Chapter 02

Le Blanc

Shards — September 2020 — Brussels, Belgium, to Bujumbura, Burundi

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gabriel was one year into his second long-term relationship when his girlfriend, Valerie, lost her older brother. Valerie, her two half siblings Josine and Marcus, her sister-in-law, her niece, and her ex-husband Enrico formed the large contingent headed to Valerie's native Burundi for the funeral. Gabriel joined them, returning to his birth continent for the first time in twenty-five years.

Pandemic restrictions on air travel turned their route into a convoluted two-day itinerary—Brussels to Doha, Doha to Dar es Salaam, then Goma and finally Bujumbura.

After travel vaccines and COVID tests that had to be timed just right to remain valid, the whole party, minus Josine, met at Brussels Airport. Despite having the largest plane of the journey, the Brussels-to-Doha leg proved the least comfortable. Face masks were the norm by then, an accepted reality nobody questioned anymore. It was a different story for face shields. Gabriel and every other passenger aboard the A320 got to cosplay as welders for the nearly eight-hour journey to Qatar.

Doha's airport unfolded as a maze of glass and steel, gleaming under sterile lights. With the flight from Brussels behind them, they had just enough time to meet Valerie's sister, who'd flown in from Sweden, before catching their next connection. Gabriel spotted Josine as she made her way toward them, her gait unhurried and her smile as bright as her clothing.

"You must be Gabriel," she said, pulling him into a tight hug.

Caught off guard by her embrace, Gabriel stiffened for half a second before he patted her back awkwardly. "Nice to finally meet you."

Josine was one of those people whose relentless good spirits could grate quickly, yet somehow made it nearly impossible to stay angry with her. Her energy didn't ask permission; it simply surged forth and swept you along. She laughed at mask-checkers and waved at strangers. When Valerie rolled her eyes at her sister's antics, Gabriel glimpsed a family dynamic that predated him, would outlast him, and would never quite include him. Valerie's grief made no such noise; she drifted half a step behind, her replies quiet and sparse, thumb tracing the stream of condolences lighting up her phone.

Before they boarded their next flight, Gabriel caught the nickname in passing. "What have you brought us this time?" Josine stage-whispered to her sister. A moment later, a strangled laugh died behind her hand. "Your blanc is so uptight."

Gabriel never quite figured out why the comment didn't bother him then. Maybe it was the stress of the journey, the mild agoraphobia he'd always taken in stride, or simply Josine's goofy charm and near-childlike innocence. Whatever the reason, he registered it and let it slide.

At the gate, once the whole group made it past security, he felt Josine's arm snake around his shoulder. "See, Le Blanc? We made it with time to spare." Her wide smile was casual, earnest, and full of mirth. Gabriel recoiled inwardly, unable to articulate why, even to himself. Something had shifted. The name felt confirmed, not given. It carried a dreadful je ne sais quoi, as though he'd been convicted of a crime for which he'd never been tried.

Six hours later, Dar es Salaam welcomed them with smog thick enough to chew. On their way to the guesthouse, Josine called Gabriel "Le Blanc" when he marveled at street vendors balancing towers of goods on their heads. She called him "Le Blanc" when he flinched at a passing boda-boda. And she called him "Le Blanc" as he stood frozen before mounds of mangoes painted in the gradients of a summer dawn.

To his traveling companions, who had grown up in Africa and returned multiple times since, this was routine. To Gabriel, everything was discovery. They watched him with amused, detached smirks, fascinated by his fascination.

Despite the looming funeral for Valerie's brother and the repeated nickname, Gabriel gave silent thanks for Josine's jaunty attitude. It was easier than watching Valerie's grief surface at unpredictable moments, leaving him feeling inadequate and guilty for feeling inadequate. Josine and Enrico teased each other like siblings reunited after years apart. Their raucousness allowed Gabriel to disconnect from the group, to focus on the stirrings of childhood memory without feeling like he was failing Valerie. He ignored moments when the conversation turned to Le Blanc's odd, white-man behavior, and dissolved instead into the delightful African chaos around him, horns blaring, incense curling in the air, the slap of flip-flops on uneven concrete.

