Running the Rift (46 page)

“Yes, Jean Patrick. I do.” Coach's hand lingered on Jean Patrick's foot. “I'll give you one chance. If you make it, you'll be on your own again.”

“You won't untie me?”

“No. That, I could not explain if they catch you.” A truck whinnied up the road, sliding in the mud. “Get out. You need to be quick.” The truck
came closer. At least, if he did not make it, he would be running when he left this world. Coach pulled him out of the jeep and stood him up. “Go! Go! Go!” He pushed him.

Jean Patrick struggled to remain upright. The truck was close enough for him to hear the soldiers' voices. He didn't need to look to know the cargo. With strength he pulled from the air, he sprang forward, an awkward, bumbling gait. If he could stand the pain and zigzag, he might make it.

“Next time we meet will be Atlanta,” Coach called after him. “For the Olympics.”

The crack of the shot came at once from far away and inside his head. Falling took forever, a feeling of release. He had time to wonder at the course of the pain, traveling simultaneously upward from his ankle and down from his skull, to anticipate its coming together like two rivers colliding. For a second, he swam. And then he drowned.

THE FAR SIDE OF THE EARTH
Umuntu asiga ikimwirukaho ariko ntawusiga ikimwirukamo.
You can outdistance that which is running after you,
but not what is running inside you.

T
HE MAN WAS VISIBLE
from far off in the bright morning as he climbed the trail. He walked quickly, head down, face shaded by a dark cap. He hefted a large pack, and his arms kept time with his legs in a way that branded him as a soldier. There was something teasingly familiar about his way of moving, but at this distance, it was hard to tell. Jean Patrick felt his heart quicken, but after so much disappointment, he was wary of its sting. Behind the soldier, a trail of red dust billowed and swirled.

Jean Patrick had been working in the garden when the man caught his attention. From the hours spent weeding, his ankle pulsed. He limped to the edge of the plot and watched carefully for some small, definitive gesture, something that would tell him that this once, he had been right to believe, that Imana had indeed turned his ear in Jean Patrick's direction.

After a few more steps, the soldier looked up toward the house. He stopped, took a few steps forward, stopped and looked again. Jean Patrick waved to encourage him. Probably he was just Auntie Spéciose's friend, uncertain about the stranger in her garden. The war that in Rwanda had ignited like a nuclear explosion and been extinguished by the victory of the RPF had continued as a never-ending smolder in Burundi.

The soldier's pace quickened. He threw his arms in the air and called out, but the wind swept his words away. He took a few more steps and then broke into a run. Jean Patrick heard his own name shouted from the soldier's lips. He took in the square jaw, the familiar sprinting stride he had spent so much energy chasing. He saw that after so much time spent shutting hope out, he could open his heart and let it hit him full force. He threw down his hoe, picked up his cane, and stepped out into the road.

Jean Patrick and Roger stood in the sunlight and held on to each other, swaying in silence, only the familiar notes of their breathing between them. The words to bring them back across the chasm of so much death had not yet been invented.

“You're alive! I knew it,” Jean Patrick finally whispered. He stepped back and studied Roger's face. War had carved a geologic epoch into his skin.

“Me, I also knew
you
were alive, and I knew that if I did not find you in Rwanda, I would find you here. Still, I can't believe I am touching you again, flesh and blood.” Roger laid his hands on Jean Patrick's shoulders. “Everyone else is gone.”

Jean Patrick fought off collapse. In his heart, he had known it. If any of them had been alive, they would have found a way to contact Auntie Spéciose. But until Roger's words extinguished it, he had nurtured a tiny flicker of belief. “Come to the house. Auntie has gone to the market, and Uncle Damien is at work.” He wiped dirt and sweat from his face and smiled weakly. “He's a teacher, like Papa.”

“Yes, I remember. He told me when I came—
before.
” The words that divided Rwandan time in two:
before
and
after. After,
only a month's worth of days.

Jean Patrick said, “When I first saw Auntie from a distance, my heart flew. She resembles Mama so much I thought it was her. It was only when I was nearly face-to-face that I saw I had been mistaken.” One hand on Roger's shoulder, one hand on his cane, Jean Patrick started toward the house.

