Unable to see me, Sebazungu returned to the gathering and took his place in the centre of the men, and the shouting began again. I inched away from the shack and crept through the dark down the side of the road.
When I arrived at Beni's house, there was no sign of her, just a few goats roaming about, neat rows of potatoes and the machete that shone in the moonlight. I leant the bikes against the side of the house and cupped my hands around my face, pressing my nose against the single glass pane. Beni, her mama, data, Fabrice and extended family – more people than I could count with the light of one candle – were huddled round the table eating a giant mound of food. They shared a fork and a spoon. It didn't look like the Christmas dinner we had eaten: it looked more like a mountain of cabbage and rice.
I tapped quietly at the window. Beni looked up. I tapped again and waved before ducking down. After a few moments she appeared from the back of the house. In the dark her eyes shone brighter than the moon.
“What you doing?” she whispered.
I showed her the butterfly in the jar. She gasped, then smiled.
“What to do?” she asked, and I pointed towards the crater, where I wanted to release it with all the other butterflies, which Father said “flew in clouds”.
Beni frowned.
“It's dark – and far,” she said.
I untied the trike and patted the seat.
After a moment's hesitation she got on and pedalled onto the road. I followed her three-wheel tracks towards the rocky road that led through the shambas and up to the forest.
When we passed the shambas, there were no children to follow us with hubcaps, jerrycans and sticks. Even the goats tethered at the side of the road paid little attention as we rode into the night.
We abandoned the bikes at the edge of the forest and entered by Beni's silvery glade. It twinkled in the moonlight like the diamonds I'd seen on tourists’ hands at the hotel.
Creeping into the dense, dark forest, both of us picked our way through the twisted undergrowth and gnarly trunks. Every beat of a wing, snap of a twig or bird call made us pause to catch our breath. At last we found the gate that led to the path up the mountain. A sign hung from it that read:
DANGER
CRATER – DO NOT ENTER.
Ignoring the warning, I opened the gate and we started to climb. I scrabbled like three-legged Monty, one hand holding the jar in my pocket at all times, and Beni followed. We clambered on, grabbing at vines and tree roots, until the path became easier. On and on we went, through towering hagenia trees thick with damp lichen, dense bamboo and tall stinging nettles, until we reached a high plateau covered in clover and wild primroses. Long strands of lichen hung from branches, and orchids blossomed among the trees. Dotted about were little corrugated cabins hung with Christmas lights. The moon cast a soft glow on the clearing, as if this were the home of a fairy-tale princess.
From inside one of the cabins I heard singing and big, booming laughter. It sounded a lot like Father's laugh. Outside the cabin was a bath filled with a sweet-smelling brew. Washing lines criss-crossed the plateau. They were hung with socks and hiking boots that dangled by their laces – and there, beside them, was my rucksack and pillow. It dawned on me that this might be where the witch lived. Had she stolen my things from the cave? I pointed to show Beni. I could tell from her panicked expression – raised eyebrows and furrowed brow – that she was wondering the same.
I remembered the story of the witch and the man she had shot and poisoned, and was terrified she might do the same to us. Perhaps we would die a slow, painful death in a cage, without our parents knowing where we were. Suddenly I felt foolish for leaving Mother and the plantation on my own.
“This way,” whispered Beni, and we crept round the camp boundary, tiptoeing nervously, desperate to get away. I was convinced we'd be killed if caught.
Just when I thought we'd made it, the door of the largest cabin was flown open. The witch stood in the doorway, wearing a black, loose robe. She was even taller than I remembered. Her mass of red hair seemed to burn like molten lava. She was holding a shotgun in her hands.
“What are you doing here?” she yelled when she got within range, the barrel of the gun pointing directly at us. “Who the hell are you?”
Beni tucked in behind me the way I used to hide behind Mother.
“You can't come in here, you'll frighten the gorillas!” she yelled.
I wondered why the witch would care about the gorillas she'd already snared and caged. Then she began to nod, laughed wickedly and pointed a knowing finger at me.
“You're Arthur, Albert's boy,” she said, and I nodded.
