The Girl Who Smiled Beads

by Clemantine Wamariya

  “Where do they sleep?”

  “They sleep on the ground and protect us.”

  The plants, the animals, the ocean, the people—everything in Tera was alive and just as I wished. Musaza outlined a world for me and allowed me to fill in the colors, gold, silver, copper, and brown.

  I turned around and lectured the other children. “Hey, do you want to know what Musaza told me today? He told me that a long time ago you just could just call crocodiles and they would come and you could lie on them.”

  * * *

  After we’d been at the camp for a couple months, a handsome Zairean CARE worker declared that he was in love with Claire. She was, somehow, as magnetic as ever, her dark eyes undefeated and alight. Rob was twenty-five and seemed extremely sophisticated and put-together, with his well-cut hair, clean crisp jeans, striped shirts, and shiny shoes.

  Claire told Rob that she was too young to get involved, that the last thing she needed was to be a sixteen-year-old refugee without any parents and with a little sister and a baby to care for. But he persisted.

  “Me, I want to marry you,” Rob said daily. “Me, I want to marry you. You can go to school.”

  “You see me in this camp suffering? You think I’d be better off pregnant?”

  Still, every day, Rob tracked down Claire and told her that he’d fallen in love with her the day we entered the camp. He promised her that if she married him, we could move to Zaire and live with his mother.

  Claire knew we were targets, two girls without a guardian. Every woman was a target there. Our lives were impossible, hopeless. One woman in camp cried all day, every day. People screamed at her: “You don’t think we all want to cry? We all want to cry.” We all knew very little separated her from us.

  That’s life in a refugee camp: You’re not moving toward anything. You’re just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know: how to make a fire, how to cook maize, how to do laundry in the river and burn the lice on the rocks. You wait, hoping the trucks will bring something other than corn and beans.

  But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do for you either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.

  The only way out was marriage. Marriage came with papers. This made Rob, with his handsome smile, an escape hatch, a ticket out. When Claire finished work, she saw Rob, in his clean clothes, in the camp office. Every time he asked her, “Do you want to go back to school?” School. Now, instead of looping in a circle of terrors, Claire’s mind had a place to go, a destination far away from the faces she, too, wished she’d never seen and the screams she, too, wished she’d never heard.

  And once Claire had possibility, so did I. I did not understand why we had to remain in this nightmare because we lacked papers, but I accepted that it was true. Besides, I had Claire to look after me, and Claire had no one to look after her, and she refused to believe that this, here in Burundi, was the life she deserved. Bugs, filth, hunger, death. Claire said yes to Rob.

  Claire and Rob married, at camp, surrounded by a few envious refugees and a couple of Rob’s friends and coworkers. I wore my favorite green skirt. The best things about the day were the sweet fried mandazi and sodas.

  * * *

  Rob did make good on his promise. After the wedding, he took Claire to Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, to get official marriage papers. The plan, from there, was for Claire to continue on to meet Rob’s family in Zaire, in the city of Uvira, and for Rob to come back to the camp to collect me.

  So Claire was gone, and now Rob was gone too, for three days. I spent each one of my hours alone, terrified, my stomach aching. I told myself if neither Claire nor Rob returned I’d walk back to Rwanda. I didn’t talk to anybody. I worried that if I did speak I’d slip up and reveal our plans, and people would turn cruel with jealousy. Then Rob did return. He found me in front of our tent, in silence, and I felt scared to leave.

  We’d been in Ngozi a year. Earthy, mystical Musaza and Mucyechuru were now the only people in my world besides Claire. We left them everything we had, but I didn’t say goodbye to them. I just put on my best clothes—my green skirt and white blouse that washed easily and dried quickly in the sun—and I bundled up my few possessions: a couple of sweaters, a smooth rock I’d found by the river, the flip-flops I’d repaired with string, a few toys I was told were gifts from children in Canada.

