One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  I needed to be with my children again. Suddenly I needed to feel them against me, to feel their little bodies in my arms. I needed to see my husband’s face and remember the gentleness in his eyes. This is what had made me marry him. I had never told him this before. I never told him about what I had seen in his eyes that had made me say yes when he asked me to marry him. In the end, we are all animals trying to survive, and the decisions that we make along the way are nothing but instincts pushing us forward. Pierre and Eloise’s voices vanished as I made my way through the quiet house. Large houses afford for silence, allowing voices to be muffled by space.

  Mélanie, my sweet daughter, was tugging at my sleeve. She was a barometer for my emotions.

  “Papa? Papa?” She was tugging hard now.

  “Yes, we’re going to see papa right now.” I found Fidèle and the boys sitting on the floor at the end of the long hallway that connected the bedrooms. Eloise and Pierre lived alone in a large three-bedroom house. They did not have any children. I had always had a hard time understanding whites who didn’t have any children. Healthy and wealthy adults who chose not to have any children. Even now, living in the west, and with the perspective of time, it seems scandalous, like an insult to God.

  As soon as she spotted her father, Mélanie began to squirm in my arms like a fish.

  “Papa! Papa!” she gleefully screamed as she ran into her father’s arms. Fidèle gathered Mélanie in his arms searching my eyes for forgiveness. I saw the guilt. This is what I saw in that moment but we didn’t speak of it. Not directly. He simply said: “I had to move quickly with the boys. I was afraid Mélanie would cry.”

  “Pierre does not want us to stay here. He says that it isn’t safe for anyone.”

  “And where does he want us to go?” Fidèle asked rhetorically.

  “The UN is coming to get Eloise and Pierre soon, do you think they will take us with them?” I wanted Fidèle to tell me that everything would be OK. I wanted him to say that we would magically be whisked away from this maddening world by a UN convoy. Fidèle squeezed Mélanie tighter, as if she were a magic genie who held all of the answers.

  “Hard to say. Maybe because I work for the party. Maybe, yes. Yes, they will take us, too.” And we held on to this thought, letting it sit there holding us all.

  “Where are the girls?” I asked suddenly realizing they were not with us.

  “They’re in the other room playing.”

  We heard footsteps. Even the way Eloise moved about had seemed to change. Her gate was lighter, quieter, as if she had already left.

  “Pierre and I decided that you can stay here. We’ll all wait for the UN to come. In the meantime, it’s best if you stay here, away from windows. If someone comes to the house, you will leave at once. You can make your way through here and into the kitchen, or if they come the back way, you can leave through the front or from any window.”

  Night came and my body was tired, but my mind was racing. We put the children all together in one room, the boys and Mélanie on a double bed and Sylvie and Angélique shared a small bed. Fidèle and I slept on the floor in the hallway so we could be ready for anything. We heard gunshots and dogs barking. Max was barking inside the house and then he became quiet again. Pierre and Eloise stayed away from us like we were a terrible disease that could catch. Now, when I look back at that night, I feel for Eloise and Pierre. I see their fear clearly and I cannot hate them for doing nothing less than trying to stay alive.

  In the morning, I was struck by the silence around us except for the sound of gunshots nearby. All birds were gone, their songs replaced by the sound of popping bullets. The firing was coming from right outside the house. Then, out of nowhere, we heard screaming. A woman’s pain, someone ran. I moved into the bedroom with the children and covered the mouths of the little ones. I motioned to Sylvie to be quiet but she looked terrified. Michel understood this and he rushed over to her and covered her mouth before she was able to start crying. I heard their voices now. For the first time, I heard the voices of the killers outside. Men voices. One man was shouting:

  “This way, she is not dead. Catch the cockroach now!” The men were angry now. They did not kill everything they wanted to kill. I looked at the bedroom window where the curtain was drawn. They were outside and the only thing protecting us from being seen was the cloth of the curtain. Fidèle was not with us. He must have stayed in the hallway. I wanted to take the children there, but I was afraid to move. I was afraid one of the children would cry out and the Interahamwe would be here, inside the house, looking to kill us also.

