A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (28 page)

Émérita’s mother, who had not ceased operating her bordello a few metres away, heard her moaning in the long grass and brought her inside to one of the little green-stuccoed rooms. In another room, the old battle-axe was hiding Doctor Jean-Marie who, with respect and affection, was attending to all the girls in the district. He was a good Tutsi. With a few dressings still left to him and ordinary thread, he tried to repair the damage, but he was giving Gentille only a short time to live. She was shivering with fever and racked by a terrible cough and he had nothing left but aspirins. Émérita’s mother read Valcourt’s name on the flyleaf of the book of works by Paul Éluard. She tore out the leaf, put it in an envelope and sent one of the young militiamen at the roadblock to find Victor, Valcourt’s friend. Gentille and Victor had a long conversation and Gentille gave Victor the blue workbook. Victor knelt and prayed for a long time at her bedside, then left and went back to the Mille-Collines. Gentille was dead.

Chapter Fourteen

Later that evening, Valcourt went down to Victor’s with Zozo. Beer had arrived from Uganda, and beef. The exiles of 1963 and 1972, or their children, were coming back in droves. The richest were arriving aboard trucks filled with produce and setting themselves up in abandoned shops, not worrying about the possible return of their owners. The peasants, traditional herders, were returning with their herds which were ravaging the few fields that had not been harvested. All these people spoke English and behaved as if they’d never left the country, which was now theirs again. There was room. The BBC was saying that nearly two million Hutus had fled to Zaïre before the lightning-fast advance of the Tutsi troops, five hundred thousand to Tanzania, and the number of dead was estimated at nearly a million. Half the inhabitants of the country had vanished, either dead or in flight. Two months to empty a country.

Victor had invited all the survivors he knew. They had all been saved by Hutus who had not hesitated to run the direst risks to hide them. He wanted Valcourt to gather the survivors’ first-hand stories and make a film or write a book or articles about them. The genocide mustn’t be forgotten, he told him, but we mustn’t make demons of all the Hutus either. One day we’ll have to learn to live together again. The survivors told their stories until the middle of the night, while Valcourt took notes and silent guests tucked into the beef and beer from Uganda.

Then, when they were alone, Valcourt asked Victor if he had seen Gentille’s body, if he knew when and how she had died, and who had killed her.

“It was Émérita’s mother who saw her body and found the workbook. That’s all I know. Why d’you want to know more?”

“Dead people have the right to live, Victor.”

He must complete the interrupted story, fill the workbook’s empty pages with words, reconstruct the last hours, the last days.

“Victor, I have to find Modeste, his wife, his family, the militiamen at the roadblock. Will you help me? And I have to find Émérita too.”

“You want to get even?”

Valcourt raised his shoulders, almost with a smile.

“No, not at all. Get even with who? Modeste? That’s for the police and the courts, when there are any. Is he the only one guilty? Get even with History? With Belgian priests who sowed the seeds of a kind of tropical Nazism here, with France, with Canada, with the United Nations who stood by and let negroes kill other negroes? They’re the real murderers, but they’re out of my reach. No, all I want is to know, then tell the story.”

He inspected every nook and cranny of Modeste’s house and found only a red scarf, perhaps the one Gentille was wearing the morning of April the tenth. The neighbours too had fled, and the neighbours’ neighbours. Émérita’s mother repeated Victor’s version word for word. She thought Modeste and his family had gone to Ruhengeri, then probably Goma in Zaïre where the government leaders and soldiers had taken refuge. The area around Goma had become an immense depository of haggard, suffering humanity. The soldiers and militiamen, who had taken a large portion of the population with them in their retreat, were reigning over a new republic of cholera and tuberculosis. They had already recreated their former world. They were fleecing the humanitarian organizations, extorting, raping, killing. The power they had lost in their country they were now exerting over these hundreds of thousands of refugees squatting in the filth of their own excrement.

A hundred dollars distributed amongst a few intermediaries brought Valcourt to Modeste, who had been promoted to lieutenant by the government-in-exile and who controlled the beer trade out of Kisangani. He didn’t remember Valcourt. He was a handsome man who looked you straight in the eye and never raised his voice. Why care about the disappearance of a single person when an Anglo-Saxon Protestant plot was going to eliminate every last living Hutu? And that because all Whites except the French hated the Hutus. Fortunately the French had intervened to save them from extermination, enabling them to take refuge here and prepare their victorious return.

