Young Traveler–Gold Winner: The Road from Ruhengeri
By Haifa Mahabir
21 Hours in Rwanda
Between April and June of 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Most of the dead were Tutsis—and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus. The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down over Kigali airport on April 6th, 1994. Within hours of the attack, a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later.
January 1st, 2007.
This room is reminiscent of a place in my mind that I always thought I had only imagined. It’s a cement chamber. The electricity flickers—I know it will go out soon. A half-burned candlestick and a box of only a few matches rest next to the mattress, sheets once white, yellowed by age and use. There’s a large window above the bed, curtains drawn to hide the iron confinements that have been fashioned against all of the windows in the house.
Images of a war and genocide begin to stalk my thoughts, and my fear of this place has become too overwhelming to bear. In less than only a day I’ve seen more things, people, and landscapes so unbelievably sickening, and horrifying, and beautiful than I believe most people will ever see in their lifetimes.
I’ve left the door of my room open by only a crack, hesitating on making my escape. Standing on the same spot on this exposed cement floor for over an hour, I’m afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid to blink my eyes. So many times I’m reduced to the existence of only the sound of my breath. The air here is suffocating. I’m dirtied with the day. I feel my skin alive, infested with memories that aren’t my own; with the deaths of a million people; with the dread of disease and sickness that plagues this small African country. With a girl’s touch that is haunting me.
I know if I don’t find a way to leave tonight, I’m not going to make it. But I’ve already convinced myself that if I try to leave I’ll die before I get home.
The fear has become unbearable. The sleep paralysis has found its way to my waking life, because I’m having trouble breathing. I feel myself falling away from my body and only my eyes can move, can search this horrible space. I feel a weakness between my legs—I realize my body is becoming numb from standing for so long, void of any motion or movement, for the lack of sleep in the days I spent getting here. The sound of my breath is maddening, my chest heavy with its burden and time seems to slow, my eyelids falling into harmony, eyes vacant, eyelashes like blades of a helicopter suspended in the air—magnified in slow motion.
I know I’ve been locked inside the house—Cathy says it’s for my own safety. The keys are with Dusi, who is asleep in a small one-room house outside behind my window. Dusi was an orphan until Cathy took him in a few years ago, and in exchange for a home and food he acts as a sort of guide for all of the volunteers coming to help at the school and orphanage here in Ruhengeri.
I have to get to him.
There’s a guard outside, and though he’s only a boy I’m cautious of him, not sure what his intentions are. Throughout the night he sits on a rocking chair on the stone porch, watching, waiting, but for what I’m uncertain. Or at least I don’t want to think about it. The compound I’m staying in is enclosed by a concrete wall that’s only a few inches taller than me, and I’m uncertain of how well one boy can hold off any potential intruder.
My attention returns to the room. There’s a ghastly-looking creature circling the dying light of the fluorescent bulb above the rotting mattress. Beyond this room is further uncertainty and I’m not ready to venture there yet, so one of us has to die. Eyeing a sandal on the floor, I kneel to pick it up and the action is slow and hesitant—I don’t want to lose sight of the creature, because knowing it’s in the room but not knowing where it is will make this impossibly unbelievable situation even worse. I pick up the sandal from the floor, and in my clenched grasp become familiar with its soft rubber in the sweaty palm of my hand. Slapping the thing, it crashes to the ground. I take a closer look and it’s slithering like a black snake with broken wings. I beat it until it is unrecognizable—you embodied everything about this place—your dark body, your deafening sound, your death.
The action has shaken me from my paralyzed fright and I grab my headlamp and make my way from the room. I hold the lamp in my hand, shining the light as I move weightlessly with every scared caress through the open rooms of the dark house. The movement becomes a dance. The walls are bare and the rooms are empty, except for a few hard-wood benches and tables in the dining corner and living chamber. I find my way to the kitchen—there’s a door here that leads outside to where Dusi sleeps. I reach for the door handle, but the bounded fate I imagined proves real—the door is locked and I can’t get out. I pull again, and then over and over, helplessly, frustrated. I find my breathing becoming rapid and heavy, and I know if I don’t slow my breath I’ll hyperventilate. This can’t be happening.
I stop when I hear a voice from outside the door, but I can’t see anything.
The voice is deep and asks, “Who’s there?”
