Free Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga

how urgent it was that he fulfill the promise he’d made to himself. It would now be his life’s mission. The Tutsi would disappear, of that he was certain. Here theywould eventually be exterminated, while those who had gone into exile would ensure their own people’s decline through interbreeding. All that could be saved was the legend, the legend that was the truth. So he neglected his friends and abandoned the plantation. He learned to decipher hieroglyphs. He attempted to study Coptic and Ge’ez. He tried to speak Kinyarwanda with his servant. But he was clearly no scholar, or anthropologist, or ethnologist. All those books, all those studies, led nowhere. For he was an artist, intuition and inspiration were his only guides, and they took him much further than all these scholars with their erudition. So he decided to continue his research in the field, in Sudan and in Egypt. There he saw the goddess’s temple before it was swallowed by the desert, and he saw the pyramids of the black pharaohs, the steles of the Candace queens by the Nile. That’s where he found the proof he sought. Those faces carved in stone were the same as those he had sketched. All his doubts were gone. It was like an epiphany. The empire of the black pharaohs, that was exactly where the Tutsi came from. Chased off by Christianity, by Islam, by desert barbarians, they undertook the long trek to the source of the Nile, which they believed to be the land of the Gods who, by virtue of the river, bestowed plenty. They had kept their cows, their sacred bulls, and their noble bearing, their daughters had kept their beauty. But they had lost their Memory.
    He, Fontenaille, was now going to fulfill his mission. He had abandoned everything for her. He had rebuilt the goddess’s temple,and the pyramid of the black pharaohs. He had painted the goddess, and Candace, the queen. “And you,” he said, “because you are beautiful, because you look like them, you will get your Memory back, thanks to me.”
    Monsieur de Fontenaille led them to his workshop. With some difficulty, they weaved their way through the stacks of boxes of drawings. There, on an easel, was a sketched portrait.
    “But that’s you, Veronica,” said Virginia.
    “Yes,” said Monsieur de Fontenaille. “That is indeed our goddess, but you’ll see her better in her temple.”
    The walls were hung with reproductions and photographs of frescoes, bas-reliefs, and steles depicting black pharaohs on their thrones; gods with falcon heads, jackal heads, crocodile heads; goddesses crowned with solar discs and cattle horns. Monsieur de Fontenaille paused before a large map of the River Nile. Veronica noticed that none of the place-names on it matched those she had read in her geography book.
    “That’s Philae, the temple of the Great Goddess,” explained Monsieur de Fontenaille. “And there, that’s Meroë, capital of the Kush, the empire of the black pharaohs, of the Candace; capital of a thousand pyramids. I’ve been there for you, the Tutsi, and I found you there. Here, I’ll show you.”
    He handed her a sheet from one of the boxes.
    “It’s your portrait. I did it based on the rough sketches I madeat the pilgrimage. And now I’ll set it next to this photo I took at Meroë. It shows Isis, the Great Goddess, spreading her wings to protect the kingdom. Her breasts are bared. Look closely at her face, it’s your own, to the last detail. Someone did your portrait in Meroë three thousand years ago. This proves it.”
    “But I wasn’t around three thousand years ago, I don’t have wings, and the kingdom is gone.”
    “Just wait and see, you’ll soon understand. Now we must go to the temple.”
    “Veronica,” said Monsieur de Fontenaille, “when you came to the temple for the first time, you probably didn’t take in my fresco well. Look closely at the faces of the young women bringing offerings to the Great Goddess, don’t you recognize some of them?”
    “Oh, yes,” said