I PEELED AWAY from the killers and turned the car toward my beloved Hotel Mille Collines.
A squad of militia had set up a roadblock right in front of the entrance. I had come to dread them on sight-young boys, many no older than fourteen, dressed in ragged clothes with red, green, and yellow stripes and carrying spears and machetes and a few battered rifles. These boys had liberated some Primus beer from someplace and were guzzling it down, though it was early in the morning. They were checking the identification papers of everyone attempting to get inside the Mille Collines. But they had not yet entered the hotel itself.
I got out of the car to talk to them. It is always better to be face-to-face with the man you intend to deal with rather than have him standing over you. To be on the same physical plane changes the tone of the conversation.
“I’m the manager of both the Diplomates and the Mille Collines, ” I told them. “I’m coming to see what is going on.”
To my surprise they did not ask me for my identification book. They glanced briefly at my family in the car before waving us through. I thought I saw them smirk to each other. If I had to guess what they were thinking, it would be this: “Oh, why not let six more cockroaches inside? It will make it easier to find them when the time comes.” They looked at me and my wife and children and must have seen corpses.
All over Rwanda people were leaving their homes and running to places where they thought they might be spared.
Churches were favorite hiding places. In the village of Ntarama just south of the capital the mayor told the local population of Tutsis to go inside the rectangular brick Catholic church to wait out the violence instead of trying to hide in the nearby swamps. The church had been a safe refuge during the troubles in 1959 and nobody had forgotten the seemingly magical role that it had played. More than five thousand frightened people crammed inside. But here, as well as everywhere in Rwanda, the sanctuaries of Christ were a cruel trap; they only made easy places for the mobs to herd the fugitives. RTLM radio kept saying the churches were staging bases and weapons depots for the rebel invaders, which was total nonsense, but it provided a motivation-and perhaps some intellectual comfort-for hesitant killers to go inside and start chopping. Like my father said when I was a boy: “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.”
Four busloads of cheerful Army soldiers and militiamen arrived to do the job at Ntarama. A man named Aphrodise Nsengiyumva was at the altar leading prayers and trying to keep everyone cheerful when those outside started breaking holes through the walls with sledgehammers and grenades. Light streamed into the darkened room. It would be among the last things most people in here would ever see. Grenades were tossed in through the holes, blasting some of the refugees into bits, splashing blood and muscle tissue all over the compound. Other militiamen broke down the doors and waded into the crowd with spears, clubs, and machetes. Babies were ripped from their mother’s arms and dashed against the wall. People were cut down as they prayed.
It happened at secular buildings as well, and there, too, death was usually preceded by a betrayal.
A rumor went around in the suburb of Kicukiro, for example, that the UN troops stationed at a technical school would offer protection from the mobs. There were indeed ninety commandos at the school, but they were less than eager to offer any protection. Nonetheless, about two thousand of the hunted took shelter in the classroom buildings behind the very thin layer of safety afforded by the blue helmets and their weapons.
On April 12, the same day my family and I reached the Mille Collines, the order was given for the UN troops to abandon the school and help make sure that foreigners got out of Rwanda safely. The mission had changed. As the country slid further and further into mass murder, the Security Council, Kofi Annan, and the United States decided that the mandate of the UN troops was not to halt the killings but to ensure an orderly evacuation of all non-Rwandans. Everyone else was to be left behind. Anyone with white skin or a foreign passport was given a free trip out. Even their pet dogs were evacuated with them.
The nation of Belgium was more than happy to go along; the grisly torture slayings of the ten soldiers assigned to protect Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana had shocked the public back home. The former colonial masters could no longer stomach the quagmire they had helped create. As it happened, the ninety UN troops at the vocational school were native Belgians. They must have heard the stories of the militia at the roadblocks making sawing motions across their throats with machetes whenever they spotted a Belgian uniform. Most of the Interahamwe, in fact, would be given standing orders to kill any person found carrying a Belgian passport. The militias surrounding the school did not have the firepower to take on the UN soldiers, so they lay on the grass drinking beer and chanting slogans and making threatening gestures. It must have been something of a relief for those Belgian soldiers to move out, knowing they would be killed cheerfully if they ran out of ammunition in a firefight. This was the clearest signal yet that the world was preparing to close its eyes, close its ears, and turn its back on what was happening.
