This felt, as it always does, like hunger and freedom and finding and wearing and racing and dancing and burning and having and laughing and fucking and bracing himself in the tide of who she is, the slap of it against his chest.
He began to fix her in his mind as the scent of syruped coffee and also green mornings, the aftertaste of Fanta – popular in Rwanda, Fanta – and the nag of over-happy music and motor taxi exhausts. There was Montreal in her, too – those flattened Québécois vowels and a park bench, sitting, being startled away by clutching mission drunks, being disproportionately frightened, scared of her multiple weaknesses and how they show themselves: that was yesterday. She had that at her surface, but he pressed until she dipped into years ago and Kigali and the sway of rounded hills – no anxiety, no shocks – simply pooled mist and dust that is a pinkish khaki, that washes down on to the pavements and the tarmac when it rains.
He chooses not to admit that Rwandan earth is a colour that makes him think of taint, of spillage, of humped soil that moves, seethes, becomes remarkable with covering too much slaughtered meat. He keeps her from that – seals every thought of her away from the slip of putrefaction, tangled cloth, unbreathable streets. The least he can do.
He’s seen other countries, other places that remember selections and thefts, houndings, flights, pits – Guatemala, Poland, Bosnia, Spain – an older and newer and larger list of countries every year. The man is aware that different violated earths have different colours, so he shouldn’t let chance mineralogy mislead him, or trouble her.
In his thoughts, she will see no blood, not where he saves her. His mind doggedly takes her to live in a flawless space in a sunlit room in an upper storey in a row of many mansions – he’s going to keep her there. Every one of his enquirers is settled safe inside imagined houses, together with the details that made them real. They are stored away with dignity, accurate tenderness.
He doesn’t forget them.
They are held under love.
This is important.
As important as the fact that he works for them and then never sees them again.
No exceptions.
His necessary loneliness.
The right way to do wrong.
The man hears Agathe stirring through the wall, a toilet flush, taps running for a bath. The accommodation they share is not luxurious, but it is pleasant, allows for privacy and space. It brought her near to her earlier existence when she saw it. There was the start of tears, an anger, a shame.
He has given her salts and oils for bathing. Neither of them believes they confer any New Age benefits. They’re having none of that crap. They do make her feel indulged, though, womanly and pampered and, by now – two days gone – this is something she can tolerate again. Guillaume, her husband would have bought her similar treats at their beginning, on one of his attentive, unbusied days.
Difficult to get the scents just right – musk, Egyptian sandalwood, frankincense, tuberose, Givenchy Pi for Men and Amarige – very 1990s. He gives her ways in which Agathe can recall Agathe, ways in which Agathe can recall Guillaume.
Michel, her son, is more difficult, further away.
It hurts both the man and Agathe that Michel is staying mainly out of reach.
The cruelty of sons with their mothers never ceases to disgust.
While she bathes, the man waits and leans his elbows on the table, shuts his eyes and shifts his head, nuzzling the conditioned air. Then he swallows and frowns and drops into a sense of her skin – this isn’t a sexual process, this is knowing – this is, in a way, being known – this is water over her surface, their shared surface, over the no-longer-needed body, the attempting-to-forget-itself body, over the scar on her collar bone. Cupping liquid warm in her left hand.
Agathe’s right hand is gone. So she can’t be right-handed.
Shame, because she was.
Could be worse. And it’s not as if she’s pretending she’d have prospered as a cleaner, a nanny, a waitress, been happy in some abject, practical, double-handed job. Agathe is not practical. Journalism suited her: ideas, concepts, a discipline of the mind, of uncovering and talking, shaping, driving, late-night calls and letting her name be printed – her byline exposed where the radio broadcasts could find it in those poisonous last days. The new kind of journalists started work: the ones who coach murderers then set them loose to play – and they wanted her. They wanted everyone. They were ready at RTLM: nailed her up on air with her husband. She is unable to forget the adolescent, happy music, the fresh voices – Georges Ruggiu, Valerie Bemeriki – all those knowing and persuasive voices, authoritative threats, exhilarating threats, the fucking and fucking and fucking energy of threats – bloodthreats, fuckthreats, young men’s threats. Some days, she could see them shading the air above her like greasy smoke.
They only broadcast for a bit more than a year, so their influence was remarkable. What might be called their productivity was highly impressive. Then again, it was a highly productive genocide – efficient beyond imagination.
Kill rates have never been exceeded.
Not yet.
And the Brits did what to intervene? Helped the delays, assisted evasions. Eventually we sent some trucks. Old ones. Fifty trucks. To save a whole country. Every mechanism slowly failing. Doesn’t bear thinking about.
But I do think about it. My job to bear.
I bear nothings, ghosts, thoughts.
A British (non-domiciled, non-taxpaying) citizen just doing what he can.
To help.
To help her.
After the killing’s stopped.
Sort of stopped.
Agathe, clearly, was not killed. She was mutilated and raped.
Agathe survived, which is an extremely misleading word.
