Blood Papa

by Jean Hatzfeld

  It was at primary school that I began to understand. During history lessons, classmates from the other ethnicity questioned the teachers about what had happened. The teachers explained the killings. Did my classmates turn around to look at me? I don’t remember anything surprising. Wickedness never touched me at school in Kanazi. The pupils didn’t know very much about my papa because we had been in Nyamata during the events. I’m not sure if this is also how it was for my older brother Fabrice. Anyway, I myself was never pestered with nasty words. I learned about the ethnic conflict in class. I found out some information about the killings, and later about the escape to Congo, the trials of the ones who confessed. The teachers delivered their lesson without adding personal details about the culprits or the dead. No mention of names or relatives. We didn’t talk about it at home. We turned the dial on the radio to avoid the commemorative programs. That was a rough time for us. I was brought to the memorial site with my school. I heard witness accounts during the ceremonies. Which ones? The stories about the people burned in the church. The people thrown into pits, the looted houses, the expeditions in places like the Nyamwiza marshes.

  My brother and I connected all that with Papa’s punishment. One morning, point-blank, I asked my mama if Papa had done something terrible. She told me that he hadn’t killed anyone. I persisted with the stubbornness of a little girl. She explained that he had kept his machete from the blood, but that he had been a famous guide. We lived that way for a long time, without really knowing if Papa wielded his machete or not. The rumors flew; with Papa gone, they kept us from digging too deep. When a child ponders things with no adult to support her, she feels uneasy and she loses trust. In other words, she stops listening. In 2003, we heard that the other children’s papas were leaving prison in a long line of pardoned men. We wondered why Papa wasn’t one of them. But really, we wondered why, if Papa hadn’t killed with his blade, he had been given the death penalty.

  That’s just the life we children lived: in dread of knowing what happened and what was going to happen to our papa. Fabrice, too, started questioning again. When nothing was going right at home—for example when sickness came, when drought ate away the land—we exchanged restless or comforting words. We shared our thoughts: Why isn’t Papa here? Is he ever coming back? And if Papa was here, how our lives would improve. That’s how we spoke to each other in difficult times.

  * * *

  MY PAPA’S NAME is Joseph-Désiré Bitero. He used to teach at the Nyamata school. They said he was jovial and very mild-mannered. Everyone knows his name in Nyamata because he led the young interahamwe in Habyarimana’s party. I was too young to attend his trial in 1996, when he received the death sentence. I know that afterward people testified against him during the gaçaças, but I didn’t go to listen. The first time I visited him in Rilima? I was in my fifth year of primary school, eleven years old.

  It was good to see my papa. He seemed kind, very strong, affectionate. He showed he was a good papa. Did I ask him any questions? Does a little girl dare ask a personal question of her prisoner father? Even now, at nineteen years old, I keep from asking him about his past doings. I go to Rilima when I can, on weekends, otherwise during school vacations. Sometimes I take a bike-taxi, and sometimes my brothers rent a bicycle and bring me along. The route takes several hours; we hold out hope for a five-minute chat. If the crowd jostling to get in is too big, the guards cut two minutes off the visits.

  Papa asks how things are going at school. We exchange quick bits of news. I ask him if his health is as he would like it to be. At the prison, things are a mess. Visitors poke their ears into our conversations; we don’t have the chance to talk privately with Papa. He always has a smile for me. He never mentions the genocide. He used to speak a little about the gaçaças, about the steps he was taking, about the letters he was writing to the high court in order to have the decision overturned. He hinted at changes in people’s attitudes. We don’t speak about it anymore. No, he has never picked up his pen to write me the truth: “Listen, Fabiola, you are grown up enough to understand, this is why I have been punished…” No. I think it’s too beneath him. He and his conscience fight over his past. He writes to encourage us to grow up brave. He believes that God is going to lend a hand in his release. In Rilima, he devotes himself to God, he implores us to give Him thanks, and he sings hallelujahs at the top of his lungs, which rise up into the sky. He shows his repentance. He tries to raise our spirits. He insists that we study without distractions at school.