  Rob walked me over to his CARE truck. Inside, on the seat, were two plastic bags, one with a new dress and colorful sandals, another filled with treats. I was not polite. I stuffed mandazi and candy in my mouth, and drank Fanta, all at once. I did not say thank you. I felt sick.

  The road was long and bumpy. I threw up. I was exhausted, so much more exhausted than I realized, and I fell into a deep, hard sleep. When I woke I panicked. I didn’t know where I was. I could not find my way back to camp.

  If I could not find my way back to camp, I could not retrace my steps to Butare and then to Kigali and get home. I knew I was supposed to feel relieved, but I felt despairing. I didn’t want to look out the window. Loss is loss is loss. I did not want to see more miles streaming by. I didn’t want to pass more stacks of hills.

  * * *

  In the evening we arrived in the city. Bujumbura looked lighter and smaller than Kigali. Rob drove us to the home of some friends who lived on the outskirts of town, in a big compound. The gate squeaked loudly when Rob opened it.

  Inside, in the courtyard, sat a large family—grandparents, cousins, aunts. I locked eyes with a woman who was about Claire’s age. She was beautiful, with a wide smile, white teeth, and black gums, and such excellent posture and shiny hair that I could tell she’d had a good life. She walked over and hugged me, and I cried.

  She called out for the other children. Four or five came running, then stood close, grabbing my hand, acting like we were friends. I felt so numb, dissociated. I’d forgotten about casual warmth. I’d even forgotten about implicit trust. The young woman with the excellent posture brought me a cup of warm tea, sweet and rich with milk.

  Pleasure. I could barely remember how to enjoy pleasure. For a year I’d been so consumed with survival—though not that, really. I was consumed with something much smaller and more banal: making it through the day. Let’s get through today, that was my mindset. Then it will be tomorrow. Let’s make tomorrow happen too.

  The young woman disappeared again and came back with a bowl of rice-flour beignets. The grease stuck to my hands. She asked if she could bathe me. I refused.

  The following day she took me to the market. It was hot and dry, hotter than any day at camp. On the way we saw a naked man walking down the road. Nobody tried to stop him or heckle him. They just let him keep walking, as though he were a legitimate part of their world.

  The young woman with excellent posture bought me a yellow dress with white lace ruffles on the back. I’d wanted a ruffled dress like that since I was four. I thought the dress looked like an ornate rice dish that Muslims served at the end of Ramadan. She also bought me four pairs of underwear. It had been a year since I’d worn underwear without a broken elastic waist.

  * * *

  We stayed with the friends for two days. Then Rob and I took a bus west, to Uvira, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, to meet Claire. En route, I fell asleep, and when I woke we were in a valley. The sun was so strong. Some trees were plush, canopied, and rubbery, and there were palm trees and cacti too. We were ordered out of the bus to pass through a border check. The wind was hot. Dust filled my eyes and mouth. An officer read Rob’s papers and glanced at mine. He let us pass.

  Back on the bus I willed myself to stay awake. I stared at the faces of the people walking on the road, the kids playing soccer, the large houses, the vendors selling oranges, fish, candy, br
ead. I wanted it all. I scanned the landscape and tried to commit it to memory so I’d know how to return. We passed beautiful houses, gardens with pink, purple, and white bougainvillea flowers.

  Eventually we stopped at a vast blue body of water. I thought it was a river or the ocean—I’d never seen the ocean—but Rob said it was the lake. The water was a dark luminescent blue. I could not wait for sunset. At sunset I could lift up the water and wave it like a carpet and visit all the creatures in the universe underneath.

  From the lake we hitched a ride on a motorcycle up a hill, to Rob’s uncle’s house—a long red-brick single-story building with glass windows in front, wood shutters on the sides, and a tin roof. Claire was inside, in a long embroidered pink-and-yellow dress. I found that completely disorienting, too, as she’d only ever worn tomboy-style clothes before.

  The house smelled like garlic and onions. Rob’s five cousins, ranging in age from five to seventeen, wandered around, bright and clear, a whole intact world. Rob’s mother and aunt were preparing big plates of rice, eggplant, and fish stew.

