* * *
People holding “Welcome to America” signs were walking toward us. I was twelve. Claire was twenty-one. We stood erect and dazed as this bright white couple hugged the five of us: me, Claire, Rob, Mariette, age four, and Freddy, Claire’s second child, age two. The couple had balloons for Mariette, Freddy, and me, the supposed children. They gave Claire and Rob $100 gift cards for Old Navy.
Claire and I had lived in seven different countries since leaving Rwanda. The United States was our eighth. I was callous and cynical. I didn’t trust kindness; I believed it came with a price. I thought I could fool people into thinking that I was not profoundly bruised.
We just stared at our hosts—this middle-aged Germanic woman with short, curly blond hair and her skinny husband. They held a paper with our names. Their car smelled new. Their shampoo smelled like plumeria. There was so much concrete. I hadn’t seen my mother in six years.
The moving car, my hands—it all felt weird and weightless, like we were still in the air, drifting, no obvious flight path. Just thirty hours before, we had been living in a slum in Zambia, one so poor that, when I returned to visit the place with Claire, seventeen years later, I jumped out of the taxi enraged.
My adult, credentialed, certifiably valuable self wanted to make the shoeless children there feel valuable too. So, against Claire’s protest, I leapt from our air-conditioned cab into the heat and passed out a few sticks of gum from my purse.
This was a terrible idea. Claire knew it and I knew it too, though I’d blocked it from my mind. When those children’s parents saw me, a wealthy-looking black stranger, giving their kids candy, they grabbed their children, scolded them, and marched them off, sure that my gift was the first move in a power play. I had been one of those kids, poor and living in that place, and I had never taken candy, not once. Candy was far too costly.
* * *
But now we were here, in Chicago, with our balloons and the concrete. We were happy, or we knew we were supposed to be. We’d seen the movies. America the Gleaming.
Claire still had her smooth shiny skin, her wide smile, her eyes that look slightly more alive than everybody else’s, her ability to bond with a stranger in thirty seconds, and her mirror talent of holding those close to her at bay.
She had heard Chicago was cold, so before we left Lusaka she’d bought us all puffy jackets. She had mastered the Zambian market. You could approach her in the morning and tell her you needed an ounce of gold, come back three hours later, and she’d have it done.
But now it was August in Illinois, steamy, and by the time Michele Becker, the short-haired Germanic woman, dropped all of us off at her pastor’s house, on a leafy paved road in suburban Glenview, we were slick with sweat.
The pastor and his wife set up neat, comfortable beds for us in the basement—you sleep here and you sleep here and there are the towels. They covered their dining table with barbecued chicken, mushroom pizza, pepperoni pizza, salad, ribs, platters of fruit. Everyone was so nice, awash in a sense of purpose. But I was so bruised and so mistrustful of others that I didn’t understand why.
I noticed that our new American sponsors hugged a lot. Claire and I didn’t hug. I didn’t hug Mariette or Freddy either, though I loved them and considered them my own and did everything in my power to keep them alive. Taking care of loved ones in my world was not based on affection. It was based on the fear of losing them.
* * *
We lived with the Beasley family, in suburban Glenview, for three months. Claire was pregnant again. Despite it all, she was a charming young pregnant wife, her hair tied in a knot on top of her head like a fluffy crown. Mariette was an innocent little girl. Freddy was a toddler. I was…what? A teenager.
The Beasleys had a daughter, Sarah, who was thirteen. She smiled at me and gave me a yellow bag with sunflowers on it and body lotion and wash inside. I used only a little bit at a time. I wanted it to last.
The Beckers, who first picked us up at the airport, had a daughter too, Julia, who was eleven. I didn’t understand either her or Sarah. I didn’t understand the way they laughed—they laughed at everything. They let their mothers do the chores. They spent their money on Smack lip balm. They talked to each other’s parents so smoothly, with so few boundaries. Sarah said, “Hi, Michele!” to Julia’s mother, no honorific. I could not connect.
Sarah had her own room. Both she and Julia wanted to make me comfortable, a thankless task. They planned a sleepover, then fluffed up the best pillow and gave it to me, and somehow that gesture, that fluffing, made them seem weak and silly in my eyes. I was so contemptuous, so defended, so easy to give to and difficult to please.
I could not relax. Claire could not relax. Neither of us had any ability to enjoy this plush new world. We’d worked so hard and run so far, only to go in a giant perverse circle. Now we were here. The Beasleys allowed us to do the dishes. That one chore, that was it. We were slipping, losing power in the unspoken economy, or so we thought. Claire made no money; she had always made money. Now Claire, with her too-alive eyes, watched cars go by.
In the middle of that first night in the pastor’s house, when I woke to go to the bathroom, I climbed the stairs, opened the refrigerator, and stared. I’d seen huge refrigerators like this one only in magazines and on TV. I was amazed and impressed, and I could not stop thinking that if our neighbors in the slum in Zambia could see this, they’d be so appalled. How could one place have such excess while in another, just a plane ride away, people starved? Freddy had twiggy arms and a big round tummy from being malnourished. His body, here, now, would be fed and fixed. There were so many Freddys in this world.
