Broken Memory Page 3

  She also remembered the arguments between him and his second wife, the cruel, bossy woman he married after Emma’s grandmother died.

  She remembered one particularly fierce shouting match when she was a little girl. The old man usually let his wife have the last word just so she would leave him in peace, but that day he was too furious. So she turned her anger on Emma’s mother.

  It was the first time Emma had ever felt injustice, and the feelings were even stronger when she remembered them now.

  There were other men in the family — uncles, cousins — but Emma couldn’t remember them. She was told all her relatives were killed during the genocide.

  And since then she had only lived with Mukecuru. Neither of them ever complained about it. The old woman stayed deeply tied to her dead husband. As for Emma, Mukecuru was the only person she had been able to feel at all close to since her mother died.

  Now that fragile balance had been upset. A strange boy who went mad at the same time every year had come into her life. And a strange old man was about to do the same.

  One day Emma saw him walking outside the school with Ndoli. One detail troubled her deeply. They both had dented heads and obvious scars.

  Emma thought about the place these two men seemed to be taking in her life. It was reassuring to have Ndoli there, lurking in the background. He’d shown her that someone could be interested in her, even watch over her for an entire night. And even if his past made her shudder, she knew that they shared the same pain.

  As for the old man, he was the same age her grandfather would have been. He seemed strong, like the way her mother had described her father, and she liked the way he had reached out to Ndoli under the tree that day. She was curious to know so many things about him.

  Emma remembered the way he had raised his hand to her that day on the road.

  She must have looked so stunned, clutching her laundry that way.

  14.

  The truck came around the bend in a cloud of brown dust. It was carrying a dozen prisoners, their hazy pink silhouettes jolting together perfectly each time the vehicle hit a bump or a pothole.

  Emma had heard that they would be coming back. The first time they had just been presented to the community. Now they came to be tried at the gacaca court, where the survivors of the genocide would come and testify.

  Some people had shown up on their own. Others had been approached by the local authorities who knew everyone who lived in town and in the surrounding area. They knew who had survived and who would have something to say.

  Before the truck drew alongside, Emma hid by the side of the road and blocked her ears so that she couldn’t hear their voices. Then she watched the prisoners closely after they passed by her hiding place.

  None of the faces was familiar. She found out later that the man whose voice she had recognized was one of the leaders, one of the ones who had given the orders during the massacres. So he would be judged by a tribunal in Kigali. He would not be returning to this area.

  In the middle of the group, some prisoners were laughing. Others sat on the edge of the truck, their heads bowed.

  Emma didn’t know what to think. She had been prepared to see monsters, men with faces full of cruelty. Instead she saw simple peasants.

  “Tell me, Mukecuru,” Emma said when she returned home that day.

  The old woman looked up, puzzled.

  “Why did they kill us? Who were they?” Emma continued, her face stubborn.

  The old woman hesitated, let out a light sigh.

  “Tonight,” she replied. “Let’s finish the day’s work first.”

  Almost relieved, Emma grabbed the basket that the old woman held out to her and obediently went to the chicken coop to gather eggs.

  That night, Mukecuru kept her word. She sat Emma down beside her and told her what she knew. She spoke softly and took long pauses between each sentence.

  The old woman told Emma that the president had been assassinated, his plane shot down. She told her how the radio had called on people to murder the Tutsis, who were nothing more than cockroaches, and how the whites had left the country. About the roadblocks where the military and the militias checked people’s identity cards to decide who would be killed. How a part of the population had gone mad with killing.

  Then Mukecuru told her about the Tutsi rebels who came over from Uganda. She told her about the horrible crimes, the looting, the people who grew rich off those who had died or who had fled, about the chaos of a war where no one, neither Hutu nor Tutsi, was safe from the militias, the military, the rebels or even their own neighbors. She told her how the rebels eventually defeated the army, causing thousands upon thousands of Hutus to flee. And that by the end of the war the country had become a graveyard, losing a million of its people.

  When the old woman finally stopped, exhausted, her face was hollow, and her eyes had dark rings under them. Emma had taken in every sentence of her gory story.

  “So it was the whole country that did the killing.”

  “No, Emma, there were men and women who did not participate in the massacres, and good people who saved lives. Some of them are dead.”

  “You were one of them, Mukecuru,” Emma said to herself. She leaned her head against the old woman’s knee, and Mukecuru softly began to hum one of Emma’s favorite lullabies.

  15.

  The next day when Emma came home from the market, she heard people talking in the house. She slowed down, quietly approached the open window and leaned against the wall.

  She recognized the clear, strangely thin voice of the old man who had approached Ndoli.

  “I can help her. You must convince her to come and see me.”

  “She’ll have to choose for herself. I won’t tell her to do anything,” Mukecuru replied in the firm tone that she only used with strangers. On the other side of the wall, Emma smiled, thinking how gentle Mukecuru was when she spoke to her.

