“One lap easy and we’ll try again,” Coach said. He zeroed his watch. “I don’t want those boys in Sweden to eat you up next year.”
Coach was trying a new plan, making Jean Patrick hold something back until he shouted, “Go!” at some point in the second four hundred. “That’s exactly how those Burundi boys got you. For the eight hundred, you have to learn strategy.”
Jean Patrick hated it; he couldn’t run that way. Trickiness was not in his nature. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was losing the battle with his cold. Cotton plugged his head. His chest burned. He ran again and failed again, and when he heard his time, he sneezed.
“Urachire,” Coach said. Be rich. “Are you sure you’re not sick?”
“Twese,” Jean Patrick replied. All of us. The call and response that accompanied every sneeze in Rwanda. “No, Coach. I don’t know what’s wrong.” Coach lifted Jean Patrick’s chin. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“No, Coach.”
“Maybe you’re overtrained. It’s going to pour soon, anyway. How about a day off?”
“No, Coach. I need to run a qualifying time before I quit. All this doubt is too heavy.” He fought off another sneeze. “Let me run my old way. If I can break through, I’ll be all right. Just one eight hundred—I promise.”
Coach placed a hand on Jean Patrick’s belly. “I think you’ve forgotten. I don’t know where your mind is lately, but this is where your power is. I want you to feel it here.” He pressed hard. “Now hurry before you have to swim instead of run.”
Jean Patrick did not hold back. At the signal, he ran as if his life depended on it. And it did. By the start of the second lap, he wanted to die. To keep from quitting, he recited physics laws in his head. He was onto harmonic oscillators when he reached the final straight. Acceleration proportional to the negative of displacement from the midpoint of its motion. He passed the line.
“One forty-six thirty-nine” Coach said. “You win.”
Jean Patrick didn’t have the energy to raise his arms into the air. A violent, heaving fit of coughing racked his body, and he doubled over.
“You are ill. I knew it.” Coach helped him upright. At that instant, the sky tore open and rain came down in a sheet. “You’re coming home with me. Jolie will make you soup, and you will drink it.”
Jean Patrick peered up at the road. “Where’s your car?”
“I ran.” Coach brought an extra rain jacket from beneath the seats. “Put this on.” He snapped the jacket open and shook it dry. “Let’s go.”
Already the ground was slick. They jogged down the road, mud sucking at their shoes. Jean Patrick observed his coach, his graceful cadence. He could probably have been an Olympic runner in his own right. Jean Patrick didn’t know whether to love or to hate him, if he was tyrant or father. Maybe he was both, all mixed up together in the same hardened soul.
“You taught me a lesson,” Coach said.
Jean Patrick shook his head to clear it. “I don’t understand.” He wiped his streaming nose with the back of his hand.
“Your slump. Forcing you to change your style is like commanding a river to flow backward.” He tugged Jean Patrick’s jacket. “Slow down, eh? You plunge full force into the waters—no looking—with everything you do. It’s why I like you, but in the eight hundred, I guarantee, you will drown ev-ery time.” He accompanied each syllable with a fist slapped against his palm. “I don’t know how to make you do it, but somehow you must learn to hold back.”
Jean Patrick wanted to laugh, but if he started, he would cough. He had a long road back to the times he was capable of, but at least he had broken the spell. He would not have to leave Bea; she had not cut off his invisible hair in the middle of the night.
JEAN PATRICK AND Coach shook off their wet clothes in the front hall. Water puddled on the floor, and Jolie scolded them loudly. “Jean Patrick,” she said. “So many days, no news of you. Why are you a stranger?” Jean Patrick stooped to receive her cheek on his.
“He has been busy with a girl, and not a good one,” Coach said.
Startled, Jean Patrick looked up. He had said not a word about Bea. “Don’t worry, Jolie. She’s not as beautiful as you,” he said.
Jolie cackled. “The water is off again. I’ve brought some for a bath, and I’ll heat some more. You are both drowned.” She headed for the bathroom with her kettle. “I thought things would change with the peace treaty. I am waiting and waiting for the government to fix all the broken things.”