The refugees knew what lay in store. Some begged the departing soldiers to shoot them in the head so they would not have to face slow dismemberment. Others tried to lie down in front of the Belgians’ jeeps so they could not leave. Still others chased after the vehicles screaming, “Do not abandon us!” The soldiers responded by shooing the refugees out of the way and firing warning shots to keep them from mobbing the departing convoy.
The massacre of two thousand people began immediately after the last UN jeep had disappeared down the street.
I decided to get rid of that roadblock outside the hotel. It was a danger to everyone inside the Mille Collines. Anybody trying to come inside would have to show their identity book. Those who could not prove their Hutuness would be murdered on the spot, barely fifty yards from temporary refuge.
After I made sure that my wife and children were safely behind the doors of Room 126 I retreated into the manager’s office with what would turn out to be one of the most formidable weapons I had in my possession. Its existence was kept secret from just about everybody I knew. It was taken out only in moments of complete privacy.
It was a black leather binder that I had purchased many years ago on a trip to Belgium. Inside were about a hundred pages of closely written script, arranged in three columns on each page. There were entries for name, for title, and for phone number.
This was my personal directory of numbers for the elite circle of government and commerce in Rwanda. For years I had made a habit of collecting the business cards of local people who passed through the Diplomates or the Mille Collines and then entering their information in pencil in my binder at the end of the day. If they came into the hotel often enough, and if I liked them, I made sure that they occasionally received little gifts from me. Almost everyone in this book had a favorite drink and I tried to keep that information memorized. If I heard gossip that a particular person had been demoted, promoted, transferred, fired, or jailed I made a change to their title. Army officers, managers, doctors, ministers, professors-they were all listed in neat phalanxes, and the eraser marks and crossed-out titles next to their names were a rough map of the shifting sands of Rwandan politics. My binder may have been one of the better registries of power in the capital. I could never be certain about this, of course, because nobody would talk about keeping such a thing. It could be used as evidence if you were found to be connected to a person who fell from grace.
Now, of course, I had no idea who in this book was still in power-or even alive.
Many of the lines rang without anybody picking up. There were a handful of busy signals and quite a few tonal patterns that indicated phones were out of service. But then I found myself talking to a young military camp chief named, as it happened, Commander Habyarimana, though he was not related to the assassinated president. After a few minutes of conversation, I began to recall what I had heard about him, and I realized that I had come to the right place. The commander was an angry young man, but not for the same reasons that the Interahamwe were angry. His fury was directed at the presidential cronies, who he felt were responsible for turning Rwanda into an armed hothouse of people who hated one another for no good reason. Commander Habyarimana had wound up on the wrong end of a dispute with a superior and had been thrown into Kigali ’s notorious jail for political prisoners, which was nicknamed “1930” for its year of construction. He was eventually released and had been able to climb back up the military ladder. He was just as disgusted as I was at the recent outbreaks of murder, and he promised to send me five of his men to help protect the hotel from invasion.
It was a good start, but I still wanted that roadblock gone.
I made a few more calls and finally got on the line with General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, a man whom I had known for several years. He was the commander of the National Police. I did not envy him his position. The army had drafted thousands of his best officers and appropriated a large part of the police arsenal, leaving him with a squad of, at most, a thousand poorly trained and unequipped recruits to get control of the violent capital streets. Whatever he could do for me was going to be a major gift.
“Now, general, ” I said quietly, in the voice of a man calling in a chip.“We have some refugees over here, as you know, and that militia outside can come inside here anytime they want.”
I knew that he was afraid of the Interahamwe himself, and perhaps also of being accused of not supporting the pogroms that had recently become the law of the land. It seemed that such a perception could spell death in these times. But I kept at him.
