A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  With a yardstick Zozo had brought, he measured Méthode and left for the coffin market, which shared space with the iron market beside a barracks. The coffin makers could no longer keep up with the demand. They had been making beds, tables and chairs until very recently, but the death market, spurred by grenades, guns and AIDS, was growing exponentially. In Kigali, a coffin is a wooden box made of a few badly squared boards, sometimes decorated with a crucifix in a burst of extravagance or folly brought on by the pain of bereavement. Valcourt chose the wood carefully: fine boards that were pale in colour and free of knots. He gave the dimensions and asked that the box be delivered to his room. Next he went to see a sculptor friend who sold multicoloured giraffes and elephants to the two or three tourists a week who still came to Rwanda to see the gorillas and volcanoes.

  “Make me a disco cross for Kigali’s best DJ.”

  There were around a hundred people in the hotel conference hall. In the aisle separating the two sections of straight chairs was the wooden box, not even varnished. Some relatives and close friends had come, but also colleagues from work at the People’s Bank and the minister responsible for the financial institution, flanked by two young soldiers nonchalantly carrying their Uzi automatic rifles, courtesy of Israel via France and Zaïre. All Agathe’s girls were present, as were Lando and his Québécoise wife, and several men who remained discreetly at the back of the room and were quickly associated with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the clandestine army of the Tutsis. For Méthode, it was rumoured around the pool, had been a member of the undercover army, like Raphaël.

  On the left behind the minister sat the few officials and Hutus close to power who felt obliged to attend this bizarre funeral. On the right were all the Tutsis, the Hutu friends of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party, and all the women Méthode had laid.

  A television set occupied a place of honour over the coffin. The emaciated face appeared with huge burning coals for eyes. The lips barely moved. It was the eyes that spoke.

  “My name is Méthode. I work at the People’s Bank. Weekends I’m disc jockey at Lando’s discotheque. My favourite music is country and love songs. I’m Tutsi, you know that, but above all I’m Rwandan. I’m going to die in a few hours, I’m going to die of AIDS, a sickness the government says didn’t exist a few years ago, when it was already destroying my blood. I still don’t understand much about how the sickness works, but we’ll say it’s like a country that catches all the defects of its sickest people, and each of these defects turns into a sickness that attacks a different part of the body or the country. That’s pretty well what I’ve learned about it, it’s a kind of madness in the human body, which succumbs piece by piece to all its weaknesses.

  “To those who love me, I want to say that I didn’t die in pain. A friend kissed me and told me I would wake up in heaven. I died in my sleep. I felt nothing. In fact, it’s as if I didn’t know I was dead. But I know that if we carry on this way, a great many of you will suffer frightful pain and die appalling deaths.

  “But I want to talk some more about the sickness. We refuse to talk about it, and staying silent kills. We know that a condom protects, but we big strong black men go through life as though we’re immortal. My friend Élise calls that magic thinking. We tell ourselves the sickness won’t happen to us and we fuck and fuck like blind men, with our cocks naked in the belly of the sickness. I’m telling you, and this is why I want to talk to you before I die, that millions of us are going to die. Of AIDS, of course, of malaria too, but most of all from a worse sickness for which there’s no condom or vaccine. This sickness is hate. In this country there are people who sow hate the way ignorant men sow death with their sperm in the bellies of women, who carry it away to other men, and to the children they conceive … Could I have a little water?”

  A hand holding a glass of water appears in the picture. Méthode drinks and chokes. He takes some more, more slowly.

  “I’m dying of AIDS, but I’m dying by accident. I didn’t choose, it was a mistake. I thought it was a White’s or homosexual’s or monkey’s or druggie’s sickness. I was born a Tutsi, it’s written on my identity card, but I’m a Tutsi by accident. I didn’t choose, that was a mistake too. My great-grandfather learned from the Whites that the Tutsis were superior to the Hutus. He was Hutu. He did everything possible so his children and grandchildren would become Tutsis. So here I am, a Hutu-Tutsi and victim of AIDS, possessor of all the sicknesses that are going to destroy us. Look at me, I’m your mirror, your double who’s rotting from inside. I’m dying a bit earlier than you, that’s all.”

