Broken Memory (5 page)

Then the day came when the old man asked Emma to draw her most terrible memory.

She tried again and again.

She always began by drawing a vertical line to represent the wall that she had huddled against. But that's as far as she got, scratching out and blackening the short line over and over, her fingers clenched, wearing down the tip of the pencil.

“I can't draw the voices, the beating, the crying. I didn't see anything,” she said one day, discouraged and exhausted. “I can't do it.”

The old man did a strange thing then. He walked over to her, tilted his head to one side, and whispered in a low voice, as if he were telling her a secret, “So pretend you are the sofa, and try to tell me what you see. You're in no danger. You're just a sofa.”

Emma's eyes widened. What an idea…

After a few moments of hesitation, she hid her face in her hands and tried. She wasn't able to turn herself into a sofa, but she found herself transported back to the scene, more like a piece of the ceiling, perfectly harmless.

And she let the voices, the beating, the crying come back, and she pictured the crime in her head.

What she saw was unbearable. Her breathing speeded up, then stopped. She thought she was about to drown when the old man's voice broke into her nightmare.

“Tell me what you see, Emma. Don't keep it to yourself.”

She managed to let go a little, took a deep breath, plunged back into the scene and described the horror. It felt so unbelievably real.

When she came back to the old man, it was as if she had been sleeping standing up. He walked over to her, his hands on her shoulders, his eyes full of compassion.

“It's over, Emma.”

“You wanted to know,” the old woman said.

Emma just stood there, frowning nervously.

She was supposed to return to her home village — her mother's village — to get a document that would prove that she had in fact been her mother's daughter, thus a Tutsi and a survivor of the genocide. Then she would be entitled to money that the state had set aside for the surviving victims — money that would allow them to look after themselves and have better lives. And, for the many children and teenagers who had been on their own since the massacres — most of them desperately poor orphans — it would allow them to enroll in school.

Emma wasn't yet sure she wanted to go to school, but Ndoli's stories and their tense conversation behind the wall had made her want to be with young people her own age.

She looked at Mukecuru. She did want to know where her mother came from and to see the house where they had lived before everything was lost in her broken memory.

But the journey scared her. She was afraid of going back to the place where her life had stopped. If she was right there, the ghosts would be even stronger than they were in her bad dreams.

“You'll find your missing memories there,” the old woman added. She knew how frightened Emma was.

The girl sat on the little bench, her safe spot in a dark corner of the room.

“I'll go,” she whispered. “I'll go soon.”

She slid her hands between her knees, her eyes fixed on the ground. Then she rocked back and forth, as if she were calming a baby.

The house where she had been born was about sixty kilometers from the old woman's place. And it was many long months after her talk with Mukecuru before Emma set off along this road for the second time. Back in 1994, she had fled on foot, hiding in fields, sleeping in the bush, nibbling on rotten fruit every few days, drinking dirty water whenever she could.

This new journey, ten years later, would be very different.

Before she left, she told Ndoli about her plan. He wanted to go with her, to protect her, he said. But she told him no. She wanted to face her past and get her life back on her own. Besides, the month of April was approaching, the time when she always noticed the first signs of his dark madness returning. She was already uneasy about this trip. She would not be able to be strong enough for both of them.

One day when she was feeling discouraged and exhausted and refused to spend time with him, he grew impatient, even angry.

She could see that he was shattered by her rejection. His eyes glazed over, his jaw became rigid, and he staggered off as if he were drunk.

Emma felt badly, too. She had a nagging feeling that she was punishing Ndoli, that she had abandoned him. During a long sleepless night, she tossed and turned, upset that she had hurt him so much.

He was her only friend. Without him she would probably still be battling nightmares.

The next morning, she decided to leave right away, even though she was upset and exhausted, and Mukecuru suggested that she rest for one more day.

It was only when she was on her way that Emma remembered the old woman warning her about Ndoli's fragility and about being careful with the power she had over him.

Emma couldn't relax until the outskirts of town were far behind her. Only then did she look up and pay attention to the men, women and children who were walking with her on the side of the road. She was surprised at how free and easy it felt to be anonymous. For the first time ever, it felt good to be surrounded by people, walking with them or past them, invisible in the crowd.

Most of her traveling companions were peasants who walked this same road every day. A few were on bicycles harnessed up like horses. It was funny to see men gripping the handlebars, their rear ends in the air as they fought to pedal to the top of a long hill. Some of them gave up and walked up the steeper hills instead, but they still struggled to push their bikes that were weighed down with huge bulging white sacks of grain that looked heavier than a pile of anvils.

From time to time, the sounds of an old beat-up motorcycle would pierce the silence, belching, farting and hissing wildly. Every once in a while a vehicle surged around the bend — the powerful four-by-fours of the aid workers or white tourists, luxurious black sedans with tinted windows belonging to some important person from the capital, a broken-down van driven by a storekeeper in the village, a minibus or crowded coach running between Kigali and Butare, Rwanda's other big city.

Emma liked to watch the way the women would calmly shift aside toward the trees when a car passed, gracefully swinging the colorful umbrellas that protected them from the sun. She shuddered at the unruly schoolchildren who waited until the last second before getting out of the way of the huge engines spewing out oil.

Then the engine noises would gradually disappear and peace would return to the roadside. And Emma would turn her attention back to the people she passed, trying to imagine what their dreams were like, what their lives were like.

She overheard a heated conversation between two teenaged boys lying in the grass, their heads leaning against the pavement. They wanted to become soldiers just like an older brother and a cousin who had been recruited by the rebels during the genocide.

She was touched by the sight of a tiny boy, his forehead creased in concentration as he struggled to keep up with the brisk pace of his mother while he hauled a yellow oil can that was as big as he was.