Propaganda is as powerful as heroin; it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think. Valcourt was talking to a Hutu propaganda addict. Modeste did not know a Gentille and did not remember having intercepted a UN convoy on the Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity. Women, beautiful women, he had them coming to him every day looking for protection or pleasure. The whole district of Sodoma knew his virility.

Valcourt produced a blue workbook out of the bag he was wearing slung across a shoulder. “Today I am shut up in a little room in Sergeant Modeste’s house.” He continued reading in a low voice, weighing each word and letting long silences hang like shadows, during which he stared with his tired eyes into Modeste’s. He read this way for several minutes, the way the clerk of a court reads in a voice devoid of emotion the particulars of an indictment for an especially gruesome crime. “He asked me if I was still bleeding and I told him yes. He doesn’t want a bleeding hole.” The lieutenant did not flinch. He opened another beer, the third, and he spat on Valcourt.

“I don’t know if your wife’s dead, but if she is, thank heaven and the Hutus. Your wife was a whore, like all the Tutsis, the worst I ever met, the most immoral. Imagine. She never once said no, never once resisted. Nothing but a whore.”

“She didn’t want to get hurt.”

Valcourt stayed at Victor’s while workmen were refurbishing the hotel. His friends kept an eye on him for fear grief would lead him to excesses. Yes, he was drinking more, but of course one imbibes more when one is alone. Zozo was reassured; Valcourt had done his mourning. He was working diligently. He was helping journalists, all as ignorant as tortoises, who arrived in Kigali for a few days. The city lay like a gigantic corpse. Every street had its common grave in which masked workers dug as the cameras whirred. Valcourt would guide the journalists from one grave to the next. He might see the long graceful neck, or the wedding dress that she was holding under an arm, or Paul Éluard’s
Oeuvres complètes
, or her blue skirt. When he went back to Victor’s he would settle in a far corner of the restaurant and read and reread his notes, like a stumped detective who has no
corpus delicti
, or witnesses, or suspects, but knows he’s very close to a body and murderers, maybe they’re round the next corner. He would sometimes fall asleep at the table, more from mental fatigue than too much beer, and stay there until Victor gathered him up and took him home.

“You should go away, my friend, at least for a while.”

“No, my friend, not before I find out.”

Why was he so determined to write about Gentille’s end? He didn’t really know but he had made it a duty, an obligation, a promise. So he carried on, rather like a sleepwalker, or a blind man advancing slowly in darkness. He was not desperate or bitter. He bore his grief like a weightless, transparent garment and kept assuring those he spoke to of the beauty and generosity of life, which, he said, amply outweighed the horror whose magnitude people were now realizing. The new Tutsi rulers, so well educated and organized, frightened him. He could see a new martial, arbitrary order being set in place, one very like a dictatorship from his childhood in Quebec, the Duplessis régime. Life had never let him down. Men, yes, who so often let life down. But with Gentille, and before her with the two women he had loved, with each woman he had made a pact with life. Each time he had died a bit, and each time life had been given back to him. Not many men are lucky enough to live three times, or even once, after thinking they were dead. Gentille had been his last contract with life. Grief and loneliness were not gnawing at him. They resided inside him, peacefully. And then through all those weeks of happiness he had lived with one certainty: he would lose Gentille—she would leave him one day, that being the usual way of things; but he should have realized that she would be carried away by the relentless course of the coming extermination. Why had he not got her out of there while there was still time? She hadn’t wanted to give up, because until the last minute, like himself, she had believed all the prophecies, analyses and signs coming from men were wrong, and her brothers and sisters would not kill her brothers and sisters. If you want to keep living, Valcourt thought as he walked along a row of market stalls that were recovering their former colour, you have to believe in things as plain and obvious as brothers, sisters, friends, neighbours, hope, respect, solidarity.

