* * *
Claire felt trapped. She wanted to go to school, as Rob had promised, but she couldn’t because she was now pregnant. So she bided her time in Rob’s family’s house, telling me that someday soon we would be going home.
I could tell she was lying. She didn’t know, and I knew she didn’t know, and I resented her for it. No one had phones. No one even talked about reaching my parents—it was impossible. None of my shoes from Rwanda fit. I’d lost so many teeth and I hated the new ones that had replaced them.
Claire spent her days dressing up—kitenge dresses, chic European knockoffs. What else was there for her to do? Rob left for two or three weeks at a time, to work at the camp. His was a good job, and he was a good son and dutiful husband. When he returned to Uvira he brought gifts: fancy lotions for his mother, beauty products for Claire, matching Nigerian World Cup soccer T-shirts for all the kids, each one in its own plastic tube, which we all treasured and saved. He shared his salary with the extended family and he bought a little plot of land, high on the hill, with a view of the lake, on which he planned to build a house for Claire, himself, the baby, and me.
As Claire’s belly grew, all of Uvira started calling her dada, the Swahili word for sister. That terrified me. Our grandma had told us: You lose your language and you disappear. Claire could not lose her name.
For Christmas, just after I turned eight, one of Claire’s friends gave me a Mickey and Minnie Mouse backpack. It was bright pink with orange shoulder straps and an orange belt that fastened at the waist with a satisfying snap. Minnie wore a red-and-white polka-dot dress, and both Mickey and Minnie had enormous white shoes. I adored it.
Mama Nepele had a purse that was full of treasures: lotion, pens, a small Bible. Inside the backpack I kept the rock I’d saved from the refugee camp and my favorite marbles, to show to Pudi someday.
* * *
A few months later, in March, Claire, then seventeen, checked into the hospital in downtown Uvira, like a regular pregnant person, a member of the community, and gave birth to Mariette. With that she became a minor celebrity, our young queen. People brought Claire food, kanga, comfortable slippers, jewelry, anything she wished for.
After school I hung around, waiting for leftovers. Some days, Mama Nepele ran a clinic for me and the other girls, teaching us how to hold up Mariette’s head, how to change a diaper, how to give her a bath, how to keep her warm or cool. I thought Mariette’s belly-button cord was revolting and sneered in disgust. Mama Nepele picked up my hand and said, “That’s how the baby was connected to the mother.”
“Where does it go?” I asked. “The part that connects?”
“That’s a different conversation,” she said.
Still, I fell in love. Mariette was a doll, my doll. I didn’t want any of the kids besides me to touch her. I obsessed over keeping her clean.
Claire was less possessive, less bossy. She loved Mariette, but she did not seem to want this life.
* * *
We walked down the hill to the lake to swim. Past the mango trees, the guava trees, the fish market, the beautiful houses on the water. On the way the kids all teased each other. “If you want to braid Clemantine’s hair, you better clear out the whole month! Her hair is like a forest!”
I had no idea how to tease back—my mother punished me if I so much as told Pudi that he had a big head—but I recognized the affection. We swam all morning, until our skin looked ashy and wrinkled. Then we filled buckets with water and powdered Omo soap, washed our clothes, and sunbathed on the sand until they dried.
Mama Nepele usually gave us some money and someone would run to the market to buy cassava bread and roasted fish for lunch. I never wanted to go home, back up the hill.
Two more cousins, Mado and Patrick, arrived when Mariette was four months old. They came without their parents on a boat from the south, carrying big bags of red palm oil, dried fish, and yuca bread. Their family was having a hard time keeping them out of trouble and feeding them, though it was not an emergency yet.
Mado, who was my age, was still a little chubby. Patrick, who was five, still felt entitled to be babied. He was constantly complaining, in his charming way, that he was too hot or too cold or too little to do chores. He demanded that we sing to him; only Mado would.
Some nights the electricity was cut off—those were my favorites. One was especially dark, midnight blue with black shadows, and all the kids in the neighborhood came to our house to play Kick the Can, because we had the biggest yard. Among them was Serge, a boy from school with dark black skin on whom I had a huge crush. All day at school I doodled his name on my notebook. He drew pictures of flowers on scraps of paper for me, but we never spoke.
That night moved with delicious slowness. We played for hours.
Long into it, when all our limbs, even our eyelids, were slack from exhaustion, Serge got tagged and ended up in our Kick the Can jail, where several other kids were already confined. A few moments after that I heard my name called. I’d been spotted and needed to avoid getting tagged or I’d end up in jail too. I ran faster than I’d ever run before, reaching the can and kicking it over—a great victory.
Serge and his fellow prisoners were free! They lifted me up, like a soccer star who’d scored the winning goal. Serge smiled and said, “Next time I want you on my team.”
People there were so kind. There’s a lovely word in Swahili: nishauri. It means “advise me.” When someone was mad at you, they would come to your house and sit down and talk and say, This is very disrespectful and I think we should consult each other on how to move forward. Let’s make peace here and come to a conclusion that is beautiful.
