Our Lady of the Nile Read online

  Veronica realizes that someone is peering over her shoulder, staring at the open page of the textbook with her.

  “So, are you looking for the way back to where your people came from, Veronica? Don’t worry, I’ll pray to Our Lady of the Nile that the crocodiles carry you there on their backs, or rather in their bellies.”

  Veronica would be forever haunted by Gloriosa’s laugh, especially in her nightmares.

  Back to School

  Our Lady of the Nile: how proudly the school stands. The track leading to the lycée from the capital, winds its interminable way through a labyrinth of hills and valleys and ends, quite unexpectedly, in a twisting climb up the Ikibira Mountains – which geography textbooks call the Congo-Nile range, for want of any other name. The lycée’s imposing main building comes into view, and it almost feels as if the peaks have eased themselves aside to make room for the school, there on the edge of the opposite slope, at the bottom of which you glimpse the sparkling lake. The lycée sits on the mountaintop, glinting at the schoolgirls, a palace that shines with their impossible dreams.

  The construction of the lycée was a spectacle that Nyaminombe won’t forget in a long time. Not wishing to miss a thing, the normally idle men abandoned their jugs of beer in the bar, the women left their fields of millet and peas earlier than usual, and at the sound of the beating drum that announced the end of class, the mission-school children ran out and scrambled through the small crowd watching and commenting on the work in progress, to be in the front row. The more intrepid pupils had already slipped out of school to line the track, watching for the dust cloud that would announce the arrival of the trucks. As soon as the convoy reached them, they ran behind the vehicles and tried to grab hold. Some succeeded, others fell off and barely missed getting run over by the next truck. The drivers hollered in vain, trying to shoo away the swarm of daredevil kids. Some stopped their vehicles and stepped down, and the kids would scamper off, with the driver pretending to chase them, but as soon as the truck started off again, the game began anew. The women in the fields lifted their hoes to the heavens in a gesture of powerlessness and desperation.

  Everyone was amazed to see no smoking pyramids of baking bricks, no procession of farmers carrying bricks on their heads, as they did when the umupadri asked the faithful to build a new church annex or when the mayor summoned the local people on a Saturday to help with community projects, such as enlarging the clinic or his house. No, this was a real white man’s construction site in Nyaminombe, with real white laborers, fearsome iron-jawed machines that ripped and gouged the earth, trucks carrying machines that made an infernal racket and spewed cement, foremen barking orders in Swahili at the masons, and even white overseers who did nothing but look at large sheets of paper they unrolled like bolts of cloth from the Pakistani shop, and who went crazy with rage when they called the black foremen over, as if they were breathing fire.

  Of all the lore surrounding the construction site, the most memorable is the story of Gakere. The Gakere Affair. People still recount it today, and it always raises a laugh. The end of each month was payday in Nyaminombe – the thirtieth, a perilous day. Perilous for bookkeepers, subjected to the workers’ often violent complaints. Perilous for the day laborers who knew that the thirtieth was the only date their wives remembered: they’d not be in the fields but waiting in the doorway of the hut to take the banknotes their husband handed them; they’d check the amount, tie a piece of banana fiber around the paltry wad, slip it into a little jug, and hide it under the straw by the bedside table. The thirtieth was marked by all kinds of quarrels and violence.

  Tables for the bookkeepers were set up beneath awnings, or under shelters made from straw and bamboo. Gakere was a bookkeeper, and it was he who paid the day laborers. He was a former deputy chief of Nyaminombe, who had been purged like so many others by the colonial authorities and replaced by another deputy chief (soon to be mayor), who was a Hutu. Gakere was hired because he knew everyone, all the local hired hands who didn’t speak Swahili. Bookkeepers from the capital were hired to pay the others, the real builders, who’d come from elsewhere and did speak Swahili. Everyone queued at the bookkeepers’ tables – come rain (usually) or shine – and there was always shouting and shoving, complaints, arguments, and recriminations. The heavies who guarded the construction site kept order, whacking the recalcitrant workers into submission with their sticks – the mayor and his two gendarmes didn’t want to get involved, neither did the whites. So Gakere settled beneath his shelter with his cash box under his arm. He sat down, placed the little box on the table, and opened it. The cash box was full of banknotes. Slowly, he unfolded the sheet of paper, a list of names of all the workers he had to pay, workers who’d waited hours. He began the roll call: Bizimana, Habineza … The laborer approached the table. Gakere pushed the few notes and coins owed toward him, the laborer pressed an ink-blackened finger next to his name, and Gakere muttered a few words to him as he marked the list with a cross. So for an entire day, Gakere was again the chief he had once been.

  Then, one payday he didn’t show up: no Gakere, no cash box. It was soon known that he’d run off with the little box stuffed full of notes. “He’s gone to Burundi,” people said. “Crafty Gakere, he’s fled with the Bazungu’s money, but how will we get paid now?” Gakere was both admired and condemned: “He shouldn’t have taken the money intended for the people of Nyaminombe, he could have figured out how to take the money from somewhere else.” But, in the end, the day laborers did get paid, people stopped begrudging Gakere, and no more was heard of him for two months. He’d abandoned his wife and his daughters, who were questioned by the mayor and closely watched by the gendarmes. But Gakere hadn’t told them of his dishonest plans: rumor had it that he planned to use the money to take a new wife in Burundi, a younger, prettier one. And then he returned to Nyaminombe, hands tied behind his back, two soldiers escorting him. He had never reached Burundi. He’d been afraid to cross Nyungwe Forest, because of the leopards, the big monkeys, and even the elephants who hadn’t roamed the forest for years. He’d traveled the entire country with that little cash box under his arm. He’d tried to cross the large swamps in Bugesera, and lost his way. Burundi wasn’t far but he’d wandered in circles through the stands of papyrus sedge, without ever reaching the border, which, it’s true, wasn’t marked. They eventually found him, on the edge of the swamp, thin and exhausted, his legs swollen. The banknotes were nothing but a spongy mass floating in his water-filled cash box. They tied him to a post by the site entrance for a whole day, to serve as an example. The workers filing past didn’t curse or spit at him, just lowered their heads and pretended not to notice. His wife and his two daughters sat at his feet. One of them would get up from time to time, wipe his face and give him a drink. Gakere was convicted but didn’t stay in prison very long. He was never seen in Nyaminombe again. It could be that he reached Burundi at last with his wife and daughters, but without his little box. Some wondered whether the Bazungu had cast a spell on the banknotes, whether those wretched notes had made poor Gakere spin like a top, and that was why he never managed to reach Burundi.

  The lycée is a large four-story building, higher than the government ministries in the capital. When the new girls first arrive, the ones from the countryside are afraid to get too close to the windows in the fourth-floor dorms. “Are we going to sleep perched like little monkeys?” they ask. The town girls, and the veterans, tease the new arrivals, pushing them toward the windows: “Look down there,” they say. “You’re going to fall into the lake!” Eventually, the new girls get used to it. The chapel, nearly as high as the mission church, is also made of cement, but the gym, bursar’s office, workshops, and Brother Auxile’s garage are all made of brick. They form a courtyard closed off by a wall, with a metal gate that whines when it’s opened in the morning and closed at night, much louder than the wake-up and bedtime bells.

  A bit off to the side, there are some small one-story houses, some call them villas, o
thers bungalows, where the foreign teachers live. There’s also a big house, much larger than the others, that everyone calls the Bungalow. It’s reserved for special guests, such as government ministers (should one ever come to stay), or the Bishop, whose visit is anticipated each year. Occasional tourists from the capital, or from Europe – who’ve come to see the source of the Nile – are put up there. Between these houses and the lycée, there’s a garden with a lawn, flower beds, bamboo groves, and a vegetable patch, of course. The servants who do the gardening grow cabbages, carrots, potatoes, and strawberries; there’s even a wheat plot. The tomatoes they harvest here are so pompously plump, they put the inyanya – the poor little native tomatoes – to shame. Sister Bursar likes to show visitors around the exotic orchard where the expatriated apricot and peach trees clearly hanker for their native climate. Mother Superior always says that the pupils must get used to civilized food.

