Our son Lucas had come home from nursery that day in a lot of pain. He wouldn’t stop crying. Elisabeth and I tried to figure out what was wrong, but small kids have great difficulty pointing to where it hurts.
All we knew was that he had a high fever and that he couldn’t keep any food or liquids down. We tried not to worry: it was the rainy season, after all, and that always brought all sorts of ailments. But we’d decided to take him for a malaria test in the morning, just in case.
I was out in the garden, having a cigarette break from all the crying, when the phone rang. It had been a long day at work, and I was tired. I’d lost my patience with Lucas’ screams, and Elisabeth had ordered me out of the room, fearing I might lose my temper.
It was my last cigarette, and I regretted not picking up a new packet after work. A traffic accident with a twegerane minibus had forced me on a detour and, with Lucas being ill, I had rushed straight home instead of driving to the other shop. Then, with curfew approaching, it was too late to go find some. Breakfast, for once, would have to be without a smoke.
Up until the phone call, it had been peaceful outside: nothing but familiar sounds you barely notice unless you focus on them: the singsong of cicadas, the crackling of a radio, the barking of the neighbor’s dogs.
The nicotine was doing its job; I was beginning to relax. I ran my fingers along a bird of paradise flower, thinking how beautiful it was, how satisfying to the touch, when the ringtone sliced through the night, sharp and cold.
Nobody, I thought, calls at 9:30 on a Wednesday evening.
I waited to see whether Elisabeth might pick up, but the phone kept ringing, so I stubbed out my cigarette against the smooth, plasticky bark of a banana tree and headed back inside.
I immediately recognized the strong Brussels accent on the other end of the line. Jean-Philippe was a friend who worked in the consular section of the Belgian embassy. Short, mustachioed, with a gold earring and a dragon tattoo on his biceps. He was a bad loser at tennis, but I played him every Sunday at the Cercle Sportif of Kigali because I liked the comfort of habit, and it was a way of catching up with the latest gossip.
Our phone call was brief, and Jean-Philippe did most of the talking. He sounded tense.
After he’d hung up, I lowered the handset to my shoulder where I let it rest, while the news sank in. Down the hallway, Lucas cried and Elisabeth hushed. My hand reached for a cigarette in my shirt pocket, but I remembered I had none left. I poured myself a large whiskey and went back out into the garden.
The sky was clear for an April night, the stars bright. I took a swig, felt the alcohol burn my throat, and closed my eyes. The neighbor’s dogs barked, and the cicadas clicked as if nothing had changed, as if the phone call had been nothing but a dream, as if hell wasn’t about to be unleashed.
I walked over to the gate where Révocate, our night guard, was sitting on a cinder block, listening to the radio, his machete next to him on the ground, the broken wooden handle fastened to the blade with a piece of dirty, old cloth.
“Mwiriwe,” I greeted him, with the added “M” to show my respect for someone older than I.
Truth be told, we had no idea how old Révocate was. When Elisabeth and I hired him, we’d had doubts about the date of birth on his identity card, mentioned just underneath his ethnicity, “Tutsi.” In Rwanda, many births went unregistered and, in those cases, officials would enter an approximate date, based on the person’s physical appearance and the events he or she said they remembered. In Révocate’s case, judging by his cotton white hair and the limp when he walked, we suspected his true birth date had been missed by a decade at least.
Révocate rose to his feet and returned the greeting. He readjusted the trousers of his navy blue suit which were hunched up at his knees from sitting down. As always, his pale pink shirt was impeccably ironed—though frayed at the collar—and his white leather shoes, three sizes too large, gouged and cracked, were polished to perfection.
“Did you hear the news?” I asked.
“Oui, monsieur.”
“It’s bad.”
He nodded and raised his eyebrows in agreement. Even in the dark, his eyes twinkled, like fragments of quartz pressed deep into his wrinkled skin.
Five years of irreproachable service Révocate had given us. Always on time, never sick. And Lucas absolutely adored him. Révocate would make him little wire cars, or boats from banana tree bark. As the sun set in the evenings, and the bats did acrobatics across the sky, they’d sit on that cinder block by the gate, back-to-back, eating guavas and littering the ground with the fruit’s bitter skin.
If ever there had been an intruder, I don’t think Révocate would have been able to defend us. He was too old and frail. Yet we all kept up the pretense because we knew that, at his age, he had no chance of finding a job elsewhere.
