Mrs. Thomas wanted me to call her every Sunday. I could not bear to talk to her. I could not bear to talk to Claire. I wanted only to broadcast, not converse. I had one friend, Luisa, and she sat with me in my room. She’d seen the pictures of my family with Oprah, me with Elie Wiesel, and she knew that I was suffering, but I still discussed almost nothing with her. I had so many nightmares. The nightmares of being trapped in the basement, the nightmares of the sleeping dead people on the boat. I was so lonely and depressed. I was in fifty pieces.
My advisor didn’t know what to do with me. She called the dean at Yale, who did not know either. I was a special problem, a rare disease. I just wanted everyone to leave me alone. I could not handle myself, but I didn’t want to be anybody’s project.
My life, up until that point, had been so pragmatic and focused on survival. I sucked up all available data and synthesized the optimal persona for any given situation. What do you need me to wear? Who do you need me to be?
All that channeling I’d been doing…it had been an illusion. Now I crashed. No algorithm, no filter. I said whatever came to my mouth and didn’t think twice. This is just a different jungle, I thought, a different forest.
I hated living by myself, for myself. It would have been easier if there were a locus for my anger: a single person. You. You destroyed everything. But there was no one person. No satisfying target. The world had torn and I thought I was bringing the pieces back together, but they just lay there, unsutured.
* * *
At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I made bracelets. I’d done this since the ninth grade, when Mr. Thomas’s mother moved into a retirement community. She was tough-minded and frugal, and over the decades she’d amassed a large tin full of buttons, beads, and single earrings. Mr. Thomas’s mother decided she could finally part with the tin when we were cleaning out her old apartment. I brought it back to my bedroom. I saved everything too: nice plastic bags, glass bottles, ticket stubs.
So for hours, late at night, I sifted through the tin, picking out the ceramic beads and brass buttons, knotting and clustering them together on elastic string.
The bracelets I made were chunky and beautiful. I kept two for myself, then started giving them away to people who I could tell had been suffering, like a girl in my class who cut herself. I told the girl who cut herself that whenever she thought she deserved to feel pain, she should put on the bracelet and remember that she was special and loved.
Mrs. Thomas drove me to sewing stores to buy buttons by the pound. I also searched consignment shops, which I loved, with their leather shoes and abandoned housewares, the dozens of gold necklaces—each item deliberately relinquished.
I was trying to braid my story together, keep all my various lives connected. I decided to make a hundred bracelets and give them all away. With each one I would let go of something painful or destructive in myself. With the first bracelet, I gave up Coke. I’d been drinking two cans a day for the caffeine. I was punishing myself, assuaging my guilt over surviving, with lack of sleep.
Next I tried to let go of hating my legs. I hated my scars—the one on my thigh from a barbed-wire fence and the one on my calf from the major infection I’d contracted at age eleven that ate a hole in my flesh.
It wasn’t working. I needed something more.
A professor’s wife invited me over to their house sometimes. Perhaps she saw the isolation in my eyes. She sewed and I liked the noise of her machine, so I decided, as an art project, to make a dress. At first I imagined one made of tulle, with a long papier-mâché train. But fabric was more expensive than I realized, so I settled on working with canvas from the art room.
The pattern I chose was for a one-shoulder dress with a fitted bodice, a wide belt, a large fabric flower sewn like a brooch on the left collarbone, and an A-line skirt. I draped it on the mannequin. It looked so white and pure. So I decided to paint it red. I brought the dress to the art room and started mixing colors. Beet, ladybug, stop sign. I couldn’t find the right red. Finally I felt satisfied, watered down my paint, and took the dress outside.
I lay it on a sheet of plastic on the ground, filled up a brush, and splattered. The paint now looked exactly like blood. I kept splattering, a massacre, trying to let go of my pain. The belt I painted entirely. It looked like a gash, open flesh. I displayed the dress, back on the mannequin, in the year-end art show. I titled the work Drop Dead Gorgeous. It did look pretty if you weren’t paying attention.
