I went to see a Jesus movie about three or four months after we arrived at Dzaleka. By then we’d moved out of the office and into our own dilapidated red-brick hut. The place didn’t have a roof, so we covered it with a nylon tent. It had a bed for Claire and Rob, a mat for me and Mariette, and a little privacy.
The movie was playing in the center of the camp, in the open area where we all lined up to collect our rations of corn from the parked trucks. That evening, a Christian charity had arrived with a projector and some chocolate. They tied up a bedsheet, which served as a screen, and all the kids jostled each other to find a place to sit on the dirt with a view.
I was mesmerized—Jesus in his tunic, his long pale nose and smooth hair; all the men with beards. I’d only seen images of skinny Christ nailed to the cross, frozen in his agony. This Jesus walked up in the mountains, preaching to his flock, his loaves and fishes multiplying. I was so happy to see food.
I left before the end because I knew it was getting late, and I arrived home to find Claire and Rob furious. “I looked everywhere for you,” Claire screamed.
Behind her, on the bed, I saw nearly all our possessions in neat piles. Beside the door sat a few small bags. Claire hadn’t bothered to tell me, but she’d made a plan with some other families who’d slept with us in the office to leave Dzaleka that night. Neither Rob nor Claire would let me look through the piles of stuff on the bed that they’d decided we would leave behind. I hated them.
Before leaving, I grabbed my Mickey Mouse backpack off the bed and stuffed three pairs of underwear into it.
* * *
All that night we walked. I felt such rage. I’d finally mastered my life here. I knew how to survive—who to borrow soap from when I laundered the clothes, how to sterilize diapers. And now we were walking away.
Claire carried Mariette on her back—I did not—and Claire did not even have Mariette tied on right. Her arms were sticking out. Her legs were sticking out. Mama Nepele warned me never to do that. She said that a baby’s exposed arms and legs were how the cold gets in. Claire knew nothing. She never learned even the most basic childcare tasks.
We walked into the farm fields, across the main road, down miles of dusty footpaths lined with acacia trees, Bruniaceae scrub, and palms. We approached a stream. The rumbling sounded like relief. I cupped my hands to drink. The water was so cold. Claire never spoke while we walked, and she never told me where we were going. She just moved, upright and aggressive, an overstuffed nylon bag in each hand, a sun-bleached cloth wrapped around her head, Mariette tied to her back.
She didn’t care if I pouted or if I seethed, or if, in my eight-year-old absurdity, I carried my Mickey Mouse backpack filled with the rocks that I’d collected over the past two years to keep track of where we’d been.
Claire also didn’t care if I was thirsty, exhausted, hungry, hot, despairing, confused, or lonely. She didn’t care if the grass cut my legs or if, now that I’d outgrown my Converse sneakers, my cheap plastic shoes burned my feet.
Claire didn’t care if Rob terrified me. She understood that Rob, too, had lost everything—his job, his home, his self—and now that he was a refugee, like us, he wanted to broadcast his pain. He hit Claire, he drank the last sips of our water. He carried nothing but his own food.
Claire didn’t care, or at least didn’t show me that she cared, that Rob scared her too.
I could feel Claire’s fear, all the adults’ fear. It was strung head to toe in their bodies, thin and brittle as pencil lead. They whispered, in jagged voices, about avoiding the Malawi immigration police.
Before dawn I heard Rob say that he thought we’d crossed the border into Mozambique. That made no sense to me. I had always assumed that a border was, if not a fence, at least a long ditch, a crack in the earth. I’d seen the lines on maps: black, unambiguous, imposing. I never considered those were made up.
I scanned the ground for clues, for signs of change, exotic plants, strange animals, glinting rocks. Along with geological specimens I wanted to collect memories, images to store and save so that when I saw my mother, my brother, or my father I could tell them, in detail, what I’d seen.
I fantasized, daily, of walking into a market, seeing my mother, and telling her I’d buy her anything there. My brother would be at the market too. I’d give him the biggest hug, then buy him popcorn and gum.
We walked over shells and bullet casings. Finally we reached the main road. Tall grass grew from splits in the pavement. I never imagined that civilization could look so forlorn.
* * *
We reached a bus stop, where our group sat down to rest, in the morning cool air, under a tree. Nobody talked or moved. We waited for hours. Time mattered only to our stomachs. The goal was just to survive. We’d made it through the night, now to make it through the day.
We’d eaten all the roasted groundnuts Claire had packed for food. All that remained was Mariette’s soft cassava porridge. I was so hungry but willed myself to fall asleep by imagining the self-loathing I’d feel when Mariette screamed in hunger.
The bus arrived shortly after daybreak—a military bus with almost no seats. A few of the men stood. The rest sat on the floor with the women and children. I compressed myself into a ball, bouncing and jolting with each pothole, so angry and desperate to stay inside myself that I refused to unfurl.
Claire nudged me when the sun was almost down. We’d reached Tete, the capital of one of the provinces in Mozambique. We all got off the bus. I sat, in a stupor, beside our luggage with Claire, Mariette, and a couple of other women.
