The primary school in Cyugaro, rebuilt in brick, today houses twenty-five classes in which Tutsi and Hutu children share the same benches. In the village, most of the mud houses are cracking or collapsing, and weeds are invading the gardens. The school is three miles from the marshes. The only path crosses fields of manioc and runs past the walls of two burned-out houses. Yellow-flowering iwuwa and red-flowering umuko trees embellish the savanna, through which roam bands of children hunting for wild cabbages. Then the trail plunges into a eucalyptus forest that glows with light filtering through the tall trees.
The vast green plain reappears on the other side of the forest. The path descends abruptly to an edging of wild banana plants, beyond which lie the marshes. The first impression is of an impenetrable entanglement of waterlogged reeds and papyrus, yet it is possible to enter this mass by moving the mats of stems aside with both hands. Spongy in the dry season and muddy in the wet, the ground smells of putrid sludge. Each step sinks calf-deep. The buzzing of flies, mosquitoes, and dragonflies provides a background to the melodious laughter of ibises and the shrill cries of macaques and bands of playful black talapoins, small monkeys whose watery acrobatics can just be glimpsed. If you don’t move, and remain patient, you may also hear the grunting of unseen wild pigs, or the rustle of tall grasses at the passage of slender marsh antelopes called sitatungas.8
Leaving the marsh, we meet a boy of about fifteen, his back bent under a load of peat, which is burned for fuel. Every afternoon, he burrows into the marsh for hours to hunt waterfowl or collect peat. He invites us to his adobe house, which sits in an enclosure of palms high on a butte, overlooking the expanse of papyrus. His name is Jean-Claude Khadafi. He offers us urwagwa in wooden bowls, checks his banana pit, sits down by its edge, and talks about the genocide. During that time, his home sheltered elderly fugitives too weak to climb the slope all the way to the school, and who would sometimes give up hiding in the mud to spend one last day under a roof, waiting for the inevitable killers to come finish them off. Many people have thus become memories for Jean-Claude.
Today, he lives with the only other survivor of their family, his father, who left this morning at dawn to roam the forest until evening, when he will return without a word, as he does every day. Jean-Claude prefers the isolation of his home, between the eucalyptus and the papyrus, to lodgings in a new house in the Nelson Mandela projects farther up the path, closer to the schools and his pals. He explains that not a day goes by that he doesn’t visit the marsh, that neither the sultry dog-days nor bouts of malaria could keep him away. And his gaze does seem never to stray for long from the flat green surface of the strangely whispering foliage.
From his house, a bush track leads to the junction at Kanzenze. Once the site of a lively market, that village is now a simple minibus stop. Just off the trail is Marie Mukarulinda’s cabaret, once a popular venue for local wheelers and dealers. Like all public rooms, this one is painted a chipped and faded African green. The seats have seen better days; cases of Primus and Fanta sit stacked against the wall.
Marie is noticeably tall and slender. In the morning, she works in the fields; in the afternoon, she tries to keep her late husband’s cabaret going, thanks to a managerial style of the utmost simplicity: whatever coins are occasionally received from a customer buying a beer serve immediately to provide a bottle to a regular fallen on hard times. Outside, the backyard is the smoky domain of another widow and Marie’s inseparable accomplice: a large lady named Pétronille who prepares on her grill the most delicious goat brochettes in the entire Bugesera.
Marie’s cabaret is called The Widows’ Corner, because many local women, most of them widowed by the genocide, like to meet there and share a bottle or two of Primus, just to gossip up a storm and laugh at everything and nothing, and especially themselves. Today, for example, a veterinarian has come from Kigali to supervise the artificial insemination of a herd of goats. Invited to the cabaret after his visit, he is taken aside by Marie’s friends, who insist that he must make a return visit to take care of them. Taken aback, he freezes … until a general outburst of laughter tells him he’s been had, whereupon he makes amends for his gullibility by ordering drinks all around.
In one corner of the veranda, sitting stiffly on a stool a touch apart from the others, is a thin man carefully dressed in a threadbare and much-mended black double-breasted suit, his face impeccably shaved, his gray mustache neatly combed. He is Monsieur Gaspard. He is the neighborhood patriarch, whose distinction is equaled only by the concision of his eighty years of memories. Sole survivor of a family of twelve, Gaspard bears his solitude with dignity. With never a hint of complaint, he admits that he now lives with only sadness and poverty for company, simply waiting for the end of his life, in the chair in his hovel nearby or on a stool at Marie’s cabaret, before a bottle of beer slipped to him discreetly by neighbors and which he savors very, very slowly. As a farewell, he quotes this Rwandan proverb in Kinyarwanda: Amarira y’umugabo atemba ajya mu unda, which means, “A man’s tears flow in his belly.”
In a clearing a mile or so away, off toward Nyamata, three houses of clay and straw sit by the path. Angélique Mukamanzi has been settled in one of them, the property of a Hutu peasant in exile, until her family home can be completely repaired. Angélique is a young woman who makes it a point of honor never to wear dresses or pagnes, but only black pants, “country” denim jackets, and “European” blouses. Coming back from the fields or the market, she hastens to touch up her nail polish, slip into leather sandals or pumps, and spend the day’s end leaning against the wall of the house with her neighbors, as if she were passing time before her date showed up. She had recently acquired a suitor: handsome, attentive, and funny, an agronomist by profession. But, she says, with a somewhat ironic smile, she had felt obliged to break things off, once she realized he was a Hutu.
During the genocide, as the weeks went by in the marshes, she inherited a little band of orphans and became a kind of big sister or adoptive mother. Now, willy-nilly, she is the head of their family.