The Girl Who Smiled Beads

by Clemantine Wamariya

  I pretended I didn’t hear.

  So few people knew who I was. Often adults said to me, “You’re so strong, you’re so brave.” But I didn’t want to be strong, I didn’t want to be brave. I wanted a fresh, fluffy brain, one that was not tormented by wars and fear. I wanted to backtrack in time to a world of innocence, to regress into the landscape of The Boxcar Children. It was so nice there. The children did not have parents but it was okay. They went places together. The brothers and sisters took care of one another.

  My life, at present, felt like a tar pit. I felt like I was disappearing, being consumed. My story was just so interesting—so foreign, so exotic. It was The Jungle Book.

  “Oh my gosh, do you know Clemantine?” people said. “I know Clemantine. She’s a refugee. She’s African. I think she had to pass through some forest or she almost died on some lake.”

  7

  We reached Tanzania catatonic and exhausted. The boat pulled right up to the beach. Steep hills rose just twenty feet from the water’s edge, so we fell asleep on the sand. It was so cold. Our whole boat had nothing. Rob’s cousin who’d come with us now had nothing. She’d left Zaire with one bag. In that bag was her whole remaining life—all her money, her husband’s college diploma. It disappeared overnight, while she slept.

  The next morning, immigration police rounded us up and we resumed being refugees.

  We spent one night at a nearby school, on a classroom floor. I wrapped Mariette in our one blanket, yellow with white flowers. Then I put her inside our one remaining suitcase to keep warm. I worried constantly about Mariette catching cold. I was nine. I knew babies died from pneumonia. I could not allow her to die.

  All night, in the yellow blanket, in the suitcase, Mariette remained silent. All the children with us in the school had stopped crying. Only the adults wept. Rob’s cousin wept. The next day we rode one of those godforsaken white UNHCR trucks to a refugee camp in Kigoma.

  You could tell from far away that people wanted to get out of the camp. Police were stationed all around the fence. We felt like cattle. Rwandans. Zairians. Burundians. It didn’t matter to our keepers. Nobody had a tent. You just picked a patch of dirt. Claire didn’t speak. We didn’t eat for two days.

  There were not enough bathrooms. The latrine lines took hours, too long to wait. People relieved themselves everywhere. Hundreds of people lay in the red dirt, sick.

  I scanned the camp for faces—my parents, Pudi. We sank into the stupor of refugee life. The nights were freezing. The days burned our skin. Mosquitoes attacked our eyes. People started streaming in from Uvira, approaching Claire, and saying, “I saw your husband die. He was working in an area where everyone died.” Many people seemed to believe, when they arrived, that they were going from danger to safety, that this camp was a stop on the way to somewhere better and eventually back home. The human mind is an amazing, resilient, self-deceptive thing.

  Every day, more white-and-blue trucks arrived, with more displaced families. For a week, people continued telling Claire that Rob was dead. Then the story changed: He was alive. They’d seen him last night, just outside the gate.

  “No,” Claire said. “My husband died in the war. Everybody said he died in the war. How can you say you’ve seen him?”

  But then another truckload would arrive, more people asking for Claire. The message became specific. Be at the gate at 10:00 p.m. Rob would pay off the guard. A man in a taxi with dark windows would shout out our names. We would jump the fence and he would drive us away.

  That night we waited. A man called Claire’s name. She swaddled Mariette in several wrappers and threw her over the six-foot-high fence, chicken wire topped with barbed wire, then climbed over herself. But I was slow, and by the time I was ready to climb over, the guard had changed. The man in the taxi shouted to me that he’d return the next night.

  Claire drove off. I curled up on our patch of dirt, terrified. My fear of abandonment had been realized. Yet later that night a guard came and found me, and told me that Claire was waiting with the man in the taxi. I cut my thigh on a piece of barbed wire when climbing over the fence.

  * * *

  We took a taxi to Kigoma, where we joined more of Rob’s extended family in an overcrowded compound. They’d lived there for decades. Everybody slept on the floor. The men ate in one group, the women in another. There was not enough food, so we drank lots of tea.

