A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche

  “No, no, we have to go back to Kigali, we’re getting married on Sunday. Tomorrow you have to pick out your dress.”

  The official radio station was broadcasting an international news bulletin in French. A release from Quebec announced that the Parti Québécois government would probably hold a referendum on sovereignty within a year. The ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia was continuing and more and more countries were considering a military intervention by NATO. On Radio Mille-Collines, a hollering voice was enumerating the list of Tutsi accomplices who were threatening to take power: Agathe Uwilingiyiamana, who was spitting on her parents, turning her back on them, and who was prime minister of the transitional government; Landouald, who liked to be called “Lando,” vice-president of the Liberal Party; Faustin, president of the Social Democratic Party, a Hutu traitor who was fond of Tutsi hookers.

  “The work has only begun. This time we mustn’t stop before it’s finished. We’ve forgiven them so often. In 1963 they didn’t get it, in spite of warnings that cost them a lot. Ten years later we’ve shown them our power and our right to this country once again, but it’s like when you cut up earthworms: machetes have only multiplied them and made them bolder and more perverted. Today they’ve killed our president and are getting ready to kill you all. You’re in a state of legitimate defence. We must eradicate the enemy. A little music and we’ll be back with the latest news. This is Radio Mille-Collines, free radio-television, the voice of freedom and democracy. Here is John Lennon’s ‘Imagine.’ ”

  There was uncustomary commotion at the Rundo crossroads. Shadows were running this way and that. Fires were burning. A minor picture of the apocalypse, thought Valcourt, kissing Gentille on the forehead tenderly. They said nothing but both were thinking of Marie who lived a hundred metres to the left, and it was left they turned when they came to the roadblock. The jeep was suddenly surrounded by a dozen militiamen armed with machetes and masus. A policeman ordered them to continue on their way to Kigali or go back toward Butare. They must not go into Rundo.

  “It’s for your own safety. The rebels are infiltrating the hills.”

  The soldiers manning the last roadblock before Kigali didn’t seem worried about the supposed invasion of Tutsi rebels from Uganda. They were more numerous and more talkative than usual. The lieutenant, whom Valcourt knew by sight, made great welcoming signs as he walked toward the jeep.

  “Good evening, Monsieur from the television station. You’re arriving just in time for some great shots. We’ve begun to cleanse the capital.”

  As soon as they were into the city they could hear the sharp, chilling sounds of gunshots from all around. Valcourt knew war, and the sounds he was hearing were not those of engagements between soldiers. The rebels had not invaded the city. Hundreds of killers were on the prowl, noisily carrying out their work.

  It was eleven o’clock when Valcourt and Gentille arrived at the hotel. At the gate, the usual peddlers of smuggled cigarettes and bogus antique carvings were gone and a dozen presidential guardsmen were inspecting every vehicle going in or out. In the background, United Nations soldiers were standing around watching. Some hundred people had invaded the lobby. The men were crowding around the reception desk or talking. The women, sitting on the mosaic floor, were trying to keep children quiet or coax them to sleep. No one had any baggage and a few women were wandering around in bathrobes. Monsieur Georges, the assistant manager, was moving about with dignity amid the confusion, assuring everyone of a room as soon as one of his guests moved out. For the moment, the hotel was glad to have them all, but it would be better if they settled down outside, around the pool. Madame Agathe’s girls, who had abandoned the pool and fourth-floor bars, were suggesting rendezvous in the shower stalls near the pool, the hairdressing salon, or the women’s washroom in the basement. Around the pool, noisiness had given way to muttering. Ensconced on their plastic deckchairs, the consultants and transient expatriates, those great adventurers of international aid who had seen it all before, were feigning indifference, masking the fear that kept them stuck to their seats. From table to table they clustered together, leaving their local counterparts to their anxieties and their rumours, forming little circles of petrified but outwardly unperturbed Whites. As professionals in things African, they anticipated a few excesses in the initial hours, which frightened them, but they also knew that the Belgian, French or American paras would step in promptly to extricate their precious compatriots from the hellfires that the great powers had helped ignite.

