When I was a regular child, I lived in Kigali, Rwanda, and I was a precocious snoop. My nickname was Cassette. I repeated everything I saw or heard, including that my sister Claire, who is nine years older than me, wore shorts under her skirt and played soccer instead of doing her family errands after school. My mother spent her mornings at church and her afternoons in the garden, where she taught me the names of plants — cauliflower, birds of paradise — and how to care for each, which needed to be in the cool soil under the mango tree and which needed the warm sun. My father owned a car service. He worked hard, often late into the night, and some afternoons he came home to nap. I knew that I was meant to be quiet while he slept, that I was supposed to stop screaming and shaking the branches of the mango tree, pretending that it was a bus that would take me and my brother to Canada or Butare. But one day I forgot. My father, who’d never punished me before, called me into the den and slapped me in the face. That was the most cruelty I’d ever seen.

In 1993, when I was five, I started kindergarten. I considered myself the most special child there, maybe the most special child in the whole world, because one day my nanny picked me up carrying a rain coat and kelly green rain boots that had belonged to Claire, and she also told me stories that made sense of the world, like that the gods shook out the ocean like a rug to make waves. But that nanny, who I loved, disappeared. A few months later my new nanny came to kindergarten to pick me up. On our way home, we passed a group of men singing, dancing, and drumming in the street, on a corner where we often bought sugar. I wanted to stop and dance with them — I’d never seen these people before, so it was exciting and exotic, and the dancers were blocking the dusty road anyway, not letting cars pass. But that nanny, who had a history of plying my patience with mandazi, or beignets, so that she could talk to her friends, refused. At home I tattled. “You shouldn’t have walked that way,” my mother said to her sharply. A few days later that nanny disappeared. I never went to kindergarten again.

Clemantine on a train from Philadelphia to New York.

You know those little pellets you drop in water that expand into huge sponges? My life was the opposite. Everything shrunk. I was forbidden to play in the mango tree, then forbidden to play outside. Our curtains, which my mother threw open at five each morning, suddenly remained closed. The drumming began, loud and far away. Then the car horns. My father stopped working after dark. My mother quit going to church. Instead she prayed in my room, where my whole family now slept, because it had the smallest window. We ate dinner with the lights off. My parents’ faces turned into faces I had never seen, and I heard noises that I did not understand — not screaming, worse. My parents whispered and I eavesdropped. I heard them say that some robbers had ransacked our neighbor’s house and left a note saying they’d soon return for their girls.

By then I was six. No one would explain anything to me — no parable for the world closing in on itself, like the sky kissing the ground to make the morning dew. Then one day my mother told Claire to pack a few things, to go to my grandmother’s farm, which we loved. At her house we never even wore shoes. The next morning a van from my father’s car service arrived. My mother handed me a bag and put me in the van alongside Claire. She made me promise to behave. She hugged us and said she’d see us soon.

On the way out of Kigali, we stopped to pick up two of my cousins — girls Claire’s age. The driver knocked on the door. Nobody came out. We stopped at other houses; other girls entered the van. We all squished together in the middle of the bench seats, away from the windows. For some time we crouched on the floor. Claire told me we needed to play the silent game. The drive took forever. We didn’t even stop to eat kabobs or buy the soap that we always brought to my grandmother as a gift.

At my grandmother’s, some of my uncles and cousins were already in her kitchen, the older girls peeling potatoes like city girls — not well. I idolized these cousins, their black freckles and fancy clothes. My grandmother circled them like a lion, livid. Earlier that day they’d snuck out of her house and walked down the street, to borrow a neighbor’s skin lotion.

Every hour I demanded an update on when my parents were coming — or at least my brother, who we called Pudi, because he loved Puma and Adidas. My grandmother, cousins, and sister all just said, “Soon.” Nobody would play with me. I felt outraged at my mistreatment. I stopped eating and bathing and refused to let anyone touch my hair. After a few nights my grandmother said, with zero enthusiasm, “Let’s play hide and seek,” and she took me, Claire, and my cousins to a different house to sleep. The following night she said, “let’s hide again.” This time she told us to climb inside the deep pit in the ground that was used to make banana wine.

When it happened, we heard a knock on the door. My grandmother gestured for us to be silent and then, she motioned for us to run, or really, to belly-crawl through the sweet potato field. I carried a blanket, which turned out to be a towel. Claire pulled my arm. Once we crawled through the field and reached the tall trees, we ran, for real, off the farm and deep into a thick banana grove, where we saw other people, most of them young, some of them bloody with wounds. We walked for hours, until everything hurt, not toward anything, just away. We crouched down by a stream to drink. I started shivering, despite the heat, and said to Claire, “I want to go home.”

She stood up, yanked my wrist, and said, “We can’t stay here. Other people will come.”

That night it rained a sticky, thick syrup. I held on to Claire’s shirt, too exhausted to hold hands. A woman tried to give us food, but we were too afraid to take it. A man told us he knew the way to safety. We followed him to the Burundi border, to the Akanyaru River. There were bodies floating in it. I was so young that I assumed they were asleep.

All my toe nails fell out. We lived off fruit. We found an abandoned house and spent the day hidden under a bed. After days, a week — who could keep track? — we found a cornfield where we heard children playing. Their cries now sounded exotic. Hadn’t the whole world changed? Claire decided that we needed to find these playing children’s parents. When we did she told them that we’d come from over the hill and that our family would follow soon. The mother accepted this non-explanation and took us to her one-room hut where she slept with her family on a bed of straw. All night I itched. In the morning I woke with welts and the children laughed at me for not knowing what lice was. We stayed there, working in the fields and eating boiled corn and sweet potatoes with no oil or salt — the worst cooked food I’d ever consumed. Then a few weeks later, we saw people walking down the roads, hundreds, maybe thousands, carrying bags, children, baskets, and faded clothes on their heads. One man carried a dog. Claire decided we needed to join them.

“What if you go and you don’t find anything?” the mother of the hut asked us.

Claire said, “We need to go.”