* * *
The spell broke a few months later. People began streaming into Uvira, knocking on doors, begging for meals. Zaire had been the pride of Central Africa for breaking free of Belgian and French control. But now fighting was breaking out to the north.
Soldiers were starving their fellow countrymen by cutting off food supplies—that’s about as much as I understood. Mama Dina and Mama Nepele cooked extra fish stew and rice, and desperate strangers came to eat.
People kept coming, stumbling off buses, flooding the markets, emptying the shelves. Mama Dina prayed with zero filter. “God, protect the kids with guns. Bring them peace. Clear their minds. God, take care of the hungry.”
Soon we didn’t have enough food for our family. Men stopped fishing. It felt too dangerous. We ate one meal a day. School closed down. The police imposed a curfew. The electricity and water were cut. Just as in Kigali, the world pulled inward.
Mama Dina’s prayers grew louder and more intense. “God, give common sense to the people throwing bombs. Bring medicine to the sick and dying. God, whup those who are doing evil. God, shield our house.”
Police and soldiers lined the lakefront. In the evenings, you could hear the shooting.
“God, this is your house. It will not be shaken by any storm. Not a storm made by men.”
* * *
Claire did not want to wait for more trouble. So Rob arranged for us to take a boat to a town close to Kazimia, where some of his extended family lived. Claire gathered her jewelry and clothes, anything she could sell. She told me to stuff my clothes in my backpack. We needed to leave.
This was not a joint decision or even a real discussion: I think we should leave. How do you feel about that? It was a command: We’re going, now.
The boat took us to the western shore of Lake Tanganyika near the Lukuga River, a lush equatorial paradise. It was gorgeous and I hated it at first sight. When we arrived at the wharf, the soldiers shouted, “Twenty dollars, twenty dollars, twenty dollars.” Claire gave them money. “Document, document,” they said. Claire showed them our bogus papers. They let us pass.
Rob’s uncle was a pastor, well-respected for converting his whole village to Christianity. Everybody was lovely to
us—so much so that soon some people grew skeptical and began to gossip. What was so special about us? But inside the pastor’s compound, just as in Uvira, all the women wanted to braid my hair. They wanted to pull me under their wing. They wanted to cook for me and teach me how to pound cassava. I didn’t want the affection. I was finished calling new people Auntie. I couldn’t do it over again.
I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close.
As I walked around the village, people would say, “How was your tea this morning? How is your family? I see you are buying three loaves of bread. Do you have visitors? Where are you from?” To this last question I had no answer.
So I tightened my focus on Mariette. She was my big Barbie, happy, smiling, oblivious. Claire often took off during the day; I didn’t know where she went. Maybe she resented all the roles and rules—be a wife this way, be a mother this way—that the local women wanted to impose on her. I assigned myself the role of Mariette’s eight-year-old mother. I carried her everywhere. I fed her whenever she made the slightest noise. I stared at her while she napped.
Sometimes Rob’s cousin, who had three kids of her own, would insist on caring for Mariette. She thought she was being nice, but I felt threatened and displaced. She tied Mariette to her back with a cloth. She took Mariette down to the lake to bathe. She walked and sang until Mariette fell asleep. I hated her for it—hated her casual competence. She was stocky and strong, and she yelled at her children when they misbehaved. I didn’t have anyone to yell at me.
I missed Pudi more than ever, his stinking Adidas shirt. I felt him slipping away in my mind. I remembered the Tintin adventures, slicking up the patio with soap, watching him climb the more fragile trees. I saw his dark ropy arms. That was it. I felt so deeply alone.
I never expected Claire to coddle me. Even before we ran, we’d had terrible fights. When I was five I stole her white watch. I snuck it into my bag to show the other children at school, but even after my mother punished me for taking it, I could not find the watch. Claire never forgave me.
Now she was my life and she was gone. I changed Mariette’s diaper fifteen times a day. I wanted her bottom to be dry, very dry. I worried we didn’t have enough powder. I didn’t want Mariette to get a rash. Mariette could not get sick. She had to stay clean, impeccably clean. I allowed almost no one to touch her. When Claire returned at the end of the day, I asked, “Have you washed your hands?” before I allowed her to nurse.
Eventually Mama Nepele arrived. I cried with relief.
But by then Kazimia was shutting down. The electricity and water had been cut off and replaced with terror.
* * *
Fleeing Kazimia required not just traveling along the shore of Lake Tanganyika, but crossing it, a six-hour trip. Fifty frantic people, including one of Rob’s cousins, crammed with us into a small boat. We carried our whole lives—or what we still had left of those lives. Rob’s cousin had lost a baby a few months before. Malaria, no medicine. A natural disaster with a war assist.
We started taking on water as soon as we left. The only way to slow our sinking was to make our boat lighter, to trade possessions for lives. So people began dropping heirlooms—framed pictures, silver, jewelry—into the water and watching them disappear.