  * * *

  I AM A boarder in my second-to-last year at the secondary school in Gitarama. It’s a scientific institution, where I study mathematics, economics, and geography. I get up and shower at four-thirty, study at five o’clock. At six we gather to clean the grounds, and lessons start at seven, last until two o’clock, then lunchtime. In the afternoon, we amuse ourselves with various activities like sports and television. At seven o’clock, study, followed by the evening meal. On weekends, we are given more time for recreation—soccer, which I play without fail, and music. We rehearse songs in chorus, we watch movies. Myself, I’m fond of videos of love songs. I really enjoy romantic shows, like Indian series. The actors I admire the most are Indian, because they play romantic roles. They show affection and a good education, and they never shout impolite things at each other. They love with passion and they dress with style. I stay away from war stories, like violent American films.

  The school makes computers available, which allow us to learn about computer science and the internet. I’ve created a Facebook profile, which doesn’t have a lot of friends yet. I’m not as active as the other girls, only on the sly. Anyway, at school we are forbidden to waste our time on it, and I don’t have the pocket money to break the rules at an internet café. I have a lot of school friends. Like normal girls, we talk about everything, about ourselves, our futures, our fashion obsessions, our secret whims and private thoughts, and boys, of course, because it’s a coed school. The boys show off and strut around; we make fun of them without their noticing. We never bring up our parents.

  No one talks about the genocide at school. We’re boarders—we don’t know one another’s families, and there is no mention of ethnicities. Thanks to the long road separating us from Nyamata, no one has heard of Joseph-Désiré Bitero. We don’t quarrel. I know that careless words might offend one friend of mine, so I prefer not to risk troubling her with secrets. Not a single Tutsi student has ever come up to me to talk about the genocide, even by accident.

  In Kanazi, I stayed silent around schoolmates. When I’m in groups, I try not to stand out, I throw myself into fun activities so as to forget the past. Sometimes I think about my mama, who lives alone farming to feed the family. The constant search for money bends a mama’s back. It upsets me more at school than it does at home. My mind drifts off into nostalgic thoughts. Worries lose me points on my exams. In my school, survivor children receive aid from the FARG, the Genocide Survivors Support and Assistance Fund.1 It pays the minervals when the need arises. Life is meant to be easier for those students than it is for me, despite the deaths they have suffered through. Everyone can see that they grow up more comfortably. They feel innocent, they aren’t ashamed of their loved ones. They know that others view them more positively than me. I’m nostalgic for an optimistic life.

  So I pray like everyone else. I had a Catholic baptism. I beg the dear Lord to improve my family’s hard existence. At church, I avoid choir and charitable activities but not God. I have been devout ever since I was very little. I have never dreamt of giving it up, I have never faltered. I pray for Rwandan unity and for my papa to be released very soon. God knew what was happening on the hills, but He provided human beings with the intelligence to choose between Good and Evil. He gave them the ability to recognize sin and to determine their own actions. The priests at church use veiled words to evoke the extermination. They speak about it in terms of morality. They console their flock, people who have lost so much or who have been
mired in misfortune. They also preach against the genocidal ideology of the former government’s decrees. At school, young people avoid sharing their thoughts about God. If someone brings up the problem of Evil in one of our conversations, we are careful not to blame Him. We fear God.

  SIDESADDLE ON A BIKE-TAXI

  The old Kigali road, which was once so pitted and broken it had to be driven in first gear, today runs smooth and paved all the way to Burundi. Storm gutters line its sides as it passes through Nyamata. At dusk, streetlights sometimes draw enough electricity to illuminate it. During the night, sentries’ mute silhouettes mind the route’s main intersections.

  Within a new, bright-red service station, Mimi has opened a swank cabaret-boutique. She is one of the innumerable adoptive children of Marie-Louise, who found the stray Mimi along the Gitarama road in the upheaval following the genocide. Mimi has inherited her adoptive mother’s entrepreneurial spirit and lucky hand in business. She sometimes returns exhausted from her boutique to join Marie-Louise’s crowded table for dinner.

