After a while, when the cartridge needed changing, everyone got up to stretch their legs, sip banana beer through straws or reposition their babies. Mother went inside, Sebazungu went off to the yard and only returned when Father was showing pictures of the uprising. Sebazungu smiled broadly at the pictures. I thought it was odd that he should find images of burnt houses and slaughtered cattle so pleasing, but he wasn't alone: others at the gathering seemed to like them too. They lifted their beers in celebration. But not everyone was pleased. Celeste sucked her teeth, her large family sitting quietly beside her, their heads bowed. Her eye wept, and she rubbed her bad leg. It was hard to imagine that, if it hadn't been for Papa, Celeste would be dead.
And then came the image of Kayibanda, who Celeste had told me was Rwanda's first President after Independence. I thought he looked a bit like an American boxer. This photograph caused the biggest reaction of all. People got up, whooped and cheered and put on their coloured caps. Sebazungu supped his beer and said, “This was a good president.”
At this point Joseph came running through the gate with a worried expression. Romeo cocked his head and lifted an ear.
“Bwana, bwana,” he said to Father, trying to catch his breath. “Monty,” he gasped, and pointed towards the flower fields.
“What is it, Joseph?”
Joseph motioned for Father to follow him, quickly.
“Come on, Arthur,” said Father, turning off the projector. A groan of disappointment came from the crowd. “We'd better see what all this is about.”
Father strode through the yard following Joseph, and I followed Father, taking two steps to his one. Romeo scattered the chickens. We walked past the cabbage patch, rhubarb and artichokes until we reached the cutting shed and the fields that stretched up into the mountains. Over the drainage ditch we went, and into the field of golden alstroemeria.
We crossed the field of spotted foxgloves – which reached to my waist and to Father's knees. As we broke out on the other side of the steep field we saw, a little farther on at the clearing where I was born, Simon and Thomas shouting at each other. Not just shouting: fighting. Simon pushed Thomas, knocking off his cap, then Thomas pushed Simon, who fell to the ground.
“Stop,” ordered Father.
Thomas backed off and Simon got up.
“What's going on?”
It was Joseph who pointed at the hut. Father went to it, and I followed with Romeo.
Monty lay gasping for breath on the floor. He was foaming at the mouth. Romeo sat down and guarded him. Monty's eyes looked like old scratched marbles and reflected no light. I stood in the entrance of the hut stock-still and watched Father press his head to Monty's heart. Anger seethed within me: I was convinced the witch was to blame.
“What happened here?” Father asked Simon.
Simon shrugged his square shoulders. Thomas looked at the ground. Father lifted Monty and pushed past them both.
* * *
“Blankets,” said Father when we reached the house. I grabbed some from the pile in the corner and placed them on the floor for Monty, who lay like a heavy sack in Father's arms. Father laid him down and asked me to get Mother. I ran to her bedroom and dragged her by her hand through the house.
When Mother saw Monty almost lifeless on the floor, she knelt down and leant over him, covering him with her cardigan. Father moved aside and rubbed her back.
“There, there, Martha,” he said.
“Can't you do something?” sobbed Mother. Her hair looked like tumbleweed, and tears poured down her face.
“There's nothing to be done. We just have to wait. It won't be long now.”
Monty's breathing was laboured, but he looked to me as if he was fighting sleep, not dying.
Mother slumped beside Monty and stroked his brow. Tears fell from her eyes and onto Monty's face: it looked like he was crying too.
I wanted to tell Mother and Father about the witch. I wanted to say something so badly it felt as if my throat might burst. In the end all that came out were a few strained grunts that nobody understood but me.
* * *
Monty died just before sunset. By the time it was dark and everyone had gone home, Joseph had dug a grave in the front garden. He chose a spot next to Monty's favourite bush.
Mother, Fabrice, Joseph, Romeo and I stood over the dark hole, and Father knelt to lay Monty down. He was wrapped in his favourite blanket. Fabrice gave me a bone to bury beside him. I held my book; Mother held chrysanthemums.