It must be the guard. Hopeful, I press both palms of my hands against the window’s cool glass and begin calling out for Dusi.
“Dusi—please, get Dusi.” My words are short, desperate. I suddenly see white teeth forming a grin—I can finally see where the guard is standing on the other side of the door. He’s smiling at me, shaking his head, and I realize he doesn’t understand what I’m saying.
“Please, I need Dusi, get Dusi!” I’m whispering a scream, afraid to make too loud a sound, afraid something will happen if anyone hears me. I’m throwing my hands against the glass, pointing at the house where Dusi is. I’m yelling to him, begging this boy, but he doesn’t understand. My words become babble.
What am I doing here? Everybody warned you—why didn’t you listen? You’re a fool. It’s beginning to hurt, the fear, and my breath feels as though it has mixed with sand and glass. Loose strands of hair flutter in a breeze I can’t trace, and there’s dirt on my face, on my hands; my lips are cracked, starved for moisture. I close my eyes, shut them so tight that my skin tightens and my mouth opens, revealing clenched teeth. I want to cry, want to get out of this place, but I have nowhere to go even if I can manage to get beyond the confinement of these walls.
Ruhengeri is a poverty-plagued village in the northwest of Rwanda near the border of the Congo. The village itself is a dead-end lined with streets of single-level concrete slabs. Here, everybody is poor. Everybody is a victim of Rwanda’s troubled past, and although there is no longer any official distinction between Hutus and Tutsis, this seems only a mask to hide the shame and corruption that still pervades the country.
It’s the middle of the night, and I know if I go out into the darkness alone I may be kidnapped or raped.
I hear a second voice—it’s Dusi, and I see him push past the guard. He looks at me through the glass and I know he can understand me. He unlocks the iron divider that’s binded to the door and comes without delay to my side. When I first arrived at the airport in Kigali earlier that day, Dusi and I found a friendship immediately. He’s my age, 23, but he seems stronger than me, capable, hardened, and he was intrigued at the way I smiled—my curiosity for this unforgiving place.
“Dusi, I can’t do this, I can’t stay. I need to leave—I need to get out of here, now.” I tell him I need to get to a phone, and he makes no hesitation at my plea.
“Meet me here again in five minutes and I will take you,” he tells me in his broken Kinyarwandan accent. “Do you understand? I promise—you will be okay.”
Everything that is vital I keep on my body: money, passport, journal. I clench the sliver of a crescent moon that hangs from the necklace around my neck in the palm of my hand. Dusi leads me out into the night and he stays close to my side, leading me away from the light, from falling into the eyes of any wayward walker. I tread the ground with my head down, hoping that the passers don’t see the lightness of my skin and the curves of my body.
Men pass us on these dirt streets, and at the immediate crossing of every stranger Dusi ceases as if to anticipate and ward of a predator attack, becoming deathly still in his walk. He stares unafraid or intimidated into their eyes and this strikes me as such a deep animal instinct, waiting until they pass, understanding that his friend is off limits.
I imagine the way his eyes became wildly deep, intent, ferocious—and I realize that Dusi, my gentle friend, has witnessed evil I’ve never known or imagined. I realize that he’s seen death, kissed its dark lips.
But, Dusi’s visual interaction is his only weapon. The smell of liquor reeks in the air at the men’s passing and I know they are all drunk. It’s New Year’s Day and in Rwanda there isn’t anything to wastefully buy except drunken nights. I know Dusi can’t truly protect me here.
I think about all the ways I’ve learned to protect myself against being attacked, and I appreciate that I don’t look especially intimidating. I know I’ll break, and I imagine a bloody mess inflicted by only a few pounds of pressure ripping into human flesh—a brutal grace to the throat, face, or groin. I will let myself die before I ever let anyone take my body.
Dusi asks me what’s wrong, and I tell him I made a mistake coming here, but he doesn’t really understand.
“You know how some things are right for some people, and not for others?” He nods his head this time and says yes. Now he understands, but an uncomfortable silence suspends itself in the space between us.
I wish I could tell him more, wish he could understand and help me understand myself. Dusi, I’m not who I thought I was. I thought I could handle this place, I thought I could do it on my own. I thought I was stronger than I am.
