Broken Memory by Elisabeth Combres Page A

without eating, drank muddy water from the ditches beside the roads. She managed to dodge the many checkpoints that the murderers had set up to catch anyone who was too tired or careless to avoid them.
    Soon she no longer saw many others trying to flee like her. She walked down her road, more and more alone, walking between the dead bodies that blackened the fields and the roads.
    Until the day she knocked on the old woman’s door.
    She had watched her for two days from her hiding place in an empty old chicken coop. Finally, something about the woman’s gentle movements made her cast caution aside and approach her.
    Sitting on her bed, Emma listened now to the old woman sweeping on the other side of the wall. She got up, pulled on the skirt that lay on the small bench under the window and went to the door of the only bedroom in the house.
    When she walked into the other room, the old woman turned toward her, one hand on her waist, the other holding the stiff tuft of straw that she used as a broom. She smiled softly at Emma, then bent over and returned to her work.
    After nine years Emma was used to the old woman’s silence. She had not said a word that day when she was faced with the terrified little girl asking for something to eat. So that she wouldn’t die, the way her mother had told her.
    â€œI must not die,” she had whispered in a weak voice, “but I’m hungry. And I am scared, too.”
    The old woman reacted quickly. Without even thinking, she grabbed the child by the arm and pulled her into the house. Only when the door was closed again did she really consider what she had done.
    This thin little girl with the big black eyes, no more than five years old, was one of those who must die.
    For weeks the radio had been practically stuttering with rage that all Tutsis must be killed. The old woman was a Hutu peasant, so she was not in danger. But by protecting the little girl, she was condemning herself to death. If the killers found out she had the girl with her, they would both be slaughtered immediately.
    So chance had brought them together, in a Rwanda torn apart in terror, fire and blood.
    Emma had to hide in the field behind the house several times after that. It was easy to hole up in the mud behind the bank, where the grass had grown quickly since the first rains of April. Meanwhile the men searched, insulted, trampled — they had been told that a young girl was definitely hiding there — then they left.
    They came back many times, full of hate and frustration, fraying the old woman’s nerves, but they never found anything. The old woman was careful to make sure there wasn’t the slightest evidence of Emma’s presence.
    So she existed without really being there, not really alive and not dead, though she would sometimes feel like a corpse herself, buried in the mud at the foot of the garden.
    The old woman and the little girl grew used to each other. When the war ended, they just carried on, and over the years the calm routine of everyday life brought them close. They looked after each other through thick and thin, both simply determined to carry on living. Emma because it was the last wish of her dying mother. The old woman because she never considered doing anything else, not even during the worst moments of her life.
    Emma turned toward the cooking area and made herself a bowl of porridge — the same mix of soy flour, sorghum and corn that was fed to babies. She moistened it with milk and swallowed in big spoonfuls. Then she splashed water on her face, washed quickly and set off for the market.

3.
    On the road, Emma passed boys and girls her age dressed in their school uniforms — the boys in pale beige, the girls in bright blue. It was time for classes to begin.
    â€œWe have to find the money so that you can go to school,” the old woman had said to her once. “So that you can be someone