Grief

Scholastique Mukasonga The New Yorker, June 22, 2020

On TV, on the radio, they never slaughter had spared them for now? called it genocide. As if that word were Maybe they’d managed to escape into reserved. Too serious. Too serious for exile, as she had? Her parents, on Africa. Yes, there were massacres, but the hill, had no telephone, of course, there were always massacres in Africa. but she called one of her brothers, who And these massacres were happening taught in Ruhengeri. The phone rang in a country that no one had ever and rang. No one answered. She called heard of. A country that no one could her sister, who’d married a shopkeeper find on a map. Tribal hatred, primi- in Butare. A voice she’d never heard tive, atavistic hatred: nothing to un- before told her, “There’s nobody here.” derstand there. “Weird stuff goes on She called her brother in Canada. He where you come from,” people would was the eldest. If their parents were tell her. dead, then he’d be the head of the fam- She herself didn’t know the word, ily. Perhaps he had news, perhaps he but in Kinyarwanda there was a very had advice, perhaps he could help her old term for what was happening in her begin to face her terror. They spoke, homeland: gutsembatsemba, a verb, and then they fell silent. What was used when talking about parasites or there to say? From now on, they were mad dogs, things that had to be eradi- alone. cated, and about Tutsis, also known as From now on, she would be alone. inyenzi—cockroaches—something else She knew a few people from home, of to be wiped out. She remembered the course, friends she’d made at the uni- story her Hutu schoolmates at high versity here, where she’d had to start school in Kigali had told her, laugh- her studies all over again, her African ing: “Someday a child will ask his degrees being worthless in France. But mother, ‘Mama, who were those Tut- that little part of her—the part that sis I keep hearing about? What did still tied her to those she’d left behind they look like?,’ and the mother will in Rwanda, despite the distance and answer, ‘They were nothing at all, my the time gone by and the impossibility son. Those are just stories.’ ” of rejoining them—formed a bond that Nevertheless, she hadn’t lost hope. grounded her identity and affirmed her She wanted to know. Her father, her will to go on. That bond would fade, mother, her brothers, her sisters, her and in the cold of her solitude its dis- whole family back in Rwanda—some of appearance would leave her somehow them might still be alive. Maybe the amputated.

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She felt very fragile. “I’m like an them to have their picture taken and egg,” she often told herself. “One jolt send her a copy? Was she a neglect- and I’ll break.” She moved as sparingly ful daughter? Had she forgotten them as she could; she lived in slow motion. as the years went by? No, they were She walked as if she were seeking her still there in her memory; she could call way in the dark, as if at any moment up their image anytime she liked. She she might bump into an obstacle and sat down at her table, took her head fall to the ground. Climbing a stair- in her hands, closed her eyes, focussed case took a tremendous effort: a great her mind, and pictured, one by one, weight lay on her shoulders. She found all the faces that death might already herself counting the steps she still had have erased. to climb, clutching the bannister as if Then, toward the end of June, she she were at the edge of an abyss, and got a letter. There was no mistaking when she reached her floor she was where it had come from: the red-and- breathless and drained. blue-bordered envelope, the exotic bird She tried to find an escape in mind- on the stamp, the clumsily written ad- less household tasks. Again and again, dress. . . . She couldn’t bring herself she maniacally straightened her stu- to open it. She put it on her bookshelf, dio apartment. Something was always behind the Rwandan baskets. She pre- where it shouldn’t be: books on the tended to forget it. There were so couch, shoes in the entryway, Rwan- many more urgent and more impor- dan nesting baskets untidily lined up tant things to do: make dinner, iron a on the shelf. She was sure she’d feel pair of jeans, organize her class notes. better if everything was finally where But the letter was still there, behind it belonged. But she was forever hav- the baskets. Suddenly, she found her- ing to go back and start over again. self tearing open the envelope. She If only she had at least a pho- pulled out a sheet of square-ruled pa- tograph of her parents. She rifled per, a page from a schoolchild’s note- through the suitcase that had come book. She didn’t need to read the few with her through all her travels. There sentences that served as an introduc- were letters, there were notebooks tion to a long list of names: her father, filled with words, useless diplomas, her mother, her brothers, her sisters, even her Rwandan identity card, with her uncles, her aunts, her nephews, her the “Tutsi” stamp that she’d tried to nieces. . . . This was now the list of scratch away. There was a handful her dead, of everyone who had died far of photographs of her with her girl- away from her, without her, and there friends in Burundi (which they’d had was nothing she could do for