Running the Rift (38 page)

“Aye! That was you? I should have guessed.” Jean Patrick gave Roger the sack of fruit. “Take some—they're sweet.” They stood in the afternoon warmth and ate. Purple juice painted their fingers.

“Let's walk, eh? I don't have too much time.” Roger wiped his hands on his pants and took off through the undergrowth, his pace steady and constant, his eyes scanning the bush. “Do you remember our conversation about Rwanda's pulse?”

“Of course.” Jean Patrick couldn't forget even if he wanted to—which he did.

“So you remember I said I would try to warn you?”

“As well.”

“That pulse is racing now, and there is no chance to slow it. The talk is that something very big is coming soon.”

Jean Patrick felt as if he had been pushed down a hill, rolling faster and faster, out of control. “I just saw this guy in the market—Albert, the one who broke my foot at Gihundwe and later tried to cut me. He used those exact words,
something big is coming.
”

“The guy who sells junk with his father in the market? The one with that ugly scar?”

“The same.”

“I remember him from primary school. He was rotten then. It's good you never told me before or I would have paid him back. But now you have to listen; there are more important things than that country boy to worry about.”

“What makes you think today is any different from yesterday or the day before?” Jean Patrick touched Bea's gift in his pocket. Hope touched him back. “RTLM is just stoking the fire as usual.”

“RPF is well placed to know what's going on. In every commune, on every level—teachers, sector leaders, burgomasters—lists of Tutsi and opposition Hutu have been collected. It's the same all over the country. This is not coincidence; it's a plan for total annihilation, and it
is
in place.”

A cool breeze penetrated Jean Patrick's clothing. The pattern, the line connecting the graph points, was there in front of his eyes. It must have
started in Kigali, as Pascal told Daniel when they were still at Gihundwe. Then spread out, commune by commune, a cancerous growth.
The teachers have made lists of all the Tutsi children,
Susanne had said. The fit was too clear; he couldn't change variables, produce a different answer.

“What can we do?”

“Last month I was in Burundi, recruiting,” Roger said. “I found Spéciose, Mama and Uncle's sister. She's waiting for the family.” Roger stared out toward the lake. Clouds swooped down from the mountains in Zaire, turning the water to steel. “I know some guys, friends of mine, who can take you all across. I told them to be here Wednesday night.”

“Can't it wait?” Jean Patrick was thinking of dinner with Bea. He couldn't miss it. He himself would never leave, but he wanted to be with his family, to see them off. If things happened as Roger said. If this craziness was anything more besides empty bluster. If, if, if.

“It's too urgent,” Roger said. “I've spent three years in the middle of this war.” He tapped his nose. “By now, I can smell the difference between smoke and fire. This fire is large.”

“What about Thursday? Can't it wait till then?” Jean Patrick showed Roger the cross. “I plan to ask Bea to marry me,” he said.

“Aye! The same? Last time I saw you, you said it was finished.”

“And I also said she would be back.”

“So she's the one I saw through my binoculars.” Roger chuckled. “The one who's not muzungu. The beautiful one.”

Jean Patrick grinned and nodded.

Roger flashed a smile and embraced Jean Patrick. “That's wonderful,” he said. The smile lingered an instant before he turned serious again, jiggling his hand as if physically weighing the question. “I'll see what I can find out. If you don't hear from me, the answer is yes.”

Jean Patrick thanked him. “But Uncle will never go.” It was too fast, too soon. He couldn't think quickly enough to untangle the threads of his questions.

“That is the reason we are not going to tell him beforehand,” Roger said.

“He'd be fighting with the RPF if he were younger.”

“He is already. I couldn't tell you before, but for years he's been giving us money. He even smuggled weapons from Burundi once, in his pirogue.”

Jean Patrick laughed. He could see it now so clearly, yet he had never suspected. “Why can't they cross in the new motorboat? He'll never leave it behind; he worked too hard to get it.”

“No engine noise. But if these guys show up and we don't give Uncle the chance to go back and forth in his mind, maybe the two of us can persuade him. If not, he'll make sure everyone else goes. At the very least, we can get the rest of the family to safety.”