  “Tell her about me,” the old man said. “Tell her where she can find me. Then she can be the one to decide.”

  The old woman hesitated.

  “Can you get rid of her nightmares?” she asked.

  His voice softened.

  “I can try. Talk to her.”

  Silence filled the room again. Emma didn’t see Mukecuru, but she could just imagine her standing there, determined and still as a statue, studying the old man.

  “I’ll talk to her,” she said finally, in a tone that signaled the conversation was over.

  Emma hurried behind the house and waited until the visitor was a long way off. When she came back, Mukecuru was still standing in front of the door, staring at the road.

  “You were here,” she said without looking at Emma.

  “He’s a strange old man,” Emma answered, leaning against the wall. “He chases away nightmares…?”

  She smiled, looking at Mukecuru. The old woman hesitated briefly, then turned and smiled back.

  “You can find him at the medical clinic behind the church,” she said as she went back into the house.

  16.

  “He killed my sister!” the young woman said, pointing a trembling finger at the prisoner who was silently facing his accuser.

  They were standing in the middle of a small crowd. About a hundred people were at the gacaca, sitting in a semicircle in a grassy clearing dotted with patches of brown. A number of them were angry at the woman.

  At the edge of the circle, other men wearing pink were waiting for their turn, leaning against a tree or sitting cross-legged, some of them with their backs turned. Others looked down at the ground. All of them wore blank, hollow expressions.

  “She’s lying!” a woman screamed from the audience. “She saw nothing, she was hiding. Otherwise she’d be dead, too!”

  Watching the scene from a distance, Emma began to tremble, as if the accusation had been aimed at her. She identified with the woman who had come to testify. When she heard that a gacaca was going to be held that morning, she decided to go, but she had not found the courage to join the crowd.

  She listened to the young woman go on with her story, encouraged by the judges sitting behind two tables that had been placed side by side. Among them was an old white-haired man, a former teacher; a woman of about fifty who was in charge of the medical clinic; and a young man Emma didn’t know, elegant in his pale suit.

  The young Tutsi woman said she had heard her sister’s murderer bragging about his crime. He’d gone back to his house after his “work day” — that’s what the people who killed during the working day called it — carrying his machete as if he’d just been working in the fields.

  That day of massacres had ended, like many others, with a party, with beer and grilled meat. There was always plenty of meat, since the murderers would slaughter the herds of their victims.

  The young woman admitted she had been hiding, but this man was the neighbor of her parents. He had watched her and her sister grow up.

  There was no possible mistake. It was his voice she’d heard.

  The crowd grew angrier as her testimony became more detailed. Unable to take any more, Emma stood up to leave.

  That’s when she noticed that Ndoli was slightly below her, also watching the scene from a distance.

  To stay out of sight she quickly sat back down, more heavily than she meant to.

  The boy heard her and turned around. He hesitated for a moment, then waved shyly. Emma took a risk and smiled back. He looked surprised. Then he moved away from the grumbling crowd in the clearing and made his way up the hill.

  When he reached her, she made a place for him on the carpet
of dried grass.

  They both felt awkward. They didn’t know what to say, so they turned their attention to the trial.

  A young Hutu boy, a little older than Ndoli — maybe eighteen or nineteen — had replaced the previous prisoner.

  “They still hate us,” Emma said in a whisper.

  “Maybe…because they feel guilty,” Ndoli stammered.

  Below them, the young Hutu was being defended by a genocide survivor in her forties. She confirmed that he had beaten her father in April 1994, but made it clear that he had done it while he was being threatened by the members of the Interhamwe militia. They were the ones who had waved their blood-spattered machetes and forced him to kill her father, a sick old man. Maybe they were trying to make the boy one of them. That first crime often led to others.

  The woman added that she didn’t understand why she was not dead as well. The attackers had left, claiming that they were finished for the day, but that they would get her, too, just wait.

  Of course, she did not wait.

  The young prisoner told his version next. It was similar to the woman’s story.

  Emma turned toward Ndoli. She could feel him becoming more tense. His jaw was rigid and he clenched his fists as the teenager, who would have been scarcely ten years old at the time of the genocide, described his crime and his ordeal.

  The young Hutu’s story had things in common with Ndoli’s, but his weakness had not led to the loss of his own family. He probably stood a good chance of being recognized as a victim by the gacaca, and officially pardoned in everyone’s eyes.

  Ndoli knew that would never happen to him.

  Emma saw that he was upset, and she didn’t know how to comfort him. But she knew she had to say or do something. After all, he hadn’t hesitated when she had blacked out on the side of the road that time.

  Suddenly the gacaca seemed a million miles away, as she realized that their first real encounter was about to end in disaster. She stopped second guessing herself, and ended up saying the simplest thing in the world.