“Keep a good eye out, Révocate. If you hear or see anything suspicious, come and wake me.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
I started towards the house and then looked back over my shoulder. “Tell me, Révocate, since when do you listen to classical music?”
His lips broke into a toothless smile. “It’s not me, monsieur,” he said, embarrassed. “They started playing it after the news.”
I stood and listened, not quite able to place the tune: a dramatic piece, intense, with rests between the notes that gave it great impact. Wagner perhaps? The chorus came, the voices swelled into a climax, stopped, then pools of silence came flooding in.
Back in the house, the crying had stopped. I edged along the dark corridor towards the bedroom, where one lamp was on, spreading a honeyed light. Everything looked like it was trapped in amber. Elisabeth lay at the far end of the bed, her back turned to me. There had been a time when we slept facing each other, but, since the birth of Lucas, things hadn’t been quite the same.
I undressed and lay down. The red digits on the plastic clock read half past ten.
“Elisabeth,” I whispered.
No response.
“Elisabeth?”
“Mmm . . .”
“Are you asleep, Elisabeth?”
“I was . . .”
“They shot down his plane, Elisabeth. They killed President Habyarimana.”
*
The shooting started around midnight.
I had not intended to fall asleep, and I didn’t think I would after hearing such news—previous attacks on heads of state in the Great Lakes region had always sparked unrest, massacres. This time, not one, but two presidents had been assassinated. Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi had also been on board.
Yet I was in a deep, dreamless sleep when the first shots were fired.
We’d lived in Rwanda long enough to recognize the sound of guns and mortars. It wasn’t uncommon for our evenings to be disrupted by explosions, the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun. Sometimes, on my way into work, I’d see a body by the side of the road, left there to rot as a deterrent. Yet those were isolated events, and we’d learned to live with them. It’s strange how easily one gets used to the presence of war, yet never to the absence of love.
That night, the fighting was different, it was everywhere, purposeful. We knew the drill: we pulled our mattress off the frame and into the corridor—away from windows and protected from stray bullets by an extra pair of walls.
We carried Lucas over, and the three of us squeezed against each other in the dark—Lucas in the middle, his tiny body burning up with fever, and Elisabeth and I on either side, like the hard parts of a shell closing protectively around its vulnerable core.
Elisabeth’s legs touched mine, and her breath was close and warm, like in those early days when we’d fall asleep in each other’s arms after making love. Underneath my pillow, squeezed tight in my right hand: a carving knife I had grabbed from the kitchen, just in case.
I kept telling myself we had little to worry about, that foreigners were usually left out of these local reckonings. Yet I also knew that anti-Belgian sentiment had swelled in recent years. Inkotanye, they called us—Tutsi lovers—because Belgium had withdrawn its forces back in 1990 when the rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front had staged their first attack. A colonial history of Tutsi favoritism made it hard to argue with that sentiment. Maybe this time they’d be out for revenge?
Hours passed, and Elisabeth and I were still awake, listening out for suspicious sounds, anything that signaled a threat. Apart from shooting, we hadn’t heard any other noise all night, so panic swept over me when cars entered our street and stopped near our house. The engines were switched off, and doors slammed. We heard banging against a metal gate and angry shouting—deep, male voices. A couple of shots were fired, and a woman screamed, like an animal in an abattoir. Then more shots and banging, more screams.
We lay frozen in the dark, hostage to our imagination—visions raced through my head of people kneeling with guns pointed at their temples, begging for their lives, bodies scattered around them, blood oozing from their wounds, dark red puddles spreading on the earth.
Then Lucas woke up and wailed as if his insides were being torn apart. His cries echoed loud down the corridor and out into the night. Nothing we tried—hushing, hugging, pleading—helped.
Terrified about drawing attention from the people outside, I pressed my hand on Lucas’ mouth to smother the cries. The shock of my action silenced him, and he stared at me with huge round eyes. I let go slightly but kept my hand in place, feeling the moisture of his quick, warm breath accumulate against my palm, while underneath the pillow, I tightened my grip around the handle of the carving knife. Elisabeth ran her fingers through his hair. I tried to avoid the accusatory look in her eyes.
