An Ordinary Man (14 page)

One of them was a man named Augustin Hategeka, who had run from his home with his pregnant wife when the killings broke out.
They had taken refuge in a patch of forest and ate scavenged food for several days. Augustin had stood guard, watching for
killers as she gave birth to their new son in the shade of a bush. Not knowing if he would live, they named him on the spot:
Audace,
French for “brave.”With the help of some Hutu friends, the family found temporary refuge in St. Paul’s pastoral center and
I sent Army soldiers to fetch them to the Mille Collines. I met them at the entrance and made sure the baby was washed in
hot water and covered in clean sheets.

I had known Augustin before the killings broke out and over the next several days we talked to each other about the things
we had witnessed. Our conversation went something like this:

“My neighbors started killing my neighbors, ” he told me. “I saw people I have known for years taking out machetes and screaming
orders. Old people were murdered. Children were murdered. I heard screams.”

“I know, ” I told him. “The same thing happened in Kabeza.”

“They chopped innocent people to pieces in the street. They cut the tendons in their legs so they could not run away.”

“It is disgusting.”

“I thought I knew these neighbors of mine, ” he told me.

“I don’t think anybody knows anybody anymore, ” I told him.

We looked at one another across my desk. I knew what each of us was thinking:
Could we even trust each other?
I know for my part that I trusted nobody completely anymore. To relax my suspicions could mean death for me and everybody
I was trying to protect. I had heard too many horrid stories by that point. Rwanda had gone insane.

I remember another guest, whom I will here call Jane, who had worked as a nurse alongside my wife. Her story was not out of
the ordinary for Rwanda that spring. She had been married to a man named Richard, a stout man with eyeglasses who worked as
a civil servant. He was a quiet man, one of those people you don’t really notice in a group. That anyone would have considered
those people a threat was ludicrous, Jane was of mixed race and the family had been marked for elimination. They tried to
lie low in their house. A squad of
Interahamwe
broke inside and began to do their work. Jane managed to scramble into the kitchen and hide underneath a few sacks of charcoal.
She stayed there while her husband and two children were cut into pieces in the other room. How she managed to remain quiet
I will never know. She stayed under the coal for several hours and then crawled out to see the bodies of her family strewn
about the front room. She fled from the house and, with the help of a neighbor, found her way to St. Paul’s Church. We sent
a car with policemen to pick her up. Her eyes were completely empty; it seemed the life had been washed out of them forever.
I recognized the look. It was all over the hotel.

In all of this, I was fortunate to have a handful of soldiers who wore the blue helmet of the United Nations. I have previously
expressed my disgust with the UN as a collective body, but those individuals serving in its name were capable of bravery.
The men in my hotel displayed courage in going out onto the streets of Kigali to fetch the condemned. They were chauffeurs
through hell. One in particular, a captain from Senegal named Mbaye Daigne, became legendary for his ability to dodge the
Interahamwe
. His companion, Captain Senyo of Ghana, displayed equal bravery at plucking refugees from their houses. It was a task that
probably violated the ridiculous mission parameters handed down from New York, but these rules deserved to be broken.

These soldiers never used the hotel van; that would have been inviting death, because everybody in town knew that we were
a haven for refugees. They used instead a white jeep with the UN logo. Rwandan soldiers also helped rescue people. One day
they went out to find a prominent politician who had been hiding in a private house. On the way to the hotel they were stopped
at a roadblock manned by an especially savage bunch of militia. There were corpses stacked up on either side, the hacked-up
remains of people who had produced the wrong kind of identity card. The car got an unusually thorough search and they discovered
the refugee hiding in the back.

“Where are you bringing this cockroach?” they demanded.

The soldier thought quickly. “We are taking him to the ministry of defense, ” he said. “Now let us pass before the Army starts
to wonder where we are.”

