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.
Most of the people who were in my cab for more than half an hour became my friends. Quite a few were talkative people and would want to know the name of my home country. When I told them “ Rwanda ” it usually led into conversations about the genocide, which most everyone had heard about. I was occasionally not in the mood to talk about it, but on most days I was, and I would answer their questions as best I could. There were just a handful of passengers, on very long rides, who got to hear me tell the story of the Hotel Mille Collines, and they always left my cab in silence.
Sometimes very early in the mornings, when the sun was not yet up, I would cruise on the cobblestones of the Place des Palais, past the antique lamps in front of the neoclassical Royal Palace where King Leopold II had lived in the early part of the twentieth century. His monarchy had been propped up and financed by the occupation of the Congo and the fantastic profits from rubber exports. But his agents had used terrible force to collect the rubber from the Africans and had instituted an economy that was slavery in all but name. They were known for chopping the hands from able-bodied men who failed to make their quotas. Their colleagues had not been so systematically brutal in Rwanda, but they were the instigators of the divide-and-conquer strategy that turned Hutu against Tutsi, brother against brother, all for the sake of profit.
The profits had come to this marbled jewel of a city, and I circled around it in my taxicab, alone, looking for anyone who might need a ride.
There is not much left to tell about my new life in Belgium. My wife and I made some friends from Rwanda -fellow postgenocide immigrants like us-and they have their own stories to tell. When the evening is late and the empty glasses multiply on the coffee table, we will sometimes talk about what we have seen with each other, and there will be crying and gentle embraces. We have friends among other Rwandans who have lived here a long time and were fortunate enough to be elsewhere when the killing started. One thing is unique among these expatriates: We haven’t the slightest regard for each other’s status as a Hutu or a Tutsi. I think the shared experience of being a stranger in a semistrange land makes us all just Rwandans, and for that I am proud of my countrymen.
About fifteen thousand of us now make the old colonial capital our home, and there are a few specialty stores where we can buy goods that remind us of where we came from. We go to each other’s baptisms, marriages, and funerals and it is enormously good for us to hear Kinyarwanda and drink beer with others who understand us in a way that the Belgians never can. These events usually go on well into the evening and are accompanied by hours of talk, laughter, and dancing. I suppose these are ordinary enough rituals for an immigrant, but it means so much to me to feel that connection with my old country.
But as Rwanda will always be with me, so too will the genocide. It is as much a part of me as the shade of my eyes or the names of my children; it is never far from my thoughts and I cannot talk for more than one hour with a fellow Rwandan before one or both of us will begin to tell a story or make a reference to what happened during those three months of blood in 1994. It is the darkest bead on our national necklace, and one we all must wear, no matter how far we have traveled to get away. Killers still walk free in Rwanda and in the world, and through my mind. I remember one evening in Brussels, at a banquet after someone’s wedding, when I saw a familiar face in the crowd. It was a man I hadn’t seen in years, a Hutu neighbor of mine from the Kabeza neighborhood where my family and I had lived. I had seen him in the opening days of the genocide wearing an Army uniform and carrying a machete. It seems likely that he participated in some murders, or at a minimum did nothing to stop them. And here he was, free and healthy and wearing a business suit. There was nothing I could do about it, either. I stared into my drink. My wife wondered why I had suddenly gone quiet, but I could not tell her until we had gone home. I did not want to talk to this man. I never wanted to see him again, and so far I have not.
These banquets we have together frequently take place in the rented basements of various churches around Brussels. Church is not an uncomfortable place for me to be, but I rarely go to worship on my own. My wife is still a faithful Catholic, but I am what you might call a lapsed Seventh-day Adventist. It was enormously disappointing to me that so many priests and pastors caught the hateful virus in 1994 and refused to do anything for those who were begging them for help. The church remained mostly silent when it should have been speaking out in a loud voice. Its failure to stand strong in this critical hour was equivalent to complicity. It still disturbs me that houses of prayer could have been transformed into killing zones.
I still believe in a kind of Higher Power that is the origin of all we see around us, but I am not one who prays much anymore. I felt that God left me on my own during the genocide. I have many troubling questions that I fear will go unanswered until the day I die. I share this yearning in the heart with many other Rwandans. Was God hiding from us during the killing? It used to be that God and I shared many drinks together as friends. We don’t talk much anymore, but I would like to think that we can one day reconcile over an urwagwa and he will explain everything to me. But that time is not yet here.