“Aye! What happened to you?” Squatting in the dirt, Roger examined the purplish, swollen skin, the jagged scar between ankle and calf. “Did you know the person who cut you? I promise he will face justice, if he is still alive.”

Justice? What was that? “You have found him, my brother. I did it to myself, jumping over a wall.” He took off the felt hat Uncle Damien had given him and ran his fingers across the pink, hairless line above his ear. “This gunshot wound I did not inflict on myself.”

“Eh?” Roger stood. “A bullet? Mana yanjye!”

“Yego. It's a long story, but we have plenty of time. Come and take
something to drink, some nourishment. Wherever you came from, it is a hard journey here.”

T
HEY SAT AT
the tiny table carved by Damien's hand and drank orange Fanta. Jean Patrick sliced mangoes and papayas, peeled a cucumber and a tomato and sprinkled them with thick granules of salt. “I am ready to hear, if you are ready to tell.”

Roger wiped his fingers on his pants. “I am ready.”

“You went there?”

“Yes.”

“And you are certain?”

“Yes. I talked to Mukabera. She's the only Hutu neighbor who didn't run to Zaire with the Interahamwe. My company would have killed her, too, if I hadn't stopped them. After all we witnessed, there were many angry boys.” Roger looked around. “Is there beer?”

“Spéciose will bring it from the market.”

“I can't be sure about Mama, Jacqueline, and the girls,” Roger said. “Uncle told Mukabera he was taking them to the church at Ntura. After the killers did their work there, the Interahamwe bolted the doors and set fire to the building. There were few survivors. I posted the names on all the bulletin boards at the camps, and I studied every picture pinned up on them. I have had no word of them. I do not think they walk among the living.”

“And the rest of the family—they were at home?”

Roger placed his hand over Jean Patrick's. It was rough and callused, as Uncle's had been. “They were. Mukabera said Uncle died fighting. She found him with an ax still in his hand. She left him with it; it was the one token of respect she could pay. The killers must have left it there for the same reason, but surely it was not long before someone else carried it off.” A fly landed on the table, and Roger flicked it away. “They even killed your little dog. Mukabera said Pili's body was resting on Zachary's chest.”

“Mana yanjye, they just left the bodies on the ground?”

Jean Patrick could have filled the world's oceans with his grief, but he found not one tear in his heart. Everything inside him had dried and shriveled. “Did you bury them?”

“By the time we got there, what was left had been scattered by animals. I won't pain you with details. We dug a single grave for the hillside, but we were not so thorough. I can only hope that someday, you and I will find the right bones so we can lay our family to rest properly and according to custom. That much we must do for them.” Sunlight, dim and dusty, canted through the narrow window and fell across Roger's face, threading his eyes with topaz. They were Mathilde's eyes. Jean Patrick had never noticed before. “Will you come back to Rwanda with me?” Roger asked.

“I can't. I'm waiting for a visa for the States, which my American professor—Jonathan—is helping me to get. I've applied for refugee status, and if I return for any reason, they will deny me.” Jean Patrick waved his hands. “But that's all part of my long story, which can wait. Spéciose will be back soon, and she will want your news. My tale, she has already heard.” The bones only, Jean Patrick thought, not the raw flesh.

Roger shook a cigarette from his pack and pushed up from the table. “You can smoke in here,” Jean Patrick said. “Uncle does all the time.” He fetched a cracked clay ashtray. His eyes followed the struck match, the ember's glow, the two tendrils of smoke rising from Roger's nostrils. Only then did he ask, “Have you been to Butare?”

“I have. I thought by some miracle I might still find you there.” Roger studied the cigarette's glow. “I'm sorry to tell you this,” he said. “I saw Niyonzima's house, and it is burned to the ground. Is that where you were?”

Although he knew this to be true, hearing it from his brother was like a grave opening up, possibility falling into it. “Yes. The soldiers and Interahamwe came. I jumped over the wall, and that's how I destroyed my ankle. Bea was with me, but at the last moment, she turned back.” It was the first time Jean Patrick had torn these words from memory, given them substance and shape. “What I am asking is if there is a chance. Remote. That someone escaped.” In the theory of quantum physics, Jean Patrick had read, a person could be leaning against a wall and fall through to the other side if the molecules simultaneously realigned in just the right way.

