Truth, by Omission Read online

  “Go ahead, Anna. I’m just staying around here for a while. I’ll get going soon.”

  “That’s what you said yesterday, and you didn’t leave the flat. What’s wrong? Everything was going so well a few days ago.”

  I didn’t know how to answer, everything was going so well just a few days ago. I was basking in all the great things that were happening to us, enjoying planning our new start in America together, and then I had a few thoughts cross my mind that maybe I didn’t deserve it.

  “Why should I be the one who gets to go to med school in America? What about the millions of more deserving kids in Africa who aren’t getting this chance that I am stealing from them?”

  “What are you talking about? You’re not stealing anything from anyone.” She sounded incredulous.

  “What makes me deserving, Anna?”

  “You’ve worked damned hard, that’s what.”

  “What makes me even deserve you, Anna?”

  I searched for some excuse for my glum mood. These thoughts had been short-circuiting in my brain for a few days now. This was the first I had verbalized them, and they sounded totally pathetic. In some perverted way, I was juxtaposing my current good fortune with the wretchedness of my childhood in Africa, and not just the poverty and tragedy of so many millions of Africans, but my particularly wretched upbringing. I simply wasn’t worthy of any of the good things that were now happening to me.

  “What’s wrong, Freddie? Why are you saying these things?” She stroked my head tenderly while I looked away from her, shamed. “You’re sad. What are you sad about?”

  “I don’t know.” I slowly rolled my head side to side. “I know logically, intellectually, there is nothing going wrong in my life. I should be happy. I can’t explain it. I’ve tried to think myself out of it, but it’s some kind of weird feeling that’s drawing me in. I’m not sad, I’m not mad, I’m not angry. I just don’t know. It’s like some deep, sullen, inexplicable despair. I can’t figure it out.” I wanted to be able to explain it, to Anna, to myself. But I couldn’t put it into words.

  Later that afternoon, when Anna arrived home and saw me still in bed, she came in and sat down again.

  “Have you been in here all day?”

  “No.” I said it with no conviction, not really wanting her to believe me.

  “Well then, how were your classes?”

  “Fine.”

  She frowned, knowing it wasn’t true but rather a plea for understanding. “You’ve got to pull yourself out of this funk. You’ve got exams starting in two weeks. I’m pretty sure that scholarship of yours has a void clause if you fail your final term.”

  I knew she was right, but I couldn’t seem to conquer the inertia and begin to pull out of my “funk.” The next two weeks were rotten, and so were the three weeks of exams following that. Just plain rotten. I existed, that’s all I did. I got by, just existing. And if it was bad for me, it was worse for Anna. Because she couldn’t understand, any more than I could, what was wrong, what was happening. This was my first experience with the inky purple whirlpool that would catch me several more times over the course of my life, especially when things were going well for me, but, oddly, almost never when they were going badly. The bad times and the tough times I could always deal with—just look at the atrocities I had already dealt with in Africa. It was the good times that caught me unaware, always the good times dragging me back to the whirlpools of Africa.

  I’ve since learned the clinical diagnosis and can recognize it quickly in my patients. My mild depressions could be called funks, as Anna stated. They’ve never been bad enough for me to think that I need medication, but it’s probably borderline. That first funk nearly cost me my final term grades, and it took all my strength to drag myself through exams. And then two weeks after exams, a few days before we left France for America, the ink dissipated, the current slowed down, and I stuck my head out of the water and gulped fresh air. As quickly as it had settled upon me, it left me.

  “I think it was stress,” said Anna. “The stress of the exams, and once they were over it was gone.”

  I smiled. If only it were that simple. “But I wasn’t stressed about school. I was in total command. I didn’t get stressed until I lost control. And I don’t know what made me lose control.”

  “I’m just glad you’re back, Freddie.”

  “I’m glad too, Anna. I wouldn’t have wanted your parents to see me like that. Thank you for being so good with me the last little while.”

  “François and the others want to come over on Friday to say goodbye,” Anna said, changing the subject.

  A week earlier I would have dreaded the prospect, but at that moment I welcomed it. “Super. We have to convince them to come and visit us in America.” We really were going to miss them. We’d all been a very tight group of friends over the past couple of years. Somehow though, it wasn’t a sad parting with them. It was joyful and positive. We were all young and knew we’d get together again. They all wanted to see America and now they’d have a good excuse, and a couch to sleep on when they got there.

  Anna and I took the same train that Vincent and I had taken barely two months ago. This time it wasn’t heading toward a sad separation, but rather a joyful beginning to the adventure of the rest of our lives together. As the train pulled into the De Gaulle station we were jittery with excitement, anxious to get to America. We each had our own backpack slung over a shoulder holding our travel documents and extra water bottles and sandwiches—enough to get us through twelve hours of flight and two hours of a layover in Newark before arriving in Denver. Airports were still confusing to me. A one-way to Paris from Tanzania and a round-trip to Pittsburgh were my complete résumé of previous air travel.

  At the ticket counter the attendant quickly scanned passes and IDs, processing the line of passengers. Anna handed over her USA passport.