“I don't think Auntie will ever leave without Uncle.”

“True. Another reason I think we can persuade him.”

“What about you?”

Roger shook a cigarette from his pack. “My fight is here. What I've trained for—my Olympics. And you? Do I have to put a gun to your head?”

“If you did, you would have to use it. I won't go. I have too much at stake.”

“If they kill you, you can't run. If you are alive, in Burundi, you have a chance.”

“They can't hurt me; I'm too well known. Habyarimana can never let it happen because he wants to look good for the West. As I told you,
he
needs
me.
”

They walked quickly. Smoke from Roger's cigarette fanned out behind him. “It is likely,” Roger said, “your friend Habyarimana won't be around to help you.”

“What are you saying?” Jean Patrick said.

“You should keep up with
Kangura
if you want to predict the future. They do quite well, much better, even, than the umupfumu with his sizzled spit and chicken entrails. They said Habyarimana would die in March.”

“So you see? It's April already, and he is alive and well.” Despite his effort to control it, Jean Patrick's voice came out shrill.

Roger stopped and took Jean Patrick's wrists. “I have to leave you here. If I can't change the date, is there any way you can come on Wednesday?”

“I will do my best,” Jean Patrick said, but in his heart he knew he would not.

Ahead of them, the familiar trail reached toward the compound, worn
from years of traffic. Their lives, their world, were here. Every morning, fishermen went out to the lake, and women and children went to the fields. Hutu or Tutsi, they fetched water, gathered firewood, balanced loads on their heads. In the evening, they padded along paths up the ridge or down into the valley with bare and dusty feet. They cooked, ate, drank beer, and scolded children. In the darkness, men and women lay together and created new life. This was the dance of Rwanda. Jean Patrick could not let himself believe that this dance, as familiar as the beat of his heart, would suddenly end. And how could they leave it behind?

Roger stubbed out his cigarette and flicked it into the bush. He put his arms around Jean Patrick, and they held each other. How strange, Jean Patrick thought, to be looking down at his older brother's face. With his eyes, he traced the square, strong jaw, the scar that ran the length of his cheek, the thin and wiry beard. He committed them firmly to memory.

“In the meantime,” Roger said, “take very good care of yourself.”

“Always. And you the same.”

Although Jean Patrick was well trained in tracking movement in the forest, it was not long before his brother's form melted into the tree shadows he had stepped from.

A
ROARING SOUND
invaded Jean Patrick's sleep. He bolted up, unsure where he was. Then he felt Zachary beside him, heard the warm, rhythmic breath he knew as intimately as his own. Slowly the walls gained form from darkness. The roar became rain on the metal roof, the familiar song. Worn out from all his tossing and turning, he nestled against Zachary and sank into a pleasant dream of the past, his family around him, even Papa.

When he next awoke, Zachary's hand touched his shoulder. “Are you up?”

“Yes, Little Brother.”

“I'm going to pray now. Will you come?”

Jean Patrick took his hand. Quietly they felt their way down the hall and through the front room. The front door sighed open. They stepped out into the wet air, somewhere between mist and drizzle, the sky past night but not yet dawn. Hand in hand, they walked the path to the
hut where they had slept all those years, and Jean Patrick with Roger before that.

Zachary lit a lantern. He had transformed the hut into a shrine. The bookshelf served as an altar, an image of the sacred Virgin flanked by two candles. A painting hung on the wall, and Jean Patrick brought the light closer to inspect it. Two lambs, one black and one white, drank from a stream. Orchids and lilies grew along the banks, and creatures—birds or angels—floated in an amethyst sky. In the blocky, primitive shapes, Jean Patrick saw a child's view of heaven.

“Did you paint this? It looks like paradise.”

“It is.” Zachary's countenance took on the innocence of a child. “For so long this vision came to my eyes. I think there was a similar painting at Gihundwe where we used to pray with Papa.” Jean Patrick couldn't remember. Certainly, it hadn't been there when he went to school. “I miss this place when I'm at Kibuye.” Zachary talked in low tones, as if speech would disturb some sleeping spirit. “It's the best place for me to worship, the place I feel closest to God.”

