On Friday, April the seventh, Father Louis arrived at the cocktail hour with a large suitcase. He had come at the request of a messenger paid by Victor. Several hours earlier, an envoy from the French embassy had asked him to get ready to leave the country. French and Belgian troops would be arriving any moment at Kigali airport to evacuate White foreign nationals and their families.13
“Make no mistake,” the priest added, accepting the whisky that Victor poured into a plastic glass, “they’re not coming to stay and save the country. They’re giving themselves three days, then they’ll be gone again. But I can’t go, if only because I’ve got a wedding and a baptism to celebrate on Sunday, as I told him. He didn’t seem to understand.”
Then, smiling mischievously as children do, he asked Gentille to close her eyes because he had a surprise for her. He opened the big cardboard suitcase and took out a wedding dress. Valcourt thought it was awful, but it was exactly what every young Rwandan girl dreams of and longs to have. “You didn’t know I was in the wedding-dress business.” The dresses were made by former prostitutes suffering from AIDS and were rented out by a Caritas boutique. To buy one would sometimes cost a bride’s family as much as three years’ income.
The dress was pink and blue with epaulettes and lace and sequin-trimmed frills and flounces, an ugly princess-of-the-masked-ball costume, a clumsy imitation of outdated bourgeois finery—Valcourt saw in it all the insidious perversions of colonization that impose even the colonizer’s castoffs on the colonized. Gentille was going to be married dressed up as a middle-class, small-town girl from the year 1900 while the world was falling apart in 1994.
Gentille didn’t like the dress any better than Valcourt but she was weeping for joy. When she had dreamed of her wedding, she had seen her dark skin made radiant by a dress so white, so diaphanously pure that it turned her into a black-and-white butterfly ready to take flight. She wasn’t being offered the wings she had imagined, but then, she was already on wings. Valcourt looked at the absurd creation Gentille was wearing as she skipped in delight around the table, and since we are transformed by the happiness of those we love, even when we don’t understand it, all he saw was the rapturousness of her smile.
Nearly a thousand people crowded about the pool that Sunday to attend the mass that Father Louis recited in a monotone. Almost all the Whites had already been evacuated. It was a gathering of Rwandans, and their prayers were neither feigned nor timid. Their voices in chorus filled the air. Their hymns rose like great flights of birds above the belt of eucalyptus trees around the hotel and hovered over the neighbouring hills. Gentille, in her too-big dress, prayed and sang with her eyes closed. Valcourt envied the believers for whom death opens the gates of heaven with all its rewards. But he too was praying in his fashion. He abandoned himself to follow in the footsteps of others, accepting their pace, following whatever tortuous path they showed him. Father Louis raised the Host above his head. Valcourt bowed his head respectfully, as in the days when he served mass at Sainte-Bernadette Church in the north end of Montreal. God didn’t exist, but he deserved that we bow down before his Word.
Victor had not only unearthed a cassette of the Wedding March , he had found two beautiful gold wedding rings, which the bride and groom exchanged. He had also had enough beer brought into the hotel that several hundred people felt they were taking part in a real celebration. After then baptizing Cyprien’s daughter, who was christened Marie-Ange Émérita, Father Louis folded up his portable altar and left without telling anyone that he had been ordered to leave for Bangui in a few hours, with all the employees of the French embassy.14 Madame Agathe gave the little girl a stuffed chimpanzee and Gentille gave her a silk scarf in Sabena colours, gifts she had bought from the shrewish Belgian who ran the souvenir shop in the hotel lobby.
Monsieur Georges had set up a table under the fig tree in the spot where Father Louis had placed his altar. An appetizer of asparagus, then roast chicken with buttered young beans, a fine salad, an almost ripe round of brie. The new bride and groom shared this sumptuous repast with Victor and Élise. Jean-Damascène had decided finally not to make the trip. Élise had come to say goodbye. She was leaving with the French. A beautiful Sunday at the pool in Kigali, thought Valcourt, relishing the hotel’s last bottle of Côtes du Rhône as if it were a truly great wine. A little tipsy, more from fatigue and emotion than wine, he and Gentille went up to their room. From their third-floor balcony they watched wordlessly as several hotel employees forming a chain passed water along from the pool in kitchen pots. The hotel was beginning to drink its pool.