Father said what a good dog he'd been, Mother sobbed quietly, and then, under the pale light of the moon, Joseph scattered soil over him, a gentle smattering at first and then great shovelfuls that thudded onto the tarpaulin.
As Joseph was filling the grave, an unfamiliar sound – a kind of pounding, came from up the road. I ran to the gate and saw a troop of about fifty soldiers, with boots and big guns, marching down the road. They passed the garden without looking in. I might well have dreamt it, had it not been for the fact I dropped my book in the mud, which left a permanent stain. Joseph picked it up, wiped it down and handed it to me. He gave me the thumbs up and led me back to the house before setting off on the first of his nightly rounds.
I sat on the front steps staring at Monty's grave. I thought about the soldiers and wondered where they were going and if they had anything to do with the changes the President was going to make. And I wondered how I could ever take my revenge on the witch for poisoning Monty.
Beyond the hydrangea bushes and the orange road, Nyiragongo glowed red in the moonlight. As I stood to go inside for the night, a gigantic boom sounded from the volcano, and the earth beneath me shook.
PART TWO
15
1991
After Monty died Mother wept for days. Most of the time she stayed in her bedroom with a bottle of wine and the door locked, not even opening it for Dr Sadler, who visited each day bringing fresh fruit and chocolate. I kept out of her way for fear of upsetting her more.
When she was able to join us for dinner, Father told her that Monty had died from eating foxgloves. That didn't make sense. Why would Monty have suddenly started eating foxgloves – a flower he had never tried in his life? When dinner was over I took down one of Mother's botany books and looked up Digitalis, which I knew was the foxglove's Latin name.
I read all about how death by foxglove was extremely rare, and that a person or animal would have to eat a lot of it to die. It said that one of the first symptoms was sickness. If Monty had eaten the flower and been sick, he wouldn't have eaten any more. It was clear to me, if not to Mother and Father, that someone had intentionally poisoned him.
Mother's book said that another name for foxglove was witch's glove. I took this as a sign that the witch was definitely to blame – after all it was she who had snared Monty in the forest and she who knew how to poison fully grown men. But as time went by, I became less convinced by my theory. Monty had been found in the hut in the clearing, not in the forest; and Simon and Thomas had been fighting. There was something that didn't add up. I promised myself that somehow I'd find out what it was, since the adults were too concerned with the awakening of Nyiragongo and the arrival of the soldiers to care.
The volcano, Father told me, had suddenly awoken, like a grumpy giant who had been asleep for years. He said that when the giant woke he was so hungry his belly rumbled loud enough to make the earth shake beneath him. I knew it wasn't really a hungry giant that made the ground tremble, but Father's story was more comforting than the reality of a gigantic hole on the surface of the earth waiting to blow hot lava, ash and gas.
Over Christmas Nyiragongo resembled a huge red decoration in the sky. But when Mother took down the tree and the lights and the volcano still glowed, it became more sinister. It became a kind of warning light in the distance – but a warning for what I wasn't sure. I tried to ignore it, particularly before bedtime, when it glowed through my window like the red-eyed devil I'd heard about in church.
As for
the soldiers, I had to try and piece together what was happening for myself, since nobody told me and I was unable to ask. About a week after they appeared, I heard Mother say to Madame B. on our newly installed telephone that “soldiers living in Uganda had invaded from the north”. I was meant to be studying in my bedroom, but the excitement made it impossible for me not to eavesdrop. Mother continued: “We're safe here on the plantation, particularly now that Belgium has sent in troops, but what about you? Are you being evacuated?”
After that conversation, Madame B. never came for coffee again. Neither did she hold another party nor shop for chocolate in town. And one day in November, when we were passing the tea plantation, we saw their high-security gates lying wide open and a dead peacock on the overgrown lawn. The sight of the peacock, dry and lifeless in the long grass, worried me more than the invading soldiers or the volcano.
“Don't worry,” said Father when he noticed that I was looking back towards the carcass. “Things will settle.”
