Running the Rift (48 page)

B
EHIND THE
I
NTORE DANCERS,
musicians leapt into the air, pounded drums with hands and sticks. Stage lights caught sweat on their foreheads and shot pink and blue spears across their leopard-spotted ikindi. Dancers tossed their imigara, the headdresses flaring like arched tails.

Jonathan and Susanne knew how to throw a party. It was nearly eleven o'clock, and they were all going strong, waiting to ring in the New Year. Every Rwandan within a hundred-mile radius of Boston had squeezed into the hall, as well as the entire geology department at MIT, students and staff. The department head was there, and even she was dancing. There was much to celebrate. In two weeks' time, Jonathan and Susanne were getting married.

Jean Patrick leaned against a wall and watched the party.
A body in motion tends to remain in motion,
he mused. The clam-shaped bells around the dancers' ankles oscillated in harmonic motion with their stamping feet. Across the room, the door to the hall opened, and one of Jonathan's students came in, skin rubbed pink from cold. He dropped dollar bills into the five-gallon bottle marked
FOR FORA
. Once more, Jean Patrick checked his phone for messages.

The cell phone was a new thing, and Jean Patrick hated it; he did not like its weight or the way it banged around in his jacket pocket. But Roger had just left for Rwanda, and they wanted to keep in touch. He was in Kigali with his wife and daughter for Christmas. “I want my Mathilde to see the country where her parents were born,” he said. In the intervening years, they had found a scattering of cousins who had survived, an aunt of Papa's, a few nephews and nieces who had returned to Rwanda from Uganda and Burundi to live. Roger and his family would meet those who
could travel to Kigali. The rest of the country still reeled from the war. He couldn't expose his child to that; they would not go to Cyangugu.

Jean Patrick was not ready to return. He couldn't get beyond imagining the instant of landing: the fuel smell, fumes, and noise rising from the tarmac. He couldn't get past the fear that with his first footstep, he would fall into the rivers of the dead.

Jean Patrick had invited a girl to the party, and she had promised to be there by ten. Her name was Leslie, a grad student in physics of Ugandan descent, lively and lithe. They had gone to the movies, had dinner together, talked until four in the morning. At her door, he had kissed her, the kiss long and hard and hungry. Feeling the warmth of her body, inhaling her heady perfume, he believed he could open a corner of his heart to her. He checked his watch and sighed; she must be keeping African time.

The musicians announced a break. Bob Marley's “No Woman No Cry” wailed from the speakers. Jonathan and Susanne danced, Jonathan mimicking the Intore dancers, tossing his headdress of red hair, unhindered by ponytail or braid. He took a glass of champagne and drank. Susanne rolled her hips, exposed the taut bulge of her belly. The baby would be born in March.

The song ended, and Susanne brought Jean Patrick a Mutzig beer. “We must have raised a few hundred dollars tonight for the Friends of Rwanda Association,” she said. “That's tuition for two and a half students.”

Jean Patrick handed Susanne a five-dollar bill. “Now it's two and nine-sixteenths.”

The door to the hall opened once more, and two Rwandan professors entered. Jean Patrick sucked his teeth. “I guess Leslie's stood me up,” he said.

Paul Simon's “Graceland” came over the speakers, and Jonathan shouted to the DJ for full volume. The sad joy of the lyrics threaded Jean Patrick's heart.

“J. P.! Come dance!” Jonathan held out his hands to Jean Patrick.

“Yes,” Susanne said. “Come dance.”

Jonathan pulled Susanne to the center of the floor, and she pulled Jean Patrick with her. Besides Roger, they were the closest family he had. The three of them swayed to the music. That afternoon, he had spent too long
on the treadmill, and his ankle let him know. A familiar but unnamable longing tugged at him. After all these years, he thought, we are still a nation in exile, a diaspora.

T
HE MUSICIANS HAD GRABBED
their instruments but had not yet begun to play when Jean Patrick's cell phone rang. It took him a moment to distinguish his brother's voice from the static.

“Umwaka mwiza, Little Brother.”

