woman in a gauzy headscarf whose hair was the color of scorched copper.
The Presidential Guard, somber and stiff, formed a loose circle around the president’s entourage. Coach stood at the edge of the circle, head bent in conversation with an officer. Pascal spoke into Jean Patrick’s ear. “Now you see the Akazu for yourself.”
Habyarimana snapped his fingers, and a soldier came running. The president’s wife spoke to the soldier, and he disappeared again.
“I don’t get what you mean.”
Daniel spoke in a low voice. “We call them the little house because it is they who surround Habyarimana—his inner circle—who squeeze the people dry, keep the cogs of government running smoothly and turning in their direction.”
“By any means necessary,” Pascal said. “They keep the money flowing, bribes and funds stolen from NGOs and who knows what other mischief.”
“Which ones are they?”
With his eyes, Daniel indicated a group of men standing near the president’s wife. One was the sour-faced man who had nudged Jean Patrick up the stadium steps.
“Not his wife, though, eh?”
Pascal made a sucking sound with his lips. “Madame Agathe is the most powerful of all.” The soldier returned with a microphone, and Madame Agathe pointed. The soldier set up the microphone in front of the president. “Watch out. You are important now. If you misbehave, it is they who decide if you go to prison or if you die.”
“Papa, don’t frighten Jean Patrick with your catastrophes.”
The music ended, and the loudspeakers squealed. Coach beckoned Jean Patrick toward him. The sudden tightness in his legs as he broke into a trot told him he had worked as hard as he could. The pleasure of well-earned fatigue filled his body.
With a hand on Jean Patrick’s shoulder, Habyarimana began his speech. Jean Patrick quickly lost count of the times the president referred to him as an example of progress. Although he tried to dismiss Pascal’s warnings, they kept whispering in his ears. Flashbulbs popped in the darkening afternoon. Thunder rumbled closer. A single raindrop splashed on Jean Patrick’s scalp. The president concluded, and a few people clapped without enthusiasm.
A greenish light shimmered in the air, as if it had been wicked up from the lawn. Lightning forked over the hills, and guests jogged toward the gate. The ambassador’s wife shook hands and said good-bye. The white-gloved waiters disappeared, replaced by a flock of women in headscarves and pagnes to collect the trash.
“J. P.! One more photo with your coach and the president,” Jonathan shouted. His flushed skin glowed.
“Daniel, Pascal—come be in the picture,” Jean Patrick said.
They gathered together, Jean Patrick between Coach and Habyarimana, Daniel and his father bookends on either side. Behind them, the tall poinsettia flamed. “Closer, so I can get all of you.” They squeezed in until their bodies touched. Jean Patrick felt heat on either side.
Habyarimana’s face glistened. Posing for Jonathan, Jean Patrick shook off Pascal’s glum warnings, and his good humor returned. When he was a young boy running through the streets of Cyangugu, how could he have imagined he would be standing here, having his picture snapped with Rwanda’s president? But as the shutter clicked, a member of the president’s guard caught his eye. Pointedly holding Jean Patrick’s gaze, the soldier smiled and drew his thumb across his throat.
“I’M STAYING IN Kigali tonight,” Daniel said. He huddled with Jean Patrick in the driveway. They were the last to leave. “Papa will bring me back tomorrow, after church.”
The ambassador’s wife had returned to her palace. Pascal came toward them, straightening his jacket as he walked. He looked handsome and smart in his uniform, how Daniel would look in another ten years. “You’re lucky to have him,” Jean Patrick said.
Daniel looked at the ground. “Yes, I know.”
Jean Patrick said, “You need to take care of each other.”
“Until death do us part,” Daniel said, smiling.
Rain swept toward them in a dark sheet. Any minute, the sky would rupture. By the open car door, Coach tapped his foot. Pascal drew Jean Patrick and Daniel into a farewell embrace. Aftershave lotion and tobacco whirled in Jean Patrick’s nostrils, and he became a little boy, lifted into the air, held against Papa’s intoxicating, sweet-smelling cheeks.
Pascal said, “You are blessed with a very special gift; use it wisely and well. Above all, be safe.”
There were many ways to interpret this wish. “I will be safe, and in Sweden I will win,” Jean Patrick said. He jogged to the car. In the ambassador’s house, light came to the windows, one after another.
“Let’s go,” Coach said. “I want to get back to Butare tonight.”
“Run as if your life depended on it,” Pascal called. “As if all our lives depended on it.”
Lightning struck close by. Thunder followed on its heels. Pascal and Daniel raced to an army truck and climbed inside. The truck’s driver followed Coach’s car as it turned onto the street. The gate slammed shut behind them. Simultaneously, the storm cracked the sky open with a deafening roar.
