Our Lady of the Nile (3 page)

The lycée is a large four-story building, higher than the government ministries in the capital. When the new girls first arrive, the ones from the countryside are afraid to get too close to the windows in the fourth-floor dorms. “Are we going to sleep perched like little monkeys?” they ask. The town girls, and the veterans, tease the new arrivals, pushing them toward the windows: “Look down there,” they say. “You’re going to fall into the lake!” Eventually, the new girls get used to it. The chapel, nearly as high as the mission church, is also made of cement, but the gym, bursar’s office, workshops, and Brother Auxile’s garage are all made of brick. They form a courtyard closed off by a wall, with a metal gate that whines when it’s opened in the morning and closed at night, much louder than the wake-up and bedtime bells.

A bit off to the side, there are some small one-story houses, some call them villas, others bungalows, where the foreign teachers live. There’s also a big house, much larger than the others, that everyone calls the Bungalow. It’s reserved for special guests, such as government ministers (should one ever come to stay), or the
Bishop, whose visit is anticipated each year. Occasional tourists from the capital, or from Europe – who’ve come to see the source of the Nile – are put up there. Between these houses and the lycée, there’s a garden with a lawn, flower beds, bamboo groves, and a vegetable patch, of course. The servants who do the gardening grow cabbages, carrots, potatoes, and strawberries; there’s even a wheat plot. The tomatoes they harvest here are so pompously plump, they put the
inyanya
– the poor little native tomatoes – to shame. Sister Bursar likes to show visitors around the exotic orchard where the expatriated apricot and peach trees clearly hanker for their native climate. Mother Superior always says that the pupils must get used to civilized food.

A high brick wall was built to discourage intruders and thieves; and at night, guards armed with spears patrol the perimeter and stand watch by the iron gate.

After a while, the people of Nyaminombe stopped noticing the lycée. As far as they’re concerned, it’s like the huge rocks in Rutare – which seem to have rolled down the mountain and stopped there, in Rutare, for no apparent reason. Yet the construction of the lycée changed many things in the district. A flurry of covered stalls appeared by the builders’ campsite, comprising traders who had previously operated close to the mission, and others from goodness knows where. These shops sold the things shops
generally sell: individual cigarettes, palm oil, rice, salt, Kraft cheese, margarine, lamp oil, banana beer, Primus lager, Fanta, and sometimes even bread, though not often. There were also bars, referred to as “hotels,” serving goat on skewers with grilled bananas and beans, and there were shacks for the loose women who brought the village into disrepute. When the lycée was completed, most of the traders left, except for three bars, two shops, and a tailor: so a new village sprang up by the path leading to the lycée. Even the market, which moved close to the workers’ shacks, stayed put, just beyond the stalls.

Yet there was one day that still drew Nyaminombe’s idle and curious to the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, and that was the start of the school year, on a Sunday afternoon in October, at the end of the dry season. They gathered along the side of the track to admire the procession of cars bringing the students to school. There were Mercedes, Range Rovers, and enormous military jeeps, their impatient drivers hooting and waving their arms about, fierce and threatening, as they tried to overtake taxis, pickups, and minibuses so overloaded with young women that they struggled to climb the last slope.

One by one, the lycée girls tumbled out before the small throng, which was held back some way from the main gates by two district gendarmes and the mayor himself. A murmur spread
through the crowd when Gloriosa stepped out of the black Mercedes with tinted windows, preceded by her mother and followed by Modesta. “She’s the spitting image of her father,” said the mayor, who had met the great man at a Party rally. “She wears the name her father gave her well: Nyiramasuka, ‘She of the Hoe.’ ” And he repeated this comment loudly enough that the party hacks pressing around him could hear it, sending a swell of admiration through the crowd. Gloriosa certainly did resemble her father, well-built and big-boned: her schoolmates nicknamed her Mastodon under their breath. She wore a navy-blue skirt, just revealing her muscular calves, and a white blouse buttoned to her neck that barely contained her generous bosom. Large round glasses only served to reinforce the unquestionable authority of her gaze. Father Herménégilde abandoned the new girls, the ones entering tenth grade, whom he had been rounding up and reassuring, then motioned to a couple of young lycée hands to take the bags from the chauffeur (who wore a short-sleeved shirt with gold buttons), and rushed toward the new arrivals, striding past Sister Gertrude on reception duty to greet mother and daughter with the customary embraces, entangling himself in the innumerable expressions of welcome that Rwandan courtesy entails. Gloriosa’s mother quickly cut him off, explaining that she simply had to greet Mother Superior before dashing back to the capital, where she was expected for dinner at the Belgian Ambassador’s, and that she was confident the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile would
provide her daughter with the kind of democratic, Christian education appropriate to the female elite of a country that had undergone a social revolution, freeing it from the injustices of a feudal system.