“General, you know we are friends and will always be friends. You know that I would not ask this if I weren’t in great danger. Something must be done about that roadblock. You could send some officers to encourage those boys to move elsewhere. There doesn’t need to be bloodshed in front of my hotel.”
It continued on like this for a while, and he agreed he would help me. I wasn’t certain if he was going to come through. But within a few hours the roadblock had disappeared.
Having won that temporary respite, I turned my attention to another problem. I had to get hold of the master keys that opened everything in the hotel. These were the tools that a hotel manager cannot afford to be without.
Bik Cornelis had told me that he had entrusted the keys to the reception staff, and so I approached one of the supervisors there, a man I’ll call Jacques.
“Hello, ” I said. “It is now my responsibility to look after the hotel. I understand you have the keys?”
“Ah yes, the keys, ” he said. “I am not sure who has them right now.”
He made a show of asking his associate, who also denied any direct knowledge of their whereabouts. But these men had charge of the reception desk, which is where Bik had told me the keys could be found. It was immediately clear what was really happening, although neither Jacques nor I felt any need to say it outright.
I should pause here and explain what I mean. Despite its history of bloodshed and jealously Rwandan culture is rooted in an attitude of excessive politeness. Perhaps it comes from all the fear in our background, the heavy hand of the European masters pressed down on our ancestors, but nobody here likes to give a simple no. It is viewed as rude. So what you often get in response to a direct question is a rambling story in which the refusal is voiced through a very soft yes. Or you often get an outright lie. Important conversations can turn into exhausting set pieces. Ask an average Rwandan on the street where he is going that day, and he’ll be likely to tell you “Oh, I don’t really know, ” even though he knows very well. Elusive answers are a national art form; any man on the street here could easily work as a high-level diplomat. But both parties usually know what is being said without anyone having to say it out loud. We call this “the Rwandan no.” Occasionally it can be misread. But I was almost certain that Jacques was blowing smoke because he liked the idea of being in charge of the Mille Collines.
I soon found out that he was staying in the manager’s apartment with his girlfriend. He was also giving orders to the staff as though he was in charge of the hotel. He had taken several bottles of the best champagne and was having a party with his friends. I did not view this as an affront to my pride so much as I viewed it as a threat to my life and the lives of the refugees upstairs. I had no idea where his loyalties really lay. We were in danger of invasion and slaughter and I suspected that he was informing the thugs outside of what was happening in here and who was occupying what room. But I could not fire him without risking a staff coup d’état at this fragile time.
I got on the phone to the Sabena Corporation in Brussels to clarify that I had their support. I then asked them to fax me a letter naming me the interim manager of the Mille Collines until further notice. It came rolling through a few seconds later, bearing the signature of Michel Houtard. He always joked that I might become president of Rwanda, but for now I just wanted to take control of this hotel for a few more days, until the danger had passed.
Photocopies of the letter were immediately tacked onto employee bulletin boards all over the property. And then I went to Jacques again. This time there was no pretense of cordiality.
“I want the keys right now, ” I told him. “And I want this place in good order. If you agree with me, fine. If you don’t, then, please: good-bye.” I got my keys.
There were two main reasons why the Hotel Mille Collines was left alone in those early days even while churches and schools became abattoirs.
The first was the initial confusion-and even timidity-of the militias. Raiding the hotel would have been a fairly high-profile operation and one that surely would have angered a lot of people in power. The Mille Collines had an image of being linked with the ruling elite and was viewed as something not to be tampered with. This mind-set was not set in stone, however, and I’m sure it would have changed as the genocide wore on and the killers grew bolder.
The second reason we were able to get some breathing room is one I have already mentioned. We had five policemen standing outside thanks to my new friend, Commander Habyarimana. As fragile as this protection was, it was still much better than what we got from the UN, which amounted to just about nothing. They had a force of 2, 700 troops stationed in Rwanda when the president was assassinated, and the majority of them had been evacuated along with all the foreigners. But about 500 peacekeepers were to be left in the country-God knows why-and 4 of them were staying as guests at the Mille Collines. They were well meaning but useless.