  I ran to the couch and cried. I wanted to go back, but I did not know where. Nobody talked about home.

  The boys shared one room and the girls another, so I slept in a room with Mwasiti, who was eleven years old, and Dina, who was fourteen, all of us in one bed, me in the middle, because I was scared.

  Claire, because she was now married, had a room on the far other end of the house, with Rob. For my first few weeks I constantly stood on our mattress and tried to touch the ceiling. We’d been sleeping outside for a year and a half.

  * * *

  I tried to impersonate a regular child, the child I had been or had wanted to be—loose-limbed, relaxed, playing Kick the Can, running through the streets and in and out of people’s homes. I tried to imagine what Pudi would do. He was confident, fun, slightly rebellious. I was self-conscious and didn’t fit in.

  Over the previous year I’d learned how to pass the hours with detached lethargy because all there is to do at a refugee camp is kill time. Now I watched Mwasiti scrub pots after lunch. She worked with furious efficiency. In two minutes the densest, greasiest smoke residue disappeared and the pot looked new. Mwasiti and Dina laughed at my pace with sweet, protective affection, like I was a baby bird with a broken wing, their sad, tender project, hobbling around.

  I cried for days, maybe weeks. Then I pulled myself together. I returned to asking the only question in my life: How do I survive here?

  Rob’s family, like everyone else in Uvira, spoke a mix of Swahili, Kibembe, and French, and each morning at five Rob’s aunt, Mama Dina, woke up to pray, loudly. Her prayers were nothing like my mother’s rehearsed Catholic prayer. Sometimes Mama Dina invoked angels. Sometimes she chastised evil spirits. Mama Dina didn’t only address Jesus or Mary. She didn’t say anything by rote. She spoke to God directly.

  “God, it’s just you and me. What is happening?” she said, mostly in Swahili. Sometimes she called him Dad, as in “Dad, we have kids who are hungry, people who are tired. You’ve always taken care of us. Keep us healthy. Shield us from evil. Bring an end to this war. We have no medicine. Help us here.”

  Rob’s father had disappeared, and Mama Dina’s husband returned only on occasion, but she never complained. Whenever Mama Dina cooked or spoke or moved, she did so with a fantastic physicality, her hair pulled back tight against her scalp. If she asked you to do something, you obeyed. She was my news service. I learned what was going on in the world through her prayers.

  Of course we woke up the moment she started praying, but we lay in bed listening and did not get out of bed until six.

  * * *

  Rob’s mother, who we called Mama Nepele, was slighter, with lighter skin, high cheekbones, and a far gentler, more subtle presence. She wrapped her tight curls up in a cloth and she held my hand when she spoke.

  Once I could make it through the day without weeping, she enrolled me in second grade. She altered some of Mwasiti’s old royal-blue uniforms to fit me. On the first day I was so excited to be going to school again, but it turned out to be a stern, punitive Christian academy with instruction in Swahili and French.

  I knew almost no Swahili and only a few French words—maison, voiture—and anytime I mispronounced vocabulary a nun walked over and whipped the back of my hand. If a student was late, a hand got whipped. If a student talked back, a hand got whipped again. After just three days, I tried to persuade Mama Nepele to let me quit school. She sat me down next to her, held my hand, and refused.

  To sweeten the deal, Rob, with money from his CARE job, bought me two pairs of sneakers—one blue with yellow laces, the other Velcro Nikes. Claire found the cutest uniform for me, a royal-blue jumper with overall-like shoulder straps that crossed in the back. Still, I didn’t want to go to school.

  For breakfast each morning we ate fresh bread, purchased from a man who walked by the house with loaves, and drank chai tea with milk and sugar. I didn’t like the chai but pretended that I did. I dipped my braided bread in it, and once the bread started disintegrating and my mug was filled with crumbs I declared it too messed-up to drink. At which point Mwasiti said, “Let me help you with that,” and drank my chai herself.

