Truth, by Omission Page 17

  The white priest spoke to me at first in French. I stared back at him quizzically, and when he realized that I didn’t speak the language he repeated it in Kinyarwanda. “Welcome to Notre Dame de la Paix, Azi. I am Father Michel Savard. You may call me Father Michel.” This time I nodded.

  “Your lessons here will be taught in French, and you’ll be expected to learn the language quickly,” he said.

  I had started to learn a few words as a small child when I was first sent to school in my village, but I couldn’t recall any of it. I hoped they would come back to me.

  “How old are you, Azi?” he asked.

  “Twelve.” I perpetuated my lie, somehow making me feel a bit more important.

  “Twelve?” He looked me up and down. “You don’t look that old. You’ve been to school before. What grade have you completed?”

  “Several,” I answered.

  “Can you spell Christian?”

  I looked blankly at him. He handed me a paper and pencil. “Can you spell your name?”

  I carefully and rather proudly wrote out A-z-i O-l-y-o-n-t-o-m-b-o.

  “Your village … where you’re from? Can you spell it out, please?”

  This was a stickler. I shook my head.

  “What is nineteen plus twelve?”

  I looked down to my hands, opening one finger at a time, counting them until I ran out of fingers, and then without looking up at him, just shook my head again.

  “We’ll put you in the first grade, Azi. Congratulations. You’ll be taught by Sister Marie until you complete the third grade. Come with me and I’ll show you where to put your things.”

  I followed him outside, and we stopped beside the church. “Have you been baptized, Azi?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, giving him an honest answer.

  “No need to worry. We’ll take care of that.”

  He led me into one of the dormitories and showed me to a single bed. “This will be yours,” he said. “You can put your things in here.” He pointed to a small chest, a footlocker at the end of the bed. “When you turn fifteen you can move to the seniors’ dorm. The other one is the sisters’ quarters. You’re not to enter there. If you need them, there is a bell outside their door. My rooms are by the office, and my doors are always open to you. You can come to me for anything.” He smiled, friendly and inviting. “It’s near lunchtime. I’ll introduce you to the sisters in the cafeteria, and they’ll present you to the boys.”

  He left me alone in the cafeteria, an open-air arrangement with rows of tables under a roof for shelter. I sat there alone, thinking about my predicament, weighing the options of either staying or bolting right then, when a bell rang, startling me. Within minutes the room filled with boys. Children, not the men I was accustomed to being around. These were kids, some younger, some older, some my age. They surrounded me as the tables filled up, and they laughed and playfully swatted at each other, teasing one another. They bantered among each other in a mixture of Kinyarwanda, French, and Swahili. Several of them opened satchels and pulled out their lunch while others formed up in a line with trays.

  Father Michel had returned. “Take a tray, Azi,” he said. “Get in line and come back to sit here. I’ll get you introduced.”

  I took to that school like a bird freed from its cage. I soared almost from the moment I arrived, seeing the world from new heights, swooping in and exploring from one horizon to another. At first I was limited by the language barrier, but I quickly mastered French and then was limited only by the hours of the day. Learning was not a challenge for me, it was an experience, a satisfaction, and the nuns were more than happy to have a student who relished being in school. I quickly found out that this was far from the norm and couldn’t grasp how most of the other boys resented having to go to school. For me it was an opportunity I had never even dreamed of, a life so completely different from the one I had led the previous four years.

  This isn’t to say that everything was easy, especially the first year. Initially, my lack of French significantly slowed my progress, and I was often embarrassed at being the oldest in my early classes. I was much bigger than the younger boys that I was placed with. But this only lasted awhile. The sisters had established a mentoring system at the school whereby the older boys spent time tutoring the younger ones, and it was a big help in getting me caught up. By the second year I had caught up with the boys my own age.

  More troubling for me in that first year were the many nights I’d wake in fright, hearing the bullets whizzing by, feeling the weight of Mamba lying on top of me, his blood running down over my face and body, only to realize it was my own sweat, a product of the memories I couldn’t shake. Sometimes when this would happen I’d lay awake for hours listening to the sounds of the boys around me sleeping, perversely missing the grunts and snores of the men I’d camped with for the past years. It was an odd mixture of knowing I was in a safe and better place, but somehow yearning for the harsh, yet still more familiar, life I had come from.

  There is no denying, however, that the instinct for survival is primal and strong. And when survival is a daily challenge, one quickly learns to sense the paths that are smoother and more secure. I, an orphan who had honed this sense of survival, had no trouble choosing between the comforts of my new school and the dead end of my previous life.

  I made numerous friends, some of them very close, and I enjoyed hearing about their families. The school was made up of two groups of students, those of us who lived in the dorms, and the majority, who walked from home to attend six days a week. A few of the others who lived in the dorm with me were also orphans, but none had come from the life that I had. It didn’t take me long to start to recognize the deviance of my past life, and I became ashamed of it, never uttering a word about it to any of the others. This was when I first began to shape my truth by omitting those details which I wanted to bury. The students and the nuns had no reason to doubt my tales when I told them of living at a mine in the jungles. The details that I offered made it believable that I hadn’t yet been to school. It served no purpose to tell anyone of my crimes.

