An Ordinary Man (10 page)

Later that night Agathe called the UN detachment and asked for more security. She wanted to go to Radio Rwanda in the morning
to tell the nation not to panic, that a civilian government was still in charge. How little she understood. Rwandan Army soldiers
were already surrounding her home in the dark shadows of the jacaranda trees. When fifteen UN soldiers arrived in the hour
just before dawn they were welcomed with a burst of gunfire that shredded the tires and wrecked the engines of two of their
jeeps. The prime minister, frightened and screaming, climbed over her back wall into the house of a neighbor.

I was listening to the buildup of this disaster being broadcast live on Radio France International. It was preposterous and
macabre and pitiful and terrifying. Agathe’s hiding place in the toilet was discovered and she was led outside in the midst
of a cheering mob. There was a brief argument among the Rwandan soldiers over whether she should be taken prisoner or executed
on the spot. The squabble ended when a police officer, who had been training to be a judical officer, stepped forward and
shot the prime minister in the head at close range. The bullet tore away the left side of her face and she bled to death right
there on the terrace in front of her house.

The UN soldiers, meanwhile, were persuaded to give up their weapons and led to Army headquarters near the heart of downtown,
right across the street from the Hotel Diplomates, as it happened. Five of the soldiers were from Ghana and they were allowed
to go free. Ten of them had the misfortune of being from Belgium—the colonial master country, the ones who had glorified the
Tutsis and made them like kings. RTLM had been passing the sentence for the last few hours: The Belgians were already “suspected”
of being the ones who had shot down the president’s plane. This was in conflict with the line that was already becoming like
gospel on
radio trottoir
—that it was the RPF rebels who had sneaked into Kigali with a shoulder missile and hidden in the weeds near the airport,
waiting for the wink of Habyarimana’s French jet in the eastern sky. But it was no matter. Logic was out the window. The Belgians
and the rebels must have worked together. Of course.

A crowd of excited Rwandan soldiers set upon the Belgians and began clubbing them, some of them to death. A few of them managed
to grab a loaded rifle and take refuge in a small concrete building near the camp entrance. They managed to fend off their
attackers for a terrified hour before their holdout was stormed. They were tortured and mutilated horribly, their tendons
sliced so they could not walk.

The secret plan to get the peacekeepers to leave—the one the UN knew about four months in advance—was being carried out according
to the letter.

I tried not to listen to RTLM in those first hours, but it could not be avoided. Given the choice between listening to filth
and missing potentially crucial information, I will choose the filth every single time.

But it was even worse than I could have imagined. The radio was instructing all its listeners to murder their neighbors.

“Do your work, ” I heard the announcers say. “Clean your neighborhood of brush. Cut the tall trees.”

I would hear variations on these phrases echoing countless times over the next three months. The “tall trees” was an unmistakable
reference to the Tutsis. “Clean your neighborhood of brush” meant that rebel army sympathizers might be hiding among Tutsi
families and so the entire family should be “cleaned” to be on the safe side. But somehow the worst phrase of all to me was
“Do your work.” It made killing sound like a responsibility. Like it was the normal thing to do.

Here at last were the bones under the skin. All the anti-Tutsi rhetoric put out on the air over the previous six months had
blossomed into what they were now actually saying out loud: Kill your neighbors. Murder your friends. Do not leave the graves
half full. Fantasy had become reality. Theft of life was now mandatory. This seemed to be the consensus of the national village,
a sickening version of justice on the grass.

The mass murders were under way in Kigali. The
Intera-hamwe
militias started setting up some roadblocks, which were often no more than a few bamboo poles set on milk cartons in the road,
or sometimes the burned-out hulk of an automobile. Eventually, the roadblocks would be made of human corpses. Every carload
of people that came by was subject to a search and a check of those identity papers that listed ethnicity. Those who were
found to be Tutsis were dragged to one side and chopped apart with machetes. The Presidential Guard paid visits to the homes
of prominent Tutsis, opposition people and wealthy citizens. Doctors were pulled out of their homes and shot in the head.
Old women were stabbed in the throat. Schoolchildren were hit on the head with wooden planks and their skulls cracked open
on the concrete with the blow of a boot heel. The elderly were thrown down the waste holes of outhouses and buried underneath
a cascade of rocks.

Thousands would die that day, the first citizens of what would become a nation of the murdered.

I looked out the next morning at a street that had been transformed.

There was the usual smoky tang of morning mist in the air, the usual dirt street and adobe walls and gray April sky, but it
was a scene I could barely recognize. People whom I had known for several years were wearing military uniforms and several
were carrying machetes dripping with blood. Quite a few had guns.

There was one in particular who I will call Marcel, though that is not his real name. He worked in a bank. Marcel had a reputation
for a gentle approach in a business that can sometimes be hard-hearted. His specialty was helping uneducated people work their
way through complicated financial transactions, and I never once knew him to lose his temper. He seemed to be a gentleman
who respected himself. But here he was, wearing a military uniform and apparently ready to kill—if he hadn’t already.

“Marcel, ” I remember saying, “I didn’t know you were a soldier.”

I was trying to keep the irony out of my voice, but he gave me a blank look through his banker’s spectacles.

“The enemy is among us, ” he told me. “The enemy is within us. This is very clear. Many of the people we have been mixing
with
are traitors.
”

I thought it best to end the conversation there and went back into my house. Marcel watched me go. I could hear gunfire all
around us, though not a heavy concentration from one place, as from a military battle. The rounds were cracking all around
periodically, almost lazily, in every direction.

