Osati laughed raucously.
“It would just be to calm things down.”
“Things don’t need to be calmed down. I can’t believe you expected me to agree to this. Maybe if they are put on trial.”
“Maybe later.”
“Go away, Katulo. Stick to tending patients in your clinic.”
Osati started to turn away.
“If you had only been alive during the massacres.”
Osati whirled, filled with rage. “It always comes back to that with you old people. Oh, oh, our terrible past. Oh, the lives lost in the massacres. It’s the past. What? We should be docile and let ourselves be ground under the boot of the Hutus because of a memory? ”
“You can’t know how bad it was. When I was fourteen I followed my father and some men to a school…”
“I mourn for all the dead but I am not dead. These people here are not dead. Right now, right here, we are being oppressed.” A woman standing nearby clapped her hands at Osati’s words. Osati turned and delivered her all his attention.
Katulo leant heavily on his walking stick. What did I expect when I came here? That he would agree? No. I knew this is what would happen, but I had to try anyway. Katulo walked away from the market slowly. His body felt more exhausted than it had in a long time.
8
When Katulo walked into the clinic, he knew with just one look at Chama. He walked forwards and pressed a finger against his pulse. It was as he had feared. Chama was dead.
How could it have happened? He had been recovering, but Katulo knew as he thought this that nothing was certain after a wound like Chama’s. A sudden seizure or a spasm could change everything. If I had only been here, he cursed himself. Why did I have to go to that bloody market? Maybe I could have…
The thoughts faded away and Katulo let go of his walking staff. He crumpled to the floor. His eyes were focused on Chama’s corpse. He knew what he was meant to do next. Contact the family, tell them what had happened, say those empty words of condolence, and then… what? Osati would find out. The rage of the villagers would be at a peak. And then…what? Suddenly, he was fourteen years old again, standing in the corridor of the primary school. He felt dizzy. He wished he could hide somewhere no-one could find him. If only he could disappear with Chama’s body and if no-one knew, if it had never happened, if he went into a dark cave far away, if no-one ever found out, if he never told anyone, if maybe…
The door opened. “…I thought I heard you. I didn’t know where you…” Eyo saw Katulo on the floor. He crouched beside him. “Are you all right? Did you fall?”
Katulo spoke slowly. “Go to the home of Chama’s family. You must tell them…”
Eyo looked at the corpse. “When… How?”
“Go.”
Eyo grabbed hold of Katulo’s arms and tried to pull him up.
“Just go.” He said the words harshly.
The wind blew the door shut after Eyo had left.
Katulo sat there for a long time. His only movement was the rise and fall of his chest. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. His mind was only partly in the clinic. The rest drifted into the past as it did when he was performing a Waking. His muscles sagged, pulling down his bones with their weight. Sweat made his clothes stick to him. His head span. An hour passed.
The door flew open. Chama ran in. He was gasping. “You have to come.” He saw Katulo was still on the ground and his face filled with shock. He repeated himself. “You have to come. Osati was at Chama’s father’s house. When he found out, he started shouting and people came to listen. Then… They are going to Bujumbura.”
Katulo was still not responding.
“Chama’s father. He opened the police station. He gave them guns.”
Katulo looked up now.
“They said they will take Chama’s killers by force.”
Katulo could see it as clearly as if it had already happened. There would be shouting and screaming. The police would be called. The mob would be angry, scared, and carrying guns. The police would be nervous, angry, and carry guns. Someone would shoot first. It wouldn’t matter which side. There would be a death, Hutu or Tutsi. And that would just be the beginning. It would begin in Bujumbura and spread to the rest of the country. Rage, beatings, killings, accusations, running, hiding, homes being burnt down…things that people swore would never happen again. And he could do nothing.
“You have to come,” Eyo said for a third time. “Please.”
And what can I do? Eyo was looking at him with so much hope. Eyo, who symbolised his own hopes to pass on the skill of Waking. “I will come,” he said at last. His skills as a healer would be needed.
He got up. “How long ago did they go?”
“I ran here. They were on the way to the police station.”
“We won’t be able to catch them but if we hurry we will arrive in Bujumbura just after them.”
Katulo wished there was a car they could take but the only car in the village had no gasoline. Burundi’s petrol reserves had run dry over a decade ago. Katulo accepted Eyo’s help to stand up. He and Eyo collected up his medical supplies and stuffed them into a leather bag. Katulo went to his house and packed the extra bandages he kept underneath a closet. Beside the boxes of medicines, he saw a machete. He used it occasionally to garden behind his house. It made him think of Chama’s wound, the catalyst for the violence that was sure to happen later. He picked up the machete and stuffed it into the bag.
9
Osati and four hundred and seventeen men and women from Azamé village were shouting in Bujumbura’s streets by the time Katulo and Eyo arrived. They were demanding the killers of Chama be brought in front of them. Twenty of them were carrying guns and the rest had rakes, machetes, spades and broom handles. Osati was standing on top of a cart shouting, “We want them. Bring them out.”
There were hundreds of other people there, too. “Go away, you Tutsi scum,” Katulo heard someone shout. There was a group of Bujumbura citizens facing the villagers. Many of them were also carrying makeshift weapons. Osati tried to make his way through the entropy. His walking stick was knocked from under him. He started to fall but Eyo caught him and the wooden staff. They continued through.
A shrill whistle sounded. It announced the arrival of a third group. The police. They were wearing riot gear and holding up batons. A few were holding up guns. One of them spoke through a megaphone. “Go home, go home now.”
The presence of the police added more volatility to the already tense masses. Unease rippled through the mob. Eyo shouted something but Katulo could not hear him through the din. Katulo saw a woman whose son he had treated for tonsillitis, crouch. She had two sons, a six-year-old and a ten-year-old. When she stood up, she was holding a stone. She flung it and it struck the side of a face. In response, a wooden pole rose and was brought down on the head of a Tutsi villager. Beside the man the pole had struck stood a man with a gun. He pointed it. The trigger was squeezed. The bullet tore through the shoulder of the man holding the pole.
Katulo reached into his medical bag. He had wished it would not be necessary but this was only the beginning of the bloodshed. Soon, people would begin to die. There was only one thing Katulo could do. His hand was trembling. He grabbed the hilt of the machete and he pulled it out. He opened himself to the land. He felt the streets around him and reached into them. He pulled out the past. In his mind, he was fourteen years old again, out of breath and desperately afraid his father was dead. He was sprinting down that school corridor again, with every step getting closer to those terrible sounds: shrieks and gurgles and wails. At the end of the corridor, opposite a sign that said “EMERGENCY EXIT”, there was a half-open door. Katulo looked in and he saw a pile of bodies. They were tiny, frail children’s bodies stacked up like bricks of flesh and bone. The children who were still alive were standing in a line and clutching each other. Katulo saw his father and the other men walking down the line. He saw his father push a uniform-clad six-year-old Hutu to the floor and swing his machete. He did not slash her only once. He lifted it again and then brought it down over and over again. Hacking.