—
The road to Ruhengeri is an expansive dirt passage that wanders through some of the world’s most beautiful landscape, equally amidst some of the saddest and cruelest human conditions on the planet. It’s the road Dusi and I traveled together earlier in the day when Cathy, my coordinator with the Global Volunteer Network here in Rwanda, sent him with a hired taxi to the airport in Kigali to meet me. I had traveled for almost three days with flights from New York to London, London to Nairobi, Nairobi to Kigali—the entire length of my journey fearing my final destination. But with Dusi my fears seemed to evanesce and I was excited and overwhelmed at the immense idea of the place, at the adventure I had taken to get there, and the idea of figuring out how I would make it through. I questioned my own madness for it all.
Leaving the airport with Dusi and our driver, I nestled myself comfortably into the back seat and began shooting a barrage of photographs, capturing every image that fashioned itself in my digital canvas. Dusi often looked back at me, smiling, and I let the rushing air from the windows engulf my hair and my face and my body. I never felt more alive in the world than I did in those first moments, and I could breathe. I was in a place I only ever imagined existed.
Kigali and much of the country is still being rebuilt over ten years after the war and genocide. Next to decrepit, shell-shocked buildings are hotels and restaurants offering an oasis to escape the images and memories of human devastation. Traffic throughout the country is an unmethodical mayhem, cars and trucks transporting people and produce, dangerously dodging men and women and children in the streets.
As we traveled further into the mountains, away from the concrete rows that dotted and lined the low valleys, homes had been constructed of mud with roofs of straw. Women and children walked alongside the dirt road, carrying large buckets of water and heaps of bamboo on their heads. Often, their feet were bare, clothes ragged and torn—many of the children naked.
I saw men and women working in the fields, the sun ablaze in the perspiration on their foreheads and dark faces, sweat falling like beads of rain, running over the lines in the muscles of their backs. Their eyes glimmered in the ardent glow, their breath emanating in waves of heat that echoed through the valleys, following us.
We wandered sinuous curves into the mountains, and I found myself allured by the jungle, desiring it, wanting to be part of it, lost beneath its ample canopies that draped the road. The trees hung thick and heavy; explosions of sunlight escaped through breaks in the forest sky, exposing a sultry mist that breathed into the humid air. It’s the contrast of darkness and beauty in continent, in the sense of a place—this place so deeply rooted in histories of evil, against a landscape sensual by its own nature. I ask myself, is there not true beauty in darkness? And the act of violence not without passion? If the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, it’s the mystery of a place that seduces, and the mystery is in the darkness—a passionate mess.
Genocide memorials at sites of murders and massacres seemed almost as frequent as blinking moments. At one point while following the dirt road on the winding mountain curve, we passed a child naked in the grass only feet away from our car. Time stopped for me, and his eyes fell into mine. He was starving, his bones protruding from his body, his belly was swollen. The child consumed me in that moment—he was haunted.
I don’t know why I didn’t have the driver stop our car. I could have given him something to eat, anything I had, but only watched him as we passed, engulfed in the deep void of his gaze as though he wanted my soul. I felt like I created and destroyed him there.
—
A young girl walking alone passes me and Dusi in the darkness. Her face is expressionless—no fear—and I begin to wonder if the night is safer for her than me, or if she’s already been raped and there’s nothing more for anyone to take of her. It’s long after dusk and there are only drunken men out. I wonder if she’s a prostitute. But she’s so young.
—
Weeks before leaving for Africa I dreamt of a girl. In the dream she was motioning for me to follow—to put her into words, capture her amidst points of light in my camera’s lens. Give her proof of existence. I couldn’t recall the face, only her voice which was trancing and haunted. I was terrified of her, this child whose echo was beauty, lingering. I remember nothing else of the dream, only her little hand motioning for me, only her lingering, haunted voice.
—
Before arriving in Ruhengeri where I would have spent the next 21 days helping teachers at the Gasanze school for orphans, we made a stop at Imbabaze orphanage. Imbabaze was founded in 1994 by humanitarians in an attempt to create a safe haven for the orphans of the genocide. This is the orphanage Dusi grew up in, and it is where I would meet Cathy Emmerson for the first time.
I appeared in the open doorway of the room where all of the children were gathered for the orphanage’s annual New Year’s Day celebration; a dark silhouette against the light of the sun. Cathy embraced me and inquired about the hell I’d been through getting there, but after the hell I’d seen in the faces of all the mothers, fathers, and children on the way, I could only bashfully blush at the question.
