It thundered a lot in those days. Every time we heard an explosion Pudi said, That’s thunder, and when I looked confused he added, Haven’t you heard thunder when it’s not raining? He told me that if anything worse than thunder happened, I should climb up into the space between the ceiling and the roof. It would take a long time for anybody to find me there.
My parents’ faces turned into faces I had never seen. I heard noises that I did not understand—not screaming, worse. My mother cried again. My parents whispered and I eavesdropped. I heard them say that some robbers had ransacked yet another neighbor’s house. They stole their money, tore their pictures from the walls, destroyed their furniture and lit it on fire. They nailed a note to the front door saying they’d soon return for their girls.
* * *
Then one day my mother told me and Claire to pack a few things to go to my grandmother’s farm in Butare, a few hours south, toward the Burundi border. Claire loved it there and I loved it there and we revered our grandmother. She lived in an adobe-style house with small windows, a thatched roof, and rows and rows of sunflowers behind it—a house out of a fairy tale. I felt free there and never wore shoes. After the previous war, my grandmother had returned to her land with her five children, including my mother, the second daughter. My grandfather had stayed behind in Uganda.
A friend of my father’s arrived in a van early the next morning. It was still dark. I wanted to show my grandmother a ceramic mug I’d made at school. I asked my mother to take it off the shelf where she kept our artwork, but she insisted I leave it behind. I was furious. My mother didn’t care. She just handed me a bag of clothes and put me in the van alongside Claire and made me promise to behave. As we left she said, “Please do not talk.”
On the way out of Kigali, we stopped to pick up two of my cousins, girls Claire’s age. Their father, my uncle, was the one who had died but had not been called to God. The driver knocked on the door. Nobody came out. We stopped at other houses; other girls entered the van.
We all squished together in the middle of the bench seats, away from the windows. Sometimes we crouched on the floor. We rode up and over the hills, the curved slopes soft, like a body, past the stands of trees, the rice paddies, the hibiscus flowers, the homes with the red roofs and the homes with the tin roofs, the university.
The ride took forever. Claire insisted we play the silent game whenever I asked a question. We didn’t eat kabobs or buy the soap that we always brought to my grandmother as a gift. We didn’t even stop to use the bathroom.
In Butare, when we arrived, some of my cousins were already in my grandmother’s kitchen, the older girls peeling potatoes like city girls—not well. I idolized these cousins, their black freckles and fancy clothes. Now my grandmother circled my cousins like a lion, livid, determined to keep her pride safe and together. Earlier that day they’d snuck out of her house and walked down the red dirt road to borrow a neighbor’s dry-skin lotion.
Every hour I demanded an update on when my parents were coming, or at least my brother, Pudi. I missed him. My grandmother, cousins, and sister all just said, “Soon.” Nobody would play with me. I felt outraged at my mistreatment. I stopped eating and bathing and refused to let anyone touch my hair. After a few nights my grandmother took me, Claire, and my cousins to a different house to sleep.
The following night she took us outside and told us to climb inside the deep pit in the ground reserved for burying the wooden cask she used to make banana wine. Colors and sounds bloomed, then exploded around me. I didn’t sleep.
* * *
When it happened, we heard a knock on the door. My grandmother gestured for us to be silent—checkeka checkeka checkeka. Then she motioned for us to run, or really to belly-crawl, out past the beaming sunflowers through the sweet potato field.
I carried a rainbow blanket, which turned out to be a towel. Claire pulled my arm. The earth felt soft and lumpy, a bucket of broken chalk. Once we reached the tall trees we ran, for real, off the farm, out of the ordered rows, and deep into a thick banana grove, where we saw other people, most of them young, some of them bloody with wounds.
I had so many questions. The cuts looked too large, too difficult to accomplish, gaping mouths on midnight skin. Claire shut down. It could have been a second, it could have been forever.
We walked for hours, until everything hurt, not toward anything, just away. We rubbed the red-brown mud and eucalyptus leaves on our bodies so we could disappear. Prickers grated my ankles. We walked up and over and around and down, so many hills. We heard laughing and screaming and pleading and crying and then cruel laughing again.
I didn’t know how to name the noises. They were human and not human. I never learned the right words in Kinyarwanda. I hope they don’t exist. But without words my mind had no way to define or understand the awful sounds, nowhere to store them in my brain. It was cold and green and wet and then bushes and my legs were shaking and eyes, so many eyes.
My thoughts and senses became jumbled. Time felt hot. Silence was dizzying. My fear was bright blue.
* * *
We needed to listen, so we avoided roads and walked instead only on the little paths animals used to pass through the scrub. If we heard any noise we crouched and froze.
Claire’s face—I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t look at her eyes. We stopped and knelt by a stream to drink. I started to shiver, despite the heat. I said to Claire, “I want to go home.” She stood up, pulled my wrist, and said, “We can’t stay here. Other people will come.”
I held on to Claire’s shirt, too exhausted to hold hands. We passed a few people. One woman tried to give us food, but we were too afraid to take it. You could tell who was running from their swollen feet, the rips in their clothes, their bleeding knees.
