A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali Read online

  Nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation

  Winner of the Prix des Libraires du Québec

  “A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a Heart of Darkness for today, with a meaner edge, the moral lines more blurred. I don’t know what reader will read this book without feeling in some way morally tested.”

  —Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi

  “A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is in part a novel about futility. It suggests that when the worst of which humanity is capable is unleashed, as in Rwanda, good is powerless to stand in its way. But it is also an essay in anger. Gil Courtemanche’s fury lights up the book: his fury at how the reverberations of the massacre, which sounded as thunder in Rwanda, barely stirred the moral air in the West until it was too late; his fury at the Western newscasters who sanitized and downplayed what was happening; his fury at the Western public and governments, for their repeated refusals to see Africa as any of their business; and above all his fury at the United Nations, with its hand-wringing and its utter failure to intervene… . Courtemanche’s exceptional book reminds us how a novel can involve the reader imaginatively and morally in ways a work of history or journalism never could. By mixing the documentary and the fictional, Courtemanche has managed to make the massacre visceral, messy and traumatically emotional again.”

  — The Sunday Times

  “The dedication page mentions ‘friends swept away in the maelstrom’ and with this nasty, hopeful, bilious, and affirming book, Courtemanche has done them justice. The journalist in him has, thankfully, emptied himself, heart and all, into a love story full of real people that demand to be remembered.”

  — Quill & Quire

  “A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a blunt, vividly visual account of a human cataclysm that has left a scar on the psyche of us all. At the same time it is a testament to love, its durability and frailty in the face of annihilation. Do not expect it to leave you untouched.”

  —jonathan Kaplan, author of The Dressing Station

  “I would like to salute once more A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, the extraordinary first novel by Gil Courtemanche on the subject of the horror of the Rwandan genocide. In my humble opinion, this fresco with humanist accents, which could easily find a place next to the works of Albert Camus and Graham Greene, is the novel of the year.”

  —La Presse

  “This extraordinary novel deserves a wider audience—not just for what it has to say about a recent holocaust that has been callously, if not criminally, overlooked, but also for what it says about the worst and, occasionally, the best, human beings are capable of… . Valcourt is the kind of unheroic hero Graham Greene might have created… . By turns angry and elegiac, Courtemanche’s novel is a damning document, an accusation aimed at a world that was and, to a large extent, remains oblivious to one of history’s worst crimes.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Riveting… . Courtemanche’s literary influences include Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and joseph Conrad. Those influences show.”

  — Victoria Times Colonist

  “An astonishing first novel… [Courtemanche’s] time in Rwanda, where he worked as a journalist, may have produced the first great novel of the catastrophe that befell that country.”

  —Giles Foden, The Guardian

  VINTAGE CANADA ELECTRONIC EDITION, 2014

  Copyright © 2000 Éditions du Boréal, Montréal

  Translation copyright © 2003 Patricia Claxton

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company, Toronto, in 2014. First published in English in hardcover in Canada by Alfred. A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2003. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Page 259 constitutes a continuation of the copyright page.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Courtemanche, Gil

  [Dimanche à la piscine à Kigali. English] A Sunday at the pool in Kigali / Gil Courtemanche; translated by Patricia Claxton.

  Translation of: Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80913-1

  I. Claxton, Patricia, 1929– II. Title. III. Title: Dimanche à la piscine à Kigali. English.

  Image credits: Hiroya Kaji/Photonica

  v3.1

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Translator’s Note

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sources

  About the Authors

  To my Rwandan friends swept away in the maelstrom

  Émérita, André, Cyprien, Raphaël,

  Landouald, Hélène, Méthode

  To a few unsung heroes still living

  Louise, Marie, Stratton, Victor

  Finally, to Gentille, who served me eggs and beer and

  could be dead or alive, if only I knew

  I have tried to speak for you

  I hope I have not failed you

  Translator’s Note

  I have had the pleasure and privilege of working closely with Gil Courtemanche, following the original publication in French of Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali.

  In response to suggestions that readers might appreciate knowing more about the background of Rwandan politics, I have provided a few additional footnotes and now and then added a clarifying word or two to the body of the book, hoping to give a maximum of information with a minimum of disruption to the story. Some of this material was provided by the author.

  The translation of all quotations of poetry by Paul Éluard and of a sentence by Albert Camus is mine. Bibliographical references for the original excerpts will be found at the back of the book.

  I would like to thank a number of people for their assistance with background and terminological information in their fields of expertise: Nouella Grimes, Antonino Mazza, Roger Titman, Eleanor Maclean of the Blacker-Wood Library of Biology at McGill University, Line Provost of La Clinique médicale l’Actuel in Montreal, Dr. Anne-Louise Lafontaine, Dr. David Claxton. Thank you to Gil Courtemanche for his cooperation and his confidence in me. Thank you also to Louise Dennys, Noelle Zitzer and Doris Cowan for their careful, courteous editing, and to our Australian publisher, Michael Heyward, for some astute and timely observations.

