He came to in the plane. They told him that the sergeant in command of the detachment of presidential guards had prevented the young woman and child from being harmed. He had, it seemed, taken them under his protection.
Chapter Twelve
In Nairobi, Valcourt learned the enormity of the massacres. He had feared there might be as many as a hundred thousand deaths and now he was hearing talk of half a million. Fire and sword ruled the whole country, except for the Butare district. The army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front had left its Ugandan refuge and was rapidly approaching Kigali, meeting little resistance. While the Rwandan forces did not resemble a real army in anything but the name and the uniforms, the Tutsi troops of the RPF were professional, disciplined soldiers, the officers products of English and American military schools. Two days earlier the RPF had liberated the little town of Byumba and many who had succeeded in escaping the pogroms were now taking refuge there.
A week later, Valcourt was walking back and forth on the muddy high plateau of Byumba, where a hundred thousand refugees were already huddled together. With Raïka, a Somalian who was working for African Rights, he was gathering eyewitness reports so that a true history could be written of the genocide that was still raging a hundred kilometres to the south. He was moving in a strange universe here, composed entirely of women, old men and children. Their gaze was not empty but chillingly absent, turned inward, or quite simply dead. Like people who can see but will not. Only a few women would speak, in hushed voices, their eyes fixed on the ground, where they kept them long after they had finished their almost clinical descriptions (for they had only concrete words) of the murders of their husbands and sons. The rapes these shy, prudish women described with a wealth of blood-curdling detail, as if they were dictating the reports of their own autopsies. They spoke of the worst mutilations and most perverse assaults with a composure and detachment that made these acts even more heinous.
And with each story he recorded, Valcourt, of course, was sure he was hearing Gentille’s. If he had returned with a grain of hope, the four weeks he spent at Byumba destroyed it. He interviewed about a hundred people who had fled Kigali, four of whom had stayed at the Mille-Collines. There was no trace of Gentille. He would go to Kigali to find out how Gentille and their daughter had died. Then … then he … He could not finish the sentence his brain was trying to compose. Silence settled in his head the way absence had made its eternal nest in the gaze of those women.
To get from Byumba to the outskirts of Kigali took him and Raïka a week, following a battalion of RPF soldiers. It was a kind of descent into hell. A curious journey, a little like that of a Christian performing the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, each of the fourteen stations opening the wounds wider and bringing him inescapably closer to death. Rather than avoiding or fleeing horror, the two men were pursuing it, hunting it down in the remotest corners, like pathologists minutely noting the nature of wounds, evaluating how long it took for death to come.
Raïka was stuffing himself with Ativan. Valcourt would fall asleep like a drunken brute. Grotesque forms would wake him, hideous, putrescent bodies, caricatures of humans with arms shaped like machetes. Gentille would appear in the distance in a halo. The closer she came, for she was running toward him, the more she would become a horrible distortion of what she had been. She turned ash-grey and an incandescent river of lava ran from her belly. And when her twisted mouth, her rotted lips, placed themselves on his, he would wake with a loud cry, the smell of his own sweat all around him. The black night would glitter with a thousand stars.
Often he slept for only an hour and then would stay sitting, not thinking anything, his nose catching whatever whiff of death wafted from the smallest thicket. Even the invasive eucalyptus that was capable of sucking up all the land’s water could not impose its fresh scent. The pungent smell of human death was killing the smell of the trees. Every night Valcourt imagined a different death for Gentille, and the closer he and Raïka came to Kigali the more appalling his wife’s murder grew. In the nightmares that peopled every second of his sleep, it was Gentille who received all the tortures and humiliation that the women, their gaze buried in the blood-reddened ground, had confided to him, with shame, the way one admits the basest obscenity to a silent priest.
On the hills, in the little villages, in the squares and places where markets and meetings happen, the same stories were repeated. Neighbours, friends, sometimes relatives had come and had killed. Amid confusion perhaps, but efficiently. The killers were known, they were named. Every dead body had a known killer. In the towns both large and small, the genocide had been more systematic. Meetings had been organized, watchwords and directives had been given, plans had been laid. If the methods seemed so inhuman, if the killers killed with such savagery, it was not because they were improvising or were out of their minds, but simply that they were too poor to build gas chambers.