  A high brick wall was built to discourage intruders and thieves; and at night, guards armed with spears patrol the perimeter and stand watch by the iron gate.

  After a while, the people of Nyaminombe stopped noticing the lycée. As far as they’re concerned, it’s like the huge rocks in Rutare – which seem to have rolled down the mountain and stopped there, in Rutare, for no apparent reason. Yet the construction of the lycée changed many things in the district. A flurry of covered stalls appeared by the builders’ campsite, comprising traders who had previously operated close to the mission, and others from goodness knows where. These shops sold the things shops generally sell: individual cigarettes, palm oil, rice, salt, Kraft cheese, margarine, lamp oil, banana beer, Primus lager, Fanta, and sometimes even bread, though not often. There were also bars, referred to as “hotels,” serving goat on skewers with grilled bananas and beans, and there were shacks for the loose women who brought the village into disrepute. When the lycée was completed, most of the traders left, except for three bars, two shops, and a tailor: so a new village sprang up by the path leading to the lycée. Even the market, which moved close to the workers’ shacks, stayed put, just beyond the stalls.

  Yet there was one day that still drew Nyaminombe’s idle and curious to the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile, and that was the start of the school year, on a Sunday afternoon in October, at the end of the dry season. They gathered along the side of the track to admire the procession of cars bringing the students to school. There were Mercedes, Range Rovers, and enormous military jeeps, their impatient drivers hooting and waving their arms about, fierce and threatening, as they tried to overtake taxis, pickups, and minibuses so overloaded with young women that they struggled to climb the last slope.

  One by one, the lycée girls tumbled out before the small throng, which was held back some way from the main gates by two district gendarmes and the mayor himself. A murmur spread through the crowd when Gloriosa stepped out of the black Mercedes with tinted windows, preceded by her mother and followed by Modesta. “She’s the spitting image of her father,” said the mayor, who had met the great man at a Party rally. “She wears the name her father gave her well: Nyiramasuka, ‘She of the Hoe.’ ” And he repeated this comment loudly enough that the party hacks pressing around him could hear it, sending a swell of admiration through the crowd. Gloriosa certainly did resemble her father, well-built and big-boned: her schoolmates nicknamed her Mastodon under their breath. She wore a navy-blue skirt, just revealing her muscular calves, and a white blouse buttoned to her neck that barely contained her generous bosom. Large round glasses only served to reinforce the unquestionable authority of her gaze. Father Herménégilde abandoned the new girls, the ones entering tenth grade, whom he had been rounding up and reassuring, then motioned to a couple of young lycée hands to take the bags from the chauffeur (who wore a short-sleeved shirt with gold buttons), and rushed toward the new arrivals, striding past Sister Gertrude on reception duty to greet mother and daughter with the customary embraces, entangling himself in the innumerable expressions of welcome that Rwandan courtesy entails. Gloriosa’s mother quickly cut him off, explaining that she simply had to greet Mother Superior before dashing back to the capital, where she was expected for dinner at the Belgian Ambassador’s, and that she was confident the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile would provide her daughter with the kind of democratic, Christian education appropriate to the female elite of a country that had undergone a social revolution, freeing it from the injustices of a feudal system.

  Gloriosa announced that she would stand with Sister Gertrude at the gate, beneath the national flag, to greet the other seniors and let them know that the first meeting of the committee she chaired would take place the following day, in the refectory, after their study hour. Modesta said she’d stand guard duty along with her friend.

  Soon after, Goretti also made a grand entrance, perched on the back of a huge military vehicle whose six thick tires took the spectators’ breath away. Two soldiers in camouflage fatigues helped her down, hailed the lycée hands to carry her luggage, and bade their passenger farewell with a military salute. Goretti brushed aside Gloriosa’s effusive welcome.

  “Still prancing about like a minister, I see,” Goretti hissed.