Agathe can type slowly, freelances with some francophone work, some English. She writes whatever she can, agrees to be an expert on the whole of Africa, to pretend that everywhere on the continent must be fundamentally alike. Agathe pretends she is from Burundi, which is almost true. She comments on Rwanda, on President Kagame, on how many potential genocidaires you can select and choose to kill before you yourself will become a genocidaire – on how the poison still frets in the earth.
Agathe knows she had a son.
Not now.
Agathe knows she had a husband.
Not now.
Agathe had that one strong border around the privacy of her mourning and the guilt that she’d been slow once, had not understood her situation – she’d been a journalist and clever but she hadn’t adequately predicted, hadn’t pre-empted a single terror, had not saved anything.
And after that Agathe had decided that nobody else would mislead her, that she would be ready, even though she believed that she shouldn’t be living, that every breath was unforgivable. She was walled up alone inside her watchfulness and sin.
So the man simply sang out her pain, made a methodical inventory for her, so that she could grow used to his being correct. He didn’t even murmur against her defences – he sat outside them and stretched in the sunlight and searched through his pockets for redemption, held it coddled in his hand and warm and let her see.
If she wanted it, then she would break herself open for him and ask him in.
Eventually, everyone does.
Because we all need mercy, how could we not?
And I have the finest for her, because I make it.
Hand-crafted for one careful owner.
None better.
And he’s set her fingers firm on his wrist, made her hold him so she can’t help but notice when he’s squeezed his pulse slower, flattened it, when he’s raced his heart, trembled. Yesterday – his arm all gimmicked, ready – they went a little further. It wasn’t a cheap trick necessarily, only a plain thing, an apposite addition which would deepen confidence – it’s not like he’d s
tooped to blood-writing, nothing shabby. Time was, he was going for 10/11 forces with Tarot cards, nonsense like that – deserved a spanking.
Now he stops his heart.
He did that for Agathe: gave her a death reversed. Nothing flash, just a sufficient halt, no showing off. She would have felt him slow, then stop, then start back up. And it wouldn’t have seemed unlikely: he generally looks like death, bloody awful.
Fucking headache all the fucking time.
He’d squeezed the gimmick, let his blood apparently falter and stop, and then he let her search his intentions, eye-to-eye. He parted himself for her, let her peep in. And then he released the pressure on his arm, restored his pulse, stuttering, struggling, fighting to be with her. After that, three decongestants and his lack of effective blood had guaranteed him palpitations, something unfakeable – unless you know how to fake it.
And then The Gift.
He’d brought her Guillaume.
He’d summoned her husband, made Guillaume beyond convincing, let him find her smile – that early-love, most beautiful and delicate of her smiles. The man gave Agathe exactly what her husband would have if he still existed and wasn’t bullshit and could have returned from the beyond. The man let Guillaume forgive and forgive and forgive.
Agathe had that one strong border.
Not now.
And today Agathe will wear the mishinana the man bought her – karkade red – and together they will finish this before tomorrow morning.
Once she’s opened her bedroom door she pauses, stands and is lovely and almost knows it. The cloth of the dress drapes conveniently – tradition leaving her perfect side revealed and concealing the damaged shoulder, the shortened limb.
The man seats her at the table, deft and attentive as a maître d’, and then he lights the final candle – hibiscus red – turns out the lamps and sits down opposite.
He always uses three candles: the black, the white, the red. His enquirers decide on each colour’s significance, a logical order. Very few of them choose to end with red.
Brave eyes and brave to the bone.
No food no drink, not for either of us – only this.
He sets both forearms flat on the tabletop, allows her to mirror him, which she does and tells her, ‘Mwaramutse.’
Kinyarwanda – I’ve not had to use that with anyone else. A nice task, picking it up – adds an extra layer, perhaps a resource for the future – Christ knows, they’ve got enough widows . . . And speaking it has pleased her, really delighted her in some tiny way. I’m slightly proud of that.
‘Is it still the morning?’ She smells of roses. She settles, meets his gaze. She is asking for everything this time – whatever else he can do.
Which will be The Final Leaving and The Beginning.
Leaving is easy – it’s starting again that’s intolerable, deciding to walk out into your life, the way it promises and then fumbles.
I used to say I’d give them hope – but no one should have to deal with that.
Even so, he says, ‘It’s another morning. Last day. Amakuru?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘We got through the night.’
‘We got through the night.’ Her voice is deeper, her words are slower than when she arrived, they seem younger, nearer, snug and unselfconscious as they touch her lips. ‘We got through the night.’