  One afternoon Rob’s mother, who’d left Zaire after us, with Rob, prepared a pot of tea and gave it to Claire to serve to the men and boys sitting around the table. Tea, too, was in short supply. Mama Nepele placed only spent tea leaves inside the pot.

  Rob had barely looked at me since we’d arrived in Kigoma. He had not fled Zaire as a refugee. He still had papers from CARE that allowed him to enter Tanzania. But he had no home. He’d abandoned his whole life. He was unwanted, one of us.

  Claire delivered the pot of tea to the table and returned to the kitchen. A few minutes later Rob yelled, “Claire, come here!”

  She entered, silent.

  “What kind of woman are you who doesn’t even know how to make tea?” Rob shouted. “How come you can’t make tea? You think we’re going to drink water?” Claire froze. “What kind of woman are you?” Rob was performing for the benefit of men in the room. “This is an embarrassment. Disgusting.”

  Mama Nepele walked out of the kitchen and placed her body between her son and Claire.

  “Rob, what about the tea?” she said with a simmering fury. “I am the one who made the tea. Why do you have to humiliate your wife in front of everyone?” He did not answer. “How do you expect young boys to respect your wife?”

  Claire left the dining room. Rob said nothing. Later that week immigration police started knocking on houses in Kigoma, rounding up refugees and taking them back to camp. Claire convinced Rob that we needed to move on.

  * * *

  We arrived at the bus station late at night because we didn’t want to be seen by the immigration police. We carried no bags, just wore layers and layers of clothing. I had on three pairs of underwear, tights with pants over them, and a long skirt on top of all that, plus three shirts, a blue sweater, and a really ugly short scarf, like a shrug. We tried to look presentable. We couldn’t look like we were fleeing.

  Claire sewed almost all of her money into the waistband of her pants. She left out just enough to bribe people as needed.

  We had no real plan, but Claire had heard there was a better camp in Malawi, a camp that was not in the middle of nowhere, that had tents and enough latrines. A camp farther away from the conflict. “Better” meant farther away from the war.

  The bus line we rode to Malawi was fancy, or at least fancy to us by then. It catered to the safari crowd. Each Twiga bus had lions or giraffes or some other big African animal painted on the outside. Inside, each window had its own curtain. There were bathrooms and televisions too.

  Claire bribed the driver to let us board early. That way we’d be safe until the police entered the bus to check papers at the Malawi border. Once the bus started to move, Claire handed me a brown paper bag filled with sweet bread and milk. But I refused to eat. I thought I was punishing Claire for not warning me that we were leaving, for having all the control.

  Every hill we passed, every valley, the landscape grew bleaker—both my internal world and outside. The pink jacaranda gave way to desert palms, which gave way to mesquite. We moved so fast. I did not feel lost, as “lost” implies that there’s a place where you will feel found and that, for me, did not exist. I was just a feather, molted and mangled, drifting through space. I tried to maintain the illusion that I kept in my mind a legible map, that I could find my way home. But whenever I tried to think back through the landmarks we’d passed, I just saw people screaming. I heard the sounds of guns and bombs and felt fire.

  “In Malawi they have the biggest trees,” Clai
re told me a few hours into our bus ride, “with the biggest, most beautiful mangoes you’ve ever seen.” I knew she was lying. She had never been to Malawi before.

  * * *

  I still, miraculously, had my Mickey Mouse backpack, with my marbles and my rocks. Allowing me to keep it seemed to be one of Claire’s few concessions to the idea that I should be given any special indulgence for being a child.

  One of my rocks was from Lake Tanganyika—it was layered and flaky, like mica. Another was from Tanzania—it was sharp and red. In my pack I also carried a few colored pencils, a notebook, my marbles, and an extra sweater. The sweater was blue and unraveling. I liked to chew on my clothes, especially loose strands of yarn and threads. Claire told me I had to stop or my teeth would rot.

  The bus driver played a single video: The Gods Must Be Crazy. I didn’t speak English but I still watched it, this story of a Kalahari bushman who finds a Coke bottle that’s been tossed out of an airplane, and how trying to dispose of it nearly ruins his life. The movie was long and bizarre, and people kept laughing, and my sole response to it was: He leaves his family and his whole world for this? The other passengers clapped when the movie finished. Outside it was pouring rain. The driver played the movie again.

  Rob, as well as Claire, didn’t have valid papers to enter Malawi, so the two of them got off the bus near the river that formed the border with Zaire, to avoid the police. They hoped to find a way to row themselves across. Mariette and I stayed in our seats onboard—Claire figured no one would harass two children alone.

  Mariette was now seven months old, unblemished and perfect. She never cried. She’d never bled or been scratched. An hour passed, two, then three. Mariette stayed asleep. If anyone tried to talk to me I planned to remain silent, to pretend I did not understand whatever language was being spoken.

  Claire was right: the soldier who boarded the bus asked everybody for papers and ignored me and Mariette. A short while later, Claire and Rob returned. They looked awful. Claire winced when she sat. She could hardly move.

  She didn’t tell me they’d been beaten but she had a look. She did not look scared—you could not bring Claire low with fear. Claire refused to let anybody limit her sense of her own possibilities or determine her self-worth. People might think they could take everything from her, that they had taken everything from her. You are a woman. You are a refugee. You cannot go to school. You cannot have a job. You are nothing under our laws. She remained immovable, unswayed. Her eyes, when she boarded the bus, said: Mess with me one more time and I’m going to make it rain fire.

  She did not want to tell me what had happened. I finally wore her down. At first, she said, the crossing went well. She and Rob found a boat and rowed it to Malawi. But once they were on the shore, soldiers caught them and whipped them with an iron rod. Claire pleaded with them to stop, asking why they needed to beat a refugee, why they needed to beat a woman.

  Still the blows continued. Rob remained silent.

  “Refugees belong in camps,” the soldiers barked. “Why are you not in the camp?”

  The beating went on. Claire wanted to give the soldiers nothing, but offered her truth: She could not go back to the camp. She’d left her baby and younger sister on the bus. To prove her point, she pulled a breast out of her shirt and pushed against her flesh until white drops of milk appeared.

  After that, the soldiers beat Claire’s thighs. They beat her back.

  Finally, Claire ripped open the waistband of her pants and gave the soldiers $100. They let her and Rob go.

  * * *

  The new refugee camp, Dzaleka, was a former political prison, built on a barren red plateau for people in Malawi who had opposed the British. Refugees here lived not in tents but in hundreds of tiny red-brick structures, the bricks made from the plateau’s red dirt, mixed with water, shaped, and dried in the sun.

  We were refugee-camp connoisseurs, sad, nationless pros. Dzaleka, with its brick huts, felt ominous but sturdy. Near the chicken-wire gate was an office building where refugees could register with the Red Cross in the vain hope that some official agency might have news about their families. The rest of the sprawling camp was overcrowded, so we were moved into the office building. We slept with twenty people in a single room.

  The luckiest of our roommates slept on or under one of the tables. A table created at least a bit of separate space. We ate rice and peanut butter and traded whole peanuts for laundry soap. I spent all day, every day, with Mariette, sitting in the shade near the gate, watching with ambition, if not hope. I wanted my parents to walk in. A nice woman helped me acclimate to life in Dzaleka: Here’s where you do your laundry, here’s when and how to shower. The showers were the most dangerous place in camp, the favored hunting ground of the most depraved men.

  Rob still had one good outfit, so each day for the first week he got up, put on his nice striped shirt, shined his brown leather shoes, and set off to find the camp director, to see if he could get work. By noon, Rob returned, disappointed and enraged, lay down on one of the tables, and stared at the ceiling. If anyone spoke to him, he yelled. If Claire or I crossed him, he threatened us.

