The Girl Who Smiled Beads

by Clemantine Wamariya

  Claire asked another old-timer, a Rwandan man who’d lived at the camp for sixteen years, to accompany her into Maputo. He spoke some Portuguese, and he told Claire that he’d known our aunt who’d died in the conflict, the conflict no one would name. Claire explained nothing to me.

  The next day Claire and the man set out for Maputo, an hour away on foot. In town they walked around until Claire found a general store. Claire told her Rwandan chaperone, “Ask the shopkeeper if he wants to do business with me! Tell him I can give him spaghetti from Italy.”

  The Rwandan man did as told. “This young woman wants to do business with you,” he said to the Indian shopkeeper, in Portuguese. “She says she’ll bring you pasta from Italy.”

  The shopkeeper said, “Oh, do you have a sample?”

  Claire pulled a box of pasta out of her bag and waited while the shopkeeper inspected it. “How many do you want?” she then asked. “How much will you pay me for half a dozen?”

  The shopkeeper offered Claire five metical a box.

  That evening, at camp, Claire was on fire. She went around the barracks asking, “Who wants money?” She offered people two metical a box for their pasta. She bought four and the next day returned to Maputo with the Rwandan man. The Indian shopkeeper gave her twenty metical, which, back at camp, she gave to Rob. He took a bus to South Africa the following day.

  In the middle of the week Claire returned to Maputo to check on her pasta business. The shopkeeper had sold out.

  From then on, each Friday, Claire bought as many boxes of pasta as she could afford from others at the camp, and on Saturday morning she woke up at 4:00 a.m., borrowed a wheelbarrow, and carried her supply into town. With her profits she purchased soap, milk, and candles, which she brought back to camp for me to sell. Now, thanks to Claire, our camp had a small black-market economy.

  We had a roof. We had a stove to boil Mariette’s water so she would not get sick. That was enough. I wanted to stay. But Claire was determined not to get comfortable. She thought lingering in a good camp was even more dangerous than staying in a bad one. We could not start to believe this life was okay.

  10

  My survival plan in high school was shoddy, a sheet of plywood nailed over a broken window. This worked well enough for a while: I shut out my family, kept up my routine, worked hard at school.

  When I needed a bit more help, I escaped into Toni Morrison. In Sula, she described a world full of people I knew: a girl whose laughter carried but whose “adult pain…rested somewhere under the eyelids”; a regal black woman who “lost only one battle—the pronunciation of her name”; children “whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling.” She embraced the same deep existential isolation I felt. “Lonely, ain’t it?” one of Morrison’s characters asks Sula.

  “Yes,” she says, “but my lonely is mine.”

  * * *

  Then one day, when I was in Target with Mrs. Thomas, Claire called to tell me Pudi was very sick. They thought he had meningitis.

  I went straight to Western Union to wire all my babysitting money to my parents to buy him medicine.

  The next day, Friday, after school, I took the train to Claire’s apartment, where the two of us spent the weekend waiting for the phone to ring. Claire had recently left Rob. His abuse had become intolerable. She had no furniture. It didn’t matter. We sat on a mattress on the floor.

  The plan was that my mother would call if it was not fine. We waited and waited. My mother called. Claude—Pudi—had died.

  Pudi was then twenty-two years old. I never knew him as a young man. I never talked to him on the phone—I was so scared. Talking to Pudi would have been talking to a ghost. I never told him that I always thought of him. I didn’t say, I missed you. Or, You tried to help me understand a world I would never understand. Or, I saved all these things to give you. I had so much to share with Pudi and nothing at all to share. We all lived lives my parents never dreamed of us having.

  I lay back on the mattress and cried an ocean of tears. So many people had been lost, so many people killed. Pudi was the first person that we mourned.

  * * *

  In August 2006, three months after we appeared on Oprah, Claire flew back to Rwanda. She’d become a U.S. citizen a week before we appeared on the show. She found my parents living on the outskirts of Kigali, in a shack. My father wasn’t working. He had high blood pressure and diabetes. My mother cooked by herself, no house girls.

  Claire took a bus into the city and walked to the embassy, where she was greeted like a star. “It’s Claire from Oprah!” the clerk said. Everyone in Rwanda had watched the video of us on TV. It was a feel-good story and lord knows Rwanda needed feel-good stories then.

  A genocide museum had been built in the lush lowland that ran through the center of Kigali. The museum contained a detailed, graphic teaching exhibit; a mass grave for 250,000 people; and a wall of names, modeled after the Vietnam Memorial, that, to this day, is nowhere near done. Trying to circumscribe and commemorate the pain of the entire country is not really possible.

  The final exhibit in the museum is a film in which traumatized Rwandans talk about forgiving. They say the whole country has to forgive, that they themselves have forgiven. Not long ago, Claire and I sat in the grass in a park near my apartment in San Francisco and fought about forgiveness.

  Claire believes that she can and needs to forgive. Her faith is her shield. Hallelujah. Be grateful.

  “Rob’s cousin, who lost her baby,” I said to Claire. “She had all the pain, all the worst pain we can imagine God inflicting on a person. And these men came along and stole from her. They took all she had left. They took her humanity, and we are asking her to forgive?”