  Although two banks built side by side now block Marie-Louise’s view of the comings and goings of the street, the seclusion hasn’t affected her intrinsic understanding of Nyamata. For Marie-Louise Kagoyire knows everything. From morning till night, acquaintances drop in to see her. Friends of the youngsters living with her set themselves down on her long table’s benches. A parade of people pass by to say hello on market days. If a story has been making the rounds at the cabaret Heaven, a visitor comes to recount it to her. If the district reaches an official decision, a guest reports the details. If the banana trees are withering in Mayange, she knows all about it even before you have come back to bring her the news. People are well aware of her generosity and gourmets know all about her talents in the kitchen. Men and women come from far up on the hills to avail themselves of her wisdom and on occasion her influence. She is present at all the funerals, and she is required at all the baptisms. Every Saturday she leaves for a wedding, which often takes her as far as Kigali. Always discreet, she refuses to divulge how many people she has married off. She remains a past master of the long-winded negotiations, smooth talking, and hazards that precede the wedding vows. When in doubt she goes in person or picks up her mobile phone. And then there is the retinue of her adoptive children.

  She began taking them in just after the killings. There was Mimi, who had made her way to Gitarama on foot; Yvette and Adam, running down the town’s main street; Jean-Baptiste, holed up in an orphanage; then her own family’s children or those of her deceased husband’s family—Irène, Diane, Jean-Paul, and many others. Her home has long echoed with the sounds of her vast brood of children, about whom she says: “We have helped each other a lot. It isn’t easy raising orphans. I can say, though, that they have helped me more than I have helped them by being their mama. Being alone after the genocide would have been unbearable to me. I don’t know if they see themselves as brothers and sisters. But I think it would be impossible for one of the boys to fall in love with one of the girls, or vice versa, because they live with each other as brothers and sisters. And what if it did happen? It hasn’t happened yet.”

  She has already married many of them off: Denise, Jean-Paul, Diane, Yvette, Fils, and soon Emmanuel and Médiatrice. The ones who have left speak French, while those who have taken over their bedrooms speak English: Adam goes to a school set up by Israelis, tall Prudence expects to be tapped by the national volleyball team, little Pascaline courageously struggles against a nasty illness, Médiatrice works in a newsroom, Emmanuel is looking for a job. Although the two banks’ generators have chased away the birds that once clamored in the courtyard, they haven’t diminished the racket one hears at daybreak as the whole family washes up.

  * * *

  IN ADDITION TO her cabaret-boutique, Mimi manages a cooperative farther down the street, across from the hardware store Vision Idéale, the cabaret Blue Star, the restaurant Le Petit Bazar, and the Beauty Saloon. The shop signs are part of the linguistic battle that continues to rage. While the hardware stores, groceries, and pharmacies have tended to remain francophone, the banks, large cabarets, hair salons, cell phone shops—everything else, in fact—have been switching to English. At the main intersection’s taxi stand, motorcycles are replacing bicycles, the latter limited to long-distance trips to the hills, where the steep paths risk overheating the single-cylinder Indian motors. In Nyamata, the buses are imported from Korea, the cars from Japan; the motorbikes are made in India, the bicycles in China.

  Flocks of gray geese pass in waves, their necks outstretched in aerodynamic pursuit. Cackling fills the sky. They come from Scandinavia or Russia on their way south. As for Englebert, he leaves Tite’s wife’s dive bar with the obvious intention of returning as soon as he can. In the meantime, he has spotted the van parked across the street. He circles it, surveys the surroundings, bemused. He smells a bottle within reach. He sets off but isn’t exactly sure where to. Unable to make up his mind, he doubles back, takes another turn around the truck, scratches his head in distress, then scrutinizes the vicinity more carefully until, with relief, he finally catches sight of me at Mimi’s. He scurries across the street in my direction.

