Martin said it would take about two hours, maybe three, to get to Kibungo.
“Why are there so few dogs on the streets?” Theo asked as they drove through the city. “I’d to get a rabies shot before I came because the doctor said there were loads of wild dogs in African cities.”
Martin shook his head and Theo couldn’t tell if he was amused by what he said or just by the idea that this big Rwandan beside him had had to get shots to come home. A vaccination to protect him from his own place. But maybe it wasn’t such a mad idea after all.
“It is true there are very few dogs here. You see after the killing, there were many bodies in the street for many days because those who could have claimed them were lying dead beside them or too scared to come out of the bush or the swamp or the tiny holes they were hiding in. So the dogs got a taste for this new meat. And then, when we came to stop the killing, we had to get rid of those dogs.” He said it so matter-of-factly that Theo felt his shock was somehow indecent.
After about an hour, they stopped at a roadside kiosk for coffee and thick slices of fresh baguette. They sat on iron chairs around a rickety table under the shade of a mango tree.
“So you never left Rwanda?” Theo asked Martin as he spooned coffee granules into his cup and then added boiling water from a giant red thermos. The cups were china with gold leaf around the chipped rims.
“No, no, I did.” Martin replied. “In fact, I was born in Tanzania. My parents fled Rwanda in the 70s so I grew up there. Then, I joined the rebellion and came with the fighters into Rwanda in 1994. We fought our way to Kigali and actually I also came to Kibungo at that time. Hmm, yes.”
Above them, some bright blue starling-like birds were fighting noisily in the tree. The road was quiet, only the occasional truck passing, some with sacks of coffee tilting precariously over the edges. The sharp scent of the beans tickled Theo’s nose. Each truck left a film of dust on the already grey leaves by the roadside. Must be the only things they don’t clean in Rwanda, Theo thought. Even here, they’re not going to wash the leaves.
“I don’t remember the fighters coming to Kibungo but we might’ve already left,” he said. “We took off just after the whole thing started, and then my father and my mother and my sister were killed at a roadblock. Our worker, our friend, Shema was murdered there too. He was a Tutsi.”
“You are not a Tutsi?” Martin posed it as a question although he must know the answer. Theo could understand why. Some things could never be simple now, he supposed.
“My father was a Hutu, my mother was a Tutsi, so I guess that makes me mixed race? Or what do you call it here? Maybe they told me once, we must’ve talked about it, I suppose, but I don’t remember. My memories are not the clearest.”
“You are Hutu,” Martin said. “Your ethnicity comes from your father. That is how it has always been. But you are also a rescapé, a survivor. You know, we cannot speak of ethnic groups here any more. We have done something so terrible because of those divisions that those names have to be wiped off the face of the earth. Of course, we still know who and what we are and we still know what we did but we are trying to become something more. To build, you know, you must first knock down the old house.”
“That makes sense,” Theo said. “But what if there’s nothing left to build on, or build for?”
“But there is,” Martin said. “Look around. We are still here.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“So, maybe now we can talk about Clément,” Martin said. “I was asked by your friends to find out what happened to him, if it was possible.”
He picked up the laptop case he’d placed carefully on the table and pulled out three or four pages in a plastic folder.
“These are for you. I did not find anything in the gacaca archives. But I did find these.” He paused, opened his mouth as if he were about to say something else, and then shut it again.
“I will be in the car.”
He gulped down the last of his coffee and headed across the car park slowly, like a man who has done a lot of walking in his time and prefers to minimise the effort whenever he can.
Theo picked up the folder and opened it. A photograph of Clément – older, a little thinner around the jaw but still recognisably his brother – stared out at him. He was wearing a grubby white shirt and short trousers, his head was shaved, there was a rosary hanging round his neck, and his eyes were narrowed, the way he used to squint when he was angry, chasing Theo around the house for eating the last mango or for teasing him about some girl at school.
The next page gave his name, his date of birth, and age. It said he was fifteen. This was a Clément Theo had never met. The paper was dated 1997. It was stamped Gitarama Prison.
It took Theo a few minutes to understand what he was reading. It was a photocopy of Clément’s death certificate. He turned back to the first page, searching that familiar and strange face for a goodbye, a sense of its own destiny. It stared back, hostile, angry, dead.
The paper listed Clément’s parents as unknown, birthplace unknown. It did give his surname. Cause of death was given as complications from suffocation. Theo wouldn’t have been able to understand the original French but someone had scrawled the English translation above the typed words. Suffocation.
Theo exhaled, long and slow. He’d never believed there would be a tearful airport reunion – not really, not much – and that’s why he hadn’t pressed Martin for whatever he’d found yesterday. If Clément wasn’t at the airport, he was dead. Of course, he was. He looked at the next page. It was a photocopy of a handwritten note. It was Clément’s writing. Unlike his face, his eyes, it hadn’t aged. It had frozen at the moment when his childhood had died.
