A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (14 page)

But the child’s laughter and Gentille’s motherly joy were speaking to Valcourt of hope again. An hour ago when he left the general’s office he wanted to get away. Now he was writing feverishly in his notebook:

“The pitfall … thinking it’s inevitable, that it’s in the nature of the society or the country or humanity, not seeing that a few men make the decisions about all the violence—and if they don’t plan it in detail they create the conditions that send it over the top … Work up the example of AIDS, the outcast women forced to be part-time prostitutes in order to feed their children because they’re denied access to land or property … it’s not only African sexual behaviour that’s at the root of it, though that’s a factor … Write this country’s story through the story of Gentille and her family … describe the complacency of international institutions over corruption…”

Gentille asked him what he was writing.

“I’m starting to ply my trade again. Trying to say what’s hidden behind the bogeymen, the monsters, the caricatures, the symbols, the flags, the uniforms, the grand declarations that lull us to sleep with their good intentions. Trying to put names to the real killers sitting in offices at the presidential palace and the French embassy. They’re the ones who draw up lists and give orders, and the ones who finance the operations and distribute the weapons.”

“Can’t we do anything?” Gentille asked timidly.

“Yes, but it isn’t much. Stay as long as possible, observe, denounce, report what we see. Keep the memory of Méthode and Cyprien alive—their examples, pictures, words—for those who’ll follow.”

He would write for those willing to read, speak to those willing to lend an ear, even half an ear, but that was all. He would knock at no more embassy and legation doors, bring no more denunciations before the representatives of justice and established powers. These things had only been futile agitation, which had soothed his conscience perhaps but was now endangering the only country he was in any position to save: his two women.

Someone knocked at the door just as Gentille was saying with a smile:

“And you’ll write about love too, so I’ll learn …”

“About love, you know as much as I do.”

The young man, sweating in his blue suit, starched shirt and nylon tie from another era could only be a newcomer to the Kigali circus ring, probably a Canadian who had been packed off to his posting before anyone remembered to tell him that Rwanda was a hot country.

Jean Lamarre apologized for inconveniencing Valcourt this way. He had tried to telephone but the phone was always busy. He needed Valcourt’s help, and urgently. Jean Lamarre, in his dark horn-rimmed glasses that were too big for his small head, and too grand for his position as novice Canadian consular official (though he seemed about ready to request an immediate recall), was faced with an insoluble problem. He rambled on apologetically about his arrival the day before yesterday, about his baggage being misdirected to Mombasa, about the Canadian embassy having abandoned him because it was tournament day at the golf club. He was sorry not to have come yesterday to pay his respects to so eminent a member of the Canadian community in Rwanda as Monsieur Valcourt, all the more since he, Jean Lamarre, was to be in charge of press relations and Monsieur Valcourt was a distinguished journalist whose televised reports he had seen and whose articles he had read.

The child, who had begun to whimper shortly before the young diplomat’s appearance, was by now howling determinedly. Her language was simple and direct. “I’m hungry,” she howled, “I’m very hungry.” She had no name because Cyprien had not bothered to introduce her to the couple who were to become her parents.

“She’s your daughter? ” enquired jean Lamarre, who could hardly ignore the source of the cries penetrating the walls and disturbing the idlers swimming about in the pool below with lazy strokes.

“Yes, she’s my daughter … and I’d like you to meet my wife, Gentille.”

Gentille almost fainted when she learned that she was henceforth Valcourt’s wife and they were a family.

“I received a call from the KHC morgue. I don’t know what this KHC is. They want me to come and identify the body of a Canadian citizen, a Brother François Cardinal, who was murdered by thieves according to the police. I’m asking you to come with me to do the identification. I contacted the police and they tell me that you knew him very well.”

No, Valcourt did not know him very well, but well enough to identify his body. “The KHC, by the way, is the Kigali Hospital Centre.” Valcourt left the only domain he had sworn to save for the one he had made up his mind to abandon to its fate. The child (we must give a name to her, Valcourt thought as he left) was howling harder than ever in Gentille’s arms, who was not at all sure what to do about it, having so recently become a wife and mother, having made love with her husband only once, and having known the father of her daughter for barely a few minutes.

