At John Robert Powers, the instructors told all of us immigrants what our modeling options might be based on height, weight, shape, skin tone, what your hands look like, your neck. They told us we had to measure ourselves every month because if your résumé said you were a size four and you showed up at a shoot as a size six, people would be upset. The idea of measuring myself bothered me but I so badly wanted to be recognized. I wanted to be looked at and get paid. I wanted to walk into a room and command the space.
In my class was a tall, muscular Russian volleyball player with blond hair extensions—she wanted to do athletic modeling—and a super-thin Ukrainian with a pixie haircut. The Ukrainian had the best prospects. The rest of us were told: You can do commercials, you can do Walmart, you can sell perfume in a department store.
I stuck with the class until the day I dressed up and took the bus to a warehouse for a photo shoot. For twenty minutes I felt glamorous, like the women in the lookbooks Mrs. Thomas received from Neiman Marcus. Then I was told that 5" x 8" prints would cost $100 each, and I felt used and left and never paid.
* * *
The Holocaust Museum in Skokie, another Chicago suburb, invited me to a luncheon they were hosting for Elie Wiesel. I read my entire Oprah essay for a group of three thousand people. Elie Wiesel said to me, “We shall keep meeting each other.”
Lots of people started calling, wanting me to talk at their events, to fund-raise, to be their story line.
It felt strange and rewarding to become such a useful character. I could connect the dots between the Holocaust and all the other genocides around the world. When I spoke, I could make people feel like they cared and listened, and yet even the kindest individuals with the best intentions rarely made room in their minds for the particular person I was.
Everyone was always exceedingly genteel to me, but under the careful niceties, I knew I had been given a chore. Please assume this identity: Oprah’s special genocide survivor, long-lost daughter made good. In that narrative, that brilliant fairy tale, I was the clever child who induced the fairy godmother to bring her parents back to life. I was to fill that slot on the show and in viewers’ minds. I was complicit. The title “the Oprah Girl” came with a dramatic story line, a happy ending, and a glamorous costume. At first I went along.
I worked closely with Harpo, Oprah’s production company. After the Wiesel luncheon, other speaking invitations followed and my talks were magic. At the end of each one people were in tears. But they understood nothing—least of all, that I wasn’t special. There were so many of me, thousands, millions. I just happened to be the one standing in the room. Don’t cry for me, I wanted to say. Cry for them. It will take you a hundred lifetimes to cry for all of them.
Yet still I posed for photos. I let people take my hands in theirs. They thanked me for sharing my story, my sad, harrowing, inspiring story. I smiled. I always smiled. But underneath I also said to myself, You have no idea. I shared one second of my life with you. I’m not the poor little kid you think I am.
* * *
The college financial applications asked: How much do your parents make—and I was like, Which parents? Do you have family members who fought in the Civil War—Which civil war?
My New Trier High School advisor laughed when I showed him my list of schools: Princeton, Yale, Georgetown. He thought I should aim less high. Everybody did. I was a lousy test-taker. My grades were erratic. My mother cleaned bathrooms at O’Hare airport. The counselor thought I should apply to Lake Forest College and William & Mary.
So I did. I applied to those schools, plus all the schools on my own list. Because of FAFSA, the Federal Student Aid department’s free application, the only money I spent was on postage stamps.
I was so anxious to leave my Chicago world—to avoid my parents, Claire. Claire was the person who knew everything, and still, when I heard her talk about her life, I felt I did not exist. I felt underappreciated, nearly erased, in her narrative of how her children were raised. I thought if I ran away from my family I could hide from some of the pain, get to a place where I felt I belonged. Nowhere in my life felt right, so I kept trading up.
That fall I marched in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I had been the captain of my team at dance camp and as a result I was invited to march. Mrs. Thomas ordered me the whole mustard-colored outfit—the skirt, the sweater, the shoes, the white gloves. I was supposed to wear nude tights. We couldn’t find the right nude. I bought too light a color and dyed them myself.
* * *
By spring, the news arrived: I’d been wait-listed at Yale. I knew by then that there were many more rungs of the ladder and that I could climb them if I was patient, if I observed the right people, watched their gestures, mimicked their conversation.
I also knew the power of my story. So when the admissions office said that there was a chance I could move off the wait-list if they learned more about my situation, I flew out to New Haven. I spent the day in a series of interviews, first talking about Habitat for Humanity, then discussing the book Infidel, written by a Somalian woman named Ayaan Hirsi Ali who served in the Dutch Parliament. I’d just read the book. Ali’s personal story was both so brutal and so typical for a Somalian girl. Her genitals were cut. She was forced to marry. As an adult she rejected her Muslim faith and wrote this blistering feminist critique of Islamic culture. Then finally I just came out with it and told the dean of admissions that I thought I belonged there, at Yale, among the world’s future leaders.
It was all so arbitrary: You should be killed, you should stand in line for food for seven hours, you should be fabulously educated and heaped with praise.
I told the dean that if people at Yale wanted to make the world a better place, I could tell them what to fix.