On April 16 I sent General Dallaire a letter informing him of our situation and asking him for some additional soldiers to safeguard our refugees. I heard later that he ordered the Bangladeshis to come help us but that their commander flat-out refused. Dallaire then rescinded his order. This was appalling to me, and I was not even a military man. This incident underlined what a later United Nations report termed “grave problems of command and control” within the mission and heightened my feeling that Dallaire could have and should have done more to put his men in between the killers and their victims.
This is not a condemnation of Romeo Dallaire as a person. I always liked him and felt he had a compassionate heart and a strong sense of morality. He had acted with honor and determination under extremely bad circumstances-and with a shameful lack of support from his bosses on the UN staff and on the Security Council. Early in the genocide he had insisted that with just five thousand well-equipped soldiers he could have stopped the killings, and nobody has ever doubted his judgment. Dallaire had also proved himself to be a shrewd commander of the media during the crisis, granting multiple radio interviews in an attempt to get the world to pay attention to what was happening here. I would gladly share a cognac with him today, and I would hope we could also share a laugh. But I still feel he should have disobeyed his foolish orders from New York and acted more aggressively to stop street murders from taking place. There is no doubt he would have taken more casualties and turned the UN into a third belligerent in the civil war, but I am convinced this action would have slapped the world in the face and forced it to do something about the unspeakable carnage here. At the very least it would have forced the UN to beef up its peacekeeping force and send us real fighters instead of inept draftees from nations who seemed more interested in collecting their per diem payments from the UN instead of doing anything meaningful.
If he did not have the stomach to do this then I think he should have made a spectacle out of resigning in protest of his hopeless job description. This, too, would have drawn some outrage to what was shaping up to be the most rapid genocide in world history. That he stayed in his job like a good soldier was a signal of a trust that the UN strategy of nonengagement was going to be a workable policy even though it appears despicable in retrospect.
In my opinion the UN was not just useless during the genocide. It was worse than useless. It would have been better off for us if they did not exist at all, because it allowed the world to think that something was being done, that some parental figure was minding the store. It created a fatal illusion of safety. Rwanda was left with a little more than five hundred poorly trained UN soldiers who weren’t even authorized to draw their weapons to stop a child from being sacrificed right in front of them. A total withdrawal would have been preferable to this farce.
The grounds of the Mille Collines were surrounded by a fence of bamboo and wire. It was about six feet high and intended by the architect to provide a visual sense of a snug compound, all the better for nervous foreign visitors to feel like their hotel was an island of safety embedded in the street grid of Kigali. If you pushed on the fence hard enough it would fall over. It provided an illusion of protection, nothing more.
From the corridor windows of the west wing, and from some of the room balconies, you could see over the top of this fence and also through the gaps. There were figures passing back and forth all day long on the other side, like backstage players making shadows on a curtain. Most were carrying spears and machetes. Some stopped to peer at us through the fence before moving on.
All the refugees, including my wife and children, were terrified of these shadows behind the bamboo. Tatiana’s family was living in a small town near the city of Butare, where the killings had not yet started but were imminent. She was terrified for them, terrified for herself and our children and me, and I cannot say I blame her. Everyone in the hotel felt a similar sense of dread. I felt terribly exposed here, but I did not see an alternative. If we left it would be a sign to the killers that the Mille Collines was being surrendered. Besides, where else could we go? Nowhere in Rwanda was safe.
This belief of mine was the subject of a bitter fight between us. My wife confronted me in the parking lot and insisted we drive to safety in my home area of Murama. To back up her argument she enlisted my friend Aloise Karasankwavu, an executive with the Commercial Bank who was also in fear of his life. He was a persuasive speaker, and we jousted.