“Well, well. So you've got a girlfriend.” She laughed, and hot blood rose to my face. I moved a little to hide Beni from the witch. “Where are you headed?”
I pointed towards the crater at the top of the mountain. The witch shook her head.
“No, no – not tonight. It's too dangerous. Far too dangerous.”
I guessed she meant the path was dangerous in the dark. I wanted to tell her we'd be fine: we just wanted to release our butterfly at the crater into a butterfly rabble.
“There are soldiers and poachers, Arthur,” she said. “They wouldn't think twice about killing you or your little friend.”
You're the poacher, I thought, straining every muscle in my neck to say something. Then a sudden noise from the other side of the camp distracted the witch, and Beni whispered: “Run!”
She grabbed my rucksack and pillow from the line, threw me the pillow and took off faster than a startled impala. I chased after her. We ran through thick undergrowth alongside a deep ravine that fell to a stony creek. Suddenly everything was cold and wet and slippery, and I was terrified that the jar and butterfly would fall from my pocket into the ravine below.
On and on we ran. Down, down, down through fierce stinging nettles and thick roots and mud. Down we ran, dangerously close to the ravine, grabbing at trees as we skidded on the slimy mud path. It took half the time to slide down the mountain than it had to climb up it. We made good progress until we reached the final steep descent that led back into the forest.
Beni's foot caught in the straps of the rucksack, and she toppled head first, rolling onto the ground below.
I skidded down the path after her on my buttocks, soiling my shorts with grass and mud, the jam jar rolling about in my pocket.
Beni stared up, frightened. She clutched her knee and moaned:
“It is bad.”
I knew she wouldn't be able to walk or ride the trike home.
Seeing her lying there reminded me of the night in the forest when I was five years old. If I made it home that night, I thought, I can do the same again. I put the pillow in the rucksack, the pack on her and helped her onto my back. She was surprisingly heavy for a skinny girl.
Slowly we wound our way back through the trees. Beni barely spoke. She held on to me so tightly I had to loosen her grip to prevent her from strangling me. When we got to the silvery glade where we'd left our bikes, I felt exhausted: I was ready to crawl into bed and forget about the witch. Just a bike ride home, I told myself, as I put Beni down against a tree. I looked around for the bikes. But the bikes were gone.
“Maybe different tree?” suggested Beni, rubbing her knee.
I looked in the dark for ages.
“We took wrong path,” she said despondently, but I noticed the bike tracks were still visible in the dirt. I rubbed my foot on them to show her that we were in the right place, then followed them for a while. They led off in a different direction to the route we had taken before. It was clear that they'd been stolen.
“We must walk,” said Beni.
I knew there was no other way.
Limping down the track in the dark with me supporting Beni took a long time. Clouds covered the moon and, with no other light to guide us, every movement and sound was terrifying: a bird hoot was like a savage war cry, the outlines of trees like warriors and the blowing grass like legions
of snakes. By the time I'd taken Beni home and reached the plantation, my chest was ready to explode.
Father's car was not in the drive. In the yard Joseph was snoring loudly, his empty beer bottle lying on the floor. I was glad he didn't see me without my bike, but cross that he was sleeping when he should have been guarding Mother and the house. Only Romeo stirred when I opened the back door: he glanced up from his bed, then curled his head back into his body. Monty snored louder than Joseph.
I slipped off my shoes, crept into the lounge and through to my bedroom. My feet were so damp I could tell, even in the dark, that they were leaving prints of moisture on the red concrete floor. I stopped outside Mother's room to see if she was awake. I pressed my ear against her door and held my breath. I couldn't hear anything, so I opened it. She was lying in bed with her eye mask on, snoring louder than Monty. I closed the door and breathed out. She obviously didn't know I'd gone up the mountain – nor did Father. Relieved, I took off my rucksack, put the butterfly back into its farm and went to bed.
Lying with my head on the pillow, I couldn't decide which part of the night had been the most frightening: hiding from the men at the bar, the encounter with the witch or having to walk back to the plantation alone after delivering Beni home. Thinking about that kept me awake for a long time, but still Father didn't return.