My mind began toggling: This is my life but this is not my life. I deserve this now because I suffered. But then my mind ground to a halt. Had all the people who ate out of refrigerators like this suffered too?
* * *
Everybody wanted me to relax, to stop worrying about Claire’s kids, to quit cleaning obsessively, to behave, at long last, like a child and start making up for all I’d lost. I was twelve years old but felt instead three years old and fifty years old, yet I knew I had to fit in. The other girls my age wore short shorts, so I wore short shorts too. But I could not be like them, languid and carefree. I had no feel for the concept of physical ease, not in any language. I raged with envy and anger and often I confused the two.
* * *
One day when I was sitting on the lawn, watching cars go by, Mrs. Becker, who lived across the street, opened her garage. The space was dusty and overflowing with sports gear, folding chairs, lawn tools, paint cans, ladders, cardboard boxes.
I hauled everything out and placed it in the driveway, then swept the concrete floor, wiped down all the surfaces, restacked the boxes, and organized the gear. I found hooks on which to hang the ladders and chairs. The whole time Mrs. Becker kept saying, “Clemantine, non.” I knew almost no English and not that much French, and could read only wealth in the detritus of their lives.
The kindness and gift-giving was overwhelming. Congregants at the Church of the Redeemer brought over secondhand clothes, books, toys for Claire’s kids. Everybody wanted to help us. It made them feel good. I understand and respect that now, but I was only a few weeks out of the Zambia slum. Generosity was suspect and nothing made sense.
One day after breakfast, Mrs. Beasley drew a picture of a house on a piece of paper. Then she slid it across the kitchen table to me, along with a box of crayons, so that I could show her what my home in Rwanda had looked like.
I did not cooperate. I could not. I did not feel, not yet, that she knew what she was asking of me. I did not want to scratch back through my memory. I did not even really know how to access that once-safe place with the outdoor kitchen, the red roof, the birds-of-paradise. Nostalgia was a destructive exercise, a jab at a still-tender wound, stitched up poorly.
Claire and I talked about nothing, not e
ver. To say I missed our childhood home would have felt perverse, like telling her that I missed wearing my baby shoes. Claire’s lone concession to a yearned-for past was a desire to eat ugali, the thick cornmeal porridge we’d eaten so often in the past six years. Ugali, Claire told herself, was not memory but sustenance. Ugali was power: We made a little money, okay, so we are not going to starve today. Mrs. Beasley drove us into the city, to the World Market, which catered to Chicago’s African and Latin American immigrants. The cassava and groundnut powder there seemed to make Claire, for a minute, feel whole.
Back in Glenview, Claire cooked her ugali. She stood at the stove with her belly and stirred. “If you don’t eat ugali,” Claire said to me in Swahili when she served it, “you haven’t eaten.”
3
The farmers in Burundi must have complained. We needed too much. We now stole food and left nothing—we had nothing to give.
One day a Red Cross truck arrived. The authority felt reassuring. The driver of the truck invited pregnant women and the wounded to sit in the back. He told the rest of us to follow on foot. We were just a mass, a herd. We walked for almost a whole day before we arrived in Ngozi, at two hills covered with blue-and-white tents.
I joined the unhinged singing of names, wailing, “Pudi! PU-DI!,” sure my brother would be here. Dozens of men worked as guards, and they corralled me back in line, next to Claire. These men only had to bark a few orders to establish their power. They looked just like us, but we were desperate, they were not. We did as told.
When we reached the front of the queue, a woman grabbed my hand and pushed it deep into a bucket of purple ink. The dye on my hand meant that I had been counted. Nobody asked my name—too many people for names. Nobody cared that I was six. Claire and I were given a tent, two water jugs, two scratchy blankets, a large plastic bag, and a pot.
A man pointed to the part of the hill where we should pitch our tent, then to the hollow between the two hills where we were to stand in line, once a month, to fill our plastic bag with maize and beans. The camp bathroom was located near the ditch that aid workers dug for dead bodies. I was afraid to go; Claire was not.
For a few hours I remained giddy. Of course we’d find our parents here. Then I looked around. Hundreds of sick on the ground, moaning. Dozens of wounded, yelling. Our tent was one in a square of twelve other tents. There was a stove, if you could call it that, in the middle. Squares of tents like ours—units—stretched out in every direction.
* * *
I lost track of who I was. I’d become a negative, a receptacle of need. I was hungry, I was thirsty, I needed a bathroom, I needed a place to sleep. I was so confused. I just kept spinning. How did I get here, where I am a nobody? We walked all this way, for this?
Everywhere you looked you saw people turned to stone. If you touched them, they’d crumble to dust. So they remained still and silent, trying not to shatter. You cannot tell the story: I lost my children, husband, my whole family—I have no idea where on earth I am.
* * *
Staying alive was so much work. We had to wait five hours in line for maize and five hours again for beans. We had to fetch firewood. No one had matches, so just lighting a fire was a chore. You had to look out for smoke and when you saw some you walked over there, with some kindling, to carry the flames back to your unit.
