Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

“THEY SAY THE war was won but for us too much was lost,” Odette Nyiramilimo told me. After the genocide, she and Jean-Baptiste had adopted ten children, and took it upon themselves to treat child survivors for free at their clinic. “We feel it’s a moral obligation,” she said, “but the children are so traumatized that we hardly know how to help them.”

After the family was evacuated from the Hotel des Milles Collines, Jean-Baptiste had gone to work with an RPF medical unit helping survivors, and Odette had taken their three children to Nairobi, vowing never to return to Rwanda. Then she received news that some of her nephews and nieces had survived. “As soon as I heard that, I knew I had to come back,” she said. “We began to find them and to take them in, but it’s very difficult to satisfy all their needs. One of them—a four-year-old—weighed just seventeen pounds when he was found.” Once she told me, “We were in the car, Jean-Baptiste and I, and our three children, and one of the kids said, ‘I’m so happy just to be all five of us together again.’ We said, ‘Aren’t you happy to live with your cousins?’ But they didn’t say anything.”

Odette looked over at her children in the pool of the Cercle Sportif. When she turned back to me, she said, “This life after a genocide is really a terrible life.” The fluidity and urgency with which she had told the story of her earlier ordeals had given way to a hopscotch, free-associating rhythm as she described life in the aftermath. “When I was still in Nairobi, saying I’d never come back, there was a group of young Rwandan fifty-niners who’d gone to visit Rwanda for the first time,” she said. “They got back to Nairobi and said how beautiful and wonderful it all was, and the only problem in Rwanda was the survivors who want to tell you all their stories forever. That really got to me.”

She said, “The trauma comes back much more as time passes—this year more than last. So how can I look forward to next year? We take refuge a bit in our work, but many people become very depressed. I’m afraid it gets worse. I dream more of my sisters and cry through my dreams.”

Odette had one nephew who survived the genocide in Kinunu, on the hill where she was born in Gisenyi. She had visited him only once, to help bury the dead, who were numerous, and she did not want to go back. “All the Hutus there watched us come, and some wanted to hug me,” she said. “I cried out, ‘Don’t touch me. Where did you put everyone?’ One was married to a cousin of mine. I said, ‘Where’s Thérèse?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘It wasn’t me who did it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know you.’ Now whenever the Hutus there see a car coming to my nephew’s, they all hide. People will say I’m an extremist because I can’t accept or tolerate the people who killed my family. So if they’re afraid once in their lives—I was afraid since I was three years old—let them know how it feels.”

She said it was hard to make new friends among the returnees. “They came with all their things. They can laugh, have a party. Among us it’s always tales of genocide, and they don’t like to hear about it. If they see I’m married to a Hutu, that I have some old Hutu friends, they don’t understand. Really, everyone lives for himself now.”

She said, “I was talking to my youngest, Patrick. I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ He said, ‘Those two guys who came with machetes. It comes back all the time.’ The children don’t go out —you have to push them—they like to stay home. They think about it a lot. My little Patrick, he goes alone into a room, and he looks under the bed for interahamwe. My daughter Arriane was in a very good boarding school in Nairobi, and one night she sat up reliving everything, and she cried. At midnight the dorm monitor came by and they spent nearly the whole night together. Arriane told her what had happened, and the monitor was amazed. She’d had no idea. And this was a Kenyan. Nobody really knows. Nobody wants to know.”

Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. “Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.”

ONE DAY IN Kigali, I ran into Edmond Mrugamba, a man I had come to know around town, and he invited me to join him for a visit to the latrine into which his sister and her family had been thrown during the genocide. He had mentioned the story before. I remembered that he made a sound— tcha, tcha, tcha —and chopped his hand in the air to describe his sister’s killing.

Edmond drove a Mercedes, one of the few that remained in Rwanda, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt and jeans and black cowboy boots. He used to work for a German development program in Kigali, and his wife was German; she remained in Berlin with their children after the genocide. As we drove in the direction of the airport, Edmond told me that he was a well-traveled man, and that after many trips in East Africa and Europe, he had always felt that Rwandans were the nicest, most decent people in the world. But now he couldn’t recover that feeling. In 1990, after the first RPF attack, he had been threatened because he was Tutsi; he had gone into exile and had only returned after the new government was installed. Edmond was in his late thirties; his father had been a cattle keeper in Kigali. His oldest brother was killed in the massacres of 1963. “And I don’t speak of my uncles killed in fifty-nine and sixty-one,” he said, “my grandmother burned in the house, my maternal uncle, a nurse, chopped into many pieces. There were many others who were killed, and others luckily went to Uganda.” Edmond himself had lived for eleven years in Burundi before returning under Habyarimana and finding work with the Germans. He showed me a snapshot of himself in full camouflage uniform and floppy khaki bush hat. In 1993, he left Germany for Uganda and outfitted himself to join the RPF—“then my appendix burst, and I had to have an operation.”

Edmond spoke quietly, with great intensity, and his bearded face was expressive in a subtle, wincing way. Despite his ordeals, he told me, he had never imagined the depth of the ugliness, the meanness—“the disease,” he said—that had afflicted Rwanda, and he could not understand how it could have been so well masked. He said, “An animal will kill, but never to completely annihilate a race, a whole collectivity. What does this make us in this world?”

Edmond returned from exile because he had found it intolerable to be living in a strange land thinking that he might be of use in Rwanda. Now he lived alone in a small, dark house with a young boy, a nephew who had been orphaned in the genocide. “And I ask myself sometimes, Is my presence here really of any significance?” he said. “To build a new Rwanda. I dream all the time. I dream of theories of this history of violence. I dream of finding an end to it.”

Near the outskirts of Kigali, we turned onto a red-dirt track that narrowed and descended between high reed fences surrounding modest homes. A blue metal gate leading to his dead sister’s house stood open. The yard was crackly dry bush strewn with rubble. A family of squatters—Tutsis just returned from Burundi—sat in the living room playing Scrabble. Edmond ignored them. He led me around the side of the house to a stand of dried-out banana plants. There were two holes in the ground, about a foot apart and three feet in diameter—neat, deep, machine-dug wells. Edmond grabbed hold of a bush, leaned out over the holes, and said, “You can see the tibias.” I did as he did, and saw the bones.