them, taken at a photographer’s studio in not even die with them. She stared the Asian district in Bujumbura, be- at the letter, unable to weep, and she fore they parted ways, so they wouldn’t began to think that it had been sent forget), there were postcards from her by the dead themselves. It was a mes- brother in Canada, a few pages of a di- sage from the land of the dead. And ary she’d quickly abandoned, but she this, she thought, would probably be never did find a photo of her parents. their only grave, a column of names she For that, she rebuked herself bit- didn’t even need to reread, because she terly. Why hadn’t she thought to ask knew them so well that they echoed in 3 her head like cries of pain. ined them waiting behind the veil of She kept the letter from her dead tears, nearby and unreachable. Maybe with her at all times. She never that was why she’d gone so far away, showed it to anyone. Whenever some- why she’d headed off into exile: so that one asked, “What happened to your there would be someone to weep for family?,” she always answered, “They all those whose memory the killers had were killed, they’re all dead, every tried to erase, whose existence they’d one.” When people asked how she’d tried to deny. heard, she told them, “I just know, But she couldn’t weep. that’s all. Don’t ask me anything “My father just died,” one of her more.” She often felt the need to touch friends told her. that piece of paper. She gazed at “I’ll go to his funeral,” she an- the column of names without reading swered, without thinking. them, with no tears in her eyes, and She immediately regretted making the names filled her head with pleas that promise. Was it right for her that she didn’t know how to answer. to honor someone else’s dead if she What she didn’t want to see: pic- couldn’t weep for her own? In her tures on television, photographs in mind, she summoned up images of newspapers and magazines, corpses ly- Rwandan women weeping over their ing by roadsides, dismembered bodies, lost loved ones, able to weep because faces slashed by machetes. What she the body was there in front of them, didn’t want to hear: any rumor that before it was buried. Yes, the women might summon up images of the frenzy of Rwanda knew how to mourn. First, of sex and blood that had crashed over they wept sitting up very straight, still the women, the girls, the children. . . and silent, their tears falling like rain- . She wanted to protect her dead, to drops from eucalyptus trees. Then keep them untouched in her memory, came the keening and the wailing; the their bodies whole and unsullied, like women shivered and quaked, racked the saints she’d heard about at cat- head to toe by violent sobs. Finally, echism, miraculously preserved from they huddled beneath their pagnes, corruption. disappearing, soundless but for their Most of all, she didn’t want to sighs as they choked back their tears, sleep, because to fall asleep was to de- and then even those slowly waned. liver herself to the killers. Every night Now the loved one could enter the land they were there. They’d taken over of the dead. He’d got the tears he de- her sleep; they were the masters of her served, and although the pain of the dreams. They had no faces; they came loss was still there, you knew that it toward her in a gray, blood-soaked would slowly ease, that you’d be able throng. Or else they had just one to live with it, and that the lost loved face, an enormous face that laughed vi- one would leave a peaceful memory ciously as it pressed into hers, crushing in the world of the living, a welcome her. memory —maybe that was what white No, no going to sleep. people meant when they talked about Of course, she should have wept. “the grieving process.” And, with that, She owed the dead that. If she wept, the loved one was allowed to set off for she could be close to them. She imag- his final home. The body was carried 4 on an ingobyi, a long stretcher made after day, hurrying out to the little of bamboo slats. The women would cemetery early in the afternoon, as keep their eyes fixed on him, accompa- soon as the dishes were washed and nying him on his voyage, as if lending the siesta hour had begun. It became him their support one last time before their secret domain, their refuge, a safe he was admitted to the other world, place, far from the irritable stares of the unknown world of the spirits. The the miserly old nun, far from the in- ingobyi also served as a bride’s palan- discreet, ardent gazes of the abbots quin on her wedding day. She, too, was and the seminarians. They pulled the expected to weep. As she was taken weeds from the graves and laid out pur- from her parents’ house to that of her ple flowers, cut from the bougainvillea new family, her sobs—too loud to be that climbed the façade of the Father sincere—showed everyone that she was Superior’s small house. “These could leaving the paternal enclosure against be our parents’ graves,” Eugénie said. her wishes. The ingobyi always de- “They may have been killed. Maybe manded its tribute of tears. because of us, because we left, they She sadly recalled the little ceme- were killed.” They stood side by side tery where she and her three fellow- and held one another as you do for a refugees had liked to meet. This Rwandan greeting. Then they burst was in Burundi, in Bujumbura, at the