An Ordinary Man (19 page)

It did not ease my feeling of general anxiety at all that we were the only car on the road. There were a number of roadblocks,
of course. They were manned not by the
Interahamwe
this time, but by the RPF. The soldiers looked at us curiously. “What are you doing out here?” they wanted to know. “Don’t
you know how dangerous it is out here?” They were very suspicious of us. But they let us pass.

We arrived in my hometown after a few hours. It was as deserted as the roads had been. This was where my friend Aloise had
wanted us to take refuge—the place where the
mwami
had taken his cows for safety during wars of past centuries. But that old myth had been broken in the past few weeks. The
genocide had come here, too. More than 150 people connected to the Seventh-day Adventist Church had had the same idea as Aloise.
These rural pastors and their families had come here thinking they would be protected at the college at Gitwe where I had
attended school. They had all been slaughtered.

It occurred to me that if I had stayed with my earlier ambition to be a pastor, I might very well have been among them, and
then killed in the same classroom where I had learned to make letters.

Things were no better in the neighboring town where my family had lived. In the commune house several dozen Tutsis had gathered
under the protection of the local mayor, who had promised to shield them from the mobs of ordinary people who had taken up
machetes against their neighbors. On April 18 an official had been called to a political meeting in the nearby city of Gitarama,
and when he came back there was trouble. “I am no longer the person you knew, ” he allegedly said, and then put a handgun
to the head of a friend of his, a man he had gone to school with and had known for more than twenty years. He shot his friend
and then ordered an attack on the commune house. Those refugees who weren’t killed immediately darted into the swamps and
the hills, where they spent the next two months trying to hide from the bands of bar keepers, schoolteachers, and housewives
who had been told: “Do your work.”

I went to the home of my elder brother Munyakayanza and found him sitting quietly in the front room with his wife. Seeing
him alive made me want to cry with gratitude. We embraced, but I could feel that his muscles were tense. His eyes darted from
my eyes to the places behind my shoulder. The area around his house was usually full of life, neighbors passing back and forth,
children rolling bicycle rims with sticks, and teenagers playing tussling games, but now there was nobody. Not even any cooking
fires were burning. It was totally quiet.

“Our neighbors have been killed by the militia, ” he told me. He and his wife survived because they were Hutus. Now that the
rebel army had driven out the militia it was not safe anymore to be of this class. In fact, it could be a death sentence.
Some rogue members of the RPF had begun to conduct reprisal killings in several parts of Rwanda. Around me I could see burned-out
houses where people had been roasted alive within their own walls.

“Listen, brother, ”Munyakayanza told me. “Please leave this place. The houses, they have eyes. The trees have ears.”

I decoded his message. My presence here would be noticed and was a danger to both his family and mine. I quickly hugged him
again and left. My wife started to cry, and I tried my best to comfort her, but it was impossible. We now headed toward my
wife’s hometown, the old Tutsi capital of Nyanza. Tatiana was so frightened she could barely speak, but we had to see, we
had to go there, even though we already knew in our hearts what we would find.

Most of her family had been slain by their neighbors. Several of them had been buried in a shallow pit used for the maturing
of bananas. Tatiana’s mother had been one of the sweetest, kindest women I’d ever met. She had always shared food with her
neighbors in times of trouble and was always available to help look after children in their parents’ absence. She had been
murdered along with her daughter-in-law and six grandchildren. The walls of her house had been knocked down. I could see some
of its distinctive tiles already plastered into the walls of nearby houses. The looting had been quick and efficient.

I felt bright hatred surging up in my throat for the bastards that had done this. I am not a violent man, but if I had had
a gun in that moment, and if somebody had pointed me to a convincing scapegoat, I would have murdered him without hesitation.
I had saved more than a thousand people in the capital, but I could not save my own family. What a stupid and useless man
I was!