Strange, Jean Patrick mused, how a person's traits passed from one generation to the next. Papa had a gift for science, but he could also turn his passion into lyric phrases on the page. As if these two halves had unraveled, the scientific side had passed to Jean Patrick and the artist to Zachary.

Papa's Bible lay open on the altar to the Acts of the Apostles, and Jean Patrick read.
And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father.
No, Jean Patrick thought. Zachary will never leave this place, not even if Uncle commands him.

I
N ALL DIRECTIONS
, a stream of colors looped through the trails, people from the hills coming down to church. Most of their bright clothes were not new, but had been saved for Easter: hemmed, mended, scrubbed in Omo, and pressed with a hot charcoal iron. Sunlight dappled the road, but the ground had not yet dried, pulling at their feet as if it did not want to let them go. Jean Patrick watched Bea, strolling ahead with the women. The girls chittered beside them, dashed in and out. They wound flowers
they had picked through the ribbons in their hair. Jacqueline whispered something into Bea's ear. When Bea threw her head back to laugh, the single feather in her hat shivered.

Jean Patrick walked between Zachary and Uncle Emmanuel, hand in hand. Feeling his uncle's callused palm in his, it occurred to him that Uncle had long ago lost all recollection that Jean Patrick, Roger, and Zachary were not his blood sons. And then Jean Patrick realized that he, too, had long ago stopped making any such distinction.

O
N THE WAY
back from church, Jean Patrick asked Bea if she would walk with him a little farther. “I want to show you something of Gashirabwoba, something of where I come from.” Together they walked down the wide dirt roads where paths plunged into the valley or rose dizzily into the hills. He showed her where his cousins lived, where he had raced Roger and honed the power in his legs, the stubbornness of his mind. Stopping beside a runneled trail into the bush, he pointed. “And that is where I finally beat him,” he said. “Far, far up there.”

Bea laughed and brushed his hand. “Shall we put up a shrine?”

“After my gold medal, we will do so.” Jean Patrick wished he could take her in his arms and tell her about Roger, but the heaviness in his heart was not a burden he would share.

As if she had read his mind, Bea asked, “This famous Roger—he couldn't come home for Easter? Kenya is not so far off.”

“We should get back, eh?” he said.

He had stopped again, this time to point out the eucalyptus grove where meetings were held, when a group of boys in Hutu Power garb walked by, RTLM blaring from a hulking radio one of them carried.
On the third or the fourth or fifth there will be a little something here in Kigali. You will hear the sound of bullets or grenades exploding.
Was there no rest from the station's fool nonsense? Not even on the day of the resurrection?

E
VERYONE FROM THE
neighboring hills came to the house to eat. They crowded together at the table or sat with a plate on a chair. Children spread out across the floor. Mukabera came with Olivette and her new husband. Olivette's belly was already swollen; by the time Jean Patrick
came home at the end of the term, there would be a naming ceremony to attend.

Angelique and Uwimana flanked Jean Patrick; Fulgence and his family sat like royalty beside Uncle at the head of the table. The center of the table was piled with a feast: grilled fish, crispy sambaza, stews with cabbage and tomato and bits of chicken and goat meat. There were bowls of ibitoki bigeretse kub'ibishyimbo, the green bananas and beans that Uncle always piled high on his plate.

Bea dove into the center of commotion as if she had always been there, cleft from the same country clay. Jean Patrick wished he could just watch her, just eat, joke with his family. But trouble bunched under his skin. He could not sweep it away, not even for this one afternoon.

A
FTER DINNER
, J
EAN
Patrick and Bea walked with Uwimana and Angelique to their car. The clouds had scattered, and the earth, hardened. With a tenderness that made him ache, Jean Patrick watched Uwimana's long-familiar rolling gait, his round body, the expression on his face as if he were always listening for something essential and was afraid he would miss it.

Angelique whispered in Jean Patrick's ear, “I hope next time we see you, you will be man and wife. You must not let this wonderful woman go.”