into tears, and their shared lament seminary that had temporarily taken brought them some comfort and solace. them in after they fled from Rwanda. They’d each chosen a grave to con- In exchange for halfhearted hospital- sider their own. Sometimes it be- ity, the four companions-in-exile did longed to their parents, sometimes to housekeeping, helped in the kitchen, a brother, a sister, a fiancé. . . . served the abbots at dinner, washed And they mourned the absence of that dishes. They tried to ward off the insis- loved one, or possibly the death, if he tent curiosity of the seminarians, who or she turned out to have been killed were made restless by the presence of in reprisal for the girls’ going away. girls. They were forever having to in- The dirt was cracked and eroded from vent new excuses to turn down the ab- the heat and the rain, so they cov- bots’ invitations to come pick out a ered the graves with pebbles taken a book or have a talk in their rooms. handful at a time from the wide walk- When the siesta hour came, the girls way that led to the calvary. They went out into the garden to talk about found a few slightly chipped vases in all that had happened to them and to the sacristy, and they placed them be- consider their uncertain future. Be- fore the crosses, which they’d carefully yond the banana grove, they discov- straightened. They filled the vases ered a small forgotten cemetery with with flowers they’d borrowed from the a handful of wooden crosses, whose altar of the Holy Virgin. And then, sit- white paint was peeling, the black let- ting by the graves, their arms around ters of the names almost entirely faded. their legs, their chins on their knees, “Let’s say a prayer,” Espérance said. they silently let their tears flow, al- “You must always do something for the ways on edge, fearing that a seminar- dead.” ian might happen onto them and mock They returned to those graves day them for their strange rituals. 5

Long after that little group of her father’s body, dressed in the spot- refugees had gone their separate ways, less pagne that marked him as an elder she still missed the haven she’d found and the white shirt he wore for Sunday in that cemetery. And today she real- Mass. Suddenly she felt tears rolling ized how much she wished she could be down her cheeks, and she heard a loud back by those strangers’ graves, where sob escape her. Now there was no stop- she’d shed so many tears. ping it. She let the tears flow; she There was a sort of minivan, of a didn’t try to hold them back or wipe discreet, elegant gray, parked in front them away. It was as if a wave of so- of the church. Two men in dark suits lace had erupted from the very heart were waiting, bored, on the steps. She of her sorrow. She couldn’t stop whis- went in and tiptoed down the side aisle pering the lamentation that accompa- until she reached an empty seat with a nies the dead in Rwanda. She could view of the choir and the altar. There feel her neighbors’ uncomfortable, re- was a priest standing at a microphone, proachful stares. She heard a mur- talking about the consolation of the af- mur run through the rows in front of terlife. Nothing to do with her dead. her and behind her. She fled, here She spotted her friend in the front row, and there jostling a kneeling woman no doubt surrounded by her family. as she hurried past. Her footfalls re- She was shocked to see that the women sounded against the stone floor as if to weren’t weeping, although some had denounce her: what right did she have red eyes, and she was sorry to find that to weep for that man she didn’t know, they weren’t draped in the elaborate that man surrounded by a family who mourning veils she’d seen in old pho- mourned him with a proper, polite sad- tos. The men were all wearing solemn ness? She was a parasite of their grief. expressions that seemed forced to her. She wished she could forget what Soon her eye was drawn to the cof- had happened at the church: that vi- fin, which was sitting on a pedestal, sion of her father’s corpse, her fit of armfuls of flowers laid out all around tears. She avoided her friend so she it. She couldn’t help admiring the wouldn’t have to answer her questions. coffin’s gleaming, polished wood, its But a strange thought nagged at her, handsome molding, its gilded handles. insistent, obsessive, telling her that her The old man, she understood, was ly- dead had given her a sign, and she ing in that padded box dressed in his was afraid to understand too clearly best suit, and maybe, as she’d heard what they were trying to say to her. people say, they’d made up his face so Nonetheless, she found that the long they could tell themselves that death strolls she liked to take through the was only a restful sleep. She began to streets of the city inevitably brought hate that old man, who’d died a pain- her to a church, where she always less death, her friend had told her—“a hoped to see a gleaming gray or black good death,” the friend had said, over hearse parked in front. More than and over. And as she stared at the once she did, and then an irresistible coffin she felt as if she could see in- force drew her inside, with the crowd side it, as if the wood had become of mourners. She knew exactly where transparent. And the body she saw to sit: always behind a pillar, but with in that silken, gently lit bubble