What I did not tell Marcel—what I was not about to tell anybody—was that there were up to thirty-two of the enemy already
packed inside my house. These were neighbors who knew they were on the lists of the
Interahamwe
. There was Muhigi and his family, as well as Michel Mugabo. There were also people like me who had refused, for one reason
or another, to buy one of the cheap firearms on the street prior to the eruption of mass murder. Why they thought I might
be able to protect them was beyond me, but it was my house they flocked to. We put the visitors up in the living room and
the kitchen and tried to stay quiet.

It occurred to me later: I had seen this before. My father had opened our tiny hillside home to refugees during the Hutu Revolution
of 1959. I had been a young boy then, a little older than my son Tresor. My father’s favorite proverb came back to me: “If
a man can keep a fierce lion under his roof, why can he not shelter a fellow human being?”

Earlier on that endless morning we had lost track of our son Roger. In the chaos of getting all our frightened visitors comfortable
my wife and I had failed to keep a vigilant eye on the children. At the time, Lys was sixteen, Roger was fifteen, Diane was
thirteen, and little Tresor was not even two years old. We had instructed them all quite sternly not to go outside under any
circumstances, but in the early morning Roger could not resist a check on the welfare of our neighbors. He had gone over the
wall, as he would in normal times, to see his next-door friend, a boy who everybody called Rukujuju, which means “boy who
sleeps in the ash.” I suppose it sounds like a mean thing to call a child, but it was one of those nicknames that must be
understood as loving teasing. In any case, the boy never seemed to take offense.

Rukujuju had been hacked apart with a machete. He lay facedown in the backyard in a small pool of his own blood. Nearby lay
the bodies of his mother, his six sisters, and two neighbors. Some of them were not yet dead and were moving around slowly.
Roger blundered back over the wall and went immediately into his room. He did not speak for the next several days.

These neighbors had joined others who had been slaughtered around us. The woman who lived in the house behind ours was named
Leocadia. She was an elderly widow who used to totter over to my house to gossip with Tatiana. Her son was unmarried, a source
of some concern for her. She was a Tutsi, but it didn’t matter to any of us. Not until today.

I heard the sounds of a commotion at her front door and peered over the wall. There was a band of hyped-up
Intera-hamwe
there, holding guns and machetes. There was no time to think through my decision. I leaped over the wall and dashed to get
help from my neighbor who I knew was a soldier in the Rwandan Army, but not a hardliner.

“Please, ” I told the soldier who opened the door to me.

“They are going to kill this old woman. Come over and save her.” Leocadia was dead, but without any apparent wounds. By the
time we arrived with his colleague, it was already too late. She died of a heart attack. I do not want to know what the last
thing she saw might have been.

What was I going to do? It seemed terribly strange to be thinking about work, but my mind kept drifting back to my responsibilities
as the general manager of the Hotel Diplomates. It has since been suggested to me that this is one of the ways that people
cope with things too horrible to understand—they gladly throw themselves into the little tasks of normal life as a way to
distract themselves from the abyss. Perhaps this is what I was doing; I am not sure. But I can tell you that while the corpses
of my neighbors stacked up around me I was obsessed with figuring out how to return to the hotel where I felt I belonged.
The manager of the nearby Hotel Mille Collines, Bik Cornelis, was a white man and a citizen of the Netherlands who had told
me he would almost certainly be evacuated on the first available flight. This would leave not one but two hotels without any
leadership during the bloodshed. I had promised the Sabena Corporation that I would do my best to look after both properties
when he left. It seemed vital that I live up to my word on this matter. I was apparently useless here at home, anyway.

In the middle of the day on April 7 I finally succeeded in getting through on the telephone with Michel Houtard, the director
of the hotels division of the Sabena Corporation. He was a European gentleman of the old landed-gentry school, courtly and
generous. He came on the line and I could hear genuine concern in his voice. We had a conversation in French.

“Paul, we are hearing very bad reports of violence breaking out all over Kigali. Are you in any danger?”

“Not at the moment, but I am trapped in my house. Some of my neighbors have been killed. The roads are too dangerous to travel
and I have not been able to arrange a military escort to the hotel.”

“Can we help in any way?”

“I’m not sure. If I can get to the hotel I will contact you from there and let you know the situation. The radio news has
been sketchy. I have to tell you that I am not very well informed about what is going on.”

“Well, I want to let you know that we will be trying to do all we can from here to ensure the safety of you and all the employees.”

It was strange: While we spoke, I could not help but see the city of Brussels, where Tatiana and I had been just the week
before. I pictured flocks of pigeons bobbing their heads in parks, gray mansard roofs, statues of dead aristocrats on horseback,
chocolates under glass, pastel-painted town houses, bars full of carefree young people drinking Jupiler pilsner. It had been
spring there and the trees were just coming into bud. It seemed like another existence altogether.

I really should have been dead. In retrospect it is a miracle that my name was not on the lists of the undesirables that the
Presidential Guard were sent out to eliminate in the first two days. I had been an irritant to Habyarimana and a member of
the moderate party. I had been the one who hosted that conference at the Diplomates called by the hated RPF. Furthermore,
I was married to a Tutsi “cockroach” and had fathered a baby—my son Tresor—of mixed descent. They had every reason to behead
me. Somebody had recently scrawled a number in charcoal on the outer wall of my house—it was 531. I could only guess that
it was a code, and an easy way for the death squads to find me.