  Afternoons, once the nuns released us, we ran home and played marbles and roamed the streets. As I began to relax, Mwasiti and Dina introduced me to the dozen women that they called Auntie, all of whom swept me into their care. My hair was now growing out. It was thick and wild.

  Every day some auntie would say, “What is this mess?” and then sit me down to wash and braid it. I felt so special. Everyone was special. You have the longest hair, you have the shortest hair, yours is the thickest.

  Women gave me freshly ironed Sunday dresses that their daughters had outgrown. They offered to cut my nails and paint them, to scrub my feet. Throughout they listened to the radio and boasted about the food they would cook—the bone marrow, the beans. They bragged, with affection, about the produce they bought. Want to know what I got at the market? I got these fresh onions and the garlic. Did you get the garlic? Oh, you didn’t? I’ll show you. Look how beautiful it is.

  Because Uvira was on the lake, the whole town ate fish from Monday through Thursday. A lot of times at the market people would say, I have too many fish, take some. The kids even sang silly songs about it: Don’t be so stingy. There’s enough fish in the lake to dry, to fry, to roast.

  * * *

  The weekends were a party. Beef, chicken, elaborate sauces, pounded cassava leaves cooked in palm oil with garlic and nuts—plus the most fabulous clothes. Zairean women and men dressed. I’d never seen anything like it, an elaborate mix of European and African styles—French- and Italian-looking blouses, Chanel-style coats, head wraps from Senegal, secondhand clothes imported from France, Spain, and the United States.

  In Rwanda, dressing up meant looking respectful, proper, and tidy. Clothes were meant to hide you. A good Catholic kept her body uncelebrated, under wraps.

  But Zaire wasn’t overwhelmingly Catholic—it was also Muslim and Protestant, Middle Eastern, African, Indian, and European, a vibrant mash-up. Clothes were costumes, a means of self-expression, buoyant claims to beauty. Claire loved it. One day she wore a long, brightly patterned dress, the next a tailored blouse and skirt. The women dressed for one another, partly to prove that their husbands, fathers, and brothers were providing well for them. Claire started a business, selling purses. They were so beautiful.

  On Friday afternoons, men stood in long lines at barber shops. Women packed salons, some panicking if their hair was not yet washed and blown out as the sun was going down. On Saturday and Sunday, the men wore suits and ties. The streets were filled with music, radios cranked up in living rooms and front doorways.

  When a new song came on, the adults paid children to dance. I didn’t know how, and I was shy, so I stood back, behind Mama Nepele if possible,
and I watched. Then I practiced when no one was looking.

  * * *

  Before long I started to forget. I started to forget the camp and forget Rwanda. Most nights we ate together as a family, ten or twelve of us, including an unmarried uncle who often came for lunch and stayed through supper. Mama Nepele began hinting that if he was going to eat at the house every day, he ought to bring along some fish.

  We all sat around a shared pot of sweet-potato-and-greens stew, beans, or roasted sardines. If you were slow—and I was slow—you missed out. So Mama Nepele started setting aside a plate just for me, a small serving tucked away in the kitchen. I loved her for it. I felt embraced, remembered. She always spoke to me softly and patted my hand, and I relaxed.

  I learned more Swahili too. Words in Swahili are like a dance. When I’m angry, I think in Swahili because that’s the language in which I learned to fully express my emotions.

  Early mornings, in the dark, I giggled with Mwasiti and Dina in bed during Mama Dina’s long crazy prayers. On weekends we pulled the TV outside on the front porch and danced together in the big front yard, eight or ten kids, trying to match all the dance moves in Papa Wemba music videos.

  One night, I had a very strange dream. It was about a black cat with earrings that turned into a person. A few days later a woman came over. I thought she was the cat lady. No one liked her and I didn’t know why. I mentioned my dream and this woman to Claire, and she said talking like that would get people in trouble. Rwandans take the dream world seriously. When you wake up, people ask, “What did you dream about last night?” It’s like saying good morning.

  Maybe this life, here in Zaire, was my real life and before was just a dream.