Everybody passed it and said, “Clemantine, what a beautiful dress.”
15
I sat with Freddy and Mariette and our torn luggage. People kept passing us, either sneering or averting their eyes, saying nothing. We’d arrived in Zambia. We were invisible.
Around the edges of the outdoor market in Lusaka ran open gutters. The filthy ground had been drenched with rain two or three days before. You could see footprints baked into the earth where the sun hit the ground directly, and a sludge of mud, thick as quicksand, drew flies in the shade. What had been clean, pure rainwater just days before was now a putrid medium for waste—fish carcasses, rotten vegetables, excrement, plastic bags. A young man dipped a bucket in the gutter and pulled it back out, full, to wash a bike.
After leaving Zaire, we’d tried to get back to Rwanda through Burundi, but it was too dangerous. So we retreated to Tanzania, again, as we had the last time we’d fled Zaire. Claire and I both wanted to make it to back to South Africa now. But that was too dangerous with a baby and a toddler, so a priest helped put us on a boat to Zambia. We’d taken four buses to get here and arrived with no plan.
So Claire left us at the teaming COMESA market while she walked off to find, or try to find, shelter and food. Claire refused to go back to a refugee camp. She was done with that life. Done with waiting hours in line for the toilet; done with eating only beans; done with living for a year in a plastic bag that someone else called a tent.
We sat for what felt like hours. Time passed, we did not move. Each stall was crammed with cheap pots, plastic sandals, blouses, kitenges, sleeping mats, toothbrushes, jeans, soap, underwear, bras, umbrellas, electric stoves—the full kit of consumer goods required for the cheapest form of urban life.
Between the stalls, in the center aisle, were stacks of wooden pallets, less desirable commercial real estate than the stalls, as you had to cover your goods with plastic sheeting every time it rained, and these pallets were topped with still more cheap pots, plastic sandals, blouses, kitenges, sleeping mats, toothbrushes, jeans, soap, underwear, bras, umbrellas, electric stoves.
By noon the market was thick with Zambian women in kitenges, flip-flops, and T-shirts, many of them bargaining and screaming at each other, most looking exhausted, the kind of dull-eyed chronic tiredness that comes from the nonstop stress of being broke. Car horns barked, music blared—it was so chaotic and loud.
Children, many of them my age, stood on the edges of the market, begging for money or food. I was so hungry and so scared. I could not stop thinking about ugali, rice, groundnuts, bananas, avocados—anything to put in my mouth.
I was new at being alone with both kids but also knew I could not broadcast my insecurity, so I kept my eyes down. I felt so self-conscious—a ten-year-old with a toddler and a baby. Who did people think we were? Freddy slept through the noise, which made me feel grateful but also mystified. He looked so shiny and perfect, his dark skin black and lacquered like a beetle.
Mariette, meanwhile, now three, sat by my side, crying. She too was hungry and scared, but I could not comfort her. I could not engage or I’d disintegrate myself. We had nowhere to go, no home in the world—no money, no friends, no relatives.
* * *
Finally a woman stopped in front of me and spoke to me gently in a language I did not understand. She then pulled out of her bag two little plastic sacks of cold water. She handed one to me and one to Mariette. We drank like t
hieves. The woman spoke again. I shook my head and said in Swahili, “Thank you but I do not understand.”
This time she responded in Swahili. She asked me if I’d like to sit with her in her stall in the shade.
So we sat there. More time passed. I felt slightly better, less like carrion, less forgotten and exposed. But still time didn’t matter. Our lives had no value and therefore there was no relevance to how our hours were spent.
Claire returned with mixed news. A woman had given her the address of her pastor and said we should go to his house and knock.