  Claire listened, unmoved. She said, “I have my own peace. I told myself long ago, no one can take my peace.”

  “But people need to know, people need to say to themselves, ‘I cannot do this thing because this thing is unforgivable. I cannot decide my wife is a cockroach. I cannot decide my neighbor is a snake. I cannot kill my wife. I cannot kill my neighbor. I cannot make others less than human and then kill them. This is unforgivable. This will never be forgiven.’ There should never be a pass.”

  Claire stayed quiet. When she spoke she said, “Let’s talk about Rwanda”—a first. “There are some people, they had kids and somebody came and killed all their kids and the killer survived. There are children, they lost their parents, everything, and the killers survived. And Rwanda is peaceful right now. Do you think Rwanda could be peaceful right now if no one would forgive?”

  I understand that forgiveness is utilitarian, that it is likely even the missing piece in my life, the keystone that will allow me to balance and stabilize and keep the bricks of my life from tumbling down. But I can’t do it. To me it feels false.

  “The thing is, Rwanda is peaceful but it’s in people’s hearts. It’s in people’s hearts and it’s going to come out.”

  “Forgive or forget,” Claire whispered.

  “Forget? There’s no forget. The damage is done. It will come back. Those lines were crossed and we can’t go back. Husbands killed their wives, wives killed their husbands. People told us, ‘Those other people over there, we do not want them. They are cockroaches,’ and we believed them. In their minds, that was okay. We have to say, ‘I am responsible. We are responsible. They are responsible. This happened.’ Right now, when we are sleeping, we see it in our dreams. We make a painting and we think it’s beautiful and the monster is right there.”

  Claire said, “Can we talk about something else?”

  * * *

  The consulate gave Claire visas for my mother and my youngest sister. Claire was back on her home turf, once again an effective dealmaker. But she didn’t have money to buy them plane tickets to Chicago—not yet.

  So she flew back to the United States and retur
ned to work. She still worked nine- or ten-hour days, six days a week. When she was not cleaning hotel rooms, she cleaned houses. It had been so hard for Claire to find a self here. Rob spent his paychecks on his girlfriends when they were together. He beat Claire; he tore her down. Claire later told me the degradation of that marriage was worse than the degradation of refugee life.

  In December, Claire returned to Rwanda, to try again to bring my mother back to Chicago to live with her. Claire called me from Kigali. She didn’t have the money to buy my mother a plane ticket; she’d known she didn’t when she left. She’d flown there trusting God would help her find it.

  The conversation was tense. Claire knew I didn’t have that kind of money. I told her I would not ask the Thomases. Then she reminded me about my boyfriend, Troy, and his father.

  Troy and I didn’t have much of a physical relationship. He was kind and generous, and we kept each other company. His parents had split up. He felt really lonely in his house. Often he came with me to Claire’s and helped with the kids. He cooked while I cleaned. He did the laundry. He invited Freddy to his football and basketball games. Troy and I balanced each other. He saw all the lies and hypocrisy in the world; I wanted to stay numb. One day his father gave him a car and he refused the gift. I later read Into the Wild to try to understand him, why he deprived himself of things. Claire’s point was: Troy’s father had once told me that if my parents ever had the opportunity to move to the United States, he’d help pay for the tickets.

  I hated asking. The whole dynamic of giving and receiving made me tense. I was nineteen, a kid but not a kid, and already the recipient of profound generosity. I didn’t want to become a charity. Claire, too, had never wanted to be saved. Other refugees we knew made the opposite play—they wore ratty pants and no shoes, to broadcast their need. But Claire didn’t want the low rung in a hierarchy.

  Claire had an intuitive sense of the postcolonial aftershocks, the lingering effects of outsiders coming in to save, enlighten, and modernize Africa. The colonists, the aid workers, the NGOs—they’re all in a single progression: paternalistic foreigners, assuming they are better and brighter, offering shiny, destabilizing, dependence-producing gifts. How can one accept anything from so-called rescuers when their predecessors helped your people destroy one another?

  It’s not enough for outsiders to want to atone for their sins. They need to look at themselves, their history and biases, and make a plan for how not to repeat their crimes. Our minds are malleable. Our minds can be possessed—possessed so gradually that we don’t even realize we’ve lost control. The German leaders had practiced the tactics they used on the Jews in the Holocaust in Namibia almost four decades earlier. The violence and degradation were systematic. Those Europeans considered their race to be superior to the Herero and Nama ethnic groups, and they became facile at mass-killing techniques: sealed-off water holes in the desert, death camps, whips.

  But Claire, determined to fly back to America with our mother, worked her jujitsu on me and made a convincing argument that my mother was too fragile, and would be too overwhelmed if Claire returned to Chicago solo to earn more money and our mother had to emigrate to the United States by herself.

  Claire’s own return flight to Chicago was leaving in two days. So I made the call. I was mortified, but a few minutes later Troy’s father was talking with Claire in Kigali.

  They conferenced-in the airline. Claire gave the ticketing agent my mother and my sister’s information; my boyfriend’s father gave the ticketing agent his credit card number.

