Running the Rift (34 page)

“Actually, we bought a car.”

Jonathan said, “
Imodoka,
right?”

“That's right.” Bea took a studied bite of pasta. Jean Patrick could feel the heat of her anger like a flame. His toe sought out her ankle beneath the table.

“I had been thinking about it for a while. I need to take Susanne to Gisenyi, and then to the Virungas.”

“What color is the new imodoka?” Jean Patrick asked.

“Red.” Susanne held up her wineglass, and Jonathan filled it. “The color of wine.” She sipped. “And of the heart.”

“To the heart,” Jonathan said, and he raised his glass.

“To the heart,” Susanne said. “That strong yet fragile organ.” They toasted the heart.

I
T WAS AFTER
curfew when Jean Patrick and Bea left. Jonathan gave them a flashlight, and they kept to the trail. Bea snagged the fringe of her shawl on a thorny vine, and Jean Patrick bent to untangle her. He held her foot in his hand. “Why did you refuse to tell Jonathan what
happened?” He hadn't meant to ask, but all evening the question had been sitting on his tongue, waiting to jump off.

“He doesn't need to know.”

“Because he's muzungu?”

“That's not it. He can't be trusted. He doesn't understand.”

“It's
you
who doesn't understand.” Jean Patrick's voice rose, anger finally boiling up. “Your father wants to tell the world, but you won't enlighten one human being—a personal friend to both of us.”

“It's not the same,” Bea said. “My father knows Rwanda. He knows who to write to and what to say. What he tells the world helps us. With Jonathan, that is not the case. The word is a dangerous weapon. He could say one wrong thing to one wrong person, and my father could be jailed. Or killed. You saw what happened to Gatabazi. The university is filled with the government's listening ears.”

“What nonsense are you telling me?” Jean Patrick quickened his pace. The flashlight's beam swept the darkness. “Maybe, as a Westerner, he
is
the one to tell our story.”

Bea stopped him. “Are you blind? The West doesn't care. All those UNAMIR troops watching while Hutu riot? You saw how quickly savagery overtook them. How long until Western troops stand around while those same Hutu start their killing?”

Jean Patrick turned off the flashlight and set it in the bush. He traced the outline of her mouth, her full, pouty lips. “Don't be cross with me,” he said. “I think you're not being fair to Jonathan, that's all.”

Bea panted. “It's not you I'm cross with. I just can't stop thinking about today. I go over it and over it in my mind. I don't know how many more days like this I can stand.” She rested her head on his chest. “I'm so frightened,” she said. “For Dadi, for you, for all of us.” She raised her chin, and the dark V at the base of her throat opened up to Jean Patrick. “Stay with us tonight, Nkuba.”

He placed his lips against the V, the delicate angle of bone. “Your parents won't mind?”

“My parents love you like a son.”

“And you?”

“Eh? No, I do not love you like a son.” She spread her shawl wide to envelop him. His head spun. The earth spun beneath him.

“Will you stay in my bed, then?” He touched her, nose to nose.

She pushed him away, laughing. “Mana yanjye. And what do we tell Mama and Dadi?”

“That we're getting married,” Jean Patrick said. “Tonight. Right now.” Bea looked down at her feet. “I am speaking from my heart,” he said. “I mean it.” He might as well have asked Miseke, the Dawn Girl, to marry him.

“Jean Patrick, this is not a time for marriage.”

“Then when?” He pulled her back to him. “When will it be time?”

She sighed, her arms tight about his hips. “Ejo,” she said, the word for both yesterday and tomorrow.

“Please clarify,” Jean Patrick said. “Do you mean
ejo
hashize, yesterday, or
ejo
hazaza, tomorrow?”

“Either one. We'll get married in Jonathan's new red car.”

Jean Patrick kissed her until neither of them could breathe. On the road below, a jeep whined up the hill, headlights pointing askew. The soldiers' talk drifted through the brush.

Bea pulled away. “We better go.”

Jean Patrick picked up the flashlight but left it off. Taking Bea's hand, he guided her down the path he now knew by the feel of every bump, every tree root beneath his foot. When they reached Bea's gate, they kissed again. Inside the safety of her shawl, he unbuttoned her blouse and found her breast, its taut nipple. She whispered, “Your hope is the most beautiful and the saddest in the world.”

