Tonight, Sylvère is the first to climb the steps of Mama Nema’s veranda. He picks a white plastic chair facing the hillside. He has just walked the entire length of main street from his work at the district offices. Mama Nema comes out of her courtyard to swap neighborhood news with him as she lights the candles on the tables. She hands him an Amstel and takes advantage of one last respite to return to her stove. The sun traces a pink streak low in the sky, announcing its imminent plunge beneath the horizon. Soon darkness will envelop the road—or is it a lane? Who knows what to call this steep path that runs from the covered market, along the soccer field, to the top of Kayumba hill. In any case, the route’s ruts and cracks, as much as its precipitous ascent, discourage even small trucks from making the climb, all of them except Chicago’s van, of course, which nothing can keep away.
What a pleasure it is to chat with Sylvère before the evening rush. His apocalyptic irony, whose humor sometimes tends to the grotesque, had once shocked me as it does others. Fairly quickly, however, I learned to read in his chronic skepticism a form of benevolent dismay. The mixture derives, no doubt, from the disillusionment of a Tutsi child, born in a hovel in Maranyundo, whose school smarts early on caught the keen eyes of church recruiters. A brilliant student, he was enlisted with his friend Gonzalve to study theology at Swiss and Canadian universities, where they were saved from the machetes. The two clergymen, whose futures destined them for the elite, abandoned their religious vocation immediately after the killings, returned to Rwanda, and rolled up their sleeves amid the devastation of Nyamata. Sylvère was in charge of a primary school when I first met him at Marie-Louise’s place. Today, he is one of the district’s most influential senior civil servants and a party executive, although he is still his old self when he enters the cabaret, with the same blunt, and slightly Jesuitical, sense of ridicule.
Just before nightfall, Dominique emerges onto the veranda, staggering off the street at the end of a retiree’s trying day in the cabarets. Éphraïm arrives next, still sporting his boots after a lightning-fast inspection of his land as he left the office. Gonzalve, the very embodiment of calm, has just come from Bugesera’s high school. Emmanuel occasionally drops by. Chicago will roll in much later, despite the risks to his truck on his breakneck drive from Kigali. Innocent, moodier by day’s end, comes to badger or tease one or another of the men or to tell amusing stories, when he hasn’t opted instead for the solitude of a corner market closer to home.
Their group was once called the “circle of intellectuals,” at a time when people no longer dared to think. Devastated, Nyamata had few schools. An emergency administration operated out of several rooms in the district office building. Doctor Georges worked his miracles at the clinic, with its population of acquiescent patients. A handful of agricultural engineers and veterinarians still raced their motorcycles up and down the hills, to Kanazi in the south, to Kanzenze in the north, and to Kibungo or Kiganwa farther out in the west. They kept at it out of a sense of dignity. In the evenings, they convened to drink until they could drink no more, setting the world to rights with a humor that lacked in the world around them. They first pitched camp in Marie-Louise’s boutique. Among its piles of fabrics, basins, and flour sacks, they sipped their beers and enjoyed the not-so-maternal kindness of the establishment’s owner.
When Marie-Louise closed her place down, having already married off several customers along the way, the group migrated to Kayumba, where they discovered a different sort of motherly warmth at Mama Mwangera’s boutique, with its candlelit walls and dim fluorescent bulb. Tite went his own way, preferring the dive bars, particularly his wife’s, at the main intersection nearer to home. Théoneste was also lost, because he liked the verandas frequented by high-society types at Heaven. Jean, the public prosecutor, was transferred, and Doctor Georges passed away, taking his jokes and medical genius with him. Moved by the mysteries of migration, the friends then set out again to empty fresh bottles at another boutique at the end of the road.
They landed at Mama Nema’s. The proprietor, another handsome and kindhearted woman, welcomed them with loving arms, and they picked up where they left off. Night has fallen on the crowd of people climbing up the hillside. They disperse into courtyards, some of which are lit solely by a single brazier for the evening meal. Fires glow red at the market below as vendors cut prices on the last of the vegetables. Along the thickets, the shadows of cows driven by the silhouettes of cowherds stealthily return from grazing in the bush, a practice now banned by Rwanda’s land reforms. Mama Nema hauls out cases of beer with the help of her son. When there aren’t enough, the boy hustles down the hill on his bike for more. The friends comment on the latest of the day’s news.
Tonight, Emmanuel is describing his most recent agricultural experiments. Since he left his position with the district administration, he and John and other friends have embarked on a venture about which they are particularly enthusiastic: the restoration and renovation of former plantations—with olive and coffee trees and intensive pig farming. Then someone asks Emmanuel about the marriage whose negotiations he has agreed to undertake. As a scrupulous negotiator, and no less as a storyteller, he is very much in demand. The group discusses the families of the future bride and groom. Chicago turns up, teary-eyed, unsteady, with a beaming smile, after a hard day’s work in Kigali. Benoît arrives from his cowshed.
Innocent has suddenly picked a fight with a bewildered stranger. He presses his case with an orator’s rhetoric and a lawyer’s gesticulations. The audience is enjoying itself, listening for the one insight or remark in Innocent’s rhetorical flights they know will be worth remembering. He indulges in throes of anguish, never retreats before a provocation, and couldn’t care less about making people uncomfortable. Then, suddenly, he sits back down, chuckles as he rubs his head, and launches into a funny story about a Tutsi cow. Everyone laughs. Politics, of the kind that might prove unpleasant, are never mentioned, except, that is, when someone has exceeded the limit of inebriation—in which case all improprieties are forgiven.
They talk about their projects. They laugh about everything and make fun of one another. They discuss the genocide night after night. If a wave of sadness overtakes them, they wait for it to pass, bottle of beer in hand. Just now, Concessa, Gonzalve’s wife, enters discreetly. She whispers a knowing word in Mama Nema’s ear, then taps her husband, who is asleep in a chair, and takes him by the arm to lead him back home. On other nights, Dominique’s or Chicago’s wife will do the same.
In the darkness, the din from the hair salons disappears all at once. The crickets burst into a terrific evening racket. The moon outlines the black ridges of mountains to the west. The night firmament gradually appears above our heads, and the shooting stars streak with joy across the sky.