A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  Studiously, methodically, coolly, a few hundred men were planning the elimination of a segment of humanity. In the initial phase, it would be relatively easy to do away with their political enemies, the important people, but after that? How could they believe, as did the Nazi leaders, that the majority of the population would follow and join this small number, and agree not only to point the finger at suspect houses but also incite the rabble to kill their neighbours and comrades at work? How could they seriously believe that the people would agree to turn into killers by the thousands? Most of all, how could they have been so sure of it?

  “Tell me it’s not possible, Gentille.”

  “No, now you know anything’s possible here.”

  They were lying under the great fig tree. A gentle, warm wind rustled the tree, bringing the barking of stray dogs and raucous music from the discotheque on Republic Square. Some reckless drivers were defying the curfew with squealing tires and blaring horns. Gentille stoically rocked the child and hummed a ballad from her hill. Valcourt was feeling very low and deriving more pain than pleasure from Gentille’s hand lightly caressing his arm. She was right. He had known it for a long time but had been refusing to admit it. And now he must live with the certainty and Théoneste’s revelations. Even Gentille’s presence under this too-perfect tree, her existence, her futile beauty in the face of the horror to come were sinking a hole in his chest. There was nothing he could do, except kiss his wife the better to cling to life’s straw.

  But old reflexes rarely vanish. Bright and early the next morning, Valcourt showed up at the UN head office with his notes and lists of names and of places where the extremists were hiding arms—with the plan of a genocide. The major general refused to see him and sent word that if he had important information, he could entrust it to his liaison officer, a notorious extremist. Valcourt rushed out onto the road leading to Kazenze, where Émérita lived. He wanted to warn her, but also ask her advice.

  A hundred metres beyond the crossroads, policemen had set up a roadblock and were stopping all passage. Valcourt went through on foot, waving his press card. There were several dozen people around the taxiwoman’s house. A real rumpus. People were shouting and crying. Others were brandishing machetes and clubs. Émérita’s brothel-keeper mother lay prostrate on the red earth, her body enormous and flabby. Josephine, Émérita’s sister, took Valcourt’s hand.

  “Come and see what they’ve done to my little sister.”

  Valcourt shook his head.

  “You have to,” said josephine. “She really loved you.”

  A trickle of water was still running in the shower, tracing red, winding paths like patient snakes. On the walls and floor, mementos, evocations of what once had been arms, a face, breasts. In this small space, the grenade slipped through the window had pulverized the body into a hundred little pieces of flesh. Valcourt began to vomit. He wanted to cry but in his despair could only hiccup to the epileptic rhythm of the emptying of his stomach.

  Just below the house, at the crossing of the Kazenze road and the boulevard that leads downtown, some interahamwes were partying. They could be heard bellowing the song about eliminating the cockroaches. They were cavorting around outside a small bar that served as their headquarters, from which they habitually harassed all the Tutsis passing by.

  After leaving Valcourt at Caritas to see Father Louis, this was where Émérita had gone, along with several friends and a police sergeant who was posted at the crossroads. Josephine had tried to dissuade her.

  “The more we tuck our heads down between our shoulders, the faster we walk by pretending we don’t see them, the surer they’ll be they can exterminate us. Our silence and docility give them courage and strength,” Émérita had replied.

  To the police sergeant she had described the threats, the incidents of young girls being dragged behind the shanty at nightfall, the bodies that were found along the road every morning, and the burning of houses. It was known who was doing these things. Many witnesses had seen them at it. They must be arrested.

  The policeman, embarrassed, said he could not request an official investigation on such insubstantial proof, and the complainant and her witnesses would have to appear before the prosecutor and lay a formal complaint. To show diligence, he asked the militiamen to disperse and put away their arms. They withdrew to a distance of about a hundred metres, laughing lewdly and shouting insults. Émérita was savouring her small victory. She gave them the finger. They would be back, of course, but she and her friends would do it all over again. Walking to the little house, she had told her sister and the several friends with her how some villagers in Bugesera, with bows and arrows, clubs and stones, had defended themselves against the soldiers and escaped the massacres of the year before.

