A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (22 page)

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 pleasure 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.

“My son, today we have closed the circle of history and absurdity. The head of the
interahamwes
, who have sworn to cut the throats of all the Tutsis and send them all the way to Egypt by the Kagera River, is a Tutsi. He’s an uncle of Gentille’s. The number two of the RPF, the Tutsi army that’s preparing vengeance from Uganda, is a Hutu, and he’s also an uncle of Gentille’s. Both of them—they don’t know this, but either one will do it—both want to kill Gentille, who doesn’t belong to either side. Gentille is like the fruit of the red earth of this hill, a mysterious mix of all the seeds and all the toil of this country. Son, you’re going to marry a country they want to kill, one that could be simply Rwandan if it had the chance, the country of a thousand hills, which all of us, nameless and heedless of origin, have built like patient, obstinate fools. Son, we must flee the madness that invents peoples and tribes. It respects neither the country’s sons nor its daughters. It creates demons and spells, lies that become truth and rumours that are claimed as historical fact. But if you are crazy enough to embrace this hill, its consuming madness and its most beautiful daughter, I shall love you more than my own sons.”

“Monsieur, I ask you for the hand of your daughter Gentille and the hospitality of this hill, because here is where I want to live.”

Jean-Damascène knelt, scratched at the earth with his long fingers, and placed in Valcourt’s hands a few pebbles, a little rich red soil, some blades of grass and a leafy twig fallen from the fig tree.