One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  Angélique walked diligently next to me while Sylvie whimpered and pulled my hand. I shook her arm like a strange dangling fruit ready to part from the tree.

  “Shush!” I said to her in a loud whisper.

  “But shoe hurts me, Maman!” Sylvie continued to whine. The next moment, is a moment that I will regret forever. I shook her violently and turned to her abruptly, forcing Angélique to turn as well. I stared Sylvie, my six-year-old daughter in the eye and said: “Do you want to die? Is that what you want?”

  My child looked at me with terror in her eyes. For the first time in my life, I had caused more than fear in one of my own children than the killers running after us outside. I remember Sylvie staring at me wildly. How afraid she looked. My own child was afraid of me. She shook her small head with all of the determination her small body could muster and she whispered back to me:

  “No, Maman, I don’t want to die. I don’t.”

  “Good.” I managed to answer and picked up the pace to catch up to the fainting color of Mélanie’s dress ahead of us. In the few short seconds I was menacing my daughter with death, Fidèle and the kids had managed to slip away from us. I wondered how long Fidèle would be able to last without dropping to the ground. I remember wondering how far we would get before we got caught.

  That’s when I saw them. The kitten came out of nowhere. Appeared like ghosts in the quiet streets with the remnants of the violence from the night before. The streets were lined with flowers, bougainvillea that likes to grow in the shade of the tall walls that border expensive houses. I remember the red dust of the road. The copper-colored dust from the mountains and later still, the deep stains of dark blood drying in the sun after each killing.

  Two men holding machetes in their hands pulled out of an opened gate; their bodies slinking like predators. They stood a hundred feet away from me and halfway between me and Fidèle and the children. I could see that Fidèle had not seen them, his back was turned as he walked away briskly with Michel by his side. Had the men seen my family? I did not know. I flung my body to the ground and pushed the girls down with me. Christian was walking ahead unknowing of what had happened. I called to him, in a loud whisper, in a forced hushed voice but he kept on walking. My boy kept on walking towards death. I wanted to warn them, I wanted to call out to my son, to my husband and the children but if I made a sound, they would hear me. They saw Fidèle first. I saw them from a distance, the way their bodies quickly snapped in a new direction, brandishing their machetes already soiled with blood, in the air. I inched away from the road towards the side of a wall and hid behind a small bush. I watched in silence as the killers approached my husband. Suddenly Fidèle turned before they got to him and he began to run. He dropped the large bag to the ground and held Mélanie so tightly she winced. Seeing his father running, Christian began to panic. He looked back to find me gone. I inched up from the bush and waived to him and he came running back to me. In the distance, I watched the gold of Mélanie’s dress vanish as Fidèle ran off into a side street.

  I heard screams in the distance. I convinced myself that I had never heard these voices before. I convinced myself that this was not the voice of my child. That these were not the cries of my husband.

  We hid all day at the heart of a bamboo bush in the garden of an abandoned house where I heard the yelps of a wounded dog and waited for night to come. The animal’s cries were incessant like an abandoned child’s, or the cries of an animal caught in a trap. I remember thinking as I waited for night to fall with my children by my side that we humans are nothing more than animals waiting to die. I huddled with the children around me, pushing their small bodies in the thickest bend of the bush as to better hide them. If I was discovered, maybe they could live. Maybe they would be spared. I heard gunshots and voices in the distance. I asked myself if I should keep moving through the city, but the voices had begun speaking to me. Stay, they whispered. I know now that the moment I saw the color of Mélanie’s dress vanish and heard their screams in the distance was the moment when the voices began speaking to me.

  At dusk, the wounded dog grew quiet and I stopped wishing someone would come and shoot him. Sit in the dark with your children and wait for death, the voices said to me. I would have listened but the children began tugging at me.

  “Maman, Maman, I am hungry.” Sylvie was pulling at my dress with her little hand. Angélique roused herself from a strange sleep that resembled paralysis. She gasped and looked around and then remembered where she was and slid back down on the ground like a forgotten doll.