The looks on people’s faces, the look of panic. It’s easier to scream. But we’d all been trained not to scream, because if you scream you’ll get shot and what’s the point if everyone is screaming with their faces already? One woman tossed her china plates, one by one; then she started on glass teacups.
Still the cold water kept rising, creeping up the adults’ shins, over my knees.
I prayed like my mother prayed, to every saint that I could remember—Mary, Rose, Catherine. Then I prayed like Mama Dina and promised God that if we made it to the other side he could kill me any way he wanted. I just didn’t want Mariette or any of the kids on the boat to die like this.
I promised if we got out, I would be the best child ever, the best sister. I would be so good and kind and generous—I just didn’t want to die in the water. There’s no trail you can leave in the water.
I told God I would die anywhere but here. I prayed for hours and hours. The whole boat was quiet and I was sobbing and praying and I did it for so long that I don’t think I could say anything more.
The water was a monster. Claire held Mariette, then seven months old, up to her chest. I wanted to hold Mariette but I was too short. I could not bear to think that she could die. Life was easier, emotionally, when it was just me and Claire.
Now we had this other life, sinking into this terrible maw. The moon was full. I willed myself to be light as air, to atomize and scatter in the wind. Water crept up to my waist. I lost my voice. No one said a word.
6
My eighth-grade English teacher at Christian Heritage Academy put the word genocide on a vocabulary list. I hated it immediately.
I did not understand the point of the word genocide then. I resent and revile it now. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie.
It cannot do justice—it is not meant to do justice—to the thing it describes.
The word genocide cannot tell you, cannot make you feel, the way I felt in Rwanda. The way I felt in Burundi. The way I wished to be invisible because I knew someone wanted me dead at a point in my life when I did not yet understand what death was.
The word genocide cannot tell you how I felt when my mother refused to let me take my clay mug from our home in Kigali to my grandmother’s house in Butare. The word genocide cannot explain why I still think about that moment, why I still miss that mug, how I wonder if my mother didn’t let me take the mug because she knew the true, intimate danger, because she knew who I was—who we were—at that moment would be destroyed, and thus she wanted to retain a piece of innocent six-year-old me.
The word genocide cannot articulate the one-person experience—the real experience of each of the millions it purports to describe. The experience of the child playing dead in a pool of his father’s blood. The experience of a mother forever wailing on her knees.
The word genocide cannot explain the never-ending pain, even if you live.
The word genocide cannot help the civilians. It can only help the politician sitting in the UN discussing with all the other politicians in suits, How are we going to fix this problem? These people have committed such horrible crimes. They’ve suffered such horrible things. They need water, they need food, and oh…wait…Their attention drifts, time to move on.
The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing.
“Oh, it’s like the Holocaust?” people would say to me—say to me still.
To this day I do not know how to respond and be polite. No, I want to scream, it’s not like the Holocaust. Or the killing fields in Cambodia. Or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. There’s no catchall term that proves you understand.
There’s no label to peel and stick that absolves you, shows you’ve done your duty, you’ve completed the moral project of remembering. This—Rwanda, my life—is a different, specific, personal tragedy, just as each of those horrors was a different, specific, personal tragedy, and inside all those tidily labeled boxes are 6 million, or 1.7 million, or 100,000, or 100 billion lives destroyed.
You cannot line up the atrocities like a matching set.
You cannot bear witness with a single word.
* * *
I started reading Elie Wiesel’s Night that April. I was sixteen. The book alarmed and comforted me. I wanted to c
onsume it whole. The main character was not a curiosity, not a member of that strange category—“martyr.” Wiesel was white, European, male, and Jewish. Wiesel was me.
He expressed thoughts I was ashamed to think, truths I was afraid to acknowledge. He described walking in the snow—the cold, the mouthfuls of bread and the spoonfuls of snow, an injured frozen foot that felt like it was no longer his, “a wheel fallen off a car. Never mind.” I had walked in the heat but it was the same walk—desperate, disembodied, surreal. I couldn’t stop staring at the page. I needed to study every detail, and every detail humiliated me. The way he talked about his father, the devotion and resentment. That was Claire.
I did not yet know the political history of Rwanda. I knew the president’s plane had been shot down—I remembered that now. My mother, terrified, came into my room early one morning and told me he was killed, and then we knelt down and prayed. But that was it. I just thought of the enemy, then, as bad guys who steal. I believed they were going to steal us, but worse. I thought, Abajura…People are coming.
Then they did come and I ran away from the bad people and the bad people stole my parents from me.
In the intervening years I had no references. Nothing to order or anchor my thoughts, and for a time I stopped trying to discipline them or pin them down. I didn’t ask questions. Nobody wanted me to ask questions. I had a cousin who sometimes slept at Claire’s house and he woke up from his nightmares screaming. But it seemed better to be like Claire. Claire was numb. She focused on building a life here, now, not excavating and examining in the Midwestern American sunshine the secrets that nobody wanted to see.
I had been shut down so many times. By my mother, my father, my sister. Everyone, every time I asked, said, “You talk too much.” Checkeka.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 8