On New Year’s Day there was more food than other days and the abana—Kinyarwandan for children—were dressed in their best clothes—tattered reminders of things once new long ago. Most of these abana are usually naked. I noticed some of the little girls wearing shoes that were obviously not their own, too big to walk in, but they wore them in clumsy grace. The children ate on the dirt floor of the room—another cement space—the day’s light streaming in through the place where a door should have been. They ate not to waste even one grain of rice or cut of potato, the food held intimately in the palms of tiny hands, eyes wide with eager love as they brought it to their hungry mouths. Children’s hands embracing bowls of fresh fruit juices, bowls too big for their small faces, sweet streams trickling over their lips and past their chins, falling to the ground. Too many children, and too many ages to count.
The warmth is different in Africa; it was as if the sun was actually consuming me first internally before ethering out of my mouth as I breathed it back out. There were innumerable dark, young faces with wide eyes staring at me, and I found myself panicking, didn’t know what to do so I stood there staring back. I confess an intimate fear of children—that when I look into their eyes they can see straight through me, can see everything I’m afraid of—that I’m afraid of myself.
I began to walk away from them, to find a place to hide, to breathe, but a little hand gently grabbed my own. I knew it was her—such an intimate touch—the girl’s touch that would be forever haunting, the child in my dream. The glare of the sun was so fierce in my eyes I could barely make out the lines of her face. She was beautiful, her skin darker than the earth, her eyes black holes consuming everything around her—the light of the sun, the hot air, me. She wore a white dress and a cross hung from her slender neck. She asked my name, and I told her, my voice low and hesitating, “Haifa.” I saw you in my dream.
She replied, “My name is Christine.”
I felt my grasp on her hand loosen and begin to fall away, my lips parted, my heart felt as though it crashed to the dirt ground, but she held firm to my hand, her skin soft, her touch gentle. I could only stare into her eyes, lost in her mystery. No words. Can it be so? Christine. If only I believed—the hand of God.
It was the first and last time I would ever see her face.
—
Storm clouds were rolling over the mountainous vast, and they fell upon my eyes like a veil of smoky silk. Instances of light began to materialize and transform the sea of sky into a glittering symphony of sensuous swells, swaying over crests and troughs. Light air tempted the veil, carried the mist of falling rain from the swollen tides to lusting lips. I closed my eyes to hear only its pulsing euphonics. I felt its baritones throbbing through my body, into the earth. It sounded like a hushing crash of ocean, and to escape I slipped into the gray oblivion.
—
Leaving the orphanage, Dusi and I now drove in an old Land Rover with Cathy. About five years ago when Cathy had traveled to Rwanda on a gorilla tracking excursion, she fell in love with the people and the country, and today Cathy is a vital figure to the orphanage and school. A Canadian woman in her fifties, when I first met Cathy upon our arrival at the orphanage she threw me off guard. I had anticipated a woman older in appearance, shorter, perhaps a bit round and above everything, nurturing. But Cathy is a hard-ass who tells it like it is, and she looked more like a London punk with short and spiky bleached-blond hair and heavy black eyeliner that outlined striking blue eyes. She was easily six-feet tall and there was nothing round about her.
The interior of the Land Rover had been gutted except for the front seats, and I sat on a bench in the back beneath the windows of the truck, every rocky bump throwing my body into a limbo, turning into vibrations the frequencies of the words escaping my lips as we talked. A mass of hands pressed against the car’s windows trying to reach inside—the desperation of their palms separated from the fear on my face by only the glass, and they were waving, smiling madly and shouting at us, loving the chaos of the interruption as they mobbed our vehicle.
We only stopped when Cathy realized a little boy had been running alongside the back of the truck, holding onto its hatch, letting his feet drag in the dirt—he had no idea of the danger he’d put himself in. But it was something else that distracted my attention from the boy. I noticed a group of men hovering against a wall and their attention was intent against something smaller, something vulnerable. I realized it was a young girl, and I was horrified; I felt I might cry at the idea of the sight. Cathy began yelling to the men from the open windows to distract them from the girl, and when their attention turned to us she ran, terrified. Her clothes were falling from her shoulders and she looked back in despairing embarrassment. The men gathered around us and the rank of liquor grazed my senses.