  “I am hungry Maman,” repeated Sylvie.

  “Me too!” said Christian.

  I heard voices rumbling in the distance like a strange quiet storm brewing from the West.

  “Hush!” I whispered to the children. “We must be quiet now.” I could feel the killers magnetically approaching, like a curse I was unable to shake. The children became restless. I covered Sylvie and Christian’s mouths. I knew that Angélique would be quiet. I heard a man’s voice:

  “Let me hit him with a masu.” And then another man replied, “Leave him, he is already dead. There are many others to kill.” I heard the muffled sound of footsteps on the moist April earth, and then they were gone again. I pulled the children out from behind the bush and motioned to them to be silent. We made our way around the garden where we had spent our entire day hiding. In the dark, I stumbled on something that felt like a bag of dirt and then I heard a moaning voice. I crouched to see what it was and I saw the body of a man, covered in blood. I searched for something I would recognize in his face, but I was relieved that I had never seen him before. The man moaned as he writhed in pain. Angélique began to scream; a strident blood-curdling scream and her voice scared me more than the presence of the body we had just stumbled upon. I lunged and grabbed her covering her screaming mouth. With both hands, I picked her up and began to run in search of another hiding place. Christian and Sylvie followed me.

  I saw that I had reached the rond-point of the Place de la Constitution, the roundabout at the heart of Kigali. We were near Sainte Famille,the church where I spent my entire childhood praying every Sunday with my grandmother, Maman Josée, and her sister, Marie—who also happened to be a cross between a nun and a voodoo priestess, who spoke to God and the spirits. When I was nine years old, one day, on our way to church, I asked her about the difference between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and she said to me:

  “Child, there is no difference between God and the spirit world. There is no difference between the dead and the living. There is just this holding us apart.” And when she said this she held onto my arm and shook it like an inanimate object she had just encountered.

  I guess I’ve been speaking to God for as long as I can remember and for a long time, I thought he spoke to me too. Only now I know better.

  That night, I prayed earnestly. I prayed like I never had before.

  Dear God, I whispered. What shall I do? And the answer was pure and simple: go to the house of the Lord and seek refuge. This is what I did.

  At the bend where Avenue de la Révolution meets the round about of Place de la Constitution, I met a roadblock. Two or three cars were parked, and the Interahamwe militia were stopping people one at a time. I held my breath. If I wanted to find my way to redemption and protection in the church, I would have to go through the valley of death. There was no way to avoid contact with the men now. Too late to turn back, I would have to speak with them. When I think of this moment, I think of Boy’s face, the same face as the man who stopped me at that night. I remember his shirt, yellow, not the gold of Mélanie’s dress or the color of the sun, but the hue of pale urine. I remember the void in his eyes and the smell of bad whisky on his breath.

  I walked up to the group of men questioning people and I saw bottles of whisky by their side. They were laughing, and nearby I saw the body of a woman with her limbs severed all the way to the white of the bone. I looked away. The man pushed me aside<
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  “Sit over there!” He barked. All three children were holding onto me now. The man was holding a bottle of whisky. I could see the dirt in his fingernails from where I was standing.

  That’s when I saw Fidèle sitting there, his body slumped against the wall of the small shack they were using as a checkpoint. He looked like a rag doll. His head was covered in blood like he’d been bludgeoned but his eyes were staring off into space while his hand held his other arm in the semblance of comfort. He didn’t see me at first. He sat there still like he was trying to hold onto something that had already vanished. Next to him was our boy Michel, who was facing the wall, looking away from us. Our boy was alive.

  The man with the yellow shirt pulled at my dress, tearing it at the shoulder. Fidèle looked up and saw me. He twitched like he’d seen a ghost. And then, propping himself against the wall, he stood up. His body barely held him up, but his spirit had been conjured. I wanted to shout and go to him, but I was afraid of the man with the yellow shirt who had shoved the children away from me like flies. Sylvie, Christian, and Angélique were huddled a couple of feet away, watching me for direction. And that’s when they saw their father and brother.