  “Of course, they think they’re all-powerful. We never lift a finger, we walk like lambs and let ourselves die bleating.”

  The friends nodded, more to be polite than enthusiastically, some already convinced that she had just signed their death warrant. She left them to take a shower. She would rather not have washed away the sweet, sharp scent of love from her body, it had been affording her such voluptuous pleasure since leaving the hotel, but business is business, and a businesswoman, as she was described on her card, must be irreproachably clean. She was singing, or rather bellowing, “Parlez-moi d’amour” when through the tiny window someone had let drop a French grenade that had travelled via Cairo through Zaïre before landing in Émérita’s shower. Josephine, who was peeling potatoes when the explosion happened, told the whole story to Valcourt. She also told him never to come and visit her and not to show up at the funeral. No, it wasn’t that she felt any bitterness toward him. She was only thinking of his safety.

  “Go back to Canada, it’ll be better for you.”

  And she held him tight in her arms, not the distant embrace that Rwandans give, with the hands, keeping a space between the bodies, but the embrace one gives a very dear friend.

  When he went back to the taxi waiting for him near the roadblock, a policeman called to him.

  “You know that terrorist Émérita? Did she have friends you can identify? ”

  “Yes, me.”

  Chapter Nine

  A big Primus, another big Primus, a dip in the pool, a little hot sun, a third big Primus, another dip, then to sleep until the next morning without a word to anyone, even Gentille, till the ravens and buzzards took off noisily for the dumps freshly filled with garbage overnight and for the roadsides and streets littered with new corpses no one dared gather up. This was what Valcourt wanted when he entered the hotel lobby to be greeted by Zozo, as always nicer than necessary.

  “A lot of messages for you, Monsieur Bernard, and a lot of Canadians at the hotel.”

  It looked like a Sunday at the pool in Kigali. Rwanda’s entire Canadian colony was in a state of excitement. There were a few shy, reserved aid workers and a few nuns who were wondering why they had been asked to come to the hotel, but most of them were living a life of great adventure here, with perks of prestige, power and freedom they had never known before. Their subordinates called them “chief” and they behaved accordingly. All the professors at the University of Butare had been summoned, as well as the Quebec government officials loaned to ministries where they were trying to instill a minimum of discipline in ill-paid counterparts whose bosses were openly robbing the till. There was even the forestry engineer in charge of protecting the great natural forest of Nyungwe, where thousands of marijuana plants were growing as though in a large, well-ordered farm. His salary, those of several other foresters, and the cost of their studies on tree species were paid by the Canadian government. He knew the trade, this bald, obsequious little man who was so ugly the hotel prostitutes accepted his clumsy advances with unconcealed distaste.

  Every one of these good people gathered around the pool had seen a Rwandan colleague disappear mysteriously, or funds evaporate as if by magic. They talked about it among themselves, almost always jokingly
, as if they were swapping sex or fishing stories in a tavern. They were totally powerless in any case, they would explain whenever cornered into talking about it. If they spoke out, they wouldn’t be believed. Worse, if they were believed their programs would be cancelled and they would go back to being anonymous civil servants.

  Under the big awning, embassy staff members were handing out walkie-talkies and an evacuation plan covering all the Canadians. Madame the Consul explained that the Tutsi terrorism was growing—there was talk of an RPF army breakthrough toward the capital from the region of Byumba. Administrative measures were being introduced as a precaution, because Ottawa was worried by rumours it was hearing through the media. There was no reason to panic, however. The Rwandan army, with excellent support from its French advisers, who were very active, was in control of the situation.