  The minister stood up and shouted, “It’s a disgrace!” He stormed out. The effect was to wake his two body-guards, who had fallen asleep. The dignitaries, the Hutus and the two representatives of the Swiss embassy, which was subsidizing the People’s Bank, followed.

  “I’m dying happy because I’ve spoken at last. Goodbye and may the Lord bless you.”

  Standing at the back of the wide, cold, ugly hall, Gentille was crying. When Valcourt came to see her she said, “Méthode’s right. Promise me you’ll take me with you when you leave, I don’t want to die.”

  Valcourt put his trembling hand on her cheek. “I promise.”

  His world flipped. Uttering two words had brought him back to life. He had come here to live at a leisurely pace, with no goal, ambition or passion. All he had wanted was to go to the end of his own path without deceit, but at the same time without getting involved or taking sides in anything. One day he had written, “We are inevitably prisoners of the words we speak.” Oscillating between anxiety and happiness, he set off with the gang to get drunk at Lando’s, prisoner of the last words he had spoken.

  He had barely sat down before he began to miss Gentille, who had not been able to leave work. He got up and left the friends crowding around a long table, which in a flash was covered with big Primus bottles, and went to sit in a corner at a rickety table. It rapped on the cement floor every time he leaned on it as he watched the Lyon–Monaco soccer match being televised by Radio-Française Internationale.

  Lando came and joined him with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and two beer glasses, which he filled. They were going to get very drunk.

  “Méthode dreamed of going to Quebec, the way his friend Raphaël did. You don’t know how he envied him for having done it. In a way I can understand that. It’s fun to be there. You’re so far away from everything.”

  Landouald then talked about Quebec’s Grande Allée and the people of the city, gently poking fun at their small-town reserve, and about his political science professors at Laval University. When he had talked to them of Rwandan excesses, corruption, violence, his Québécois Third-World-enthusiast profs had told him he was talking like “a colonial.”

  “I sometimes had the strange impression that the oppressed Blacks were the ones driving round in their Volvos and I was just a naive little White who wanted to exploit Africa.”

  Valcourt smiled and emptied his glass. His friend did likewise but without a smile.

  “You should leave, Bernard. Our friend Méthode was more observant than I thought. He was right. The big bloodbath is brewing, bigger than all the others Rwanda and Burundi have seen. Our only chance is the Blue Berets and your Canadian general. But as Hélène says— mind you, she’s a separatist—he’s a real Canadian, an imitation Swiss, a civil servant who follows procedure to the letter. Here, if you follow procedure, you’re a hundred corpses late. Drink up. Come and see.”

  Lando held Bernard by the shoulder. Since he was tall and limped, there was more weight than grip. They walked the length of the bar and crossed the restaurant parking lot to the tra fic circle. It was well past the curfew. In theory, only “humanitarians,” which is to say Whites, doctors and of course soldiers, still had the right to be out and about. “The vultures,” as Lando called them, were patrolling the tra fic circle. There were around twenty of them. They were neither policemen nor regular soldiers.

  �
�Hello, gentlemen of the presidential guard,” called Lando. “I drink to the health of Rwanda. Would you like to drink with us? No, you would not like to drink with us. You are Hutus, real Rwandans, and I am a villainous Tutsi, a false Rwandan. You are only awaiting the command that will kill me. That is not tonight, I know, but which of my friends will you kill when he leaves here? Which one will you follow patiently all the way home so he can die in front of his children and neighbours?”

  The soldiers burst out laughing. Then came the abusive language and insults: all Tutsis were sons of bitches and Lando more than all the rest, he’s not a negro any more because he sleeps with a White. The dull thud of a grenade exploding came from downtown. Flames licked at the purple sky near the national stadium, a neighbourhood where mostly Tutsis lived. Lando gripped his friend a little tighter.