  Valcourt and Gentille wandered around hand in hand amid the pandemonium for a few minutes. They went to their room and found the child they were going to christen Émérita sound asleep. Alice, the young Muslim girl from Nyamirambo, was watching though not understanding a word of a CNN program on new European fashion trends. She didn’t feel like going to work and even less like taking the risk of going home. Gentille bedded her down on the balcony with several pillows and a heavy wool blanket while Valcourt went up to the bar to get something to eat and drink. He came back with a case of mediocre Côtes du Rhône, some cheeses, some bread and three cartons of milk.

  “The barman advised me to go easy, especially with the wine. With all these newcomers, the stock’s going to run out pretty fast.”

  He opened a bottle and poured three glasses, but Alice declined because of her religion. She accepted a piece of bread, which she spread with cheese as though it were butter. The Camembert wasn’t bad and the wine was less corked than usual. Valcourt and Gentille sat cross-legged, face to face on the bed like two children making up ghost stories when their parents think they’re asleep. But they weren’t talking. They gazed at each other, their eyes moving only when there were gunshots. They ate hungrily and drank quickly, as if they were devouring chunks of life.

  “Gentille, d’you know when I fell in love with you? ”

  “The night you came and drove me home?”

  “No, the first morning. It was six o’clock and you’d just started your internship. I’d asked for eggs turned over, but they weren’t. With bacon, but I ended up with ham. But all I could see were your breasts almost cutting through your starched blouse and your behind that must have been shaped by a genius of a sculptor, and I didn’t want to say anything that wouldn’t be nice to such a beauty. When I got up to go, you whispered, as frightened as a gazelle that scents a lion, ‘Monsieur, it’s my first day interning. I hope you’ll forgive me. I reread my order slips. You asked for bacon and eggs turned over. Why didn’t you say anything? Thank you.’ You spoke looking at the ground. You were so upset and so embarrassed, so embarrassed. I didn’t say anything. I was paralyzed by your beauty and enchanted by your coming to me that way. I watched you from that moment on. I knew when you started and finished work. You’d bring me a Primus and I was the one who was shaking when I thanked you.”

  “And when did I fall in love with you? ”

  “After that phony Parisian asked you for a herb tea? ”

  “No, my first day interning. When I realized I was more important to someone than my mistakes.”

  “So why did we wait so long?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not sorry.”

  They lay down and in spite of the shouting, loud talk and crying of children coming up from the pool, around midnight fell into a deep and peaceful sleep.

  According to eyewitness reports gathered from neighbours, this was the hour when their friend Landouald, his Québécoise wife, Hélène, and their two children were murdered by presidential guardsmen. Raphaël’s body was found eight or ten metres from Élise’s house, where he was trying to take refuge. Six months after the genocide, Valcourt was present when they exhumed several thousand decomposed bodies from a common grave alongside the hospital wall, a stone’s throw from the Detection Centre where André worked, the gentle musician who made his living distributing condoms. Valcourt recognized his guitar case but no one could identify the body. The family decided to give a proper burial to the guitar. Mar
ie’s husband succeeded in hiding his wife and six of his nine children in the false ceiling of a Hutu friend’s house. They spent nearly two months there. Charles himself was killed while trying to save the three other children; the three boys were also felled by machetes and clubs. With fifteen thousand refugees, Stratton resisted attacks from soldiers and militiamen for a week. Almost all were massacred. Of the 320 members of Stratton’s family, seventeen survived. By night, Stratton travelled through fields and swamps, a distance of a hundred kilometres, to Gentille’s father’s house, to find Jean-Damascène nearing death from the tuberculosis that was destroying his lungs.