Jean Patrick knew he could never let her go again. “Let's find a spot in the bush.”

“Eh? In the stinging nettles?” She fastened her blouse and called for her parents to open the gate. “
Ejo,
my Nkuba.
Ejo
hazaza: tomorrow.”

I
F YOU STRETCH A SPRING
long enough, far enough, the metal will fail and the spring will snap. The same with a human body. The same with a human heart. The same, even, with a country. This is what came to Jean Patrick on his Monday morning workout in a moment of reprieve between hard intervals. Coach ran at a steady pace somewhere behind him. Dawn broke across the fields, the birds shrill and constant in the trees, the air sharp enough to cut the lungs.

Coach seemed to know exactly where Jean Patrick's breaking point was, and he kept Jean Patrick just at its edge. Instead of snapping, his body turned harder, stronger, faster. Coach had abandoned the truck tire for a new method from his magazines, a technique called fartlek. It was a system for distance runners modified for Jean Patrick's torture. “I will make you suffer for kilometers at a time,” Coach said with his typical smirk. “That way, the eight hundred will seem like a walk.”

Since the beginning of the new semester, they had been working out together in the mornings, then weights and breakfast at Coach's house. Coach said he wanted to keep a closer eye on Jean Patrick's training and nutrition, and anyway, it was time he got back in shape himself. Coach had grown lean like a leopard, the angle of his jaw sharper. Jean Patrick wondered if a woman had caused this change, and his mind pondered what she must be like.

“Go! Last and fastest!” Coach shouted at his back.

Jean Patrick accelerated. Three minutes of pain until Coach yelled “Stop.” As he surged, he tried to focus on the political situation. The transitional government had yet to be sworn in. Always the tease of success and then another excuse: a procedural difficulty, a delegate whose name
had been omitted. He could no longer tell Bea to have faith, to trust that Habyarimana would keep his word.

“I can't stand this anymore,” Bea said on one of the rare days Jean Patrick managed to capture her for a walk. “This cycle of hope and disappointment breaks my heart every day.”

Jean Patrick knew too much about the behavior of hearts. His own was breaking. Bea had jumped headfirst into politics. She started a club, organized student meetings, wrote articles and opinions for an underground newspaper. Jean Patrick saw little more of her than a skirt disappearing around a corner, a fringe of shawl beckoning from the stairwell. He tracked her news through Jonathan, greeted Niyonzima to catch a glimmer of her scent. He wondered if all this passion had at its heart the fear of losing her father for good. Jean Patrick glanced at his watch. Forty seconds to go. He let emotion fuel a final burst of speed.

“Stop!” Coach said, surprisingly close behind him.

Jean Patrick took a welcome gulp of cool air, turned back, and jogged toward his coach. His legs quivered, and sweat burned his eyes. “You're getting fast, Coach.”

“Or you're slowing down,” Coach said. He took off his sweatband and shook it out. “You'll turn heads at World Championships, put Rwanda on the map.”

“Turn heads? I'm going to win.”

Jean Patrick was half joking, but Coach didn't laugh. “It's possible. I've been thinking. We should travel this spring, race in countries like Kenya that are serious about running. People outside Rwanda need to know your name, and you need to get a taste of real competition. You have to get experience fighting through a pack with guys who've been around a track once or twice, guys you can't shake off so easily.”

“Those boys from Kigali—didn't you say they went to Kenya?”

“Those boys,” Coach said, “are specks beneath your heels.”

T
HE PHONE RANG
the instant Jean Patrick and Coach walked in the door, as if their entrance had set it off. Coach sprinted to answer. He listened in silence a moment, then covered the mouthpiece and turned to Jean Patrick. “Wait in the dining room. I'll just be a minute.”

Taking off his shoes, Jean Patrick strained to catch some scrap of Coach's conversation. Jolie came in from the yard, chicken feathers stuck to her arms and clothing. “Where were you five minutes ago when I needed a fast runner to chase down a hen?”

“It looks like you did fine without me.” He thought he heard Coach say
icyitso,
and he cocked his ear toward the living room.