  By that point it was very late in Rwanda. The next morning Claire told my mother she had airline tickets for her.

  My mother asked, “Where did you get the money?”

  Claire said, “God.”

  * * *

  I was still too terrified to deal with my mother, so I avoided Claire’s apartment.

  My mother tried to help Claire with her house and her children, but there were endless misfires. My mother didn’t reset the time on her watch, so two days after arriving she woke Claire’s kids up in the middle of the night to get them ready for school.

  My mother didn’t know English and Claire’s children understood very little Kinyarwanda, so she clapped at them to go take showers or to clean up their rooms, and this drove them crazy. Claire felt infantilized too—my mother wanted Claire to fall under her care again: to cook for her, to run the home.

  Neither Claire nor I had been a child in such a long time. Claire did not want to be mothered. She wanted to make money. The two of them crushed each other. Claire would cook and my mother would say, “I don’t like my chicken fried.” Or Claire would open her closet and give my mother clothes and my mother would say, “I don’t wear this kind of blouse. I don’t like these shoes.” Those small moments undid Claire. This was not the reunion she had expected. Often she walked out of her house and sat by Lake Michigan, trying to breathe.

  * * *

  A few months later Claire returned to Rwanda once again, for my father and other two siblings. The church had raised the money for the plane tickets.

  This time she brought my father with her to the American embassy in Kigali. He was so destroyed, but he kept in his wallet a photo from the day of the Oprah taping, and when the consulate asked my father if he had family in the United States, he reached in and pulled out the picture of himself, Claire, me, and Oprah. The consul nearly fainted. “Oh my goodness! Oprah! Can I make a copy?”

  The consul gave my father a ten-year visa.

  My parents arrived as immigrants, not refugees, which means they had a country. Living in America sounded prestigious. Of course they came. But they were not really capable of planting themselves, digging in, growing roots and branches into the past and future to create a full life. Like Claire, my parents didn’t talk about before, or what had happened between before and now. They existed in a never-ending present, not asking too many questions, not allowing themselves to feel, moving forward within the confines of a small, tidy life. They stopped talking whenever Claire or I walked into the room. Perhaps this was inevitable—that we would become permanent aliens, irreparably estranged.

  My father was now in and out of the hospital for his diabetes. Claire had eight people living in her apartment—our immediate family plus several cousins—and she was the only one with a job. This was fine, everything was fine. At the beginning of the week she bought a big box of chicken and a bag of rice at World Market. The church dropped off a few grocery bags of staples to supplement that, and everybody tried to make it last.

  On weekends, at Claire’s house, I’d see my youngest sister, who was six, jump into my mother’s lap, as though anybody could just jump into her mother’s lap. She’d beg for my mother’s attention, like all lucky little girls do.

  One night, I sat down at Claire’s kitchen table to study for the SATs. My mother, who’d been taking ESL classes, sat down to do her own homework, next to me. It was the first time we’d been still and close together in fourteen years.

  The one time I tried to ask my mother what had happened to her during the war had not gone well. She had been cleaning my sister’s apartment, which I thought would provide a good distraction. She could keep her eyes on the cupboards she was wiping down, and tell me about her life without the unbearable intimacy of me seeing her face. But as soon as I said, “What happened…,” I felt ashamed. The cabinet door started shaking, my mother’s hands frantic and trapped, a bird flown through a window who can’t escape. Now I see I should have known better. Claire told Mariette almost nothing. What mother could? The contours of pain are not fixed. Suffering expands and metastasizes. Our pain stays in our own hearts and fills our loved ones’ as well.

  My mother hardly slept anymore. She just focused on her children and grandchildren, and the dozens of other neighborhood kids. She kept lists. She remembered everybody’s birthday and gave each child as many
dollars as their age. Her punishments grew soft.

  As I practiced for the SATs, my mother bowed her head and studied her ESL workbook, pausing and deliberating over each word, as if taking a final exam. Her dark skin didn’t match mine. Her hair was short and tight against her head—I remembered it as long. Her fingernails were chipped. Her lips were parched. The fantasy of reunion was a lie. No lights, no camera angles, no makeup could restore the time we’d lost and the relationship we could have had. The only things about my mother that conformed to my memory and felt congruent with the mother I knew were her cheekbones and the white rosary she wore around her neck.

  I ran to the bathroom and turned on the shower full blast. After twenty minutes, Claire knocked on the door.

  “You are not taking a bath. Why are your eyes red?” she asked harshly. “Have you been crying? What happened?”

  11

  I could see fear in Claire’s face. Fifteen of us were packed into the coyote’s car. He drove crazy fast, in the dark with no headlights, and I was sure we were going to hit a tree. Claire had heard that in South Africa you could make money everywhere. You could get a job. So we were fleeing Mozambique. I, age eight, crouched in the car’s footwell. To contain my fright I focused on my hands. In the lines of my palms I saw a picture of an old woman.

  The coyote stopped the car at a hut in a cluster of trees and gave us dried meat, bread, and water. Then we started walking across a nature preserve. The sky was orange, that orange I hated. I saw snakes—the coyote hadn’t told us there would be snakes.