A week later the dean called. “I have good news and not so good,” he said. “The good news is you’ve been accepted at Yale. But, the bad news…” I inhaled. “Looking at your writing especially, I think you can use some more classes to help you to manage the writing and workload.”
“Yes, I’ll take classes,” I said, jumping in. “In fact I took classes for writing this past summer.”
The dean slowed me down. “You might have to do a little bit more,” he said. “The type of thing we’re talking about is maybe taking writing classes at Northwestern for a few semesters. Or, I was just talking to someone from a boarding school called Hotchkiss and I took the liberty of sending them your application. They’d be very keen on having you there.”
I felt spun around and deflated, a balloon spasmodically losing gas. I needed to stay in high school? I was twenty. I was over it. My first, emotional response was preposterously spoiled: No way, I don’t want to do that. But I pulled myself together. This was the most privileged hardship possible.
13
I saw a father on the bus to the Mozambique border drinking Fanta with his daughter. I wanted so badly to be that girl, to be casually drinking soda on a trip with a parent, though I no longer imagined a real reunion possible if we returned to Kigali. Everything about my body was different. I was nine. I’d lost most of my baby teeth and grown in new ones. I had muscles. I had scars.
I refused to sit with Claire. She was just as happy not to sit with me anyway. She hated my whining and self-pity. So while I jostled Mariette on my lap in the back of the bus, Claire, five months pregnant, sat up near the driver on a jump seat that folded down into the center aisle. Every square inch of the bus was packed with people and bags, the space dense and alien to its surroundings, a submarine in the terrestrial ocean of dust, farmland, oleander, milkweed, agave, lantana, and date palms. The only thing that gave me solace about our journey back north through East Africa was the fact that we’d be passing through Zaire. Zaire was the one place, other than South Africa, that had felt inviting, the one other country where we’d had what felt like a family, where a half dozen women brought me dresses already irone
d for church.
But when we arrived, nothing was the same. The war had destroyed Kazimia. The city looked toppled and covered in ash, like a child had kicked over and burned a building-block town. The lake was still deep blue, the ancient palm trees still stately. A few guileless flowers bloomed. Rob’s family huddled in his uncle’s house, starving. Instead of welcoming us with stew and fish, they served us sweet potato leaves, cut into strips and boiled, with no oil and no salt. I felt so exhausted and so depressed. We left South Africa for this? When we were last in Zaire, people served sweet potato leaves only to pigs.
We had been gone three years.
* * *
Life had been rubbed away. The electricity was cut off. Many water pumps were dry. You couldn’t fish from the shore, you couldn’t fish on the lake in a boat, you couldn’t hang out on the rocks after you washed—the soldiers wouldn’t let you. A curfew barred anybody from leaving the house after 5:00 p.m. and before 7:00 a.m., so you couldn’t be out during the time when you’d catch fish anyway.
The lazy afternoons swimming, the dashing clothes on Friday nights, the goofy dancing to the TV in the yard—that Zaire was gone. The country was now called Democratic Republic of Congo. There were so many soldiers from so many countries. We slept and lived in a battlefield, a directionless, disorienting fog of violence.
There is an expression in Swahili, vita ni mwizi—war is a thief. The destruction of this place was brazen. Dead people lay in the streets. Shell-shocked neighbors stared at them. Bombs exploded in no discernible pattern. Children starved. All of my fears came true.
We all knew the routine: If you hear an explosion, run as fast as you can, crawl under the bed, close your eyes, and pray to God. We all learned every crack on the floor, every creak in each spring, where the wires that stuck out at the head of the bed could poke you in the eye.
One afternoon, I glanced at Estienne, one of Rob’s cousin’s children. He lay with me under the mattress, curled up and crying.
“Are we going to die?” he asked his sister, who lay with us too.
“No,” she said. “None of us are going to die. We just need to pray for God to send angels to protect us.”
I didn’t believe in angels.
* * *
One day Mama Nepele sent me, and Dina, Mwasiti, and the other kids who lived in the house, to the pump. We needed water, we had no choice. She sent us together, in a group, to keep each other from making a minor but deadly mistake.
We walked twenty minutes, each of us with two twenty-liter yellow containers, and we arrived to find a dozen people in line arguing with a soldier who said he was closing the pump for the day. All of us needed to take our huge containers elsewhere.
So we backtracked and walked an hour up and over the hills down to a different valley by the lake. This one had a large house with running water. A guard outside the house told us that we needed to bring him rocks in exchange for filling our buckets. He pointed behind him to a large half-built stone cottage.
We combed the lakeshore, looking for big rocks. Mwasiti tied a huge one, the size of a large melon, behind her hip with her kitenge. She was now thirteen, well-muscled, confident as a racehorse in a paddock. You could see her strength was throttled down.
This was the only thing Mwasiti knew. This was her whole world. She had such pride, such defiant pride, like she’d been caught in a booby trap and was still standing in place saying there’s nothing better than this. Her love of her home was unshakable. Patric, meanwhile, was five and still wanted to be babied. He picked a rock the size of a coconut and grimaced the whole way to the pump.
The soldier stared as we filled our jugs with water—mine only halfway. Then we started the long trek up the hill. By now it was afternoon. I carried my water on my head. We walked in silence. The streets were too quiet. The market was too quiet.