Over the sound of my thumping heart, I listened out for approaching footsteps, voices. Blood whooshed in my ears, my chest was so tight I could barely breathe, my tongue a piece of sandpaper.
But no one came, and, eventually, the commotion subsided. When the cars had gone and no more people could be heard, I let my hand slip off Lucas’ mouth. He turned away from me and sought refuge in his mother’s arms.
I rolled onto my back, wet and cold with sweat, and stared into the shadows around me. Though Elisabeth didn’t say a word, I could sense her disapproval.
The fighting in town carried on until around 5 a.m., then fizzled out into the sporadic crack of a gun, an occasional blast somewhere in the distance, and, then, nothing. Not even the clicking of cicadas, or the barking of the neighbor’s dogs. All that was left was an ominous silence—the kind that signals the onset of storms, of terrible events.
*
I woke again at that strange time when night passes into day, imperceptibly, from grainy darkness into nebulous grey, then into a livid blue from which springs the full brightness of a new morning. A transition so gradual, seamless—like aging or love lost. No trigger, no single, decisive moment when you realize what’s going on, and when you do, it’s already too late: the change is complete.
It was the swishing of the broom that woke me, a familiar sound which had been my alarm clock for the past five years: the gentle brush of Révocate sweeping the dust and leaves off the sidewalks before heading home. A sound as comforting as the gurgling of my mother’s coffee machine in the kitchen of the farm where I grew up. A sound as relaxing as the rain tapping on the terracotta tiles above my childhood attic room.
Then: gunshots, and everything came back.
I jumped out of bed and found Révocate in the garden at the back of the house, emptying the dustpan’s contents onto the compost heap.
“Révocate, what are you doing?”
“I’m sorry monsieur. I hope I didn’t wake you?”
Heavy shelling erupted in the distance. I ducked and covered my head with my hands.
“Révocate, you shouldn’t be out here. Come inside and have some breakfast.”
I brewed tea and made toast with butter and papaya jam. While we ate, our hands clenching the warm mugs, Révocate explained what had happened in the night. A Rwandan family living down the road had been on a hit list announced by Radio Mille Collines of prominent Tutsis and moderate Hutus—politicians, businessmen, journalists—who had to be eliminated.
The people on the radio, Révocate said, had asked the population to look for Inyenzi and to report them to the army. Inyenzi, he said, were cockroaches.
“I’m sorry monsieur, I don’t think it’s safe for me to go home today.”
Noticing his bloodshot eyes, I said, “Why don’t you get some rest?,” and I offered him the guest room.
*
While Révocate took a nap, I took advantage of a lull in the shooting to climb the roof and gain a view of the surrounding area. Our garden was fenced in by mimosa and jacaranda trees, and it was only from high up that I could see farther afield.
Careful not to make the corrugated iron roof creak under my weight, I did a military crawl up to the riff and, through the tops of the trees, discerned the valley down below, where the morning mists lay shredded amongst the bushes and reeds.
With my binoculars, I followed the deserted road winding down the hill and, about halfway, where it forked into two, I spotted a makeshift roadblock: a eucalyptus branch resting on two rusty barrels.
It was guarded by a dozen young men, dressed in a mishmash of military and civilian clothing—camouflage gear and berets, but also football jerseys and shorts, flags in guise of capes, sunglasses, caps—whatever, it seems, they had managed to get their hands on. One was wearing a bowler hat, another bright yellow rain boots. All carried machetes. They were Interahamwe—Hutu militia.
A young woman dressed in a kitenge approached the roadblock, hauling a small suitcase. The men surrounded her and, from the way they gesticulated, I gathered the conversation wasn’t amiable.
The woman handed over some papers. One of the militia waved a machete at her and another pushed her over. When she fell to the ground, they kicked her. The man with the bowler hat stepped forward and lifted his machete. The sun caught in the metal, sparkling. A bird landed in a tree near me and burst into song. Then the man hacked at the woman the way people chop up dangerous snakes.
Inzoka, Révocate had said. Snakes—that’s another insult for Tutsis.
*
When the sun had burnt the last dew of the leaves and grass, Jean-Philippe called. He said killings were taking place all over town. Prime Minister Agathe, who was acting president, had been assassinated, along with ten Belgian soldiers protecting her.
Jean-Philippe said Agathe’s body was found with a beer bottle stuffed up her vagina, and that the soldiers had been castrated, gagged with their own genitalia.
