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Chapter One

IMMACULÉE MAKERI

I Envy Hutu women one thing. They can eat meat. I must admit some of us Tutsi women do too, but it isn't right and my husband, also of a good clan, would be ashamed of me if I did. Even so, now, as I knead the sorghum dough, I can smell from the opposite hill the wind-driven smoky odor of meat cooking. Tonight the Hutu women over there will sink their teeth into strong-tasting red meat, while I sit here over sorghum porridge and beans. If I told those Hutu women that I, a Tutsi of good blood, envied them anything, what would they think? That I had gone mad? What would that nice Hutu girl think, the one who once bandaged my son's cut and smiles at me each time we meet on a path? She's pretty, if short and rounded in a Hutu way. What would she think of a Tutsi woman who admitted envy of a Hutu?

    But of course I would never admit such a thing. My husband is a cattle owner in Butare préfecture with standards to uphold, and I have seven children whose mother's reputation is important to them. My eldest son studies in France, the next at the national university in Butare, my girl of eighteen will marry within the year, then comes twelve-year-old Innocent, whom I nearly lost to fever in his infancy and so, secretly, is my favorite, and then the girl of seven, the boy of five. Two years ago, when I considered myself beyond childbearing, I was blessed with a baby boy who has been baptized by our Catholic priest and awarded a legal birth certificate by the government. For such children I must look and act the part of a Tutsi mother and wife,even if circumstances have changed terribly since I was a girl.

    I still love our rugo, our compound of five buildings on this most beautiful of hills overlooking the valleys of the most beautiful of lands, for everyone knows that Rwanda is God's country. It is said that if Imana walks elsewhere during the day, at night, always he returns here. But sometimes I wonder if he has forgotten the Tutsi, his chosen people, his favorite of favorites. In my grandmother's day a Tutsi woman like myself would never find anything to envy in a Hutu. The idea would not have occurred to her. She would have been too proud of her position to think of eating meat. I am ashamed of myself.

    And I am sorry for my husband, who has never reconciled himself to the loss of Tutsi power. After bringing in the cattle for the day, he drinks with his friends and often stumbles home drunk. I wish he could see things for what they are. After all, Imana and Jesus have preordained everything that happens. We must do our best and accept what fate gives us. That's what I try to explain to my good husband. I tell him almost every day that he's still a patron to Hutu clients, that he rents them his cattle so they can have milk and fertilizer for their fields, that the cattle will never be theirs. My husband is aware of being less than his father, who ruled his pastureland like a king. Each month my husband's father had his clients come bow to him when they paid for the use of his cattle.

    Now our former Tutsi king can't even visit his ancestral land. They say he lives the life of an outcast, corrupted by whites in a white country, and frolics in the warm sea with naked women. Does my husband envy him? My husband used to compare my beauty to the glory of his favorite cattle, almost as if he were a court poet, an umusizi, in the service of a Tutsi king. My husband used to say his friends envied him for the way I gave him good children. And it's true, I paid back in fertility his bride-price of cattle. He'd never have to consider the old saying that the worst thing known to man is to lack children to mourn him. Imana has taken care of our family and Jesus has too with the help of the White Fathers in their mission house.

    I was almost finished with the dough and getting the smell of cooked meat out of my nose when Innocent came in to ask for something. I shook my head and said nothing, because it's bad luck to speak while preparing sorghum dough. It's all right to speak while preparing maize but not sorghum dough. His eyes were bright while he panted and poked the air with his toy spear. He must have come from playing with the Hutu boy on the next hill. In the old days when we Tutsi were the warriors and they our servants, the Hutu would never touch a spear without permission. Now their children are teaching ours to be fierce. I gave Innocent a warning look that had him backing out of the house with downcast eyes. Later on, when the dough is finished, I will speak to him again about remembering the past. I don't want him to forget the splendor of our people when Imana brought them southward four hundred years ago and gave them these beautiful hills to rule as they pleased. But perhaps I'm asking too much of a twelve-year-old. Some people say the glory of our Tutsi past should be forgotten. They say it only makes things worse to remember. After all, thirty years ago many of our people left this country in fear, and for all these years the Hutu have been in charge. Or thought they were in charge. It is all so difficult to understand. When I see boys playing with toy spears and jabbing at one another with glee, I worry that someday their play will change to real violence. We have seen too much of it in our beautiful hills. A man dead by the side of the road, his throat cut with a panga as if he were a goat. Two brothers hacked down in their pastureland. Whole families murdered. A massacre of ten here, of fifty in a nearby sous-préfecture. Year after year the numbers grow. Confusion, accusations, and more hatred.

    I don't understand politics, but when my husband and his friends come here to drink, I overhear them talk about such things. They discuss the civil war that has been going on for almost four years now. Tutsi refugees from Uganda crossed the border and started it all, although they haven't got very far. From what I know they stay mostly in the north and hide in the mists of gorilla forests. All they do is come out for raids that annoy the government. Even so, my husband and his friends are proud of this little war, perhaps because it gives them hope for a Tutsi victory some day. Fortunately, my two eldest boys think more of education than they do of war, and Innocent has the cleverness of someone twice his age. But what of the five-year-old? Already he begs to go with Innocent when the boys play war. And the little fellow of two? These questions make me secretly hope that the Tutsi soldiers from Uganda will go back to that place and give up causing trouble here. Our country is so beautiful. These terraced musozi are planted in good crops by Hutu farmers, and Tutsi cattlemen like my husband make daily trips into pastureland with their longhorns. We all eat well, Tutsi and Hutu, and the smoke of our cooking fires mingles in the wonderful air breathed out of the divine mouth of Imana.

    But these are thoughts I keep to myself when my husband comes home. They say a hen mustn't crow when the rooster appears.

    It was late when it happened and all the children had eaten and gone to sleep, but my husband still hadn't, come home. He was drinking in a beer shop somewhere with his friends. So I sat under the electric, lightbulb and did some sewing on a new raffia basket. I like to do close, even work. I make complicated designs with dyes just to challenge myself. No change is possible after beginning with colored designs. I'm proud of my coiled work.

    There was a program of Ethiopian music on the radio that I was half listening to when a voice interrupted with an announcement. President Juvenal Habyarimana has died in a plane crash tonight under mysterious circumstances. I put down my awl. Some kind of missile had shot the plane down and all aboard were killed, including a French crew of three and the leader of Burundi.

    President Habyarimana dead. Who killed him? Tutsi? Hutu? Tutsi? Perhaps we Tutsi would be blamed for the death of a Hutu president.

    I looked at a Kenyan calendar pinned on the wall. Sixth of April, 1994. If this date was special in the mind of Imana, our lives would be changed by it. Six has often been a special number for me. I was married on the sixth day of the sixth month. Someone once told me that six was Imana's favorite number. But favorite could mean important, not good. So the sixth of April could mean the day when important bad things began for us all. I wanted my husband to come home, but surely the moon was going to be much higher before he staggered back into the rugo, full of banana beer and brave talk.