Broken Memory (3 page)

That night Emma had her usual nightmare. The next morning, still lying in bed, she tried to remember the face of her mother. She saw her long shadow bending over her, but a dark, shifting mass blurred her face.

Emma's belly clenched. The more time passed, the more her memory seemed to betray her.

She beat her fists against her stomach, curled up into a ball and sank into the old mattress.

Ndoli was gone for a long time. He came to see Emma again one morning in June.

She saw the surprised look on Mukecuru's face as she glanced out the little window. Curious, Emma went over and saw the young boy planted under the tree as if he had never left. He just stood there, not moving, but something had changed. He didn't look as stiff.

“It's his clothes. They're clean now,” Emma said to herself.

Every year, he gradually returned to reality as the anniversary of the genocide faded. Those days of commemoration, darkened by the April rains, were filled with the buried memories of another storm. A storm drenched in the blood and agony of a million deaths. The country lived according to the rhythm of the official memorial and the testimonies shared during long nighttime vigils, while the rainy season brought torrential downpours, and mud flooded the roads.

“They say we must not forget. I guess that's true,” thought Emma as she continued to watch Ndoli. “Mukecuru says the same thing, even though no one remembers how brave she was and even though they still don't trust her just because she is a Hutu. Dear Mukecuru, how ignorant they are,” she declared, smiling up at the little window.

Like many survivors of 1994, Emma found it hard getting through the month of April — a time when she was more deeply in the grip of her horrific memories.

For Ndoli it was the same thing, she realized, and now he was better because April was long past.

But something else was different, too. Something that she could not quite put her finger on.

When Emma returned from the market the next day, Ndoli was stationed under the tree once again. She was surprised to see him wearing his school uniform. Usually he didn't put it on until August or September after wandering restlessly for long months.

She walked past him, was tempted to say something, hesitated, felt ridiculous. What could she say to him today? His uniform was from a world she knew nothing about.

She turned away from the big tree and hurried into the house. As Mukecuru looked on, worried, she silently put her money on the table and retreated to the bedroom.

Emma didn't see the schoolboy approach. She was sitting on the outskirts of the market putting together her little bags of fruit when he abruptly held out a crumpled old bill.

She jumped, raised her eyes and saw Ndoli standing there silently, his arm stiff.

She didn't move either, but took her time and just looked at him. She saw each mark the blows had left nine years earlier. The hollow on the right side of his skull where his hair was shaved. The thick scar that cut across the caramel skin of his forehead and pointed toward his left eye. She was astonished again by his eyes, so red, his gaze clouded.

Then she felt her stomach knot. Ndoli was beautiful.

She suddenly realized the women were laughing behind her, though Ndoli didn't seem to see them or hear them. His arm was still stretched out and he was looking at her, not even noticing the others.

She remembered that he was there to buy something, and she thrust a little bag at him, brusque, just like him.

They didn't exchange a smile, not a word. The young boy simply stared at her and left, as if that was his thank-you. Emma watched his silhouette get smaller as he went down the road.

“Hey, little one. Did the guy with the dented head put a curse on you?”

The market women laughed loudly again. Emma grabbed her bags, leapt to her feet and headed off, embarrassed. She felt as if she had been set up. She was mad at Ndoli. She had always shielded herself from these women by keeping to herself, keeping her face blank. Now, because of him, she had been exposed.

Emma had grown up in a world of women. Her father died before she turned two. Her mother had talked about him a lot, though she never said how he died.

That night, after meeting Ndoli and having to deal with those rude women, Emma managed to remember bits of her past. She did not see the face of her mother, but she could feel again the gentleness of those moments when her mother would talk about how fair, generous, strong and clever Emma's father was — the perfect father who watched over his baby daughter while she slept.

After that, Emma was able to leaf a little farther back through the family album. She didn't know why this was happening now. Her memory seemed to have a mind of its own. Each time she retrieved another scrap, she could look on from a distance as some other part of her opened it up and examined it.

The only man she remembered being close to was her grandfather, her mother's father. She liked to remember the way the old man would sit in front of the house smoking his pipe — a piece of wood as scrubby as he was — that he would use to threaten anyone who made him angry.

She also remembered the arguments between him and his second wife, the cruel, bossy woman he married after Emma's grandmother died.

She remembered one particularly fierce shouting match when she was a little girl. The old man usually let his wife have the last word just so she would leave him in peace, but that day he was too furious. So she turned her anger on Emma's mother.

It was the first time Emma had ever felt injustice, and the feelings were even stronger when she remembered them now.

There were other men in the family — uncles, cousins — but Emma couldn't remember them. She was told all her relatives were killed during the genocide.

