Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong

Author:Michela Wrong [Wrong, Michela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Anyone who was in Rwanda during that era finds a few choice images clinging to their minds long after the events, sending out tendrils of disquiet. From out of the undifferentiated mass of horror peek grotesque individual anecdotes and the odd story of heroism and self-sacrifice. The Tutsi wife who begged her Hutu husband to kill her before the militias did—and he complied. Was he a hero or a monster? The Catholic priest who ordered the church where 2,000 Tutsi parishioners sheltered to be bulldozed by the militiamen. How could anyone reconcile that with the Christian faith? The trusted Hutu retainer spotted by his Tutsi employer manning an interahamwe checkpoint. What was he thinking?

My moment came several months after the genocide, when I was walking up a hilltop on the outskirts of Kibuye, a spot of picture-postcard beauty overlooking the waters of Lake Kivu. Kibuye, I knew, had seen some of the genocide’s worst massacres, so I instinctively headed for where experience dictated many must have died: the church on the summit.

It was Sunday, an organ had been playing, the singing had faded, the devout streamed out of the church doors: an idyllic pastoral scene. The parishioners who quietly passed me on the path, which was lined with high banks of exposed earth—a bulldozer had recently been at work, I saw—seemed like model citizens.

They looked neither left nor right, which allowed them to avoid commenting on the sight that suddenly brought me up short. From one of the mounds of earth poked, ludicrously, comically, a brown L-shaped object. A naked adult foot. The piled earth, I realized, was there for a reason. It hid the bodies of Tutsi men, women, and children slaughtered inside the church, whose corpses, after three long months, had probably been starting to smell.

Who can explain how a God-fearing community calmly worships feet away from where the bodies of 11,000 recently slaughtered neighbors and friends—I later discovered—lie buried—buried, what’s more, with less care than you would allot an item of roadkill—without experiencing some kind of collective spasm? I couldn’t. If instead of a foot—anonymous somehow—a pleading hand, or a recognizable head, had poked out of the soil, would they have felt obliged to do something?

I gazed after the disappearing parishioners. A white soldier was walking down the path, beret on head, high-powered rifle cradled in his arms. He was a Foreign Legionnaire, part of Operation Turquoise, the force President Mitterrand belatedly ordered to southwestern Rwanda. The Foreign Legion is open to all nationalities, and this one happened to be a Brit. He noticed the human foot a split second after I had. “Well, he’s got one foot in the grave,” he quipped, then carried on past me down the path.

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