Running the Rift (42 page)

“Be careful,” Bea said. Her plaits glistened. She brushed his fingers. “You're coming back, aren't you?”

“As long as I am welcome.”

“You're family now. Of course you are.”

J
EAN
P
ATRICK TRIED
to keep his body from shaking as he put his identity card into the soldier's outstretched hand. The old, rheumy guard was gone; the gate was manned by the soldiers.

“You're not on the list,” the soldier said. “You can't pass.”

Fear squeezed Jean Patrick's throat. “The list?”

“You're not listed as a student present on campus.” The soldier rattled a sheaf of papers.

A hand clapped Jean Patrick on the back. “Eh! Let him go. It's that
famous runner.” Jean Patrick looked into the face of the officer from the Cyarwa checkpoint, the one who was always friendly to him. “Hey, Rutembeza's boy. Amakuru?” He patted his round belly and snatched the card from the soldier. “This guy's OK. Remember him; he's going to the Olympics.” He handed Jean Patrick his card. “Wah! What a crazy guy! A storm like this, and just a flimsy jacket to protect you? How is your coach? Lately we have no news.”

“He's well, thank you. I will greet him for you.” With his shaky hand, it took Jean Patrick three tries to get his card back in his pocket. He broke into a jog up the hill, but his legs moved in random directions, all signals from the brain on hold. He barely knew how to move one foot in front of the other.

T
HE CAMPUS WAS
as deserted as the roads, only ghosts moving about. A familiar-looking woman walked quickly toward him from the direction of the cafeteria, and Jean Patrick soon realized that it was Valerie, the last woman Daniel fell in love with, the last on his long list of women he was going to marry. He waved her over. She peered at him blankly, rain dripping from the visor of a cap with the logo of a Hutu extremist party.

“How are you doing?” Jean Patrick said. He held out his hand, but she didn't accept it. He pointed to her cap. “I see you've switched sides. No more Parti Libéral?”

“Times change,” she said. “We have banded together for the common Hutu good. What do you want?”

Jean Patrick stared back at her. “My friend Daniel. We had dinner with you and your girlfriends. You sat with him. Did you know he was killed?”

“He was icyitso. He deserved to die. As you do.”

Jean Patrick observed her impassive expression, trying to bring forth something human in her. “He was eighteen years old, and he wanted to be a doctor, to help people. He did not have an evil thought in his head. What happened to all your talk about unity and justice?”

She shrugged. “We will not allow Tutsi to enslave us again. If we have to kill, we will kill. We adapt to the situation as we see fit.” She turned away and continued down the path.

“Yego,” Jean Patrick said to the space she left behind. “As we see fit.”

J
EAN
P
ATRICK STOOD
outside his room and stared in at what remained of his world. Shards of glass, splinters of wood, a few rags of clothing. The door listed drunkenly on a single hinge. Windblown rain slanted through the broken window. All the furniture, their clothes and books, gone. In the center of the floor, a small fire had been built, fueled by his and Daniel's belongings, those few deemed unworthy to be carried off.

Out in the yard, an occasional student passed. Strands of RTLM's noise floated, disconnected, in the air.
Inyenzi are disappearing. They disappear gradually as bombs continue to fall on them.
Simon Bikindi's hate-filled lyrics vibrated the walls of students' rooms. Jean Patrick stepped through the doorway, and glass crunched beneath his shoes. The stink of smoke and moldering ash infused the air. On the wall, someone had written
TUBATSEMBATSEMBE!,
Kill Them All. The red paint had dripped and pooled on the floor.

As he searched frantically through the wreckage, a piece of glass sliced his palm. In the charred remains of the fire he saw flakes of Paul Ereng's picture, a corner of ironwood frame, blackened scraps of his father's journal. He dug further and found the Hutu card, curled like a dead insect's shell. It was open to his photo, his own sad, burned eyes peering out at him. He brushed off the card and put it in his pocket along with the corner of frame, an entry of his father's journal that was readable, and a page of Daniel's physiology text, underlined, with notes in Daniel's careless writing.
Tibia = flute bone!

