Running the Rift

by Naomi Benaron

  “Amos is a good cook.”

  “I’ve never been honored with a dinner invitation before.” He searched her face for reaction, a spark of her usual fire; none was there. “I waited for you after class,” he said. “I wanted—”

  Bea cut him off. “You should not have bothered. I went straightaway to my father’s office when the bell rang.”

  “Stop a minute.” He stepped in front of her and held up his hands. “I don’t understand you tonight. Did I do something to make you angry?”

  A boy on a bicycle passed them. He stood as he reached the steepest part of the trail and pedaled with a rhythmic side-to-side sway. A woman sat sidesaddle behind him, steadying a basket on her head. A serene smile graced her features. “Good afternoon,” they called together.

  Bea watched them, a look of pain on her face. “It’s nothing to do with you,” she said.

  “Then what? Tell me.” He wished he could hook a finger beneath her chin, raise her face to his, and kiss her. Good customs would not allow it.

  “Something horrible has happened in Kigali.”

  “I know. I read it in Jonathan’s paper. It has been haunting me since. That’s why I came to find you.”

  “One of Dadi’s friends lost his daughter in the blast. That’s why you found me at church.” She took a step forward. “Let’s walk; I feel this cold too much.”

  Maybe her mood had only to do with Kigali and not with him. He chided himself for putting his own selfish wishes above respectful grief for the children, but he allowed the thought to gather shape and substance in his mind. He walked stubbornly beside Bea, ready to pounce on any scrap of affection. He felt as if he were grabbing her little finger as she was swept downstream by a swift current. Although his mind told him to stop, his heart made him go forward. “You shouldn’t let events we can’t control stand in our way. It doesn’t mean we have no chance for a future.”

  “Mon pauvre,” Bea said, as if Jean Patrick were a little boy to slip inside the blue wing of a shawl. “If this crazy country made sense, we would stand a chance. But after what happened today, I can’t believe in futures anymore. Not even with you. It is too painful.”

  They reached the Cyarwa checkpoint. Bea moved away from him. The soldiers patted him on the back and wished him good night. Even in darkness, he saw the way their eyes slid over Bea’s body, the slight twist of their mouths into a sneer.

  Jean Patrick had a list of arguments against Bea’s worries, but none came out. He walked on in dumb silence, his head on fire with fever. It was clear she was determined to run away, and his mind wavered in doubt over every point he thought to bring up. Only when they came to Jonathan’s gate did she catch his gaze and hold it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t look well at all. I should have held my tongue.”

  “Is there something else? Did your father tell you to keep away from me?” The only explanation that came to him.

  “You are not the center of the universe,” she said. But then she touched her cheek to his, and her damp warmth remained on his skin. “How stupid. I didn’t mean that.” Her eyes glistened, and she wiped them with her sleeve. “Nkuba Jean Patrick.” She released the syllables of his name like pebbles tossed into water. “How can you think of a future in a world where nothing is left of twenty-one children but bits and pieces in the leaves? Not even a body for a mother to bury.”

  “But Bea—”

  “I’ll be busy for a while, so I can’t see you,” she said. Jean Patrick opened his mouth to continue his protest, but she touched a finger to his lips. “Not a word. You can’t change my mind.”

  She reached up on her toes and gently kissed his cheek. He thought to kiss her quickly on the mouth, but she stepped away. “You will catch my cold now,” he said. Just to say something.

  As he watched her hurry off toward her house, he had to believe he was still in her heart. He didn’t know why she had done this. He almost wished her his cold, some small part of him to linger in her presence.

  Jonathan’s gate was unlocked, and Jean Patrick stepped into the yard. Coach had instructed him to be patient, to hang back and wait for the right moment to strike. The strategy hadn’t worked on the track, but it might with Bea. If he bided his time, he thought he could reel her in again.

  Before he could knock, Jonathan opened the door, his face nearly as red as the glass of wine he put into Jean Patrick’s hand. “Come drink with me, J. P. I’ve finished half a bottle, but so far it hasn’t helped. I can’t even drown the day in alcohol.”

