by Tony Park
Henri was silent. Carmel thought that they were both probably experiencing the same strange sensation. They’d spent much of the past seventeen years trying to forget what they’d seen, but they both knew they would be forever haunted by it as well.
Outside on the tarmac an African man in waterproof gear was guiding the pilot to his parking spot with precise waves of his hand. Carmel wondered, as she always did, if pilots actually paid any attention to these waving guys on the ground. After all, a GPS and a computer had brought them from Kenya, so was it really necessary to have a poorly paid man with a glowing wand to point you to a big painted number on a runway devoid of other commercial aircraft? Was the man with the wand an anachronism from the days when aircraft had propellers and compasses, or was he a failsafe? The world had assumed that Rwanda would autopilot itself into some sort of vaguely acceptable democracy in 1994, after the Arusha Accords, but that had just been wishful thinking. The warring parties had been guided, on and off, to the negotiating table, but the people with the glowing wands had ultimately turned their backs and the country had crashed.
The engines sighed and the seatbelt light flashed and pinged off, but the businesspeople were already on their feet opening overhead lockers and retrieving laptops and snapping out the handles of wheelie bags. The handful of tourists on the flight collected their daypacks and duty-free bags and shuffled forward.
Carmel and Henri let the other passengers bustle past them and waited until the aircraft was nearly empty before finally standing and retrieving their bags. Carmel was frightened by the task ahead. Someone, an individual or a group of people, was killing to protect a secret. She carried a residual dread of this country, but at the same time she felt her heightened state right now might be something else as well. Her heart was beating and she could feel adrenaline coursing from her heart out to her fingertips. Was she excited too? she wondered.
Rain still pelted the window, but the pilot had parked close to the terminal – no more than a hundred metres. ‘I thought we were going to have to make a run for it. That’s why I wasn’t in a hurry to get out, in case the rain eased,’ Henri said, putting a brave face on his reluctance. But at the foot of the covered staircase that had been driven up to the aircraft’s door was a bus, its engine idling. Carmel and Henri ignored the impatient and accusatory glares from the other passengers, who were already on the bus.
‘Crazy,’ Carmel said as the bus lurched off on its short journey to the terminal. ‘We could have walked.’
As she looked out over the glistening runway Carmel recalled a story she had heard from an Australian soldier who had been on the first flight into this very same airport after the genocide, when the UN had finally got its act together and sent in the peacekeepers.
‘The first thing we saw, as we walked down the rear ramp of the C-130,’ the soldier had told her, ‘was a mangy dog, trotting across the tarmac with a human head in its mouth.’
Now a country that had once imploded, with neighbours turning on each other and beating babies to death against brick walls and hamstringing women with panga slashes so they couldn’t run away from rape and torture before their executioners finished them off, thought enough to put on a bus to transport thirty people a hundred metres to the airport terminal because it was raining.
Inside the terminal, Carmel knew the drill, which made it marginally easier to deal with the nonsense of African bureaucracy. To save time, she and Henri had filled in an application for a Rwandan visa online and received a letter of authorisation. Instead of presenting this to the visa payment counter, they first had to join a queue of people who were being triaged by a roaming bureaucrat in a suit. Waving the confirmation letter wasn’t enough. Each passenger had to wait while the man in the suit, as polite as he was deliberate, examined their passports and visa confirmation letters. Only once he was satisfied that each applicant had spelled his or her name correctly did he allow them to move to the visa payment counter. Eventually it was Carmel’s turn. Once at the counter, another man checked her passport, letter, name and numbers and then took her sixty US dollars. After that, she sidestepped two paces left to an attractive woman with braided hair who checked her passport again and stamped the visa.
Thanks to the time all this had taken, Carmel didn’t have to wait to collect her checked baggage. She grabbed her bag off the carousel and loaded it onto a trolley and waited for Henri to catch up and collect his luggage. Carmel led on, past the customs officers, who were there more as a formality than to fleece visitors or returning residents of phantom duties, but she was stopped short by the sight of man with a knife in his hand.
