A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (25 page)

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 soldiers
¹²
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.

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 UNAMIR
¹⁵
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.