“In all of history there has never been a war brought to that little town, ” he told me. And in a sense he was right-at least in my own memory. The uprisings of 1959 and 1973 had created a lot of prejudice in my hometown, but they had never resulted in massacres. But there was no guarantee that blood wasn’t being spilled there right now, without our knowledge.
“My friend, the whole country has gone mad, ” I told him. “Do you think Murama will be spared?”
“You are being misled by the Europeans, Paul. Even the mwami used to bring his cows there for safekeeping during times of trouble. Throughout history it has always been a refuge.”
“Aloise, even if that were true, how do you think you are going to get there? By flying? There are hundreds of roadblocks out there. You will be stopped and possibly killed.”
I looked at my wife, whose eyes were red and miserable. I only wished we had stayed in Brussels a week ago. I wanted to go to Murama as badly as she did-I still had brothers and sisters living there and I was tremendously worried for them-but I knew it would be risking death to go out onto the roads.
I am not necessarily proud of what I did next, but it happened. I lost my temper.
“Listen, ” I told her, “you have a driver’s license. You know how to drive.”
I held out the keys to the Suzuki jeep.
“Take these, ” I told her. “You go to Murama.”
She looked back at me with furious eyes. We loved each other fiercely, but she was a Tutsi and I was a Hutu. This trivia of ancestry had never mattered the slightest bit in our marriage, but it mattered to the killers around us, and I loathed Rwanda more than I ever had before because of it. Once again I hated myself for being a lucky Hutu. Many years before Tatiana’s father had taken the precaution of changing the whole family’s identification cards to read “Hutu, ” but she might have been recognized by someone at a roadblock. We both knew this.
I was, of course, not going to surrender the keys to my wife under any circumstances. I only wanted to make a point. But it was a harsh one, and perhaps too harsh. I was trying to highlight our need to stay where we were and wait for the bloodletting to stop. But my wife was hurt by my words.
Aloise later took his wife and children and hitched a ride out of town, trying to get to Murama. He did not make five kilometers. The militia forced them all out of the car and separated him from his family. Amazingly, nobody was killed. Aloise went on foot to the village of Nyanza, and later on to Murama.
I would learn it was extremely fortunate that we decided not to leave the capital.
The Mille Collines grew more and more crowded. The rumor had spread through town that the hotel was a safe haven from the killers. This was far from the truth, but hope becomes a kind of insanity in times of trouble. Those cunning or lucky enough to dodge the roadblocks were welcomed inside, even though the hotel stood every chance of becoming a killing zone without warning.
We charged no money for rooms. All the usual rules were irrelevant; we were now more of a refugee camp than a hotel. To take cash away from anyone would also be to strip them of money they might need to bribe their way out of being murdered. Some guests of mine who were wealthy came to me with a proposal that they would sign a letter of guarantee promising to pay Sabena when the trouble was over, and I accepted this. But nobody was asked for money.
One exception to this rule was liquor. Those who could afford it were allowed to buy cocktails and bottles of beer-never invite a man without one, even in a crisis-and I used the proceeds to help buy food. It was one way of passing the hat. I also asked my bosses at Sabena to send me more cash and they were able to smuggle two hundred thousand Rwandan francs to me with the help of a humanitarian organization that I should not name here. Room, however, was our greatest asset, and one that could not have a price tag attached. I guarded it closely and had to fight for it on one occasion. I have already mentioned my battle with the reception staff. One of them-Jacques, my problem employee-had taken it upon himself to live in the manager’s apartment with his girlfriend. They were in there alone, and wasting crucial space. Other recalcitrant employees had followed his example and were claiming the choicest suites for themselves. In my mind, nobody had this prerogative. We needed to conserve and share everything we had, and that included the most precious thing we had to offer.
So I went to their room and knocked.“I have two choices for you, ” I said. “Either you can move to smaller rooms or you can have some new neighbors.” After that I felt free to assign other refugees to sleep in the rooms they had been hogging for themselves. That put a quick end to their party. It also freed up yet more accommodations for those people who kept finding their way to the Mille Collines from the mayhem outside the fence. I resolved that nobody who could make it here would be turned away.