Carmel’s brain told her that it would be very unlikely for a thief or madman armed with a blade to be waiting in ambush inside the airport’s cordon sanitaire, but neither would her mind ever be totally free of images of white bone laid bare beneath red slash wounds.
‘Your plastic bag, please,’ the man said, smiling an apology.
Carmel’s heart dropped back a gear when she saw that instead of a knife blade the man carried a pair of scissors. ‘Excuse me?’ she asked.
‘I am sorry, but non-biodegradable plastic is banned in Rwanda.’ He pointed at the clear plastic wrapping around her wheelie bag.
‘Oh. OK. That’s new.’ Carmel waited while the man bent to her bag, carefully but quickly snipped through the layers of plastic wrap, then balled it and tossed it in a rubbish bin.
‘And plastic bags?’
‘Also banned, madam.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ she said, meaning it. Too much of Africa was awash with plastic ‘flowers’ – countless millions of cheap plastic shopping bags. In isolated areas, such as South Africa’s national parks, the park shops had been able to ban plastic bags in favour of paper, but Carmel had never heard of a first, let alone third, world country serious enough about the environment to ban plastic packaging.
‘The plastic bag ban has been in force for a couple of years now,’ Henri said as the security wrapping was removed from his bag. It’s a great idea. Somehow symbolic, too, I think, of the change in rule here.’
A man dressed in black trousers and a long matching smock trimmed at the cuffs and hem with orange embroidery stood holding a sign with Carmel’s name on it. She walked to him, smiled and introduced herself.
‘I am Lucien,’ he smiled back. ‘Please let me take your bags.’
They followed Lucien out of the terminal. The rain had eased, but they walked briskly to avoid the light drops towards a minibus with the Hôtel des Mille Collines’ stylised three hilltops on the side. They climbed in and said hello to the driver as Lucien loaded the baggage then took the front passenger seat. ‘Welcome to Kigali,’ he said. ‘This is your first visit?’
‘No.’
The silence that followed Carmel’s answer was enough for the two men up front. Perhaps they were relieved that she and Henri weren’t first-timers, with a million questions they wanted to ask about the genocide. The four of them settled into the companionable silence of veterans.
Carmel looked at the backs of the men’s heads and wondered, as she invariably did when she returned to this blighted country, what their stories were. Had they been active participants or unwilling accomplices in the genocide? If they weren’t génocidaires, had they done nothing to stop the killing? Were they Hutu or Tutsi? Despite her repeated visits she’d never been able to correctly guess on a first meeting. Were they Tutsi returnees, or were they one or two of the remarkably lucky Tutsi survivors of the murderous rampage of 1994?
Lucky? No, that wasn’t the right word. She knew from the interviews she’d carried out with survivors that many felt the opposite. Carmel remembered one woman in particular who had been forced to watch as her two children, a boy and a girl aged four and seven, were slaughtered in front of her. The woman had been raped and then hacked at with a panga by the drunken Interahamwe man who had killed her children. She had been left for dead, minus a hand and with a brutal gash on the side of her neck.
The man had been too high or too inebriated, or both, to do the job properly. ‘I wish I had died, with my children,’ the woman had told Carmel. ‘Then my pain would have ended. Instead, I will carry it all my life, until it finally kills me.’
‘What are you thinking?’ Henri asked.
She shrugged. ‘The usual. And you?’
He nodded. ‘The stories, the images I have of that time . . . it’s hard in some ways to connect it to how the place is now, but when I see a familiar building or street, then it’s so easy.’
‘I know what you mean.’
She had come here with other lawyers from the ICTR who hadn’t been in Rwanda for the genocide or its aftermath, and it had been impossible to answer their questions, to convey what she’d seen, to provide the explanations they sought. With Henri she didn’t need to analyse or shock or console or explore. They had both seen the horror. It didn’t make it any easier to live with, but at least they didn’t have to talk about it.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing out the window, ‘the twenty-first century. Perhaps it will be better for my country than the twentieth.’