Night is when the young men ran and played with their swooping, exhumed blades, their stockpiled determination to remove the inyensi, the ibyitso, accomplices of the rebels, the inkotanyi.They made roadblocks which could not be passed, constructed gauntlets that clotted with bodies, breathing heaps and parts. They laid waste. They took neighbours and teachers, broadcasters, politicians, shopkeepers, journalists, anyone, anyone, anyone who was marked, who was listed as a collaborator, cockroach, moderate, threat. And the running men, the playing men – they denied the rules of homes and cities and hospitals and churches and villages and farms, the rules of human beings facing other human beings. They raped in the way they might smoke a cigarette, or take a drink. They raped to prove their point – that they were raping nobody, doing nothing – that appetite and liberated thinking are invincible. They were an absolute, carried out their umuganda as if it was truly clearing brush, cutting down the tall trees – fast as pulling out the bad weeds – as if their country ought to be reworked into one vast, manicured landscape – like the grounds of a stately home, or perhaps a golf course. Machetes and bullets and fears so great that everyone must die before the morning.
Each time Agathe has closed her eyes it has been night. Six years of night inside her skull and the noises that people make when they stop being people.
This morning she will watch the man’s face and he will talk her back into April and living in Kimihurura – up the hill by the diplomatic compounds, in amongst the curved roads and woodlands – good for parties and gossip, good for sweet air.
But the President’s plane has exploded and what couldn’t be happening is; beyond any limits, it is. There was a plan. All along, the men with machetes, the broadcasters, the politicians who moved them – they had a plan – there were strategies and contingencies and diplomatic considerations and she never found the red, wet truth of them. So it found her. It found everyone.
And the man and Agathe and Guillaume – they are there together.
And running up the middle of the road is a naked woman and then she falls the way she might if she had tripped. She will have hurt herself, skinned her knees. There’s an odd stain on her back, it glistens. A presidential guard ambles towards her, shoots her once more, this time in the head, moves on.
Agathe is three minutes away – a three-minute leisurely walk – caught in her dangerous, pretty house that has simple doors and unarmoured windows, a pleasant garden, decking for the evening sun, an inadequate fence.
None of what she has is any use to her, not now.
Guillaume wants Agathe to hide. He tells her in one hot whisper, ‘Genda!’ He sounds the way he never has: so small, so scared, tearing with love. And she won’t go and he begs and the men are next door – outside and next door – Abakuzi, Impuzamugambi, Interahamwe – the names of her coming death.
And when she remembers this, drops into this, Agathe shivers and the man shivers and when she cries – this bereft, immobile weeping – the man weeps, too.
And she’s going, she’s going there – completely there – and so stay with her and love her and stay with her and here she goes, all of the way.
And the man tells her that Guillaume is in the room with her – imagines a sense of being filled with this breath, with this scent, this years-ago air – and the man takes her husband’s words into his own mouth – ‘Iruka!’ The last word – good guess, lovely guess – beautiful job.
So follow up, keep hold.
The husband must have watched while Agathe hid somewhere . . . no thought of being tortured for her whereabouts – he’s going to be murdered, not interrogated – and he wants to see the last of his wife, he wants her face there firm in his thinking when he’s by himself and the horror comes.
Somewhere – look at her – it was somewhere tiny, hopeless, flimsy . . . she’s shrinking into it, thinking of hugging herself like a girl – somewhere low that was like a cupboard – at the level of the soldiers’ shins, boots – flinching, flinching, flinching – loud boots once they were indoors and kicking.
Because this is fucking obvious, the man tells her the intruders took money and jewellery and pawed through her clothes.
Mention bedding – I’d rip bedding – if I was a cunt like that.
Confusing, intoxicating – being the violated and the violator – the killer and the killed.
I’ll sleep well tonight – bloody exhausted.
I’ll sleep well or not at all . . .
Agathe frozen somewhere when he
mentions the bedding.
Bedding.
The word hits.
Lovely.
So she was in a linen cupboard. Smell of bedding, fresh, intimate, owned – no way to sleep for her, ever after – no way out of dark and wakefulness – or there hasn’t been – but I’ll make her a way. I will.
Agathe hid in the linen cupboard and listened to the sounds of metal and her husband’s bones.
Guillaume didn’t shout, didn’t want to upset her, stayed unexpressed – comes across as an odd man, very gentle, slightly distant – more suited for academia than journalism.
Either way, they’d have fucking killed him.
Agathe holding her breath in the cupboard – has kept holding her breath ever since – the only sounds letting her understand Guillaume’s murder.
She heard the breaking of her husband’s body – what she kissed, learned, fucked, loved. They killed Guillaume.
This would be the point where she went very reasonably insane.
And afterwards – being the perpetrators again – the man imagines and describes searching, giggling, drunk men, stoned men, breaking things, foulness in Agathe’s house.
Naturally, they found her – cruel to dwell on that and it might push her too far, lock her beyond herself again, so be gentle over it – be gentle anyway – fuck – of course, be gentle.
Agathe was not Tutsi like her husband and her rapists knew that. Because she was Hutu, they exercised perverse restraint, permitted everything except her murder. Or else it was premeditated torture – this leaving her alive, alone, making her see.
Trying to overwhelm those eyes. Make them shut.
The last thing they did was to cut off her hand.
The man thinks of her hoping she’d bleed to death.
Not allowed – none of those thoughts, not any more – no more dying, no rushing into destruction. Can’t let the bastards make her kill herself, reach out and murder her with her own will.
The Blue Book Page 10