was a view of the coffin. She stared at it 6 long and hard, hoping she might once which had become a labyrinth of her again see through the wood and find despair, with no way out. She sensed one of her dead inside it: her mother that the very tenuous, very frail bonds wrapped in her pagne, her younger sis- that had connected her to her own ter in her schoolgirl dress . . . It didn’t dead through the losses of others were always work, but the tears came every now broken forever. She felt herself time. And she was convinced that, be- sinking into an aloneness that would cause she was there with them—those never end. All she had left was that who had come to mourn a son killed piece of notebook paper, now tattered, in a traffic accident or a brother dead and its list of names that she couldn’t after what they called a long illness or bring herself to read but whispered to a father felled by a heart attack—they herself over and over, like a hypnotic would also weep for her dead, just a lit- refrain of sadness and remorse. tle. In exchange, she told herself, I’m She went home and tried to im- sharing their sorrow for the one they merse herself in her most recent class lost. They can’t possibly mind. notes, to neatly copy them out on a She thought that her dead wanted fresh sheet of paper, but she found her to be present at funerals so that the names of her dead filling the page. they, too, could have their share of Now she was afraid: she was going to mourning and tears. In the past, she lose her mind, she had already lost her had never read the newspaper; now she mind, these things she’d been doing opened it feverishly every morning to weren’t what her dead wanted at all. read the obituaries. She became a reg- They weren’t here, in this land of exile, ular at the church near her apartment. in these foreign churches. They were That went on for some months, but waiting back home, in the land of the eventually her strangely faithful atten- dead that Rwanda had become. They dance was noticed. One day, as she was were waiting for her. She would go to trying to discreetly leave the church, a them. young priest stopped her outside the “Stop,” she told the driver. “This front door. is the place. That’s the path to my “Madame, please . . .” house, and if you keep going it takes She couldn’t push him away, and you up to the eucalyptus plantings at she couldn’t go back inside. the very top of the hill. And that “Madame, please, allow me, I’d like hut over there at the side of the road, a word with you. . . . I’ve noticed that’s Népomucène’s cabaret. He sold that you come to almost every funeral, banana beer and Fanta, even Primus and that you weep as if you knew the sometimes, but not often. One time, deceased. That can be upsetting for I remember it to this day, my father the families, for everyone who’s suf- bought me an orange Fanta when he fered a loss. Perhaps I can help you? came back from the market. He must I’d like nothing more than to listen to have got a good price for his coffee.” you, help you . . . if there’s anything “You really want to go there?” the I can do.” driver said, sighing. “You know, it’s “No, let me be. I promise you’ll no use. There’s nothing left. It might never see me again.” not be good for you. In any case, you She wandered the city streets, shouldn’t go by yourself: you never 7 know, you might run into a madman, bore witness to their abandonment. A and besides there are people who still few oversized, sterile maniocs rose from want to ‘finish the job,’ so being there the weeds, smothering the last stalks of all alone, with those people who died sorghum. up there . . .” Halfway up the hill, in the middle “I made a promise. Maybe I’ll find of deserted fields, a patch of almost what I’ve come here for. . . . I impenetrable forest had survived. Fig promised, I have to go.” trees towered over the sea of pointed “I’ll come back this evening, before dracaena leaves. Her father had told the sun goes down. I’ll honk, and then her that those were the vestiges of the I’ll wait for ten minutes. Look, I have enclosure of an old king. This place a watch just like you do, ten minutes, was now haunted by his umuzimu, his no more. I’ve got people waiting for spirit, and he had perhaps been rein- me, too, at home.” carnated in the python that guarded “I’ll be here. See you this evening.” this sacred wood where no one dared The Toyota pickup drove off in a set foot. “Stay away,” the old ones cloud of red dust, loaded with bananas, said. “The python has been furious mattresses, sheet metal, maybe ten ever since the abapadris forbade us to passengers, and a few goats squeezed bring it offerings. If you go near him, in. The noise of the engine faded he’ll swallow you!” She couldn’t help away. She spent a long moment look- thinking that this gloomy forest and ing around her. The dirt road snaked its python were now the masters of the between the hillside and the swamp, hill and would end up devouring her. but the shallows where her mother She reached the stand of banana once grew sweet potatoes and corn trees, whose glossy leaves had once were now clogged with reeds and pa- concealed the enclosure. Many of the pyrus. Népomucène’s cabaret was a trees had fallen and were dull brown ruin, its flaking mud walls showing with rot. The leaves of those still their skeleton of interlaced