  The next morning at breakfast, Valcourt and Gentille learned in bits and pieces that their world was collapsing around them. There were now several hundred people camping around the pool, in the parking lot and in the corridors of the hotel. The hotel’s water supply and telephone lines had been cut. Victor, the restaurant owner, was hailed as a hero when he showed up with a hundred loaves of bread, bottles of water and all the eggs in his restaurant’s refrigerator. He had already made ten trips between his restaurant on Justice Avenue and the hotel. A hundred people had taken refuge in his basement there. In his shiny beige Peugeot, waving handfuls of money at the militiamen and policemen, he was driving them four at a time to the Mille-Collines. The rumour had got around fast: the presence of White aid workers and experts as well as some UN soldiers made the hotel, which belonged to the Belgian airline Sabena, an even safer sanctuary than the churches. Victor asked Valcourt to accompany him on these comings and goings. His presence could be useful.

  Valcourt got in the car with Victor, who steered with one hand and counted a rosary with the other. Having the White with his papers from the Ministry of Information in the car with him could only help. At the very first roadblock, Valcourt blanched and thought he’d pass out. A long, wavy line of bodies snaked down one side of Justice Avenue. Beside it, militiamen and policemen were ordering passengers out of their vehicles. A single machete blow was often enough, then teenagers dragged the still-quivering body to the side of the pavement. The men’s bodies, clothed, made black and white patches; the women’s were exposed, legs spread, breasts bared, pink or red underpants around their knees. Many were still alive. Valcourt could see them tremble and hear them rattle as they breathed and moaned. The men were killed skilfully and accurately with a single shot or machete stroke, but the women didn’t have the right to a quick, clean death. They were mutilated, tortured, raped, but not finished off as the killers would have done with wounded animals. They were allowed to bleed to death, to feel death coming rattle by rattle, gob by gob of blood-filled spit, to punish them for having brought so many Tutsis into the world, but also to punish them for their arrogance, for the young killers had been told that Tutsi women considered themselves too good for Hutus.

  Victor and Valcourt followed a red pickup truck. Standing in the back of it were three presidential guardsmen and a cameraman who was calmly filming the long multicoloured ribbon. They stopped and got out near a woman all dressed in pink, lying on her back. Two children were kneeling beside her, crying. One of the soldiers turned the woman’s light body over with his foot, and her slender arm extended toward him as though appealing for help. The cameraman kept filming, moving around her to get more angles and close-ups, long shots and medium shots, then put down his camera, unzipped his fly and penetrated her. When he raised his head, probably after ejaculating, Valcourt recognized him. It was Dieudonné, his best student. Victor was muttering, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you …” The ravens and buzzards were flying low, circling over the banquet being offered them. Valcourt vomited himself inside out.

  They passed the prison and police headquarters, from which group after group of armed militiamen poured forth, each with a policeman, and clambered into vehicles that headed off in the direction of Nyamirambo, Gikondo or Muhima. Victor turned onto Hospital Street, then Revolution Boulevard. The vendors of expired medications and women selling food who usually clustered about the entrance to the Kigali Hospital Centre were gone. There was no doctor doing a triage of the wounded coming to receive treatment. Soldiers were casting a quick eye at the injured. Their method of selection showed incontrovertible logic: someone with a machete wound could only be a rebel and was finished off. The body was tossed onto the piles of other bodies that trucks, buses and cars were unloading. Militiamen were rummaging through the clothes and brandishing their precious finds with whoops and laughter.

  Victor had approached the leader at the roadblock near his restaurant and offered to feed his men. He wanted to do his bit for the republic, he said. A handful of militiamen, already dead drunk, were asleep outside the restaurant. Inside, two policemen were guarding some terrified female captives. “Cockroaches, Tutsi cockroaches we’re going to find some good Hutus for.” Valcourt recognized an employee at the television station to whom he had never spoken and whose name he didn’t even know. Instinctively, he moved toward her. She put a hushing finger to her lips and signalled a frantic no with her eyes, then turned her back to him. Victor, who had seen the move, gripped Valcourt by the sleeve, still counting his beads.