“Everyone’s a target now,” Jean-Philippe said, “including us. They want us out. Or dead. They don’t want witnesses to what they’re about to do.”
“People are turning into monsters,” I said.
“They’re not turning into monsters, they’ve always been monsters. You just didn’t notice.”
“So you saw it coming?”
“What?”
“All this,” I said. “Habyarimana, the killings. Surely, at the embassy, you must have had intelligence?”
“We didn’t want to see it coming,” Jean-Philippe said. “But deep down, we all knew it was five to midnight. The assassinations, the massacres . . . We just got used to them. We closed our eyes and wished them away. We kept moving the boundaries of the acceptable.”
*
We spent the next two days inside the house, with the shutters closed, while the fighting raged outside between the Rwandan army and the Tutsi rebels. Both sides sought to settle militarily what had been politically impossible.
I once read that the present lasts only seconds—two ticks of a clock to be precise—and then it’s gone. The moments melt in our grasp: the now becomes the past, the future morphs into the now. We rarely live in the present; we always run after the facts.
But not during those two days. The present seemed to last forever—an infinite gap between ticks, or rather, an infinite number of ticks. Our past had disintegrated, the future was nonexistent. We had become prisoners of the now, with no escape possible.
Lucas lay on the sofa, cuddled up under a blanket, knees drawn up to his stomach, chin tucked to his chest. With his bunny clutched in the nook of his elbow, thumb in mouth, he watched Disney’s Little Mermaid on repeat—the sea witch trapping Ariel’s voice in a shell, in return for human legs. I listened to his breath—wheezy, labored—the occasional moan.
In the far corner of the living room: Elisabeth, the features of her face dissolved by darkness. A cup of coffee on the side table next to her, half empty, cold. Rings on the table, lip marks on the cup; dried, brown lines where the beverage had dripped. And I wondered which was worse: Lucas’ inability to speak or Elisabeth’s unwillingness.
In some relationships, silence is a safe space, a common ground of understanding, of shared feeling, of recognition and mutual respect. In those relationships, silence is necessary: it is the glue that holds people together.
In our case, silence embodied a failure to communicate; it symbolized the deep dysfunction of our marriage, something I had always tried to fight. But it seemed to me Elisabeth knew that what isn’t said can hurt more than what is. She used silence as a weapon intentionally, violently.
As I watched her from the corner of my eye, Jean-Philippe’s words echoed in my head, We didn’t want to see it coming . . . We kept moving the boundaries of the acceptable.
Meanwhile, Révocate sat at the dining room table, haloed by the pendant light, a tiny, thumbed Bible in his hands. He read the scriptures, his lips moving slowly, laboriously, without making a sound. The rustle of the turning pages, like crepitating paper wings, seemed to lift him to another world. I envied the peace and inner strength God gave him.
I needed a cigarette. Restless, I paced the room, peeked behind curtains, and chewed on a piece of gum—hard and flavorless as rubber. I spent hours on the phone with neighbors and friends, trying to keep up with the latest news, which gave me a semblance of control. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth: we were at the mercy of forces far greater than ourselves, momentous events of historical proportion.
The clock’s ticking drove me mad. I took out the batteries, but then it was Elisabeth’s endless sighing that irked me—immaterial wisps of air heavy with meaning and accusation which, I was certain, said: This is all your fault, I never wanted to be here in the first place. And it was true that it had been my decision to move to Rwanda, that I had insisted she give everything up to come with me, and maybe that was when a seed of resentment had been planted. But things were starting to disintegrate even before we moved. You couldn’t blame it all on one event, pin it down on a single cause—that would have been too easy. No, it was all the little things that happened over time, that accumulated and weighed us down, that brought us to this breaking point.
*
Late Friday afternoon, Lucas’ condition took a turn for the worse. He developed a rash and shivered uncontrollably. By evening, his fever was so high he was hallucinating. He kept shouting, “No!” to imaginary people, “It’s not me, it’s not me!”
Elisabeth finally broke down. “We need to get him to a doctor, now!” she screamed, mascara streaking her face. “If anything happens to him, I swear, I will never—” She looked at me, haggard and pale, her vulnerability seeping through the cracks of the defenses she had built against me.