Jolie slapped his arm. “Inshyanutsi! Mind your business, nosy one. What did I warn you?”

Coach strode into the hall. “Bring us tea and something to eat, Jolie.” The toothpick between his pursed lips worked up and down. “No weights today. Something's come up.”

Sitting at the table, Jean Patrick watched Coach out of the corner of his eye. Whatever news he had received was important enough to change a schedule that was as rigid as stone. He waited for a hint, a crumb of information, but Coach remained silent except for the rhythmic tap of his knife against the tablecloth.

Jolie brought bread and fruit, a thermos of tea. She set down plates and cups.

“Jean Patrick takes milk,” Coach said.

“Milk is finished. Four days now I haven't seen that Tutsi woman I buy from at the market. She must have joined the Inkotanyi.”

Coach pushed the bread basket toward Jean Patrick. “Eat. You worked hard.”

“I'm not very hungry, Coach.”

“You need to rebuild muscle; you're far too skinny.” He sliced a tomato and slid it onto Jean Patrick's plate. “What's the matter? You're not sick again, are you?”

Jean Patrick picked at his food. He spooned extra sugar into his tea to make up for the lack of milk. It tasted strong and bitter. “No, Coach, I'm not sick.”

Coach's eyes flitted to the window, stared out toward the road and came back to rest on Jean Patrick's face. Jean Patrick remembered how Roger had done the same thing, his mind never coming to a state of ease.

With half his food left on his plate, Coach pushed it away. “I'll drive you to school.”

“Coach, I can walk. I have time before class.”

A crumb remained on Coach's lip, and he swiped his napkin across his mouth. “Today, you're not walking.”

A
CHILLY WIND
whipped at Jean Patrick's neck as he leaned against the car door, waiting for Coach to unlock it. He wiggled the zipper on his jacket to force it closed. Clouds gathered over the mountains and left Burundi in shadow. Coach remained in the doorway, a bundle of clothes in his arm, talking to Jolie. RTLM blared from an open window and competed with their conversation. Jean Patrick couldn't make out the words, but the announcer's animated tone made him nervous. He recalled the same rapid-fire, accusatory delivery from the day Ndadaye was killed. By the time Coach came to let him into the car, both RTLM and the cold had seeped into his bones.

Coach tossed a newspaper onto the seat. He handed the clothes to Jean Patrick. “I never could have imagined, that day at Gihundwe when you collapsed on the track, how far you would go. They gave you a different brand this time.”

There was a new green tracksuit with
PUMA
across the front and
RWANDA
across the back of the jacket in the colors of the flag. “To replace the one you lost. I hope you're more careful with this one.”

“How did you know?”

“You don't need to be an engineer to use deductive reasoning. You are wearing a rag with a broken zipper when I gave you a shiny new jacket. Until last month, you never took it off.”

Jean Patrick took off his old jacket and tried on the new one. Folded inside the tracksuit were white running shorts with red-striped matching singlets that said
PUMA
on the sides. At the bundle's center was a pair of running shoes, also Puma. He held up a singlet. For years he had seen them in the magazines, dreamed how it would feel to wear one. There was a small Rwandan flag above the breast and the Puma logo—a leaping cougar—by his heart.
RWANDA
, in bold red letters, spanned his chest. His heart drummed a high-speed rhythm.

“For World Championships,” Coach said. “They will be here before you know it.”

“Suddenly it is very real.” Jean Patrick touched the cougar. He touched each letter of
RWANDA
. But as he settled into his reverie, unease returned. Every time he received one of these packages, something more was required of him. He glanced at the headlines of
Kangura,
which had come open beside him.
UNAMIR SHOULD CONSIDER ITS DANGER.

Coach stopped in the university parking lot, but instead of getting out, he let the engine idle. “I want you to stay on campus today. I have some business. Someone will substitute for afternoon practice. By now, you know what I expect.”

“When will you be back?”

“Tomorrow. I mean what I say. On campus. Understand?” He put the car in gear.

“Yego, Coach. I wasn't planning to leave anyway.” Again he thought that something bad had happened, something Coach was not revealing. Then Jean Patrick shook his head, unhinged his long body, and stepped from the car.