  Victor was a hard-working man. Aside from being the proprietor of a very popular restaurant, he was also the owner of a number of trucks that transported fish from Lake Kivu. He always took as his cut a good share of the load to recover his incidental expenses, an arrangement that enabled him to serve the best and least expensive fried tilapias in town. In the basement of his restaurant he had set up a machine shop plus the offices of an import company that did business only with South Africa. Victor revered two prophets, jesus and Nelson Mandela. Jesus held the future of the world in his hands and Nelson Mandela held the future of Africa in his. If the former Robben Island prisoner had freed a country that had belonged to the Whites and given it to the Blacks without much killing while allowing the Whites to exist too, then he might well save Rwanda, where the majority was as black as the minority. All the businesspeople who looked to Europe and the United States for trade laughed at this pious, uneducated man who wanted to do business with Africans. They ignored him so completely that Victor could import Mandela’s small electric motors built with Israeli technology, and his light agricultural machinery, without paying any bribes at all to Akazu members or customs agents. Only Victor’s workshop, of course, had the necessary parts and expertise to repair what he sold. Victor was rich, but that was not important to him. What he wanted was to live in peace with his wife and six children and, above all, get into heaven.

  Two militiamen opened the big black metal doors that gave access to the machine shop. Victor stopped the Peugeot and asked them to close the doors behind him. Ahead on the other side was a lane a hundred metres long that joined a street leading to the Church of the Holy Family. From there they could get back to the hotel without going through the Revolution Square roadblock.

  “Victor, I knew one of the prisoners.”

  “I knew almost all of them.”

  Victor got three women who were hiding in the shop into the car. At the bottom of the hill he stopped outside his house and came back with a bundle of money and a handgun, which he slipped under his belt. The soldiers guarding the hotel entrance recognized his car and waved him through, but he stopped and gave the lieutenant ten thousand francs for beer and cigarettes for his men. Over the next few days, he brought a hundred people to the hotel in this way. Forty children spent two months in his machine shop and all were saved. One day, while he was bringing food back to the hotel, a policeman refused the money he was proffering and asked him to get out of the car. Victor closed his eyes and stepped on the gas. The Peugeot hit an oil barrel, throwing a militiaman who was sitting on it against the windshield and onto the ground. Victor made it back inside the hotel and there lay low until the extremists were defeated.

  Not only Kigali was engulfed by the insanity. Newly arrived refugees at the hotel were bringing terrifying news. Identical operations were going
on at Rumagana, Zaza, Kazenze, Nyamata, Rundo and Mugina.

  The Canadian general came to reassure the expatriates and the notables who had taken refuge in the hotel. He talked like a press release. The international community would not remain indifferent, but for the moment the UN forces could only intervene peaceably, in the hope that their presence alone would bring those responsible for these excesses back to reason. One of the leaders of the Liberal Party—Lando’s party and that of most Tutsis—approached him, looked him in the eyes, which he turned away, and spat on his shiny boots.

  “Shut up. You’re pathetic. They killed ten of your own soldiers12 and even then you didn’t react. If you can’t defend your own soldiers, you’re not going to have us believe you’re going to protect us.”

  The general bowed his head and left the hotel with the round-shouldered, heavy gait of a man condemned.

  At Monsieur Georges’s request, Gentille had agreed to go back to work. After two days of massacres, there were almost a thousand people at the hotel, including a hundred children. With several of Madame Agathe’s girls, she established a small area for children in a secluded part of the garden behind the fig tree and the aviary. She organized games and took the children in groups to the pool. Monsieur Georges had also set up a kind of refugee committee, of which Victor and Valcourt were members. The committee talked for hours on end, envisioning the best and worst scenarios, calculating reserves of food, trying to find equitable rationing methods while taking account of the fact that the hotel also had “normal” guests. Gentille and Valcourt shared the strange impression that they themselves were the only ones living normally. The young woman took care of children, comforted worried mothers, prepared bottles, seemingly endowed with such serenity and lightness of touch that she appeared to float above a world she had ceased to be part of. With Victor, Valcourt (who was hardly even-tempered himself) came up with hundreds of soothing arguments to cool the squabbles and innocuous but still disruptive confrontations bred by close quarters and fear, even among the most reasonable of beings.