Well, La Québécoise was coming back to life, it appeared.
“To Émérita, who believed in hope!” They drank to Émérita. “But seriously, Valcourt, you must leave with Gentille and the child. For now, this isn’t a country for lovers, it’s a country of madmen and fighters. Get away from here. Give the little girl a nice place to grow up in, you two. A normal place.”
Softly, Gentille asked Valcourt if he wanted to leave; nothing was keeping her here.
“What about the morning mist in all the valleys of Kigali, Gentille, and the sun lifting those fluffy mushroom-like clouds, and the concert from the children running down the hills to school? And the slow pace of Sunday morning, when you walk almost ceremonially in your blue dress to the Church of the Holy Family. And the songs and dances of the mass, which are more easygoing folk songs than canticles, more love songs than hymns of adoration. Then the goat’s-meat brochettes at Lando’s and the fresh tilapia from Lake Kivu. The lean dry chicken that’s had the run of the hills. The tomato display in Kigali market, with thirty women back of it arguing and chuckling and hiding their poverty behind picturepostcard smiles. The Ruhengeri highway, with those Cinemascope volcanoes. The steep flanks of the hills that your ancestors tamed and turned into thousands of fertile little terraces, which millions of people are still cultivating like quiet, efficient ants. The rainy season’s midday storms that are wiped away in minutes by the sun. The cool of the breeze in the hills when God rests, because, as the saying goes, it’s to Rwanda that he comes to sleep. You want to leave all that?”
For over twenty years Valcourt had earned his bread and butter from wars, massacres and famines. For all this time, he had had a house but no country. Now he had a country to defend and it was Gentille’s, Méthode’s, Cyprien’s and Zozo’s. He had come to the end of a long road and could say at last, “Here is where I want to live.” This is what he was explaining to Gentille, purposely avoiding her eyes, weighing each word, keeping his own eyes fixed on his empty plate so that hers would not distract him further, so that each sentence would describe as precisely as possible the monumental discovery he had made—the discovery of a woman he wanted to die with, and of a country. What is a country for someone who is neither a soldier nor a rabid patriot? A place of subtle a finities, an implicit understanding between the land and the foot that treads it. A familiarity, an agreement, a secret sharing with the colours and smells of it. The impression that the wind is with us and is sometimes carrying us. A renunciation that does not imply acceptance of the idiocy and inhumanity that the country nurtures.
Leaving, even temporarily, did not appeal to him at all. He knew by now that once you’ve found the place that makes you feel at peace, you can’t leave it without ceasing to live, becoming a zombie, an empty body walking around in the barren space of a dreary diaspora. He had walked so far and hesitated, faltered and backtracked so many times before finding his own hill.
“If you asked me to leave I’d do it reluctantly, knowing that one grey autumn day we’d miss the sweet, warm breath of the eucalyptus so much that each of us would be blaming the other for the choice. Gentille, we’re not leaving here unless you really want to go, or unless they throw us out.”
Élise, who, for all her recriminations, threats and anger, had decided long ago that she too was going to stay, stood up and declared:
“Valcourt, you’re crazier than I thought.”
Gentille wanted to kiss him but instead, under cover of the table, put a toe on her future husband’s foot.
Élise kissed and hugged them both harder than usual, then left carrying away what remained of the Côtes du Rhône, “for the road.”
That night, Valcourt woke with a start, covered in sweat. Gentille was not there. The child was asleep in the other bed. He turned on the bedside lamp, then saw the young woman on the deckchair on the balcony, her nakedness outlined by the twofold reflection of moonlight and a candle. A yellow light on her delicate shoulder, a whitish touch on her angular hip. She was reading. She turned when she heard his step.
“I was worried when I didn’t see you.”
“Next time I want to read then, I’ll turn on the light even if it wakes you,” she said teasingly.
She was reading Éluard.
“You don’t know how much I’m discovering reading this book, Bernard. You talk so well, as if you were born knowing how to talk. You find words for all your emotions and people can understand you. I was taught not to talk about all the commotion inside of me. I’m not used to it and can’t find the words. So sometimes at night when you’re fast asleep and I’m lying awake, I come here and learn to give words to my love and my life. Even if they’re someone else’s words, they’re mine too. Listen: ‘We are the first cloud we two / In this absurd expanse of cruel happiness.’ That’s just like us, don’t you think?”
