A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche

Author:Gil Courtemanche [Courtemanche, Gil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9780345809131
Google: 0b8aAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00GQAETUU
Barnesnoble: B00GQAETUU
Goodreads: 19082044
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

The morning after this conjugal spat, the only one they ever had, Valcourt got up very early, with the mists and the ravens, before the dogs and the children. Sitting on the balcony which gave him a view of the city, dazzled by the fig tree shining as though a fairy gardener had waxed each of its leaves during the night, he wrote in a careful hand on hotel letter paper:

“Gentille, if I go back to Canada and you want to come, I’ll take you with me. But I don’t want to go back there. My real country is the country of the people I love. And I love you more than anything in the world. My country is here. We’re father and mother now but we must make this adoption official. It would be easier if we were husband and wife. We must also find a name for our daughter. I don’t really know what order we should do these things in. So as a start, I’m asking you to marry me. And if ever we had to leave this country, it would be for some place neither of us knows. Then each of us would be as lost as the other, each as poor and dependent.”

He crossed the room on tiptoe and put the letter, folded in three, on Gentille’s hip. She was not asleep.

“Wait.” She read it and wept softly.

Ten years earlier he had been playing the tourist in Paris with his sixteen-year-old daughter. At the Musée de l’Orangerie, they gazed at Monet’s Waterlilies unbelievingly, they were so astonished, so overcome by the beauty, nuances and subtleties of the painting. “Oh my, papa, it’s so lovely,” said a choked little voice. Anne-Marie had wept with tenderness at the beauty of life, as Gentille was weeping now. The way a woman weeps, with torn, exhausted muscles and hurting belly, when a red, wrinkled newborn is placed in her arms. For a fleeting moment, Valcourt wanted to tear up the already rumpled sheet of paper, erase the words, go back in time, turn back the clock, start again without yet having succumbed to Gentille’s beauty. Her happiness terrified him. He was no match for this young woman’s passion for life. He was so much older, inevitably he would be the first to die if life unfolded in the normal way. He could only promise her a tiny window of happiness, he knew, he was now convinced, then a plunge into a horrible, lonely void filled with the emptiness he would leave behind, an emptiness crammed only with memories impossible for her to recreate alone. Men who feel loved to distraction are easy prey to complacency, forgetting how much strength and patience women put into forging happiness. In this, Valcourt was a very ordinary man.

And there was something else. The killers were becoming less inhibited, less cautious and less anonymous every day. They proclaimed their extermination plans on the radio. They laughed about them in the bars. Their ideologues, like Léon Mugasera, were inflaming whole regions with their speeches.

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