If I told you everything, I would never stop. The beginning was the death of my parents and my sister. We were trying to flee our village near Kibungo. But we were stopped by the interahamwe. They said my father could join them, as he was a Hutu, but that we children and my mother must die. My father did not join them. He was beaten to death. My mother’s throat was cut and my baby sister was also killed. But that I do not want to describe. They came to cut me with a machete but I begged them to let me join them. I cried and they laughed and then they said yes but I must prove myself. Our worker was with us. He was a Tutsi. They said I must kill him. They had already beaten him but he was still alive. They gave me a masu. I looked for my brother, Théoneste, because I did not want him to see what I would have to do. I could not see him. I hoped he had got away. So I killed Shema. Or at least I tried. I beat him on the head and he bled but I think I was not strong enough, so I hit him again on his forehead but still he moaned. The others laughed at me, calling me ‘boy’ and ‘weakling’. I tried again, but still Shema moved. Then the leader, he came and brought his machete down on Shema’s neck. I have never seen so much blood, it washed over me, into my eyes, even my mouth. But then Shema was still because all of his blood was gone. I stayed with that group for many weeks. I got better at killing so that I would not cause so much suffering each time. I was taken near Kabgayi by RPF soldiers. They brought me here to Gitarama. I am sorry for what I did and many times, I see those I hurt when I close my eyes. Luckily, there is no space to sleep in the cells here because we are so many, so I do not often close my eyes.
That was it. No signoff, no goodbye, as if Clément had more to say but ran out of time. The handwritten piece was not dated. Theo turned back to the picture. I ran, he whispered. I ran away and left you. I didn’t even try to help. I turned my back on you.
There was a lump in his throat but he could not cry. This was beyond tears. He read the letter again, slowly now, stopping every now and then to look straight into his brother’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I couldn’t even remember right. I couldn’t keep your story alive. All this time, I’ve been rehashing lies. I’ve let you down in so many ways. All that time, I was whinging about school, and kids in the playground, and your breath was being sucked out
of you here.”
The face on the page did not change. It would never change now.
In the car, the radio was turned up high, a jaunty, salsa-like melody sashaying across the empty car park. When Theo got in, Martin started the engine and they pulled back out into the road. They drove for nearly half an hour before Martin spoke.
“I am sorry it was not good news about your brother. But I hope you can find some comfort in the truth. I have been collecting stories of sorrow for more than five years now and it is difficult work. I feel as though I am a collector of tears, so many people cry when they speak of that time. But afterwards, they often say how much it has helped them, just being able to speak.”
Theo swallowed hard.
“Do you know where my brother is buried? Is it at Gitarama?”
“He must be buried there if he is buried anywhere although I do not know if the grave will be marked. There are so many graves from that time that, if we marked them all, this would be a nation of gravestones.”
“I’d like to go there. I’d like to look at the things he looked at. Can I do that?”
Theo turned to look at Martin.
“We can try. It is on the other side of Kigali. But I must warn you, Théoneste. It is a bad place even today. At that time, when your brother was there, there were thousands of génocidaires packed into tiny cells, no room to sit, or lie down, only to stand on feet that swelled, feet that rotted so that toes even fell off. It was a place for the guilty but then so many of us were guilty. Your brother was just one and an unlucky one because he was caught when so many others escaped. But even today, that jail is a place of despair, a place that reminds us of the worst we can be.”
Theo thought of Clément’s feet. He had their mother’s small, shapely feet while Theo took after his father. But Clément was fast, running up the hill from school or chasing the ball into the corner when he played football with the other boys on the dried-out patch of ground behind the community hall in the village.
“I’d still like to go,” he said.
Martin nodded.
“I will take you but you know, you may not find answers there. This is a country of questions or maybe just one question. Why? We will never be able to answer this but even to ask it is to acknowledge the importance of trying to find an answer. Umugayo uvuna uwugaya uwugawa yigaramiye. Do you know what that means?” Martin asked.
Theo shook his head.
“The blame hurts the one doing the blaming, while the blamed person is enjoying life. We want to enjoy life now, so we have learned not to blame and we have learned to live with the open question. It is the only way. It may not be the same as forgiveness but, without it, there can be no future.”
They drove a little further, passing villages strung out by the road like beads on a rosary. Straw-roofed huts and brick homes with corrugated roofs grew like mushrooms on the terraced mountains above valleys carpeted with thick banana plants and patches of tilled, red earth.
“We are coming to Kibungo now,” Martin said, turning down the music. “Do you recognise this place, Théoneste?”
Nothing had looked familiar so far but now as one-storey, pastel-coloured buildings, with iron grates around the windows, began to congregate on either side of the road, something began to stir.
“Are we coming to the market? Something tells me it should be just on the right now?” Theo asked.
“Yes, that’s correct,” said Martin, sounding proud.
They passed rickety tables stacked with tomatoes, bananas and avocados. There were piles of colourful basins on the ground, a mountain of Timberland-type shoes, and piles of knickers on a piece of plastic sheeting.
I’ve been here, thought Theo.