That was good enough for the militia and our refugee made it inside the Mille Collines without further incident. I suppose
it was fortunate for us there were no cell phones in Rwanda in 1994, before the widespread use of cell phones. As we have
seen, the violence was inherently full of chaos and mistakes. The chain of command was often vague and the orders were sometimes
confusing. In such an environment it was therefore possible to make a convincing bluff that you were working for somebody
in authority without anyone able to check your story. If there had been cell phones I think many who escaped death would have
been killed instead. But that is not to say that the phones would have all worked for evil. I have said before that tools
of murder can be turned into tools of life. If we had had cell phones in Rwanda, the
Interahamwe
would have been more efficient, but we also would have been able to coordinate more rescues right under their noses.

I used my secret fax phone many times to get a bead on where a given refugee might be hiding. One of them was my friend Odette
Nyiramilimo, and her husband, Jean-Baptiste Gasasira, and their children, who I hoped was still in her house. In the first
days of the genocide they had traded their family car, their stereo, their television, and other goods to some policemen in
exchange for a ride south of Kigali, to where they thought they might be safe. But the policemen reneged, leaving my friends
to try and flee through the marshes on their own. They were captured by
Interahamwe
and led in for interrogation, which they managed to escape. But in the chaos of war somebody made a mistake and put their
names on the list of people who had been eliminated. Odette and Jean-Baptiste heard their own names being read on the rebel
army’s radio station as among those who had been killed. This took the heat away temporarily and, not knowing where else to
go, they went back to their house and stayed out of sight, afraid even to answer the telephone. I rang and rang again. But
one day when their food was almost gone, the phone started ringing.

“Don’t pick it up!” ordered Jean-Baptiste.

“It’s all the same, ” said Odette. “We are going to die of hunger here anyway.” She answered the phone and it was me on the
other end.

She could not have been more surprised. “We thought you were dead!” she said.

“I thought you were dead, too, ” I answered. “But don’t go anywhere. I’m going to organize a rescue.”

“Who are you going to send?”

“Froduald Karamira.”

I meant it as a small joke, for he was a businessman who was notorious for his role in the massacres, but Odette missed my
humor. “No, he will kill us all!” she said, and I made up a proverb on the spot: “If you want your goods to be safe, give
them to a thief.” Though she was in tears, she laughed. It was good to hear.

I negotiated again with Commander Habyarimana for the services of a Lieutenant named Nzaramba. His uniform and vehicle would
give him partial, but not total, protection against the militias, and so it was going to be a risky operation. Not wanting
to risk having the whole family in his jeep, Nzaramba made three separate trips. Odette came first with her son Patrick, and
they were stopped at a roadblock close to the hotel.

“Where are you going?” they demanded.

She pulled out a supply of malaria pills and showed them to her would-be killer.

“I am coming to take care of the manager’s children inside the Mille Collines, ” she said. “They are sick.”

It worked. When she came in her eyes were glassy and faraway. I had not seen her since the killing had started.

“Odette, what may I bring you?” I asked her and could not have been more surprised to hear her say, “A beer.” I had never
seen her drink beer before. It went down in three gulps.

Once she came out of her daze Odette told me that being inside the Mille Collines was like being in a land of the resurrected
dead; she was seeing many people who she had heard had been killed.

The next time Nzaramba went out he came back with Odette’s children in the back of his jeep, and they too were stopped at
a roadblock. This one happened to be right in front of the warehouse of an old friend of mine named Georges Rutaganda.

“Where are you going?” asked the man who leaned in their window. “Where are your parents?”

“My father is manning a roadblock and my mother is at the hospital, ” said Odette’s son. The killers did not buy the story
and withdrew to discuss what should be done. The machetes were just coming out when a car pulled up. Inside was Georges Rutaganda.