It was at Nyamata, an indolent, sizeable village whose low houses straggled along one wide, sandy street, that Valcourt and Raïka really understood. They were walking the paths of a second Holocaust.
They were taken to “the parish,” which in Rwanda refers to a gathering of buildings—elementary school, secondary school, health care clinic, residence—a veritable fortress of red brick around the church. The soldiers on guard advised them not to go any closer. From the nine or ten buildings a stink arose that was more revolting than liquid pig manure freshly spread on a hot summer day. It was not just the smell of death but of all deaths and all rotting things.
At the beginning of the massacres, almost all Tutsis shared a single reflex: the militiamen would not dare attack the house of God. By the tens of thousands, from all the hills and all the hamlets, they had run, walked and crawled through the night, and with a great sigh of relief had squatted in the choir of a church, or the entrance of a presbytery, or in a classroom with a crucifix looking down from the wall. God, the last rampart against inhumanity. But in this gentle springtime, God and more notably most of his pious vicars had abandoned their flocks. The churches became Rwanda’s gas chambers. In each building of the parish of Nyamata were piled hundreds upon hundreds of bodies. Three thousand people had squeezed into the round church, under the gleaming metal roof. They had closed the heavy wrought-iron doors behind them. The killers, frustrated not to be able to enter, finished their business with grenades. A few dozen grenades did the job and blew a thousand little holes in the roof, which on this sunny day made a thousand diamonds of light on the floor of the church. Three diamonds sparkled on what Valcourt thought he recognized as Gentille’s neck.
Valcourt and Raïka were no longer taking reports from survivors, or very few. Their guides were efficient and determined, leading them from one common grave to the next, from one church to another.
They had almost reached Kigali but had to make a stop at Ntarama, where the RPF soldiers led them once again to the church. There they found the same formless carpet of bodies, the same stench of putrefaction that enters not through the nose but through the mouth and invades one’s guts. It was as if the smell of death was trying to purge everything living from Valcourt’s body. His stomach had emptied repeatedly for days. Now only a trickle of bile wet the corners of his mouth.
At a turn in the road he saw the first hill of Kigali. This was Gentille’s place. He was coming back to where he would feel he was in his own house.
The city was quiet and empty. Only a few military vehicles were driving sedately on the long Boulevard of the Organization of African Unity. At the major crossroads there were a few disciplined and polite RPF soldiers on watch. The endless ribbon of bodies had disappeared. Where death had put on its most indecent show, long trenches had been dug that made a red ochre hem at the side of the asphalt. Here and there one could make out a splash of colour, a shirt, a dress, a red scarf that the lime had not completely covered.
Valcourt was stopping at each grave, hoping not to recognize anyone. He walked slowly, examining the clothes, studying the shapes of the bodies, trying to figure out the faces. Fear had taken the place of horror. But it was a contradictory, ambiguous fear that he could not pinpoint. His last remaining shred of logic, of analytical capacity, all the evidence he had heard, everything, absolutely everything told him that Gentille was dead. He was afraid in fact not to know for sure that she was dead, because then her disappearance would mean that her death was just one of a hundred thousand other deaths, like a drop of water in a sea of nameless and faceless tragedies. Gentille deserved to live until her own death, and Valcourt knew he would not be able to live unless he could write the story of her death. He wasn’t interested in the killers, didn’t care much what their names were. Obedient bit-players, ridiculous puppets, poor devils conned by everyone. In his country you couldn’t bring them to trial or demand punishment because the courts would declare them insane on account of collective poisoning of their minds.
At the hotel, the only thing left unscathed was the fig tree, whose luxuriant beauty stood like a foil for the idiocy of men. Valcourt came across several soldiers camping in the rubble-strewn lobby. The pool was empty. The hotel’s refugees had drunk all the water. They had also eaten the few birds in the aviary, whose door was swinging in the wind, grating on its hinges. Some of the eucalyptus trees around the pool were missing. They had been cut down for boiling water once there was no more wood from tables or bedroom furniture to burn. The ravens and buzzards and jackdaws were making do, perching more numerous than ever on the remaining branches.