  Patricia Claxton, Montreal, january 2003

  Preface

  This novel is fiction. But it is also a chronicle and eyewitness report. The characters all existed in reality, and in almost every case I have used their real names. The novelist has given them lives, acts and words that summarize or symbolize what the journalist observed while in their company. If I have taken the liberty of inventing a little, I have done so the better to convey the human quality of the murdered men and women.
Those who planned and carried out the genocide are identified in this book by their true names. Some readers may attribute certain scenes of violence and cruelty to an overactive imagination. They will be sadly mistaken. For proof, they have only to read the seven hundred pages of eyewitness reports gathered by the African Rights organization and published under the title Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (African Rights, London, 1995).

  Finally, I would like to thank Patricia Claxton for the wonderful job she has done in translating my book into English, and for the skill and great care she brought to the task. As a result of our discussions, we made a few useful modifications and I took her counsel and the opportunity she offered to clarify some additional points. A good translation improves a text, and I feel that is certainly true in this case.

  G.C.

  Chapter One

  In the middle of Kigali there is a swimming pool surrounded by deckchairs and a score of tables all made of white plastic. And forming a huge L overhanging this patch of blue stands the Hôtel des Mille-Collines, with its habitual clientele of international experts and aid workers, middle-class Rwandans, screwed-up or melancholy expatriates of various origins, and prostitutes. All around the pool and hotel in lascivious disorder lies the part of the city that matters, that makes the decisions, that steals, kills, and lives very nicely, thank you. The French Cultural Centre, the UNICEF offices, the Ministry of Information, the embassies, the president’s palace (recognizable by the tanks on guard), the crafts shops popular with departing visitors where one can unload surplus black market currency, the radio station, the World Bank offices, the archbishop’s palace. Encircling this artificial paradise are the obligatory symbols of decolonization: Constitution Square, Development Avenue, Boulevard of the Republic, Justice Avenue, and an ugly, modern cathedral. Farther down, almost in the underbelly of the city, stands the red brick mass of the Church of the Holy Family, disgorging the poor in their Sunday best into crooked mud lanes bordered by houses made of the same clay. Small red houses—just far enough away from the swimming pool not to offend the nostrils of the important—filled with shouting, happy children, with men and women dying of AIDS and malaria, thousands of small households that know nothing of the pool around which others plan their lives and, more importantly, their predictable deaths.

  Jackdaws as big as eagles and as numerous as house sparrows caw all around the hotel gardens. They circle in the sky, waiting, like the humans they’re observing, for the cocktail hour. Now is when the beers arrive, while the ravens are alighting on the tall eucalyptus trees around the pool. When the ravens have settled, the buzzards appear and take possession of the topmost branches. Woe betide the lowly jackdaw that fails to respect the hierarchy. Birds behave like humans here.

  Precisely as the buzzards are establishing their positions around the pool, precisely then, the French paratroopers on the plastic deckchairs begin putting on Rambo airs. They sniff all the feminine flesh splashing around in the heavily chlorinated water of the pool. Its freshness matters little. There is vulture in these soldiers with their shaven heads, watching and waiting beside a pool that is the centrepiece of a meat stall where the reddest, most lovingly garnished morsels are displayed alongside the flabby and scrawny feminine fare whose only diversion is this waterhole. On Sundays, as on every other day of the week at around five o’clock, a number of carcasses—some plump, some skeletal— disturb the surface of the pool, well aware that the “paras,” as the paratroopers are known, are not the least daunted either by cellulite or by skin clinging to bones merely from habit. The women, if they knew what danger stalked them, would drown in anticipation of ecstasy or else get themselves to a nunnery.

  This tranquil Sunday, a former minister of justice is warming up energetically on the diving board. He does not realize that his strenuous exercises are eliciting giggles from the two prostitutes from whom he is expecting a sign of recognition or interest before diving into the water. He wants to beguile because he doesn’t want to pay. He hits the water like a disjointed clown. The girls laugh. The paras too.

  Around the pool, Québécois and Belgian aid workers vie in loud laughter. The Belgians and Québécois aren’t friends; they don’t work together, even though they are working toward the same goal: ‘development.’ That magic word which dresses up the best and most irrelevant of intentions. The two groups are rivals, always explaining to the locals why their kind of development is better than the others’. The only thing they have in common is the din they make. There ought to be a word for the atmosphere surrounding these Whites who talk, laugh and drink in a way that makes the whole pool know their importance—no, not even that—just their vacuous existence. Let’s use the word ‘noisiness’ because there’s certainly noise, but it’s continuous, there’s a permanence to it, a perpetual squawking. In this shy, reticent and often deceptive country, they live in a state of noisiness, like noisy animals. They are also in continuous rut. Noise is their breathing, silence their death, and the asses of Rwandan women their territory of exploration. They are noisy explorers of Third World asses. Only the Germans, when they descend on the hotel in force like a battalion of moralizing accountants, can match the Belgians and Québécois in noisiness.