“Why have the Belgian troops withdrawn so soon, after only a few weeks?” asked Mother. “Some of the gardeners are talking about Tutsis being beaten and left without food or water for days.”
“Martha,” said Father, laughing, “since when do you listen to the gardeners’ gossip?”
I figured if Father was laughing there was nothing to worry about – neither the dead peacock on the lawn nor the Tutsis.
* * *
One Wednesday in January, Father tuned his radio to an English-speaking station that sounded very far away and unlike anything the gardeners listened to. He was in his study and I at his door when he caught me, but instead of being angry, he beckoned me in and sat me on his knee.
“Do you know about the Tutsis fleeing to Uganda?” he asked, ruffling my hair and spinning us round on his swivel chair. I nodded, remembering the story Celeste had told me. “Well, now the sons and grandsons of those people are coming back. They want to live in Rwanda: they believe it is their home.” What he said made sense to me. The soldiers’ families had been forced out of the country long ago. Why shouldn't they return?
Father went on to tell me about the invading army, the RPF, which had been trained by the Ugandans. They were strong and clever and spoke English, not French or Kinyarwanda. He said they wanted to “overthrow the government”.
“But the government have told the people the soldiers are creatures from another world with pointed ears and tails – and the people believe them.” The image of an army with pointed ears and tails was so strong that I almost believed it myself. “So now Rwanda needs soldiers to add to its army, which means we need to be careful not to let the government steal our gardeners.” Father tickled me on the tummy, kissed my head and put me down. I thought about how the government might steal the gardeners. Did they have a butterfly net like mine, big enough to trap men? I let out a little laugh at that idea and went to my bedroom to collect African Butterflies and my collection kit that I'd been given for Christmas.
In the garden, with Romeo at my side, I placed the kit on Mother's bench and set up the equipment on the table. When I had first received it I wasn't sure how I felt. Having spent three years gathering eggs, creating the perfect environment for them to hatch, grow and turn into butterflies, I felt uncomfortable about capturing and killing them. But African Butterflies had an entire section about collecting that referred to the “happy dispatch” of butterflies. It occurred to me that maybe death wasn't so dreadful – after all I'd watched Monty die, and that looked pretty much like he'd fallen asleep. I decided, after a lot of thought, that I'd give it a go.
The “killing agents” needed to put the butterflies to sleep weren't included in my kit, so Father had brought me a selection from the laboratory, and for the first few attempts he supervised me in the garden.
First we tried cyanide. I ran up and down the garden, jumping over rose bushes and tumbling into hydrangeas while chasing after a citrus swallowtail that looked like a black-and-yellow bird-of-paradise feather floating above me. After several failed attempts to catch it in the air, I crept up on it when it rested on an iris. I positioned the hoop of the net over the flower so that when the butterfly leapt up it flew straight into my net. Feeling very pleased with my catch, I ran straight to Father, who opened the bottle of cyanide.
“Cyanide's a good word, Arthur. Do you want to say it?” Increasingly I wanted to speak, so that I might talk to Beni, but trying to do it while poisoning butterflies was definitely not the right moment.
“Maybe another time,” said Father, his tone dejected, as the fumes from the cyanide killed the butterfly. Watching it die didn't feel how I'd imagined it would, and it wasn't as exciting as the thrill of the chase. I thought I'd feel powerful, but mostly I felt guilt and regret. The butterfly would never fly again – and I was responsible. It felt terrible, and yet I couldn't stop staring, just as I stared at the wrecked trucks at the side of the road on the way to town. I couldn't get over how quickly it had died and its colour begun to fade. I was able to watch life drain out of its veins – able to see it take on the appearance of one of Fabrice's faded tea towels.
Father encouraged me to have a second go – this time with chloroform, which he said wouldn't fade the colours. For this method we needed one of the little boxes supplied in the kit. They had glass bottoms for inspection and holes in the lid for the droplets of poison. After waiting several minutes for a forest leopard – a long, thin-winged butterfly that looked just like its name suggested – to land on a bright-pink gerbera, I managed to net it and place it in the box. I added a drop of chloroform and covered the holes with my fingers until the butterfly was dead. It felt as though I'd taken a pillow and smothered someone in the night. I didn't like that.