As the sun lowered I became too tired to keep up. I emptied a quarter of the water out of one jug, so that I could move faster. My whole body seized in a knot of fear right behind my backbone. It was getting dark. If we were out after 5:00 p.m., nobody would protect us.
The older women talked. I heard them talking about all the things they do to women. I’d heard them say, If you’re a girl, someday you will have to be the sacrifice. The other girls will have to watch.
* * *
A priest lived next door to us, a white priest, and people from all over came to his house, hoping he would chase away the devil. The lines grew longer by the day, people screaming, crying, and fainting as they stood for hours in the equatorial sun. Some supplicants knocked on our door, asking for a bite to eat or a sip of water. We had so little.
One morning Mama Nepele woke up long before dawn and left the house before the curfew lifted to go stand in line at the mill. She hoped to beat the rush. After the sun rose we joined her, walking past the graveyard and through a tunnel.
Still we waited in line for hours. I wanted to leave my body. I hated that I had to eat. I hated my stomach, I hated my needs. The bargain my body offered did not feel worth it. I did not want the trouble anymore.
* * *
Back home we spent the days under the bed or, really, taking turns under the bed because we didn’t all fit. Claire’s belly was as big as a three-kilo sack of rice and each time she fell asleep she had nightmares.
She saw people turning into animals, no doubt because, a few months earlier, rebels had taken over the house and hung a crocodile skin on the wall. Mama Nepele never dared to take it down. During the day military trucks rumbled down the streets, soldiers marching in small groups of six or eight, including pairs of little boys with guns they could barely hold.
The house sat partway up a small hill, a better location than on the main street. But still. All night the bombs exploded. People threw grenades. The adults pushed furniture against the windows. We moved the beds into the middle of the room. Yet my body felt as exposed as if I slept in a nightgown on a wide plateau. I felt cold even though the air was hot. I shook and could not stop.
Holding Mwasiti or Mado did not help. We all rattled and reeked with fear. Mama Nepele commanded us to be silent. We could not cry, so we did not cry. Noise provoked the devil.
* * *
Then I was not just scared but sick. Malaria, depression, malnutrition, it did not matter. I could not stop sweating. I could not stop shivering. I couldn’t eat.
Claire was too big and vulnerable to go out—a sadist’s prize. Mama Nepele took me to the hospital.
None of my clothes fit. I was too skinny. I could not stand up. Mama Nepele wrapped me in a kitenge and tied my scrawny ten-year-old body to her back. I hated being carried. I didn’t believe in its implicit promise of care and protection. But I was too weak to walk.
The war had no logic, no direction, no discernible objective, no face. It was everything, everywhere, all at once, and it stood for nothing at all. I was only semiconscious when we reached the hospital. Doctors prayed over me. A nurse raised my head and made me drink charcoal, as Mucyechuru had done for Claire in Burundi. Nobody offered medicine.
We slept on a hospital bench. Then Mama Nepele carried me back home to die.
* * *
I was so thin. I was so weak. They had to hold me up to get me to the bathroom.
Mama Nepele lay down a mat under beautiful trees and she put me on it and read the Bible to me, to walk me through my own death. She knew I was going to die. Everybody knew I was going to die, and they all accepted that. But I thought, I’m not going out like this. I’m not going to take this. I know where home is, I know where home is. I want to go home.
* * *
Maybe I needed to mourn my old life. I recovered faster than anyone expected, and as soon as I was strong enough we left for Uvira. It was not better there. Flies swarmed the bodies in the street. One day Mama Nepele sent me and Mwasiti to walk up a steep hill near the edge of t
own to look for sweet potato leaves. The rocky hills scraped our knees. We found the vines stripped bare.
The Congolese government had started printing money. You now needed a whole plastic bag full of francs to buy charcoal, a suitcase full to buy sugar.
I prayed more. I sang more. I praised God.
I had this dream in which everyone was sleeping and I had to wake them up—wake them from their own near-deaths so that they might receive the word of God. When I was strong enough, I started doing lock-ins in churches, praying and kneeling all night behind a locked door, until my knees bled. I was obedient. I was holy. I cut my hair, nails, I wore long outfits, not showing any part of my body, like a nun. I regurgitated everything.
But once I fully recovered from my illness, I began to harbor doubts. There had always been preachers at the front gates of the refugee camps, greeting us with the message that we should focus on our lives beyond this one. This world was full of sinners, they said. We were those sinners. Our lives, this camp, they were hell, yes. But our true home was heaven.
Here, too, the preachers were saying that we were sinful. We should be punished. We should pray to God to make the suffering stop. I felt confused. We did not seem to be the sinners, not to me. We lacked food. We lacked water. People, not God, were causing us pain. Why should we be set on fire?
* * *
In August, Claire went to the hospital to give birth to Freddy. The maternity nurses were so cruel. They said to all the women in labor, “Why did you spread your little legs? Why are you screaming and crying? Do you think you’re the first to feel this kind of pain? Do you think you’re the last?” They considered it their job to toughen women up.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 14