Gloriosa announced that she would stand with Sister Gertrude at the gate, beneath the national flag, to greet the other seniors and let them know that the first meeting of the committee she chaired would take place the following day, in the refectory, after their study hour. Modesta said she’d stand guard duty along with her friend.

Soon after, Goretti also made a grand entrance, perched on the back of a huge military vehicle whose six thick tires took the spectators’ breath away. Two soldiers in camouflage fatigues helped her down, hailed the lycée hands to carry her luggage, and bade their passenger farewell with a military salute. Goretti brushed aside Gloriosa’s effusive welcome.

“Still prancing about like a minister, I see,” Goretti hissed.

“And you, think you’re Chief of Staff?” Gloriosa piped back. “Come on, move it, through the gate, and remember, we don’t speak anything but French in school: we’ll finally get to know what the Ruhengeri girls are saying.”

As the Peugeot 404 began the final climb to the lycée, Godelive recognized Immaculée, who was swathed in a wraparound and
walking along, with an urchin at her heels carrying her case on his head. She immediately told her driver to stop:

“Immaculée! What happened? Get in, quick! Did your father’s car break down? You didn’t walk all the way from the capital, did you?”

Immaculée took her wraparound off and got in next to Godelive, while the driver put her case in the trunk. The little porter tapped the glass requesting his tip. Immaculée threw him a coin.

“Don’t tell a soul. My boyfriend brought me on his motorbike. He’s got a big one, you know. There’s no bigger bike than his in all Kigali, perhaps in all Rwanda. He’s so proud of it. And I’m so proud to be the girlfriend of the boy with the biggest bike in the country. I get on behind him, and he tears through the streets at full speed, the bike roaring like a lion. Everyone panics and runs for their life, the women all knock over their jugs and baskets. That makes my boyfriend laugh. He promised he’d teach me to ride his bike. Then I’ll go even faster than him. Anyway, he told me: ‘I’ll take you all the way to school on my bike.’ Sure, I tell him. I was a bit scared, though, but it was really exciting. Dad was on a business trip to Brussels. I told my mother I was going with a girlfriend. He dropped me off at the last bend, just like I asked. You can imagine the scandal if Mother Superior saw me arrive on a motorbike! I’d be expelled. But look at the state I’m in now, all red with dust. It’s horrible! They’ll think Dad doesn’t have a car anymore, that I hitched a ride on some Toyota pickup, crushed
between goats and bananas, and peasant women with their kids on their backs! The shame!”

“You’ll take a shower, and I’m sure you’ve got enough beauty products in that case of yours to put things right.”

“That’s true. I managed to find some skin-whitening creams, but not that Venus de Milo stuff you get at the market. American ones: tubes of cold cream and green antiseptic soap. My cousin sent me them from the Matonge quarter in Brussels. I’ll give you some.”

“What would I do with them? There are those who are beautiful, or think they are, and those who are not.”

“You look so sad, aren’t you glad to be back at school?”

“Why should I be glad to be back at school? I always get the worst grades. The teachers feel sorry for me, but not the rest of you, my dear classmates. It’s my dad who wants me to stay on, in spite of everything. Once I get the diploma, he hopes to marry me off to a banker like him. But I’m sure he’s got other plans too.”

“Cheer up, Godelive. It’s our final year and then you’ll marry a rich banker.”

“Don’t make fun of me. Maybe I’ve got a surprise for you all, a big surprise.”

“And what surprise might that be?”

“If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”

Gloriosa welcomed Godelive and Immaculée with disdain, casting a scornful eye over Immaculée’s skintight trousers and
plunging neckline. Gloriosa wondered why she was covered in dust but decided against asking her right now. She ignored Godelive completely.

“I’m counting on you girls to be real militants,” she whispered under her breath. “Not like you were last year. Our Republic requires more than vanity and a banker father.”

Immaculée and Godelive pretended not to have heard a word.

With Father Herménégilde as their shepherd, the shy herd of newcomers passed through the gate under Gloriosa’s searching gaze:

“Did you notice, Modesta?” She sighed. “The old regime still wields influence in the ministry. They’re lax with the quota. If I counted right, and I only counted the girls I know, those I’m sure of, we’re way over the percentage that, unfortunately, they’ve been granted. A fresh invasion! What was the point of our parents’ social revolution if we let them carry on like this? I’ll be reporting this to my father. But I think we’re going to have to take care of things ourselves and get rid of these parasites, once and for all. I told the Bureau of Militant Rwandan Youth about it, and we see eye to eye. They listen to me. It’s not for nothing my father named me Nyiramasuka.”