The cheery cries of merchants at their stalls could be heard again. Valcourt did not recognize any of the women selling tomatoes, nor any of the men selling potatoes. In fact, in this city now full of people from Uganda or Burundi, some of whom stopped him and asked for directions, he hardly knew anyone any more. This particular day he was with a German television team that wanted to do a quarter-hour human interest piece on life after the genocide. Where a thousand people had been jostling, shouting, arguing three months earlier there were now perhaps a hundred all told, merchants and customers together. At the butchers’ stalls there was more beef than goat or chicken. No one was manning the long, magical counter where little pots of golden sa fron and ground peppers had been displayed like explosive flowers. The tobacco sellers should have been visible just behind and, at the end of the line, Cyprien’s angular face, his prominent shoulder blades and feverish eyes.

The Germans were tired of these traditional African market pictures. And Valcourt of his memories. Then, in a bright ray of sunshine, Valcourt saw the white cover of a book, with a photograph inset in its centre. A tobacco seller wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat was reading Paul Éluard’s
Oeuvres complètes.

He approached and recognized the back of the neck, then as he bent over her, the hands holding the book.

“Gentille.”

“Yes.”

She closed the book and placed it on the tobacco leaves. He squatted in front of her, placed his hands on her shoulders and drew her gently toward him. She recoiled in what seemed to be fear. He withdrew his hands and gently asked her to look at him. She bent her head even lower.

“Gentille, speak to me. I’ve read the workbook. I love you. Nothing’s changed … You knew … you knew I’d come back … why, for heaven’s sake … Come. We’re going to leave here, come …”

Gentille’s voice was very weak, barely a breath, interrupted by a racking cough.

“No, no. My darling, if you love me as you say—and I believe you, I believe you—you’ll go away. I’m not the Gentille you loved and that you think you still love. Bernard, I’m not a woman any more. Don’t you smell the sickness? Bernard, I don’t have breasts any more. My skin’s dry and tight like an old drum. I can only see with one eye. I probably have AIDS, Bernard. My mouth is full of sores that keep me from eating sometimes, and when I can eat, my stomach won’t hold anything. I’m not a woman any more. Do you understand what they’ve done to me? I’m not human any more. I’m a body that’s decomposing, an ugly thing I don’t want you to see. If I left with you I’d be even sadder than I am now because I’d see in your eyes as you look away that what you really love is your memory of me. Bernard, please, please, if you love me, go away. Go now and leave the country. I’m dead.”

She drew a finger along his hand and apologized for having touched him.

“Go, my love.”

Valcourt obeyed without a word and entered a second period of mourning. He did not know if he could bear this one. He went back to Victor’s and drank and drank.

Victor, relieved to be set free of the lie he had been asking forgiveness for every day, explained to him how Gentille had gathered all his friends together and made them take an oath on the Bible. Since she had ceased, in her words, “to be a woman,” Valcourt must not know she was still alive. Since then, the friends had been taking turns driving her from Émérita’s mother’s brothel, where she was still being cared for, to the marketplace. There she would spend every day but Sunday reading Éluard and transcribing his most beautiful lines into another school workbook.

They had all come, Victor, Zozo, Stratton, Doctor Jean-Marie, Émérita’s mother. Bernard thanked them for respecting Gentille’s wish. He asked them now to respect his.

The next morning, Victor told Gentille that Bernard had already left for Brussels and would continue to Montreal. She thanked God.

Every day Valcourt went to the prosecutor’s office and listened to the examinations of defendants and witnesses, hoping to learn who had ordained that Gentille and thousands of other women should be consigned to the purgatory of the living dead. Each time as he left, he would smoke a cigarette, standing on the topmost step. Below, thirty metres away, the sun would reflect strangely on the white cover of a book and a hat of golden straw.

Six months later, a lightning-fast attack of pneumonia carried Gentille off in only a few days. She is buried under the great fig tree that shades the hotel swimming pool.

Bernard Valcourt is still living in Kigali, where he works with a group that defends the rights of people accused of genocide. Recently the government, now dominated by Tutsis, threatened to expel him. When ignorant and slightly drunk foreign journalists ask him to explain Rwanda, he tells them the story of Kawa. He lives with a Swedish woman his own age, a doctor who works for the Red Cross. They have adopted a little Hutu girl whose parents have been condemned to death for their part in the genocide. Her name is Gentille. Valcourt is at peace with himself.