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"A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali", by Gil Courtemanche, is translated from French into English and published by Canongate.
"A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali" is available with a 35 percent discount from Canongate Books website.
When the sun goes down over Kigali, the beauty of the world brings joy to the beholder. Great flocks of birds delicately embroider the sky. The wind is gentle and cool. The streets are transformed into lazily slipping, brightly coloured ribbons, thousands of people, like swarms of ants, leaving the city centre and slowly climbing their hills.
On all sides smoke rises from cooking fires. Each column that shows against the sky speaks of a tiny house. Thousands of laughing children run about in the earthen streets, kicking burst footballs and rolling old tires.
When the sun goes down over Kigali, if you’re sitting on one of the hills surrounding the city and still have the remains of a soul, you cannot do otherwise than stop talking and watch.
Cyprien put his hand on Valcourt’s shoulder.
"Look. Everything’s beautiful from my house. This is why I want to die here, watching the sun put Kigali to sleep. Look, it’s like red honey running out of the sky."
Gentille came and sat beside Valcourt. They stayed this way in silence, the three of them, until nightfall, hypnotized by the murmuring city curling up for the night in the folds of sun-painted shadows, first golden, then red, and finally brown.
They felt that their lives, until now more or less shaped by their own decisions, were escaping them totally. They felt borne along by forces they could name but could not understand because they were foreign to them, had no place in their genes, or their frustrations, or their failures, because never, in their worst excesses of hatred, had they ever imagined that anyone could kill the way one hoes a garden to get rid of weeds.
The hoeing, the work, had begun. Still, they were not giving up hope.
Dogs were barking as though speaking, as though warning humans: "Watch out, men are turning into dogs and worse still than dogs and worse still than hyenas or the vultures on the wind making circles in the sky above an unwary herd."
Cyprien began speaking again. Valcourt, he said, was trying to teach him how to live while waiting to die. He wanted to teach the White that you could live only if you knew you were going to die.
Here, you died because it was normal to die. Living a long time was not.
"In your country you die by accident, because life hasn’t been generous and leaves like an unfaithful wife.
You think we don’t value life as much as you. So tell me, Valcourt, poor and deprived as we are, why do we take in our cousins’ orphans, and why do our old people die with all their children around them?
I’m telling you in all humility, you discuss life and death like great philosophers. We just talk about people who are living and dying.
You consider us primitive or ignorant. We’re just people who don’t have much, either for living or dying. We live and die in messy ways, like poor people."
Over the Kigali prison, the breath and sweat of thousands of men cooped up one against another was raising a cupola of mist.
Cyprien knew much more than he wanted to say about the massacres brewing. He knew the caches where guns and machetes were being stockpiled, the barracks where the militia was training, the gathering places in most of the city’s neighbourhoods.
He had never liked the Tutsis. He thought they were arrogant and laughed too much, but he adored their women’s slender waists that he could girdle with his two great hands, their milk-chocolate skin and their breasts as firm as juicy pomegranates.
That was his downfall in the eyes of his Hutu neighbours and friends, that and his friendship with this White, who hung out only with Tutsis and talked about freedom when instructing the journalists for the television station that still wasn’t producing any television.
He liked this Valcourt, who could listen for hours and hours and talk without ever preaching. But he was also a little sorry for him.
Valcourt was as arid as a desert, like dead earth that rejects seed. He was being eaten away by the hopelessness of living, the malady that afflicts only those who can afford the time to think about themselves.
Valcourt was dead though alive, while Cyprien was alive though dead. Cyprien had been using this equation to resolve the endless questions he kept putting to himself after their meetings.
Perhaps the beautiful Gentille would administer the electric shock that would bring the White back to life and allow him to die properly. Only the living know how to die. Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters.
