One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  “Come!” Jean de Dieu said, pulling me again. This time he was waiting for me to respond. Maybe he knew that I would go hysterical if he insisted, and a scene in the presence of the militia, was a death sentence even for a man like Jean de Dieu.

  “You’ll be safer on the other side,” he said.

  “What about them?” I pleaded looking at the children again. Angélique was as still as a spring breeze right before the rains. I caught Devota’s eyes on me, her incriminating gaze. She was the inquisition, and in that moment of hesitation, I knew that I had just been judged by God’s greatest witness. Her eyes were saying everything my conscience felt inside: Will you leave us to die? Will you leave us to save your own skin?

  I turned to see that Jean de Dieu had gone. Why did he want to save me when there was nothing between us to save? Why had our paths crossed like this? Thierry, the older of Rose’s two children began to cry. He did not know that crying could cost him his life. Angélique, Devota, Sophie, Michel and Sylvie all turned to him as if they all understood his tears had no place in this house of madness. Mad woman was in my head again, laughing at the pity of our situation. For the first time, I ignored her and tended to Thierry’s tears.

  “Don’t cry sweetheart. Don’t cry. We will all be OK.”

  “I want my mommy,” he whimpered in between tears. And before I had a chance to comfort him, the mad woman said loudly in my head, so does the priest! She let out a wild laugh that resonated in my head, louder than the voice of the killers.

  “Quiet! Everyone quiet!” One of the militia boys yelled. I tried to think of the way his body was pumping blood in that moment. I tried to think about the push of his muscles against the rage of his voice. In his madness, he was trying to quiet 2,500 terrified souls who were facing death.

  “We know that some of you are trying to get away to the RPF. We know you’re trying to help the enemy and we will not have this!”

  He brandished his gun up in the air and the other militia boys behind him roared. From the outside, this was a strange sight, this handful of young men, on the cusp of manhood, each conjuring madness in a singular way. But no one was watching us from the outside. There were no witnesses to this lunacy.

  The boy was wearing a Primus beer T-shirt, tattered and torn in places. Another man moved up to the front to address us, and I noticed how strange it was that he was wearing tall leather boots. Only the Europeans wore those boots—Belgian soldiers to be exact. Now, when I think back on the death of the ten Belgian paratroopers who had been killed days earlier, I realize this boy must have been among the killers. In the distance, I thought I saw specks of red on the black of the leather. Here were the hungry boys of Rwanda. They were the empty-belly boys, the sit-on-an-overturned-case-of-beer boys, the spit-in-your-face boys, the end-of-the-rope boys existing without a place to stand. These boys were now the men of our nation, their overturned manhood gone wrong without a place to land. But today, these boys had been given a mission; they had a purpose. Kill the other and fill the void.

  Wenceslas came out of nowhere, a ghost that suddenly materialized with the conjuring of evil. The boy with the boots began to wave a piece of paper in the air. I hadn’t noticed the origins of the paper. Had Wenceslas given it him? I knew that in his hand, this killer held the list that would decide if we lived or died.

  “I have a list here,” he said waving it in the air. “That tells me there are many traitors among you. This list tells me who among you are the inyenzi we must kill like cockroaches invading a kitchen.” The others laughed. I searched among them for the presence of the Primus beer shirt boy, but he was nowhere to be seen. Thierry was quiet now. Sophie, who couldn’t have been much older than him was holding him as he looked around the church with eyes as round as saucers. Even the children understood we were waiting for our sentence to be pronounced.

  “I will read the names of the people who signed up to go with the RPF. As I read your names, come forward.”

  I had been right. This had all been a trap and at the heart of the ambush was Wenceslas. He had collected our names and given the lists to the killers. Anyone who had opted for the RPF zone (which was most of the Tutsis) had just been condemned to die. People began to scream, women mostly and the cries of children followed. The speckled-boot killer began reading the names out loud, but the cries of the damned were quickly drowning out his voice. Shots were fired.

  “Quiet!” People grew silent instantly. The militia boy continued to read the names out loud. Most names were that of boys and men. A thin line of them began to form on the side as they made their up to the front after being called. I wanted to understand why these boys came forward. Couldn’t they hide and pretend they didn’t exist? Why were they giving themselves in to this death sentence? Maybe this was the power of naming. From birth, we are named; we are summoned to respond to a calling that connect us to the world. Our name is the thread that holds us together, that keeps us from slipping away into the void of nothingness. So that even now, this call—this need to respond to the thread of identity, to the line that assures us of our existence—is stronger than our fear of death. Even in death, we wanted to be called. We wanted to be pulled out from the mass of the crowd, from the void of nonexistence.

  I knew this instant would be with me forever. I knew that it would define me, like the handful of moments that define all of us. We are all called, pronounced by a handful of seconds, minutes in our lives that recur eternally. This is refrain of the broken song, the only rhythm we know, the only cadence that pushes us to dance to the half tunes life has brought us. This was one of those moments. Waiting to be called or not to be called. Waiting for my remaining children to be saved or killed. I waited for this man whose feet were encased in a dead white man’s leather to determine my fate. Watching these boys weighing out their youth in how they could conjure death. This moment would become my name, the sound to which I would always respond, no matter what the circumstance.