  Jean Patrick would have preferred a cup of Jolie’s cyayi cyayi or even a beer, but he put the glass to his lips and sipped. He expected something sweet, like the fruit wines his father gave him when he was small, but this had a moldy, sour taste. He sipped again. “It’s good,” he said.

  “You’re not a skilled liar, but don’t worry,” Jonathan said. He led Jean Patrick to the table and filled both glasses to the brim. “Trust me—it will taste better with every mouthful.”

  With the next taste, a pleasant heat tingled his tongue. Amos came in with a tray, and when he saw Jean Patrick, he grinned from ear to ear.

  “I believe you’ve met before?” Jonathan said.

  “Yes, yes.” Amos set the food on the table and grasped Jean Patrick’s hands. “I watched your race on television—so wonderful!” He clucked his tongue. “It’s an honor to greet you again. You make us proud.” From his emphasis, Jean Patrick understood that us meant Tutsi. He remembered Uncle’s words and smiled.

  “Let’s eat,” Jonathan said. “I better get something in my stomach before I pass out under the table. Amos, will you join us?”

  Amos smiled shyly. “I have just now eaten,” he said, straightening the spoons in the bowls. He nodded to Jean Patrick. “Bon appétit. I cooked you a special meal.”

  Amos had cooked a feast of foods from his region, plenty of beans and green bananas, vegetables and spicy sauces. Jean Patrick wished his nose were less stuffy so he could inhale the aromas.

  AFTER DINNER, JONATHAN emptied his wineglass and leaned his elbows on the table. “I told Susanne. She was pretty upset, but she’s still coming. Of course there was no word in the American papers, and no one at the State Department had a clue—at least not that they shared.” He tipped the last few drops of wine from the bottle into Jean Patrick’s glass. “No one back home cares about a few African children more or less in the world. It’s business as usual to them.”

  They stayed at the table long after Amos cleared the dishes and brought tea and fruit. Jonathan patted his stomach. “I don’t have any beer. Shall I send Amos for some?”

  “If I drink any more, I will be the one to sleep beneath the table.”

  “I did not intend for you to go home tonight. Amos has already made up your bed.”

  The candles flickered in their clay holders. For a while, Jonathan and Jean Patrick watched in silence. Then Jonathan sighed and folded his hands on his chest. The ghosts of the children tiptoed in and sat in the empty chairs.

  “I have learned that it is rude in Rwanda to ask prying questions, but we are both scientists,” Jonathan began. “I am getting nowhere trying to figure this thing out on my own.”

  Jean Patrick’s head swam; he couldn’t hear his own thoughts, so muffled by congestion. He had planned to tell Jonathan a little of Rwanda’s history as he understood it. But which story would he tell? He could say that the Tutsi were a Nilotic people: tall and thin, with narrow, graceful features. They came with their cattle and, shunning cultivation, tended cattle to survive. The Hutu were a Bantu tribe, farmers, a shorter, broader, and stronger people more suited to the constant toil that farm work required. Both groups settled in the territory that became Ruanda-Urundi and later Burundi and Rwanda. The Twa, a small and slight people, lived as hunters and gatherers in the forest and remained so until the forests diminished and the animals became scarce. This was one story, the most commonly accepted, and the one that was taught in school.
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br />   Much of it was true, but how much? It was true that the mwami, a Tutsi king, came to rule over all. But now Zachary came home from school with stories that the Tutsi were a haughty people, merciless oppressors of their Hutu brethren. One teacher told the class that the mwami forced his Hutu serfs to stand beside him and receive the points of his spears in their feet. This, Jean Patrick did not believe, and this he would not say to Jonathan.

  Before the Belgians, Jean Patrick wanted to say, Hutu and Tutsi lived properly as neighbors. Perhaps, as Uwimana thought, Hutu and Tutsi were in fact one people. Had he lived, Jean Patrick’s papa would most likely have taught him the same lesson. He would have said—as Uwimana did—that before the Belgians, distinctions were as fluid as the rivers, determined by marriage, convenience, and status. Names of rivers changed, but the water remained the same.