I tasted, in that moment, the poison and self-hatred in my country’s bloodstream, that irresistible fury against a ghost,
the quenchless desire to make someone pay for an unrightable wrong. My father would have said that I had drunk from the water
that was upstream from the lamb.

My wife and I crouched there in the remains of her mother’s house, holding on to each other, and for the first time in many
years, I wept.

Nothing could ever be the same for us again.

My family and I stayed in the manager’s cottage at the Diplomates while Rwanda went about the slow process of trying to rebuild
itself. Work is an excellent place to lose yourself, and I proceeded to do just that. My bosses at Sabena had been satisfied
with my performance during the genocide, and I was allowed to keep my job as the general manager of the Hotel Diplomates.
Business was booming, of course. Rwanda’s expatriate class had swelled once again now that the terror was over.

There was a change in my employment in February 1995. The Sabena Corporation was planning to merge with Swissair, but a condition
of the deal was that Sabena would renovate all of its existing hotels. They were then forced to break their management contract
with the new government of Rwanda, which was the legal owner of the Diplomates. This put me in a difficult spot. I thought
about asking for another job in the corporation, but I enjoyed too much the demands of day-to-day management—the attending
of the thousand little details that make a hotel the welcoming place that it is. This was my deepest image of myself. I was
born to be a site manager, not a suit in a conference room. And so Sabena and I parted on friendly terms.

But I found a way to stay on as the manager of the Diplomates. With the Belgian corporation now gone the government needed
someone experienced to run the hotel and I brought them a proposal that allowed me to stay on as manager while still living
on the property. My wife opened a pharmacy downtown and we managed to make a decent living together while Rwanda tried to
reinvent itself as a new nation.

The government got rid of those wretched ID books and made it taboo for anyone to be officially labeled as a Hutu or a Tutsi—a
change that I and millions of others applauded. Informal “orphanages” spontaneously opened up all over the country, often
run by teenagers; few adults were left to take charge. An entire generation of young people was told never to mention their
ethnicity to anyone because it could mark them for death in the changing currents of history. Rwandan exiles from all over
the world, some of whom hadn’t seen their country for thirty years, flooded back inside. There were more than three-quarters
of a million of them, which meant there were roughly three new settlers for every four people who had been killed in the genocide,
a ghoulish impersonal replacement. The exiles were mostly from Uganda, Burundi and the Congo, but they came from the United
States and Canada and Belgium and Switzerland as well. Prisons, meanwhile, were jammed full of people suspected of having
killed their neighbors.

The economy, like the infrastructure, was in a shambles. An entire year’s coffee crop had been lost. What little industry
there was had been destroyed. But international aid helped get the power back on, and Rwandans have always been creative when
it comes to making money. There was a brief period of Wild West capitalism, in which it became possible to grow very rich
transporting foodstuffs and goods from Uganda. Anybody with a working truck could make fantastic profits hauling bananas and
beans.

My own life, meanwhile, became complicated and a little frightening. It was with profoundly mixed feelings that I returned
to the streets where I had seen the bodies of my friends and neighbors stacked up like garbage. Their bloodstains had washed
away in the autumn rains, but I always took note of the spots where I had seen them lying. The Mille Collines no longer smelled
like a refugee camp, but it was hard to walk its halls without feeling that palpable sense of impending murder. The role I
had played in saving those people had not been forgotten, and it was not appreciated in many quarters. I had seen too much
and knew too many names. There were many people in the new government who had been complicit in the genocide and who feared
any surviving witnesses from that time. They were political survivors, hard men, dangerous when threatened. Every time I saw
a stranger scowl in my direction I tried to memorize his face in case I had to find him later if he harmed my family.

Others had it in for me for economic reasons. The hotel management contract I had received was seen as a cash cow by some
of the thugs close to the new government. One very bizarre incident at the hotel convinced me I might be better off living
someplace else. A friend of mine came by the hotel one evening with an Army sergeant. The sergeant was highly agitated and
it became clear that my friend was not there by choice. I tried to calm things down and offered them a beer, but the sergeant
would not sit still for long. He took out his pistol and told me: “We know you have stolen computers in your house!”

