Broken Memory by Elisabeth Combres

First published as La mémoire trouée by
Élisabeth Combres
    Copyright © Gallimard
Jeunesse 2007
    First published in Canada
and the USA in 2009 by Groundwood Books
    English translation
copyright © 2009 by Shelley Tanaka
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    This edition published in 2011
by
Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press Inc.
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Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4
Tel. 416-363-4343
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    Ouvrage publié avec le
concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture – Centre national du
livre.
This work has been published with the assistance of the French
Ministry of Culture – National Book Center.
    Library and Archives
Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Combres, Élisabeth
Broken memory
: a novel of Rwanda / Élisabeth Combres ; translated by Shelley Tanaka.
Translation of: La mémoire trouée.
eISBN
978-1-55498-161-8
1. Genocide–Rwanda–Juvenile fiction. 2. Hutu (African
people)–Juvenile fiction. 3. Tutsi (African people)–Juvenile fiction. 4.
Rwanda–History–Civil War, 1994–Juvenile fiction. I. Tanaka, Shelley II.
Title.
PQ2703.O53M4514 2009 j843’.92 C2009-901409-2
    Cover photograph
copyright © by Robert Palumbo
Design by Michael
Solomon
    We acknowledge for their
financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts,
the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Ontario
Arts Council.

The author would
like to thank
Le centre régional des lettres de Midi-Pyrénées for its
support.

À Manu
À mes parents
À Fabienne et Christine

“He did not only kill my
mother.
He killed humanity.”
    â€” A survivor of the
Rwandan genocide

BAD
DREAMS

1.
    They are there.
    Behind the door.
    They are yelling, singing, banging, laughing.
    Mama’s eyes are wide with fear.
    Soon she will be nothing more than suffering on the ground.
    Cut up and bleeding.
    Then, finally, set free by death.

2.
    Emma woke up with a start, exhausted by the same nightmare that she had almost every night. Ever since that day in April 1994, when the men burst into the house and murdered her mother.
    She didn’t see it happen, but she heard everything, huddled against the wall behind the old sofa, trembling with fear. To keep from screaming, she kept repeating to herself what her mother had ordered when the first blow of a club battered against the door — “Slide behind there, close your eyes, put your hands over your ears. Do not make the slightest move, not the slightest noise. Tell yourself that you are not in this room, that you see nothing, hear nothing, and that everything will soon be over. You must not die, Emma!”
    Everything was over quickly after that, just as her mother had promised.
    But for Emma the nightmare was just beginning.
    She lay curled up in the empty house for a long time, until the ache in her limbs brought her back to reality. She peeled her hands from her ears and very, very slowly opened her eyes.
    When she heard nothing but silence, she stood up stiffly and staggered out of her hiding place. She stumbled blindly around the lifeless body of her mother and stepped over the shattered door and through the curtain of rain that blocked the open doorway of the house.
    In a daze, she joined the crowds of fleeing families. She slept in the bush, went for long days