like Claudius Kagina’s – and he is the ugliest man I have ever met! But Mum is beautiful. Everyone says so. I think so. This is getting confusing.
‘But you are a Tutsi, Mummy. Your nose should be thin.’
She holds the mirror like a plate in her hand and drums her fingers on it. ‘If what Sarah says is true then my nose should be thin, but it is not. I do not think it is my imagination. This is my nose. I can feel it.’ She stops the drumming and uses her finger to squash her nose instead. She makes both her eyes look towards it – her cartoon face makes me laugh. She laughs too. ‘Many, many years ago, perhaps it was easy to tell a Tutsi and a Hutu apart by their looks alone. But many Hutus have married Tutsis and given birth to beautiful children, with wide or thin noses. We are not so different anyway. We speak the same language, sing the same songs, go to church and worship the same God. Your father is Hutu, so you stand with the Hutus at roll call. But you, my baby, you are lucky; for you have the best of both worlds – you are both Hutu and Tutsi, outside and inside.’ She presses her hand to my heart and I think she is a doctor listening with that metal disc, listening for my double heartbeat – the Tutsi and the Hutu beat. And I do feel lucky. With my Hutu skin and Tutsi nose, I feel powerful and beautiful all at once. ‘Now you must help me cook quickly before your brother and Daddy come.’
‘What are you staring at, Clem?’ says Pio.
I look down at my plate and fill my mouth with more of the isombe that Mum and I have cooked. I love isombe, because it has eggplant in it, my favourite vegetable. But my eyes keep wandering all through dinner. I cannot help it. I have to look at Pio and Dad, study their faces. Everything about Dad says Hutu – he is dark, not very tall, and everything about him is wide. His nose, his neck, his arms, his legs. But Pio is tall for his age, tall and slender. And his skin is lighter than Dad’s, lighter than mine. But his nose is thinner than Dad’s, thin like mine. Yet he must stand with the other Hutus at roll call. Sarah really does not know what she is talking about!
Dad is chuckling. At first I think he has noticed what I am doing and I feel my face get hot, but then he says, ‘Bikindi! That man is so naughty. How does he get away with it?’
‘Habimana is as bad,’ says Mum, squeezing her lips together, trying to stop the smile growing on her face. ‘Listen!’
And I realize that they are laughing at the radio, at the song that has just finished and the announcer who is now talking so fast I can barely understand him. Habimana, Mum called him.
‘Habimana is my name,’ I say.
‘No,’ my dad is still chuckling, ‘Kantano Habimana. That is the name of the announcer.’
‘And never was a man so wrongly named.’ Mum rises to collect our plates. ‘He is a little devil.’
I do not know why the announcer is so naughty, but I know what my mum is talking about. My name Habimana means ‘God exists’.
‘And if ever a girl was so perfectly named, it is you, angel.’ Dad rises too and kisses my head. Pio pretends he is choking on his isombe. ‘Ah, do not fear, my soldier.’ Now Dad is squeezing Pio’s shoulders tightly – if Pio’s smile was not so wide, his scrunched-up eyes would make me think Dad was hurting him. ‘Your mother and I never forget that we were blessed twice, and that before Clem came we had our first-born, Pio Sentwali.’
Sentwali? Courageous? Ha!
Pio’s chest swells over the table, but I do not wait to see it grow further. The naughty announcer with the same name as me is still firing words from the radio faster than fruit bats fly from the caves at twilight. I think he says something about Inyenzi, but perhaps I misheard because that means ‘cockroach’. Then the singer starts his song again and n’umututsi is the phrase that jumps out at me. But I think every time you learn a new word, as I have done today with Tutsi, you feel like you hear it everywhere. Perhaps it was always there, perhaps it was just a sound that meant nothing before. But I am not concentrating on noisy songs from the radio, I am trying to catch up with Dad as he leaves for the cabaret.
Of course I am not going to the cabaret with Dad – at least, no one knows when I am there. The cabaret is for the men, where they go to meet their friends after a hard day in the fields. Where they drink that disgusting beer made from banana and sorghum flour, urwagwa. I know because I had a sip once, when no one was looking – just one sip and I was nearly sick. It was like drinking the smell of cigarettes. I wanted to cough and shout the taste from my mouth, but that would have given away my hiding place.
I love to walk with Dad, to ride on his shoulders and to hear his stories. His journey to the cabaret is usually our time for this. This morning, coming up from the river, was an extra treat – Dad does not usually come to the river to collect the water. The cabaret he goes to is only on the other side of the village, so the walk is less than two miles. It is the same place we go to buy rice when we need to, and potatoes. Joseph also sells underwear and some other clothes, and beans, oil, batteries, shampoo…Some people say that Joseph can get you anything you need.
‘Tell me a story, Daddy!’ He has just helped me down from his shoulders so I know we must be close to the time when he tells me to run home. He has been quiet for most of our walk, but if I get him to tell me a story then perhaps we can stay together just a bit longer. But he says,
‘A story…Mmm…Once upon a time there was a little angel called…’
I look up at his face. It is getting hard to see now the sun has gone, but I know his eyes are bright, I know what he is going to call her.
‘…Clementine.’
Yes!
‘She fell from her home up among the stars one night.’ Dad looks up to the sky and the millions of twinkling stars light his face so I can see it much better. ‘And if she does not get back home soon, the devil will take her out on this lonely road.’
He reaches down to tickle me and shoo me off home. I laugh – I cannot help it, I love it when Dad tickles me – but I scrunch up my nose, my thin nose, to make sure Dad knows that I am not really happy with his story or the idea of going home now.
‘Hurry home, Clem! And do not find too many distractions on your way. Mummy will be angry if you are late.’
We both start walking in opposite directions. Dad is striding fast into the dark, eager to see his friends and taste his urwagwa. I stop after only three steps and watch him until he is almost out of sight. Then I follow. ‘Women do not go to the cabaret,’ Mum said to me once. ‘And it is certainly not a place for a young girl.’ What is so special about the cabaret? What is so secret there? I thought. I could not resist trying to find out, so I have been there three or four times now. It is funny to hear the men gossip about their wives and about other men who are not there. It is funny how their eyes begin to change, as if they are about to cry even though they are very happy, and how they become unsteady on their feet when they get up to piss in the road the more urwagwa they drink. Many of the men have been drinking at the cabaret for a long time before Dad arrives – you can tell by the way they sway on their stools. But I am never sure if Dad becomes like the others, because I cannot stay too long, otherwise Mum will be angry.
Joseph lives in a house like ours behind the cabaret. The cabaret is really just an extra room on the front of his house. The back wall of the cabaret, where all the cases of beer are stacked, is really the front wall of his house. But he has built extra walls – adobe, like the rest of his house – that come out only a bit further than the counter, where all the bottles are lined up. From there, the corrugated metal roof turns into a thatched one and the walls become fences of woven papyrus and grass. There is no wall at all at the front, just a big old sofa and stools around a low table, where most of the men like to be, if it is not raining. Once Dad has finally stopped shaking everyone’s hands at the table and they have finished shouting out his name and saying things like, ‘Hey, Jean-Baptiste, you are late tonight, working too hard again, eh?’ and he has gone to the counter to buy his drink, then I can run to the fence and hide in the grass there. The weaving on the fence is so loose that I can easily see through