A man told us he knew the way to safety. We followed him to the Burundi border, to the Akanyaru River. There were bodies floating in it. I still didn’t understand what killing was. To me, the people in the river were sleeping. People in water sleeping and sleeping. That’s all I knew.
We walked until late afternoon, almost dusk. We didn’t know where we were going—just to the next hill and then the hill after that and then the hill after that and then across another river. We saw more bodies, sleeping and sleeping. I stopped thinking about my feet and worried about finding a place to rest.
That night the world ripped in two. The sky opened and out gushed a rain so heavy and complete there was no point trying to hide from it. Thunder shook the earth and made our legs wobble. We were pelted by hail.
For a while I could hear Claire asking God why this needed to be happening, why he was testing us this way. But then she stopped. Our mother had told us that hell was a fire that never ends, and that this hellfire was fed by the wood and charcoal of each of our sins. This was hell, clearly, but the wrong hell. Claire stopped speaking aloud to God.
Near dawn we found a house with its front door ripped off. The place was the darkest bedlam, the detritus from its own storm. We hid under the bed all day.
All my toenails fell out. We lived on fruit. Days were for hiding, nights for walking. I thought I was one hundred years old. I thought I was the thunder’s child. I had always wanted to be Claire’s age or my mother’s. I knew I was six. Age made no sense anymore.
* * *
I held on to my towel. I looked out for stray dogs. We found a school, a long narrow building with a row of tiny open windows across its front. The school had a playground—that felt comforting. Other people were hiding inside the school. The people’s faces were all eyes—wide, scared, wild, sharp. The windows had no panes and no shutters, and I wished they did.
We stayed in the school all afternoon. A woman began crying in agony. She could not stop. At dusk, the sky turned bright orange. Pudi had told me the sky turned that color when a nun or priest died. We left at dark to walk. The crickets were so loud.
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After days, a week—I could not keep track—we found a cornfield where we heard children playing. Their cries now sounded exotic to me, as the whole world had changed. Claire and I exchanged no words. Our mouths, our bodies, had gone mute. Only our eyes still could speak and even then only in bursts. I could see, and then I stopped seeing, the lights flickering in my mind. We crouched down to hide among the giant cornstalks. We each shucked a few cobs and tried to eat the kernels. They tasted like paste from school.
Claire decided that we needed to find the playing children’s parents, so we left the field and started walking down a red-brown dirt road. We saw some farmers. Claire approached a woman, her leathered skin loose and pleated over her strong arms. Claire told her that we’d come from over the hill.
The woman asked Claire about our family. Claire’s eyes did not flicker. She said, “Our family will follow soon.”
The woman accepted this non-explanation. She sensed there would be no real answer. She said she’d keep us until our parents arrived. Then she whistled to some men cutting sugarcane across the road. They gave us thick, sweet lengths and plastic bottles of water and stared at us like we’d risen from the dead.
I felt ripped out of the ground—not ready to be transplanted, just destroyed.
“You can’t trust anyone,” Claire whispered. “Don’t tell her anything.”
* * *
The woman took us to her one-room hut, where she slept with her husband and four children on a bed of straw. They were so poor. They had their corn, a few sweet potatoes, and a line of pineapple trees. They farmed, kept a portion of the food for themselves, and sold the rest, which was not much, to the ministry down the road.
All night I itched. In the morning I woke with welts and the woman’s children laughed at me for not knowing what lice were.
We stayed there, working in the fields and eating boiled corn and sweet potatoes with no oil or salt—the worst cooked food I’d ever consumed. We slept when their kids slept and ate when their kids ate. The fields were in a valley and the hut was on a hill, so when we finished farming we ran up to the hut to watch the road. I imagined my mother or my father or my grandmother coming. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore. I only knew lives like this existed from stories—lives without mattresses, lives with rats. I was ready to be found, ready to go, not to live like this.
After a few weeks, we saw people walking down the roads, hundreds, maybe thousands, carrying bags, children, baskets. One man carried a dog. Claire decided we needed to join them.
“What if you go and you don’t find anything?” the hut mother asked. She wrapped some sweet potatoes in a sweater and handed it to Claire.
Claire said, “We need to go.”
* * *
It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.
We kept walking, now with this crowd. Through forests and up hills that felt like mountains. The sound of the group was the sound of children crying for their mothers. Mama. Ma-MA. Mama mama mama. I did not say it myself. I did not dare. That sound filled my brain and never drained.
We walked, this mass of desperation, no longer distinct people. We walked until we stopped and fell asleep. While trying to sleep I heard people asking, “Have you seen my daughter?” “Do you know Umutoni?” It was so loud.
We walked over a hill, through a forest, to a large clearing, or what became a clearing when our mass pushed down the young limber trees. We stopped there. The adults decided this would be our home. You could walk a mile and find a stream of water. You could walk toward town and ask the farmers to share whatever they had, though they also had nothing. If they were not there you took a few sweet potatoes or some corn, and in return you left a sweet potato vine or a shirt, to let the farmer know that you recognized taking his food was wrong. You’d just run out of choices.
