True Sources of the Nile

1 It began as an ordinary lunchtime. Every business and government office in Burundi had shut down for two or three hours, and Jean-Pierre came to join me. We'd already disappeared into the bedroom while Deo, my housekeeper, finished making lunch. The sound of his disapproving hymns, floating back from the kitchen, had continued all through our love-making. Now we sat on my porch, gorging ourselves on Nile perch lapped in palm oil and surrounded by green bananas baked until they were soft, fat, sticky with oil. Though it wasn't raining just then, it had been earlier, and the clouds were thick and spectacular overhead, massed above the black mountains of Zaire as they rose up across the lake, the light and water harmonizing in dense, luminous grays. We picked through our rice, casually, sorting for little rocks, and Jean-Pierre said to me, in his rich Kirundi-accented French, "I have such a surprise for you." "A surprise?" "Don't make any arrangements for the weekend. Friday, after work, look for my driver. What would you say to being away from other people for a few days?" "I'd say, yes, please. Should I bring anything?" "I will have what you need. Deo and I have an understanding. But don't try to get anything out of him. He doesn't know the whole story." He crossed his arms. I had his smiles memorized: this private, ironic smile, full of secrets; his official smile, judicious, formal--lips narrowed, teeth covered; and a reckless teeth-baring grin, a smile that made me crazy with desire. The neighbors' dogs, all eight of them, began to bark (how I wanted to poison them! Sometimes, when I slept alone and they kept me awake with their barking and howling, I would imagine how I'd do it, though I'd always been an animal lover before). Outside, on the broken pavement of the road, a tank rumbled by. But it was only one, and Jean-Pierre paid it no attention, so I knew it didn't mean much. My house wasn't that far from the military installation. We had stopped eating. I wanted to go back to bed, but not to overdo it, to lose the chance of spending the night together. "Shall we take a walk?" "You have read my mind. Again." He grinned, and I grinned back. An awareness of the way two very different creatures could function as one. He reached out and took my hand. My house was only ten minutes by foot from Lake Tanganyika, though there was no time of day when I could safely walk there by myself. All the stores and street stands were closed for the midday break. We passed the Musee Vivante, with its re-creation of a traditional housing compound, and an adjoining reptile park, which had an old crocodile in a shallow pond, and glass cages full of mambas and one indifferent kingsnake who'd been flown out from California to live on a branch and a pile of rocks, to be taken out and shown to frightened tourists and children who couldn't tell a poisonous snake from a harmless one. "I want to see the bats," I said, and Jean-Pierre, courteous and obliging, turned around. We walked toward the Ministry of Education and the fruit bats. The earth was unbearably red. The banana trees, jacaranda, papayas crowded the mud-streaked, pot-holed roads, luscious and terrible. The saddest place in the world, this piece of central Africa, site of a terrible history--German and Belgian colonialism, the breaking of Ruanda-Urundi into two countries: Rwanda and Burundi. Coup after coup. And, most of all, the struggles between Tutsi and Hutu: power-grabs, betrayals, death, people fleeing to Zaire. But Burundi felt more and more like home to me. The leaves, blossoms, shone jade, emerald, rose and vermilion against silver and ebony trunks. I inhaled the smells of wet earth, of diesel fuel from the truck rumbling past, of Jean-Pierre beside me, sharp and familiar. He was sweating, and the smell of his skin aroStone, Sarah is the author of 'True Sources of the Nile' with ISBN 9780385503013 and ISBN 0385503016.