I cannot say that life was normal inside that crowded building, but what I saw in there convinced me that ordinary human beings are born with an extraordinary ability to fight evil with decency. We had Hutu and Tutsi sleeping beside each other. Strangers on the floor, many of whom had witnessed their families being butchered, would sometime sleep spoon style just to feel the touch of another.
We struggled to preserve routines. It helped keep us sane. The bishop from St. Michael’s parish, a man named Father Nicodem, was one of our guests and he started holding regular masses in the ballroom. There was no such thing as privacy, but occasionally the occupants of a room would clear out to give a husband and a wife some room to make love. Several women became pregnant during the genocide, a way of fighting death with life, I suppose.
There was even a wedding. A seventeen-year-old girl was pregnant and her father was a very traditional Muslim who wanted nothing more than to see her married so the child would not be born outside wedlock. The bishop agreed to perform the sacrament in the ballroom. She was married right there to her boyfriend, and nobody thought to question the difference in faiths.
I suppose it is natural to want a form of government, even in times of chaos (perhaps especially in times of chaos), and so five of the guests agreed to serve as a kind of high council to mediate disputes between the residents. I met regularly with them as a sort of chairman. You might have called the Hotel Mille Collines a kind of constitutional monarchy in those days, because I reserved the right to make all the final judgments on matters of day-to-day living. My kingship came not from a heavenly birthright but from the personnel department of the Sabena Corporation sent via fax from Brussels.
In mid-April we lost our water and electricity. The killers had cut all of our utility lines in an attempt to make us uncomfortable. Perhaps they thought we would all drift away and then they could finish us off outside. It confirmed for me what I already knew-that they had designs to murder us-but it also gave me a bit of hope. The militia still did not want to risk an overt massacre at the hotel. We ran our emergency generator for a while with smuggled gasoline, but it eventually broke down, and so most of our time was spent in darkness.
Life immediately became even harder. The absence of electric lights created a mood I can only describe as disintegrating. How secure those lights had somehow made us feel! Everybody knew the killers liked to do their work in the dark, and the darkness inside the hotel made it feel like a permanent midnight. The absence of light created a sense of decay around the world, which appeared to be running down on its axis, its center breaking apart into mindless pieces. Our last days would be spent in shadows.
Each room held an average of eight frightened and brutalized people. They slept fitfully in the humid dark and often awoke to the sounds of a neighbor shouting or whimpering in a dream. There were mothers who cried out for sons who they would never see again, husbands who wept in secret for their disappeared wives. And though few people wanted to say it out loud, I think most shared my belief that we would all wind up dead ourselves when the militias outside finally decided to raid the Mille Collines. Those hotel rooms were like death-row prison cells, but we knew they were all that kept us from joining the ranks of the murdered for one more day. I worried there would be no more space, but we kept finding ways to fit more people inside our walls. I suppose it is like the story of the oil not running out in the Temple of Jerusalem. There was always more room. I think I would have ordered my guests to start lying on top of one another if it would have meant saving a few more lives. And I don’t think anybody inside the Mille Collines would have objected.
That these people crammed together in the rancid half light, each nursing their own horrors, could endure such conditions and keep on fighting on the side of life is proof to me not just of the human capacity for endurance but also to the basic decency inside all people that comes out when death appears imminent. To me, that old saying about one’s life flashing before the eyes is really a love for all life in those final moments and not merely one’s own; a primal empathy for all people who are born and must taste death. We clung to one another while the violence escalated, and most of us did not lose faith that order would be restored. Whether we would be there to see it was a separate question. All we could do was wait in the dark, with militia spies coming in and going out at all hours, even sleeping among us like fellow refugees. Cats and mice were in the same cage.
