A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali Read Online Free PDF Page B

if they become what they are not.” Even with the gods and ancestors, caution and discretion are permissible. A man who tells all is a naked man. A naked man is weak.
    He spat into a small calabash. His cousin soaked a strip of wood in his saliva and added a little goat’s grease. She heated the strip over the flame of the oil lamp. She examined the forms created by the heat and closed her eyes. The serving girl brought a big bowl filled with boiling water. Nyamaravago put two little dabs of butter into it. Once the butter was melted, she closed her eyes once more and said, “Your children and the children of your children, as long as they live in the land of the hills, must change their skins like snakes and their colour like chameleons. They must always fly in the direction of the wind and swim with the river. They will be what they are not, otherwise they will suffer from being what they are.” Silence fell. Kawa trembled. Ants could be heard walking on the mat. The cousin slowly raised her right hand. Kawa, without his cow, took the path back to his hill.
    Here is where the story of Gentille, who is yet to be born, begins a second time.
    When he reached home, Kawa said not a word of his journey and even less of his worries or the painful decision he had taken in order to save his progeny and their yet unborn descendants.
    In the land of hills, the father’s origin determines the ethnic group of the children. A Hutu father has Hutu children, a Tutsi father has Tutsi children, regardless of the origin of the mother. Kawa’s daughters would need only to marry Tutsis for their children to be part of the race chosen by the gods and admired by Whites. This ought to be easy to bring about. Kawa was rich and knew many less well-endowed Tutsi families who would gladly agree to improve their lot by a few cows in exchange for a son. But for the males of the family, fate condemned them to remain Hutus in Tutsi bodies. And their origin and that of their children would forever be written on their identity papers. What a nightmare. What a tragic fate. Schools forbidden, scorn from Whites, careers and ambitions blocked. Kawa would not allow his sons and the sons of his sons to be officially inferior beings forever, negroes among negroes.
    Father Athanase confirmed his darkest fears when he reminded him that God loves all his children equally, that the true greatness of man is within and that the first shall be the last, implying, Kawa understood, that the Batwas 6 would enter heaven first, followed by the Hutus, then the Tutsis. He did not dare ask the holy man why the children of God did not love the Hutus and Tutsis equally, why true greatness in this country was physical and why, here on earth, the first are always first. The man of the hills, who does not like to lose face, takes care to save face for the person he is talking to. Which is why he never revealed his transaction with the burgomaster.
    To the burgomaster he offered several cows, several goats and his most beautiful daughter, who had just turned fourteen. The White refused to issue new identity papers transforming Kawa’s Hutus into Tutsis. However, he would take the girl in exchange for the silence he would keep forever regarding Kawa’s improper and shameful proposal. This is how Clémentine (whose buttocks and breasts nourished fantasies in the men of the hill, whatever their ethnic group) became the property of a very ugly, pimply-faced Belgian who came and abused her from behind every time he was in the neighbourhood. She died at seventeen from a blood disease that came, it was whispered, from the cocks of unwashed men.
    Kawa’s other five daughters married Tutsis, thus saving their descendants from shame and infamy. Kawa still had enough cows to find Tutsi wives for his four sons. He chose his daughters-in-law for their stature and paleness of skin. He wanted them slimmer and taller than average, as long and sinuous as snakes, hoping that the Tutsi blood