So we walked down a long flat street, away from the chaotic bus depot, away from the COMESA market, out of the city proper, on paved but potholed roads. Both shoulders were filled with hundreds of people walking, skinny black people with excellent posture and inspired outfits built of secondhand clothes walking slow and steady, the gait of people who walked for miles.
The pastor’s wife answered the door. She’d been cleaning—she had a mop in her hand and a blue-and-gold kitenge wrapped on her head. Claire apologized for the inconvenience and for needing to ask a favor, but here we were, she explained, herself, her two young children, and her little sister, and we had nowhere to sleep.
The pastor’s wife, God bless her, paused only for a moment before inviting us in. She gave us food and water and pointed to some rolled cotton mats that we could use to sleep on, on her swept floor.
The pastor, when he returned, looked at us with soft, weary eyes. Two days later, he helped us buy bus tickets to Mozambique. He thought perhaps we could, and should, backtrack to South Africa, where Rob still lived and we’d had better luck.
The ride was so long, twelve hours long. When we arrived at the border, immigration would not let us through. We had no visa, no home. So we rode the twelve hours back to Lusaka and once again walked along the shoulder of the long flat road to the pastor’s house.
We knew the pastor’s wife didn’t want us to return, and Claire regretted the inconvenience, but she felt it was not unreasonable to ask. We were people—homeless, poor, countryless, vulnerable people. Kindness was a Christian commandment—we could ask for a roof and food.
The pastor’s wife opened the door and loudly sighed and invited us back in. She tolerated our presence for two weeks. Then she said her mother-in-law was coming to visit and we needed to move out.
* * *
Again we walked, Freddy tied to my back, Mariette tied to Claire’s. We walked past the roadside shacks selling fruit, T-shirts, oil, maize, and bicycle tires, our faces impassive, or at least Claire’s was. Some guys called out to her in Kinyarwanda, “Hey, beautiful!” Male attention was a liability more than a help, but since they’d catcalled her in Kinyarwanda, she stopped.
“You from Rwanda?” Claire asked.
One of the men was very tall. The tall man said yes.
“My name is Claire,” she said, and the taller man’s face contorted and he started crying.
His sister had died in the genocide, he said. Her name had been Claire too.
Claire said, “I’m so sorry.” What else was there to say? Claire then explained our situation. “I have nowhere to sleep. I’m with my younger sister and two kids—I don’t care if you put me in the kitchen or whatever.”
The man with the sister named Claire invited us to come to his apartment to sleep. His friend, who lived with him, tried to stop it. “I have a girlfriend,” he said, his voice clipped. “We can’t take you…”
Claire just stood there and repeated herself. “I have two kids—I don’t care if you put me in the kitchen or whatever.”
The man with the sister named Claire told us to follow him to his sweet potato stand. When we got there, the friend broke down. He said, “I think I remember you from a church dance.”
* * *
We moved in with the tall man and his friend. Claire scrambled to make money to help our hosts with food and rent. She now spoke so many languages. She befriended everybody, greeted everybody. “Hey, Auntie! Hey, Uncle!” she called out to all the neighbors, always with a smile. She would not be broken. I resented her leaving me with the kids, but she remained an immovable force, determined to hold on to a shard of independence and not to be pitied.
She was also never willing to sell her body, which I was now old enough to realize was a miracle. I did not judge the other women and girls around me, who wore too much makeup and heels to advertise their trade—they had nothing and needed to survive. But my mother had been adamant about never, ever trading on sex.
I thought back to those lessons my mother casually imparted to Claire, when we all stood in the kitchen and our mother talked in her Catholic way about how special it is to be a woman and how when you sleep with a man he takes something from you. He knows you inside and out and you can never get your whole self back.
Claire tried so hard to hold on. Or maybe it wasn’t trying exactly; she refused to let go of her sense of self-worth.
So many women in the market spent their minuscule profits on lotion to lighten their skin. The world made them feel ugly. Men made them feel ugly. They wanted to feel beautiful.