Their hosts welcomed them with a generosity grand enough to advertise status, then the group split naturally in two. The women would visit the local market with their hostess while the host took Marcus and Gabriel to get a haircut.

Gabriel breathed a sigh of relief when Enrico excused himself to visit a friend. He had nothing against Valerie's ex-husband; Enrico had been civil, even charming, exactly as Gabriel remembered him back when they were on friendlier terms. But Valerie had made it clear that Enrico disapproved of their relationship, and Gabriel knew civility revealed little in Rwandan and Burundian circles alike. He himself wouldn't have chosen this company if death hadn't assembled it. Maybe Josine was right and he was so far gone to the white side that he could no longer interpret Rwando-Burundian social registers. Or maybe death was, after all, truly the greatest of equalizers. Or maybe he was dead tired after so long in the air.

The next morning, they rose at dawn to catch the flight to Goma, their final layover before Burundi. Gabriel embraced his awe, gaping at the early sun climbing golden over evergreen fields, mountains cresting and falling like earthen waves. Africa didn't whisper. She sang a chorus of diesel engines, goat bells, and children's shouts.

"Look at Le Blanc," Josine said at one point, snapping a photo on her phone as he pressed his own phone to the car window. "Acting like he's never seen dirt before." The echoing laughter stung, an inside joke he hadn't been told, but Gabriel's batteries had recharged after a good night's sleep. Inside, he flipped them off. His and Valerie's room had been the only one with air conditioning anyway. Laugh at that.

The airport came into view as their small plane descended toward Goma, little more than a glorified shed beside a single concrete strip. The red earth below, its dust encroaching on the strip to the point of near-invisibility, cracked open memories Gabriel had forgotten. Kanombe, Kigali. Age six, but before the Mango Tree Treaty… he believed. That same impossible dust, the color of rust, carried him from Goma to Kanombe, where his brother had lived while attending university. Gabriel had eaten his first spaghetti there, back when his eldest brother was still his idol.

It was also on that visit to Kanombe, more than two decades earlier, that Gabriel had fallen in love with his brother's girlfriend, Joan. The first time Gabriel had wet the be in which all three slept together, his brother had given him a spanking that put Nunu's knuckle raps to shame. When it happened again, Joan had noticed first, then made an obvious show of spilling water across the shared bed so his brother wouldn't notice. Huh. Nearly three decades later, Gabriel finally realized that Joan's kindness, much more than her gorgeous looks, was what his child self had fallen for. The revelation amused and astonished him in equal measure.

The memory of Joan stayed with Gabriel during their short stay in Goma as they waited for the final plane. When they took off again, rising above the postcard landscape of verdant green on crimson soil, thoughts of Joan made Gabriel's eyes prickle. A pang of guilt rocked him. Why was he mourning another when the entire reason he was here was to ease his girlfriend's own mourning? Why now when he hadn't so much as thought of Joan in two decades? When he turned away from the window Josine had insisted Valerie surrender to Le Blanc, Gabriel found Valerie absorbed in a loud Swahili conversation that everyone but him could follow. He thought of his childhood daydreams, of the spear he always wielded when they ended, inevitably, in an epic battle with his brother over Joan.

Like so, so many others, Joan was gone now, nothing of her left but bones buried somewhere. Perhaps not even that. When Valerie leaned over and brushed his shoulder, he closed his eyes and feigned deep sleep.

A welcoming party awaited them in Bujumbura. As everyone embraced, Gabriel stood apart, an awkward smile fixed in place. He wasn't sure how much grief he was entitled to, and the old sense of not belonging began to nag again. That Enrico fit in without any apparent effort did not help, almost as if he were the one always meant to be here, leaving Gabriel little more than an impostor. No. That did not help one bit. Still, he rebuked himself and pushed the pang of envy or jealousy or both back down.