Coach accelerated past a bus. Jean Patrick turned in his seat and watched the truck until rain engulfed everything but the headlights. Pascal’s last entreaty had left an uneasy feeling in his chest. It brought back the image of the soldier, thumb to his throat. Jean Patrick shook it off. Hadn’t Habyarimana arranged the party to celebrate his achievements? The soldier was a single stupid man, probably angry for having to waste an afternoon. And wasn’t Daniel always saying that his papa smelled catastrophe cooking in every harmless puff of smoke?
SEVENTEEN
TO COOL DOWN, Jean Patrick jogged through campus. It was a chance to strengthen his legs with a few extra intervals on the stairs. Since the race in Kigali, many people recognized him, and he spent this last portion of his run returning greetings. “Mr. Olympics!” they called out. He believed he had earned this name as much as Roger had earned Mistah Cool and Isaka earned One Shot. But he was also looking for Bea. He had not stopped looking for her since she opened her gate to call him inside.
He spotted her talking to Jonathan in a patch of sun, hugging an armload of books. Behind her, the flowers on the flame trees earned their name. Her right foot jutted out as if she were on the verge of motion, and she spoke to Jonathan in rapid English. A crushed orange-red blossom stuck to the sole of her sandal.
“J. P.! You remember Bea, don’t you?” As if he could forget. “Did you know she’s going to be the next president of Rwanda?”
“It would not surprise me.” Jean Patrick smiled and extended his hand. Suddenly conscious of his chipped tooth, he covered his mouth.
Bea laughed. “You are very famous now; I see your picture all over the papers.” She took his hand, and her books tumbled to the ground.
“So sorry. My fault.” He bent to collect them, each title another piece of the puzzle that was Bea. Like Coach’s books, most concerned government and history, but there was also a sketchbook, flung open to an intricate drawing of flowers. She bent to help. He could have reached over and touched her emerald-tinged eyelid.
“We’re going for a coffee at the Ibis,” Jonathan said. “Why don’t you join us?”
“Yes, you must.” Bea rose and straightened her pagne. Her cheek would fit perfectly, he imagined, in the hollow of his breastbone.
BEA WAS A second-year student, studying journalism and history. She had wished to be an artist like her mother, but art, like physics, was useless. Instead she would follow in her father’s footsteps. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” she said. “Journalism is also in my blood.”
She told Jean Patrick all this after Jonathan left, while she sipped a second cup of tea. She collected crumbs from the pastry they had shared and sucked them from her finger.
“You speak English like a native,” he said. “How did you learn?”
“I spent nine years in London. We left Rwanda when I was four, to be with my father while he got his PhD. Later I went back for secondary school.” Her hands on the table gave off a tingly heat. “I’m rusty—when you don’t speak a language, you lose it so quickly—so I’m grateful to practice with Jonathan.”
Now it made sense the way she walked through the world, the way she took life on her own terms and defied anyone to stop her. “Why did you come back?”
“At first I never wanted to. Great Britain felt like home.” She added milk to her tea and stirred. “Everything so convenient. Hot water and electric light on demand, an inside stove you turn on with a button, clean buses and trains to take you everywhere. And no one on an English bus hits you on the head with a leaky sack of sorghum or pushes you off a seat with a filthy suitcase.”
“I think I would get very fat.” The waiter brought a fresh thermos of tea. Too much caffeine usually left Jean Patrick on edge, aware of his rapidly beating heart, but this morning he found the jolt pleasurably intense.
“When we first came home, I didn’t know how to be African. My feet were soft, and I couldn’t stand to go barefoot. But by the time I left for boarding school, I was Rwandan again. They nearly had to drag me to the plane.”
Jean Patrick thought of the last day of Mathilde’s life: the soldier pushing Aunt Esther, the rifle aimed at his heart. He thought of the soldier with the Presidential Guard who drew his thumb across his throat. “Some days I could get on a plane and never glance back.” But there was also the lake, its bottomless blue eye. There was Uncle, standing in his pirogue as graceful as a stork to slap his pole and summon fish to the surface. “Other days I look around and feel only love for my country.”
“Imana yiriwa ahandi igataha i Rwanda,” Bea quoted.
“True. God spends the day everywhere, but comes home to sleep in Rwanda.” Sun streamed through the window, striping the tablecloth. Jean Patrick took off his jacket. “I don’t think I could ever leave my family, and of course now I am representing Rwanda at Worlds.”
“Did you grow up in Cyangugu?”
Jean Patrick momentarily lost himself in the light of Bea’s eyes. He had to haul himself back. “Yes. My father was préfet des maîtres at Gihundwe.”