  “You still don’t understand. Good little Westerner that you are, all tied up with fine sentiments and noble principles, you’re witnessing the beginning of the end of the world. We’re going to plunge into a horror never seen before in history. We’re going to rape, cut throats, chop, butcher. We’re going to cut open women’s bellies before the eyes of their husbands, then mutilate the husbands before the wives die of loss of blood, to make sure they see each other die. And while they’re dying, coming to their last breath, we’ll rape their daughters, not just once but ten times, twenty times. And the virgins will be raped by soldiers with AIDS. We’ll have the savage efficiency of the primitive and the poor. With machetes, knives and clubs we’ll do better than the Americans with their smart bombs. But it won’t be a war for television. You won’t be able to stand fifteen minutes of our wars and massacres. They’re ugly and you’ll think they’re inhuman. It’s the lot of the poor not to know how to murder cleanly, with surgical precision, as the parrots of CNN say after their briefings from the generals. Here, we’re going to kill in a great, wild excess of madness, beer and pot, in an unleashing of hate and distrust that’ll be beyond your capacity to understand, and mine as well. I say ‘we’ because I’m Rwandan and because the Tutsis will do it too when they get the chance. I say ‘we’ because we’ve all gone mad.”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  “You’re crazier than I thought.”

  “No, I’m in love. It’s the same thing.”

  From Sodoma, the hookers’ quarter, a bucolic landscape can be seen several hundred metres away. A hill where the earth is always freshly turned and dotted with pretty flowers. The view is beautiful from Sodoma. A CIDA official on a visit to ascertain whether the money Canada was giving to the fight against AIDS was being well spent said to his Rwandan escort:

  “So you have community gardens too?”

  He has to be forgiven. On this hill there’s a constant coming and going, with people hoeing, digging and turning the earth. From a distance it looks as though they’re working at small plots, carefully and methodically cultivated, such as one sees on vacant lots in poor districts of Montreal.

  “No, that’s the new cemetery,” replied the escort. “There’s no room left in the others.”

  The cross Valcourt had ordered was perfect, twisted like a dead tree, all yellow, blue and green, with a body not of Christ but of Johnny Cash, not a perfect likeness but recognizable because the sculptor had engraved the name.

  Valcourt was there, and Élise, and Father Louis, the calm, stubborn old priest from Champagne, who by himself cared for more AIDS sufferers than all the humanitarian organizations in the country. They listened to Johnny Cash while two teenagers finished digging a hole deep enough to hold the box. They kept turning their heads to look in all directions but no one else arrived except other groups coming to bury their own dead. Then a few soldiers came prowling like jackals, just close enough to be noticed. At this mid-morning hour in this city of five hundred thousand souls, ten gaping holes awaited their boxes, and there would be ten more later, around midday. There would be scores of others by late afternoon, when the sun would beat less directly on the coffins.

  A muddy black Volvo appeared. Lando’s car. Lando got out with a huge bouquet of flowers, which he let drop into the bottom of the hole. They mustn’t wait any longer for anyone else to come, he said. At the bank, he explained, employees who might be tempted to be absent had been threatened with dismissal. The private radio station, Radio Mille-Collines, which had just begun broadcasting, was announcing that a terrorist named Méthode had died the previous day and the local militia would consider anyone seen at his burial as an accomplice to be eliminated. And then, during the night, Raphaël’s house had been burned. Raphaël had taken refuge at Élise’s. Élise had said nothing about this, not wanting to alarm anyone. She shrugged an apology, and Father Louis said a few words in Latin, which he persisted in using in moments of solemnity or when he was officiating for friends. Then he sprinkled the box with holy water and said:

  “Méthode, you do not need my benediction or my prayers. All you asked of life was simply the pleasure of life. And you have died of it. While you have committed a thousand mortal sins, your words yesterday may ensure your redemption …”

  He broke off because he had seen Gentille approaching. She had just passed the group of soldiers, who were insulting her profusely. In one hand she held her black leather shoes and in the other a bouquet of blue irises. She walked in a straight line, resolutely, like someone with a mission to accomplish.