Valcourt’s eyes roamed over every centimetre of the big, now desolate garden. Well, he was home, he said to himself. He looked around at his empty house like a widower coming home alone after burying his wife. The pain and sadness were numbed. He felt neither anger nor bitterness. Not even despair. Worse, inside himself, dig as he might, he could find only a void. An absolute void. Gentille had given meaning to this landscape. Now it was his turn to try and give it one.
Zozo was looking at him and it was not a dream or a mirage. Only his lips were smiling. His huge black eyes were looking at Valcourt with the desolate sadness of beaten dogs. Why, why had Valcourt come back? To retrace Gentille’s steps from the moment a sergeant of the presidential guard had separated her from him.
“Monsieur Bernard, I don’t know anything. I only know she’s dead.”
Valcourt knew that already, he had never been under any illusions. But he explained that he couldn’t go back to Canada until he’d found out exactly how she died.
He inquired after friends. He knew the replies but did it out of respect for their memory. He who was alive had to hear each of their names and the word “dead” after it. He would say a name and Zozo would reply “dead.” This way they were commemorating the funerals of some thirty people, including all of Madame Agathe’s girls. Victor?
“Victor,” said Zozo, laughing, “would be pleased to receive customers at his restaurant.”
Victor hugged Valcourt, holding him for many seconds on his broad chest, as though Valcourt were the survivor and not himself. Then he put his two hands on his friend’s shoulders and squeezed them almost roughly.
“You’re a man, Valcourt. There aren’t many who’d have the courage to come back and revisit the darkest moments of their life.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she? D’you know how? D’you know who? ”
“Yes, she’s dead, Émérita’s mother told me, but I don’t know how.”
“And the sergeant? ”
“I don’t know. Come and eat. You’ll forgive me, I don’t have fish or beer. But I have eggs, beans, tomatoes and South African champagne.”
Victor recounted his life-saving operations the way one recounts camping adventures or fishing trips. He laughed about each of the problems he’d overcome and made fun of his fears. He protested vigorously when Valcourt praised his courage. He’d only done what any man with a little money would have done in his place. To Zozo, who also expressed bountiful admiration, he replied soberly that he was not a hero, he was a Christian.
“Will you help me find out what happened to Gentille? ” Valcourt asked. Victor nodded, turning away his eyes.
With a bottle of champagne in his hand, Valcourt went up to room 312. The bed was no longer there. He lay down on the balcony and listened to the silence, which was ruffled just barely once in a while by the barkings of dogs. No shouting, no laughing, no human sound except occasionally a motor. A warm wind and a shower enveloped the city. The birds lowered their heads and wrapped their wings closer. Valcourt huddled against the wall.
In the morning he went up to Rundo, which was already being called the town of widows and orphans. Out of two hundred men, around fifty had survived, most of whom had fled to Zaïre because killers had made all those widows and orphans. Six hundred. The Hutu and Tutsi widows had got together and decided to divide up the homeless children. Marie had taken in three, two of whom were boys she showed to Valcourt. Their father, a neighbour and good friend, had killed her husband. “They were close friends with my eldest … and children aren’t responsible for our crimes.” He gave her a little money. She asked him to find help to rebuild the school. Like Victor and Zozo, she told him that Gentille was dead, but she didn’t know where or how. He left to go back to Kigali.
He found a more or less intact mattress and a few bedclothes in the litter scattered through the abandoned hotel and took them out under the fig tree. Lying around on the floor in his old room were some clothes that had been his. He picked them up and discovered
Essais
by Camus, the other book which, along with the Éluard, had been his entire library. The first pages of this La Pléiade edition had been torn out, probably because the fine paper made good toilet paper. He smiled at the thought. The book now began at page 49: “I no longer wish to be happy now, just to be aware.”