That day in its major international bulletin CNN spent twenty seconds on the recurrence of ethnic problems in Rwanda, giving assurances, however, that foreign nationals were safe. Even the perspicacious BBC said little more. Radio-France Internationale talked about recurrent confrontations and ancestral tribalisms, wondering if Africans would ever be able to rid themselves of their ancient demons that kept provoking the most dreadful atrocities.
Gentille opened Éluard and read:
By day the house, by night the street
The street musicians
All play till lost in silence
Under the black sky clearly we see
She read in a voice that was firm yet filled with emotion, because the words were too close to reality, until night fell in a matter of seconds, as if God were placing a cover on a cauldron. Sometimes from very far away came a shrill scream; you’d have thought all the men on earth were after a single animal and disembowelling it.
Tomorrow they would have pain and absurdity back in their lives. Valcourt closed the door to the balcony and drew the curtains. Gentille sang a strange, sad ballad that lulled Émérita to sleep. She and Valcourt undressed, determined to celebrate their wedding night as if the whole world were celebrating their happiness with them.
They loved peacefully and long, without noisy or passionate embrace, like two streams meeting and blending and in the flow of the current losing their original colours. They were not in the time that was, or in the land of a thousand hills. For a few hours they lived elsewhere. And the sleep into which they drifted to the rhythm of their daughter’s breathing was simply another place for their radiance.
It was Monsieur Georges, the assistant manager, who awakened them with a big pot of coffee and a triumphant smile that disconcerted them.
“Prepare yourselves for your wedding trip. I’ve arranged everything. You’re leaving in two hours. Destination Nairobi with an English crew. You’ll come back when the bad season’s over. For now there’s nothing more for you to do here. The country doesn’t need refugees, it needs soldiers to kill the madmen.”
“What about our friends?” Valcourt wanted to know.
“You can’t do anything for them by staying here.”
Leaving didn’t mean betraying their friends any more than their country. They would be back. They had no time to pack, for Victor came to warn them that the UN troops were waiting and were leaving the hotel in fifteen minutes. Valcourt took his computer, his Walkman and several cassettes; Gentille took the chimpanzee, her wedding dress and Éluard. With Émérita, they climbed into a UNAMIR15 truck in which eight or ten haggard-looking Whites were already crowded with their suitcases. Four Senegalese soldiers mounted guard with guns in their hands. An armoured car went ahead.
At the foot of Republic Avenue they saw a hundred dead bodies piled up outside the French Cultural Centre. They turned right onto the Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity. Gentille could only look for a moment or two. Valcourt had not told her about the multicoloured ribbon strung out along the streets of Kigali. She bowed her head and asked Émérita to sit at her feet. At major crossroads, the ribbon stopped and became an enormous mass of flesh heaped up like old clothes.
Just beyond Gikondo, five minutes from the airport, the little convoy stopped at a roadblock manned by a dozen Rwandan soldiers who surrounded the truck. They made the passengers get out to check their papers. They
were only interested in Gentille, who explained that she was Valcourt’s wife. Five soldiers surrounded her, passing her papers from one to another. The more she protested, the more they laughed. False papers. Her face, her legs told them she was a Tutsi. False marriage. No one had signed marriage papers. Émérita, whom Gentille was holding by the hand, was howling. Oh yes, she was their daughter, but by adoption. The soldiers laughed harder still. The Senegalese sergeant in charge of the small convoy tried to intervene. He was shot dead. Valcourt lunged in Gentille’s direction. He was knocked unconscious with a rifle butt.
He came to in the plane. They told him that the sergeant in command of the detachment of presidential guards had prevented the young woman and child from being harmed. He had, it seemed, taken them under his protection.