—
My attention returns to the dirt road Dusi and I are wandering in Ruhengeri village. Cathy lives three blocks from the compound where I’ve been placed, and our efforts to get in contact with her are hopeless, the images of the day a constant reminder that in this moment, fear is necessary.
We reach a stand like a newspaper booth, selling gum and candy and soft drinks, magazines and newspapers, and Dusi’s brought me to use their telephone. There are two other men standing around beside the woman who’s actually working the stand, and they don’t know what to make of us when they see me, a dark bazungu—white woman. For the people of Rwanda, all westerners are white, regardless of skin color—it’s a backwards notion, but I accept that the darkness of my middle-eastern and south Asian complexion is inconsequential.
Dusi tells me I’ll have to pay a dollar for every call, and all I have in my pocket is twenties—we were going to exchange currencies in the morning. I know they don’t have change, but at this point I don’t care, and I hand over a bill to the woman’s confused delight. Dusi asks me to tell him the phone number I want to dial, and I realize I’ve forgotten the U.S. country code; I realize I’m so overwhelmed and exhausted that I’m not even sure I even know who I want to call, let alone the phone number. We begin dialing numbers, but nothing’s working and I’m panicking, beginning to fear this trip into the night has been for nothing and I’ve foolishly risked my own safety. Dusi decides we’ll try to find another phone, that maybe something was wrong with this one, and we set back out into the darkness.
It feels like every minute is bleeding into hours until I’m finally able to get in touch with my boyfriend in New York. Unable to stay on the phone long enough before the operator disconnects us, all I can tell him as I cry into the receiver is, “I have to find a way out of here…Chris, I’m so sorry…”—click.
Here, I finally know what it is to truly be alone. So deep into the heart of darkness.
—
Back to where we started. Dusi and I are sitting against the concrete barricade of the wall surrounding our compound, and I realize the sky has cleared. The moon, nearly full, is lingering overhead cascading its whitewash in hues of blue that consume the blacks of our eyes, illuminating the liquid crystals of perspiration on our faces and the tears that are falling in hot tides to my lips, bleeding into the palms of my hands and between the divides of my fingers, trembling. God, please, I promise I’ll believe.
“I know a boy—he can get a car, take you back to Kigali. But you have to wait here for me.” Dusi’s looking at me, eager. Tired. “I’ll make sure you’re safe.”
Hesitant, I agree.
—
It’s sometime in the dark of early morning and I’m alone inside waiting for Dusi to return, but he’s been gone for over an hour and I’m starting to get scared that because of me, something’s happened to him. I’ve been blindly flipping through the pages of a London gossip magazine that someone’s left on the table—“Prince Harry to serve in Iraq”; “The Scandal Behind Blair’s Early Departure”; “Dubai Creates a Multi-Island Oasis Depicting “The World”, Land for Sale.” I wonder who will buy Rwanda.
Oh, wait. It’s not even there.
I hear someone fumbling at the door, and although I know it’s Dusi, I don’t move. Instead, I’m staring at the handle, afraid I might be wrong. As he enters he tells me the boy has agreed to take us to Kigali for $80 US, and he will meet us in a few hours just before daybreak.
I can’t sleep and Dusi refuses to leave me alone in the house. With his company in my insomniac state, my tired curiosity takes over.
“Dusi, do you think I’m crazy?”
“No—I think you’re interesting.”
I smile and laugh. “Do you have any family?”
At this he looks to the ground, then directly into me. “No, only a sister. She lives in the orphanage.”
He tells me before he came here to work for Cathy he had lived in the orphanage since the genocide. I realize the inappropriateness of my inquiry, but I don’t want to act in pity of him—he’s stronger than that, stronger than me.
“Do you go to school?” He asks me this, and I’m relieved at the lightness of the question.
“Yes.”
“What do you study?”
I tell him I’m studying writing, but he doesn’t quite understand the idea.
“I want to write about places,” I tell him.
“Will you write about me? If I ever leave Rwanda, I will never come back. Have you seen many places?”
“Many places.”
Here, in our obscure hideout in the middle of a village somewhere in the depths of Africa, I tell this boy about the world.
