So at the roadblock Georges looked inside the car and saw children he thought he recognized.

“Aren’t you the kids of Jean-Baptiste Gasasira?” he asked, and they nodded, frightened, not knowing what else to say. Now it was clear: They were cockroaches. They would be killed without further delay.

Georges then stepped in. Perhaps he had a soft spot for Odette and Jean-Baptiste, who had gone to the same university as he had in the 1970s. Perhaps he recalled that Jean-Baptiste had been his parents’ personal physician. Perhaps this bankroller of the militias never agreed with the genocide that unfolded from his actions. I cannot say. But he turned to the captain of the roadblock and berated him.

“Let them go right now, ” he demanded. And one of the top officials of the murderous Interahamwe waved the lieutenant and the jeep and the children on toward the Mille Collines.

Just as I dealt with some questionable people during the genocide, I also sheltered some questionable guests. Several times in those days I drank cognac with a man named Father Wenceslas Munyegeshaka, who was the priest at the Sainte Famille church just down the hill from my hotel. He had abandoned the black robes of a priest and was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and carrying a pistol in his belt.

His church had been turned into a refuge for Tutsis, but the militias felt a lot more comfortable going inside it than they did the Mille Collines. Hundreds of people were taken from their refuge inside its redbrick walls and murdered elsewhere. And Father Wenceslas showed no interest in stopping it from happening. I knew that he even had a working telephone in the sacristy and I don’t think he made phone calls to save anybody from execution, even though he also had political contacts.

One day when he was over having a drink my wife asked him, “Father, why don’t you put on your robes and pick up a Bible instead of wearing a pistol? A man of God should not be wearing a pistol.” For some reason, he directed his answer to me and not Tatiana.

“Listen, Paul, ” he said. “There have been fifty-nine priests become the sixtieth.”

“If somebody comes and wants to shoot you, ” I said, “do you think that the pistol will protect you?”

It turned out that he had more reasons to be afraid than just his job. One day he came to the hotel with an elderly woman in tow. “Paul, ” he said, “I am bringing you my cockroach.”

It was his own mother, a Tutsi. I assigned her to live in Room 237 without saying anything further.

Another person who found his way to us was a man I will call Fred, though that is not his real name. He was one of my neighbors from Kabeza, but not a very popular person. He had beaten an old man to death several years before and had been released from prison just before the genocide. He was a Tutsi, which made him an automatic target, but he was also a wanted man because he had three sons serving in the RPF. In the opening days of the genocide he was one of the neighbors who took shelter in my house. On that day, April 9, when the Army had come to take me to the Diplomates, he made several desperate comments, shaking as he spoke. “I know these people are looking for me. Let me go out there so they can kill me before they kill everyone here.” Fred was not my best friend, but when he showed up later at the Mille Collines I was happy to see him alive and made sure that he got a place in a room and was protected from harassment by those who knew his story. There is no sin so great that somebody should die for it. When you start thinking like that you become an animal yourself.

I suppose Fred was another one of those wounded lions that my father had been so fond of talking about. There was a whole pack of them living in my hotel. By the end of May we had 1, 268 people crammed into space that had been designed for 300 at most. There were up to 40 people living inside my own room. They were in the corridors, in the ballroom, on bathroom floors, and inside pantries. I had never planned for it to get this big. But I had made a promise to myself at some point that I would never turn anybody away. Nobody was killed. Nobody was wounded or beaten in the Mille Collines. That was an extraordinary piece of luck for us, but I do not think there is anything extraordinary about what I did for them with a cooler of beer, a leather binder, and a hidden telephone. I was doing the job that I had been entrusted to do by the Sabena Corporation-that was my greatest and only pride in the matter.

I am a hotel manager.

EIGHT

WAKING UP BEFORE THE SUNRISE has been my habit ever since I was a boy. I seem biologically incapable of sleeping in. Before the killing started that predawn quiet was one of my favorite times of the day. I would slip out of bed gently, so as not to wake Tatiana, and go out into the yard and putter around at various tasks. There was a radio on the outside ledge and I would listen to the news. I suppose it is that bred-in-the-bone Rwandan love for news. Besides, a hotel manager needs to know the gossip. This was one of the only times in the day I would have all to myself.

During the genocide I yearned to have one of those quiet mornings in the yard, when the news was just soccer scores and road closings instead of incitements to murder and lists of the dead. I still woke up in the hour before dawn, in a room jammed with people, and I craved that time when I was all alone. So I developed an early-morning ritual of visiting my favorite spot in the whole hotel.

To get there you take the stairs to the top floor. The rooftop restaurant and the conference rooms are down the hall to the right. You turn left off the staircase and enter the second unmarked door on the south side of the hallway. Behind this is another door, but this one is locked. You open it with a key that only the manager and the chief of security possess. You go up another flight of metal stairs, and there you are on the roof, with the whole of the city of Kigali spread out before you.

The hotel was built on the slope of Kiyovu Hill and the panorama is gorgeous. Even in the midst of war and death this aerie of mine had a peaceful aspect if you didn’t look at any spot too closely and focused just on the hills and the sky. To look at the streets for longer than a few seconds was to see homes with broken windows, wrecked vehicles, roadblocks, and corpses everywhere. Better to focus on the distance than the details.

To the west, along the line of the far mountain ridge, you could see the road that snaked away down the valley. It led eventually to the city of Gitarama, where the crisis government held its seat. To the north was the area held by the rebel army. In the middle was Amahoro Stadium, where I knew there were over ten thousand refugees crammed inside, sleeping on the soccer field. It was a larger version of the Mille Collines, only with a different ethnic majority and living conditions that were far worse than what we had. There was nothing to cover anybody from the rain. Those who were wounded had no real medical care and their cuts grew infected and gangrenous. There was nowhere for people to relieve themselves and so the field became a stinking heath.

Between the army lines was the no-man’s-land. There is a saying in Rwanda: “The elephants fight, but it is the grass that suffers.” Caught between the armies, we were the grass. When I came here at night I could see the flashes of gunfire and the red tracer bullets whizzing across the sky. But early mornings were calmer, the mortar shelling quiet and the popping of gunfire only occasional, heralding not a clash between troops but the killing of a lone victim or his family.

These mornings on my roof, with the sky melting to blue from purple, I took the time to prepare myself for what I knew was coming. I was going to die. I had done far too much to cross the architects of the genocide. The only question would be the exact time, and the method of my death, and that of my wife and our children.