  “Papa! Papa!” Christian yelled. Sylvie ran to Fidèle and wrapped her little arms around his legs. The man looked up and away from my torn dress now that he realized we knew Fidèle. He pulled out his revolver. Fidèle was trying to move towards me, as he held on to his children wrapped around him like a tree. He looked at me like maybe he was trying to say something and the man with the yellow shirt shot him in the chest at close range like a dog. He shot him like the dogs they had begun shooting in the city because they were eating all the corpses. I did nothing. I did not move. Michel ran over to me and grabbed a hold of my hand.

  Fidèle looked at me. His eyes looked in my direction, but he was already gone, his body had not fallen yet, but he was already with the spirits. The expression in his eyes told me that Mélanie was gone too. His blood flowed out of him like a river. The children fell down with him. They fell down with their father and they began to scream and cry. I wanted them to be quiet. I wanted to yell: “Quiet!” and silence them so they would be spared.

  The man stepped over my husband and began pulling at me again.

  I pushed Michel away towards his siblings and his dead father as the man continued pulling at my dress. I wanted to help him remove it. I wanted to help him focus on me so he would forget about my children. So he would forget about my crying children in the corner of the room with their dead father. My body became a distant shell inside of which I tried to hide. The way a child buries his head under the blankets in the dark night.

  I am mad now. I am mad. I am a mad woman.

  I thought of my children in the corner of the room and I thought about God. This was the first time I felt his presence since this whole thing had started and suddenly the madness left me, just like that. Like a ghost pushed out of a room.

  “Shhh!” the voice inside me said. “Shhh! Be gone! Go, mad woman, go devilish woman. Be gone!” And then she was. And I was left standing there at the checkpoint with the man with the yellow shirt pushing me against the wall and my children huddled over the body of my dead husband.

  More people came by at the checkpoint. Men. Tutsi men like my husband, like me. They tried not to look at Fidèle and our children crying over him. They tried not to look but I know they saw him. I witnessed shame as they averted their eyes away from the body of my dead husband, away from me. They knew what would happen to me now. I knew also. Another man took care of the two Tutsi men. He let them go. Why I do not know. God seemed to have a funny way of taking care of business. Some people lived, some people died and there was no reason for it. The killers walked away. The man with the yellow shirt pulled me towards him and he laughed. I was talking to God now and praying that he would not do this in front of my children. I was praying that my children would stay alive.

  I smelled the liquor on the man’s breath. The liquor and this sour smell of rotten meat. His teeth were rotting. He held me by the arm and motioned me to walk. He walked behind me shoving me with the barrel of the gun that had just killed my husband. The man pulled me towards a little house that used to be an épicerie, a corner store. We walked inside and it was dark. I saw the shelves where there used to be food, it was gone. One shelf was knocked down on its side. The walls were dirty in some places. Blood trailing down, like someone had tried to paint with it and then had changed their mind.

  The mad woman came back to me now. Only now she was not leaving. She walked right inside of my brain like she had been living there all her life and she laughed like a witch. In that instant, she became a part of me. And there was no asking her to leave.

  That’s when I saw the opened case of whisky with just three bottles left inside. The cardboard was dirty, with smeared blue letters on the side that read: Produit d’Ecosse—Product of Scotland. They must have stolen it from the embassy or one of the Belgian houses. The Belgians, the French, the Americans—all of the white people were gone. The UN carried them, one by one, away to safety in white trucks, jeeps with big black crosses painted on them.

  Yellow Shirt pulled me down while he was still standing and opened his pants. I saw the blood on his hands and smelled the acrid smell of his sex and the stains of death on him. I thought of the devil. The mad woman and I we were quiet now. When I tasted the salt of his penis on my tongue, we grew quiet, she and I, and I prayed. I prayed.

  Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom come… as it is in heaven. I heard a gunshot outside and then a woman’s scream. I wondered if it was me screaming. The man came. He pushed me off him, zipped up his pants and was gone. I stayed in the dark for a long time. I thought about my children, but I could not move. I could have run. I should have run. But I didn’t. The mad woman inside me said, stay and wait. Like a rat in a tunnel. And I did. I heard more screaming outside. I heard the sound of chopping, like wood being cut and a strange blunt sound and then laughter. The men laughed; the mirth of drunkenness. I heard Yellow Shirt return. He slammed the door open. It smashed against the wall and he was still holding a bloody machete in his hand. I saw the madness in his eyes. His yellow shirt was now speckled with fresh blood and his eyes were rabid like a dog gone mad. I had once seen a rabid dog in the village once, how he would slink around the village, looking down and sideways, looking for trouble. You could never shoo that dog away; the disease had gotten hold of him and nothing scared him anymore. We had to find and shoot him. This man, he reminded me of the animal.

  Yellow Shirt pushed me down again, only I fell on my back, and heard a snap followed by a crack. I felt a dull pain in my hand. I had broken my little finger. The pain vanished as if I wasn’t even there anymore. He was on top of me, pushing his way into me. His foul breath blowing on me. Pushing me into the cement. I looked away; I turned my head away. Tried not to look into his eyes. Tried not to see the rage, the emptiness, the devil. The mad woman was laughing again like a witch. This is not my body. This is not my body. This is not my body. When he was done. He moved away and went outside to kill again.

  I ran outside to find the children. All around me the darkness fell oppressively like a blanket in the middle of the summer. I needed light. I needed to see my way, to find my children, to recognize the killers, to bury my husband. I wanted to bury my husband. But there would be no time for this.

  Men were laughing in the shadows, the kind of laughter that always accompanies drunkenness, the laughter of alcohol gone bad in the heart. I could still smell Yellow Shirt on me, his whisky smell, his sour rotting smell. His blood and semen smell. The blood on his hands, his semen oozing out of me like piss in a latrine.

  In the light of the car’s headlights, I could clearly see the faces of people making their way past the checkpoint into the night. Scared faces, hungry, tired faces, frozen faces, stone faces. What did I resemble? I inched my way back to the barrack where I had left my children. I h
ad left my children with killers. The mad woman pushed her way in the forefront of my mind again and began to wail—the mourning wail, the wail of widows. I couldn’t hear the men laughing outside anymore.

  I found each of my babies hunched in a circle, untouched. Anqélique sat her back against the wall, her legs stretched in front of her like a brand new doll from the store. But her face was not the face of a doll’s. Her eyes were strange, mad-like, not the eyes of a four-year-old girl, but those of an elder. Christian, Michel, and Sylvie were holding each other, their tiny shoulders sheltering each other from the passing of men, from the darkness of the devil, all around us. I quickly knelt by their side, pulling Angélique from her frozen position. Fidèle’s body was still a couple of feet away, lying in his own blood, his body stiff and strange. His right leg twisted bizarrely at the knee. He was not sleeping. This was not my sleeping husband.

  The mad woman spoke inside of me, this is your dead husband. Watch him now because you will never see him again. I felt as though someone had gotten a hold of my heart and was holding it in their fist, squeezing it as tight as they could. For a moment, the pain startled me because I had forgotten I could feel.

  Sylvie’s body was covered in blood, but she was moving. I wanted to scream, but I stayed silent. The men should not see us. Christian grabbed hold of my hand patting his sister’s body in search of the wounds inflicted and said, quietly:

  “Maman, this is not her blood. This is Papa’s blood. This is Papa’s blood.” I looked at him and for the first time I saw Fidèle in him. I saw my Fidèle’s eyes, the curve of his cheeks, the line of his hair, the firmness of his ways. When Christian was born, everyone said that he looked just like me. Maman said to me when she was holding him: