One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  I pictured this faceless wife riding with her children in the dark. Like me, she had probably tried to protect her children, but in the end, she had died on some country road, her children slaughtered along side her.

  “Who died first?”

  “What?” Jean de Dieu did not understand the question. He was a man. How could he understand the importance of what I was asking?

  “Did she have to watch her children get killed? Or did she die first?”

  Jean de Dieu stopped walking now. We were standing in the courtyard right at the spot where he had buried the bodies over the last few weeks. The earth was still freshly overturned, and for a second I thought he was looking at this. But he was thinking about something he had never considered before. He waited, his head leaning towards the ground like an oversized fruit dangling at the edge of a weakening branch. And when he looked up at me again, I saw sadness in his eyes.

  “This, I do not know.”

  When we returned, Rose was sitting among the children in the church. She did not look at me. At first, I thought that she had not seen me walk up with Jean de Dieu but then I realized that she was avoiding my eyes. I handed the food to the children and then I gave her my rice. She shook her head. I pushed it to her a second time, this time she looked up at me and when she shook her head no again, I saw that shame had forced its way into her body, past the dried-up tears on her face, past the fear of getting killed. Shame had eaten away at every inch of her body. Jean and José were hanging all over her, pressing their tiny bodies against her own. Rose was still, sitting like the trunk of a tree that been recently been severed from its roots.

  The next day, the UN trucks came as scheduled. Wenceslas handed to the list of names to the UN soldier in charge of calling the names to be saved. Little did they know that the men that had been scheduled to climb into their white truck on that day had been killed two days earlier. The lists had been reshuffled. The names that were read had nothing to do with choice or with luck. Wenceslas had carefully compiled the list himself. There were many girls and women on that list. Girls whose bodies he had savored. This man of the cloth had become an expert at plucking young girls before their time. He knew of the perfect timing of a girl’s season, the moment when she would not taint him with her menstrual blood. He knew of the perfect predatory cycle of his touch on young flesh.

  Rose was called with the others. Her body shuddered when they called her name and she pulled away from her clinging children, instinctively, like a spring rebounding after being coiled too long. But then she caught herself and realized they had only called her name and not theirs. The confusion lay in many of the children having different last names from their parents. UNAMIR did not seem to understand this and read the names in alphabetical order separating children from their parents. At first, Rose waited hoping that this was the case. They had just read the B for Bayingana and she would wait patiently for them to read the R – for Rukamba. They read José and Thierry Mukarubibiza. Then, the R passed and she was still standing by our side. Jean de Dieu began to stir. He felt responsible somehow.

  “Rose, you must get on the truck. This is your only chance.” The fragile trust Jean de Dieu and I had managed to create since he had told me about his wife and children in the courtyard suddenly vanished in this moment. How could he suggest she get on the truck without her children? This was a recurring theme. Seeing my consternation, Jean de Dieu added.

  “The children can join you later. They can stay with us and we’ll make sure they get to you safely.” This was a lie. How could we ensure their safety when we could barely ensure our own? Rose did not move. Wenceslas was standing at the front of the line waiting for UNAMIR to finish reading the names. They never paused or waited for people to come, when a person did not come, they simply added one more person at the end from a secondary list. If Rose did not hurry, she would lose her place.

  “Take the children. I am going to get you on the truck with them.”

  Jean de Dieu grabbed hold of Rose as she pulled her sons with her to the front of the line. I watched as Jean de Dieu pushed people out of the way to make his way with Rose and the children to where Wenceslas was standing. UNAMIR continued to read the names while Jean de Dieu began to argue with Wenceslas. I could see him gesticulating and pointing to the children and the line and then to the list in the UN personnel’s hand. Wenceslas was shaking his head. I knew, I had learned in the past few weeks that appealing to Wenceslas’ emotions or logic was a pointless endeavor. Appealing to his pride was the only way. As if Jean de Dieu heard me, he began addressing the UNAMIR soldier who had finished reading the names on the list. Jean de Dieu had just shifted the axis of power from Wenceslas to UNAMIR, keeping Wenceslas out of the loop. The priest could not stand being left out of the equation. As if the idea had been his own, Wenceslas grabbed hold of Rose’s children and placed them in the line himself. Rose followed closely behind while the UN nodded and called out the end of the evacuation.

  “That’s it for today!” He called raising his hand in the same way the killers had brandished their machetes in the same spot days earlier. One convoy of death, one convoy of life. It all depended on the day.

  I watched as Rose climbed onto the truck with her children in tow. I wanted to see her face one more time. I wanted to be able to hold her with my gaze, to tell her that she was getting out for all of us. But she never looked back. Now I know that Rose had lost the ability to look into another human being’s eyes on the day Wenceslas had called her to his chambers.

  Everything changed on that day. Jean de Dieu and I and the children were left alone in our reclusive existence. We lived inside a cocoon of our own making, along with thousands of people who lived and breathed beside us. But we were alone. We existed alone inside a pallid shell that had been cracked so often it was a miracle it still existed at all. But miracles were not a part of this world. And we knew that the only thing that could save us from everything else was time itself. We would never be chosen for evacuation. Wenceslas needed Jean de Dieu to help him bridge the cockroaches that we were and those in power. He needed Jean de Dieu and he knew that he could not touch me as a result. We dangled, he and I. We dangled on the edge of our sheltered world. Our privilege contaminated us and kept us from the others. These all-seeing eyes I had gained when the last group of men were called for execution had suddenly vanished. I had climbed into the darkness of my own severed existence. The children knew that I was drifting and this knowledge made them needier, more desirous to hold on. At night, they held on to me tightly. Five sets of hands pulling at me in the darkness, pulling me to the center of the earth. The children kept me grounded against my will.

  The other child was still growing in my body. I had not yet told Jean de Dieu. I would not tell him. Nor would I tell the children. This is what I did. I existed in the silence of this gestation until my body would betray me and silence would no longer be my ally.

  One more evacuation took place two days after Rose and the children left and then nothing. I had stopped waiting for something to happen long ago. For days, Jean de Dieu was busy working with Wenceslas, keeping the place as orderly as hell itself could be kept in order. I had begun understanding Jean de Dieu. He was riding the fence between the world of the powerful and that of the oppressed because staying on the other side of the weak meant vanishing in fear. I wanted my children to live. And on days when I could manage to imagine us outside of these walls, I even wished life for the baby growing inside me.

  On July 4th, three weeks after the last evacuation, the RPF came to the church and took us to the refugee camp of Kabuga.

  “It’s over,” the RPF soldiers said. “It’s all over.” I don’t remember marching out of the church with a sense of freedom and relief. In fact, I don’t remember walking out of the church at all. But I do remember Wenceslas’ eyes when he realized that his sense of control had just ended. He looked at me on that morning, right after the RPF arrived and I saw the hatred in his eyes, the hatred
he felt for everything he had not been able to destroy.

  Chapter 14 – Francine

  We stayed in the camp of Kabuga long enough to know that our misery had not ended with our departure from the church. Memory is not a faithful servant. I only remember patches of light and long drawn out waves of darkness. The ride to Kabuga from Kigali was endless. The children cried incessantly early on, in the trip and then later, when hours turned into more than a day, their cries stopped. I must have slept most of the ride because I am only left with the shards, sound bites, and blurred out images on the way there. Night fell, and when I opened my eyes the truck was rocking back and forth. Sylvie’s head rested against my stiff body; she was sleeping. It was still raining outside. I remember the sound of the rain on the large oversized leaves of the banana plantations. I heard the sound of a woman crying and men laughing. Or was it in my dreams? Jean de Dieu pressed his body against mine on the other side of Sylvie and Michel. Angélique, who was in need of containment, slept between us. Devota slept by our feet. We were all heaving, together in the storm of the country’s madness. Our bodies rocked and plunged into the abyss of potholes along with the rest of our cargo. Inside me, Boy was already growing. I carried the enemy inside my body.

  We arrived in Kabuga at night. It was a small town, a peapod of a village really in comparison to the capital to Kigali. But its size had been replaced with oversized chaos, with a dose of madness so large, the tiny town was quickly swallowed by a wave of doom that gave it an air of grandiosity. Kabuga was not really a camp but a monster of a village with humanity turned on its head, a looting ground where we were called to continue fending for ourselves as we had inside the church. Hundreds and thousands of wounded lay everywhere. Some people were fortunate to stay with locals while others slept outside.

  God has a funny way of making his power known. The house where we slept was nothing like the houses in Kigali. There were four walls with terre battue or bare dirt as the floor, without electricity or water. I remember wanting to wash, wanting to rid myself of the stench of the church. I remember hunger and the children’s eyes on me. Their neediness, their desire to be saved. They demanded I save them when I couldn’t even save myself.

  I remember the eyes of Marie Josée, the woman of the house. Marie Josée and her eyes on me like a stigmata on a sinner. She had lost her husband but lived with all of her children. Six in all. The oldest of the boys Sylvain, who was 18, limped around carrying water, sweeping the house, cutting wood for the fire. Marie Josée’s children were older than mine.

  “How far along are you?” Marie Josée said to me placing her hand on the mound of my hidden belly. Even though she was beyond her childrearing years, Marie Josée was the first one to know about the child growing inside me.

  “There is nothing more sacred than the gift of life,” she added.

  “I think I am four months along,” I told her averting my eyes.

  I was relieved Marie Josée had freed me from having to tell Jean de Dieu directly about the child growing inside me.

  “You are pregnant?” Jean de Dieu shot a glance of surprise in my direction.

  I wanted to tell Marie Josée about the provenance of the child. I wanted her to know that she should not be kind to the child, that she should not regard it as a creature of God. But her comment about the sacredness of all life told me this would be futile. Marie Josée was obviously a pious woman who believed that God had a plan in everything he did, even if it was murdering a woman’s husband along with two of her children.

  Like us, Kabuga was a powder keg waiting to explode. The RPF controlled the town, but at night, militia would make their way inside and terrify us. There were so many wounded, we had to lay bodies on the ground at the center of town under a large tent to rest. Later, after they died, we simply carried them a few feet and buried them almost in the spot where they had fallen. There was not enough food to feed all of us and Jean de Dieu would sometimes go roaming in the village and dig for potatoes. When he was lucky, he would come back with enough for each of us to have a bite or two.

  Marie Josée was making chai as we sat on empty overturned cases of beer.

  “Drunk militia boys drove their trucks into the camp last night,” Marie Josée told us, her eyes gleaming with tears. A convoy carrying militia had driven into the town while people were sleeping.

  “Is that what all that noise was about?” I asked.

  “Yes, they ran down tents and drove over the bodies of sick men, women and children who were sleeping inside.”

  “How many dead?” I asked, unable to conjure any emotion.

  “Two dozen people, maybe more.”

  “That’s a bold move for these militia boys to drive their truck right into an RPF territory” I added.

  “Those boys have lost their fear of death. Death is only a veil to them. It isn’t real. Death is just the canvas of magicians.”

  I wasn’t sure what Marie Josée meant by the canvas of magicians but I knew enough to understand that these boys who had killed the wounded in their tents last night were as dead inside as I felt.

  “Didn’t the RPF fight back?” I asked.

  “They shot at the trucks, but the bullets only grazed them. This was a joy ride for them. Something to distract their minds from the void.”

  I looked at the face of the man I had chosen as my companion. I wanted a sign that we were all absolved of the sins of sharing kinship with the killers. We were all human and I wished it were otherwise. But Jean de Dieu sat still. A remarkable stillness that had inhabited us both since we’d arrived in Kabuga. We’d found nothing but the emptiness of our fragile shelled cocoon since leaving the church. Jean de Dieu and I existed together in this place we’d made our own. The children were outside of it, outside of our veiled world. How can I explain my own connection to Jean de Dieu in this quiet place of exclusion? How do I draw upon the silence and find words to describe our own dreamlike state?

  Jean de Dieu sat in Marie Josée’s kitchen and said nothing. I watched her tiny frame sitting on the only wooden chair in the kitchen, next to the fire where Sylvain had placed wood for tea. She was no typical Tutsi. Where was the tall frame of her ancestors? Where were her long and slender limbs? In her lineage, the ancestors had forgotten to give her the mark that would make her recognizable to our clan beyond any doubt.

  “We Tutsis need to find a way to get revenge. We need to find a way to rid the earth of all Hutus.” Marie Josée’s words opened a gateway inside of my own dormant rage. Jean de Dieu shifted in his chair. I sat in the stillness I now knew so well. Something broke loose inside me and I found myself on automatic pilot as I listened to Marie Josée’s words speaking a sentiment I’d carried inside me since the killing had begun.

  “If I had a blade in my hand, I would slice open the throat of every Hutu I found.” Marie Josée added taking a sip of her tea.

  “Every Hutu?” I asked her. “Even if he were sitting here with you at this table?” I let the words slip out of me like I had just tossed a lit torch at my own house. Marie Josée stood up abruptly and took a step back as if she had been scalded by the embers of a fire.

  “Are you saying there is a Hutu sitting here at my table?”

  Jean de Dieu shifted nervously in his chair, shooting me a glance of panic. I’d never seen this man I’d spent so many weeks observing express so much fear in the face of uncertainty.

  “Francine, what are you doing?” Jean de Dieu asked after having regained his composure.

  “Well, isn’t that what I saw this morning in the leather pouch containing our passports?” I felt myself bolstered by the presence of Marie Josée. As if her words of hatred for the Hutu had suddenly breathed life and words into my desire to confront Jean de Dieu about what I had suspected since the day I had met him.

  “Francine, you don’t understand what you saw,” Jean de Dieu said as calmly as if he were greeting me good morning.

  “What is going on here? Are you a Hutu? If you’re a Hu
tu, you have to leave my home at once!” Marie Josée was screaming in the direction of Jean de Dieu who was still sitting on the empty overturned case of beer. Things were unraveling so fast. I wanted to be able to confront Jean de Dieu before Marie Josée’s rage took over completely.

  “I know what I saw. How many different ways are there to understand the four-letter word HUTU written on your ID card?” I blasted Jean de Dieu.

  “Get out of my house!” Marie Josée screamed lunging across the table to grab hold of Jean de Dieu with her bare hands. She knocked over my cup of chai, barely missing him by a hair. Instead, the hot liquid scalded me by landing on my thigh. I felt no pain as I thought of the memory of the softness of the worn leather pouch containing Jean de Dieu’s ID card. It was strange to think how worn and soft leather becomes after years of contact with the human hand. Alerted by the screams of his mother, Sylvain came marching in holding a pistol in hand.

  “He is an impostor.” Marie Josée screamed again. “There is a Hutu in our house!” She pointed her index at Jean de Dieu like the stereotype of an accusing fury. This reminded me of the stories I’d read regarding World War II in Europe, when people pointed to the Jews as they marched in a line on the streets of their own neighborhoods, after being led to their death.

  Everything loosened inside me; I could feel a letting go, a severance, a watershed. It was like knowing what I had always feared made everything around me finally lighter. Knowledge is power. I felt free.

  Sylvain brandished his gun in our direction. The memory of the moment when Fidèle had been shot in front of me and the children suddenly engulfed me.

  “Please don’t shoot him,” I yelled. He is the father of my children.” I heard myself crying and remembered Fidèle was dead and this man next to me had never fathered a single one of my babies.