  “Anna Fraser?” The attendant glanced up perfunctorily as she processed entries into her terminal, printed a card, and tagged luggage. “Your boarding pass, Mademoiselle Fraser. Have a nice flight.”

  Anna stepped aside while I handed the attendant my Rwandan passport.

  “Mr. Alfred Oly-Oly-on-tom-bo?” She stumbled over my last name and then looked from the passport picture to my face and back again—and then again, once more. This wasn’t unusual for me. I knew that the scar on my forehead and the scar in my picture were as good as fingerprints for my identity. When people were first forced to look at me, it often took a second or third glance to register properly. That no longer bothered me, and I knew that most people were uncomfortable themselves because they’d focused on it. I could see Anna was disconcerted while the attendant processed me. She was still embarrassed for me when others made an issue of my facial deformity.

  “Thank you, monsieur, have a nice flight.” She handed me my documents.

  Each now carrying only our own backpack, we started toward the security checkpoint and Anna tugged at my sweater. “Alfred, can I see your passport?”

  I handed it to her as we kept walking.

  “This is from Rwanda,” she stated and asked at the same time.

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were Tanzanian. You said you came from Tanzania.”

  This was another of my omissions, and I was caught out in it, as I knew I would be eventually. But there was nothing here to hide, except perhaps some of my own uncertainty, and the fact that I’d rather forget most of Rwanda.

  “I did come from Tanzania. I came here from Tanzania, and Rwanda before that.”

  “You never told me.” Another statement and question at the same time.

  “It never came up, and you never asked.” I could tell she was disappointed, everything drooped, her shoulders, her entire face. I felt terrible for letting her down. I probably should have told her before. “I’m sorry, Anna, it just didn’t seem important.”


  The line had moved us close to the first security check. “What else doesn’t seem important? Is there more you should tell me?”

  “Honestly, Anna, there’s lots more I’d like to tell you. And I will, sometime. Please, just not now. If we make a scene here, they won’t even let us on the plane.”

  As soon as we’d made it through to the other side of the security check, she started with her questions again while we walked toward our gate.

  “So, you’re Rwandan?”

  “I’m not positive, but I think I’m Rwandan. I lived most of my life in Rwanda, and was given a Rwandan passport. I suppose that makes me Rwandan.” I paused for a moment. “Does it make a difference?”

  She ignored my question and asked another of her own. “Why couldn’t you tell me?”

  I stopped, turned to face her, and held her by each shoulder at arm’s length. “Anna, there are six million people trying to forget Rwanda. I’ve never lied to you, but there’s a lot you don’t want to know.”

  “Alfred, we’re married. I want to know everything about you.”

  She wasn’t angry. She was disappointed. Her eyes, her entire face was begging for more of an explanation. How could I blame her for wanting to know the full truth?

  I hung my head and nodded. “Let’s find our gate. I’ll tell you.”

  We had more than an hour to wait in the departure area, plenty of time for me to give Anna a history lesson on Rwanda in the early nineties. As a student of international studies she’d heard some of the story, but not told in the way that someone who lived through it tells it. I related what happened in a fashion typical of most war survivors: I painted a panorama of the broader landscape and avoided the pain of the finer personal details. She didn’t need to know these, and I’d worked hard to forget them myself.

  The hour passed quickly, and our flight was called. After bumping our way down the aisle and settling into our seats, Anna took my hand and squeezed it, turned sideways in the seat and kissed me on my upper cheek, purposely or accidentally, I’m not sure, but landing it right on my scar.

  In all the years since, Anna has never pushed, never pried into these personal horrors. Instead, she’s kindly and gently helped me nurse the wounds that I hope will never need to be reopened, and she’s patiently let me offer her morsels of Rwanda on my own time. She continued to hold my hand for much of the flight while I sank back and closed my eyes, unable now to stop thinking about Rwanda, Tanzania, Africa … and all that I’d omitted.

  Rwanda

  After filling a small rucksack with as much food as I could stuff into it and hastily departing the convent, I headed east. The roads were surprisingly busy with vehicles, even at this early hour of the morning, almost all of them heading in one direction—out. Everyone and everything was leaving Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Hardly anyone was going the other way. I thought that perhaps I would hitch a ride on a passing truck. Each time a vehicle approached I turned around and put my arm out hoping it would stop, but none even bothered to slow down. I understood their reluctance; no one in Kigali trusted anyone else, especially at this time of day. I considered just walking but reasoned that a quicker departure would be better. If I was going to put any speedy distance between the convent and myself I’d have to find a ride.

  I watched a one-ton flatbed pass me and then followed its taillights as it slowed down about a hundred yards ahead and turned off into the gravel parking lot of a small roadside shop. By the time I had walked the distance to where it was stopped, the driver was just returning to his truck. I approached him with a friendly greeting.

  “Can I hitch a ride in the back of your truck?”

  “There’s room, if you want. I’m only going as far as Kayonza, and it’ll cost you one thousand Rwandan francs. But I’ll take five dollars US if you have it.”

  I only had the two thousand francs I’d taken from the convent and I certainly wasn’t about to turn over half of it just to get me the sixty miles to Kayonza. I planned to go a lot farther than that.

