Putting an end to the conversation with their sudden racket, a flock of scarlet-throated western bluebills and long-tailed souimanga sunbirds, with their dazzling green cloaks and blue bellies, comes parachuting into the banana plants. In front of Christine’s house is a path that runs through a forest of red-flowering trees and across a muddy river via two worm-eaten trunks. Through the dense foliage, one can sometimes glimpse the round huts of the Twa pygmies, who are themselves almost never seen. Not far from Christine’s family home is the former house of Odette Mukamusoni.
Odette and Christine, born one year apart on two adjacent hills, are both farmers and have children the same age. Ever since childhood, they have encountered each other on the paths to the school and the well, but they have never spoken together, although they would now have even more thoughts and memories to share, especially regarding their experiences escaping from the massacres.
Odette has recently left her hill to live in a shanty on the edge of Nyamata. Her family perished during the killings. The father of her oldest child is in exile in Congo. Vegetation has overgrown the ruins of her home and the bush has invaded the family fields, which might seem to explain why she has not returned to her village to pick up her life again. Innocent Rwililiza met her by chance near the church, in a group of volunteers unearthing bones from a mass grave to preserve them from the flooding rains. Odette was working off to one side; she seemed lost, and stunned by what she had lived through, and she told Innocent as much that day. At the time, he was not surprised by her isolation, far from her former home. He found temporary lodgings for her in a small mud hut.
During our first meeting, Odette told of her flight to the church when the killings began, her miraculous escape in the bedroom of a Brazilian nun, her hiding place under the mattress of a woman friend of her godmother’s. She spoke in detail about the month she spent concealed under a bed every day, about her anguish at hearing killers chatting in the house, the waiting, the boredom, the loneliness, the latent depression, and her rescue. She wove together incidents that were certainly extraordinary, but plausible. And yet, something odd in her story awakened my suspicions: not the strangeness of her survival, or her present solitude (the fate of many traumatized survivors), but the chronological rigor, the accumulation of details, and in short, a most unlikely excellence of memory.
From the outset of the second meeting, Odette abandoned the initial version of her narrative. She admitted her fabrication, which she justified through her fear of being misunderstood by her neighbors. She offered spontaneously, and with seeming relief, to tell a true version, given here, a story as astonishing as the first tale. One episode of her flight, difficult to make public given the inevitable rumors and suspicions it would inspire, explains her initial lie, her anxiety, and her abandonment of the hill where she was born.