Twilight

His English seemed too ‘American’ for an African, his penmanship small and squat with a child’s arduous style even though his messages were long and convoluted, rambling sometimes. I actually imagined taking a scissors and cutting apart the gerunds then reassembling them so that I could figure out exactly what he wanted me to do with the $300 that my Defender desperately needed for new brakes. So you can imagine my surprise after asking him where we should meet, that he replied that he wasn’t sure he could meet me, anywhere! ‘So what do you suggest?’ was all that I could say to a fugitive who had no postal address or American Express mailbox. The idea of continuing to correspond on the excessively public Thorn Tree Café message board was growing more ludicrous with every moment. Over the next several exchanges I repeated that the handover of his money had to be in person. Worried that others were reading what I wrote him, I hesitated before continuing – as politely as I could – to suggest that I was hard to offend, that if he were badly injured or had only tattered clothes or whatever that it was OK. I was just trying to fulfill a promise to a valued client! His reply was all over the place and pretty hostile, and I realized that by now we probably had a following anxiously waiting the café to open each morning. Then, of course, it hit me: He was in unbelievable shock, so severe that maybe it was too hard for him to exit the shadows. This Watutsi apparently had no idea that the most horrific genocide since the Holocaust had been coming for him. Somehow, though, he’d gotten out. And he’d been running and hiding so hard for so long that he was now running away from himself. He couldn’t even stop to put out his hand and accept some help.

Finally, I think it was our sixth exchange, I replied that the gig was up. We had to meet or game over. I gave him my room number and Norfolk Hotel phone number and arranged specific times during the next day that I would be certain to be at the hotel.

When he didn’t show, I wandered reluctantly back the next morning to the Thorn Tree and sure enough, he’d posted a new note. His style was newly cold and simple, and the penmanship so small I wondered at first if he thought that writing tiny was sufficient to keep our conversation private. He couldn’t appear at the Norfolk and what’s more, he dared not try to phone me from a public kiosk, most of which didn’t work, anyway. (He was suddenly making sense.) He couldn’t imagine where it would be safe for him to meet me in person, full stop. He really needed Jay’s money. He suggested this cockamamie idea that I bury the cash under some dirt in the hydrangea plant in the corner of the café! Then he lost it, again: He didn’t want me to think he was criticizing Jay if this was Jay’s idea, that we meet, because he was overly grateful to Jay. Jay was his only hope. And it wasn’t that he didn’t trust me, because he trusted Jay implicitly and obviously Jay was trusting me. It was just, he said continuing on the reverse side of a tiny piece of paper that looked like it had been torn from the edge of a newspaper, that all those in-person clandestine meetings that we all know about that take place all over Africa always end with everyone either killed or disappeared.

Goose bumps replaced thoughts. When I returned to the real world of morning chatter and tinkling utensils my eyes darted all over the café though I can’t tell you now whether it was busy or dead. My body was frozen. I was holding the note up in the air as if I were looking for flaws in a jewel. I scrunched it hurriedly into my fist and practically jogged all the way back to the Norfolk. I’m not sure I exhaled before I was alone in the long, covered hall close to the swimming pool. I wandered like a zombie into my room and sat on my bed staring vacantly out the window onto the brick siding of an adjacent apartment building. I took a very deep breath, wiped the spit off my lips and unraveled the note that he had pinned to the bottom left pane of the Stanley Board not more than a few hours ago, crowded among a couple dozen other uncensored, uncovered, unprotected messages announcing Hank’s journey tomorrow to the coast did anyone want a ride? and Odhiambo had a bike he had to give away who wanted it? Whereas the note to me effectively announced to the world, “I don’t want to be disappeared like all those blown spies you share Tuskers with in the Delamere bar.”

I picked up the “Norfolk Hotel” message pad and wrote slowly in my best script. “My clients arrive Saturday for safari. Where should we meet Thursday? Last chance.” I folded the paper in half and wrote on the side I would pin to the board, “From Jim to Jay.” His messages were titled, “From Jay to Jim.”

Seven years previously I’d guided Jay McFiel and his wife Loreda on safari, and they fell in love with Africa. On their final connection home from New York to Cincinnati they sat opposite an excited looking, very tall and thin young African who they couldn’t resist telling about their safari. The kid was on his way to grad school at Northern Kentucky University. It wasn’t far from where they lived. At first they thought he was being recruited for basketball, but when he told them he was enrolling in advanced studies in computer science they were awe-struck. Would he like to come over for dinner? He came many times. He spent Thanksgivings and Christmases enjoying Loreda’s special turkey dressing and ice cream cake. Jay’s grand-kids circled around him as he told them colorful stories of boys like himself gathering firewood and feeding chickens. When he graduated with his masters in the new field of computer science, Loreda and Jay attended the ceremonies and he even introduced them at the honors dinner as his “American parents.”

Jay called me right after work, his time, waking me up. “A Watutsi kid we met on the plane coming back from your safari a few years ago is hiding in Nairobi and needs money.” I begged forgiveness because it was midnight. “Why the fuck did he have to go back to that damned country, anyway!” he repeated loudly, clearly uninterested in time zones. It was May, 1994. His name was Jossef, and he was a Watutsi, and he was hiding in Nairobi. OK. “Can you front me three hundred?” OK. “I’ll send it to your Chicago office today.” Not necessary, ‘I mean so quickly,’ I thought but he’d already started, “...Stanley? Some message board or something.” Oh, yes. “Thanks, Jim.” Click.