After a few minutes I snapped out of my fog in horror. I’d left my Mickey Mouse backpack on the bus. I could see across the depot that the bus was still there. I knew exactly where the backpack was. I’d hidden it in a slot between one of the few seats on the bus and a side wall so no one would steal it while I slept.
I asked Rob, in the nicest, calmest voice I could muster, if he would please go get it for me. He refused. I begged Claire. She looked at Rob and then shook her head at me, no. I asked the other women. They would not go either. No one would go. No one would risk being caught by the immigration police.
I stood up and took a few defiant steps toward the bus myself. Rob grabbed my wrist. “No. NO,” he hissed. I felt the threat of his violence, just as he wanted me to. “No one cares. Leave it.”
8
I walked onstage, my school backpack containing just two objects, as per my drama teacher’s instructions. The first was a picture of Mariette and Freddy standing in front of the gate at our first apartment in Chicago. They looked so incredibly sad. Mariette stared straight at the camera and her eyes had nothing behind them. Freddy was two—so tiny, perfect, and worried. That photo still makes me cry.
The second object was my pillow, which had a lavender sachet inside the case. Mrs. Thomas had bought me the sachet in hopes of chasing away my nightmares. Each evening she microwaved the little silk pouch and inserted it, warm, next to the down. I loved our ritual but it didn’t work. I hardly slept.
The objects were for my eleventh-grade improv class. Our instructor had given us a simple assignment: present yourself to the group using only two possessions. The exercise made me agitated and insecure. I’d been doing theater since the seventh grade and my teachers always told me I was brilliant. They cast me as the star in Les Mis. I never doubted them. I didn’t want to consider that I was given roles out of pity or consolation. But by high school they started letting me in on the truth: I was a terrible actress. I tried to mimic expressions of anger or joy, but I never accessed my own emotions. My performances were mechanical and flat.
For the two-object assignment, I asked my teacher for more precise instructions. I wanted to know who to pretend to be. “Just express yourself!” she said. “You’re not acting—just be yourself. This is going to set you free.”
On the appointed day, the s
tage was set with a twin bed. When it was my turn, I walked onstage and set the pack down as if to do my homework. That’s who I was, right? A kid who came home from school and did her homework. But I could feel that I was failing—communicating nothing, revealing nothing of myself—and I hated to fail, so I tried a new tack. I took my pillow out and placed it on the bed, lay my head on it, and stared at the picture of Mariette and Freddy.
Then I just lost it. All the anger inside me erupted. I threw the pillow to the floor, ripped the sheets off the bed, found my cell phone and called Rob, for real. He didn’t pick up, so I left a raw, ranting message, telling him my truth, at last: He was supposed to have protected us from so much terror, and he hadn’t. He’d failed. He’d abandoned us. He’d caused terror of his own, and we were so hurt.
“I forgive you,” I said. “I can do that: I forgive you. But I will never trust anyone ever again. I will never put my life in anyone’s hands, never again.”
I sobbed until my teacher called me offstage.
My classmates avoided me after that.
* * *
By the time I wrote my essay for the Oprah contest, we knew my parents were alive. Claire had kept in touch with World Relief, the agency that brought us to the United States.
One day, while she was at the Chicago office, she met a Rwandan woman from the same village as our uncle, my mother’s eldest brother. That uncle was a priest and the only person in our family we believed to be alive. He’d moved to Belgium before the genocide, as had the children of this woman.
Claire ran across the street to a convenience store and bought a phone card. She gave it to the woman to call her children to see what they knew.
It turned out that my uncle had since returned to his home village in Rwanda and was a priest there. So the woman made another call. A few moments later she handed Claire a slip of paper with the phone number of my uncle’s church.
The next morning Claire called. The priest was taking a nap.
Claire called back an hour later—still napping.
The third time Claire called, the priest was awake.
I was at the Thomases’, in my bedroom with the built-in bookcases, my cheerleading uniform on the floor. Claire told our uncle her name.
He didn’t believe her. He said, “Those children died a long time ago.”
Claire told him our parents’ names.
He said, “No, no, no.”
Claire said, “Uncle, it’s me. My nickname was Pupusi.”
He gasped, then erupted in joy.
Claire was terrified to ask about our parents. So many people were murdered. How could you ask if your family was alive? It was hard to want to know.
Our uncle saved Claire the trouble. “Your parents—they are still alive, still in Kigali,” he said, once he composed himself. “They are still alive, but their lives have really changed.”
My father had lost his business. Rebels had stolen our house. My parents had no phone. Our uncle gave Claire the number of our aunt, our mother’s youngest sister. She lived two hours from Kigali. My uncle said he’d tell our aunt to visit my parents the following morning with her phone.
* * *
The next day I skipped school and took the L to Edgewater and sat in Claire’s apartment. I hated going there. Rob cheated on Claire. He hit her, he told her she was ugly, he made her feel worthless. I watched in silence as Claire dialed.
“Hi, Mama,” I heard her say. I walked out of the room.
My mother fainted, and Claire called back. I could not bear to listen to them.
“Yes, Mama, Clemantine is alive too. We were refugees for a long time. A very long time. All over. We’re in America now.”
Claire and my mother spoke like strangers. No one knew what to say. My mother told her Pudi was alive.