“Don’t worry,” Coach called after her. “When Habyarimana comes back from peace talks in Arusha, milk and honey will flow from our pipes.” He pushed Jean Patrick. “You first. We need to protect our Olympic future.”
Jean Patrick squatted in the tub and breathed in steam from the basin. Above him, wet laundry hung on a cord. There was no doubt about it now; the cold had won the war. He would ask Jolie for some herbs; old people knew such things. He could not afford to miss a workout. He needed to run another A-standard time to know that this was not a fluke. To be certain that Bea had not cast some spell.
Coach knocked at the door. “I have some clothes for you. I was saving them for Christmas, but take them now, since yours are wet. There’s a leak in a pipe, and I’m going to try to fix it. Jolie will bring you soup.”
“I could help you.” Jean Patrick poured hot water over his head and wiggled his fingers in his ears to clear the soap. Coach was gone when he came out of the bathroom.
A sweat suit, neatly folded, lay on the bed in the spare room. Beside it was a pair of shimmery shorts and a long-sleeved jersey with a Nike swoosh. He put on the shorts and jersey and stood in front of the tiny mirror. The look pleased him.
Since the last time he had slept there, the room had changed. The bed had a thick blanket that hung down to the floor. He thought how pleasant it would be to wrap himself in its warmth and go to sleep. Jolie had hung his jacket on a chair. He shook it out, and something fell from the pocket and rolled under the bed. He bent to retrieve it and saw it was the crystal he had meant to give to Jonathan and forgotten. A wooden crate with Chinese writing had stopped its roll.
Curiosity won out over courtesy and common sense. He pulled on the crate, but it didn’t budge. A dark substance had stained the wood, and when he drew his finger across it, a residue of oil remained on his skin.
“Inshyanutsi. Why are you nosing about?” Jolie’s voice made him bump his head on the bed frame. She closed the door behind her and pushed a steamy towel at him. “I soaked it in herbs for your throat.” Bending closer, she said, “I will teach you something I have learned. Stay out of places you have not been invited into. Otherwise, things will not go well for you.”
Jean Patrick backed away from the bed.
“Come to the table,” she said. “I brought you a special soup. Lucky for you, I am an old woman, and my memory is very short.”
She touched his forehead, and he knew by the coolness of her fingers that he was burning up. He followed her out of the bedroom, and she closed and locked the door. Whatever the contents of the box, it would be better for him if his memory was short as well.
JONATHAN BOUNDED ACROSS the classroom, his voice booming with excitement. His constant motion made Jean Patrick woozy. Despite Jolie’s herbs and two days of rest, his cold hung on. The subject of the lesson was geologic structures, and Jonathan described each one with wild swoops of chalk across the board. Students nudged each other and rolled their eyes. “Umuzungu yasaze,” they hooted. The white man is crazy.
After class, Jonathan caught Jean Patrick. “Do you have a minute?”
“Sure.” He followed Jonathan to his office.
The room looked as wild as Jonathan’s class, every inch of space occupied by rocks and stacks of journals and books. “Tea?” Jonathan cleared a pile of papers. “Have a seat.” He pushed a chair toward Jean Patrick. “You coughed and sneezed all through class. Are you sick?”
“A little. Just a cold.”
>
Jonathan heated water in an electric kettle. “My new most prized possession.” From the chaos on his desk, he retrieved an airmail letter. “And here’s my Christmas present.” He handed the envelope to Jean Patrick. Not sure what to do, Jean Patrick held it on his lap.
“Go ahead and open it. It’s not top secret.”
“This is from your umukunzi?”
“My what?”
“U-mu-kun-zi. Your girlfriend.” Jean Patrick had studied Susanne’s picture on Jonathan’s desk. She posed on a mountaintop, feet wide, hands on hips. He thought she looked more like a boy than a young woman, but he liked her cheerful smile and the way the breeze had blown her hair into silky wisps around her head.
“Yup. She’s coming January seventh.”
“She really is your Christmas present.”
“I couldn’t ask for a better one.” Jonathan sorted through a pile of letters, slitting the flaps with a wooden letter opener tipped with a carving of a giraffe. The kettle whistled, and he poured water into the teapot.