And since then she had only lived with Mukecuru. Neither of them ever complained about it. The old woman stayed deeply tied to her dead husband. As for Emma, Mukecuru was the only person she had been able to feel at all close to since her mother died.

Now that fragile balance had been upset. A strange boy who went mad at the same time every year had come into her life. And a strange old man was about to do the same.

One day Emma saw him walking outside the school with Ndoli. One detail troubled her deeply. They both had dented heads and obvious scars.

Emma thought about the place these two men seemed to be taking in her life. It was reassuring to have Ndoli there, lurking in the background. He'd shown her that someone could be interested in her, even watch over her for an entire night. And even if his past made her shudder, she knew that they shared the same pain.

As for the old man, he was the same age her grandfather would have been. He seemed strong, like the way her mother had described her father, and she liked the way he had reached out to Ndoli under the tree that day. She was curious to know so many things about him.

Emma remembered the way he had raised his hand to her that day on the road.

She must have looked so stunned, clutching her laundry that way.

The truck came around the bend in a cloud of brown dust. It was carrying a dozen prisoners, their hazy pink silhouettes jolting together perfectly each time the vehicle hit a bump or a pothole.

Emma had heard that they would be coming back. The first time they had just been presented to the community. Now they came to be tried at the gacaca court, where the survivors of the genocide would come and testify.

Some people had shown up on their own. Others had been approached by the local authorities who knew everyone who lived in town and in the surrounding area. They knew who had survived and who would have something to say.

Before the truck drew alongside, Emma hid by the side of the road and blocked her ears so that she couldn't hear their voices. Then she watched the prisoners closely after they passed by her hiding place.

None of the faces was familiar. She found out later that the man whose voice she had recognized was one of the leaders, one of the ones who had given the orders during the massacres. So he would be judged by a tribunal in Kigali. He would not be returning to this area.

In the middle of the group, some prisoners were laughing. Others sat on the edge of the truck, their heads bowed.

Emma didn't know what to think. She had been prepared to see monsters, men with faces full of cruelty. Instead she saw simple peasants.

“Tell me, Mukecuru,” Emma said when she returned home that day.

The old woman looked up, puzzled.

“Why did they kill us? Who were they?” Emma continued, her face stubborn.

The old woman hesitated, let out a light sigh.

“Tonight,” she replied. “Let's finish the day's work first.”

Almost relieved, Emma grabbed the basket that the old woman held out to her and obediently went to the chicken coop to gather eggs.

That night, Mukecuru kept her word. She sat Emma down beside her and told her what she knew. She spoke softly and took long pauses between each sentence.

The old woman told Emma that the president had been assassinated, his plane shot down. She told her how the radio had called on people to murder the Tutsis, who were nothing more than cockroaches, and how the whites had left the country. About the roadblocks where the military and the militias checked people's identity cards to decide who would be killed. How a part of the population had gone mad with killing.

Then Mukecuru told her about the Tutsi rebels who came over from Uganda. She told her about the horrible crimes, the looting, the people who grew rich off those who had died or who had fled, about the chaos of a war where no one, neither Hutu nor Tutsi, was safe from the militias, the military, the rebels or even their own neighbors. She told her how the rebels eventually defeated the army, causing thousands upon thousands of Hutus to flee. And that by the end of the war the country had become a graveyard, losing a million of its people.

When the old woman finally stopped, exhausted, her face was hollow, and her eyes had dark rings under them. Emma had taken in every sentence of her gory story.

“So it was the whole country that did the killing.”

“No, Emma, there were men and women who did not participate in the massacres, and good people who saved lives. Some of them are dead.”

“You were one of them, Mukecuru,” Emma said to herself. She leaned her head against the old woman's knee, and Mukecuru softly began to hum one of Emma's favorite lullabies.

The next day when Emma came home from the market, she heard people talking in the house. She slowed down, quietly approached the open window and leaned against the wall.

She recognized the clear, strangely thin voice of the old man who had approached Ndoli.

“I can help her. You must convince her to come and see me.”

“She'll have to choose for herself. I won't tell her to do anything,” Mukecuru replied in the firm tone that she only used with strangers. On the other side of the wall, Emma smiled, thinking how gentle Mukecuru was when she spoke to her.

“Tell her about me,” the old man said. “Tell her where she can find me. Then she can be the one to decide.”

The old woman hesitated.

“Can you get rid of her nightmares?” she asked.

His voice softened.

“I can try. Talk to her.”

Silence filled the room again. Emma didn't see Mukecuru, but she could just imagine her standing there, determined and still as a statue, studying the old man.

“I'll talk to her,” she said finally, in a tone that signaled the conversation was over.