You had to remember your unit number—not a given at age six.
You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try to stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which also was a number. If you died, no one knew. If you got lost, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew.
I started telling people, I’m Clemantine, I’m Clemantine, I’m Clemantine! I don’t want to be lost. I’m Clemantine!
I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place. I wrote my name in the dirt. I wrote my name in the dust. But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.
I lost myself anyway. Every little thing. I had always loved the fancy soaps at my aunts’ houses. I loved the ones that smelled like geranium and lilac best of all. Now we had no toilet paper. Nobody in the camp had toilet paper. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, had apparently decided that human dignity was expendable. There were too many of us to try.
I hunted for soft leaves—young iridescent eucalyptus. I smoothed them flat and kept them hidden in a corner of our tent. Everybody who had not given up entirely kept a secret stash. We all walked around with leaves in our pockets and did each other the courtesy of pretending not to see.
* * *
I felt lice crawling down my neck, out of my hair, toward my ears. I watched people sitting by their tents for hours, picking bugs out of the hems of their clothes. The lice in your clothes are smaller and harder to kill than the lice in your hair. I checked my seams—the waistband of my purple skirt, the cuffs of my red sweater. I found hundreds, maybe thousands, entire dystopic kingdoms.
When it was cold for a day or two, I forgot about the lice for a few moments. But when it was hot I was obsessed. Not even my body was mine. My hair was blitzed and occupied. My bed was blitzed and occupied. Same with my clothes. The eggs were everywhere. More were coming. They were coming. There was no winning.
So I surrendered. I sank back into the sea of degradation. Claire walked me over to a man in camp who had a razor, and he shaved my head. Almost all the kids in the camp were bald. I had not wanted to be like them. I wanted to be special. I cried for days.
Every surface, every body part, was a battleground in the struggle to remain a person. I missed my mother most when I bathed. Claire wouldn’t help me. I couldn’t reach a spot on my back. Along with the lice on our heads, a whole other species of bugs burrowed into our feet. We waged a hopeless war against them. Our only possible strategy to win was impossible: keep our feet clean.
Claire found a big flat rock and placed it by our tent. Each morning we took turns standing on that rock and using the water left over from doing dishes the night before to scrub our feet. While still on the rock we put on our shoes. Then we spent the rest of the day trying to keep our feet from touching the larva-filled dirt. We failed, every day. How could we not fail? Our lives were structured for defeat. Our shoes were destroyed. We lived outdoors. Once the bugs had burrowed into your feet, you couldn’t walk for days. You had to take a pin, if you could find one, and dig them out. If you couldn’t reach them, or if you left a bug’s head in your flesh by mistake, you had to soak your feet in ashes and salt water. If you could find any salt.
If the bugs remained, they multiplied. They tunneled to neighboring patches of skin. Once this happened, you spiked a fever. Good luck to the refugee who got sick.
* * *
The maize was gray, and hard as pebbles. It was nearly impossible to cook.
Our stove consisted of three cinder blocks with a clay cylinder built around them. You stuffed firewood in the holes inside. I was the lowest-ranking responsible person in our unit, so I was given an important, miserable job: watching the pot on the stove and adding water to the maize and wood to the fire, for four, six, eight hours on end. The stove put out so much smoke that I was scared I would go blind.
But I did not want to see anguished, angry eyes staring at me. I was vigilant and never once burned the food. We had no plates. We ate off the lids of the pots as platters. All the choices for how to consume the maize were bad. If you ate it right away, the maize burned your fingers. If you let it cool, the maize hurt your jaw to chew. It hardened completely, within fifteen minutes, as if it had never been cooked. The maize had no aroma and no flavor. I hated it and wanted to boycott meals. But if I didn’t
eat, my stomach growled all day.
* * *
I made a list of things to cry about, so that if someone said, “Why are you crying?” I’d have something to say. My stomach hurts, I had a bad dream, I miss my mother, that older boy is making fun of me.
I did not usually know why I was crying. I did not know that I was not going back. Most of the people in the camp were poor farmers from southern Rwanda and Burundi. They knew they weren’t going home soon. We were privileged—abakire. In Kigali, I had a TV. My father had cars. Here I had a sister who was indomitable, even if she resented me. Their fate was not mine.
People didn’t like us very much. We were the rich girls, we had so much to learn. All the small luxuries of city life, the table manners, the cut flowers, Claire’s dream of going to McGill—all that was useless.
We didn’t want to tell people our parents weren’t around. When asked, Claire said, “They aren’t currently with us right now.” In response everyone said, “Mana yanjye we!”—my God, how poor, how heartbreaking! They looked not straight across but up and down on us.
When I was not cooking I sat on a rock and watched people coming into the camp, their faces slack with defeat and relief. I no longer had hope. I didn’t expect to see my mother’s hair, plush and wavy. I didn’t expect to see Pudi’s ropy arms. I could barely remember the rest of him.
But still I waited. I told other kids that if they sat with me while I waited I’d give them candy or balloons. The youngest of the children believed me. I felt no remorse.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 4