  “I’ll give you one hundred francs.”

  As if he had never even encountered me he climbed into his truck, slammed the door, started it up, and backed around, almost right into me. To avoid being hit I leapt up onto the flatbed. He pulled the truck ahead and turned back east onto the road. In the darkness I could make out five other bodies, backs propped up against the racks on the side of the truck. In the front of the truck bed burlap sacks of root crops were piled and covered with a mildewed canvas tarp. None of the five bothered to acknowledge me, so I shifted around and joined them, leaning my back against one of the side rails. The truck had little suspension, and we bounced jarringly along. This was a paved road but was in such disrepair that a gravel road would have been better. It, like most of the other roads in the area, had been built and paved thirty years earlier in the midsixties. Right after the Rwandan independence in 1962 the new governments wanted to demonstrate their largesse and paved a series of roads linking disparate parts of the country, but none of the succeeding governments had the money necessary to repair them or do upkeep. As these paved roads became potholed and washouts from seasonal flooding swept parts of them away the remaining pavement sometimes became more of an impediment than a help.

  Dawn was just starting to break, and I watched the landscape slowly move past us. The sides of the road were filthy with trash carelessly discarded by others who didn’t want to be troubled carrying anything extra with them. Makeshift tents and plastic tarp lean-tos were pitched irregularly along the roadside where families had stopped for the night. Someone sat awake at each of these campsites, keeping guard against looters and bandits who might find them easy prey. Other early risers were out walking on the sides of the road trying to hitch rides, but our driver ignored them.

  As the morning sky gradually lightened, the large body across from me began to stir and straightened himself up. He measured me and then said, “He’s going to be stopping in Nyagasambu. He might kill you if he finds you on his truck.”

  With as much bravado as a youth of nearly sixteen could feign I replied, “Perhaps I’ll kill him first.” To which the man laughed uproariously. The guffaws woke up everyone else. He had no idea how many people I had already killed. And he had no idea how old I was. I was big for my age and had already been passing for older. I was insulted and embarrassed by his mockery.

  “If he doesn’t kill you he’ll probably beat you.” The man continued to laugh. When he was finished making fun of me he said, “Give me two hundred francs, and we’ll hide you at Nyagasambu. We can put you under the tarp.”

  “I haven’t got any money.”

  “I know you have at least one hundred. Give it to me and we’ll hide you.”

  I had divided up my two thousand francs that I had taken from the sisters at the convent, putting five hundred in the soles of my shoes, five hundred each in two different places in my rucksack, and five hundred in my shorts. I pulled out this wad and gave the man one hundred francs.

  “I’ll tell you when we get close and show you how to hide,” he said.

  The other four were all awake now and I could tell that it was a family: the father and mother; two sons, both younger than me; and a girl around nine. After a while the mother reached into a sack beside her and pulled out a flat round loaf of honey bread, which she partitioned and passed around. She set a small bowl of bean paste in the center for them to scoop out. No one offered me any, so I opened my rucksack and took out a plantain.

  One of the boys ventured to make conversation with me. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “North. And then probably Tanzania,” I replied.

  “Where is your family?” the little girl asked.

  “I’ll meet them in the north,” I said.

  By now I’d become a very good liar and they all accepted this story. I still wasn’t sure whether I’d go to Tanzania, bu
t I had decided to go north, initially. Maybe I could hide out there, or maybe I’d try to blend in with the masses and make it to one of the camps. Most everyone else in Kigali and west of there was headed toward Zaire. It was the obvious route out of the country since there were more roads and they were better. Also, word had passed back that camps were indeed there. Camps in Tanzania were still just an unconfirmed rumor.

  An hour later, as we lumbered into Nyagasambu, the father crawled to the front and drew back the tarp. He rearranged the sacks of cassava and turnips, creating a small space for me at the bottom and then pulled the tarp back in place. A few minutes later the truck came to a stop and the door slammed.

  “How many bags do you want?” the father asked the driver.

  “Ten here. The rest will come out at Kayonza.”

  The man and his two sons lifted the tarp partially away and took ten sacks from the pile. They stacked them on the edge of the truck, returned the tarp into place, and jumped down to help carry the sacks to the front door of the shop. Afterward, they loaded themselves back on the truck and the driver put it in gear. Once we were rolling eastward again the father lifted the tarp.

  “It’s safe to come out now.”

  I climbed up and over the remaining sacks. “Thank you,” I said.

  He put his palm out to me. “Two hundred more.”

  “I paid you one hundred already.”

  “That was to Nyagasambu. It’s another two hundred to Kayonza.”

  I thought about arguing with him but realizing it was probably futile, I slapped another two hundred francs into his open palm.

  “Plus fruit.” He had seen inside my rucksack. “For everyone.” He gestured to the rest of his family.

  I opened my bag and passed out a plantain to each of them.

  Another two hours passed with the family conversing among themselves. I kept one eye on them and the other on the countryside as we drove along. It was nearly nine in the morning and the sun had risen enough to make things steamy. The makeshift campsites along the side of the road had been packed up, and they were being trundled by all manner of carts and wagons as people moved east toward the Tanzanian border.