They didn’t sleep. They lay quietly on their backs, breathing calmly and steadily, content with the peacefulness and serenity in them.
When the first pink glow touched Gentille’s slender foot, Valcourt whispered, “What are we going to call the child?”
She murmured, “Émérita.”
Chapter Ten
Some stony land on the heights above Nyamirambo had been cleared for a new cemetery. There were as many militiamen and uniformed and plainclothes policemen in attendance as family and friends of Émérita. Lando had not come. He had spent the last few days shut in at home and the evenings at his restaurant, surrounded by a dozen armed men. Monsieur Faustin rather nervously delivered a short speech to fit the occasion. When he spoke the word “democracy,” he dropped the volume of his voice so far that only his immediate neighbours heard it. Then it was Émérita’s mother’s turn. Before speaking, she walked slowly round the hole, kicking angrily at pebbles. Then she turned to the whole gaggle of cops standing ten or so metres off.
“Look at me, you little shit-ass murderers, scum of the hills. Look at my wide face and flat nose, my deep-set eyes, my broad hips and big behind. There’s no mistaking me, I’m a real Hutu. Not a single Tutsi in my family to slim us down or lighten our skin. Émérita had my nose, my face and my butt. Like me, she was a real Hutu. More real than any of you. I’m telling you, when a Hutu chops his sister up in little pieces that won’t even fill a coffin, I’m telling you, that Hutu’s sick. You killed her because she was a friend to Tutsis. You didn’t understand what that meant. She just wanted to be a Rwandan, to have friends on all the hills. And you, Gaspard, playing with your machete and looking stuck-up, you ought to understand because you’ve been coming to my brothel twice a week for jasmine, who’s more Tutsi than I am Hutu, jasmine from Butare, who’s been getting lots of beer and flowers from you, and who you keep proposing to and who keeps turning you down because you don’t give her any pleasure. Émérita’s losing nothing losing you. She’s with the angels.”
Gaspard had taken to his heels but he knew they would find him and kill him for having loved and courted a Tutsi prostitute. Émérita’s mother knew it too. She came back to the grave and threw in a small bouquet of roses.
“I’ve killed one, my darling. I’m going to kill some more.”
Gentille and Bernard had sent their regrets because they were leaving that day to announce their marriage to Gentille’s family, especially her father, Jean-Damascène, who was living in Butare. They joked together that this would be their honeymoon trip, 175 kilometres of peaceful roads and contrasting landscapes, sharp rises and sometimes giddying descents. They would stop to visit her friend Marie at Rundo, just outside Kigali, and at Mugina thirty kilometres farther on where Gentille’s cousin Stratton was living now.
Just before the modern brick factory, which wasn’t working because the minister had sold the German machines to a Zimbabwean colleague, they came to the usual roadblock but had no trouble passing through. After crossing the placid Nyabarongo River, the road began to twist and turn and climbed steeply all the way to Rundo.
Gentille wanted Valcourt to meet Marie, who had been her teacher. Marie was thirty-five and had nine children. She was a teacher at Rundo’s elementary school and had married the assistant burgomaster. With their two incomes they were able to afford the family that their religious convictions dictated. But Marie had not been paid for six months and her husband Charles had lost his job several weeks before because he had refused to draw up a list of all the Tutsi families in the commune. Since then he had been in hiding with Hutu friends. Charles didn’t know if he was really a Tutsi although he had the Tutsi physique and a Tutsi identity card, and yes, although his grandfather had been a dignitary at the mwami’s court. With her head bowed and her eyes almost closed, Marie apologized for Charles’s not being there, as if the man’s absence was an a front to her guests.
It was noon and the children were declaring their hunger. Marie shooed them away, scolding them. She had guests she hadn’t seen for a long time. The children would eat later. Here, when friends turn up at midday they’re taken straight to table, and when they’re great friends the family kills the goat that’s kept tied by a foot in the yard. Playing with the children, Gentille took a discreet look about the house. There was no goat in the yard or the kitchen, not a single chicken either, only a bag of rice and a few dry beans. Not even a withered tomato or some bruised bananas. She called Valcourt, who offered the children a ride in the car. They piled happily into the capacious Land Rover, the eldest standing on the rear bumper. They came back twenty minutes later with thirty brochettes, two fat roast chickens and several kilos of tomatoes.
Meanwhile Marie had told the whole story to Gentille, who probably knew it already. Marie wondered if she shouldn’t leave with the children for Butare. For several days the strangest rumours had been going round. A group of militiamen from the North were camping at the crossroads. Others were living in a warehouse that belonged to the commune. She couldn’t bring herself to abandon Charles, whom she was visiting under cover of night, or her forty pupils who were making such progress in French.
Valcourt opened one of the bottles of Côtes du Rhône he had brought in order to celebrate with the Butare in-laws. Marie drank the first two glasses of alcohol she had ever had in her life, and when she was thoroughly tipsy Gentille told her she was getting married. At the news, Marie clapped excitedly, thanking God for her young friend’s liberation. This was the word she used before asking if she wasn’t afraid of the cold in Canada. She would never understand why the two lovers (who could leave whenever they wanted) had decided to stay in this country but was overcome to learn that they had, and shyly gave Valcourt a brief kiss on the forehead that felt to him like a warm, gentle breath or the touch of a passing swallow.
The jeep had almost reached the crossroads and was about to turn right toward Gitarama. Marie was still waving goodbye with both hands, making a windmill in the air as the vehicle disappeared behind the dark mass of the service station, which had had no gasoline for three months. Like small pennants of living flesh, her hands stayed held in the air. Marie would not leave either. She would remain on Charles’ and the children’s hill. These steep cli fs were perhaps worth clinging to after all, worth defending against the gravediggers.
Before the turn onto the dirt road leading to Mugina there were two roadblocks manned by militiamen who were making many passengers get out of their cars and sending them back on foot the way they had come, without their baggage. Sometimes a car or truck simply had to turn around and go back. The militiamen were young and obviously drunk. Not a single policeman, not a single soldier. Ten metres from the second roadblock, Valcourt saw the body of a woman lying in the long grass beside the red dirt road. He stopped. Her orange scarf, bright red pullover and green skirt, the colours of the Rwandan flag, might have looked like a fine primitive painting if she had only been sleeping, exhausted by digging in the fields. Her long legs were spread, her knees covered by her bloodstained underpants. Her green skirt was pulled up to her hips and a broad flow of coagulated blood issued from her vagina. An accurate machete had sliced her throat, where hundreds of red ants were already making a nest. In the trampled grass was a small piece of worn cardboard bearing the seal of the republic and a badly taken photograph. Alice Byumiraga, age twenty-seven, Mugina Commune, Tutsi.
In this region, the hills are close and watch one another. The valleys lie long and sinuous, and are so deep and steep-sided that to cross a distance of only one kilometre one must suffer twenty-five on ill-kept dirt roads.
Stratton was Gentille’s favourite cousin. On a long thin neck, he bore like a toy the head of a little learned mouse with eyes that sparkled, especially when telling the local legends and the tall tales he had learned watching European television, which had made Gentille laugh a lot when she was a child.
From his father’s house, where Stratton had been living since he fled the Bugesera region two years earlier, he pointed a long, slightly crooked finger at each thatched house clinging to the flanks of the hills across the valley. Hills so close you might think you could reach out and touch them, but at the same time so far away that each was like an independent little country jealous of its neighbours.
“
Ma petite
Gentille, half your family lives over there. See that big house opposite, beside the banana grove? Georges lives there, he’s one of your uncles. You don’t know him and it’s best that way. He bought a Hutu identity card twenty years ago and eats pig-meat and spaghetti every day so as not to be thin like a Tutsi. He’s been a success and has become head of the
interahamwes
of the commune. He’s the one in charge of the new roadblock they’ve set up just before the dirt road. Farther down, the five small houses, those are his sons’. To the left, a bit higher, that’s Simone’s house—she’s his sister who refuses to become a Hutu. Simone has five daughters, all as beautiful as can be, but she’s only been able to marry off one, to a cousin of mine from Butare. Below Simone’s house (see it, near the clump of eucalyptus?), that big bungalow, that’s another cousin’s. He’s a friend of Lando’s, the Tutsi minister, perhaps you know him. But he’s put his house up for sale and wants to go and live in Belgium. Then there are all the others I won’t name for you, the families are so big. But from our common ancestor who one day wanted to turn us all into Tutsis to save our lives and open the doors of the Belgian schools to us, we’re over six hundred descendants on three hills here. A little over half are officially Tutsis, and some, like you, have the physical appearance. The ones our ancestor’s clever plan didn’t succeed in changing, the ones he failed, are getting ready to kill us as soon as they get the word.”