“What are these people like?” he asked, returning the stares of the people passing.
“Pretty violent,” I said, and told him how, four years before, at independence, there had been a gruesome uprising, the Hutus against the Tutsis. The Hutu people had been a despised underclass, and their tremendous resentment erupted into a massacre. A journalist friend of mine had actually witnessed Hutus torturing Tutsis. They hacked the Tutsis’ feet off and forced them to stand up. Then they cut their legs off at the knees and laughed as the Tutsis were propped on their bleeding stumps. More mutilation followed: the cutting off of ears, of noses, eye gouging, castration, all of it while the victims were alive. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been butchered in this way, and so the country had been partitioned, the Tutsis taking Burundi, the Hutus Rwanda.
Vidia listened, horrified, grimacing. The car filled with dust that whirled into the open windows. To close the windows would have suffocated us. Now Vidia had started humming a tune.
“Toot-toot-Tutsi, goodbye,” he sang in an Al Jolson voice. “Toot-toot-Tutsi, don’t cry.”
We came to the crossroads of Ruhengeri. To the left was the road climbing to Kigali, to the right was the way to Kisenyi and Goma. We sat and pondered this in the slanting sun. Vidia ate a cheese sandwich and drank a cup of coffee from a thermos. Even in this remote place, where food was scarce, he kept to his strict dietary rales.
“There’s a better chance of finding a place to stay in Kigali,” I said, and he agreed: it was, after all, the capital. We had no reservations, no prearranged route; we were simply on safari, winging it in the bush.
Dusk like ground fog obscured the road as we entered Kigali, but even so, we could see that the town, though crowded, was very small. That was the Rwanda problem: so many people, so little space. There were three or four hotels, none of them good. We stopped at each one. Vidia expressed first amazement that we were stopping at all—“Such low places”—and then, inevitably, discouragement. There was no room for us.
“They’re filthy,” he said.
“Maybe they just look dirty.”
He did not laugh. “What are we going to do?”
“Let’s try the U.S. embassy.”
It was now past seven in the evening, and after more than thirteen hours on the road it now seemed that we had no place to stay. The embassy was closed, but we found an American woman on the premises — the duty officer, she said, dealing with a consular problem.
“We are totally stuck,” I said, and explained that I was an American, a lecturer at Makerere University. “We have no place to stay in Kigali. Is there anything you can suggest?”
“We have a guesthouse,” she said. “You can use that.”
I then introduced my distinguished friend, the visiting lecturer and writer V. S. Naipaul. The duty officer had not heard of him, but never mind, there would be no problem. She drew me a map to the place, which was near the center of town. So we were saved, and we each had a room. She even suggested a restaurant where we might eat. Vidia relaxed — I could sense it from a few feet away, what he would have called a vibration. Cleanliness and order were everything to Vidia. He was relieved and consoled by this sudden intervention.
“This is perfect,” he said at the embassy guesthouse, yet he sounded sad, and I guessed that he was tired.
On a back street in Kigali we found the restaurant, which had a pompous French name, something like La Coupole. Vidia still looked melancholy, perhaps because we had been so lucky here. He had once told me how he had a cynical Hindu nature and that he was suspicious of good luck, believing that it attracted bad luck.
The restaurant was small, and warm with aromas of good food, herbs, and fresh bread. It was full of people, Africans and whites, all of them talking. The manager was a thin Belgian woman in late middle age. She was clearly harassed yet gentle and helpful, entirely at our service, apologizing for being so busy. She brought us a bottle of wine. Vidia tasted it and said it was first rate and grew even sadder as he spoke of how amazing it was to find a great wine in such a crummy town. The woman, flattered by Vidia’s praise, became even more solicitous. She chatted with him, complimenting him on his fluent French. I had a glimpse of Vidia’s sympathy and compassion. He was moved by the good nature of the woman, who was struggling to run a decent restaurant in this remote place. He admired her the way he admired the Major at the Kaptagat, seeing someone fighting to overcome the odds, bringing order to chaos, a sort of colonizer. The woman moved among the tables, setting out dishes, filling glasses, advising waiters, folding napkins, rearranging forks. Where was this fish from? Vidia wanted to know. Lake Kivu, she said.
He praised the woman with feeling. He watched her work. Then he looked around and said, “In a few years, this will be jungle too.”
He had not ceased to be melancholy. He ate his fish. I tried to draw him out on the subject of vegetarianism, but he was monosyllabic and unwilling. He drank most of the wine. It was a good bottle, he repeated. Why was he unhappy?
“You Americans are so lucky,” he said at last. “You come from a big, strong country. You are looked after. If there was trouble here or in Uganda, serious trouble, your government would send a plane for you. You would be airlifted out.”
“They were promising that during the Emergency and the curfew,” I said. “But I was having a good time.”
“You’re a writer. That’s why you don’t go insane. You can define and order your vision. That is so important. If you didn’t, your life in Kampy would be insupportable.”
It vitalized me to hear him say this. What had I written? Poetry, some essays, part of a novel. What had I published? Hardly anything. Yet to V.S. Naipaul, a writer I admired, I was a writer. He had seen it as much by reading my essay as by reading my palm.
“What’s all this about being airlifted out?”
“The embassy here, man. Your embassy. We had no place to stay. They provided it. Don’t take it for granted.”
“What would have happened if we’d gone to the British embassy?”
“Nothing, man. Nothing.”
“I’m sure your country would help you if you were stuck.”
“I don’t have a country,” Vidia said.
Now I knew why he was sad.
Kigali, not anything like a capital, was pitiful even by African standards. There were few streets and no buildings of any size. It had no breadth, it had no wealth, and it was dirty. The paved road ended at the edge of town. Yet Kigali swelled with people, who had flocked to find work and food, to feel safe in a crowd. The Hutus thronging the place had the watchful covetous gaze of hungry people, and when they set their eyes on me they seemed to be looking for something they could eat, or else swap for food. They lingered near the market, along the main street, and at the church that was called a cathedral. Easily seen from the main street were slums and shantytowns on the nearby slopes.
“I think we’ve done this,” Vidia said.
He said he did not want to see the cathedral. Churches filled him with gloom. He wanted to avoid the market. Mobs, he said. The crush of people. The danger, the stink. The colonial architecture, the shop fronts, the high walls of yellow stucco with glass shards planted on the top, the tile-roofed houses, all these Belgian artifacts, he said, were already looking neglected and would soon be ruins.