My sister lied and said she’d married a nice man. She tried, unsuccessfully, to sound joyful when she told my mother she had three kids. There was no masking how wrong that was. Three children by age twenty-two was way off the family plan.
It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali. Those people had died. We had all died.
For years I’d told myself that I would remember all the places I’d been and all the things I’d seen and I would tell my mother. I’d share everything about my life.
Now I decided not to tell her anything at all.
9
All night long, every night, I imagined how I would fight if it ever happened.
I saw teeth. Teeth as my weapon. My teeth, my nails, my hands, my kick. I saw myself kicking and biting. I had never bitten anyone in my life.
I saw myself propelling my body into motion—physically, verbally, emotionally. I saw the way I had to stand. The way I had to glare. I had to project, Do not mess with me, and not just with the control I used for women—with a wild fury. You cannot take what is mine.
I had to be impermeable, self-sufficient, and I practiced this in my waking hours too. I didn’t trust or accept help, especially from men, because when people extend their help to you, they feel you owe them. They believe they have the right to take advantage of you later. When you are at your lowest, they will say, Well, remember I gave you those beans? When you have nothing, nothing at all to give, they will say: I need you to repay me now.
* * *
My rage at losing my backpack was dark red. Everything in Mozambique was dark red. The men walked off into the town of Tete to find help. I tried to fall asleep again to escape, for a few moments, the boils of my sadness. The moon rose—the men were still gone. The moon crossed the sky—no one returned.
Claire’s face hardened. I could not be awake for this life. Then, from the shadows, a few women in black dresses emerged. They brought us sweet bread and water, and started talking to Claire in a language that sounded nearly like French.
They gathered their dresses—nuns’ habits, it turned out—and sat with us on the ground. One noted my scowl and patted my hand. A few hours passed. The men did not return. When the moon was high, a few more nuns arrived with the news that the immigration police had caught three men, including, presumably, Rob. Rob, along with the rest of us, had crossed the border illegally, so he was put in jail.
We walked with the nuns down a side road to a former soldiers’ camp, a half dozen sturdy green tents. The nuns offered us more bread and water, plus jam, candles, mosquito repellent, and supplies for Mariette—proper diapers, which I hadn’t seen since Zaire, and a bottle of formula.
Inside the tent a dog slept on the cardboard slabs intended to be our beds. I stood outside. It started raining. When, soaked, I finally entered, the dog left and I lay down on the soggy cardboard and fell asleep.
In the morning the nuns walked us to the prison. The border patrol had jailed the men in one room, the women in another. For a while we sat on a bench in the hallway, where mosquitoes attacked our ears and eyes. Claire held Mariette up to a guard, hoping to compel mercy. His face remained blank. Later in the morning, another guard appeared. Together the two men shooed all of us women and children into a windowless room, and locked the door.
The guards only spoke Portuguese. None of us did. For a while Claire and the other women stuck to the two languages everybody understands: smile or cry. Then Claire started screaming. We all screamed.
“Aren’t you ashamed?” Claire yelled in Swahili as she banged on the door. “Do you know how hungry these children are? We walked from my country at war.”
I joined her, yelling, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” her self-appointed chorus.
I was still so furious about my backpack, but I felt relieved to be away from Rob. I suspected Claire was relieved too. Still, we needed him. Two girls and a baby—Rob was a shield, our barrier against more predatory men.
Eventually the chief of immigration unlocked the door. He had a kind face. He spoke in Swahili, telling Claire that he, too, was a refugee, from Tanzania. Claire told him the simplest version of our story. After that he gave us bus fare south to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where, he said, we must stay at the refugee camp.
We slept that night on the cardboard at the nuns’ camp. The next day the chief of immigration released the men.
* * *
By that point I knew that Rob wanted to leave me behind. Unlike Claire, he did care about my emotions—they infuriated him.
I couldn’t look at Claire. I didn’t want her to see my anger, or how desperate I’d become. In Maputo immigration officers met our bus and took us to a camp, this one run by Italians, and surprisingly nice. The camp was set up like a hostel—a long barracks with lines of cots. Claire and Rob had a mattress and sheets. Mariette and I slept on the floor.
I was happy to be there, to be treated like a person, a normal person with normal human needs. We received dried milk, tomato sauce, bread, and toothpaste. Sometimes we received fish. On Fridays aid workers distributed pasta. I felt safe. The weather was hot, and while I did not risk walking around in my underwear, as the men did, I felt secure enough to wear a tank top.
Still, at night children cried out, “Mama, Mama!” as they drifted into sleep. I hated them for it.
In the morning life felt manageable again.
A few days after we arrived, Claire approached a woman who’d been living in the camp for twenty years. Twenty years, here? That unit of time made no sense. Maputo was only 60 miles from the South African border, 370 miles from Durban. Men who could afford bus tickets would sneak out and cross the border to live in South Africa and work. Yet this woman had lived here, in the camp, more than twice as long as I’d been alive. Claire said to this woman, with her salesgirl charm, “I have this nice bra that can fit you.” The woman bought it for ten Mozambican metical, less than twenty cents.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 11