“Should you really let her come?”
Jonathan stared at Jean Patrick. “Let her come? J. P., in America, women make up their own minds.” He removed a newspaper from a manila envelope and snapped it open. “Sorry. That was rude; I shouldn’t have said it. Anyway, I’ve been missing her like crazy, and the CIA or the embassy or whoever her NGO consulted assured us the situation in Rwanda is stable.”
Stable? Jean Patrick watched the changing clouds out the window. Wedges of slate-colored sky sliced their bellies. As stable as the weather in rainy season, he thought.
Of course U.S. agencies didn’t understand. Even Jonathan, after what he had witnessed in Kigali, could not begin to understand. Rwanda’s reality remained carefully hidden from foreigners so they could continue to float on the calm waters, conjured up for their benefit, above the turbulent sea Rwandans swam.
Jonathan poured tea. He no longer had to ask, spooning three sugars into Jean Patrick’s cup. “Sorry, all I have is chemical milk.”
Jean Patrick wrinkled his nose. “That’s OK. I can drink it black.”
“I am not quite man enough,” Jonathan said, adding white powder from a plastic tub to his tea. He flattened the newspaper on top of the letters and paperwork. “I hate to divide my attention like this, but it’s a newsletter from a French friend in Kigali. I just want to skim it before my next class.”
“About Susanne, I only meant…” Jean Patrick searched his mind for words to complete the sentence.
“Dear God.” Jonathan suddenly sat upright. His neck and face flushed, and he looked dumbly into Jean Patrick’s eyes. For an instant, Jean Patrick thought he must have said or done something terribly wrong, but then he saw the tears. “Do you know anything about this?” Jonathan handed him the paper.
Stunned by the words, Jean Patrick dropped it into his lap.
“Did I get this right?” Jonathan asked. “Did someone bury a mine on a path where children walk to school? And the children stepped on it?”
Too numbed to speak, Jean Patrick nodded.
“How can one human being do this to another? To children, for God’s sake: six- and seven-year old children,” Jonathan said. He cradled his head in his hands. “The cold, calculated brutality—to camouflage the damned thing with leaves.”
Jean Patrick wished he could tell Jonathan that he was mistaken, that his translation was faulty, that twenty-one innocent children had not died. But he could not. Words unraveled; belief came unhinged. It had happened in Kigali, but it could have been anywhere. It could have been his sisters, his cousins. “Iyo nyamunsi yaciye ishumi, nta mubyeyi uyihisha ikibando,” he quoted.
“Which means?”
“Something like, ‘When destiny cuts the link in the fence, no mother can hide her child.’”
Jonathan nodded slowly. Tears brimmed in his eyes, but he did not wipe them away. Instead his hands fluttered in a random fashion across the scatter on his desktop.
The clamor of students came to Jean Patrick slowly. He looked at his watch. “Sorry. I have a physics class.”
“One second, before you go.” Jonathan looked like a little boy pleading with his mother. “Do you think I should write Susanne and tell her not to come?”
“I’m sure it’s OK. It’s nothing against white people.” As if his reassurance could hold the fence against death’s machete. “I really have to go. If you want, we can talk about this later.”
“Yes,” Jonathan said. “I’d appreciate that very much.” The words fell one at a time from his lips. “But who could have done this? Interahamwe? RPF?” He sighed. “I can’t keep them straight, who stands for what.”
Jean Patrick stood by the door. “These guys—they don’t know themselves what they stand for, but I don’t think it could be RPF. What you hear on the news about them—it’s not like that. I’ll come back after class, if you have time.”
Jonathan stared out the window. “Hey—come for dinner,” he said to the glass.
Jean Patrick’s limbs ached. All he wanted was to retreat to his bed and fall into a dreamless sleep. “That would be great,” he said, and he closed the door behind him.