  I didn’t know where Eloise and Pierre were or what they were doing, but we were all alone in different parts of the house listening to the carnage outside our windows. I felt entranced by the sound of death. I remember thinking, if it is happening to them, it’s not happening to us. I felt protected by the misery of others. This was the first moment when the devil first came into my head. That was the moment when he began telling me lies.

  I slid under the bed, pulling Mélanie and Sylvie with me. I motioned to Christian and Michel to do the same and take Angélique with them. I knew these beds could not hide us. I felt the roundness of my back sticking out beyond the edge. I was like a child pulling the covers over my head at night so the monster would not get me. We stayed like this, motionless. I had wrapped my arms around my children. First around Mélanie whose small body was shivering against my own and then in front of her, Sylvie’s my oldest girl. My courageous girl who remained calm and quiet.

  Outside the screams had stopped, but the soldiers were still walking by the house.

  I heard one of the killers say: “The others are dead, but the woman still runs. The woman and her child.” A strange shudder passed through me, like an electrical current moving in my body. This woman, her child. Me and my children. We were the same. And then what I feared most happened.

  “Maybe they have hidden in this house. I’ll go see.” I heard them pounding on the door and Max began barking incessantly. I held my breath. I did not need to breathe. I needed to live. I strained to listen but could only hear the short little breaths of my daughters, like tiny animals trying to make their way out of a trap. After the silence, I heard the soldiers again. Footsteps beyond this wall. Beyond this place where I was hiding with my children. I heard Eloise’s voice now, intermingled with his. Her words would be my guardian or my death. Our lives rested in her hands. If I had known months ago that my life would hang in Eloise’s hands, I might have been nicer to her. I might have smiled at her more often, at work. Had we managed to become friends? I waited. They were right outside the door now.

  “I am telling you that no one but my husband and I have been here. But feel free to look around.” Her voice was tense, wound up like a rubber band about to snap. I knew this, because I knew her quietude. I knew of her peaceful ways. This man, this killer who cut through flesh with his machete could not discern the variations in a woman’s voice. He was numb to the subtleties of humanity. Eloise and the soldier stopped in front of the room. I heard the door open and squeak a little. It didn’t open all the way. I knew this from the way the duration of the squeak and the silence that followed.

  “I believe you, Madame. I believe you.” He passed the door. His voice faded with the distance of his footsteps.

  “If you see anyone that looks like a Tutsi, keep them away from you. Keep them away.” I strained to listen again. And then I heard Eloise. Her voice was firm and determined.

  “I will. Don’t worry, I will.”

  When the silence returned to the house again, I felt my body shudder. I began to shake and then I heard myself crying softly in a whimper. My daughters began to cry too only their cries were loud and unrestrained and the fear came back again. I wanted to keep myself strong. If we were to survive, I would have to be strong. How easy it was to lie to myself when our lives hung in the balance between the world of the living and that of the dead. I invented lies to keep us moving forward. On that
day, curled up in a ball with my children against me, I wrongly believed that strength could save us. I wrongly believed that it could save us all.

  Christian was bravely trying to entertain Angélique, who had slipped far away into a distant place inside of her. He was playing with her braids, singing her a little song that I had been singing to each of them since they were born:

  “Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai.”

  Pierre stormed into the bedroom where I had gathered the children around me. Fidèle came right behind him.

  “You have to leave. You all have to leave. They were in our house looking for you. I cannot risk our lives for yours. I can’t.” When he said this, he held his head in both his hands like he was trying to erase these thoughts from his mind. Fidèle looked at me. The children were looking at me. Their eyes were searching for an answer, but there was no answer to be found. Eloise pushed Pierre out of the way and faced him. I had never seen her like this. There was fury in her eyes. Fury and shame all mixed into one.