Chapter Twelve
In Nairobi, Valcourt learned the enormity of the massacres. He had feared there might be as many as a hundred thousand deaths and now he was hearing talk of half a million. Fire and sword ruled the whole country, except for the Butare district. The army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front had left its Ugandan refuge and was rapidly approaching Kigali, meeting little resistance. While the Rwandan forces did not resemble a real army in anything but the name and the uniforms, the Tutsi troops of the RPF were professional, disciplined soldiers, the officers products of English and American military schools. Two days earlier the RPF had liberated the little town of Byumba and many who had succeeded in escaping the pogroms were now taking refuge there.
A week later, Valcourt was walking back and forth on the muddy high plateau of Byumba, where a hundred thousand refugees were already huddled together. With Raïka, a Somalian who was working for African Rights, he was gathering eyewitness reports so that a true history could be written of the genocide that was still raging a hundred kilometres to the south. He was moving in a strange universe here, composed entirely of women, old men and children. Their gaze was not empty but chillingly absent, turned inward, or quite simply dead. Like people who can see but will not. Only a few women would speak, in hushed voices, their eyes fixed on the ground, where they kept them long after they had finished their almost clinical descriptions (for they had only concrete words) of the murders of their husbands and sons. The rapes these shy, prudish women described with a wealth of blood-curdling detail, as if they were dictating the reports of their own autopsies. They spoke of the worst mutilations and most perverse assaults with a composure and detachment that made these acts even more heinous.
And with each story he recorded, Valcourt, of course, was sure he was hearing Gentille’s. If he had returned with a grain of hope, the four weeks he spent at Byumba destroyed it. He interviewed about a hundred people who had fled Kigali, four of whom had stayed at the Mille-Collines. There was no trace of Gentille. He would go to Kigali to find out how Gentille and their daughter had died. Then … then he … He could not finish the sentence his brain was trying to compose. Silence settled in his head the way absence had made its eternal nest in the gaze of those women.
To get from Byumba to the outskirts of Kigali took him and Raïka a week, following a battalion of RPF soldiers. It was a kind of descent into hell. A curious journey, a little like that of a Christian performing the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, each of the fourteen stations opening the wounds wider and bringing him inescapably closer to death. Rather than avoiding or fleeing horror, the two men were pursuing it, hunting it down in the remotest corners, like pathologists minutely noting the nature of wounds, evaluating how long it took for death to come.
Raïka was stuffing himself with Ativan. Valcourt would fall asleep like a drunken brute. Grotesque forms would wake him, hideous, putrescent bodies, caricatures of humans with arms shaped like machetes. Gentille would appear in the distance in a halo. The closer she came, for she was running toward him, the more she would become a horrible distortion of what she had been. She turned ash-grey and an incandescent river of lava ran from her belly. And when her twisted mouth, her rotted lips, placed themselves on his, he would wake with a loud cry, the smell of his own sweat all around him. The black night would glitter with a thousand stars.
Often he slept for only an hour and then would stay sitting, not thinking anything, his nose catching whatever whiff of death wafted from the smallest thicket. Even the invasive eucalyptus that was capable of sucking up all the land’s water could not impose its fresh scent. The pungent smell of human death was killing the smell of the trees. Every night Valcourt imagined a different death for Gentille, and the closer he and Raïka came to Kigali the more appalling his wife’s murder grew. In the nightmares that peopled every second of his sleep, it was Gentille who received all the tortures and humiliation that the women, their gaze buried in the blood-reddened ground, had confided to him, with shame, the way one admits the basest obscenity to a silent priest.
On the hills, in the little villages, in the squares and places where markets and meetings happen, the same stories were repeated. Neighbours, friends, sometimes relatives had come and had killed. Amid confusion perhaps, but efficiently. The killers were known, they were named. Every dead body had a known killer. In the towns both large and small, the genocide had been more systematic. Meetings had been organized, watchwords and directives had been given, plans had been laid. If the methods seemed so inhuman, if the killers killed with such savagery, it was not because they were improvising or were out of their minds, but simply that they were too poor to build gas chambers.