Josine noticed Gabriel's distress and, with a huge grin, grabbed her youngest brother and marched him toward Gabriel, interrupting his exchange with Enrico without a second thought.

"Bruno," she shouted, pulling on her brother's hand, "you have to meet the Blanc that Val brought into the family."

Bruno laughed and took Gabriel's hand in both of his. Gabriel let him hold it, unsure how to act. He fumbled through the greeting, hoping he hadn't already made a fool of himself. When Bruno repeated the name—Le Blanc—arching a questioning brow, Gabriel decided to ignore the pit in his stomach as he gave a polite laugh. Bruno gave half a smile, narrowed his eyes in confusion, then reciprocated. Josine, being Josine, amplified.

Further away, Gabriel caught Valerie watching them. He thought he saw a little smile stretch her lips. Was it contentment? Relief? Had she been worried, on top of everything else that… her brother might not—what? Not like him? Gabriel grew self-conscious, but forced all misgivings aside. This was not about him. He would endure a thousand Le Blancs if it eased Valerie's burden.

Ah, how easy it can be to misread a situation when you're missing half the story. I can hardly believe that those events happened less than five years ago, considering how little I knew of how much I didn't know. Anyway. Don't worry. We'll get back to that.

The moniker Le Blanc would cling to me like secondhand smoke throughout the stay and long after. Back in Europe, every subsequent meeting with Josine resurrected the name.

Looking back, despite everything that would later unfold with Valerie, I hold no ill will toward Josine. The anger the nickname triggered was an arrow loosed in the dark. It took me a while to realize that what it awoke in me wasn't anger so much as disappointment. I had long known of my dual identity. I had accepted that not everyone would understand and that of those who understood, few would empathize. Truth be told, what really pissed me off was how alien my own culture felt after years and years of fighting the label of foreigner abroad, only to discover that I had become one indeed. At home.

Dar es Salaam's streets, Bujumbura's markets, and Goma's red-dust plains all held mirrors to my face. Josine did the same. Look, they all said. You belong here. I knew they were right, but I couldn't see it. Couldn't feel it. From birth until Belgium stole me at ten, I'd never seen a white face; for the next decade, I rarely saw a black one outside my own family. And here I was, surrounded by black faces, not a single white one in sight, and instead of elation, I felt… nothing. At first, there was a sense of wrongness I couldn't quite put my finger on. When I later realized that the shock came from seeing people who looked like me everywhere, I felt ashamed for having associated that with wrong. But even after I gave myself enough grace to process what I was feeling, I still couldn't belong the way everyone else seemed to. And the kicker? Even if I set the context aside and tried to explain what I was feeling, I knew I'd only be mocked with Le Blanc, Mister Philosopher, and other supposedly harmless jabs. That made bottling it all up feel not only easier, but necessary. Justified.

So, no, Josine wasn't wrong. The assholes who'd called me Bounty weren't wrong. Fuck me—I was, in fact, white inside and black outside.

And yet, she was wrong. My own culture and all the assumptions it imposed, the virtue-signaling activists, and the bigoted racists alike were all wrong. I myself had been wrong in thinking that acknowledging the dichotomy was the same as solving it.

And… right there. Assuming there was something to solve was the issue. Like children lashing out because they cannot name what actually hurts, we saw something other, something different, decided it was a problem, and set about fixing the wrong thing. You can only make things worse if you try to cauterize a wound that isn't there.

Hearing Josine call me Le Blanc triggered something I couldn't identify, name, or exorcise. So I reached for one of the earliest tools we humans learn to master. Blame chased doubt away. If Josine was the problem, I didn't need to ask uncomfortable questions or face uneasy answers. I swallowed every complaint and called it generosity. I never asked her to stop and deemed myself gracious.

Unless these pages reach her one day, she'll die thinking the nickname was good banter. Nothing more. She'll never know that, sometimes, I still find myself on a No Man's Island where every canoe is made of ash, every carpenter is a faded memory, and the tide rises so fast that only the suicidally brave or the truly desperate still dare to tread water.

Alone.