All the refugees, including my wife and children, were terrified of these shadows behind the bamboo. Tatiana’s family was living in a small town near the city of Butare, where the killings had not yet started but were imminent. She was terrified for them, terrified for herself and our children and me, and I cannot say I blame her. Everyone in the hotel felt a similar sense of dread. I felt terribly exposed here, but I did not see an alternative. If we left it would be a sign to the killers that the Mille Collines was being surrendered. Besides, where else could we go? Nowhere in Rwanda was safe.

This belief of mine was the subject of a bitter fight between us. My wife confronted me in the parking lot and insisted we drive to safety in my home area of Murama. To back up her argument she enlisted my friend Aloise Karasankwavu, an executive with the Commercial Bank who was also in fear of his life. He was a persuasive speaker, and we jousted.

“In all of history there has never been a war brought to that little town, ” he told me. And in a sense he was right-at least in my own memory. The uprisings of 1959 and 1973 had created a lot of prejudice in my hometown, but they had never resulted in massacres. But there was no guarantee that blood wasn’t being spilled there right now, without our knowledge.

“My friend, the whole country has gone mad, ” I told him. “Do you think Murama will be spared?”

“You are being misled by the Europeans, Paul. Even the mwami used to bring his cows there for safekeeping during times of trouble. Throughout history it has always been a refuge.”

“Aloise, even if that were true, how do you think you are going to get there? By flying? There are hundreds of roadblocks out there. You will be stopped and possibly killed.”

I looked at my wife, whose eyes were red and miserable. I only wished we had stayed in Brussels a week ago. I wanted to go to Murama as badly as she did-I still had brothers and sisters living there and I was tremendously worried for them-but I knew it would be risking death to go out onto the roads.

I am not necessarily proud of what I did next, but it happened. I lost my temper.

“Listen, ” I told her, “you have a driver’s license. You know how to drive.”

I held out the keys to the Suzuki jeep.

“Take these, ” I told her. “You go to Murama.”

She looked back at me with furious eyes. We loved each other fiercely, but she was a Tutsi and I was a Hutu. This trivia of ancestry had never mattered the slightest bit in our marriage, but it mattered to the killers around us, and I loathed Rwanda more than I ever had before because of it. Once again I hated myself for being a lucky Hutu. Many years before Tatiana’s father had taken the precaution of changing the whole family’s identification cards to read “Hutu, ” but she might have been recognized by someone at a roadblock. We both knew this.

I was, of course, not going to surrender the keys to my wife under any circumstances. I only wanted to make a point. But it was a harsh one, and perhaps too harsh. I was trying to highlight our need to stay where we were and wait for the bloodletting to stop. But my wife was hurt by my words.

Aloise later took his wife and children and hitched a ride out of town, trying to get to Murama. He did not make five kilometers. The militia forced them all out of the car and separated him from his family. Amazingly, nobody was killed. Aloise went on foot to the village of Nyanza, and later on to Murama.

I would learn it was extremely fortunate that we decided not to leave the capital.

The Mille Collines grew more and more crowded. The rumor had spread through town that the hotel was a safe haven from the killers. This was far from the truth, but hope becomes a kind of insanity in times of trouble. Those cunning or lucky enough to dodge the roadblocks were welcomed inside, even though the hotel stood every chance of becoming a killing zone without warning.

We charged no money for rooms. All the usual rules were irrelevant; we were now more of a refugee camp than a hotel. To take cash away from anyone would also be to strip them of money they might need to bribe their way out of being murdered. Some guests of mine who were wealthy came to me with a proposal that they would sign a letter of guarantee promising to pay Sabena when the trouble was over, and I accepted this. But nobody was asked for money.

One exception to this rule was liquor. Those who could afford it were allowed to buy cocktails and bottles of beer-never invite a man without one, even in a crisis-and I used the proceeds to help buy food. It was one way of passing the hat. I also asked my bosses at Sabena to send me more cash and they were able to smuggle two hundred thousand Rwandan francs to me with the help of a humanitarian organization that I should not name here. Room, however, was our greatest asset, and one that could not have a price tag attached. I guarded it closely and had to fight for it on one occasion. I have already mentioned my battle with the reception staff. One of them-Jacques, my problem employee-had taken it upon himself to live in the manager’s apartment with his girlfriend. They were in there alone, and wasting crucial space. Other recalcitrant employees had followed his example and were claiming the choicest suites for themselves. In my mind, nobody had this prerogative. We needed to conserve and share everything we had, and that included the most precious thing we had to offer.

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.