The stairs swayed, and Jean Patrick grabbed the railing for support. What sense could he make of a child one minute chattering on a leaf-covered path, the next blown apart in the trees? What sense from a hand digging a hole, readying a mine, brushing the leaf litter back? Did the man wait to see his result? Did he smile or laugh? Did he feel anything at all? If Jean Patrick followed the hand to an arm, a shoulder, a face, whose face would he find, and what would he see inside those eyes? Would it, in the end, be better never to have seen at all? Yet here were Jonathan and Susanne believing in the world’s order. Inviting love in. The last bell rang, and Jean Patrick took the stairs two at a time.
“I THOUGHT YOU drowned,” Daniel whispered when Jean Patrick squeezed into the seat Daniel had saved for him. “I waited and waited, but you never came back from your workout.”
The professor was already busy writing equations. RESONANCE, he wrote in bold letters across the board. He sketched a vibrating string fixed at one end with a weight and pulley and driven by a motor at the other end. He drew arrows of force.
Still sick? Daniel scrawled in his notepad.
Jean Patrick nodded. He opened his notebook to a fresh page and copied the professor’s equations. Discordant frequencies jangled his nerves, and he needed to replace them with the steady, predictable vibrations of science.
The professor asked for examples of resonance. Jean Patrick raised his hand. “The waves on Lake Kivu, driven by wind.”
“A tuning fork struck by a rod fastened to a turning wheel,” a student in the front said.
And then, from the back row: “Rwanda driven crazy by Inkotanyi.” Laughter rippled through the hall. Jean Patrick’s cheeks burned hotter.
He tried to shout out a response, but only a cough came out. Daniel elbowed him and put a candy in his palm. Good for the throat, he scribbled in Jean Patrick’s notebook. From a muzungu girl in English class. She likes me.
An explosion of mint filled Jean Patrick’s sinuses and resonated in his throat. The professor wrote an equation on the board concerning the force, frequency, and density required to produce resonance. Jean Patrick’s attention faded. The only equation in his head was a shock wave from a mine, resonant in the morning air, that traveled out across a school yard filled with children.
WHEN JEAN PATRICK jogged onto the field for afternoon practice, Coach struck his hand to his forehead. “Are you completely without sense? Go back to your dorm. And I do not want to see you in the morning.” Behind Coach’s back, Daniel wagged a finger and smiled.
In his heart, Jean Patrick was relieved. As hard as he tried to deny it, he had no will to run. Every muscle in his body ached, and like a bad migraine, the headlines in Jonathan’s paper kept flashing behind his eyes. Bea’s art history class should just be ending, and if he hurried, he could catch her and w
alk her home. He needed to talk about the children. Only Bea could calm the angry spirits in his mind. Standing outside the building in the almost rain, he searched the swell of students for a flash of gold blouse, a blue shawl, but he saw no trace of her. He waited five minutes after the final bell rang and then set out for Cyarwa Sumo to find her.
Dusk brushed the arboretum fields. At the top of the ridge, someone had cleared the rubble of the guard’s hut and piled freshly made bricks on the ground. Jean Patrick hoped it was the work of the old guard and his family. In this country, hope always chased close on the heels of despair. It was in the people’s blood to try and try again.
For weeks after the killings, Jean Patrick had avoided the fields. Each time he set out for them, the smell of death overpowered him. It was an impossible situation; these were his favorite trails, the steepest for interval workouts, with plenty of action to distract him from pain. Bea had cured him. One morning, she met him after his workout, and without thinking about their destination, he set off with her. He was lost in conversation, and when he looked up, the fields surrounded him. The banter of the women in the plots filled his ears as before. He inhaled the morning, clear and fresh. Not one scrap of memory remained in his nostrils. Since that time, it had not returned. Now, at the church on the far side of the fields, evening mass had ended, and the worshippers poured out onto the road. A young woman picking her way down the trail caught his eye. With her broad shoulders, her considered and graceful step, it could only be Bea. He quickened his pace to meet her.
“It’s good to see you,” she said, kissing the air by his cheek. She could have been greeting a distant cousin, a friend of a friend at school.
Jean Patrick fell into step beside her, let her radiant heat temper his chills. She kept her eyes on the ground and marched forward. This gesture of displeasure he had also come to recognize. “I’m on my way to Jonathan’s,” he said. “He’s invited me for dinner.” He hoped she would ask if she could join him.
Running the Rift Page 20