Hours pass and it’s five o’clock in the morning. The sun will be rising soon, so Dusi decides it’s time to leave. Back in New York I had carved wooden charms fashioned after the moon I wear around my neck, and hung them on short strings in bracelets for the children. I’d intended the charms to be a departing gift, but not so soon, and these I now reluctantly leave on the table along with notebooks that they will use for journals and writing. Dusi asks me the meaning of the waning crescent that hangs pendulously suspended from my neck and I explain that before I wrote about places, I studied the stars. It’s where I go to escape.
“You must be a dreamer,” he says.
At this, I look into his dark eyes and fall over any words that may have followed. “Do you know what Mark Twain once wrote?” I know he has no idea of the writer. “Sail away from the safe harbor.” Explore. Dream. Discover. “You have to dream.”
“Will you write something for my sister? A letter? I want her to know you.”
Girl, I don’t believe in angels, but two found me today.
I leave a short letter for Dusi’s sister, and another for Cathy, and I leave defeated.
We walk back out into the morning night to a street corner and wait until Dusi’s hired boy finds us in the darkness. As we stand on the side of the road a small truck full of men stop and begin speaking with Dusi, and I turn away—the fear is something I can’t get used to, but I don’t know if I have the energy anymore to fight or care if something were to happen. As the men drive away, I see headlights coming over a hill in the distance; the car is rattling away as though all of its parts were about to dismember themselves at every revolution. Our driver has arrived.
Inside, the car reeks with the stench of stale sweat and I gag at my inhalations until I become acquainted with the smell.
The drive on the road from Ruhengeri is self-evident to be a death-wish in itself. In the early morning darkness, the heavy mist that has entangled itself beneath the canopy of trees is too thick to see beyond loose vines and small boulders beneath. Beyond the edge of the dirt road, rugged cliffs drop into jungle valley, and I know there’s no logical reason why I should be alive. It’s as though our driver is driving blind, and he sails through, slicing a swath in the thick fog effortlessly mad, by instinct alone that he knows the curves of this road.
I’ve always imagined that if I die, I’ll die in the face of adventure, and that may mean dying young. I realize I may get my wish after all, and now, exhausted in all ways, I find comfort in the idea of giving in to death and I begin to drift off to sleep as dawn begins to break. May flights of angels wing you to your rest.
It’s the sudden grinding of breaks and heavy friction of our car that throws me from the dream I had fallen into. I must have been unconscious for over an hour and we’re in Kigali, the madness of another day alive around us. We’re stopping at a security checkpoint, but this is unusual, and unlike yesterday when the soldiers waved us through, they now surround our car with their AK-47’s raised, bringing our driver to a stop. I feel a numbness in my jaw that travels throughout my body—I’m the reason these soldiers have blocked our car.
I recognize a physical difference between Dusi and the driver, and the soldiers that are now surrounding us. Neither Dusi nor the boy is much taller than me, their builds muscular, stocky, and their skin as dark as the night we just left. But these soldiers are taller and thinner, their skin lighter, the lines in their faces harder.
I realize that on the road from Ruhengeri, I traveled with Hutus.
A soldier walks over to the right side of the car where Dusi is sitting in the front seat, me directly behind him. The driver begins speaking and I can’t understand, but I see a fear in Dusi and I know it can’t be good. He says nothing, only looks ahead in defiance of the soldier. I look to the driver and a smile slithers over his lips, and he looks back at me. I realize his intentions are to offer me to the soldier for a price—an idea that sickens the numbness that’s crept over my body. I wonder how rape would feel, and I look to the soldier. I wonder if there is pleasure in inflicting fear—a strength in the feeling of weakness beneath you—an independence in found helplessness. I imagine the reality of a man forcing himself between my thighs, and inside I’m screaming.
When the soldier leans his face through the open window of my seat, I meet his glare for only a moment, the whites of his eyes yellowed like the rotting mattress. Fear is a sickness. In defiance of my fright I turn my head back and gaze directly ahead, unafraid by the face that is so close I can feel his breath, his heat. God help you if you touch me.
I stare through the glass of the car’s windshield; let these last images of Rwanda invade the dark place in my mind. I’ve done this to myself.
The soldier steps backward from the car, keeping his black gaze against me, and once more my eyes meet his before he waves us through. Dusi looks back at me and smiles in relief, but the driver looks ahead in disappointment. I don’t know why he let us go, but I understand in my own madness that he still took something from my soul.