Carmel looked at the big digital billboard, broadcasting a succession of mini videos promoting Japanese cameras, a local hotel, a Korean car brand. Carmel hadn’t seen this form of advertising anywhere else in the world, and guessed it probably would have been banned in Australia as it would be too distracting to drivers.
Horns blared around her as the Kigali traffic closed in on them. Banning plastic bags to protect the environment was probably an easier goal for the Rwandan government than getting people to drive more safely, she thought. Motos – small motorcycles used to transport fare-paying pillion passengers – swarmed around the minibus like bothersome tsetse flies, their riders in bright yellow vests sounding their horns with annoying regularity.
The setting sun, filtered through wood smoke and the belching exhausts of Kigali’s battered and ill-maintained vehicles, painted the clouds a rich gold and glittered off new, glass-clad office buildings. In between the towers were one- and two-storey walk-ups, their walls covered with more traditional handpainted murals advertising mechanics’ garages and washing powder. The old and the new sat side by side in a fascinating montage.
The driver entered the big Place De L’Unité National roundabout and weaved his way across three ragged, shifting lanes of traffic until he came to the Avenue de la République exit that took them further up a hill, towards the more expensive part of Kigali, home to government residences and the administrative district, the foreign embassies, and the Hôtel des Mille Collines.
A security guard raised a boom gate and they drove through the gates. ‘The Hotel Rwanda,’ Carmel said, using the common name for the Mille Collines. It had been bestowed on the hotel after the movie, Hotel Rwanda, about the manager who had provided sanctuary there to hundreds of Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the genocide.
Carmel could see even before entering that the hotel had undergone some renovations and extensions. The foyer of the hotel looked pristine, except for the muddy footprints on the polished white floor tiles, apparently left by the group of six bedraggled-looking tourists who were checking in ahead of Carmel and Henri. Carmel picked up the familiar Australian accents as one of the women asked about getting her boots washed.
While she was waiting, Carmel took out her iPhone and checked her emails. There was nothing from the ICTR in Arusha. She was annoyed, as she’d marked her message to her boss, an English barrister and full-time UN employee named Kellie White, as high priority. The subject line had read, Witness protection – life threatening, so it was unlikely Kellie could have ignored it. In the email Carmel had outlined the recent attempts on the lives of Liesl and Richard, and her own close brush in Livingstone. Carmel had also suggested the ICTR communicate formally with the Thai police and urge them to re-examine the death of Mike Ioannou in the light of the three failed attacks. It was clear someone was trying to kill everyone with any information about the photo Liesl had taken.
‘What is it?’ Henri asked, perhaps seeing the annoyance in her face.
‘Nothing, and that’s the problem.’
‘Are you Australian?’
Carmel looked up from her phone to see the man who had addressed her, one of the group of tourists, a man with short silver hair. ‘Yes.’
‘Here to see the mountain gorillas? We’ve just been up gorilla tracking. It was awesome, but pretty muddy.’ He laughed.
A cleaner was busy mopping up around the party, not even waiting for the group to finish checking in. Carmel remembered human cadavers lying where they had fallen in Ruhengeri, where these tourists had just come from; bodies left like litter; a food source for feral dogs and birds of prey. ‘No.’
‘Oh,’ said the man who, rebuked, went back to his companions.
‘You’ve never seen the mountain gorillas?’ Henri asked her.
‘I have, but we’re not here to sightsee, Henri.’
‘We should go anyway,’ Henri said. ‘They are amazing creatures.’
Carmel lowered her voice. ‘I hardly think we have the time, given what’s happened lately.’
Henri shrugged. ‘I still have to go to Ruhengeri, near the Volcanoes National Park. That’s where the rescued chimpanzee is. He was smuggled across the border from Congo and is being kept there. Maybe you should book a trekking permit and make the most of our visit?’