bamboo. standing hung tattered and yellow. A The start of the path up the hill was few of them bore sad, stunted fruit. half hidden by tall fronds of dried She found her pace slowing as she grass. For a moment, she wondered if neared the enclosure. She wasn’t sure this really was Gihanga. But soon she she’d have the strength to see this got hold of herself. She should have journey through to the end, to face known that everything would be dif- firsthand what she’d already been told ferent: death had come to this place. about. But now she was standing It was death’s domain now. by the palisade. The wall of inter- The hill was steep, but the path laced branches had collapsed and come soon turned rocky, and the tangle of apart, and what were once uprights brush that slowed her down at first were now shrubs with vigorous green- gradually thinned. She tried to make ery or scarlet flowers, which struck her out what were once cultivated parcels as indecent, as if, she thought, those of land in the thick growth that had simple stakes had been brought to life invaded the hillside. The plots marked by the death of the people who had off for the coffee plants were easy to planted them. Nothing was left of the spot, but shaggy, dishevelled bushes rectangular main house but a shat- 8 tered stretch of wall. She searched see the dead?” for some trace of the hearth and its “Yes, they were calling me.” three stones, but she found only a lit- “You won’t find them here. Here tle pile of broken tiles. She couldn’t there’s only death.” hold back a surge of pride: somehow “Let me go in.” her father had roofed his house with “Of course. Who could deny you tiles! But she also observed that the that? I’ll come with you, follow me, killers had gone to the trouble of tak- but then I have something to tell you.” ing most of them away. They’d had “As you see,” the old man said, all kinds of reasons for murdering their “the abapadris and their houseboys neighbors: the neighbors were Tutsis; washed everything clean. There’s they had a house with a tile roof. In nothing left, not one drop of blood, the back courtyard, the three big grain not on the walls, not on the altar. baskets were slashed and overturned, There may still be some in the folds and the calves’ stable was a mound of of the Virgin Mary’s veil, if you look ash and charred straw. Not wanting closely. Once it was all cleaned up, to break them any further, she took the Monsignor came. He wanted Mass care not to walk on the shards litter- to be said here again, like before. All ing the ground, all that remained of it would take was some holy water. the big jugs the family had used to col- But the survivors objected. They said, lect rainwater. Amid the debris of the ‘Where was your God when they were collapsed awning that had once cov- killing us? The white soldiers came to ered the hearth, she thought she saw take the priests away, and He went off a patch of fabric and hoped it might with them. He won’t be back. Now be a piece of her mother’s pagne. But the church belongs to our dead.’ The when she came closer she realized that mayor and the prefect agreed. It seems it was only a yellowed taro leaf. they’re going to turn it into a house She knew she wouldn’t find what just for our dead—a memorial, they she was looking for in the ruined en- called it. I’ll show you where our dead closure. As soon as she’d got to the are waiting in the meantime.” town, before heading to the hamlet He took a key that hung around his of Gihanga, she’d gone to the mission neck on a string and opened a door church where the Tutsis had sought behind the altar, at the back of the shelter, where they’d been slaughtered. apse. Beyond it was a vast, dark room Four thousand, five thousand, no one stacked to the ceiling with large bags, quite knew. Outside the front door like those used for carrying charcoal. she’d seen a little old man with a white “These are for skulls,” the guide beard and a broad, fringed straw hat said, pointing at the bags against the sitting behind a wooden table. He was wall to his left, “and the ones straight the guardian of the dead. He had a ahead of you are for bones. We’ve got notebook in front of him. Visitors were everyone who was here in the church, invited to write a few words on their and all the bones we could find in the way out, as at an art gallery. The hills, left behind by the jackals and the old man gave her a long stare, nodded, abandoned dogs. Even the schoolchil- then finally said, “I know you—you’re dren went to gather bones during va- Mihigo’s daughter. Did you come to cations and days off. I hear there are 9 going to be display cases, like at the see this through to the end, that in Pakistani’s shop in the marketplace. just a few steps her journey would Your family’s here in these bags, but be over. She staggered up the final no one can tell you whose bones are slope, tried to wave away the blind- whose. You can make out only the ing mist of gnats, and bent over the babies’ skulls, because they fit in the side of the latrine. She thought she palm of your hand. But what I can tell could see something shaped like a hu- you is that your father isn’t here. His man body in the filth, and maybe—but bones are still up there where he lived, surely this was an illusion—the hor- at Gihanga, but don’t you go looking rible black glistening of