  “And you, think you’re Chief of Staff?” Gloriosa piped back. “Come on, move it, through the gate, and remember, we don’t speak anything but French in school: we’ll finally get to know what the Ruhengeri girls are saying.”

  As the Peugeot 404 began the final climb to the lycée, Godelive recognized Immaculée, who was swathed in a wraparound and walking along, with an urchin at her heels carrying her case on his head. She immediately told her driver to stop:

  “Immaculée! What happened? Get in, quick! Did your father’s car break down? You didn’t walk all the way from the capital, did you?”

  Immaculée took her wraparound off and got in next to Godelive, while the driver put her case in the trunk. The little porter tapped the glass requesting his tip. Immaculée threw him a coin.

  “Don’t tell a soul. My boyfriend brought me on his motorbike. He’s got a big one, you know. There’s no bigger bike than his in all Kigali, perhaps in all Rwanda. He’s so proud of it. And I’m so proud to be the girlfriend of the boy with the biggest bike in the country. I get on behind him, and he tears through the streets at full speed, the bike roaring like a lion. Everyone panics and runs for their life, the women all knock over their jugs and baskets. That makes my boyfriend laugh. He promised he’d teach me to ride his bike. Then I’ll go even faster than him. Anyway, he told me: ‘I’ll take you all the way to school on my bike.’ Sure, I tell him. I was a bit scared, though, but it was really exciting. Dad was on a business trip to Brussels. I told my mother I was going with a girlfriend. He dropped me off at the last bend, just like I asked. You can imagine the scandal if Mother Superior saw me arrive on a motorbike! I’d be expelled. But look at the state I’m in now, all red with dust. It’s horrible! They’ll think Dad doesn’t have a car anymore, that I hitched a ride on some Toyota pickup, crushed between goats and bananas, and peasant women with their kids on their backs! The shame!”

  “You’ll take a shower, and I’m sure you’ve got enough beauty products in that case of yours to put things right.”

  “That’s true. I managed to find some skin-whitening creams, but not that Venus de Milo stuff you get at the market. American ones: tubes of cold cream and green antiseptic soap. My cousin sent me them from the Matonge quarter in Brussels. I’ll give you some.”

  “What would I do with them? There are those who are beautiful, or think they are, and those who are not.”

  “You look so sad, aren’t you glad to be back at school?”

  “Why should I be glad to be back at school? I always get the worst grades. The teachers feel sorry for me, but not the rest of you, my dear classmates. It’s my dad who wants me to stay on, in spite of everything. Once I get the diploma, he hopes to marry me off to a banker like him. But I’m sure he’s got other plans too.”

  “Cheer up, Godelive. It’s our fina
l year and then you’ll marry a rich banker.”

  “Don’t make fun of me. Maybe I’ve got a surprise for you all, a big surprise.”

  “And what surprise might that be?”

  “If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”

  Gloriosa welcomed Godelive and Immaculée with disdain, casting a scornful eye over Immaculée’s skintight trousers and plunging neckline. Gloriosa wondered why she was covered in dust but decided against asking her right now. She ignored Godelive completely.

  “I’m counting on you girls to be real militants,” she whispered under her breath. “Not like you were last year. Our Republic requires more than vanity and a banker father.”

  Immaculée and Godelive pretended not to have heard a word.

  With Father Herménégilde as their shepherd, the shy herd of newcomers passed through the gate under Gloriosa’s searching gaze:

  “Did you notice, Modesta?” She sighed. “The old regime still wields influence in the ministry. They’re lax with the quota. If I counted right, and I only counted the girls I know, those I’m sure of, we’re way over the percentage that, unfortunately, they’ve been granted. A fresh invasion! What was the point of our parents’ social revolution if we let them carry on like this? I’ll be reporting this to my father. But I think we’re going to have to take care of things ourselves and get rid of these parasites, once and for all. I told the Bureau of Militant Rwandan Youth about it, and we see eye to eye. They listen to me. It’s not for nothing my father named me Nyiramasuka.”