Ever since the lycée opened, no one in Nyaminombe had seen a car like the one Frida arrived in. It was very long and low-slung,
bright red, with a soft top that had been seen to fold and unfold without anyone touching it. There were only two seats. Both driver and passenger reclined in them as if in bed. It made a noise like thunder, leaping forward in a cloud of red dust. For a moment, it looked as if it would ram the gate and knock Sister Gertrude, Gloriosa, and Modesta flying, but it stopped short, with a hellish screech, right at the foot of the flagpole.

Out stepped a man of a certain age, wearing a three-piece suit (with a floral-patterned waistcoat), large dark glasses with gold-tinted frames, and a crocodile-skin belt with matching shoes. He opened the passenger door and helped Frida extricate herself from the seat in which she was half embedded. Frida smoothed out the creases in her dress, which was as red as the car, and it flared like an umbrella. Beneath her little scarf of purple silk, you could see her brutally straightened hair, stiff, starched, and shimmering in the sun like the asphalt used to resurface some of Kigali’s streets not that long ago.

The sports car’s driver addressed Sister Gertrude in Swahili (ignoring Gloriosa and Modesta): “I am His Excellency Jean-Baptiste Balimba, the Ambassador of Zaire. I have an appointment with the Mother Superior. Take me to her immediately.”

Shocked that anyone would speak to her in that tone, and in Swahili no less, Sister Gertrude hesitated for a moment, but seeing how the man seemed determined to force an entrance, she felt compelled to lead the way.

“Wait for me in the hall,” she told Frida. “I’ll sort this out, I won’t be long.”

Gloriosa had pointedly marched out of the gate to greet the nine seniors who were just getting out of a minibus.

“There’s our quota,” she said, watching as a small truck pulled up, sagging beneath the weight of a wobbly pyramid of barrels and badly stacked cardboard boxes. “See, Modesta, nothing will ever stop the Tutsi from their trafficking: even when they take their daughters back to school, they need to make it worth their while. They unload the goods at the Nyaminombe store, but whose store is it? A Tutsi’s, of course; apparently some distant relative of Veronica’s father, who himself has a business in Kigali. Oh, she’s something, that Veronica; believes she’s so beautiful, she’ll end up selling herself. And Virginia, her friend, who thinks she’s the most intelligent girl in the lycée, simply because all the white teachers dote on her. You know what she’s called? Mutamuriza, ‘Don’t Make Her Cry’! Well, I certainly know how to make her do exactly that. Two Tutsi for twenty pupils is the quota, and because of that I know some real Rwandan girls of the majority people, the people of the hoe, friends of mine, who didn’t get a place in high school. As my father likes to tell me, we’ll really have to get rid of these quotas one day, it’s a Belgian thing!”

Gloriosa’s rant was accompanied by little coughs of approval on the part of Modesta, but when she started to lavish overly affectionate hugs of courtesy on the two Tutsi, Modesta moved away.

“The tighter you embrace those snakes,” said Gloriosa, once Veronica and Virginia had walked off, “the more you suffocate them, but you, Modesta, you’re scared to be mistaken for your half sisters; you sure look like them, and yet I have to put up with you hanging around with me.”

“You know I’m your friend.”

“Better for you, then, that you always stay my friend,” said Gloriosa, hooting with laughter.

At sundown, the clanging bell and the creaking of the closing gates solemnly ushered in the start of the new school year. The monitors had already led the girls to their various dormitories. The seniors were entitled to certain privileges. Their dormitory was divided into alcoves to give each girl some privacy – all relative, since the only thing that separated them from the corridor, where the monitor did her rounds, was a thin green curtain that the sister could pull open at any moment. And although this partitioning of beds, which they called “rooms,” was presented by Mother Superior as an example of the progress and emancipation the girls could enjoy thanks to the education provided by the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, not everyone appreciated it. Late-night gossip and whispers were hushed. Above all, how could a girl sleep on her own? At home, the mothers made sure the younger girls shared a bed or a mat with the older girls. Are sisters really sisters if they don’t fall asleep all squashed together? And how can true
friendships form without the exchange of confidences on a shared mat? The lycée girls had a hard time falling asleep in their solitary alcoves. They’d listen out for their neighbors’ breathing behind the partition, and that reassured them a little. In the tenth-grade dormitory, Sister Gertrude refused to let the boarders move their beds together. “We’re at the lycée, here, not at home,” she said. “We sleep alone, each in her own bed, like civilized folk.”