what used to for them. They’re someplace where be a face. A violent nausea washed you shouldn’t see them. All right, let’s over her, and she vomited as she ran go now, you don’t have to write any- back to the termite mound. She closed thing in the book—that book’s for the her eyes, only to see once again what bazungu, the white people, assuming she’d just glimpsed in the latrine, that they’ll come, or for the grand gen- same fleshless face with its vile, viscous tlemen from Kigali in their four-by- mask. She opened her eyes to make fours. There’s nothing for you to write. the vision of horror go away. She was You’re on the side of the dead. But let sure that she would never again close me tell you again: don’t go looking for her eyes without that monstrous face your father’s remains, you mustn’t see appearing from the deepest darkness. him where they left him.” She ran down the hill and took shel- She stepped over the back court- ter amid the crumbling walls of Népo- yard’s broken fence and found herself mucène’s cabaret, next to the road. To in another banana grove, which seemed keep her eyes open, she stared at a more overgrown than the one she’d just bamboo rack, still dotted with a few come through. But, even with the clods of red clay. Trembling with fever weeds, she could make out a path. It and nausea, she sat there for hours, led to a thicket that exuded a horrible watching for the truck to come back, stench, veiled by a buzzing, humming like a promise of deliverance. fog of mosquitoes, gnats, and fat green All night long, she struggled flies. A black puddle had spread all against sleep in the room she’d rented around it, like stinking lava. Pallid, at the mission, trying to hold back almost transparent worms twisted and the flood of visions and nightmares writhed wherever the flood hadn’t yet that would wash her into their world dried to a sickening crust. of terror if she let herself drift off She forced her way through the tall for even a moment. When the cur- grass and sat down for a moment on few hour came and the generator was the termite mound where people used turned off, the mission was submerged to wait their turn every morning. The in pitch-darkness. She saw the glow of smell was almost more than she could a fire through the narrow window: the bear. The air felt thick and heavy. She watchmen warming themselves on this wasn’t sure she could go on, wasn’t cold, dry-season night. She wished she sure she had the courage to climb the could join them, hold out her hands last few metres to that putrid thicket. toward the flames, talk with the men. But she told herself that she had to But, of course, a girl couldn’t min- 10 gle with strangers in the middle of the means saying goodbye to your dead. night. She remembered that she’d seen You can’t: they’ll never leave you, a hurricane lamp on the little table, they’ll stay by your side to give you and surely a box of matches next to it. the courage to live, to triumph over She felt around for the matches, struck obstacles, whether here in Rwanda or one, and lit the lamp’s wick. It felt abroad, if you go back. They’re always as though that trembling, blue-tipped beside you, and you can always depend flame were watching over her, keeping on them.” at bay the dark forces that lurked all Now the rising sun was illuminat- around. She lay down on the bed and ing her tiny room. She sat on the finally fell into a dreamless sleep. edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, There was someone in her room head in her hands, listening. She let when she awoke. In the dim early- the guardian’s words sink into her, and morning light, she recognized the slowly despair loosened its grip. guard from the church, sitting in the They sat for a long while, looking room’s only chair. at each other in silence. Her visitor “You went to your house in Gi- picked up a small gourd that he’d set hanga,” the old man said. “Don’t tell down at his feet. He dropped a single me what you saw or thought you saw straw into it. “I made this sorghum there. You went right through to the beer for the dead I watch over,” he end. There’s nothing beyond it, and no said. “Share it with them as I do.” way out of it. You won’t find your dead He handed her the gourd and she in the graves or the bones or the la- sucked up the liquid. She closed her trine. That’s not where they’re waiting eyes. A gentle bitterness filled her for you. They’re inside you. They sur- mouth, like something she’d tasted vive only in you, and you survive only long before. through them. But from now on you’ll find all your strength in them—there’s “Now,” the guardian of the dead no other choice, and no one can take said, “what is there for you to fear?” that strength away from you. With (Translated, from the French, by that strength, you can do things you Jordan Stump.) Published in the print might not even imagine today. Like edition of the June 22, 2020, issue. it or not, the death of our loved ones Scholastique Mukasonga will pub- has fuelled us—not with hate, not with lish her fourth book in English, the vengefulness, but with an energy that story collection “Igifu,” in September. nothing can ever defeat. That strength The movie adaptation of her novel, lives in you. Don’t let anyone try to tell “Our Lady of the Nile,” was released you to get over your loss, not if that in 2020.