  “I took the morning o f,” she whispered to Valcourt. “I had to be here with you. I didn’t really come for Méthode. Forgive me for being so frank.” She took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. The soldiers came closer, laughing.

  Dozens of jackdaws wheeled patiently over the cemetery. In the distance a family approached, carrying a body on a stretcher, and behind them other mourners, tired out from climbing the hill. Six bodies now were waiting for the gravediggers to finish with Méthode’s and dig holes for them. A dismal cacophony rose skyward—a confusion of hymns, hysterical weeping, and the roaring of engines and blaring of horns from dilapidated trucks on the Mombasa–Kampala road, the AIDS freeway. For in the valley between the cemetery and Sodoma stood the smoky, smelly truck stop. You parked your truck, you climbed the Sodoma hill to drink a few Primuses and shoot your wad, and a while later you ended up in a hole on the hill opposite.

  Father Louis resumed his sermon.

  “We are here to honour the dignity of a man who dared to speak out. I am here to tell him that the gates of paradise are open for him. Can we reproach a man for dying because he wanted to love? My faith reassures me but leaves me powerless to act, except, like Méthode, through words. And so I say that here in Rwanda we are approaching the limits of humanity, we are in danger of falling into insanity, into a madness that will be beyond our own understanding. I would like to reassure you and I cannot.”

  The priest straightened his shoulders and with sweeping gestures traced a benediction that cut across the sky, as though blessing the entire country.

  Once the hole was filled with earth, they put a circle of stones around the psychedelic cross. Gentille placed her bouquet of irises and then they all piled into Lando’s Volvo, since the truck that had brought them had left to get another wooden box.

  Near the mosque on the way out of Nyamirambo, some young men of the Hutu militia were running about among the cars and minibuses trying to sell one of the many extremist rags whose publication the regime encouraged. Lando stopped and bought a copy of Ijambo.

  “What are our killers saying today? ”

  And he handed the badly printed little weekly to Father Louis.

  “They’re talking about Raphaël, who owes his advancement only to his sisters who he’s put into the bed of the White manager of the People’s Banks. And about you, Lando, who, to thank the manager, Raphaël and Méthode for the credits you’ve been given by the Banks, have provided them with rooms in your hotel for entertaining prostitutes … Tutsis, of course.”8

  “Gentille,” Lando said, “you’ve got yourself in a he
ap of shit. You can’t go home, not for now anyway.”

  Gentille said not a word because she was busy letting Valcourt know discreetly that if her thigh was pressed against his it was not because of the car’s cramped space, any more than the fact that her elbow had gradually slipped into the bend of his arm. Valcourt was not a fool. He was living in this country partly because he had often waded blindly into murky waters for no more than an insistent thigh or an innocently nestling elbow. He had got carried away for a lot less— a glance, a smile, a way of moving. In Montreal he had followed one of those dancers who float almost on the surface of life all the way down into the black hole of heroin. He had fled successfully in time, but had remained bruised and broken in the most vital of a man’s possessions, confidence in the object of his love. How warm was this thigh! How fragile and delicate this elbow! But Valcourt had not left his country in order to live more or better. All he had craved was the right to drowse in peace. And here he was being woken, jolted like a child being told he’ll be late for the party. He had promised, of course. He would not abandon Gentille, he would keep her with him, protect her, a little like an adopted daughter. This was the lie Valcourt told himself, paralyzed by the fear of re-entering life fully, and perhaps even more of being unable to give those breasts the caresses they expected, or that sex—whose scent and taste he had already invented—a sex that could satisfy it. He was sweating huge drops and shivering at the same time.

  “Are you all right?” she said, taking his hand.

  He said nothing but did not withdraw his hand, which she squeezed gently. He squeezed hers, closed his eyes, rested his head back against the seat. God was offering him the most beautiful of his daughters. Never had he felt so old, so close to the end, but at the same time so free. This scared him more than anything. He had always believed that absolute freedom was a prison. Never had he been so afraid of the acts he was going to perform, for he was having forebodings about them already. He was measuring the depth of the happiness promised him, and of the pain into which he was willingly, knowingly, rushing headlong.