  “They are not going anywhere. No one is going anywhere. We are all waiting for the UN to come and to take us all out of this hellhole. You hear me?” I watched Eloise as she discovered her husband for the first time. That day, in the face of death, Eloise realized she had married a stranger. Pierre was silent. He was fighting with his own demons. I watched him pacing now in a tight circle. The children were looking at us, trying to understand. Mélanie began to cry. Her tears were strange and unfamiliar like she’d found a way to tap into this collective frenzy. This was something we were all discovering about ourselves. This was a small moment of discovery.

  “Do you realize that they could come back again and kill us all for harboring them? Kill us all, in this house! Do you realize this?”

  “And do you realize that if we kick them out now, they will all die out there. They’ll all get murdered one by one. Do you realize that! You scare me Pierre. Your callousness scares me more than what is happening out there!” And with this Eloise stormed out of the room and Pierre was left alone with us. We were silent. There were no words. I would like to be able to say today that I would have behaved differently, had I been Pierre. But I am not sure. How can we say with certainty what we are capable of doing in order to save our skin? His eyes fell on me. He did not look at the children. He did not look at Mélanie, who was still crying, or Christian, who had stopped playing with Angélique’s hair. He did not look at Sylvie, who was huddled against me like a child younger than her age. He did not look at Michel, who was holding his father’s hand. He looked straight at me and in his eyes I saw humility—the humility of one man’s will to survive.

  “You can stay.” He almost whispered before closing the door behind him.

  When Pierre left the room, something returned to each of us, a sense of unity and the memory of the time before that moment. The time when we were a family with lives, and dreams and hopes. I heard Fidèle breathe a sigh of relief.

  We should have sung Mélanie her birthday song. We should have stopped right there, in that moment of waiting and sung our baby girl her second birthday song. But we didn’t. We were prisoners of our own terror.

  The children were hungry. I went to find Eloise to see about some food. I became a beacon, a messenger traveling to the other side of the house where Eloise and Pierre were containing their own imprisonment. I found them both in the living room, severed from each other, each isolated in their own hell. Pierre was lying expressionless on the couch while tossing a small ball up in the air over and over again. Eloise was sitting in an armchair, reaching over to pet Max, who was lying down at her feet. I stood in the doorway waiting to be noticed. Max noticed me first and let out a single low rumble bark that sounded more like a cough. It was simply his way to tell his people that I was standing there.

  “The children are hungry. Is there any way I can go into the kitchen and try to find something to give them?”

  “I’ll come with you.” Eloise said getting up. Max followed her. We made our way into kitchen leaving Pierre to his thoughts and his isolation.

  “It’s nothing against you. He’s just afraid, that’s all.” She didn’t look at me when she said this. We arrived into the large kitchen with the latest European-style gadgets. A large silver stove, a brand new refrigerator, beautiful shiny pots and pans hanging from large silver hooks.

  “The domestic hasn’t returned since it all started, so the place is a mess.” I was weighing everything around me, trying to discover the key to this woman’s character, a woman who held our lives in her hands. I could see how she had spoken of the “domestic”: her name was Marie. Even I knew this and yet Eloise had detached herself already, preparing herself for the departure. Did she really think we would all come with them? Did I?

  I watched as Eloise moved around awkwardly in her kitchen. She placed a pan on the stove and opened the fridge uncertain of her next move.

  “I don’t know where anything is in this kitchen. I never cook, so…do you want eggs? I can make eggs. We have bread also and cheese. Terrible cheese, but it is cheese.”

  She laughed. It was strange hearing laughter again. I watched her as she cracked the eggs one by one in a large porcelain bowl. I watched her hands sure and certain the way I’d watched them with patients. I felt safer in the presence of this woman who had saved so many lives. Malaria, typhoid, pneumonia, dysentery. She had combated them all and won most of these battles. Maybe she would win this one.

  The next day at dawn, we heard footsteps again. Max began to bark madly and I roused the children quickly and slid under the bed with them once again. It had become a habit. The idea of hiding more than actual escape. Eloise came into the bedroom.