After several hours of walking, she decided to take a minibus. She reluctantly handed a few Rwandan francs to the driver, then slid into a spot between two travelers. Her shoulders, her arms, her back, her thighs, her entire body were squeezed in close, unsettling contact with her neighbors. Their clothes rubbed together and their sweat mingled. For a while she put all her energy into holding herself stiff, afraid she would never get out of that hellish box. But in the end she just gave up.

Once she relaxed, she was able to sneak glances at the people smiling around her. She saw how a sort of good mood was developing among the travelers, in spite of their complaints about the driver or the occasional rowdy passenger.

There was a big, tough-faced lad who she thought looked mean, until she watched him place his hand on the head of a baby swaddled on the back of its mother so that it wouldn't be crushed by the sliding doors. She admired an elegant woman until she saw her rudely scold a crippled old man who was trying to sit down to rest his legs.

Emma realized that every thing and every person had an outside and an inside, and that the two were not necessarily the same.

She also saw how beautiful her country was. After one of her fellow passengers got off the bus she was able to lean against a window. The countryside unfurled before her eyes like a patchwork of luminous greens stretching into the distance — the cultivated slopes of valleys irrigated by rainwater. As far as she could see, hills poked into the sky, nudging aside the clouds. From time to time little houses popped up like tiny brown islands in a sea of banana groves with their large bright green leaves.

Emma realized just how little she knew about her own country and how inexperienced she was. At the beginning of the journey, she had been ready for anything to happen, especially the worst. She never imagined she would be surprised by so much, feel so carefree. She could see no signs of the past horror, no scars. She saw nothing on the faces around her that reminded her of the tragedy she had lived through and that had shaped the entire country.

This journey showed her a Rwanda that seemed to be at peace.

She could see things with a positive frame of mind — places and people that had looked blacker than hell to her ten years ago.

And for the first time, she felt strong enough to face the future, as uncertain as it was.

A second minibus took Emma to her village.

By the time she arrived, the energy she had gained during her journey was draining away as fast as the fading daylight. At the small open-air bus depot, travelers were rushing to get home. Some were met by friends and relatives, others by persistent taxi drivers. Those less well-off were leaving on foot or heading toward the mobilettes and bicycles waiting for clients on the side of the road. Emma saw several with loads of luggage precariously balanced on their narrow racks.

Before long she was the only one left. Afraid that she would never find the courage to finish her journey, she looked around and just started to walk. She passed the old cars that had been abandoned behind the shack that housed the ticket office.

When she reached the edge of the depot, she stopped again. She felt the night deepen, saw the red earth of the road in front of her turning brown.

She placed her small blue-and-black backpack on the ground and searched through one of the pockets, pulling out a piece of paper and carefully unfolding it. Mukecuru had written down the name of the woman she was supposed to stay with overnight. Emma didn't know how to read very well — the old woman had taught her only the basics, which was all she knew herself — but she knew enough to get by.

Small shops surrounded the open-air terminal, so she headed toward one that was lit up — a grocer's with telephone service according to the symbols on the sign — and asked a man sitting in front of the door for directions.

He looked tired, his eyes dull, a bitter wrinkle running from the corner of his mouth where his pipe was wedged. He barely looked alive.

“He's not old, though,” Emma thought. She tried to imagine what kind of a life he had led, but she was in a bleak mood. She imagined him in 1994, decided he was a torturer at first, then a victim, a survivor without family who had come out of it well, judging by the grocery store. No matter what, he had still ended up with dull eyes, tired features and a bitter mouth.

The man slowly dragged twice on his pipe, held it in his left hand and without a word pointed it toward the house she was looking for.

Emma had never seen a house so full of things. In the salon, the furniture seemed to be fighting for space. Embroidered and crocheted white doilies smothered every armchair, bureau and table. The walls were scattered with religious pictures to cover up cracks in the plaster.

Emma had a hard time concentrating as the woman welcomed her. Her attention kept shifting between the doilies that threatened to slide off the sofa where she was sitting and the sheer fabric of her hostess's blouse, which seemed to be struggling to contain a powerful and generous bosom.

“The button is going to pop off,” Emma thought, distracted by so much luxury.

Everything here was the exact opposite of Mukecuru and the life she led. Yet she had recommended this woman, whose name she had been given by a neighbor who knew her family.

She welcomed Emma warmly.

“I knew your mother, you know. We went to the same school. We never talked to each other much, because she was younger than me. But I remember her well. She was very smart. It caused a lot of jealousy. However, I believe she only wanted the same thing all us Tutsi students wanted back in those days. She wanted to get by without being noticed. There weren't a lot of us in the school. Only the best and some of the privileged had the right to go to school.”

Emma forgot about the doilies and the blouse and tried to imagine her mother as a child. What kind of a little girl was she? Had she looked like her mother when she was six years old, ten, thirteen? Would she be like her when she was twenty or twenty-four? Had her mother been twenty-four? She didn't even know how old she was when she died.

“Would you like a Fanta?” the woman repeated, touching Emma's arm lightly.

“Um…yes…thank you,” she babbled. She smiled at the sight of the low-cut sea blue neckline right in front of her nose.

Her hostess took the smile as being aimed at herself, and she smiled back.

“I stayed away a long time,” she went on, as she took the cap off the lemonade. “I went to work with my aunt, who left the country for Kinshasa in 1973. We came back after the end of the war in 1994 like most of the exiled Tutsis. We'd at least been tolerated there before the war, but after the victory of the FPR, we had to get out fast. But I'm boring you with my stories. You're falling asleep. Tomorrow, if you like, I can show you your house.”

“Is someone living there?” Emma asked, awkwardly trying to pull herself out of the sofa while she tried to replace the doilies that she had rolled into a ball on her knees without even noticing.

“Oh, no. It's nothing but a ruin now.”