  “Thank you for the other night.”

  Caught off guard, Ndoli looked at Emma, and all at once his eyes filled with tears. To stop herself from crying, she gave him a big fake smile, crinkling her eyes and showing all her teeth.

  The cheerful look on her face was so unexpected that Ndoli felt something let go deep inside him. He started to laugh, even though he was still crying. Then he wiped his face, took a breath and shrugged his shoulders, as if to excuse himself for being so pitiful.

  17.

  “This boy is fragile,” Mukecuru said when Emma told her what had happened. “Take care with him, Emma,” she warned.

  Emma didn’t understand. She thought the old woman was being unkind to Ndoli, just like the whole world was against him, she told herself bitterly. It wasn’t fair. He was a victim himself. He was doing the best he could.

  But Mukecuru’s words would come back to her a few months later. She would understand what she meant then.

  18.

  Emma and Ndoli met each other often after the gacaca. She told him about the gossip at the market, and he reported on what was happening at school — both passing on news about what was going on in their separate worlds. She would put down the women who had made fun of them. He told her about the funny, cruel and often disappointing things that went on at school.

  Emma liked one of his stories in particular. It was about a girl at school who had fought to join the boys’ soccer game at recess, even though they didn’t want her to, and she ended up playing so well that she caught the attention of the coach of a girls’ team.

  Emma often asked Ndoli about this girl. She became sort of an imaginary friend, the kind you secretly admire and who makes you want to do better yourself.

  “I would like to be like her,” she confessed one day. “But I could never do that.”

  “How do you know? You’ve never set foot in a school,” Ndoli replied, a little annoyed. He had exaggerated the accomplishments of this girl to a certain degree, and Emma’s huge interest in her was starting to irritate him.

  That evening, Emma thought about what Ndoli had said. She hadn’t paid much attention at the time, in spite of his unusually gruff tone. But now, stretched out under the big tree, she dared to dream.

  How did she really know what she could or could not do? She began to imagine a life for herself as a daring schoolgirl caught up in a thousand and one activities, in a recess without end.

  19.

  Ndoli lay on his stomach beside Emma, in the grass behind the low wall that surrounded the schoolyard. He didn’t hesitate for a second when she asked him to take her to watch the recess break. He had run out of true or even almost true stories, and his imagination was seriously beginning to fail him when he tried to think up new ones.

  “When are they going to come out?” asked Emma without taking her eyes off the empty yard on the other side of the wall. She was trembling with excitement, her forehead glued to the dry stones, her hands on either side of the gap in the wall that allowed her to see without being seen.

  The students burst onto the playground before Ndoli could answer. He watched Emma. He was only interested in recess because she was. She drew back when she saw the sea of children pouring out the doors of the big yellow building, but quickly went back to her observation post.

  The students swarmed into the yard, the striking contrast of their blue and beige uniforms making it easy to tell the girls from the boys, even from a distance.

  Ndoli chose a hole of his own — the old wall was full of them — and pointed out the students he had told her about. She was surprised at how ordinary the girl soccer player looked. She was walking with another girl that Ndoli had never mentioned, and she didn’t look like the heroine Emma had imagined.

  She was just about to tell Ndoli how disappointed she was when she noticed a student walking toward them. Small and dirty, he snuffled and dragged his feet. One leg of his shorts was torn and spotted with blood. Standing near the wall, he passed his sleeve under his nose. Then he found a clean tissue and wiped the traces of snot from his cheek.

  His finger to his lips, Ndoli grabbed Emma’s wrist and pulled her away. They lay on their backs, their heads leaning against a solid section of the wall. The boy was right on the other side. He sniffed loudly and spat on the ground. Then he began to kick the stone wall violently. Emma and Ndoli could hear him taking out his frustration.

  Suddenly, a whistle rang out, making Emma jump. Ndoli burst out laughing and the boy stopped, his foot suspended in midair. Then, either because he realized someone was spying on him or because he was afraid of being late, he took off, getting his legs tangled up and tripping in mid stride.

  Ndoli was sorry to see Emma leave him to take up her observation post again in time to watch the students rush back into their classes. Behind them the dust fell in slow motion, cloaking the yard in silence.

  “Who was that?” Emma asked, sitting down in the grass facing the wall.

  “Kanuma,” Ndoli answered, sitting down beside her.

  “The one who’s always being blamed for everything?”

  “Yes.”

  Ndoli started to get up, but Emma continued. “Why don’t the others like him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you?”

  “What about me?” Ndoli said hesitantly.

  “Do you like him well enough?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Ndoli hugged his knees and briefly touched the scar on his forehead.

  “He’s weak,” he said abruptly, without looking at Emma. “He doesn’t stand up for himself. That makes the others meaner. Whatever happens to him is his own fault.”

  “Why would you…” Emma started to say weakly.