A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  It was noon and the children were declaring their hunger. Marie shooed them away, scolding them. She had guests she hadn’t seen for a long time. The children would eat later. Here, when friends turn up at midday they’re taken straight to table, and when they’re great friends the family kills the goat that’s kept tied by a foot in the yard. Playing with the children, Gentille took a discreet look about the house. There was no goat in the yard or the kitchen, not a single chicken either, only a bag of rice and a few dry beans. Not even a withered tomato or some bruised bananas. She called Valcourt, who offered the children a ride in the car. They piled happily into the capacious Land Rover, the eldest standing on the rear bumper. They came back twenty minutes later with thirty brochettes, two fat roast chickens and several kilos of tomatoes.

  Meanwhile Marie had told the whole story to Gentille, who probably knew it already. Marie wondered if she shouldn’t leave with the children for Butare. For several days the strangest rumours had been going round. A group of militiamen from the North were camping at the crossroads. Others were living in a warehouse that belonged to the commune. She couldn’t bring herself to abandon Charles, whom she was visiting under cover of night, or her forty pupils who were making such progress in French.

  Valcourt opened one of the bottles of Côtes du Rhône he had brought in order to celebrate with the Butare in-laws. Marie drank the first two glasses of alcohol she had ever had in her life, and when she was thoroughly tipsy Gentille told her she was getting married. At the news, Marie clapped excitedly, thanking God for her young friend’s liberation. This was the word she used before asking if she wasn’t afraid of the cold in Canada. She would never understand why the two lovers (who could leave whenever they wanted) had decided to stay in this country but was overcome to learn that they had, and shyly gave Valcourt a brief kiss on the forehead that felt to him like a warm, gentle breath or the touch of a passing swallow.

  The jeep had almost reached the crossroads and was about to turn right toward Gitarama. Marie was still waving goodbye with both hands, making a windmill in the air as the vehicle disappeared behind the dark mass of the service station, which had had no gasoline for three months. Like small pennants of living flesh, her hands stayed held in the air. Marie would not leave either. She would remain on Charles’ and the children’s hill. These steep cli fs were perhaps worth clinging to after all, worth defending against the gravediggers.

  Before the turn onto the dirt road leading to Mugina there were two roadblocks manned by militiamen who were making many passengers get out of their cars and sending them back on foot the way they had come, without their baggage. Sometimes a car or truck simply had to turn around and go back. The militiamen were young and obviously drunk. Not a single policeman, not a single soldier. Ten metres from the second roadblock, Valcourt saw the body of a woman lying in the long grass beside the red dirt road. He stopped. Her orange scarf, bright red pullover and green skirt, the colours of the Rwandan flag, might have looked like a fine primitive painting if she had only been sleeping, exhausted by digging in the fields. Her long legs were spread, her knees covered by her bloodstained underpants. Her green skirt was pulled up to her hips and a broad flow of coagulated blood issued from her vagina. An accurate machete had sliced her throat, where hundreds of red ants were already making a nest. In the trampled grass was a small piece of worn cardboard bearing the seal of the republic and a badly taken photograph. Alice Byumiraga, age twenty-seven, Mugina Commune, Tutsi.

  In this region, the hills are close and watch one another. The valleys lie long and sinuous, and are so deep and steep-sided that to cross a distance of only one kilometre one must suffer twenty-five on ill-kept dirt roads.

  Stratton was Gentille’s favourite cousin. On a long thin neck, he bore like a toy the head of a little learned mouse with eyes that sparkled, especially when telling the local legends and the tall tales he had learned watching European television, which had made Gentille laugh a lot when she was a child.

  From his father’s house, where Stratton had been living since he fled the Bugesera region two years earlier, he pointed a long, slightly crooked finger at each thatched house clinging to the flanks of the hills across the valley. Hills so close you might think you could reach out and touch them, but at the same time so far away that each was like an independent little country jealous of its neighbours.

