So I went to their room and knocked.“I have two choices for you, ” I said. “Either you can move to smaller rooms or you can have some new neighbors.” After that I felt free to assign other refugees to sleep in the rooms they had been hogging for themselves. That put a quick end to their party. It also freed up yet more accommodations for those people who kept finding their way to the Mille Collines from the mayhem outside the fence. I resolved that nobody who could make it here would be turned away.
I cannot say that life was normal inside that crowded building, but what I saw in there convinced me that ordinary human beings are born with an extraordinary ability to fight evil with decency. We had Hutu and Tutsi sleeping beside each other. Strangers on the floor, many of whom had witnessed their families being butchered, would sometime sleep spoon style just to feel the touch of another.
We struggled to preserve routines. It helped keep us sane. The bishop from St. Michael’s parish, a man named Father Nicodem, was one of our guests and he started holding regular masses in the ballroom. There was no such thing as privacy, but occasionally the occupants of a room would clear out to give a husband and a wife some room to make love. Several women became pregnant during the genocide, a way of fighting death with life, I suppose.
There was even a wedding. A seventeen-year-old girl was pregnant and her father was a very traditional Muslim who wanted nothing more than to see her married so the child would not be born outside wedlock. The bishop agreed to perform the sacrament in the ballroom. She was married right there to her boyfriend, and nobody thought to question the difference in faiths.
I suppose it is natural to want a form of government, even in times of chaos (perhaps especially in times of chaos), and so five of the guests agreed to serve as a kind of high council to mediate disputes between the residents. I met regularly with them as a sort of chairman. You might have called the Hotel Mille Collines a kind of constitutional monarchy in those days, because I reserved the right to make all the final judgments on matters of day-to-day living. My kingship came not from a heavenly birthright but from the personnel department of the Sabena Corporation sent via fax from Brussels.
In mid-April we lost our water and electricity. The killers had cut all of our utility lines in an attempt to make us uncomfortable. Perhaps they thought we would all drift away and then they could finish us off outside. It confirmed for me what I already knew-that they had designs to murder us-but it also gave me a bit of hope. The militia still did not want to risk an overt massacre at the hotel. We ran our emergency generator for a while with smuggled gasoline, but it eventually broke down, and so most of our time was spent in darkness.
Life immediately became even harder. The absence of electric lights created a mood I can only describe as disintegrating. How secure those lights had somehow made us feel! Everybody knew the killers liked to do their work in the dark, and the darkness inside the hotel made it feel like a permanent midnight. The absence of light created a sense of decay around the world, which appeared to be running down on its axis, its center breaking apart into mindless pieces. Our last days would be spent in shadows.
Each room held an average of eight frightened and brutalized people. They slept fitfully in the humid dark and often awoke to the sounds of a neighbor shouting or whimpering in a dream. There were mothers who cried out for sons who they would never see again, husbands who wept in secret for their disappeared wives. And though few people wanted to say it out loud, I think most shared my belief that we would all wind up dead ourselves when the militias outside finally decided to raid the Mille Collines. Those hotel rooms were like death-row prison cells, but we knew they were all that kept us from joining the ranks of the murdered for one more day. I worried there would be no more space, but we kept finding ways to fit more people inside our walls. I suppose it is like the story of the oil not running out in the Temple of Jerusalem. There was always more room. I think I would have ordered my guests to start lying on top of one another if it would have meant saving a few more lives. And I don’t think anybody inside the Mille Collines would have objected.
That these people crammed together in the rancid half light, each nursing their own horrors, could endure such conditions and keep on fighting on the side of life is proof to me not just of the human capacity for endurance but also to the basic decency inside all people that comes out when death appears imminent. To me, that old saying about one’s life flashing before the eyes is really a love for all life in those final moments and not merely one’s own; a primal empathy for all people who are born and must taste death. We clung to one another while the violence escalated, and most of us did not lose faith that order would be restored. Whether we would be there to see it was a separate question. All we could do was wait in the dark, with militia spies coming in and going out at all hours, even sleeping among us like fellow refugees. Cats and mice were in the same cage.
The loss of our utilities created another problem. Without water we would all start to dehydrate, forcing people to go out onto the streets rather than die of thirst. We had only a few days to figure out a solution. Every large compound in Rwanda -embassies, restaurants, and hotels-must have their own set of reserve water tanks built onto the property as an emergency supply. Ours were located directly under the basement. I went to check their levels several times a day and watched them steadily dropping. There was no way to get a fresh delivery.
The solution came to me: We did have a reserve supply of water. In the swimming pool.
This pool was, in some ways, the most important part of the Mille Collines. Built in 1973 when the hotel was still new, it was smaller than Olympic size, but it got a lot of use from our European guests who brought children. The logo of the hotel-five overlapping triangles that represented hills-was painted on the slope that led from the deep end to the shallow end. A very ordinary looking pool altogether, but it was the centerpiece of the back lawn, and it was surrounded with ten tables where waiters used to bring cocktails, peanuts, and bar food. This was where the power brokers of Kigali often came to have private conversations with each other in the evening. You never invite a man without a beer.
Something about human nature compels us to draw close to the edge of water. I feel it myself even though I never saw the ocean-or even a lake of any size-until I was seventeen years old. I cannot explain it, but it is real. The tables near the pool were snapped up first, even by men who would not dream of taking a dip, and who may not have been able to swim. Those tables probably saw as much intrigue in the early 1990s as the courtyards of the doge’s palace in the heyday of Venice. In any case, that pool was now a tool of life.
Here was the math. It held approximately seventy-eight thousand gallons. At the time, we had nearly eight hundred guests. If we limited each person to a gallon and a half a day for their washing and drinking needs we could last for a little longer than two months. A rationing system would have to be devised so that each person could be insured of receiving a fair share. So we began a twice-daily rituaclass="underline" Every morning at 8:30 and every afternoon at 5:00 everyone was told to come down with the small plastic wastepaper bin from their room. They were allowed to dip it once into the pool water, which was already turning slightly yellow. In order to keep the water as clean as possible, we did not permit anyone to swim in it, or even to wade.
The room toilets no longer flushed, and so we had to devise a method to get rid of waste. One of the guests discovered a trick, which was quickly broadcast to the hotel at large: If you poured the pool water into the commode it would still wash the feces and the urine down the pipes. The rooms began to smell a little worse, but at least there was no imminent sanitary emergency.