I placed my hand on her shoulder, but she brushed it aside, picked up Lucas and stormed off towards the corridor. On her way out, she hit a vase which shattered on the concrete floor, leaving the lilies it contained sprawled among the glittering glass.
As I cleaned up the mess, Elisabeth’s sobs echoed down the corridor, an occasional screech from Lucas too. I cut myself, and finally brushed the last shards into the dustpan. The crying faded into a whimper and then into silence as they both fell asleep.
Révocate, who had been hiding in the guest room, reappeared and helped me bandage my cut. A grenade exploded in the distance, and it started raining—at first just a tinkle on the iron roof, then like hammers crashing down from heaven. Lightning lit up the living room, followed by a thunderclap. If there was any fighting going on, we could no longer hear it.
I poured myself a large tumbler of whiskey, and Révocate said, “Monsieur, would you like to play a game of checkers?”
He laid out a piece of old cardboard on the table, then carefully placed rusty bottle caps on the squares he had drawn on himself. He let me choose which I wanted to be: Fanta or Coca-Cola, and I chose the latter.
We played a game with no intention to win. We took our time with every move—Révocate’s bony fingers fiddling with the pieces, me shaking the melting ice cubes in my drink. We captured our fears with clever moves, crowned our friendship by reaching the king’s row. We spent an hour in that bubble, listening to the rain, darkness all around, neither of us speaking because there was no need.
When the storm turned into a trickle and the rains were no more than a gurgle in the gutter, I caught Révocate’s last piece—or rather, he let me catch it. We leaned back in our creaking chairs and stared at the board for a long time.
Then Révocate said, “I hope you and madame will make peace again someday.”
I tilted my head back to empty the last drops of whiskey into my mouth and placed the glass back on the table with a soft, dry tap. I said, “Easier said than done, Révocate. Marriage is complicated . . .”
“I know,” he said.
I looked surprised, so he explained, “I was married once.”
“You were—what happened?”
He didn’t speak for a while. With his long, elegant hands he built a tower out of the bottle caps, alternating Fanta and Coke. The light bulb flickered, and the tower collapsed.
“She died during childbirth,” he said.
“Révocate, I’m so sorry.”
He pushed the bottle caps into a pile and proceeded to make flowers with them: a pistil of Fanta with Coca-Cola petals. He’d made about four when I asked about the child.
He looked up, his eyes brimming with tears. “She didn’t make it either,” he said. “And you know what the worst part is, monsieur? My wife and I had an argument the day before it happened, so she’d gone and spent the night with her parents. She went into labor without me knowing and when I heard the news, it was too late. I never . . .” Révocate’s voice faltered. “I never had a chance to make peace.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, then tidied up the board and bottle caps. He stood up, excused himself and limped off towards the guest room.
“Révocate?”
He stopped and turned. “Oui, monsieur?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I thanked him for the game.
“It was my pleasure monsieur. Goodnight.”
When Révocate had disappeared, I switched off the lights and headed to the corridor, where I lay down on the mattress, careful not to wake Elisabeth and Lucas. I closed my eyes and let myself be nursed to sleep by the sounds that followed the rain—the trickle of water from the gutter, the pitter-patter of drops on the leaves, the clicking of cicadas reemerging from their hiding place and, just as I was about to drift off, the neighbor’s dogs howled—a smarting lament that carried far over the hills and deep into night of our human hearts.
*
The next morning, I woke not to the sound of shooting, but to giggles instead. I was alone in the corridor—Elisabeth and Lucas were up already. I dressed and made my way towards the living room, where the laughter came from.
Lucas’ little head poked out from behind the sofa, sleepy-eyed, flushed red cheeks, but with a curiosity-induced energy he hadn’t shown for days. Crouched next to him was Révocate.
“Monsieur, look what I found in the bougainvillea.”
“A chamemeo!” Lucas shouted.
Révocate lifted his arm to reveal a small chameleon perched on his thumb, its cone-shaped eyes rotating nervously. Lucas was in stitches as the animal first mimicked the pale pink of Révocate’s shirt, then the dark blue of his suit.
“Come here,” Révocate said, taking Lucas’ hand to transfer the chameleon onto it. Lucas’ smile vanished when the little sharp claws pinched his skin, but when the animal moved and tickled his arm, he nearly fell off the sofa with laughter.