  “Ma petite Gentille, half your family lives over there. See that big house opposite, beside the banana grove? Georges lives there, he’s one of your uncles. You don’t know him and it’s best that way. He bought a Hutu identity card twenty years ago and eats pig-meat and spaghetti every day so as not to be thin like a Tutsi. He’s been a success and has become head of the interahamwes of the commune. He’s the one in charge of the new roadblock they’ve set up just before the dirt road. Farther down, the five small houses, those are his sons’. To the left, a bit higher, that’s Simone’s house—she’s his sister who refuses to become a Hutu. Simone has five daughters, all as beautiful as can be, but she’s only been able to marry off one, to a cousin of mine from Butare. Below Simone’s house (see it, near the clump of eucalyptus?), that big bungalow, that’s another cousin’s. He’s a friend of Lando’s, the Tutsi minister, perhaps you know him. But he’s put his house up for sale and wants to go and live in Belgium. Then there are all the others I won’t name for you, the families are so big. But from our common ancestor who one day wanted to turn us all into Tutsis to save our lives and open the doors of the Belgian schools to us, we’re over six hundred descendants on three hills here. A little over half are officially Tutsis, and some, like you, have the physical appearance. The ones our ancestor’s clever plan didn’t succeed in changing, the ones he failed, are getting ready to kill us as soon as they get the word.”

  Valcourt put the yellow card on the table littered with empty Primus bottles. Stratton looked at the picture.

  “That’s one of Simone’s daughters, the most beautiful of Simone’s daughters. Georges has killed his niece.”

  As in all the country’s major and lesser principalities, the centre of the town was dominated by an imposing church. Mugina’s was one of those contrived modern horrors with a sloping roof and a bell tower on the side, vaguely inspired by Le Corbusier. Several thousand people were camping on the broad expanse of vacant land around it. Stratton guided Gentille and Valcourt through the crowd, stopping sometimes to talk to a man, who would invariably nod respectfully and then turn and give orders.

  Along the dirt road a wide trench was being dug, and with the earth dug out of it an embankment was being built, spiked with pieces of wood. Children were bringing stones and making piles of them at regular intervals. The inside of the church had been turned into a workshop and child-care centre. Dozens of children were running about in the aisles, women were sleeping on the hard pews of blond wood, groups of men were holding confabulations all over the place, others were coming in carrying big pieces of wood and stacking them in a corner. At the rood screen, some thirty young men were making bows and arrows. On the altar devoid of any religious symbol were a few hunting rifles and a hundred or so cartridges.

  These several thousand people had fled from Sake, Gashora and Kazenze, which could all be seen to the east. It hadn’t been a collective flight or in response to anyone’s signal. Seeing the increasing numbers of Tutsis being murdered, families and individuals were fleeing toward Butare, then perhaps Burundi. By day they would sleep in swamps and ditches. When night fell they would move slowly, avoiding the paved or dirt roads and built-up areas. Mugina had a large Tutsi population and many of the fugitives had close or distant relatives here. Stratton and several others had persuaded the first arrivals to stay and regroup. They had requisitioned the church, whereupon the Belgian priest had left because he did not want to get involved in politics. So had his Hutu assistant, who went and set himself up at the roadblock where Simone’s daughter was killed. Since there were more and more rumours of killings and the refugees were
more and more numerous, it was decided, after much discussion and with encouragement from Stratton and a number of local sages, to turn the Mugina plateau into a Tutsi fortress. “Alone, one dies without dignity,” said Stratton to Valcourt and Gentille as he thanked them for their visit. But they must leave while it was still daylight, because once night fell militiamen controlled the dirt road leading to the highway.

  “Ma petite, you are your great-great-grandfather’s finest achievement. We should set you up in a museum and invite the population to come and admire you, and find out that a Hutu woman can be more beautiful than the most magnificent of Tutsis …”

  His laughter came to an abrupt end.

  “A few years ago I didn’t really know what I was and it wasn’t so bad,” he continued. “I wasn’t Tutsi or Hutu, just Rwandan, and that suited me, because what I was was all right, a mixture made of a combination of random couplings and great-great-grandfather ’s plan. But today they don’t leave me any choice. They’re forcing me to become a Tutsi again, even though I don’t want to. I don’t want to die by mistake, you understand.”