The crying. The moaning. The faces. The expressions of pain. I did not ask questions. I was glad we did not have a mirror. I wanted to think I still had the same face.
The clearing became a colony and people started dying. I had never seen that many flies and bugs of all kinds, day in and day out. Cholera, dysentery, infected wounds. People bonded together into groups for safety. You have daughters, I have daughters. You’re young, we’re young. Nobody spoke of the past or the future. Time balled up into a knot.
We stuck with the young people with daughters and moved across the clearing when our patch turned to mud.
* * *
One night I woke up. The stars and the moon glowed as though nothing bad had occurred. Bodies were scattered everywhere, lifeless, yet alive.
I tiptoed away to pee and when I returned I couldn’t find Claire. She always slept on her side with her elbow folded under her ear. I couldn’t find her shape. I moved from one body to the next, crouching down, tapping faces.
I woke a woman with her head resting on a kanga cloth, her cotton blouse the same color as the dirt. She had a young baby. I asked her to help me find my sister.
She patted her kanga. Sleep here, she said. Let’s wait for daylight.
I shook my head, refused.
She stood up, collected her baby, and walked with me around the clusters of bodies. We didn’t find Claire. I cried until I felt empty and I thought of all the bad things that might happen to me if I did not find my sister. I would be an orphan. I would be forever lost. No one would know that I wanted the bathrobe with the buttons. No one would know that Mukamana had to sing me a song to get me to brush my teeth.
The woman with the dirt-red shirt and the baby was so bone-tired and calm. She tried her best to help me understand that I would see Claire again. We sat—me, this calm woman, and her baby—until first light.
When I saw Claire walking toward me, she looked puzzled and sad. I flew to her side. She shook me and screamed to never, ever go anywhere without her. I nodded yes.
2
I have almost no photographs, no relics or mementos, to commemorate the gruesomeness and beauty of the days, months, and years Claire and I spent trying to survive. When we arrived in the United States, at O’Hare International Airport, we landed with nothing. The airline had lost our one suitcase. This had happened so many times: We’d lost everything. We’d been stripped, repeatedly, down to the skin.
That bag—big, black, soft-shelled—still haunts me. The suitcase was the product of so much struggle, and it contained everything Claire had worked so hard to provide: her kids’ clothes, my favorite red sweater and my skirt with the buttons down the front, the plastic photo album Claire started in South Africa when Mariette, my niece, was a baby and we, very briefly, felt rich. Several photos in that album were of Mariette’s birthdays, the date I used to measure time, as nobody celebrated my birthdays anymore. One photo in the album shows us at a water park in Durban, South Africa. Rob, the ex–CARE worker my sister married, is holding Mariette, and you can see fountains in the background, water droplets glinting in the sunlight. We look like a happy family.
The loss, the lights—the neon American colors overtook my senses, including my senses of reality and history, and the colors of Africa started to fade. My past receded, grew washed-out, jumbled, and distorted. I could no longer discern what was real and what was fake. Everything, including the present, seemed to be both too much and nothing at all. Time, once again, refused to move in an orderly fashion; the pages of the book lay scattered, unbound. This still happens to me: My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating.
To make sense of my life, to reestablish a linear time line, I collect primary sources. I document myself. I collect and catalog detritus, junk: loose beads, old maps,
stray toys, nice plastic bags, ticket stubs, buttons, paperbacks filled with marginalia. Often I travel with my katundu, my stuff: my pillow, my blue blanket, a candle to make the room smell like a home.
I wish I still had the mug my mother refused to let me take to my grandmother’s house. In its place, I often look at the diamond heart necklace Mrs. Thomas gave me for my twenty-first birthday. It’s an heirloom, the only one I have. Mrs. Thomas inherited it from her grandmother. When Mrs. Thomas first fastened it around my neck, she cried and I felt loved and soothed by her crying. I thought to myself: This is belonging. I’m not just a person who lives with somebody. I belong here.
I keep, too, a gift my mother bought for me at her neighborhood Dollar Store for my twenty-fifth birthday: a small rectangular mirror pre-inscribed with a poem to a daughter. I will always love you / For forever and a day / You’re the meaning in my life / And precious you will stay.
I keep photocopies of pages from other people’s scrapbooks: images of me, wearing too-small borrowed clothes; me, standing next to the son of the American family who first hosted us. He’s wearing, with no irony, a T-shirt that says I SURVIVED BASKETBALL CAMP. I keep museum handbooks, like the one I have on Rwandan basket weaving. I keep a My Little Pony that belonged to Claire’s youngest daughter. I once put the toy in my bag by mistake when I was cleaning Claire’s house.
My katundu is my ballast, exogenous memory, my solace, my hope. Some part of me believes that if I can just find the right arrangement of the pieces—if I can string all the beads in the right order, situate them in the right light—I can create a narrative of my life that looks beautiful to me and makes sense.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 3