Outside, the sun shone and filtered through the shutter slats, projecting bars of gold across the living room. Lucas crawled onto my lap, rested his head on my chest and fell asleep. Motes of dust floated across the light. The wood pigeons cooed, and the iron roof cracked as it expanded in the heat.
For a brief moment, we forgot about the war. Even Elisabeth’s lips broke into a smile, and she looked like a different person, or rather, she looked like the woman I remembered, the woman I had fallen in love with and missed so much.
*
Around midday, Jean-Philippe called with the good news: Operation Silver Back was underway. Belgium would send troops to Rwanda, and we would be saved. The evacuations would start the following day. Jean-Philippe said we should pack one small bag each.
It was hard deciding what to take. Whatever we left would probably never be seen again. We had to choose which memories to keep. We packed photographs, important documents, jewelry, Lucas’ bunny—but all his other toys, most of our clothes, our small African art collection, our books, music, Elisabeth’s wedding dress, the pebbles and shells we’d collected on our honeymoon . . . all those things that make us who we are, the stories that are attached to them, had to be left behind.
Even so, our imminent escape lightened the mood, and, for the first time in ages, Elisabeth and I spoke. Although our conversation was limited to practical matters—had I packed the passports, and should we hide some of our possessions in the attic—we took joint decisions, made plans together. I was surprised how little we disagreed, how aligned we were in our views. In mundane things we had lost each other; perhaps in mundane things we’d find each other again?
Evening fell early that day, and the sky was a bad watercolor painting—washed out and grey. It poured down again, and mosquitoes swarmed the lamps, the light filtering through a thousand insect legs and wings. Glued against the wall, geckos waited patiently for the feast to come within reach of their long, sticky tongues.
With dusk, Lucas’ condition worsened again—he vomited a couple of times and had a raging fever. I read him a bedtime story while Elisabeth and Révocate were in the kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards for anything that could be used to make our final dinner in Kigali. They were talking, but the clatter of the rain on the iron roof made it hard to make out what they were saying. Every now and then, Elisabeth laughed.
When Lucas was asleep, I returned to the living room and went through our belongings one final time to make sure we hadn’t forgotten anything important. I picked up a book from a shelf and a Polaroid fell from its pages, creased and discolored. A young Elisabeth, 21 or 22 perhaps, smiled at the camera, wearing a denim jacket, large round earrings, pink eyeshadow. She looked beautiful.
Révocate came in to set the table, and I slipped the photograph into my pocket. I helped bring out the dishes, and we sat down to a meal of toasted bread and canned tuna accompanied by lettuce and tomatoes from the garden. We washed it all down with half a bottle of vinegary wine we had kept for cooking, then Révocate fried bananas for dessert.
Against a backdrop of gunfire, I raised my glass to our impending rescue. Elisabeth clinked with me, and we made brief eye contact, which did not go unnoticed by Révocate, who looked down at the table with a hint of a smile on his lips.
By the time we went to bed, it had stopped raining. The cicadas were out en masse, as if trying to drown out the sound of gunshots echoing between the hills. Now and then, the neighbor’s dogs barked, a grenade exploded. The night was full of sound, but my thoughts wandered to the things I couldn’t hear, to the tragedies and horrors happening inside churches, schools, people’s homes—between four walls, too far away to be heard.
Silence, I thought, is a function of distance. And of time. But what we hear is also a matter of effort, imagination and compassion. Maybe we hear only the things we want to hear, and we ignore the rest. I rolled over onto my side and looked at Elisabeth, who was asleep. Over the years, how many cries for help I had not heard, or chosen not to hear?
*
The army trucks arrived late afternoon the following day. The neighbor’s dogs were first to notice, and they jumped up against the fence, barking. Then we heard the approaching convoy too, like thunder rolling in the distance, gradually getting louder, until eventually the canvas-covered vehicles lined up in our street. On a normal day, they would have whipped up a cloud of dust, but the rains had left the road damp and pockmarked with orange puddles.
A few soldiers jumped out of the trucks, while the engines were kept on, rattling, clanking. One of them came to our gate—a young man in his early twenties, a child almost. Clean-shaven, with small round eyes that were too close together. He glanced nervously from side to side as he yapped the instructions we already knew: one small bag each, departure in ten minutes.
Elisabeth hurried towards the truck carrying Lucas, and as I picked up our bags, I turned to call Révocate, who emerged from the house and froze.