  Gentille kissed him the way Whites do, with her arms around him, then pinched his nose the way she used to when she was little.

  Driving down to the Butare highway, they passed dozens of young men coming the other way armed with machetes and masus. Some of them were carrying cases of Primus on their shoulders. There were two more roadblocks to be passed, watched sullenly by militiamen. After glancing at Valcourt’s papers they clustered about Gentille, who refused each time to translate what they were saying.

  Butare was living as if in a bubble. This former capital of Rwanda—it was then called Astrida, from the name of a Belgian queen—still had the air of a peaceful and indolent colonial city. At the Hôtel Ibis, Monsieur Robert, the Belgian proprietor of forty years’ standing, was observing the day’s happenings as usual from the big round table in the perpetually shaded corner of the terrace. He and his wife and son spent a good eight hours a day here, joined from time to time by all the university town’s decrepit expatriates and all its Rwandan professors dreaming of going to teach in a Canadian university. The rest of the tables were occupied by a constantly replenished tide of foreign aid workers and their Rwandan counterparts. On the surface, none of the demons and madness that were tearing the other regions of the country to pieces were at work here. A few militiamen had in fact turned up to see the burgomaster not long before, armed with papers signed by a colonel from headquarters, but the burgomaster had had them escorted to the border of the commune without even receiving them.

  Monsieur Robert was disappointed when he saw Gentille and Valcourt, who was carrying a suitcase, coming toward the big round table. If Gentille, the most beautiful woman in Butare, was arriving like this, holding Valcourt’s hand, it was pretty serious. He had never had any illusions, but there was nothing to stop a big-bellied Belgian from dreaming, especially if he was rich and lived in Africa. As for Valcourt, he was shaking a little as he greeted all these people he knew at least by sight. And Gentille was now breaking, one by one, all the rules governing Rwandan behaviour between man and woman. She was speaking up, asserting herself. For the last few days she had been going ahead of him when they entered a shop or restaurant. When Valcourt spoke about her, their relationship or their plans, she did not bow her head and look at the ground, she sat or stood even straighter, like an alluring statue, with her back arched and her eyes bright. He remembered how timidly she used to walk, her shoulders hunched, eyes cast down and hidden by lids half closed. Her voice was then only a murmur, and her laugh a thin, shy smile that she covered with an embarrassed hand. Today, Valcourt told himself, she would not hesitate to kiss him in public if she felt like it.

  Two chairs were brought, and two bottles of Primus. It was Gentille who announced their coming marriage. The news was greeted with smiles but no real emotion. These old colonial hands and veteran aid workers had seen marriages between expatriates and star-struck or ambitious young things before. The couple’s decision to live in Rwanda didn’t surprise them either. At the beginning, this was always the way. But wishes were expressed for much happiness.

  Valcourt raised the deteriorating situation in Kigali and around the capital. A red-haired Belgian, who had been teaching philosophy since the university’s foundation in 1963, laughed and said, “They have to kill each other at regular intervals. It’s like the menstrual cycle: a lot of blood flows, then everything returns to normal.”

  Gentille stood up and put her hand on Valcourt’s shoulder.

  “We won’t sleep here tonight after all, Bernard. We’ll go to papa’s.”

  When they arrived at the big brick house surrounded by its impenetrable rugo hedge, Gentille asked Valcourt to wait outside while she announced the news to her father.

  Valcourt sat down on a rock several metres from the house. In the distance he could see the twinkling lights of the old capital as it dozed off insouciantly, then, between this canvas of flickering candles and himself, an immense hole, both black and silent. But after a few seconds, as his eyes adapted to the darkness, he detected a thread of smoke. Then another, then ten, a hundred, a thousand. A thousand, ten thousand little pinpoints of light were piercing the cover of night and letting as many tiny white ribbons escape. And from this cover pierced with ten thousand stars, like a sky inverted, there rose ten thousand gentle breathings, gasps, muffled barkings, shy tears, restrained laughter, together composing a warm, murmuring sound. The hush spoken by the silence was the language of the hills. And depending on whether he was thinking of the men clinging to the flanks of the hills or the peacefulness flooding through him, Valcourt could choose to listen to the murmuring of humanity or the wondrous hush of silence.