  As much as I loved and appreciated the school, there was one aspect that I didn’t care for. Notre Dame de la Paix, Our Lady of Peace, was a Catholic missionary school. I’m not sure of the exact sources of funding, but it was one of several schools in Rwanda run by religious orders based in Europe. Father Michel acted as the school administrator, headmaster, and chief spiritual force. He was aided in shepherding the young flock by a cadre of four white nuns from Europe and several locals who filled teaching positions and housekeeping duties. The four nuns, Sisters Marie, Geraldine, and Brigit, and Mother Katherine, as we knew them, were responsible for ensuring all students received adequate indoctrination through twice-weekly catechism classes. I had no use for this gibberish, but put up with it as a small price to pay for receiving the rest of my education, courtesy of the generous support of donors in faraway countries and the volunteer efforts of the four sisters and Father Michel. It didn’t take me long to recognize the selflessness and true generosity of these kind women. They cared for our well-being in a way that I’m sure many mothers couldn’t even offer to their children. And Father Michel, though often firm and sometimes stern, would make the effort to spend one-on-one time with many of the boys, particularly the younger ones who needed extra help or a fatherly presence in their lives.

  One day, after I had become comfortable in the school and, according to Sister Marie, been adequately prepared “to be welcomed into the family of Christ,” Father Michel approached me.

  “Azi,” he said. “I’m sure that you’ve been anxiously awaiting your baptism into the Holy Catholic Church.”

  I knew what he was talking about because Sister Marie had been tutoring me toward it, but “anxiously awaiting” was far from accurate. I’d have preferred to skip the whole nonsense but dared not jeopardize my place at the school since
it mattered a lot to the sisters, and obviously to Father Michel.

  “Once baptized,” he said, “you’ll be able to receive Holy Communion with the rest of the boys at the school. We can do the baptism and your First Communion next Sunday.”

  “I’d like that, Father.”

  “Have you thought of a Christian name you’d like to be baptized under?” he asked.

  I really didn’t care. As far as I could tell it was just a formality and I would still be called Azi by my friends. “Sister Marie has suggested Alfred,” I said.

  “Ah, St. Alfred. An excellent choice, Azi. One of the greatest scholars in the history of the church—and a fluent linguist, like you. It’ll bode well for you in your studies. St. Alfred will make a superb role model for you.”

  I was unaware of this. I thought that Sister Marie had recommended it because that was her father’s name.

  “You’ll need to make your first confession sometime before that,” Father Michel added. “You’re welcome to come to my rooms this week, anytime you like.”

  When we were seated across from each other in his sitting room two nights later he began by saying, “Azi, I know that this may not be easy for you. And although you’ve been very private about your past, I am aware from the soldier who dropped you off that you’ve been through some very troubling times. You can feel free to talk about any of these things with me. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I nodded, still not yet sure what I was going to confess. Sister Marie had taught me all about the Ten Commandments and the sins according to the church. I became lost in the thoughts of my dilemma, either opening wounds that had barely begun to heal or ignoring them and risking not gaining entry into heaven—on the off chance that there was something to this forgiveness stuff. Actually, before Father Michel informed me that he knew more of my past than I thought, I had been prepared to ignore the brutal sins of my previous life and keep my confession to a few lies and lascivious fantasies. But now that I knew he knew some of the truth, and I wasn’t sure exactly how much, I had to make a decision. And it wasn’t just about my everlasting salvation, it was about imperiling my standing and my relationship with him and the sisters.

  My lips tightened and began to quiver as I weighed it out. Father Michel saw my turmoil and responded by leaning forward and putting a firm hand on my shoulder. The human touch caused a tear to form, and I could feel it dribbling down my cheek.

  “It’s okay, Azi. It’s what’s in your heart, what you confess to God, that matters. If it’s too difficult for you to say to me, just say it to our Lord.”

  “Thank you, Father,” I whispered.

  “Let’s begin, shall we?”

  And I did. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Father, I have sinned. I have done many things that I know are wrong and I hope you can forgive me. That’s all, Father.”

  I sniffled, not because of my sins, but because of my cowardice in not being able to face them. Father Michel, trying comfort me, moved across and sat beside me, putting his arm around my shoulders until I straightened up.

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  “It’s quite all right, Azi. No need to be sorry.” And then he dropped his hand to my knee giving it a fatherly pat. “Don’t be sorry. You can come to me anytime you like.” His hand stroked my thigh. I sat frozen, not knowing if this was part of the sacrament or him just being fatherly. Eventually he broke the spell and said, “You’re a good boy, Azi. No need for penance.”