“Révocate,” I shouted. “The trucks are here!”
But he just stood there in the doorway, arms dangling by his side, shoulders slumped.
“Révocate, we’re leaving!”
Still no movement. I was getting tense—one of the trucks revved, ready to go. I dropped my bags and stepped forward, but the Belgian soldier grabbed my arm, pulled me back and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but no locals.”
I have no idea why I’d ever thought they would take Révocate. It seems naïve now, but I guess it’s one thing to leave behind possessions, quite another to abandon those we love.
“But he’s Tutsi,” is all I managed.
“We’re leaving now,” the soldier said. “There are more people to pick up.” He slung his machine gun over his shoulder and marched off towards the truck, where Lucas, sitting on Elisabeth’s lap, called, “Papa, please come.”
These days, when I think of Révocate, it’s that last image I have of him that pops up—standing in the doorway of our house, dressed in that suit which is too small, the shirt with the frayed collar, the cracked shoes polished to perfection. And he smiles that goddamn smile as he raises his hand and shouts, “Goodbye monsieur. Take good care of Lucas and madame!”
*
The journey to the airport was long and bumpy, because we avoided the main avenue and its many roadblocks.
We drove past abandoned houses and shops. The city, which usually smelled of rain and dust at this time of year, stank of rotting flesh. Hungry dogs circled the corpses strewn in the streets, swarmed with flies. Amongst the bodies: a teenage boy, machete cuts all over his back, but still alive, writhing.
We continued without stopping.
Farther on, citizens lined the streets with screwdrivers in their hands, wrenches, hammers—anything that could serve as a weapon. Then, a group of Interahamwe who, thinking that we were French, shouted “Vive la France!”—still grateful for 1990, when France, unlike Belgium, had supported the Habyarimana regime.
The soldier next to me ripped the Belgian flag off his sleeve. “Better not take any risks,” he said.
Eventually, the column of trucks pulled into the heavily guarded airport and drove towards the C-130 planes waiting on the runway. The propellers were on, and we braved the strong gusts of wind, loud noise, the smell of jet fuel, to walk up the loading ramp and into the big metal belly of the plane, where we sat on the folding chairs and waited in silence as the sun set on the horizon.
When the plane was nearly full, our Belgian neighbors walked up the ramp. We hadn’t seen them in days, and I was relieved they had also made the flight. Their dogs were on a leash behind them—the ones that kept me up at night with their barking—and the soldier who had refused to take Révocate kneeled down and rubbed their heads. For a brief moment, his eyes locked with mine.
You’re saving the dogs, I thought to myself. You’re saving the fucking dogs!
*
The plane took off at dusk. Below us, Kigali switched on its lights. There was a final glow over the land of a thousand hills, and I wondered whether, if those hills could talk, they too would have chosen to say nothing; whether, after all they had seen and heard, they too would have withdrawn into themselves and surrendered to the silence of matter: the drip-drop of rain on the banana leaves, the shrieking of the weaver birds, the wind rustling through the papyrus leaves.
Elisabeth had her eyes closed and cradled Lucas in her arms. The dim lights inside the plane cast an orange glow on her cheek, her hair golden in the shine. She looked pretty like in that Polaroid which I held in my pocket, my fingers running along its surface, feeling the many creases.
There was a patch of turbulence as we rose above the clouds, and I thought about Révocate. I prayed he was safe and that maybe one day we would come back and we would play checkers again, and he and Lucas would eat guavas under the bougainvillea, spitting out skins, or sail banana bark boats on the orange puddles in our street.
Elisabeth’s hand rested on her leg next to me, and I remembered Révocate’s words, I hope you and madame will make peace again someday. Then, as the plane steered a course towards Nairobi, with all of us on board—the lucky ones who’d been given a second chance, away from the horror—I gathered my courage and placed my trembling hand on top of Elisabeth’s, like that first time when we were young, and I waited with a fearful heart to see how she would react.
The engines hummed, and the airframe buzzed. Beeping noises came from the cockpit, the sound of air rushing around the plane. The neighbor’s dogs were asleep, their heavy heads resting on their paws, and nobody in the plane said a word. Elisabeth opened her eyes, stared into space. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak, and while she didn’t withdraw her hand, it felt weary and limp, her skin cold to the touch.