  A lithe, slender young girl wearing black sunglasses passes by riding sidesaddle on a bicycle’s passenger seat. It’s Ange, Gigi to her family, Angel on her Facebook profile. The daughter of a French professor, Innocent Rwililiza, and a francophone, Épiphanie Kayitesi, Ange speaks a lovely English, with just a touch of an East Coast accent, which isn’t surprising since she attends a Catholic school managed by a foundation from Boston. She hops off the bike-taxi in front of the internet café.

  ANGE UWASE

  NINETEEN YEARS OLD

  Daughter of Innocent Rwililiza, Tutsi survivor

  The semester ended well, safe from bad grades. I am excited about my vacation in Nyamata. Our family lives in the Kayumba neighborhood, on the other side of the high school. The breeze blows its cool air on the dust up there. It’s good. During vacations, I like giving my mama a hand with the cleaning work and preparing the meals. I continue playing basketball, the same as at school. I am often asked to play center, thanks to my long and slender build. I am not much of a dancer. I don’t feel so confident when I dance. At school, dance music is banned in our rooms, and in Nyamata, you don’t see attractive cabarets where you can dance without spending a tidy sum. I’m no worse off.

  I visit my girlfriends. We meet up in the courtyard, at my place or theirs, and sometimes share a juice. They are all good friends from school, because that is where I spend most of my time. I wouldn’t say I have a best friend—I mean, a deeply trusted confidante. But we still talk without holding back. We watch movies on our smartphones. We all dislike American films. We can’t get enough of Nigerian soaps, with their love stories and especially the endless family squabbles. For my part, I don’t admire any celebrity in particular; I couldn’t give you a name that excites me, besides singers and soccer players, of course.

  I have friends who are boys, like so many other girls. We see each other but our get-togethers aren’t so carefree, because of our parents, who pile on their endless warnings. We chat beside the houses, we stroll along the paths, we go off to quiet spots. Our walks sometimes take us to Nyamata’s main street to check out the stores and review the new fashions. I know most of the boys from primary school, the others are good neighbors. We tease each other, we joke around, and we like to talk about what is happening in our lives. I also go on walks with my brothers and sister. There are four of us children in all. We always get along. Their company cheers me up. We go to the market, to church—we even go down to the center of Nyamata if we catch news of something fun like a soccer match or a show at the Cultural Center. If we come across a little money, we order something to drink.

  Nyamata is a quiet little town. Boredom doesn’t last for long. Unlike before, there are plenty of entertaining things to do—it’s nice. Sometimes we go to the internet café. I have opened
a Facebook account, and I post photos to my timeline. My friends and I take pictures of one another striking elegant poses, which is quite the comedy. I like looking at everyone’s pictures. I chat online with classmates or former teachers. For example, an American woman from Boston has been writing to me, describing how life is good where she lives, too. We discuss videos we have seen, we share how surprised we are by all the turmoil in the world, and we express our convictions. People from my mother’s family scattered around Canada send me news about the Arctic cold they have over there. I listen to good music on YouTube and the like. I don’t go digging around in celebrities’ private lives as much as some other girls. But I do a little bit. Their love interests, their fashions, their quarrels—it’s tempting to find out those frivolous things. YouTube lets us listen to songs we don’t hear on the radio. We soak up all sorts of startling news about the world. We can see that it’s sensational, but that’s what attracts us. I don’t waste too much time on it, though. And anyway, I avoid fatal disasters, and I steer clear of terrorist attacks—they don’t interest me at all. Young people in America poke around on the internet for hours, but with us it isn’t for so long.

  The teachers give us thirty minutes at school. They encourage us to do research on Google to document our work. I am in my third year at Maranyundo Girls School. It’s an American boarding school. Students come from everywhere. School makes me happy because we learn complex subjects, and because we can talk among us girls without the disruptions of the other sex. When I am on vacation, I only surf the internet when I have the money. It really adds up. I can go nearly a week without touching the keyboard.