“That is foolish, ” I told him.

“Then you will not have any problem showing me your house?”

“All right, ” I said. “This is foolishness, but if you insist, come look.”

The three of us walked into the next room. Our housemaid was inside, and when she saw the Army sergeant’s pistol, she screamed.

“He is going to kill you!” she said, and without thinking, I dashed toward the sergeant and shoved him hard into the wall.
He dropped his gun. I supposed I could have grabbed it off the floor and pointed it at him, but my instinct told me otherwise.
I raced out into the parking lot and toward the Army post next door—the place, as it happened, where the ten Belgian soldiers
had been killed by torture in the opening hours of the genocide. There is hardly a patch of ground in Rwanda, of course, where
somebody
was not hacked to death in 1994. I got the attention of some of the soldiers on guard and told them I had been threatened
by the sergeant. They took him away and I learned that he was attached to the Department of Military Intelligence, our nation’s
version of the CIA.

The next day, an influential Army major named Rwabalinda came in to see me about the incident.

“Mr. Manager, that man did not have a real gun. It was a toy.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. If the major was concocting a story about what had happened it meant that there were
some high-ranking people who wanted to see me gone.

“Listen, major, ” I told him. “I am not a solider and I don’t even like guns, but I know the difference between a real gun
and a toy. That sergeant was carrying a real gun.”

“It was not. This is what our investigation has shown.”

I thought it best to keep a stone face. I thanked the major and he left. Shortly thereafter a friend high up in the government,
who I should not identify, came to my house and made plain what I already knew to be true.

“Paul, I have heard they want to kill you so that other business interests can take over the management of the Hotel Diplomates,
” he said. “But the object now is not to kill you out in the open. It is too dangerous politically. They will pretend they
are arresting you and taking you to prison, but you will disappear and your body will never be found.”

The choice now seemed clear to me. I could open up my treasured black binder once again and start dialing all my Army friends
for protection. But it would be like living the genocide all over. Years ago I had looked forward into my future as a church
pastor and seen nothing but rural banality waiting for me. Now I imagined my future as a Rwandan hotel manager and saw nothing
but constant fear and an eventual knock on the door after midnight. I loved my job and I loved my country, but not enough
to die for them and leave my children without a father. My family and I quickly flew to Belgium and applied for political
asylum. We had remained in our own country slightly more than two years after the genocide.

We may have left Rwanda, but Rwanda will never leave us. Those thousand hills were imprinted inside us forever. There are
times today when I walk down a street and smell a fire burning in a hearth and instantly I am back in Nkomera, and it is evening,
and my father is coming back from the village with a butchered goat on his back and my mother has lit the fire for supper
and the shadows of the banana trees are long on the hillsides.

And there are times when I will be in some public place, in a small crowd at a bus station, for example, and I suddenly cannot
bear the presence of the other people because I see them holding machetes. They are always grinning at me.

Tatiana and my children have similar troubles and it is not uncommon for one of us to awake screaming in the middle of the
night. When this happens I always come in and hold whoever it is, and we talk in quiet voices, in Kinyarwanda, until calm
comes once more. It is the best therapy, I think, to simply talk about the things you have seen, and we have talked hundreds
of times together about the dreadful things we have lived through. We will probably be talking about them together as long
as we are alive, a conversation that will never end.

It is not such a bad thing to start one’s life afresh. I was forty-two years old. We had a lot of bad memories, but we were
all in good physical health and we all had hope for a better life in our new country. I had always liked going to Belgium
on vacation and it would be free of the violence and fear that I wanted to be done with forever. As a twentieth-century colonial
power Belgium had done wretched things to Rwanda, and its conduct during the recent genocide was not honorable, but I never
held the actions of its government against the people at large, who were generally very likable and decent to me.