Carmel was amazed that Henri could be talking of viewing primates when she was about to embark on an investigation that could lead them both into more danger. She wondered whether he fully appreciated the seriousness of the situation. Perhaps it was time to tell him everything she knew – everything that had happened so far, to Mike, Liesl and Richard.
The Australians finally got their room keys and moved off, leaving a fresh trail of mud on the tiles. The cleaner, who had been hovering nearby, followed their spoor to the lift. Carmel wondered what kind of mess the hotel must have been when there were a thousand or more people crammed in here hiding from the Interahamwe.
‘Shall we meet at the bar for a drink in, say, half an hour?’ Henri asked once they had checked in.
Carmel checked her watch. She had more work to do. There were more emails to be sent, including one to the investigators in Arusha who also hadn’t replied to her request for information about the identities of the men in Liesl’s photo. She half wondered if there might be some communications problem at the ICTR – if the email server was down. It seemed as though all contact between her and her employers had been suspended. She was tired, but she needed to eat, and it would be more pleasant – even more reassuring – to be with Henri than sitting alone in her suite eating room service food. Besides, she could always keep an eye out for emails on her phone at the bar. ‘All right.’
Getting out on the second floor, Carmel was greeted by a fresco of a lion on the wall. The decoration was new, and seemed slightly out of place to her. Try as she might, she couldn’t get her head around the idea of people visiting Rwanda as tourists; of the country as a big-game safari destination. She knew about the role of research and tourism in stopping the decline in numbers of the endangered mountain gorillas, but to her a word-association game beginning with Rwanda always ended with death.
Carmel located her room and tipped the porter who had carried her bags into the room. When he left she opened the sliding glass doors and stepped out onto the narrow balcony. The sky was a darkening red now, the valley in front of her dotted with lights. Off to her left a squadron of kites wheeled and dived over a construction site. The sight of the birds sent a chill down her spine. They, and the crows, had been everywhere in 1995, feeding off the rotting flesh of dead bodies. She wondered what was drawing these birds, and hoped to God the construction hadn’t unearthed more bodies. It was possible, she knew, as mass graves were still being uncovered all over the country.
She leaned her elbows on the balcony railing and wondered if she had done the right thing, coming straight back to Rwa
nda. The sensible thing would probably have been to go to Arusha and set the creaky, squeaky wheels of the UN in motion. She would have been safer there, but what of the others involved in this thing? Whoever was trying to kill the people who had seen that photo had the power to reach across continents. Carmel knew the answer to who was behind this thing was here in Rwanda.
It was hard, being here again. She knew that each time she visited part of her had hoped she would never again have to set foot in this country and that, paradoxically, at the same time she had always known it was her destiny to return. Rwanda had cost her the love of her life, and probably a chunk of her sanity. Her descent into alcohol abuse and losing her job . . . it all stemmed from her desire to forget what she’d seen and who she had become. It had defined the second half of her life. Africa was in her blood now, not in the form of a love potion, but as an addictive, poisonous drug that was consuming her. Perhaps this time, once this was done, she would be able to go through withdrawal and free herself from Africa’s hold.
As she looked out over the city she felt the fear and sadness rise inside her. She took deep breaths to try to control it, but her grief began to surface again. On its crest were the images she had tried hardest to forget – the body of the baby exhumed from the latrine pit in Butare; the corpses in the church, locked inside by their priest who then stood aside as the Interahamwe tossed in hand grenades; the look on Richard’s face when he realised he’d been caught out. This place held nothing but bad memories for her, yet time and again she dashed herself against it.
The sobs came from deep within her and they shook her body as the tears rolled down her cheeks. She clung to the balcony railing to stop herself from falling.
*
Henri sat at a stool at the hotel bar, which was a rectangular island under a large thatched shelter by the pool. Even though it was dark, a couple of young Rwandan boys, their fat bellies attesting to their parents’ wealth, were locked in a ceaseless pattern of bombing into the water, climbing out, running up the grass and jumping in over and over.