  The line of boys formed like a curling worm, the solitary kind that eats away entrails in silence and calls out hunger when there is nothing else to consume. I watched to see if I recognized their faces. I wanted to make sure I knew none of them. Maybe if they remained unrecognizable, I wouldn’t have to share anything with them. Maybe then I could be spared. I caught myself wishing Jean de Dieu would be called. As absurd as this thought really was, it began to fill me, entrap me like the strange thickness of cement and the way it fills every crack in the earth. I knew the likelihood of Jean de Dieu being called was almost as logical as Wenceslas himself being pulled up from the ranks of priest—of God’s assistant—to the denounced criminal that he was. But I wanted to make this happen. I began to pray, a solemn prayer. For the first time since I had set foot in the church, I called for the angel of death himself. May his wings grace the shoulders of the man with whom I have shared so many nights. This is what I prayed for, this is what I wished. And for the first time since the killers had walked into the church, this prayer quieted the mad woman inside me.

  I sensed movement on my right. I opened my eyes again and saw a man my age pull away from a group and walk up to the front of the church. As this man had been suddenly dislodged from the living, I realized how fear had kept me from the others. I had hardly looked around at the hundreds of others around me until that moment. I looked at the man as he walked up to the front. I caught a glimpse of his hands, the way he held them cupped by his sides, as if he were still expecting to use them for a long, long time. I looked at the way he held his head high, looking ahead as though something still waited for him in the future. I held on to the sight of his back, the speck of his red shirt, the creases of the fabric as he moved away. I needed to hold on to this man, to my recollection of him. I needed to engrave every detail of his face, of his body imprinting in my memory. He reached the front and became part of the line with the others. It became difficult for me to see him. Others were blocking the view. I panicked; I needed to remember every detail around me. I was
the witness who would live; I was the one who would now have the burden of carrying the memory of these people across to the other side. The other side of what? I did not know. I began to look around me for the first time.

  A group of three people were sitting next to each other; the oldest of the three was a woman with strangeness in her eyes. It took me a while to figure out what was wrong with her, and for a moment I thought that maybe she was blind. Her gaze was blank; she looked in front of her without holding on to anything. Her body was lifeless and yet I knew that she was still alive. She must have been no more than 40, although it was hard to tell from the weariness in her body. Two young men, barely out of boyhood were holding on to her, each with a hand placed on her thigh like they were trying to anchor her to the ground. I needed to carry this woman with me to the grave, to carry her memory with me through however many years I had left on this earth. And when I looked again, I saw that her eyes were dead. She had lost her spirit somewhere in the battle of this city. And now her body was waiting to let go. Her sons knew this; they knew they needed to hold on to her if they did not want her to drift away completely.

  A child was whimpering a few feet away, and for a second, I thought that maybe the sound came from one of my own. But when I looked again, I saw that it was coming from a young girl my Mélanie’s age. She wasn’t crying so much as she was whimpering. A strange low, constant cough-like cry I knew would become this child’s permanent refrain, even long after she had silenced it.

  In my newly gained awareness, I realized that I had been avoiding the children. I caught myself standing a foot or so away from them. I was not holding them. I was not touching or comforting them. I could suddenly see them. Their singularity: Sylvie with her mass of hair that hadn’t been brushed since we’d left the house more than a month earlier; Angélique in her quiet enclosure; Michel in the contrast of his wisdom with his size; Devota and Sophie, whose mother I had known only briefly. And now José and Thierry, too young to fend for themselves, too green to understand that their innocence had been crushed the moment they had entered this church. I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t see myself holding them. My hands were cursed. My touch only brought on the rancidness of all that was once living. I had witnessed the rotting of a mango once. I had watched the fruit go from its green and firm state to a pulpous mass that gave off a pungent smell of sweetness and something else that called out the earth. I remember the way my mother had been annoyed by our carelessness. How could we have allowed the fruit to go so quickly? How could we not have been more vigilant in our witnessing of time? Now it was too late. The decay had set in and we had not been there to stop it. My hands knew of decay. My hands spoke of the touch that brought on instant death. If I held these children close, the way I had held Fidèle, Mélanie, and Christian, they would surely die. I needed to keep my distance. Keep my distance and watch the faces of the hundreds of strangers who would die around me. I needed to remember them all from a distance. I was the embalmer; I could preserve anything forever, as long as it was already dead.

  Sixty-seven in all. This is how many men they gathered in one serpentine line. Wenceslas had gone shortly after they had all gathered. As simply as they entered the church, the militia walked out, escorting the men out with them. They were encircled carefully surrounded by the militia who made an effort to keep them in line. Was this not a gesture of humanity? These men exerted their energy to keep the prisoners in one line. They exerted their bodies to keep the mass of killings going. At dawn these boys woke with the same pang of hunger as we all did. Their hearts were the same organs of blood, pumping oxygen to their brains, to their limbs. They defecated as we all did. They slept and swallowed, spat and pissed; they sweat and bled. We were all the same animals. And seeing these eight militiamen pushing the men by the tip of their machete into the light of the courtyard, I asked myself, what made us any different?

  Night fell, and Jean de Dieu returned, like a strange nocturnal creature to his nest. I saw him for the first time that night, when he returned after all 67 men were killed. Why had I never seen the scar on his nose before? A tiny gouge, a nick in the flesh almost at the tip of his nose. The mark was old; it had been made years earlier. Why had I never seen the breadth of his forehead? The way it opened up like a half moon at the top of his head. He had thick eyebrows, bushy and full like his hair. His mustache covered his upper lip, giving it a false notion of thinness, as if he were a man who would be prone to sipping instead of slurping soup. His ears were pushed back on his head, bringing his half-moon forehead to the forefront, giving him an air of inherent intelligence. He had two faint circles under his eyes, and for a moment, I tried to remember if this was new or if he had always looked a little tired. What could this man have exhausted himself doing? Had he buried more dead? Had he held a weapon recently? Had he simply used the power of his mind to select names on a list? I wanted this man to rest, I wanted him to sleep, to stay still and never move again.

  “You should have come with me. You could have died staying here,” Jean de Dieu said to me as if he could hear my thoughts. I caught Angélique looking at him. In that moment, he had ensured the children would never trust him. He was a man who could leave them out alone to die.

  “Do you understand I could not leave the children alone?” I asked rhetorically.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said scratching the top of his head. He was turning his back to the children now. “You think I’m one of them. You think that maybe I am one of the killers.” And when he said this, he looked at me with a look of uncertainty, as if even he were unsure of his own identity.

  “If I were a killer, if I were even one of them, I would not be here. I would be out on the streets. I would be free. I am a Hutu after all.”

  Was he actually telling me that he was a Hutu or was he alluding to my suspicions? I did not know. I said nothing.

  “Tomorrow, the UN will probably come and take people away. But the people who will be taken will not be the people you think. It is not the people from the lists that were formed days ago.” I knew all that already. Jean de Dieu was not saying anything I didn’t already know. “Your friend Rose will be among them, if she wants to leave.”

  “And the children?”

  “The children will be saved also.”

  In the silence between us, we both knew that we could not talk about my own salvation since I had turned down Wenceslas early on. In this moment also, I knew that the only reason I was still alive was because Jean de Dieu had bargained with Wenceslas. No woman turned down Wenceslas and lived to tell about it.

  The children were hungry. I hadn’t fed them since the day before. I hadn’t eaten either, but hunger had stopped affecting me even though I was carrying a child inside me.

  “Come with me to the Caritas office.” I said to Jean de Dieu. I wanted to be alone with him, without the children. I needed to understand who this man was. Why did he try to help me? What did he want?

  We made our way past the bodies entwined on the church floor. Outside, the sun was bright, unaware that this place was hell and that nothing or no one in this city deserved a ray of light. But nature was both forgiving and cruel and shedding light on this church was its way of showing us our own vacuity.

  “Why are you not married?” I asked Jean de Dieu.

  “I was married but she died.”

  Suddenly I felt myself caught in some kind of storm, a rush of air and I needed to catch up to if I was going to stay in one piece.

  “They all died,” he added.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “My children and my wife.” And when he said this, he pinched his index finger between his other index and thumb.

  “What happened?”

  “She was a Tutsi and—”

  “You collect them?” This last part just slipped out of me, the way Boy would later slip out of my body.

  “Collect what?”

  “Dead Tutsi wives.”

  “You’re not dead,�
�� he said, this time looking straight at me.

  “Right. And I’m not your wife either.”

  We were in the line for food now. There were fewer of us now. I didn’t know if it was because more people had died or if people were simply afraid to leave the church. Whatever the case, the line was thinner. This was a blessing. I had stopped believing or praying for blessings for myself, but I needed them for the children.

  When we got almost to the top of the line, Jean de Dieu grabbed me by the arm. “Let me get something straight here. I’m not a killer and I’m not going to waste my time trying to prove it to you. Either you trust me, or you don’t. But given your situation, I’d say you don’t have much of a choice.” His fingers were digging into my flesh. Our faces were only inches from one another. Aside from our bodies laying side by side at night, this was the closest we’d ever been.

  “This is where you’re wrong.” I could have spit, splattering his face as I said this. “We always have a choice. I can choose to get shot, right here, right now if I want. At least I’d know that I died with a clean conscience. Can you say that? Can you say that if you died right now, you’d have a clean conscience?”

  “God gave us life to preserve it, and I do what I can to stay alive.”

  “God gave us life to live it in all good conscience, and sometimes it means dying with dignity.” I pulled my arm away and moved to the top of the line where I received food for the children and for myself.

  “For your information, she died three years ago, visiting her family. We lived in Kigali, but her family was from Bugesera where the killings took place in 1992. Her car was ambushed at night with the children and they were all killed. I have been alone ever since.”