Emma hurried behind the house and waited until the visitor was a long way off. When she came back, Mukecuru was still standing in front of the door, staring at the road.

“You were here,” she said without looking at Emma.

“He's a strange old man,” Emma answered, leaning against the wall. “He chases away nightmares…?”

She smiled, looking at Mukecuru. The old woman hesitated briefly, then turned and smiled back.

“You can find him at the medical clinic behind the church,” she said as she went back into the house.

“He killed my sister!” the young woman said, pointing a trembling finger at the prisoner who was silently facing his accuser.

They were standing in the middle of a small crowd. About a hundred people were at the gacaca, sitting in a semicircle in a grassy clearing dotted with patches of brown. A number of them were angry at the woman.

At the edge of the circle, other men wearing pink were waiting for their turn, leaning against a tree or sitting cross-legged, some of them with their backs turned. Others looked down at the ground. All of them wore blank, hollow expressions.

“She's lying!” a woman screamed from the audience. “She saw nothing, she was hiding. Otherwise she'd be dead, too!”

Watching the scene from a distance, Emma began to tremble, as if the accusation had been aimed at her. She identified with the woman who had come to testify. When she heard that a gacaca was going to be held that morning, she decided to go, but she had not found the courage to join the crowd.

She listened to the young woman go on with her story, encouraged by the judges sitting behind two tables that had been placed side by side. Among them was an old white-haired man, a former teacher; a woman of about fifty who was in charge of the medical clinic; and a young man Emma didn't know, elegant in his pale suit.

The young Tutsi woman said she had heard her sister's murderer bragging about his crime. He'd gone back to his house after his “work day” — that's what the people who killed during the working day called it — carrying his machete as if he'd just been working in the fields.

That day of massacres had ended, like many others, with a party, with beer and grilled meat. There was always plenty of meat, since the murderers would slaughter the herds of their victims.

The young woman admitted she had been hiding, but this man was the neighbor of her parents. He had watched her and her sister grow up.

There was no possible mistake. It was his voice she'd heard.

The crowd grew angrier as her testimony became more detailed. Unable to take any more, Emma stood up to leave.

That's when she noticed that Ndoli was slightly below her, also watching the scene from a distance.

To stay out of sight she quickly sat back down, more heavily than she meant to.

The boy heard her and turned around. He hesitated for a moment, then waved shyly. Emma took a risk and smiled back. He looked surprised. Then he moved away from the grumbling crowd in the clearing and made his way up the hill.

When he reached her, she made a place for him on the carpet of dried grass.

They both felt awkward. They didn't know what to say, so they turned their attention to the trial.

A young Hutu boy, a little older than Ndoli — maybe eighteen or nineteen — had replaced the previous prisoner.

“They still hate us,” Emma said in a whisper.

“Maybe…because they feel guilty,” Ndoli stammered.

Below them, the young Hutu was being defended by a genocide survivor in her forties. She confirmed that he had beaten her father in April 1994, but made it clear that he had done it while he was being threatened by the members of the Interhamwe militia. They were the ones who had waved their blood-spattered machetes and forced him to kill her father, a sick old man. Maybe they were trying to make the boy one of them. That first crime often led to others.

The woman added that she didn't understand why she was not dead as well. The attackers had left, claiming that they were finished for the day, but that they would get her, too, just wait.

Of course, she did not wait.

The young prisoner told his version next. It was similar to the woman's story.

Emma turned toward Ndoli. She could feel him becoming more tense. His jaw was rigid and he clenched his fists as the teenager, who would have been scarcely ten years old at the time of the genocide, described his crime and his ordeal.

The young Hutu's story had things in common with Ndoli's, but his weakness had not led to the loss of his own family. He probably stood a good chance of being recognized as a victim by the gacaca, and officially pardoned in everyone's eyes.

Ndoli knew that would never happen to him.

Emma saw that he was upset, and she didn't know how to comfort him. But she knew she had to say or do something. After all, he hadn't hesitated when she had blacked out on the side of the road that time.

Suddenly the gacaca seemed a million miles away, as she realized that their first real encounter was about to end in disaster. She stopped second guessing herself, and ended up saying the simplest thing in the world.

“Thank you for the other night.”

Caught off guard, Ndoli looked at Emma, and all at once his eyes filled with tears. To stop herself from crying, she gave him a big fake smile, crinkling her eyes and showing all her teeth.

The cheerful look on her face was so unexpected that Ndoli felt something let go deep inside him. He started to laugh, even though he was still crying. Then he wiped his face, took a breath and shrugged his shoulders, as if to excuse himself for being so pitiful.