12
I woke the next day to the cockerel crowing and waited for Joseph to walk through the garden. Lying there I thought about my bike and how I wouldn't be able to ride it in the yard the way I'd ridden my trike every morning. And I thought about the butterfly too. Looking at it in its farm I imagined Beni and me at the crater releasing it among all the others. I was certain we'd get there soon.
After Joseph had passed my window, boots slapping, I got up, ate two small green bananas and fed the scraps to Romeo and Monty, then went outside. I sat in Joseph's lookout watching Celeste heat water and worried about Mother finding out about the bikes.
There was a faded picture of Celeste and Fabrice in my album that intrigued me. In the photo, taken outside the back door years before, Fabrice looked lean, upright and proud. He showed nothing of his round stomach, curved shoulders and sagging chin, but it was Celeste who had changed the most.
She stood with a serious expression – something all the workers did when they had their photograph taken. In the picture she was tall, slim and pretty, not like the woman I knew – the heavy old woman who walked hunched over a fimbo, was blind in one eye and looked as though the skin on the left side of her face had melted. The young Celeste had no cane, two good eyes and flawless skin. Father told me that Fabrice and Celeste had worked on the plantation since his papa had owned it, but he'd never said anything about what had happened to her.
When my watch read seven, Celeste picked up her buckets and gently motioned for me to follow. The prints on the floor and the dirt on my clothes must have led her to realize something was wrong. There was something in her gesture that told me she had figured out about the loss of the bikes and promised not to tell Mother.
In the bathroom I helped slosh the water into the tub, undressed and climbed in. Celeste broke away from her usual routine and sat in the chair beside me, where she kicked off her flip-flops and scratched the dry, hard skin of one foot with the toes of the other. She began to tell me a story.
“One night, when I is young, a Hutu leader is attacked,” she said. “Hutus think: our leader is dead and violence fills Rwanda.
“Hutus attack Tutsis. They use spears, clubs, machetes and,” she pretended to shoot a bow and arrow at me, which made me giggle, “anything dangerous. Soon Rwanda is chaos.”
I tried to envisage the quiet hills and sleepy valleys around the plantation full of people fighting, but it was impossible. I rubbed a bar of soap over my ribcage.
“And one night, when clouds are low, Hutu neighbours attack my home. They burn roof and kill my cattle and beat me with club.” Celeste glanced at her leg and raised her hand to her bad eye. I understood how her injuries came about.
“Your Father's papa save me. Arthur. He bring me here and hide me in cutting shed. He move cattle to forest and my things to house.” She smiled faintly and paused.
“More cattle is killed, more buildings burnt, men dead in bananas groves and cornfields. Tutsis flee to Uganda and Belgian soldiers arrive. King Kigeri” – the one who looked like a giraffe, I thought – “drop paper from aeroplanes for fighting to stop. But Kigeri remain in palace and people get mad. The fighting, it last a month. Thousands without homes. Even more dead. Then Hutus take control.” That last comment made Celeste suck her teeth.
The bath water was getting cold, but I was interested in her story, so I hugged my knees to keep warm a little longer.
“Hutu chiefs replace Tutsi chiefs and Tutsis leave Rwanda. Hutus take important jobs but…” She allowed herself a chuckle – her face looked entirely different when she smiled, her skin plumper, even the side that looked melted. “Hutus stupid, Arthur and Rwanda soon in trouble.”
She gazed out the window with a distant look in her eye. It was hard to tell what she was thinking. Perhaps, I thought, she was thinking about her wounded cows or her friends lying dead among the cornfields. Perhaps she wondered how life might have been if it wasn't for the troubles.
“The church,” she continued after a while, “they teach Hutu children: Tutsis are bad, different – from somewhere else.” She pointed with a finger tipped with a thick yellow nail towards the sky, suggesting a mysterious, far-off planet. “Soon Hutus hate Tutsis and win first election.”