  At least Jean Patrick thought this to be true. He had spent his early life not knowing the distinctions, and a country without distinctions was what his father had believed in and striven for. Jean Patrick believed, too, that examination of Rwandan blood under a microscope would yield mixed results, impossible to quantify or label. Bea’s own mother was a perfect example. With her golden skin, her regal bearing, who would not look at her and say she was Tutsi?

  And he wanted to explain to Jonathan what it meant to be Tutsi in a world where belief and order were blown apart daily, a world where he was constantly forced to navigate uncharted waters, the currents impossible to gauge. If the moment arose, he might also have attempted a careful defense of the RPF.

  None of this came out. The history Jonathan’s wine loosened on his tongue was the tale of Bea and of a need to be with her that burned almost—but not quite—as bright as his Olympic flame.

  NINETEEN

  JEAN PATRICK KNEW IT WAS FOOLISHNESS, but he suspected his lingering cold and Bea’s lingering absence grew from the same bitter seed. If he could chase sickness from his body, Bea would come back. Or if Bea came back first, she would sweep the aches and pains from his limbs, the congestion from his lungs.

  The team had finished the warm-up—a series of lunges, strides, and butt kicks—and gathered to watch Coach struggle with something in the trunk of his car. He had his back to them, and no one could get a clear view through the dense eucalyptus that stood between them and the road above.

  “It’s a body,” Daniel said. “A guy who cheated in Coach’s government class.”

  A four-hundred-meter runner patted Jean Patrick on the back. “Oya! It’s a wife for this guy. Coach found her in the bush, and if Jean Patrick survives the workout, he can have her.”

  The trunk lid banged shut. Coach rolled the object toward the edge of the road and shoved it down the slope. An immense truck tire careened down the embankment.

  “Yampayinka!” Daniel said, and he let out a whistle. They all stood frozen, watching the tire’s unpredictable passage as it crashed through the trees. At the last instant, they scattered. The effort sent Jean Patrick into a fit of coughing.

  Coach howled. “You guys have to learn to relax. If you remain calm, your mind will tell your body what to do. It works on the track, and it works in your life.”

  The tire gyrated on the field. Its rotation slowed until it could no longer sustain the motion, and it toppled. Coach tapped it with his shoe. “Who’s first?” He pulled a harness from his bag and let it swing from his fingers.

  Despite the beating from his cold, Jean Patrick couldn’t resist the challenge. “You want one of us to pull that thing?”

  Coach held out the harness to Jean Patrick. “Did I hear you volunteer?”

  “Wait. You mean, I race with that weight while the others run free?”

  “Precisely. We’ll start with two hundreds and work up to eights,” Coach said.

  Coach attached the lines. A crowd gathered in the stands. Just two days remained before Christmas vacation, and the students were boisterous, celebrations under way. Jean Patrick scanned the seats in vain for Bea. Since the evening two weeks ago when she had stood with him outside Jonathan’s gate, she had truly vanished from his life.

  “Coach is finally going to kill you,” Daniel said, lining up beside him.

  “We’ll see. And if you run in your usual slack way, you’ll be next.”

  “Six two hundreds,” Coach shouted. “Tugende.”

  At first, inertia got the better of Jean Patrick. The tire’s weight chopped his stride and sent him flailing. But by the third two hundred, persistence paid off, and he found a rhythm and stillness in his step that kept the tire straight and steady behind him. It was a matter of momentum; if he never quite stopped, if he conserved the tire’s linear motion, he could keep the other runners in sight. He tasted the same sweet success that came from unraveling a stubborn equation after an evening of failure. From the stands came a rhythmic clapping. “Mr. Olympics!” the audience cheered.

  Jean Patrick ate it up. When Coach said, “Enough!” after the last two hundred, he pleaded for a little more time, just one four hundred. To whistles of approval, he put his head down like a bull with a heavy cart and stomped his foot. He started off strong, but on the back straight, his strength gave out, and his legs began to quake. He barely made it back to the line. As Coach took the harness away, Jean Patrick doubted he could run a step farther. But freed from the burden, he flew, feet barely touching the ground. Life was like that, too, he thought, as he floated around the track. If only this weight of identity and politics could be lifted in the same way from his shoulders.