She offered one of her firm, pointed breasts, hoping some liquid might come out of it. Here, children were nursed at the breast until two or three years old. The child’s lips and budding teeth instantly recognized the nipple and the howling ceased. But to her immense distress, not a drop of milk emerged from this breast, which hardened and tingled to the immense pleasure of Gentille, who was newly discovering this kind of caress and would tell Valcourt about it when he returned. And there must be other secrets in this body of hers whose subtleties she was unaware of and which no one had ever before explored with such urgent need. The child let go of the useless nipple and began to yell again. Gentille opened a little pot of puréed baby food for her but she turned up her nose at it. All she knew as yet were her mother’s breasts. Gentille went downstairs to Agathe’s. Among Agathe’s girls she would surely find a milk-filled breast, or a baby bottle if not. At the hairdressing salon, all the girls who were overflowing with milk volunteered. So as not to make any of them jealous, Gentille suggested they take turns nursing the baby, which they accepted with great enthusiasm, clapping and laughing triumphantly. For night-time, a bottle would serve nicely.

The young diplomat, who was on his first posting and should have been paying social calls that day with his seven-months-pregnant wife, admitted that this unforeseen visit to the morgue was not much fun.

“That’s what you get, Monsieur,” Valcourt said, “for being a diplomat in Rwanda and not playing golf. Get with it, first chance you have. Otherwise you’ll find all the chores being dumped in your lap. After the morgue, the burials, then laying the first brick for Canadian-subsidized houses they’ll tear down before they’ve finished putting them up, French lessons in a school Canada has just paid to renovate. Then confabulations around the pool so your Rwandan friends can figure out which Canadian purse strings you hold.”

“You paint a very black picture of a country that considers Canada a friend.”

“When one is a small country, Monsieur Lamarre, one takes the friends one can get.”

“In that I recognize a cynicism typical of you journalists who are Third World specialists.”

They were walking alongside a red brick wall against which whole families seemed to be living in a variety of makeshift constructions, mingled with a few street stalls selling food, soaps and pilfered medicines. They overtook three patients being carried laboriously on rough stretchers by their families.

“No, Monsieur Lamarre, there aren’t any ambulances, except for soldiers or Whites, and Whites don’t come to the KHC. They take a plane. A death can always wait, especially if a body less allows someone to discover life.”

Valcourt knew his way around the hospital blindfolded. He had filmed here several times and had met almost all the medical and nursing staff for his film on AIDS.

“The morgue is right at the back. On the way, I’ll give you a tour of the property. A little visit to darkest Rwanda.”

To the left of the main gate, guarded by a dozen nonchalant soldiers, a small bungalow with dung-coloured stucco walls was slowly but surely crumbling in the shade of some eucalyptus trees. “Welcome to Emergency,” read the sign. Three beds with soiled sheets, a photograph of the president centred on the wall, bloodstains on the concrete floor, a bedpan full of urine and a few dressings. On the bed at the back, a young man with machete wounds was voicing all the pain of this earth. An old woman as wizened as a dried-up orange and a little boy holding both hands over his ears sat in a corner, waiting. What was going on? Perhaps the young man was yelling himself to death. Valcourt and Lamarre went through to a waiting room. Around a table covered with dressings, small bottles and ashtrays, male and female nurses were having coffee. An espresso machine was quaintly enthroned on a gurney doing duty as a sideboard.

“Coffee, Monsieur Bernard? We’re waiting for the doctor on duty, who had an important lunch date with the deputy minister of health. There’s a chance he’ll be appointed to the Ministry.”

Lamarre whispered with some disgust that they might at least have given the wounded man some painkillers. Valcourt took him by the arm.

“Next visit: Kigali Hospital Centre’s Central Pharmacy.”

Side by side on straight chairs, patiently working at embroidery, three women sat in silence in an ill-lit grotto. Rats as big as beavers scurried hither and thither. When they saw Valcourt the women put aside their work.

“What a lovely surprise!” said josephine, the head stock-keeper of the central pharmacy. “Have you come to show how badly off we are?”