  Valcourt asked for news of the inquiry into the murder of Brother François. The Rwandan police report was final, Lisette told him. The little brother who organized co-operatives and gathered up displaced persons had been killed by people he was protecting. Displaced Tutsis or labourers disguised as soldiers. The motive was theft. The consul made these pronouncements in the peremptory tone of a teacher addressing a pupil with learning problems.

  “You’re trying to make a fool of me,” Valcourt said to her, while she wondered whether she’d at least have time for nine holes before sundown.

  “Monsieur Valcourt, there are some things intellectuals like you won’t ever understand. Minor crises over individuals must never destabilize relations between states. You’re too sentimental to live in this country.”

  Élise was there too, obedient to the orders of her boss, who was nicknamed “the Countess” and was making a career out of aid work the way others do out of diplomacy or fraud, which in this country made her an honest-to-goodness professional. Élise seemed mightily amused by this sudden uproar. Too amused by half, mocking the student trainees who were as edgy as the veterans—and too caustic with her comments, too ironical with her humour for the Countess who told her off, reminding her that the whole program of AIDS detection was financed by the government she was ridiculing. Élise yelled in reply that all the killers in this country loved Canada, such a worthy country in its silence, its refusal to take sides. And because she could not separate her motions from her emotions, or her thoughts from her words, she shoved the Countess into the chlorine-reeking pool. There were a few bursts of laughter but mostly a shocked silence filled with reproof and scorn for this angry outburst that was so un-Canadian. Each expatriate community maintained a surface unanimity. Its members could tear one another apart ferociously over the telephone or at meetings behind closed doors but, in public, solidarity was the watchword and anyone who broke it was soon persona non grata—his or her projects had trouble getting financed and contracts evaporated.

  Élise refused to comply with these rules. She went through life like a born guerrilla fighter. This front-line nurse hadn’t been through the abortion battle in Quebec in the 1970s only to come to Rwanda and keep a register of AIDS cases. She hadn’t lived and worked with the Salvadorean rebellion only to wither away in silence in this stinking dung-heap. As the Countess clumsily hauled herself out of the pool, dripping and mortified and missing a high-heeled shoe and a large part of her dignity, Élise watched, smiling. Then she went and joined Valcourt.

  “Next time I’ll whack her.”

  A big flock of jackdaws made a thousand little shadows on the surface of the pool. From a distance, very high in the sky, the buzzards observed, turning in wide circles. Around the pool, order reigned once again. The Tutsis of the People’s Bank took their places. Léo, who was making a film on the great Rwandan democracy, financed jointly by Canada and the president’s party, was moving about from table to table distributing smiles and lies like a negro Maurice Chevalier in a bad musical comedy. The Kigali Canadians left with their walkie-talkies and their plan of evacuation. The rest of the aid workers who were staying at the hotel were already drunk and vying in noisiness with the Belgians. In a corner of the bar, Madame Agathe’s girls giggled as they sipped their Pepsis. The evening was going to be profitable. They just wished the Belgians would go someplace else. They were coarse and brutal. The Canadians, now, were a bit nerdy. They courted the girls at the bar as if they weren’t hookers. They told them stories, held their hands, whispered soft words, offered them wine and whisky before daring, almost apologetically, to invite them to their rooms, without ever asking the price of the ride. And when they learned it, even if the girl had doubled the normal price, they would tut-tut over the sorry lot that fate had dealt her. And fork out a nice fat tip besides, the big-hearted humanists. The French, the girls said, rape and take. They don’t talk, and when they pay they fling the money on the bed contemptuously.

  “The Belgians insult us while they shoot their wad and tell us we don’t deserve any better, that we’re all sluts, then after they’ve put their pants back on they haggle over the price. The Canadians are nice. They tend to tell us what’s good for us. They seem to worry about our future as they fondle our breasts. They insist on a lot of kissing before they get inside us. When they pay, they’re always embarrassed. They try to disguise a fuck as a love story. Probably because they’re as afraid of losing themselves in the fuck as in love. The Canadians are okay—even drunk, they’re reasonable.”

