One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  In the days that followed Jean de Dieu’s first attempts at claiming his rights as my husband, he began telling me about his rounds in the camp at night.

  “I like the camp at night,” he said to me when we sat down to drink some tea and have some rice. “I like it because I can hear the people’s true voices, their cries. I can see their real faces. No one’s pretending at night. Night is when all the demons come out.”

  I was looking at his face when he said demons and I realized in that moment that my fear of Jean de Dieu had nothing to do with his origins or mine.My fear was held by the push of the frailty of our lives, mine and the children’s, Jean de Dieu’s and the killers’, each of us facing the crimes of our own humanity.

  Part III

  Chapter 15 – Francine

  Syracuse, New York, 1998

  Francine spent so much time thinking about the way God decided who would live and who would die. She thought about the countless people in her own life who had been chosen to die. Only God decided. Francine tried not to think about the others, the ones that had transitioned unjustly. Was there such a thing as justice? Francine did not know. She closed her eyes and tried forget their faces. And even so, even if she could push their cries away, sometimes the spirits called her in the form of dreams. These reveries were more than just the imaginings of Francine’s brains during sleep; these were visitations, incrimations of the dead—what she called spirit calls—begging Francine for answers that she did not possess. Francine disliked these visits, which would leave her feeling a vast emptiness.

  The phone rang. Francine picked up the receiver.

  A man’s voice sounded on the other end. Her heart was racing. Why did she answer the phone if she could not speak the language? It was an old habit. The voice was male with little affect. The caller spoke in rapid-fire English.

  “Mrs. Mwanzimba? May I speak to Mrs. Mwanzimba please?”

  “Yes,” Francine responded matter-of-factly. Answering like this in English was a mistake since it only invited the doctor to speak even faster.

  Francine interrupted the stream of words that poured into the phone. “No English, no English.” She hung up and called Elbe.

  “The hospital called with Innocent’s results but I couldn’t talk to them.”

  “No worries. I’ll call you back as soon as they tell me what they have to say.”

  Francine was beginning to like Elbe, how efficient she was. How distant.

  Francine closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She wanted to understand what God wanted from her. What did he want her to do with Boy? Why was he sick? She wanted to understand why God had sent Innocent to her in the first place. Why the pregnancy, under those unspeakable circumstances…why take away her other children while bringing her new ones? She became frightened. Maybe this was the devil’s work. What if God had left her for good? Francine knew she had a strange relationship with the Lord. She wished she could let go of Him but somehow she held on to a faint thread of hope that kept her imploring.

  She got down on her knees and began to pray. Notre père qui êtes aux cieux. Que Votre nom soit sanctifié. She prayed for God to return to her heart. She prayed for protection for them all, even for Innocent who was still in the hospital. She prayed for her ability to forgive herself for not having been able to save her children. When the doorbell rang, she was still praying.

  Francine peered through the peephole to see who it was. She saw Elbe’s face impassive and comforting, somehow. She opened the door.

  “I called you back but you didn’t pick up so I thought I’d just come over directly. We have to go pick up Innocent at the hospital. He is going to be OK!” Elbe was now beaming with the great news. “The doctor said that this type of viral infection can be treated with mostly rest and absolutely no stress. As long as he rests, he should be fine.”

  Francine’s heart lept for her son, for the first time ever. This surge of emotion surprised her, for even when he had taken his first breath, she had felt nothing more than the rush of adrenaline that came with physical pain.

  Francine entered Elbe’s car and sat quietly in the passenger seat watching the houses moving on by as they drove quietly back from the hospital. The roads were still white but it had stopped snowing. Francine liked Elbe’s silence and how she knew enough not to force her way inside the dark corner of Francine’s head. She wanted to sit with this newfound feeling of love she now felt for Innocent. Her prayers had been answered and yet, she was afraid that this love which had just seemingly appeared in her heart would somehow be taken away just as easily as it been given. He giveth and he taketh away.

  Elbe pulled the car over in front of a store.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said running inside Abdo’s Grocery.

  Sometimes Francine caught a glimpse of herself as if she were observing her own life from the outside. She could see her own reflection sitting in this car, in this small city, in a country that was not her own. She thought about the quality of light in this new country and how sad and gray everything was around her making her feel like God had left this place long ago. Yet the love she had felt just moments ago when Elbe had told her that Innocent would be fine told her otherwise. Francine looked at the bit of snow that had accumulated overnight on the ground. Before coming here, she had never expereinced snow. Of course, she’d seen pictures, strange and beautiful but nothing that even came close to the stark reality of this new life in cold country. How many times had she tried to visualize this snowy landscape when she was still in the camps in Africa? She would close her eyes and imagine herself in a large field with snow everywhere. Now, she didn’t have to imagine it, the cold was all around her, a deep cold that settled in her bones.

