All Your Children, Scattered by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

Author:Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd.
Published: 2022-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Your voice was low, extremely hoarse. I realized you’d begun smoking again.

I could see a patch of sky through the front door. The sun was at its zenith now, causing white rays to stream down the brick wall and splash onto the plants. In concrete planters, tall canna indica were growing, yellow and red, and boatlilies. They were making the most of the meager shade of a young banana plant that hadn’t been there before. The courtyard seemed much smaller than in the memory I’d fashioned in exile. The living room, too, seemed small and shabby. Nostalgia idealizes things.

The maid couldn’t take her eyes off me, she must have seen pictures of me, did she know who I was? You didn’t let go of my hands, you seemed to be waiting for me to say something.

Mentally I’d prepared a list of sentences I thought would suit various scenarios. Hypothesis number 1: you get angry because I didn’t tell you I was coming, I get everything off my chest all at once, then I leave you there, free of the burden of my resentment. Hypothesis number 2: you weep with joy and tell me how much you’ve missed me, you ask me never to go away again, I take the time to reassure you, make the most of the joy of being together again, and wait for the right moment to bring up the past. Hypothesis number 3: you have lied to me about your health, you are suffering from the serious physical after-effects of the genocide, I persuade you to come back to France with me, and I get in touch with Samora to prepare your hospitalization in Bordeaux.

I thought I’d mapped everything out in the airplane bringing me home.

You can’t map out a collapse.

I didn’t know what sort of attitude to adopt. Your lips were smiling but the sadness in your eyes was unfathomable. In my anxious predictions I hadn’t factored in Bosco’s presence. How could I have erased him? And yet I knew he’d come back, that he’d been living at home since his return from the front. As if this story was only about you and me, Mama; you and me.

He was there between us, the way he’d always been.

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