  “Francine, Fidèle, hurry, it is the UN. We must all leave now.” We came out from our hiding places and ran down the hall. Pierre was carrying bags already. A UN soldier took Max by the leash and lead him into a white Jeep right outside the door. Another UN soldier turned to us. He turned to me and grabbed me by the arm as I walked by him getting ready to climb into the jeep.

  “We cannot take you with us,” he said in a neutral tone. My heart skipped. Pierre looked at me furtively and kept moving. He climbed into the jeep and held out his hand to Eloise, who stopped dead in her tracks.

  “What do you mean you cannot take them? But she worked at the hospital with me. They’re our friends, our colleagues. Fidèle here worked for the government.”

  The UN soldier pulled Eloise up into the convoy.

  “We have strict orders; we are not allowed to take anyone but foreign nationals. Do you have a European passport?” The man asked me knowing the answer to his question. And in my silence, he added: “Then there is nothing I can do. Nothing.”

  Eloise’s face was static with shock. Her mouth was gaping. She wanted to say something, but everything was moving so quickly. The last UN soldier climbed into the convoy. Pierre was looking down at his feet. The white truck began to drive away. We all stood; Fidèle and I, each with a child in hand and Michel in front of us, watching the convoy of white faces driving away. In the distance, I heard Max barking. I watched the dust rising from the road until silence fell around us.

  Chapter 7 – Francine

  After Eloise and Pierre left, Fidèle and I took the children into the kitchen and ate a large meal. We ate not because we were hungry but because we needed our strength for the journey ahead. I try to remember where Mélanie sat. Was she sitting in my lap? I do not remember touching her then. I see Fidèle eating quickly. I remember Michel saying he wasn’t hungry and Angélique strangely withdrawn still, eating in silence next to Sylvie. I don’t remember Christian. I don’t remember his voice, if he ate. What he might have said. Memory is a trickster, a friend of the devil. Always trying to trick the heart into feeling something that doesn’t exist.

  We left Eloise and Pierre’s house and headed to the Sainte Famille church across town where we hoped we would be safe. Outside the air smelled of spring. The bougainvil
lea were in bloom, making my head swim with memories of all the springs we had spent together, Fidèle and I. But now, we were standing outside in the deserted streets of Kigali, our lives dangling. Fidèle and I decided to split up. We had spent a lot of time deliberating this decision before we left the house and we had finally settled on dividing our chances of survival in two rather than being caught together and killed. He took Mélanie and Michel with him and I took Angélique, Sylvie and Christian. Fidèle insisted we take our bags with us. I told him to leave them behind. What good would our belongings do us if we could not run to spare our lives? But he held on to them like an amulet that would save us somehow. There are two things I remember in great detail from that morning. The first one is Angélique’s silence, the way she skidded off into a hole somewhere inside herself. It had started with the killings right outside the house when we were hiding under the bed. With each moment that passed, I realize now that this is the moment when she started to fall behind. It is strange to think that life’s greatest moments can be narrowed down to a handful of seconds. It gives me chills now to think that each of our lives hangs by a single thread that can snap at any moment.

  I also remember the color of Mélanie’s dress: gold, like the sun, like the heart of the Pyrethrum daisies that grow everywhere after the rainy season. The night before everything changed, I had laid out her birthday dress next to the bed; a beautiful gold dress with a bright red ribbon that wraps around the waist. Sylvain, Fidèle’s oldest brother, and his wife, Hélène, had bought the dress in Brussels, where they had traveled a few months earlier. As we left the house, it was these small pieces of memory that remained. When I look back on those days, I am left with shards of memory, pieces of buried images like torn-up pieces of a larger image.

  I held the girls one on each hand and walked behind Fidèle who was carrying Mélanie in one hand and the bags in the other. My heart pounded in the back of my throat, in the back of my head, like my body had suddenly been turned upside down. Michel walked between us all like a tiny chick protected by his parents. Fidèle and I always wanted to be a sanctuary for our children, we wanted to protect them from the rumble of the world.