  Elbe returned with a triumphant look on her face, holding a pint of ice cream in her hands.

  “This is not exactly an ice cream cone, but I promised Innocent he would get ice cream. Ice cream he will get!” Francine was moved by Elbe’s kindness towards this child she herself was learning to love for the first time.

  When they arrived at the hospital, Francine saw him before he noticed her. How small her boy seemed in that hospital bed, with a tube coming out of his arm. The doctors had put him in Pediatrics, on the third floor. The room was crowded with two other beds occupied by another sick child with IVs and oxygen and all kinds of bandages around his head. There was also another boy Innocent’s age who seemed to be sleeping deeply. Francine walked in while Elbe waited on the other side of the glass window, in the hallway.

  Innocent’s face lit up upon seeing his mother.

  “Bonjour Innocent,” Francine said to her son a bit more formally than she had hoped. She knew she would need to unlearn the distance that had settled between them as a matter of habit for the last four years since her son’s birth. In many ways, Francine felt as if she were meeting her own child for the very first time. Francine conjured the love she felt for her departed daughter Mélanie, the love she felt for her son Christian and her husband Fidèle. She could feel it hovering above them in this sanitized room, in this strange country, governed by an unfamiliar season and she leaned down and embraced Innocent. Francine could not remember the time when she had touched her boy in this way. A touch beyond necessity. She buried her nose in the crux of his neck and for the first time since they had vanished, she smelled the others on him. Innocent smelled like her other babies, like the baby boy that he was, a cross between caramel and freshly-washed cotton.

  On rentre à la maison? “Shall we go home?” She asked her son.

  He nodded and smiled.

  Beyond the glass, Elbe was beaming as she brandished the pint of ice cream in her hand. Innocent’s face lit up and pushed the covers off him with excitement.

  In spite of the distance between them, Francine could see that Elbe was crying.

  Chapter 16 – Elbe

  I walked in the door of my apartment and felt myself vanishing quickly until I became narrow, a thread so thin, a filament that passed throu
gh the world unnoticed. This feeling of strangeness was the same I felt when I would sometimes say my own name over and over again until its syllables lost all meaning. When I looked at my face in the mirror, I erased myself trying to find meaning in my own genetic pool. No one around had ever looked like me—except in ninth grade, when a boy came to our school from Peru and all of a sudden, everyone asked me if we were siblings. I didn’t see the resemblance, but everyone around me did. It was the black hair they said. Hair so black, it’s hard to believe you wash it sometimes. Peru. The Indians of the Americas. We became relatives of strangeness.

  I sat down on the couch and examined my life. I knew that I had no friends. This was not something I liked to admit, but it was a fact. I wanted nothing. I remembered given up on the false comfort of acquaintances back at the end of high school. When I entered college, I pared down, seeking only that which I knew. And since I knew so little about myself, I sought almost nothing from other people.

  I’d asked my mother about the circumstances of my birth, and she told me all that she knew which was very little. My biological mother was young. A full-blooded Lakota, she lived on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. And in the place where my father’s name should have appeared on my birth certificate, it said unknown.

  I spent years imagining him in countless forms. In the week after my mother told me those few facts about my birth for the first time, I imagined my father as a pirate, a traveling man who sailed the seas. He’d met my mother in a secret port. I knew nothing of South Dakota in those days of my childhood when I first learned that I was adopted. I did not realize that South Dakota is landlocked and imagined my father to be a man of the seas; his long dark beard covering the paleness of his face. The first father I imagined was white, a Southern-looking pirate from Spain or Portugal. For a long time, this is the only way I was able to imagine the world, a place discovered by a white man from the European continent.

  For the first time in my life, I thought about how continents are not discovered but conquered. I thought about the existence of my twin sister, another one of me, waiting for me somewhere on the other side of the world.

  **

  When the phone rang, I felt as I always do when the outside world tries to pierce through my cocoon: anxious. A rattling. Over the years, I’ve learned to force myself to answer the phone.

  “Bonjour, Elbe?” a man’s voice was on the other end. He spoke French with an accent and I barely recognized the pronunciation of my name. Elbé with an accent at the end.

  “Oui?”

  “Bonjour, c’est Jean de Dieu ici à l’appareil.” It was Francine’s husband.

  “Oui, bonjour!” I tried to sound cheerful, civil. Through the years, I had forced myself to be more civilized, to sound more human than I felt. Jean de Dieu was talking on the other end. Something about a dinner invitation to thank me for all the kindness. I accepted even though I didn’t know what he was referring to exactly. I had accepted this volunteer thing as a filler. Like everything else in my life, it was a reprieve from the hole I felt inside at all times.