  When I returned to the dorm that night some of the boys asked me how my time with Father Gushyukwa was. I was familiar with the term, it meant “erection” in Kinyarwanda, but I hadn’t heard it used in conjunction with Father Michel. It seemed to be a joke among some of the older boys that the priest would often be seen with an erection, especially when he was alone with any of them. Once I was let in on the secret, it became a frequent topic of conversation around the school for me. Some of the boys claimed that Father would rub his gushyukwa up against them, some made claims of him exposing it, others said that he had fondled them, and the most outrageous claims were that he had made some of the boys suck on his gushyukwa.

  I wondered for months whether they were just playing a joke on me or if some of these claims could be true. The sisters had never told me anything about these types of activities being a sin, but I already had a firmly entrenched belief of what I thought about them. Among the men that I had spent those horrible four years with, homosexuality was despised, and even though they would joke about it, such proclivities were taboo. But even more reviled was the practice of men playing with boys. This was such a serious crime, even among the despotic criminals I had lived with, that offenders were subject to the most severe of punishments. I witnessed it more than once—a man disemboweled alive, his belly slit open, and then his genitals severed and stuffed into his mouth before he died. I can’t say with certainty that all of the men I watched suffer this punishment were true pedophiles. I suspect that the accusations against these men were frequently false, used to justify their savage murders. Nonetheless, I understood that what the boys at Notre Dame de la Paix were alleging of Father Michel was very serious.

  Even though the rumors about our headmaster persisted for the next two years, I had no firsthand experience of such behavior. I did keep my distance somewhat, avoiding being alone with him whenever possible, so I wouldn’t have to find out the truth for myself. I did notice what I thought was Father Michel’s gushyukwa on many occasions, but it was possible that I was mistaken and just susceptible to the power of persuasion. And even if it was, that in and of itself wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We were all boys, most of us either approaching or going through puberty, and we all often sported a healthy turgidness. Why should we expect any different from Father Michel?

  It seemed that the completion of my First Confession that night had sealed the deal and the following Sunday I was baptized into the Holy Catholic Church as Alfred Olyontombo. Father Michel printed me a certificate saying as much, also showing the false birth date I had given and my baptismal date.

  During the first couple of years at the school I grew quickly, and when I entered puberty I began to fill out with the muscles I had coveted from the time I was young. On my first birthday at the school I turned twelve but continued to feign my age as being one year older. Now I even had a baptismal certificate, officially signed by Father Michel, offering proof. It had been a matter of chest puffing when I had first begun the deception by telling Lieutenant Wigy the lie, and then it evolved into a matter of personal pride. Eventually, I became so caught up in the lie that I began to believe it myself. Fortunately for me, I was growing faster and taller than most of the other boys and no one ever challenged me on my claim. And by the time I reached fourteen, after just two years at the school, I had caught up in my studies with the others of the same age. Sister Geraldine, who was now teaching me, was as proud as my own mother might have been at how well I was doing.

  The sisters gave me my first responsibility in the homework program, assigning to me one of the younger boys who had come to the school shortly after I arrived. Gabriel—Little Gabe, as we all affectionately called him because of his diminutive size—was, like me, an orphan and he lived in the dorms with us. But unlike me, he had a cheerful and bubbly disposition. Whatever hardships he had endured in his short life were either put well behind him or carefully disguised. He was always full of exuberance and pep, and he endeared himself to all of us at the school.

  Perhaps in the way that opposites attract, Gabe and I began to spend quite a bit of time together, originally through my good fortune of having been assigned as his homework mentor, but increasingly by what each had to offer the other. I think Gabe looked up to me as a big brother—the serious and stalwart figure he could rely on for advice and security. And I, in response, enjoyed the role of being respected and
relied upon. Gabe’s carefree, jovial attitude inspired me to enjoy my own good fortune at having escaped my previous life of destitution. Gabe seemed proud of the attention and care I showed him. He hung around me constantly, and I didn’t mind one bit. Then, the cord that bound us cinched even tighter.

  Sunday mornings at the school were reserved for attending Mass, but the afternoons were free time and most of us spent it playing football in the large open field at the back of the compound. Father Michel often joined us, and even opened the field to other boys in the neighborhood. We split ourselves into teams based on ages and abilities, usually playing three games side by side. One Sunday afternoon, in the midst of play, I caught sight of Gabe running as hard as he could, laughing and taunting a much bigger boy who chased him. What I first thought was horseplay between the two turned serious when the bigger lad finally caught him and violently threw him to the ground. I ran from my own game and grabbed the one on top by his shoulders, pulling him off, but not before he landed a series of solid blows to Little Gabe’s face. When the assailant turned on me, I let my fists fly in a flurry of punches that quickly brought him to his knees.

  Father Michel parted the crowd that had formed and stepped between me and the neighborhood boy, thinking that I might lay more wrath on him. But he need not have worried; I wasn’t a fighter. I was only acting on impulse, only doing enough to save Gabe from his beating and then defending myself. Father Michel sent the other boy away, banning him from the school grounds, and he ordered Gabe and me to the dorm, to “be dealt with later.”