“Is he still there?”
“No.” He did a quick calculation and was shocked. “He’s been dead nearly nine years.”
“I’m sorry.” Her gaze drifted to the door and back. “Cyangugu was one of my favorite places when I was small. We used to visit the lake during vacation, or go to Nyungwe Forest. I used to pick flowers and hide them under my dress. When my parents weren’t looking, I threw them to the monkeys so they would have something to eat besides my arm. For some reason, they terrified me.”
Jean Patrick couldn’t imagine Bea terrified of anything.
“Did you live in one of those beautiful houses by Lake Kivu?” she asked.
How could he tell her that his mother cleaned floors and did laundry in those houses? “No,” he said. “We live some distance away.” He hoped she wouldn’t guess that only country people lived there, scratching an existence from the earth and the lake. Many would never read a book. Some could barely scratch a few words in a letter.
A beggar came and squatted outside the café, his empty sleeve pinned at the elbow. Two police officers shooed him away, then came inside and sat at a nearby table. One nodded to Bea, and Jean Patrick thought he saw her spine straighten.
“Mwaramutse,” the officer said. He offered her his hand. A row of braids and stripes adorned his uniform. “I see you ’re acquainted with Butare’s new celebrity.” He smiled, revealing a mouth full of gold-rimmed teeth.
“I had the good fortune to watch him race in Kigali,” Bea said.
“Perhaps I could see you next week.” The man’s eyes flicked over Jean Patrick’s T-shirt. “If you aren’t too busy.”
Bea graced him with a smile that could have coaxed honey from a stone. “Next week I have exams. Perhaps after, when I’ve finished.”
He lit a cigarette and extinguished the match in the pastry plate. A ribbon of smoke rose from the burned sugar. “It’s nice to greet you here,” he said, touching the brim of his cap to Bea. “Félicitations,” he said to Jean Patrick, and then he turned on his heels.
Bea leaned across the table. “He uses the most awful aftershave,” she whispered. Jean Patrick hid his smile. She gathered her books. “Let’s go.”
Bea marched so fast down the hill that Jean Patrick jogged to keep up. “How was your reception?” she asked. She hugged her books tightly, and her face was pinched.
“It was great. A big celebration: music, dancing, Coca-Cola. I even tasted MacDonard’s.”
“What?”
“MacDonard’s. Some hamburger from U.S. It tastes like shoes.”
“Ha! McDonald’s!” For an instant, her bad mood lifted. “My God—where did they find those?”
“They flew them in from Belgium. Just for my reception.” He waited for a response. When he got none, he said to fill the space, “President Habyarimana was so nice to me.”
Bea’s nostrils flared. “That’s great.” She would not look at him.
Jean Patrick stopped her. “What did I say wrong?”
She glanced around. “Do you mind if we keep walking?” Jean Patrick fell into step beside her as she picked up her pace again. “Habyarimana had my father arrested on November twelfth, 1990, a month after the RPF invasion,” Bea said. “I was in boarding school. My auntie came to get me.”
Jean Patrick felt as if he had set out for a stroll on a calm morning and headed into a storm. “Why did they arrest him?” He studied a little boy playing with a discarded tire.
“Y
ou can look at me,” Bea said. “I’m not Queen Nyavirezi. I won’t turn into a lioness and eat you. He was imprisoned for speaking—and writing—his mind.” She touched Jean Patrick’s elbow. “Don’t look so shocked. Even we Hutu suffer Habyarimana’s wrath. By my father’s calculations, over ten thousand people—Hutu and Tutsi—were put in prison in late 1990, early ’ninety-one, and our president was not nice to any of them.” Her voice shook. “My father spoke out because he loves Rwanda enough to die for her, and Habyarimana nearly made him prove it.”
“Please.” He started to wipe a tear from her cheek but thought better of it. “I’m sorry I caused you to think of these things.”
“It’s me who should be sorry.” She touched a finger beneath her eye. The smudge her mascara left looked like ink. “What a gloomy subject to get started on. So. Tell me more about your fete.”
There seemed nothing more to tell. What—or whom—did he love enough to die for? He needed to run, to win. He thought he would be willing to die for that. “Bea,” he began, “I’m sorry for what happened to your papa. I don’t know what else to say except I thank God he didn’t die.”
Bea said, “So do I. Every day.”
When they reached campus, Bea stood on her toes, and for one giddy moment Jean Patrick thought she was going to kiss him. Instead she spoke into his ear. “Be careful, Mr. Olympics. I’ll see you on Saturday night.” Her sandals tap-tapped the brick pathway as she hurried away.
Running the Rift Page 17