* * *
A few weeks later, Rob unexpectedly showed up. He’d taken a bus to Lusaka and asked around until he found us. He arrived with nothing, no toy for Mariette and no money to help feed and clothe his new son, whom he’d never met. Claire felt too embarrassed to continue living at the Rwandan men’s house, for them to see how Rob treated her.
Lusaka was such a divided city. As I now knew from our bus rides, the wealthy lived in splendor in large homes with pools and lawns. The well-off lived nicely too, on their paved roads, behind their gates.
The merely poor lived in tiny tin-roofed cottages in dusty neighborhoods. They had no indoor plumbing, and their children had to walk an hour to get to school, but they carefully tended the bougainvillea vines blooming by their front doors, and the tomatoes, beans, and greens in their gardens, and they built nice, dignified lives. Farther out still were neighborhoods of half-built houses, rebar sticking out of cement like arms waving for help.
Then there was Chibolya, the slum we moved into. I’d come to believe that there were stages of death, that you don’t just fall down and die. The market that first day, feeling invisible while Claire tried to find us a place to stay that night—that was one level of death. Chibolya was far beneath that. Along with filthy rain gutters and pools of standing water, it had open garbage dumps; children with no shoes and torn clothes sitting expressionless in the dirty street; crumbling cinder-block houses; girls blatantly selling themselves; kids pressing their bodies into the doorways of schools which their parents had not paid for them to attend, hoping, against reason, that the teachers would feed them lunch.
We rented the smallest possible room, just five by ten feet. Even apart from its size, the place felt suffocating, as though we’d passed through a one-way valve into a level of death so deep that I wanted to tear off my skin to remind myself I was still alive.
Our room faced a courtyard. In that courtyard, on a stool, sat one of the landlady’s daughters, making sure that we did not use the shower in the communal bathroom, as we had not paid for that right.
When it rained, the garbage dumps swelled, the trash inflating like a grotesque quilted leviathan. Each raindrop on the tin roof sounded like a footfall in a deafening stampede. Our kitchen consisted of one ancient electric stove with wires sticking out from the heating coils. It sparked when you turned it on. I was terrified of being electrocuted. I wore plastic shoes while I cooked.
* * *
Claire’s hustle was in the market. She befriended a woman who rented a spot on the open-air wooden pallets. The woman sold underwear and bras, black, white, and red. She let Claire share her table. Claire still said hello to everybody. She helped bring in business. If a customer purchased from Claire’s side of the table, the woman who pai
d the table’s rent let Claire keep the profit—Claire’s presence was still a net plus.
Soon other merchants were bringing Claire commissions—jeans, soccer jerseys. They’d give her a button-down shirt and say, “I need thirteen dollars back.” All the market would be selling the exact same shirt for $15. Claire would sell it for $14.50.
A little money today was better than no money at all—that was Claire’s reasoning. Soon Claire had more commissions than she could handle. She returned the unsold merchandise to its owners at the end of the day. She did not want to be responsible. In Chibolya, things got stolen.
My hustle was getting through the day. How to claim dignity. How to keep the kids clean—in particular, how to keep Freddy from crawling in the filth. How to roll up my sleeping mat. How to “shine” the house, which was really just dousing the floor with petrol to keep out the bugs. How to wash my loud, floral, short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, which I loved and which I wore with my jean skirt, tied at the waist. How to make the kids cute, and thus make them lovable and seen. How to buy the cheapest vegetables, the nearly rotten tomatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, and spinach, go home, put on my plastic sandals, and make a stew.
The kids needed so much. I would not allow Mariette to play with friends. She got too dirty that way. Everybody thought Freddy’s big belly was so cute. It was not cute. I was the most tired eleven-year-old in the world.
There was no infrastructure really. The water pump was a twenty-minute walk away. To go with Freddy and Mariette, I needed to borrow a wheelbarrow, although borrowing a wheelbarrow meant that I needed to return it to its owner with an extra gallon or two of water.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 16