The economy, like the infrastructure, was in a shambles. An entire year’s coffee crop had been lost. What little industry there was had been destroyed. But international aid helped get the power back on, and Rwandans have always been creative when it comes to making money. There was a brief period of Wild West capitalism, in which it became possible to grow very rich transporting foodstuffs and goods from Uganda. Anybody with a working truck could make fantastic profits hauling bananas and beans.
My own life, meanwhile, became complicated and a little frightening. It was with profoundly mixed feelings that I returned to the streets where I had seen the bodies of my friends and neighbors stacked up like garbage. Their bloodstains had washed away in the autumn rains, but I always took note of the spots where I had seen them lying. The Mille Collines no longer smelled like a refugee camp, but it was hard to walk its halls without feeling that palpable sense of impending murder. The role I had played in saving those people had not been forgotten, and it was not appreciated in many quarters. I had seen too much and knew too many names. There were many people in the new government who had been complicit in the genocide and who feared any surviving witnesses from that time. They were political survivors, hard men, dangerous when threatened. Every time I saw a stranger scowl in my direction I tried to memorize his face in case I had to find him later if he harmed my family.
Others had it in for me for economic reasons. The hotel management contract I had received was seen as a cash cow by some of the thugs close to the new government. One very bizarre incident at the hotel convinced me I might be better off living someplace else. A friend of mine came by the hotel one evening with an Army sergeant. The sergeant was highly agitated and it became clear that my friend was not there by choice. I tried to calm things down and offered them a beer, but the sergeant would not sit still for long. He took out his pistol and told me: “We know you have stolen computers in your house!”
“That is foolish, ” I told him.
“Then you will not have any problem showing me your house?”
“All right, ” I said. “This is foolishness, but if you insist, come look.”
The three of us walked into the next room. Our housemaid was inside, and when she saw the Army sergeant’s pistol, she screamed.
“He is going to kill you!” she said, and without thinking, I dashed toward the sergeant and shoved him hard into the wall. He dropped his gun. I supposed I could have grabbed it off the floor and pointed it at him, but my instinct told me otherwise. I raced out into the parking lot and toward the Army post next door-the place, as it happened, where the ten Belgian soldiers had been killed by torture in the opening hours of the genocide. There is hardly a patch of ground in Rwanda, of course, where somebody was not hacked to death in 1994. I got the attention of some of the soldiers on guard and told them I had been threatened by the sergeant. They took him away and I learned that he was attached to the Department of Military Intelligence, our nation’s version of the CIA.
The next day, an influential Army major named Rwabalinda came in to see me about the incident.
“Mr. Manager, that man did not have a real gun. It was a toy.”
I could not believe what I was hearing. If the major was concocting a story about what had happened it meant that there were some high-ranking people who wanted to see me gone.
“Listen, major, ” I told him. “I am not a solider and I don’t even like guns, but I know the difference between a real gun and a toy. That sergeant was carrying a real gun.”
“It was not. This is what our investigation has shown.”
I thought it best to keep a stone face. I thanked the major and he left. Shortly thereafter a friend high up in the government, who I should not identify, came to my house and made plain what I already knew to be true.
“Paul, I have heard they want to kill you so that other business interests can take over the management of the Hotel Diplomates, ” he said. “But the object now is not to kill you out in the open. It is too dangerous politically. They will pretend they are arresting you and taking you to prison, but you will disappear and your body will never be found.”
The choice now seemed clear to me. I could open up my treasured black binder once again and start dialing all my Army friends for protection. But it would be like living the genocide all over. Years ago I had looked forward into my future as a church pastor and seen nothing but rural banality waiting for me. Now I imagined my future as a Rwandan hotel manager and saw nothing but constant fear and an eventual knock on the door after midnight. I loved my job and I loved my country, but not enough to die for them and leave my children without a father. My family and I quickly flew to Belgium and applied for political asylum. We had remained in our own country slightly more than two years after the genocide.
We may have left Rwanda, but Rwanda will never leave us. Those thousand hills were imprinted inside us forever. There are times today when I walk down a street and smell a fire burning in a hearth and instantly I am back in Nkomera, and it is evening, and my father is coming back from the village with a butchered goat on his back and my mother has lit the fire for supper and the shadows of the banana trees are long on the hillsides.
And there are times when I will be in some public place, in a small crowd at a bus station, for example, and I suddenly cannot bear the presence of the other people because I see them holding machetes. They are always grinning at me.
Tatiana and my children have similar troubles and it is not uncommon for one of us to awake screaming in the middle of the night. When this happens I always come in and hold whoever it is, and we talk in quiet voices, in Kinyarwanda, until calm comes once more. It is the best therapy, I think, to simply talk about the things you have seen, and we have talked hundreds of times together about the dreadful things we have lived through. We will probably be talking about them together as long as we are alive, a conversation that will never end.
It is not such a bad thing to start one’s life afresh. I was forty-two years old. We had a lot of bad memories, but we were all in good physical health and we all had hope for a better life in our new country. I had always liked going to Belgium on vacation and it would be free of the violence and fear that I wanted to be done with forever. As a twentieth-century colonial power Belgium had done wretched things to Rwanda, and its conduct during the recent genocide was not honorable, but I never held the actions of its government against the people at large, who were generally very likable and decent to me.
Belgium has a very generous social service net for its citizens, and even for the recent immigrants, but I felt very strongly that I did not want to live on public assistance or take any kind of handout. I was restless and eager to go to work. Since managing a hotel was not in the cards for me anymore, I decided to become another kind of manager. I had a little cash saved up from the Diplomates contract and I used twenty thousand dollars of it to buy a Nissan car and a permit to run a taxi company. The city of Brussels requires you to take an exam to be a taxi driver and I passed on the first try. I was now a company with one employee: myself. There is a saying in Rwanda: “If you want to own cows you must sleep in the fields with them.” In other words, money comes only with long workdays. So I started going to work at 5:00 A. M. and coming home at 7:00 P. M. The streets in Brussels are tangled like spaghetti, and many switch their names after only a few blocks, but I quickly learned the major arteries and then started to master the side streets. I cruised all over the city dozens of times in a day, usually with a stranger in the backseat, a businessperson usually, or somebody with dealings at the European Community headquarters.