Celeste, noticing me shivering, fetched my towel. She held it out, I got up, and she wrapped it round me snugly. She smelt comfortingly of wood smoke, from heating the water and doing the laundry.
“Kayibanda arrange coup,” she said, and I allowed her to dry my hair gently, “and Sovereign Democratic Republic of Rwanda is declared. Hutus take control. Kayibanda is President and soon,” she said, breaking into a full, mischievous grin, “abazungu leave too.”
Celeste finished drying my hair and, though I didn't want it to be, I knew story time was over.
* * *
“Are you ready, Arthur?” said Mother. “We mustn't keep the Blanchetts waiting.” I was investigating a colony of ants on the front step. They moved in patterns I didn't understand. I wanted to dip them in ink so that I could follow their tracks more easily, not go to the Blanchetts’ for their New Year party.
“Come on then,” said Father, folding up his newspaper. He'd been sitting in the car for ages waiting for Mother, who had taken longer than usual to put on her make-up.
I climbed into the back with my book and compared the picture of the Charaxes acræoides with my drawing. Mother stared out of the window. Father drove without speaking. I watched the world pass by.
When we arrived at the Blanchetts’ house, Father sounded the horn at the gates and we waited for their security boy. I watched the sun fall over Lake Kivu. The sky looked like the layer cake Madame B. bought in town – bands of yellow and pink.
Eventually the metal gate clattered open, and we drove into the enormous compound. As if in slow motion we passed the security boy – it was Zach. Safe in the car I turned to watch him close the gate and run through the banana palms to his shack at the back of the house. We parked at the front, next to all the other cars.
“Martha, so good to see you,” said Madame B., kissing the air by Mother's cheeks. Mother smiled.
“Come along, Arthur,” said Mother, standing at the front door. I watched the peacocks parading across the front lawn.
“It's OK, Martha. He can come in later.”
Mother and Father went into the house. I stood on the drive, clutching my book and staring at the prehistoric-looking legs of a peacock that strutted over the gravel, its blue-and-green feathers shining in the setting sun.
I followed it round the side of the house. From there I could see the whole of the tea plantation. As far as I could see, tea bushes str
eaked the terraced hills. I wandered after the peacock, his tail feathers tickling a trail in the dust, and followed him until he scrambled clumsily over a hedge and out of sight.
“Eh,” said a voice from the boys’ quarters – a row of corrugated tin shacks surrounded by banana palms. I stared into the dark. “Eh,” said the voice, and a pebble shot past my foot. “You.” The heavy “oo” made it sound big, as I imaged a gorilla would sound.
I turned towards the voice and saw two bloodshot eyes flashing out of the shack. It was Zach. My chest tightened. I checked behind me: there was no one else. He had to be talking to me.
“Yego,” he said. “Ici.”
I walked towards him uncertainly, as if walking a tightrope.
“Come,” he said, and I approached his hut.
He stepped back. I loitered at the entrance.
There was nothing in his shack apart from a sagging mattress on the floor, a string of damp clothes on a line and a cooking pot hanging from the ceiling. It smelt of sweat and cassava. The boy slugged from a brown bottle, then thrust it in my face. I didn't take it. He thrust it again.
This time I took the dirty bottle and wiped the rim. The fumes shot up my nostrils and irritated my throat. I sipped a tiny amount. The fiery liquid burned my mouth and strangled my windpipe, but somehow I managed to swallow, then coughed repeatedly. My eyes watered and stung, as if they might be bloodshot too.
I held out the bottle to him and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, the way I'd seen the gardeners do after drinking beer. He didn't take it.
“Plus!” he said aggressively, and I took another swig.
Immediately my stomach burned, then my head turned dizzy and my vision blurred. The boy snatched back the bottle and took a gulp, which had no effect on him at all.
“Comment t'appelles-tu, mzungu?” he asked.
My hearing was now muted, my face flushed. I wondered if he'd poisoned me. I tried to run, but found I could only stagger.
“Un peu plus,” he said, but I wasn't going to take any more. I zigzagged from the shack as fast as my weakened legs would take me. I needed to find Mother.
The Flower Plantation Page 10