“Umwaka mwiza, Roger. Happy New Year. Is everything OK?” Jean Patrick realized he was shouting into the phone, the tingle of panic at his throat. He still felt always on the edge of disaster, as if at any moment the earth could open beneath his feet.

“Are you sitting down? I think you should be sitting down.” Roger sounded strange—drunk or disoriented.

“Mana yanjye, what's happened? Is Marie hurt? Mathilde?”

“No! Everything's fine. I have someone here who wants to talk to you. Hold on.”

Jean Patrick waited. There was static, followed by murmurs in the background.

“Uraho? Jean Patrick?” A female voice, woman or child, he couldn't be sure.

Jonathan trumpeted over the loudspeaker. “One minute to midnight by my official clock. Set your watches. Countdown in fifty seconds.”

“Muraho? Who is this? Just a minute. I can't hear.” Jean Patrick covered one ear and pressed the phone against the other.

“Are you there? Are you hearing me now?” A woman, but not Spéciose.

“Ten. Nine. Eight.” The whole hall roared.

“I'm here. You'll have to speak up.”

“Is that really your voice coming through this phone, Jean Patrick Nkuba?”

Jean Patrick found his way to the wall and sank against it. The light in the hall took on an unnatural color. His lips couldn't form the name; he was afraid that if they did, it would not be true. He closed his eyes and held the phone to his heart.

“Three. Two. One.”

He brought the phone to his lips. “Bea?” He tried to absorb it. Tried to breathe. “Bea,” he said again, louder, holding the sound on his tongue, a musical note. “Yes. It's me. I always believed one day I would hear you again.”

Cheers bounced in standing waves across the hall. “Happy New Year!”

“Is it just New Year's there? Is that what I hear?”

Jean Patrick nodded before he realized she couldn't see. “Uzakubere uw'amata n'ubuki.” The last time he had wished her a year of milk and honey was in Café Murakazaneza, in 1994.

“J. P.—what's wrong?” Susanne was at his side.

“It's Bea,” he said. He handed her the phone while all at once the dam burst on a lake that had been filling for four and a half years.

J
EAN
P
ATRICK SAT
in darkness. His bed remained undisturbed, sheets folded crisply over the blanket. Stripes from a streetlamp fell across his desk. The faint gray glow of dawn outlined the buildings against the skyline. In fifteen minutes, his alarm would ring. He opened the window and let the cool air hit his face. The hiss of falling snow filled his ears.

It was incredibly crazy. Roger sitting in the hotel bar in Kigali watching TV, Bea's face suddenly there, on the screen. She was being interviewed for her work with women survivors with HIV-AIDS. Roger said he knew instantly—absolutely—that it was the same woman whose face had greeted him from the photo on Jean Patrick's desk. When her name flashed on the screen, he hollered so loud the whole place looked around, although madness was something they were used to. He bought everyone a drink. Jean Patrick wanted to believe it was more than coincidence. He tried to convince himself it was fate.

“But how did she seem?” Jean Patrick had asked Roger when he called back to give him the details. Jean Patrick sat at his desk, staring into Bea's eyes. He had had enough time to let the shock settle, to wade out into the murky waters of speculation.

“She looked great. I can see why you fell in love with her.”

“But I mean, she seemed
well
? Not skinny or something? She was never skinny before.” He couldn't say the word
AIDS.
He could barely think it.

“She didn't look ill, if that's what you're asking.”

Jean Patrick nodded. “You're sure?” Roger must understand what he meant.

“Yego, Little Brother. Yes, yes, yes.”

Beside Jean Patrick's desk, the wastebasket overflowed with the detritus of discarded letters. All his attempts to smooth sweetness over the words he needed to say came out as schoolboy nonsense. Over and over, he tried to steer his mind away from the abyss beyond the instant of hurtling over the wall. Over and over his mind traveled back to that one second in time he could never undo. He didn't know what price she had paid to survive, but he knew it had been high. He picked up the pen again and wrote the only two words for which meaning remained:
Forgive me.

J
EAN
P
ATRICK STOOD IN THE FRONT HALLWAY
of his apartment building, Bea's letter in his hand. Unlike the first two letters, short and chatty, this one had substance and weight. Even the stamp appeared carefully chosen: a landscape of Lake Kivu. A cold draft came in through the door, but despite the dampness of his clothes from a run in the snow, he did not move.