  Bernadette, who was telling Gentille all this, would have liked all her clientele to vanish into thin air. She didn’t want to work any more, but what else was she going to do? In the beginning, even when she was exhausted, she never refused a john. Not for the money, just for the pleasure and chance of fulfilling her dream. The pleasure of surprising caresses and kisses. A tongue playing in her ear while a deft finger set a nipple quivering. Well, yes, the johns were all in a hurry and got into her faster than she would have liked, generally dispensed with amorous demonstrations and cut short their tenderness. But she was getting more pleasure here than when she was working at Sodoma, and then at the Hôtel des Diplomates.

  And she still had her dream. A hundred, two hundred johns had had relations with her. There were some who were regulars and wanted to pay less or else get her into sexual activities that Rwandan tradition forbade, or would show affection by bringing her little gifts that she knew were inexpensive and insignificant. Tiny bottles of alcohol and sets of toiletries given away on airplanes, old magazines (she couldn’t read, or barely anyhow). The most generous went so far as to offer a few cheap bits of jewellery from the Nairobi airport duty-free shop. But all her sexual prowess, her beauty, her total availability and her vigour (she was a good lay, she wanted no doubt about that) were not enough for them. They were not content with her body, which she gave without reserve (except for tradition’s requirement), and all her caresses, which she’d learned to refine and adapt to the various tastes of Whites—no, besides all this, and for the same price, she had to admire and love them, transform johns into heroes, into supermen, and most of all into men amorously desired. And they would tell her a girl as intelligent as she was (funny, they never said “woman,” though she was nearly thirty), a girl as beautiful as she was, could remake her life with a little help. Bernadette, who was sterile, dreamed of owning a children’s clothing shop and had asked one of her first rich johns to lend her a small sum of money. The rotund and paunchy German almost died laughing his deep, coarse laugh. He hadn’t been talking about that kind of help, which she would squander in any event, knowing nothing about business, but a recommendation or sponsorship for the kind of employment she was capable of, such as cleaner at the embassy, or maid in a family of aid workers, and later, perhaps, a recommendation for a visa. Others, even more impatient to take her love as a trophy, went further still with the rape of her soul. After the trinkets might come a little cotton dress worth less than the price of the fuck, and only occasionally flowers worth half the price of the dress but demonstrating depth of feeling and perhaps even commitment. She would find herself someone, ev
en if he was ugly, bald and adipose with one foot in the grave, who would get her out of here and take her to Belgium or Australia, Canada or Italy. Anywhere.

  To that nice, shy French accountant who in just a few days had progressed from nylon stockings to a bouquet of irises, from talk about her intelligence to the new life she could make for herself with his help if he could swing it, and finally how happy it would make him to spend a lot of time with her, to this nice gentleman—who set the alarm so he’d be back in his room by four o’clock—she had suggested going to spend the weekend in Kagera Park to see the giraffes and lions and zebras roaming free. The man’s skinny limbs had stiffened, and his complacent smile, the smile of a male who’s just ejaculated, became an accountant’s or diplomat’s smile held at the corners with paper clips.

  “I could never explain to the embassy my being away.”

  The hungriest for love, she continued, was a Lebanese businessman who controlled several interests in the Ruhengeri district and who came to Kigali on business every Monday. In four Mondays he went straight from caresses to sudden declarations of love. Not a single gift, not a single flower, nothing. But he could not, he realized, live without her. He hadn’t made love to his wife for as long as he’d known Bernadette. And Bernadette was fond of him, enough anyway to marry twice, as she put it. He made her laugh all the time and caressed her the way she imagined it was done in Europe, where Lebanon was located. He spent the night with her, encircling her with his arms, engulfing her with his huge, hairy torso and—ah, supreme proof of devotion—having Tuesday morning breakfast with her in public on the main terrace, being bold and open enough to touch her hand between two mouthfuls of bacon. This was a real lover.