On his way out the door, he glimpsed a pair of shorts tossed into a corner of the room. They were his Puma shorts, white with the red stripe, the last threads of his dream. They were filthy, trampled with muddy footprints, but whole—savable. He used them to wrap his hand.

J
EAN
P
ATRICK HEARD
whistles, a high-pitched din. His skin went cold. A woman burst into the yard, running with long-legged strides, arms pumping. With a sinking feeling in his belly, he recognized Honorine, the distance runner. A group of guys chased her, slipping and sliding in the wet grass. A bottle hit her on the back of the head. She kept going. In the pack, Jean Patrick recognized teammates and friends he used to sit beside in
class. He took off after them as Honorine disappeared around the corner of a building. They didn't follow, the heart gone from their chase. They staggered off toward the dorms.

When they had gone, Honorine emerged from her hiding place. “Jean Patrick, thank God you're safe.” Her chest heaved with the effort of her sprint. She collapsed into his arms, trembling, no more weight to her than a leaf in the wind.

“Shh. It's all right. Are you staying here, on campus?”

She started to cry. “I have nowhere else to go. What about you? I looked and looked for you. I was so afraid you were…”

Rain had soaked their clothes, and they clung together like drowned creatures. “I'm staying with friends. I was there when…” When what? The world ended? He, also, could not finish his sentence.

Honorine nodded. “That's good. You should leave this place now and not come back. The Hutu Power students terrorize us night and day. We've banded together for safety, but I don't know how long it can last. I was stupid to think I could go out by myself.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “As you see.”

“Come—I'll walk with you.”

She grabbed his arm. “Nkuba, we are gupfa uhagaze, the walking dead.”

Jean Patrick wanted to comfort her, to tell her this was not so, but the lie would not pass his lips. He accompanied her past the rows of rooms, past doors, like his own, hanging off hinges or missing altogether.

She stopped beside a room. Inside, the shadows of students moved. “Will you come in? We can make you some tea.”

Jean Patrick touched his cheek to hers. “I should get back,” he said. “May God keep you safe.” It seemed an empty phrase.

A
CRUDE BARRIER
of rocks and tree limbs blocked the trail that led from the woods to the road, manned by a citizen patrol. One was a fellow student who waited tables at the Ibis. “Hey, my friend,” he called to Jean Patrick. They shook hands. “I'm glad to see you're well.”

“Yes—thanks to God. And you, too—it's good to see you on patrol.”

A ragged man demanded Jean Patrick's papers and examined them
with a puzzled look. Jean Patrick remembered the day at the arboretum, the man with the bloodied club holding his card upside down. “Here,” Jean Patrick said, pointing at the word
Tutsi.
“Hu-tu.”

“OK,” the man said. “You can pass.”

“Lord bless us,” the waiter said. He switched to French then so the man would not understand. “This fine fellow would much rather slit my Tutsi throat than stand here with me, but in these times we do what we can, huh?” He waved Jean Patrick through.

J
EAN
P
ATRICK COULD
see through the slit in the gate that Coach was not in. One last time he called out to Jolie. “It's me, Jean Patrick. Can you let me in?” The windows glared at him, dark and empty. The wall surrounding the house had grown a crown of broken bottles.

Blood from his cut palm seeped through the makeshift bandage of his shorts. He turned to leave but then did not leave. If he waited long enough, Coach must come. Just as he made up his mind to go, he saw Jolie trundling up the road, arms wide to balance two baskets of food. He ran to help her.

“Your coach is not here,” she said. She walked forward, eyes on the road.

“Let me carry these.” He took the baskets from her.

“I can't let you in.”

“Grandmother, when will he be back?”

“Inshyanutsi!” she said. “Someday your nosiness will kill you.” But she smiled when she unlocked the gate. “You look like a drowned bush rat. Come and dry off for a minute.”

Jean Patrick followed her into the yard. “Are you cross with me?” he asked.

“I am angry with all Tutsi for killing our president. You have destroyed everything good in our country.”

“Grandmother, I am not a killer. I am the same person I was two weeks ago, last month, last year.” Though this was a lie. He had been turned upside down, shaken, emptied out. They walked into the house, and he gave her the baskets, one handle stained with his blood.

“What happened?” Jolie removed the bandage and inspected his hand, holding it in her gnarled fingers.