  After a week he stopped putting on his good clothes and just dressed in a T-shirt and played cards.

  * * *

  Claire was restless. She did not want to settle in. In a refugee camp, she knew well, others were invested in your suffering. Their jobs and self-worth depended on your continued abasement, on your commitment to residing in a social stratum below them, the same old neocolonial scheme. Many were American and Canadian; some were educated Africans, like Rob. You could see the surprise in aid workers’ faces when you upended their worldview by revealing that you, a refugee, spoke five languages or had aced calculus or ran a successful accounting firm.

  To be a refugee was to be a victim—it was tautological. And not just a victim due to external forces like politics or war. You were a victim due to some inherent, irrevocable weakness in you. You were a victim because you were less worthy, less good, and less strong than all the non-victims of the world.

  Claire’s solution to escaping all that was to make money, for bus fare, to get far away from this place. She took entrepreneurial reconnaissance walks every day, scouting for opportunities. One morning she left with my new romper, sold it, and returned with soap, sugar, and rice.

  On one of her strolls, she noticed an old Somali woman sitting in front of her crumbling red-brick hut, selling goat meat. Claire saw her opening. The old woman had a good product but she was lazy and tired. She didn’t even bother calling out to passersby to try to make a sale.

  Claire could, and did, talk to everyone. She spoke Swahili, Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, and French. She started asking people who’d lived in the camp for a long time how she could get a goat. Who did she have to bribe to leave the camp? Who had a basin in which to collect goat blood? Who had a knife?

  I spent the days playing peekaboo over people’s beat-up luggage. I learned to tie Mariette onto my back by myself. I learned how to wrap the kitenge around the base of Mariette’s scalp to support her neck. I learned when it was a good time to ask our neighbor to borrow her tin basin and electric stove so I could give Mariette a warm bath. I learned the right ratio of salt and sugar to mix with the water in Mariette’s bottle. I learned how to clean and sanitize the cloth we used for Mariette’s diapers.

  Claire, meanwhile, studied how the local Malawi women dressed. They wore long skirts and plastic shoes. So Claire found a long skirt and plastic shoes. She tied up her hair like the locals tied their hair.

  Given that the camp was split between Christians and Muslims, Claire realized that if she was going to sell goat meat, the butchering process needed to be halal. So Claire approached a man who slept at the mosque inside the camp. “Do you know how to kill a goat?” she asked him.

  The man said yes.

  Claire said, “Okay, let�
��s go into business. What should I pay you?”

  The man asked for the goat head.

  Next, Claire told everybody, “Tomorrow I will have a goat!” She sold a few of her remaining blouses and Rob’s good outfit. Before dawn the next morning, she dressed in her long skirt and plastic shoes, bribed a guard to allow her to leave for a few hours, and walked out of the camp, through the fields of beans, groundnuts, and soy. She knocked on the door of every house on the dirt road, asking whether they had a goat for sale.

  Claire finally saw one in someone’s yard. She knocked and said, “How much?”

  “Forty,” the man said.

  She told him that she only had twenty and he took her twenty and gave her a piece of rope to place around the goat’s neck. Then she walked back to camp, with her goat, through the fields.

  That afternoon the Muslim man butchered the animal. I did not watch.

  Then Claire, a huge smile now on her face, set up a kiosk and called out, “Meat! Meat!” in all the languages she knew. It was the most basic form of commerce possible: food, on a table, in a pile. No ice, no refrigeration. But working as a black-market butcher gave Claire a sense of power. Dzaleka was the same miserable life for everybody, every day. The men played cards, the women cooked and tried to keep things clean.

  The next week, Claire bought a goat again. And the week after. She liked walking the dirt roads alone, singing and praying, thinking about something other than hour-to-hour survival. One week the goat she bought ran away from her and she had to chase it all the way back to the house of the farmer from whom she’d purchased it. The farmer’s children corralled the goat in the yard and, once again, looped the rope around its neck. Claire walked the goat back to camp.

  * * *