On seeing my discomfort, Father decided that a bigger receptacle was needed, and so we tried a milk bottle with carbon tetrachloride. We poured some onto Mother's cotton-wool balls and placed them in a bottle. The grey-and-white butterfly I'd caught fluttered frantically, much to my displeasure. The specimen we used, a one-pip policeman, was a skipper, so its curved antennae and folded wings became caught in the wool. Its capture and death looked like torture.
Father said he had a plan to improve on this – “a solution that will combine all our efforts” – so off he went to the house in search of more equipment. He returned with a large pickling jar, blotting paper, brown paper and string.
In his absence I had caught a gold-banded forester, which was bright blue, black and gold, and placed it in a little box. Father put a half-teaspoon of ammonia into the pickling jar, placed several layers of blotting paper on the bottom and put the little box into the jar. He then covered it with thick brown paper and tied it tight with string. Very quickly the butterfly in the box appeared to sink into a deep slumber. Killing with ammonia was just as I had imagined killing butterflies would be. Its colours were still strong, I hadn't felt too involved and the butterfly hadn't struggled. The ammonia, though smelly, felt like the best option for the “happy dispatch” of butterflies.
That Wednesday, my equipment ready, I caught my second-favourite butterfly, a crimson-tip, which looks as if a young child has coloured the edges of its white forewings in red crayon and then outlined its entire body with a black pen.
I spent the best part of an hour chasing it through the plantation with Romeo, from the side garden through the yard to the vegetable patch, cutting shed and fields beyond. It wasn't until we were at the foxglove field and it stopped for a while that I managed to net it. It was thrilling to see the butterfly close up. I took it back to the side garden and set up the equipment. That done, Father came into the garden and stretched out on the bench asking if I'd like a story while I worked. I nodded and placed half a teaspoon of ammonia into my pickling jar.
He began by telling me how Rwanda was granted independence in 1962: “It happened so quickly that people didn't know what it meant.” He was still at school in England, but his papa had written letters telling how government helicopte
rs had flown over the countryside dropping leaflets that explained all about it.
“Papa sent me a copy of the leaflet. It said things like ‘Tutsis and Hutus must unite’ – ‘No one is allowed to steal’ – ‘Everyone must work hard’ – ‘Tax must be paid’ – ‘Bride prices will remain’.”
The idea of paying for a bride seemed funny. I wondered how much Beni's family would want if I asked her to marry me, and if Father would have enough money to pay. Once, when Mother and I saw a bride in a huge shiny white dress with her bridesmaids walking by the side of the road, she told me that most people paid for brides by giving goats or cows. We didn't have a cow to give. It filled me with worry and sadness that someone with lots of cows might want to marry Beni and then I'd have to let her go. I put some blotting paper in the bottom of the jar to absorb the ammonia. It seemed to suck up some of my sadness too.
“Anyway,” Father continued, “the government was worried that the Tutsis in Uganda might come back and cause trouble if there were big celebrations in the streets. So on Independence Day people were told not to celebrate, but simply to stay home and hug one another.” I was glad not to have been alive then – the thought of having to hug everybody made me short of breath.
“A few days later, Papa was told there were Tutsis from Uganda hiding in the forest, some of whom were captured by the gardeners behind the cutting shed. And then, not long after, armed Ugandan Tutsis were caught on the road to Kigali. They had hand grenades, machine guns, pistols, ammunition and whisky, and carried notebooks full of names of people to be killed – mostly Hutu politicians.” I put a little box with the crimson-tip inside it into the pickling jar, covered the jar with brown paper, tied it shut and left the butterfly to die.
“And then,” said Father, with an incredulous look on his face, “Belgian troops were withdrawn. For the first time in almost fifty years Rwanda was left without any Belgian control. Even the King decided to leave.”
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