The loss of our utilities created another problem. Without water we would all start to dehydrate, forcing people to go out onto the streets rather than die of thirst. We had only a few days to figure out a solution. Every large compound in Rwanda -embassies, restaurants, and hotels-must have their own set of reserve water tanks built onto the property as an emergency supply. Ours were located directly under the basement. I went to check their levels several times a day and watched them steadily dropping. There was no way to get a fresh delivery.
The solution came to me: We did have a reserve supply of water. In the swimming pool.
This pool was, in some ways, the most important part of the Mille Collines. Built in 1973 when the hotel was still new, it was smaller than Olympic size, but it got a lot of use from our European guests who brought children. The logo of the hotel-five overlapping triangles that represented hills-was painted on the slope that led from the deep end to the shallow end. A very ordinary looking pool altogether, but it was the centerpiece of the back lawn, and it was surrounded with ten tables where waiters used to bring cocktails, peanuts, and bar food. This was where the power brokers of Kigali often came to have private conversations with each other in the evening. You never invite a man without a beer.
Something about human nature compels us to draw close to the edge of water. I feel it myself even though I never saw the ocean-or even a lake of any size-until I was seventeen years old. I cannot explain it, but it is real. The tables near the pool were snapped up first, even by men who would not dream of taking a dip, and who may not have been able to swim. Those tables probably saw as much intrigue in the early 1990s as the courtyards of the doge’s palace in the heyday of Venice. In any case, that pool was now a tool of life.
Here was the math. It held approximately seventy-eight thousand gallons. At the time, we had nearly eight hundred guests. If we limited each person to a gallon and a half a day for their washing and drinking needs we could last for a little longer than two months. A rationing system would have to be devised so that each person could be insured of receiving a fair share. So we began a twice-daily ritual: Every morning at 8:30 and every afternoon at 5:00 everyone was told to come down with the small plastic wastepaper bin from their room. They were allowed to dip it once into the pool water, which was already turning slightly yellow. In order to keep the water as clean as possible, we did not permit anyone to swim in it, or even to wade.
The room toilets no longer flushed, and so we had to devise a method to get rid of waste. One of the guests discovered a trick, which was quickly broadcast to the hotel at large: If you poured the pool water into the commode it would still wash the feces and the urine down the pipes. The rooms began to smell a little worse, but at least there was no imminent sanitary emergency.
As for food, we were well stocked at first. Before the massacres started Sabena had a limited partnership with its rival Air France on the question of catering meals for passengers. Because the hotel was the property of the airline their ready-to-eat meals were stored in the basement of the hotel. We did a count: There were approximately two thousand trays. Those would be a limited luxury that we parceled out stingily. It was very strange, of course, to be dining on rosemary chicken and potatoes au gratin while young boys with machetes in hand peered at us over the bamboo fence.
When the airline meals ran low we had to come up with an alternate plan. Even though there were senseless murders happening all over the country-more than five every minute-the marketplaces were still open. People still had to shop, even in the middle of a genocide. I sent the hotel accountant, a man named Belliad, out with a truck and some cash to get us sacks of corn and beans and bundles of firewood. We tried to acquire rice and potatoes, but they were unavailable. I then asked the kitchen staff to cook it up. Since they had no electricity to run the stoves and ovens we had to build a fire underneath the giant ficus tree on the lawn. Large pots of food were set in the blaze. We then served up this vegetable gruel in the large metal trays we had used for buffet-style meals on the lawn. We ate as a group twice a day, the hotel’s fine china balanced on our laps. If the pool was now a village well, the lawn was now our cookhouse.
Now that was a sight! It used to be that we would use the back lawn to host weddings, conferences, and diplomatic receptions. I remembered nights out here with men in dark suits tailored in London and women in long silk dresses, holding cocktails in thin-stemmed glasses, their faces gently lit with the soft colors of Malibu lights and their laughter like the music of an opera libretto. Now our party was one of exhausted refugees in dirty clothes, some with machete wounds, many who had seen their friends turn into killers and their family turned into corpses, all lined up under the ficus tree for that simple act of eating that unconsciously signifies a small piece of hope, the willingness to store up fuel and keep living for another day.