Dozens of racks of shelves, three-quarters empty, made a kind of enormous grillework in the semi-darkness. Nothing had changed since Valcourt’s last visit. There were still no antibiotics. The next delivery was expected in a month. The last aspirins had been distributed three days ago. An enormous quantity of antifungal ointment had been received from a generous donor country, but people here didn’t come to the hospital for skin ailments. There was a little morphine left and a lot of cough syrup, as well as a potion no one knew quite what to do with called Geritol, which, it seemed, could relieve certain ills related to old age. “But you know, Monsieur Bernard, there aren’t many old people in the hospital. They stay at home.” So not really knowing what to do with this syrup, the pharmacists were giving it to anyone insisting on medicine.

“Would you like to take a picture for your scrap-book? ”

In his sweating hand, Lamarre was clutching an old-model Polaroid, marked with a Canadian flag and an inventory number. He was supposed to take pictures of François Cardinal’s dead body for the embassy’s file.

“I’ll spare you the maternity ward, it’s too noisy, but on the way to the morgue we should drop by the internal medicine buildings. They’re fascinating, you’ll see.”

The KHC consisted of some thirty low buildings separated by grassed spaces and asphalt paths. If it were not for the long white coats walking hurriedly, pushing gurneys at breakneck speeds, one could have supposed this to be a refugee camp. Everywhere, on the smallest patch of shaded earth or grass, families were cooking, children were playing, young men were ogling young girls. Old people were sleeping, one on a mat, another on a big piece of corrugated cardboard, their heads covered with towels or squares of cheap cotton.

“Monsieur Lamarre, Structural Adjustment, 101. Structural adjustment, which you’ve certainly heard has helped a number of poor countries stabilize their public expenditures, has in a way invented this hospital, which must look rather surreal to a Canadian like you. A gentleman from Washington tells the Rwandan government that it spends too much on public services, that its debt is too high, but it will be helped to repay that debt if—”

“Monsieur Valcourt, I did an internship with the International Monetary Fund. Spare me your leftist demagogy. The public finances of several African countries have been successfully stabilized this way.”

“Of course. When you’re discussing these things in an office in Washington or drawing econometric curves on a computer, it all seems logical. In a hospital, it doesn’t hold up at all. You begin by charging admission fees. Half the patients stop coming to the hospital and go back to the leaf-doctors—that’s what they call the witch doctors or charlatans. The cost of medications goes up because they’re imported and structural adjustment devalues the local currency. This is how the pharmacy here has turned into an embroidery room. Staff reductions come next. Then you charge for meals, medications, dressings and so on. That’s why all these people are swarming and finagling inside and around the hospital walls. Little restaurants selling food for patients, vendors of expired medicines, snake oil, filched antibiotics and various toiletries, and everywhere around you, these families too poor to pay for it all who’ve come to stay and prepare food for their patient and wash him, watch over him and comfort him. A structural adjustment hospital is a place where one pays for one’s death … because by the time patients come their condition is such that it would take a miracle or an accident for a cure to happen. Perhaps you’d like me to tell you about a structural adjustment school … no? I insist. When I was visiting the Ivory Coast, I discovered that since they’d introduced fees for high-school-level education, more and more young girls were taking to occasional prostitution, and since, like typical Africans, Ivory Coast males detest condoms, this new supply of fresh pussy on the market caused the AIDS propagation rate to skyrocket in the principal cities of the country.

“I’m telling you all this rather like a tourist guide trying to familiarize a newcomer with the country’s curiosities. I’m not cynical, Monsieur. I know my country well and assure you that the maps and guides your department has given you are all wrong. Well! Off now to the main internal medicine building, the kingdom of slow decay and transformation of the human being into an oozing, dying spectre.”

“You’re exaggerating, Monsieur Valcourt.”

“I wish you were right, Monsieur Lamarre.”

Valcourt pushed open the swinging door of Pavilion B. In a tiny office on the left, a nurse was filling out a form. Jars filled with cotton batting, test tubes, and orange peels littered the small table she was writing on.