It was at Nyamata, an indolent, sizeable village whose low houses straggled along one wide, sandy street, that Valcourt and Raïka really understood. They were walking the paths of a second Holocaust.
They were taken to “the parish,” which in Rwanda refers to a gathering of buildings—elementary school, secondary school, health care clinic, residence—a veritable fortress of red brick around the church. The soldiers on guard advised them not to go any closer. From the nine or ten buildings a stink arose that was more revolting than liquid pig manure freshly spread on a hot summer day. It was not just the smell of death but of all deaths and all rotting things.
At the beginning of the massacres, almost all Tutsis shared a single reflex: the militiamen would not dare attack the house of God. By the tens of thousands, from all the hills and all the hamlets, they had run, walked and crawled through the night, and with a great sigh of relief had squatted in the choir of a church, or the entrance of a presbytery, or in a classroom with a crucifix looking down from the wall. God, the last rampart against inhumanity. But in this gentle springtime, God and more notably most of his pious vicars had abandoned their flocks. The churches became Rwanda’s gas chambers. In each building of the parish of Nyamata were piled hundreds upon hundreds of bodies. Three thousand people had squeezed into the round church, under the gleaming metal roof. They had closed the heavy wrought-iron doors behind them. The killers, frustrated not to be able to enter, finished their business with grenades. A few dozen grenades did the job and blew a thousand little holes in the roof, which on this sunny day made a thousand diamonds of light on the floor of the church. Three diamonds sparkled on what Valcourt thought he recognized as Gentille’s neck.
Valcourt and Raïka were no longer taking reports from survivors, or very few. Their guides were efficient and determined, leading them from one common grave to the next, from one church to another.
They had almost reached Kigali but had to make a stop at Ntarama, where the RPF soldiers led them once again to the church. There they found the same formless carpet of bodies, the same stench of putrefaction that enters not through the nose but through the mouth and invades one’s guts. It was as if the smell of death was trying to purge everything living from Valcourt’s body. His stomach had emptied repeatedly for days. Now only a trickle of bile wet the corners of his mouth.
At a turn in the road he saw the first hill of Kigali. This was Gentille’s place. He was coming back to where he would feel he was in his own house.
The city was quiet and e
mpty. Only a few military vehicles were driving sedately on the long Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity. At the major crossroads there were a few disciplined and polite RPF soldiers on watch. The endless ribbon of bodies had disappeared. Where death had put on its most indecent show, long trenches had been dug that made a red ochre hem at the side of the asphalt. Here and there one could make out a splash of colour, a shirt, a dress, a red scarf that the lime had not completely covered.
Valcourt was stopping at each grave, hoping not to recognize anyone. He walked slowly, examining the clothes, studying the shapes of the bodies, trying to figure out the faces. Fear had taken the place of horror. But it was a contradictory, ambiguous fear that he could not pinpoint. His last remaining shred of logic, of analytical capacity, all the evidence he had heard, everything, absolutely everything told him that Gentille was dead. He was afraid in fact not to know for sure that she was dead, because then her disappearance would mean that her death was just one of a hundred thousand other deaths, like a drop of water in a sea of nameless and faceless tragedies. Gentille deserved to live until her own death, and Valcourt knew he would not be able to live unless he could write the story of her death. He wasn’t interested in the killers, didn’t care much what their names were. Obedient bit-players, ridiculous puppets, poor devils conned by everyone. In his country you couldn’t bring them to trial or demand punishment because the courts would declare them insane on account of collective poisoning of their minds.
At the hotel, the only thing left unscathed was the fig tree, whose luxuriant beauty stood like a foil for the idiocy of men. Valcourt came across several soldiers camping in the rubble-strewn lobby. The pool was empty. The hotel’s refugees had drunk all the water. They had also eaten the few birds in the aviary, whose door was swinging in the wind, grating on its hinges. Some of the eucalyptus trees around the pool were missing. They had been cut down for boiling water once there was no more wood from tables or bedroom furniture to burn. The ravens and buzzards and jackdaws were making do, perching more numerous than ever on the remaining branches.
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali Page 20