  Important Frenchmen don’t stay at this hotel. They dig themselves in at the Méridien with high-class Rwandans and clean hookers who sip whisky. The hookers at this hotel are rarely clean. They drink Pepsi while waiting to be picked up and offered a local beer, which may get them offered a whisky or a vodka later on. But these women are realists, so today they’ll settle for a Pepsi and a John.

  Valcourt, who is also Québécois but has almost forgotten it over the years, observes these things and notes them down, muttering as he does so, sometimes angrily, sometimes with tenderness, but always audibly. For all anyone knows or imagines, he’s writing about them, and everyone wants someone to ask him what he’s writing, and worries about this book he’s been writing since the Project left him more or less high and dry. Sometimes he even pretends to be writing, in order to show he’s alive, watchful and serious like the disillusioned philosopher he claims to be when he runs out of excuses for himself. He’s not writing a book. He writes to put in time between mouthfuls of beer, or to signal that he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Rather like a buzzard on a branch, in fact, Valcourt is waiting for a scrap of life to excite him and make him unfold his wings.

  At the end of the terrace, walking slowly and grandly, appears a Rwandan just back from Paris. You can tell, because his sporty outfit is so new its yellows and greens are blinding, even for sunglass-protected eyes. There’s sniggering at a table of expatriates. Admiration at several tables of locals. The Rwandan just back from Paris is afloat on a magic carpet. From the handle of his crocodile attaché case dangle First Class and Hermès labels. In his pocket, along with other prestige labels, he probably has an import licence for some product of secondary necessity, which he will sell at a premium price.

  He orders a “verbena-mint” at such volume that three ravens depart the nearest tree. Gentille, who has just completed her social service studies and is interning at the hotel, doesn’t know what a verbena-mint is. Intimidated, she whispers—so softly she can’t even hear herself—that there are only two brands of beer, Primus and Mutzig. The Rwandan on his magic carpet is not listening and replies that of course he wants the best, even if it’s more expensive. So Gentille will bring him a Mutzig, which for some is the best and for everyone more expensive. Valcourt scribbles feverishly. He describes the scene with indignation, adding some notes about the outrageousness of African corruption, but he does not stir.

  “You little slut!” the Rwandan just back from Paris yells when confronted by his Mutzig that is not a verbena-mint. “I know the minister of tourism, you dirty Tutsi, sleeping with a White so you can work at the hotel!” And Gentille, whose name is as lovely as her breasts, which are so pointed they abrade her starched shirt-dress, Gentille, whose face is more lovely still, and whose ass is more dist
urbing in its impudent adolescence than anything else about her, Gentille, who is so embarrassed by her beauty she has never smiled or spoken an unnecessary word, Gentille cries. Just a few tears and a little sniff of the kind young girls still have in them before the smells of men take hold between their thighs.

  For six months now Valcourt has thought of only one thing between the thighs of Agathe, who comes to his room when she has no customers rather than risk walking home to Nyamirambo in the dark. For six months now he has barely been getting it half up with Agathe because he wants to turn Gentille’s breasts into a woman’s breasts; six months in which the only thing that gets it up is seeing Gentille walking with those sweet breasts of hers among the tables on the terrace or through the dining room. Valcourt has but one plan in his head now—to thread Gentille, enfiler is the word he has in mind, a favourite of the writer Paul Léautaud whom he had discovered through a woman crueller than any of the words of that detestable writer, a woman who left him in pieces like a badly butchered carcass on a blood-smeared meat counter.

  “I’m the president’s nephew,” bawls the Rwandan just back from Paris.

  No, he’s not one of the president’s nephews. Valcourt knows them all. The one who plays the political science student in Quebec but in Rwanda organizes death squads that go after Tutsis at night in Remero, Gikondo and Nyamirambo. And the one who controls the sale of condoms donated by international aid agencies, and another who has AIDS and thinks the way to get rid of his poison is by fucking young virgins, and the other three, Eugène, Clovis, and Firmin, who are soldiers and protectors of the hookers at the Kigali Night, the “cleanest” of Kigali’s hookers. The paras screw the clean hookers in the bush around the bar without condoms because the president’s nephews tell them they fuck them without condoms and they aren’t sick. And the rapacious French jerks believe them. As if they didn’t know the Kigali Night belongs to one of the president’s sons.