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK, Coach called the runners off the track. “That’s it for today. Short cooldown and then meet in the stands for a few words.”

  “Looks like I finally found a way to slow Jean Patrick down,” Coach said when he had gathered the runners together.

  “Now he knows how the rest of us feel,” shouted Honorine, a distance runner, one of three other Tutsi on the team. A sprightly girl, skin shiny and brown like the shell of an umushwati nut, she gave many of the boys a challenge. A jovial drumbeat of heels reverberated to signal agreement.

  Coach silenced the unruly group. “Tell us, Jean Patrick, did you learn anything?”

  With his scratchy throat and thick head, Jean Patrick intended to say only a few words and then sit down. But in the middle of a sentence about the struggle between balance and weight, inspiration came to him, as if a hand had wiped clear a fogged windowpane.

  “I learned that physics cannot be separated from running any more than running can be separated from physics. Everything in this world is about momentum and the conservation of energy, about motion deriving from a center of stillness.” From somewhere in the stands, Jean Patrick heard runners groaning, a few suppressed bursts of laughter, but conviction kept him going. “What I saw is that if I want to win, I must focus every cell in my body on the shortest distance to the finish. We have all heard Coach’s lectures once or twice”—again the laughter—“but when you are pulling such a weight behind you and you don’t want to see the backs of eight runners getting small, small in front of you, then those words come into focus. Today, I felt them, absorbed them into muscle memory.”

  Coach took over the lecture from there, but Jean Patrick’s attention faded, lulled by the wind’s rhythm on the roof above the stands. He started awake as the team shuffled down the stairs. The anesthesia of excitement had worn off, and his head burned, his legs wobbled.

  Daniel caught him on the bottom stair and looped an arm through his. “You OK?”

  “Just tired. Lately I don’t sleep well. Especially with you snoring away.”

  “What? That’s your own snore reflecting back to you.” Daniel screwed up his face. “My English professor killed a cow on my paper. I’m not going to tell Papa.”

  “If you paid less attention to girls and more to your books, you wouldn’t have so many red marks.”

  “It’s one time, eh? Don’t act so superior.” Daniel made a kissing sound with his lips. “When are you going back to Cyangugu?”


  “I’m not sure. I have some things to take care of.”

  “Would some things involve Bea?”

  The first drops of rain fell with a hiss in the surrounding trees. Jean Patrick followed the tremble of the leaves. He was too tired to explain. “I just hope I feel better before I go.”

  “Papa can give you a ride tomorrow.”

  “To Cyangugu? It’s the opposite direction.”

  “No problem. Papa likes to drive in circles.”

  The thought made Jean Patrick laugh, and once he laughed, he started to cough and could not stop. Tears brimmed in his eyes.

  Daniel pulled one of his minty candies from his jacket pocket and smiled wickedly. “As many as you need, they are yours.” He tossed the mint to Jean Patrick.

  “Ah!” Jean Patrick nudged him. “Success with your muzungu.”

  There were footsteps behind them, and Jean Patrick moved aside to let the person pass.

  “Excuse me,” the man said. “I was looking for a bathroom.” He fell into step beside them and pulled up the brim of his cap. Jean Patrick found himself staring into Roger’s eyes. “You looked like someone who would know.”

  Jean Patrick folded the candy wrapper into tiny squares. “Daniel,” he said, applying the same concentration to his tone that he had applied to the truck tire, “I’ll show this guy where to go and then meet you in the room.”

  “Why don’t I come with you, huh?”

  “Can you go and put water on for tea? I don’t feel so well.”

  Daniel showed Jean Patrick the mint on his tongue and trotted off toward the dorm. When he turned the corner, Jean Patrick gripped his brother. “Mistah Cool! What’s your news?”

  “My news is good. And you, Mr. Olympics?”

  “As well. Wah! If I had passed you on the street, I would not have known you.” Roger’s face was leaner, cut to the bone, the high cheeks and square jaw more pronounced. A scar divided his cheek like a boundary line sketched on a map.