• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“There was a great ceremony. My husband’s family brought my parents two cows and six goats. We went to the priest so he could bless us. Afterward, we organized a big party.”

“What was he like as a person, a man, a husband?” I ask.

“The type of husband I dreamed of since I was a child. Someone very tall, who’s not a drunk and doesn’t smoke. When I met him, he had all these qualities, and I said, ‘This is the man.’

“As a husband, he was responsible. As the father of my children, he was responsible up to the end of his life. He had a habit. When I was very tired he would say, ‘Today, it is not your chore. I will prepare food for the whole family. ’ He prepared eggs and rice. That was his dish. This created a problem with his family. They said, ‘How can a man prepare food for his wife? This must be a problem of witchcraft.’

“But there was no witchcraft. Only love.

“We say when you love one another very much, you don’t have a long life. Sometimes I have candidates, men who come and would like me to be with them, but when I remember the love my husband had for me and I know those men have their own wives, I say, ‘No. You can’t give me love as given by my husband. You only want to joke with me. No. No.’”

“I have one last question,” I tell her. It has been on my mind for a year. “My father didn’t die in a violent way. He had cancer. But when I think of him, the first thing that comes to mind is the way he would slowly run his finger around the edge of his coffee cup while we would talk for hours. I miss that.” His habit used to annoy me when he was alive. But when I think of it now, I remember it like the slow hum of a Tibetan singing prayer bowl. “What do you miss about your husband?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “When I was pregnant, very heavy with a baby, my husband would wash my body. It was very intimate.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Salt

WHY? THAT’S THE burning question I’ve had for years.

I have a unique opportunity to talk with one of the very few people who might have the answer. I’m sitting down with a former Interahamwe rebel who is staying at the child soldier rehabilitation center. André walks into the empty boys’ dorm, which is lined with wooden bunk beds and barred windows. I’m surprised. He is a chubby-cheeked seventeen-year-old in jeans and a T-shirt—and he’s Congolese. He carries himself with the mild, respectful manner common to boys who have been through serious military training.

In 2002, André was at school when the Interahamwe showed up to “recruit.” They forcibly took every boy in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. He was eleven years old.

André lived as a member of the Interahamwe for six years. “Life in the forest was very, very hard,” he tells me. “It was not possible to wash with soap. We had to eat food without salt. It was impossible to eat food prepared in pans, to have clothes. We had hair everywhere on our bodies. We ate tree roots. We passed many years without seeing anyone in society.”

I ask, “If Interahamwe rebels could have normal lives once they leave the militia, how many would simply walk away?”

“If you leave, you are killed. If there was really a possibility, if they had authorization to go home, maybe eighty out of a hundred would accept. Easily.”

For a boy who never finished fifth grade, he is as close to the mark as any Washington policy wonk. Those I have spoken to estimate would-be Interahamwe deserters at around 70 percent.

“The other twenty—why would they stay?” I ask.

“The twenty are afraid of judgment. They recognize they have killed a lot of people in Rwanda. One person may have killed more than a hundred persons in Rwanda, so they say, ‘Instead of going back to my country, I prefer to shoot myself and die here in the forest.’”

The Interahamwe are responsible for the most sadistic violence in Eastern Congo. But perhaps worse, this force of six to eight thousand provides the excuse for other militias to exist—and terrorize—in the name of protecting civilians from the Interahamwe. The combined presence of these militias has