  Francine opened the door, smiling broadly showing the white of her teeth. I walked in. Her home smelled delicious, a mix of onions, garlic, and something else: meat of some kind, roasted, or fried. Francine moved towards me, unexpectedly and for a second I was thrown off balance by her gesture. She took me in her arms and kissed me twice on each cheek. My body bounced and swayed trying to follow her cue awkwardly. She laughed. I laughed with her. Innocent came bounding from around the corner and ran to me wrapping his tiny arms around the breadth of my legs. “Ice cream lady! Ice cream lady!”he yelled before scurrying away.

  I felt oddly tall and large in this house filled with family.

  Jean de Dieu came from the living room and greeted me shaking my hand.

  “Bienvenue chez nous!” He welcomed me into their home.

  I sat in the living room; we exchanged smiles. Francine disappeared into the kitchen. I tried to remove myself from the immediacy of this moment. I thought about the strange trajectory I’d made so far. A constellation of planets had pulled me into their orbit, and now I didn’t know where to turn. I was sitting there in this unfamiliar home and my usual cues of the white world I knew by heart had been discarded.

  An elderly woman came into the room and Jean de Dieu got up to help her make her way into the room. Her hands were small fragile, and brittle, like crystallized wood grasping her cane like a claw. She inched her way across the floor, paused halfway, looked up at me and smiled, a toothless grin. She looked a century old. Instinctively, I felt the urge to stand, to show her the respect she deserved for having been on this earth so long. How could anyone live that long? I remained standing. I wanted to go to her but I was an outsider. I had nothing to offer. I smiled. Jean de Dieu helped her make her way safely across the floor, next to me on the couch. When she finally sat, she let out a deep breath and turned to me again with her smile. Her eyes were smiling more than her mouth and I felt instant warmth pouring out of this stranger. Something released inside me, as if a wedged piece of grief deep inside me had suddenly been freed. I wished this woman could hold me, cradle me like a baby. I felt tears welling up inside me, but I had mastered the art of pushing back emotion, and the tears returned in their place forming a tight ball at the base of my throat.

  “This is Maman Elaine, my grandmother,” said Jean de Dieu. Francine had told me about Maman Elaine and how, a few months after the genocide, they found out she was alive and initiated the immigration visa process as soon as they had settled in Syracuse. Maman Elaine took my hand in hers. It was as soft as I expected it to be soft like silken paper or parchment, smooth and warm. I held onto her tightly. Her grip was firm. We sat like this quietly. She smiling, me holding back the tears. I didn’t know what to say, I wanted to talk about the usual, the weather, work, the kids, the house in order to anchor me through the grief dislodging itself inside of me but I could not muster the strength to pretend anymore. Innocent sat next to me on his chair, too big for him, feet dangling, giggling as he looked up at me, smiling.

  The house was pulling me inside it. A part of me wanted out of this unraveling. If I could slip out and away from this family’s entanglements, I could remain intact. I looked outside. The moon hung low and full in the sky. It was full and pregnant with its young hanging low, read to be birthed. Francine came back in for a moment, four girls came in with her. She was in a hurry, wanted to make contact. Francine pointed to each one in turn and said their names. “Sophie,” she said placing her open palm on the top of an eight-year-old. “Devota,” Francine said again pointing to a smaller version of the first child. “And these are Angélique and Sylvie.” The last two girls were maybe six and eight years old, respectively—a perfect replica of Francine’s fine chiseled features. Then came the boy Michel whose tootless smiles brought me out of the density of the flood of my emotions.

  “Ça va? Veux-tu quelque chose à boire?” Something to drink? I accepted soda. She came back running into the kitchen. Jean de Dieu was sitting across from me and Angélique, Sophie, and Sylvie were now sitting with us too.

  There was so much I wanted to know about Francine and her family, so much I wanted to say.

  If fait très froid. “It’s very cold outside,” I said unable to unravel the undercurrents between us.

  Oui, nous n’avons pas l’habitude. “Yes, we are not used to it,” Jean de Dieu responded.

  I tried to imagine Africa. I was afraid to even bring up the place where they came from, it was a taboo subject. I knew they were exiled. Did they want to talk about the place from which they fled?

  L’humidite, la chaleur… Jean de Dieu told me about the heat and the humidity of the Congo. We remained with the topic of climates and fluctuating temperatures.

  Il va neiger bientôt. “It will snow soon.” I told them. They smiled. I told the girls that I could take them sledding. I made the gesture to describe it because I had forgotten the word in French
. They giggled, having no idea what I was talking about.

  We were each holding the world we knew in our minds on our open palm so we could share it with each other. Their world was unfamiliar: vast, moist, and warm, with large insects and the persecution of people. What about my world? How could it be reduced to a handful of images? Adopted. White hands holding me as a baby. The snowy mountains of Vermont.