  He had not heard Jean-Damascène approaching.

  “Monsieur, I am honoured by the honour you are paying our family and our hill.”

  The moon highlighted an angular face. The deep voice spoke of a stern teacher, and the eyes … the eyes were Gentille’s, dark and silky, burning and exciting. The man spoke like a master from another era, which he was. He prolonged his sentences as if watching them unfold while formulating them. Gentille’s father, Valcourt thought, must surely have decided one day that he was going to speak French better than those he had learned it from.

  “I’m going to call you ‘son,’ even though I think— you’ll forgive me—that you’re older than I. It will be strange, but it’s a term I like. It’s what I call all my sons-in-law. And my daughters-in-law I call ‘daughter.’ ”

  He beckoned to Valcourt to follow him. He set off along the path Gentille and Valcourt had come by after leaving the jeep at the end of the dirt road. His long, bent frame was outlined against a sky glittering with a hundred thousand stars. Valcourt was following a spectre, a living dead man humming a languorous melody. Jean-Damascène stopped by a tree that had been twisted by the winds, with branches thrust down toward the valley, forming a kind of elongated parasol whose far end was protecting only a void.

  “It was under this fig tree that my great-grandfather Kawa died. In a way we are sitting on his grave, because no cemetery wanted to have him. Gentille told me that you knew our family secret, the pact that Kawa made with the devil so that we would cease to be what we were and his descendants would become members of a superior race. Monsieur Valcourt, my son, there is still time not to join this family and not to belong to this hill. No one will hold it against you, least of all Gentille, if you decide against an accursed destiny that can lead only to death. Kawa succeeded beyond all his dreams. Half his descendants are officially Tutsis and the other half have the physical characteristics to varying degrees, even though their identity cards show that they are Hutus. You could say that Kawa invented the Rwanda of today and his family is the horrible summation of it. A man alone on a hill, manipulating the ingredients of life, condemns those he creates to all sicknesses and all dangers.

  “Until 1959, this pact with the devil brought us only ple
asure and prosperity. Then the Belgians, who were a bit lost in an Africa that was shaking free of the colonial mould, and probably a bit tired of this unprofitable country, discovered as if by magic the virtues of democracy and the law of majority rule. Overnight, the shiftless Hutu became an incarnation of modern progress, and the shapeless mass of ignorant peasants a legitimate democratic majority. Even God complied, and his Gospel became a promise of justice and equality. The parish priests, who had had only Tutsi altar boys and seminarists, began to sing hallelujahs to the majority from the pulpit. The shepherds sent out calls to forgotten flocks and exhorted their members to take the pews closest to the altar. Kawa had to die a second time. People’s souls are mysteriously capable sometimes of taking on the folds of the skin they’re covered with. From all corners of the hill, Hutu sons and daughters of Kawa, who until then had been disappointed only to be tall like a Tutsi or have a Tutsi nose, were shouting loud and clear that they belonged to a new race that democracy made superior and dominant. Not many short, dark Hutus believed these turncoats, these mutants of history. But some of the turncoats were so convincing, making themselves the worst enemies of their brothers and cousins, that the new masters of the country decided to trust them and took them into their circles, their businesses and their families.

  “This hill is still today Kawa’s family’s hill. See how peaceful and fixed in time it is. That is the landscape’s lie, telling you that all the ferocity of Nature, every steep slope, has been tamed by man’s patient toil, humanity’s exemplary conquest of the unconquerable. What delusion! While we were clearing each square centimetre of these precipitous slopes, planting beans where nothing was growing but stones and brambles, and bananas where there had been only thistles, a cousin was hiding behind a rugo hedge, waiting for his cousin so he could kill him and thus prove his own Hutu identity. Our big, fine family, neither Hutu nor Tutsi, began to tear itself apart like a pack of mad, hungry dogs. Part of the hill scattered, some to Burundi, where the Tutsis dominate, some to Zaïre, most to Uganda.