Jean Patrick had told Bea nothing of his time in the swamps, nothing of his rescue by his coach. He merely said that in the end, he owed his life to Jonathan and Susanne, and he mentioned in passing the journey in the trunk, curled up with Amos like twins in the womb.

In turn, Bea's life as he knew it jumped from the shadows of the wall to three years in London, where she received a degree in social work. She had been back in Rwanda for less than a year. She did not mention to whom she owed her life. Each letter sank beneath the burden of all that remained unsaid, but where could either of them begin? How could they dig with the blade of questions at a scab that had not even begun to heal? Neither of them had sent a photo.

After her second letter, he hadn't been able to stand it anymore.
I want to come and see you,
he had written.
I have no other way forward from here.

Jean Patrick shivered. When he opened the letter and began to read, he would find the word
yego,
yes, or
oya,
no. He did not think he could stand a no, did not think he could bear to lose her one more time. Tucking the letter into his inside jacket pocket, he took the three flights of stairs two steps at a time.

Once inside his apartment, he made himself wait. From the cupboard he took a box of Burundian tea—a gift from Spéciose—and brewed a strong cup. He added milk, three teaspoons of raw sugar. Stirred. Only then did he take a knife and slit the flap and sit down to read.

Dear Jean Patrick,

I cannot tell you how many times I have started my letters, found my words to have failed completely, and started again. I know it is the same for you. We are walking among land mines, eh? I wonder if we will ever be able to go back to speaking as we used to, living from one day to the next without memory seizing us by the throat.

Jean Patrick's blood went cold. He read on, scanning her descriptions of life in Kigali, the rubble of buildings cleared so that new, modern ones could replace them. She had enclosed a newsprint photo of the building where she worked, and this, not her thoughts, had made the letter bulky. A group of women stood beneath a purple banner that said,
FIGHTING THE STIGMA OF AIDS
. Holding the print close, he examined the gaunt faces; Bea's was not among them, he was sure.

I cannot begin to express how brave these women are or the sorrow I feel when I lose one of them. I have thought this over and over until I have worn holes in my mind. I do not think we should meet. At least not now. I cannot bear to take into my arms one more life I could lose.

Folding the letter in half, Jean Patrick set it down on the table where the spilled drops of tea would not wet it. He took his cup to the sink and emptied it, came back to his chair and rested his head on his hands. From somewhere came the sound of a young child laughing. Day faded into evening, but he did not turn on the light.

I
T WAS THREE
days later when the next letter came. The envelope was thin and square with the embossed image of a stork, made from reeds, in the corner. Jean Patrick almost missed it, tucked between the bills and the endless flyers of junk mail. This time, he did not wait. He tore the envelope open so he could read as he climbed. Bea's perfume embraced him, the familiar scent of flowers and perfumed tea bridging the gap between them as if they had been away from each other for a day, an hour, a minute.

It was a tourist card that, like the envelope, was made from woven reeds embossed on paper. Susanne had a box of similar ones that she sent to her
closest friends. This one had a stork and a fisherman casting a line from his pirogue, and he nearly wept to see it. A letter was folded inside.

Dear Jean Patrick,

When I found this card in a shop, the past came back so clearly that my strength left me. Suddenly I was in my father's car on a ridge above Lake Kivu, sun beating through the windshield. It was the day you told me about your life. Do you remember?

As if he had forgotten one scrap.

You gave me a little pirogue with two fishermen inside made from imiseke. You placed it on the seat between us as if it were a crown of jewels. Only now have I realized that yes, it was.

Holding the card in my hands, it came to me that my true reason for refusing you had nothing to do with what I wrote. Please forgive me. I should never have sent that letter. I am writing you at my desk, and above me is a stained-glass bird. For some reason, it has begun to sway, and it is spilling rainbows onto the page. I wish I could send them to you. But what I want to tell you is yego, yes, please come. I will put this card in its envelope and lick it shut quickly, before I change my mind once more.