“I slipped. On campus there is broken glass everywhere.”

After lighting the fire, Jolie sat him at the table and brought a towel. Then she went to the cookhouse and came back with a steaming bowl filled with a potion of grasses. She cleaned off his hand and bound it with a cloth soaked in the pungent liquid. “I'll get your clothes for you.” She took the ring of house keys from the hook and unlocked the door to the room where he used to sleep, emerging with shorts and a sweat suit, an older pair of running shoes, a T-shirt, a sweater that was now too small for him. She pulled the door to and locked it. “You can change your clothes in the bathroom.” She cackled, conspiratorial. “Take one of your coach's old ponchos to keep you dry. He'll never notice its absence.”

When he came from the bathroom, there was fruit on the table, a bowl of soup, a piece of bread and margarine, a cup of cyayi cyayi, the lemony brew Jolie always nursed him with when he was tired or sick. “Eat quickly. You'll have to leave soon,” she said.

He ate hungrily. “Jolie, your food still melts my heart.” Through the window he watched the weather. He listened for Coach's car. Not even the whistle of a bird broke the rain's monotonous song.

Full and warm, he let his eyes shut. Dozing off, he dreamed he heard the gate swing open, the clink of a key in the lock. When he started awake, he was smiling.

“You better go now,” Jolie said. She held a cracked green poncho and a sack with Jean Patrick's wet clothes. She gave him a second sack. “Put the rest of your dry clothes in here.”

“When can I come back? When will Coach be here?”

She hastened him toward the door. “I don't know. I haven't seen him since…” The sentence hung in the air, unfinished.

“I have to speak to him. He's my one hope to help my family,” he said. “To help me.”

“He will find you when he can. He cares for you.”

“How will he find me?” He did not want to say where he was. “My room at the dorm was destroyed. I can't go back there anymore.”

“You have to trust him,” she said. She unlocked the front door. “He will come for you.”

Jean Patrick touched his cheek to hers before stepping out into the wet. Trust Coach? If Coach told him that tomorrow the sun would rise in the east, it seemed to Jean Patrick there was a fifty-fifty chance it would rise in the west.

B
EA'S BELLY WAS SOFT AND WARM.
Jean Patrick lay on the couch with his ear against it, listening to the secret sounds. The voice of RTLM that came from Niyonzima's office was like fingers scraped across a blackboard.

“Do you think there's a baby inside?”

Hutu, when you see people gathering in schools and churches, this is not good at all, because there are Inyenzi-Inkotanyi among them. You must take action against them.

“Eh! I don't know.”

Bea's head bent over his, and he wound a plait of hair about his finger. “I say yes. I say it's a boy.” He examined the cut on his palm; it was healing.

Bea kissed her teeth and pushed him away. “Why not a girl? What's wrong with a girl?”

Go after those Inkotanyi. Blood flows in their veins as it does in yours
.
All those who sympathize with both sides, they are ibyitso. They will pay for what they have done.

She pressed her hands to her ears. “How long do we have to endure this?” She rose from the couch and paced.

Jean Patrick had no answer. A span of time marked only by the count of the dead on RTLM.

Niyonzima had finally made contact with Uwimana, and Jean Patrick had spoken with him. He closed his eyes and imagined life and love coursing through the wires. Although Niyonzima called every day, connections were unpredictable, the distance from Butare to Cyangugu no longer measurable by any method Jean Patrick understood. His family had not come to Gihundwe, and Jean Patrick could only hope they were safe in Burundi. People inside the school were starving. Some had died. Angelique could not keep up with the sick, the wounded, more coming every hour.

A slate sky promised rain. Claire's children played in the yard, soft laughter rising and falling. Jean Patrick reached out to Bea with both his hands. “Come back. I want to touch you again.”

“I cannot sit still.”

Who could? But what was there to do besides sit still? Go for another run, read another book, play igisoro, write a letter. Soon enough, there would be no one left to write. Jean Patrick heard the name of the baker and the jeweler from Cyangugu announced on RTLM. Then a teacher from primary school.
All Tutsi will perish. They will disappear from the earth. We will kill them like rats.
He buried his face in his hands.