Roger exhaled a thick blue ring of smoke. “I suppose.” But his expression told Jean Patrick he did not believe it. There was an equal chance, the expression said, that they would wake in the morning in their house
at Gihundwe, Mama and Papa at their bedside, the past ten years of their lives nothing more than a terrible nightmare.

“I heard their names announced on RTLM—the three of them—but then, I heard yours, too,” Roger said.

“Eh? They announced my name on the radio?” Possibility stirred, put a bony finger on the edge of the grave.

“They boasted of it. We were fighting near Kigali. I had just returned to the truck and put the radio on. They said they caught you at a roadblock. I punched the dashboard so hard my hand was swollen for a week.” He held up his fist to show the scarred knuckles. “But after the shock wore off, a little voice kept telling me it wasn't so. My brother, he is too crafty, I told myself. Since that time, I knew I would find you again.”

Jean Patrick said, “The thought of greeting you again has kept me going.” That and the smallest spark of belief that Bea lived.

The sun had started its descent, its angle now missing the tall window. The topaz was gone from Roger's eyes. “A funny thing,” Roger said. “When they mentioned Niyonzima's wife, they said she was Tutsi. Do you know anything about this?”

Jean Patrick shook his head. “She could easily have been mistaken for one—most likely this happened—but she was Hutu.”

I
N THE EVENING
, Roger sat outside with Jean Patrick. The full moon painted a path into the bush. Spéciose brought out a small table and two bottles of ikigage. The sorghum beer was strong, and Jean Patrick's head spun, although he was only halfway through his bottle. Smoke from a mosquito coil spiraled upward. An occasional volley of gunfire came from the forest. War, it seemed, would never be far away.

“Do you remember the roof Uncle made for us when we first moved in?” Roger asked.

“How could I forget? When I think how proud he was of his corrugated metal, and how we joked about it in private, I could crawl into the earth with shame.”

“Those killers stole it. Every scrap of metal gone. When we were advancing, we saw so many Hutu fleeing with heavy, heavy piles of roofing on their heads. They could barely move forward under the weight.”

Jean Patrick laughed at the image. A dance of looters and killers wobbling and weaving to the borders. He asked Roger if he had been to Gihundwe. He had. Nothing left of the school, the survivors counted on a single hand.

Spéciose came out with two more bottles. She touched Roger's cheek. “You have your mother's beautiful face.” She wiped her eyes. “You'll have to come in soon; it's almost curfew.”

Roger stared into the bush. “Is the fighting near?”

“It comes and goes,” Jean Patrick said. “Not like Bujumbura, where you fear for your life going to market. But everywhere is dangerous after dark.” He smiled weakly. “At least I'm on the right side now.”

“Right side? Is there ever one?” Roger lit a cigarette. The match flared across his face. “I brought you something.” Roger fished a bundle wrapped in newspaper from his pack. Inside the layers was Zachary's Bible, pages curled with dried blood. “Mukabera saved it. She found it clutched in his arms.” He snorted. “Probably the killers knew there was too much deadly sin on their hands to tempt God's wrath by stealing it.”

Jean Patrick held the Bible to his face and took the scent of his brother's blood deep into his lungs. He inhaled the decay, the ferruginous odor of death. Suddenly he was underwater, grief flowing over him like the sea.

“She found this, too.” Roger uncurled his fist. “Do you recognize it?”

Jean Patrick examined the Saint Christopher's medal. “It's not Uncle's, but it's familiar.”

“Think about fishing.”

He saw it then, lantern light across a bare chest in the pirogue, the medal flashing and twirling in its gleam. “Fulgence. It used to mesmerize me when he pulled in the nets.”

“He was one of the killers. Mukabera saw him.”

“What are you going to do with it?” Jean Patrick gave the medal back to Roger.

“I'll keep it.” He shoved it into his pocket. “So I can show it to him before I kill him.”