"You have to know my brother," Terry said. "He wasn't being disrespectful."

Was he speaking to her in that quiet voice or to himself? She watched him draw on the yobie It had gone out.

"You should go to bed."

"In a while."

"Well, I'm going." She got up from the table with her Russian pistol and stood looking at him. "Why do you talk like this to me?"

"Like what?"

Walking away she said, "Never mind."

And heard him say, "Why are you mad at me?"

Lying still to listen, she heard him taking a shower and then could hear him brushing his teeth, in the bath between the two bedrooms.

Always he brushed his teeth and smelled of toothpaste when he came to her bed. Once a week he brought two Larium pills, so they wouldn't catch malaria, and a glass of water they shared. The pills were hallucinogenic and in the morning they would try to describe their dreams.

Tonight he slipped in next to her beneath the netting and remained lying on his back, not moving, leaving to her whatever would come next.

She said, "You tell me you come here to paint a house. That's the reason?"

"It's something I wanted to do."

"Then why don't you paint it?"

He didn't answer, but said after a few moments, "I want to have the bodies buried, the ones lying in the church, the bones."

She said, "Yes?"

But now he was silent.

She said, "Can't you talk to me?"

"I'm trying to."

She said, "Give me a break." One of his expressions she liked.

For several minutes she listened to the sounds in the night, outside, before turning onto her side and was closer to him now, close enough to see his face, close enough to rest the stump of her arm on his chest.

Now if he takes it in his hand…

He did, he took the hard, scarred end of what remained of her arm and began to caress it lightly with his fingers. She raised her head and he slipped his arm around her.

She said, "I know why you don't talk to me."

She waited and he said, "Why?"

"Because you going to leave and not come back."

This time when she waited and he said nothing she raised her head and put her mouth on his.

She awoke in the morning looking at sunlight through the netting and closed her eyes again to listen for sounds in the house. She knew he was gone but continued to listen. Sometimes he would return to his own bedroom during the night. Sometimes he rose before she did and would put the coffee on the stove to boil. She listened to hear him cough and clear his throat. She believed if she didn't see him for a long time and heard him clear his throat in a crowd of people she would know it was Terry. There were times she believed he loved her: not only when they were in bed and he showed his hunger for her, but other times, seeing the way he looked at her and she would wait for him to say it. When she said it to him she would smile, so the words wouldn't frighten him. After they went to bed the first time he was so quiet she said to him, "Listen, there were always priests who want me, Rwandese priests, French priests, it's nothing new. Do you think people care if we sleep together?"

Opening her eyes she turned her head on the pillow.

He was gone.

Now she turned to her side of the bed to get up, looked at the night table and saw her pistol was also gone.

IT TOOK HIM THREE HOURS to drive the hundred miles from Arisimbi to the Banque Commerciale and the Sabena ticket offlee in Kigali, and then three hours back, the road through Rwanda like nothing from past experience.

Get to the top of a long grade and look around, all you saw were hills in every direction, misty hills, bright green hills, hills that were terraced and cultivated, crops growing among groves of banana trees, the entire country, Terry believed, one big vegetable garden.

The red streaks on distant hills were dirt roads, the squares of red dotting the slopes, houses, compounds, a church. He cruised the twolane blacktop with all the windows in Toreki's Volvo station wagon cranked open. He drove with a sense of making his move, his life about to turn a corner.

The down side was getting stuck behind trucks on the blind curves and grades, trucks piled high with bananas and bags of charcoal, trucks carrying work crews, a big yellow semi with PRIMUS BEER lettered across the rear end that Terry stared at for miles. The trucks, and the people along the side of the road, people standing in groups like they were waiting for a bus and people going somewhere, women in bright colors carrying plastic buckets on their heads, clay pots as big around as medicine balls, boys pushing carts loaded with plastic chairs grooved together, goats grazing close to the road, Ankole cows with their graceful horns and tough meat taking their time to cross.

But no dogs. Where were the dogs? A roadside poster warned against AIDS. A sign on a Coca-Cola stand said ICI SALLON DE COIFFURE.

People strayed onto the blacktop and he would lean on his horn, something he never did at home.

Finally cresting a grade he descended toward Adsimbi, the village laid out below him left to right, the marketplace of concrete stalls on the offside of the main road, away from the sector office and the squares of red brick among plots of vegetation, the bar, the beer lady's house, the compound where Laurent's squad lived, the well, the charcoal seller's house, the compound where Thomas the corn man lived, all of it a patchwork of red and green leading up to the white church and the rectory in the trees.

Terry parked the Volvo wagon in front of the sector office and went in.

Laurent Kamweya in his starched camies looked up from the only desk in the room and then rose saying, "Fatha, how can I be of service?"

Terry liked Laurent and believed he meant it. "You know where I can find Bernard?"

It seemed to stop him for a moment. Laurent turned enough to indicate the window, the heavy wooden shutters open, the street outside that trailed through the village. "You see the white flower by the door of the beer lady's house," Laurent said. "She has banana beer today, so that's where he is, with his friends. Tell me what you want with him."

"Have a talk," Terry said. "See if I can get him to give himself up."

"Persuade Bernard Nyikizi to confess to murder?"

"To save his immortal soul."

"You serious to do this?"

I'll give it a try. Are you busy?" Terry said. "There's something else I want to ask you."

Laurent said, "Please," gesturing over his desk, the surface clean except for a clipboard holding a few papers. The brick walls of the office were as clean as the desk. A woven mat covered the floor. The place always looked the same, temporary, never much going on. Laurent was watching now as Terry slipped his hand inside his white cassock and came out with currency, ten five-thousand-franc notes, the new one illustrated with tribal dancers, and laid the money on the clean desk.

"Fifty thousand francs," Terry said. "I'd like you to do me a favor, if you would. Use half of this to pay for graves dug in the churchyard, forty-seven graves."

"You have permission of the bourgmestre?"

"Fuck the bourgmestre, it's private property, the state has nothing to say about it."

Laurent hesitated. "Why do you ask me? You could see to it."

"I'm leaving, going home."

"For good?"

"For good or bad. This afternoon."

"You have someone to take your place?"

"That's not my problem. Ask the bishop."

"Will you continue to be a priest?"

Terry hesitated. "Why do you ask that?"

"You seem different to other priests I've known. I say this as a compliment to you." Laurent paused, waiting for Terry to tell if he would still be a priest. When he didn't answer, Laurent said,