Let me pause here a minute and tell you about this man. We grew up together. He took an investment from his father and made
quite a lot of money as the executive distributor of Carlsberg and Tuborg beer in Rwanda. He also went on to become the vice
president of the
Interahamwe
and a man very close to the party of President Juvenal Habyarimana. I tried not to let this get in the way of our friendship.
I did tell him several times before the killing started, “Listen, Georges. What you are doing is wrong. You are going down
the wrong path.” But he never got angry with me for my opinions. This absence of acrimony was a key element of our relationship.
We both knew where the other stood politically. We had to stop visiting each other’s families in the evenings, but our professional
dealings continued, as did the presence of good feelings. It was like that German expression I mentioned earlier:
Dienst ist dienst und schnapps ist schnapps.
We continued to do business together even during the genocide. In fact, he was the main supplier of beer, toilet paper, and
other necessities to the Mille Collines. Yet another irony of Rwanda: The man near the heart of the militia movement was making
cash on the side by helping the refugees. I used these deal-making sessions to take him into my office and speak to him, as
only one friend from the hills can do to another. “Listen, Georges, ” I would tell him, “I would like you to be very careful
with my hotel. It would be very bad for me if any of your
Interahamwe
came inside. Please do me a favor and tell them it is off-limits.”

Several people have criticized me for staying close to such a bad man, but I have never apologized for it. People are never
completely good or completely evil. And in order to fight evil you sometimes have to keep evil people in your orbit. Even
the worst among them have their soft side, and if you can find and play with that part of them, you can accomplish a great
deal of good. In an era of extremism you can never afford to be an extremist yourself.

So at the roadblock Georges looked inside the car and saw children he thought he recognized.

“Aren’t you the kids of Jean-Baptiste Gasasira?” he asked, and they nodded, frightened, not knowing what else to say. Now
it was clear: They were cockroaches. They would be killed without further delay.

Georges then stepped in. Perhaps he had a soft spot for Odette and Jean-Baptiste, who had gone to the same university as he
had in the 1970s. Perhaps he recalled that Jean-Baptiste had been his parents’ personal physician. Perhaps this bankroller
of the militias never agreed with the genocide that unfolded from his actions. I cannot say. But he turned to the captain
of the roadblock and berated him.

“Let them go right now, ” he demanded. And one of the top officials of the murderous
Interahamwe
waved the lieutenant and the jeep and the children on toward the Mille Collines.

Just as I dealt with some questionable people during the genocide, I also sheltered some questionable guests. Several times
in those days I drank cognac with a man named Father Wenceslas Munyegeshaka, who was the priest at the Sainte Famille church
just down the hill from my hotel. He had abandoned the black robes of a priest and was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying
a pistol in his belt.

His church had been turned into a refuge for Tutsis, but the militias felt a lot more comfortable going inside it than they
did the Mille Collines. Hundreds of people were taken from their refuge inside its redbrick walls and murdered elsewhere.
And Father Wenceslas showed no interest in stopping it from happening. I knew that he even had a working telephone in the
sacristy and I don’t think he made phone calls to save anybody from execution, even though he also had political contacts.

One day when he was over having a drink my wife asked him, “Father, why don’t you put on your robes and pick up a Bible instead
of wearing a pistol? A man of God should not be wearing a pistol.” For some reason, he directed his answer to me and not Tatiana.

“Listen, Paul, ” he said. “There have been fifty-nine priests become the sixtieth.”

“If somebody comes and wants to shoot you, ” I said, “do you think that the pistol will protect you?”

It turned out that he had more reasons to be afraid than just his job. One day he came to the hotel with an elderly woman
in tow. “Paul, ” he said, “I am bringing you my cockroach.”

It was his own mother, a Tutsi. I assigned her to live in Room 237 without saying anything further.

Another person who found his way to us was a man I will call Fred, though that is not his real name. He was one of my neighbors
from Kabeza, but not a very popular person. He had beaten an old man to death several years before and had been released from
prison just before the genocide. He was a Tutsi, which made him an automatic target, but he was also a wanted man because
he had three sons serving in the RPF. In the opening days of the genocide he was one of the neighbors who took shelter in
my house. On that day, April 9, when the Army had come to take me to the Diplomates, he made several desperate comments, shaking
as he spoke. “I know these people are looking for me. Let me go out there so they can kill me before they kill everyone here.”
Fred was not my best friend, but when he showed up later at the Mille Collines I was happy to see him alive and made sure
that he got a place in a room and was protected from harassment by those who knew his story. There is no sin so great that
somebody should die for it. When you start thinking like that you become an animal yourself.