“My father bought me a pair of shorts here,” he said slowly. “They were light blue, like football shorts. I had to try them on over my school trousers. We came straight after classes and my father bought me a Fanta. Yeah, I drank a Fanta, just over there, on that wall.”
The memory exploded all at once, a blast of sound, taste and colours that changed everything. I know this place, Theo thought.
Martin parked the car on a patch of open land just beyond the market.
That’s when Theo’s feet took over. He didn’t think, he didn’t reason, he just went. As he walked, he automatically gravitated to the shade beneath trees and awnings, weaving easily between the oases of cool. This is not me, this is just my body, he thought, amazed. My body knows where it is going.
“I’m going to walk to my house. It’s not far from here, I think. Okay?” he threw over his shoulder.
“We can drive. It will be cooler for you than walking in this heat. You will get very tired,” Martin said.
I never got tired before, Theo thought, striding forward.
They pushed through the crowds, past a stall piled with batteries, Nokia phones and radios. There was a narrow lane leading from the market, out into the fields beyond and up the hill.
Theo led the way or rather his feet did. This path was in his blood. Little things leapt out at him. He knew, before he saw it, that a tree on the right would have a fork in the trunk that you could just about reach from the ground. He stopped by it. The fork was now at chest-level. He grinned to himself.
I got big, he thought.
Martin seemed happy to stay behind him, refusing to adapt his regular pace to Theo’s skipping, stop-start canter.
After a while, Theo noticed the silence and he stopped to let Martin catch up. There were birds singing, insects whirring in the long grass on either side of the track, but nothing else. No shouts, no cries, no laughter and no radios. This was not how it had been. Theo’s ears were in on the joke now too, racing ahead of his mind, uncovering a long-buried playlist, but there was no echo outside in the real world.
“Why is it so quiet? I don’t remember it being this quiet?”
Martin plodded towards him. He slowly took a white cloth handkerchief from his pocket, opened it, and wiped his face.
“Everyone left the village after. The houses were burned and the crops were destroyed and so the rescapés preferred to move to new houses that we built by the roads. Nobody wanted to live in the village any more. There were too many ghosts, too much pain. And they felt it was safer to be by the road.”
His words seemed to be swallowed up by the eerie silence.
“You lost family members?” Theo asked.
Martin nodded.
“But that is not all of it. Here we say: don’t ask me to tell you everything because then I will never stop talking. But I will tell you this. We came in from the east, we pushed down through villages and towns and swamps, and what we saw made us so angry that sometimes… sometimes anger makes you do things. I killed many people. At first, it didn’t bother me. I was very, very angry. I had seen things no man should ever see. So when we came upon the killers, we showed them no mercy. And some of them were teenagers, like your Clément. But maybe sometimes we did not have time to be sure. And we were not God, so we should not have carried out these final judgments. I regret many of my actions. I regret them every day because when I hear the stories of the survivors, I see myself. Not in them, in the others.”
“For ages, I was dead certain my father was a killer,” Theo said. “And I thought what he did was on me too. Maybe because I ran away and survived. I got out and had a new family in a country that was like a bleedin’ dream. I felt guilty and I felt I owed some kind of debt because of what my father did. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, I remembered. I remembered what’d really happened, and it was like I was born again. I was so bloody relieved that we were clean. All of us. Now I know what Clément did but, to be honest, I can’t take it in really, because I have no memory of it. So it’s not real to me. I only see him as he was, a boy, my big brother.”
“Keep that in your heart,” Martin said. “Nothing should change that. Your brother was what you remember, but he was more also because he had to be, he had no choice. You cannot blame him, you mu
st forgive. You must go on and the only way we can do that is if we learn to live with the horror. We can’t always forget it, forget what was done to us, what we did to others, but we must try to forgive them and to forgive ourselves. We must think of those times as another life, separate from this one, an after-life that for one time only, in a world gone crazy, came before the life.”
He put his hand on Theo’s arm.
“We must be nearly at your home?”
Theo nodded and headed off up the track again, swatting the flies away with an arm that remembered the gesture all too well.
The village was deserted. Many homes were gone. Their straw roofs had burned so easily after their owners had run to the bush, or even sometimes before. Theo found his house quickly. The corrugated iron roof was gone, the walls were crumbling, and there were weeds growing through the stones. The bougainvillea bush was still there though, the flowers pink as a scream. He went inside. The rooms were empty. The furniture, curtains, pictures, everything was gone. It was as though no one had ever lived here. He went into the kitchen. They had even taken the taps from the sink and the pipes underneath. In a corner, there was a bundle on the floor. He picked it up. It was his mother’s apron, the one Clément had bought her from the market one Christmas. It was blue and red and green, flower shapes and spirals weaving around each other. He lifted it to his nose but she was gone. It only smelled old.
He walked out the back door. A few feet away, a calabash lay in the grass. The neck was broken but the rest was intact. The smell of banana beer lingered, just, or was it in his mind?
“Our… Shema used to drink beer from this,” he said, lifting it carefully and showing it to Martin, who was silently following through the house.
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