* * *

Although usually quiet and unemotional, little Jossef was by far the smartest. The family knew their dreams would be realized by this strangely brilliant, gentle child. Jossef was the oldest of a household with six children. He was eight years old in 1972 when Kathleen and I began teaching in western Kenya. Rwandan genocides were not new in 1994. Neighboring countries expected them like economists expect recessions. In 1972 Kathleen and I listened to Radio Uganda describe the 1972 genocide of nearly a 100,000 people in Kigali. The macho Ugandan boys at our school got wind of an old American song and marched around the football field waving the softball bats I’d introduced to them like machetes, singing, “Tut-tut-tutsi goodbye, tut-tut-tutsi don’t cry!” Perhaps it was that very day, or the day before or after, when eight-year old Jossef was grabbed from the back stoop by his Watutsi aunt and raced inside the house to cluster with others in the family just as the Hutu mob crashed through the front door. One smelly Hutu who didn’t seem to have a machete tore Jossef out of his aunt’s grip, stepped a few feet backwards then pushed him high into the air forcing him to watch his aunt decapitated. That day they only killed his aunt and one cousin. Five others were left alone to wail while cleaning up. That night the family that survived stole out of their neighborhood into some nearby forest. Eight-year old Jossef had never cried, never whimpered, never closed his eyes, and now would not speak. Not a word left his mouth for nearly four years until a priest convinced one of his aunts to let him attend the one Catholic school in Kigali. When pressed by the priest if he understood the Trinity, Jossef spoke for the first time in four years. “Yes” he didn’t exactly lie, because as a teenage survivor of a holocaust he knew that there was nothing divine in the universe, so he had prepped for the interview.

Jossef couldn’t be taught anything without first being baptized. Only one aunt, holding his sweaty hand for hours on end, entered the sanctuary with him. She told him that the man in white would harmlessly sprinkle water on his head after which he could start studying O-levels. But the liquid which either because of being left unused through the hot season, or because of transubstantiation, was warm like the blood that had spurted out of his aunt’s neck. Jossef cowered back from the priest. The priest smiled even while continuing his liturgy. Jossef was baptized a Catholic in spite of the bloody hot holy water. After he was convinced to let go of his aunt’s hand, the priest walked him to some outbuildings and delivered him to a white nun who handed him a Bible and led him to a large room with eight bunk beds and fifteen other Watutsi boys. He relaxed when he exchanged glances with the others who seemed as suspicious as he felt. Books were piled all about the room, but they were running out of books just before he arrived, and all the white Nun could find to place on the rickety table beside his bed was what had kept two half-drunk bottles of Irish whiskey from clanking into one another when the pantry door was shut too hard: “Elementary Algebra” by Hamblin Smith, published in Toronto by J. Gage & Co. in 1888, which according to a frayed and yellow piece of paper slipped into the back cover was “in fair condition and worth $10.” Jossef read the book that night and while it took several more readings before he actually understand the 19th Century math, the introduction was seared into his psyche: “Standard-use algebra arose in Canada in the early 1700s.” So at the ripe age of 13 Jossef knew that he would become an algebra scientist and/or live in Canada, or both, at last fusing fate into his single desire in life, to leave Rwanda for good.

The priests didn’t teach O-levels, and it quickly became clear that what they could teach was hardly enough for the silent “Tutsi-toto.” So the white nun enrolled him in Kigali’s best O-level boys day school after pointing out to its Headmaster that most students never spoke, anyway. The two priests went into divine session and decided that Jossef really ought not be separated from the old algebra text, so could continue to sleep in his bunk. The other boys didn’t particularly like this, so Jossef lost what tenuous friendships that he’d made. The teasing of the “mute” grew violent and finally the white Nun walked Jossef back to his family home on the east side of Kigali, where his aunts hid any surprise by turning their gaze to the floor. Jossef sat on one of the two stools at the kitchen table and was fed cold posho while the aunts tried and failed to ask the nun who they always knew was a secret Muslim why Jossef had flunked out of the Catholic school having been properly baptized with holy water. Jossef, of course, said nothing. His tome of secrets was growing. The next morning he picked up his book bag and walked five kilometers back through the city to Kigali’s best O-level boys day school.

Throughout the next several years he excelled in every subject. When asked by his Peace Corps math teacher if he wished to attend A-levels, he answered for the second time since the awful decapitation of his aunt, “Yes, thank you.” The Peace Corps teacher, as was wont by Peace Corps, beamed joyfully on a frequency that Jossef could easily tune out thereby letting her believe that she had saved the world. That lasted for an instant until she discovered how difficult it was to get a genius student out of Rwanda to America. After all sorts of interviews and lots of documents Jossef signed on the dotted line, pledging to return to Rwanda after he obtained his degree and work for at least three years in the Ministry of Finance. His signature wasn’t as important to the Hutu administrator as the list of names and ages just under Jossef’s signature. It took the government three visits to his family home and three weeks to verify that it was all correct. Jossef had mortgaged his advanced academic study with the list of every one of his Watutsi family members.

* * *

I went to the Stanley later the next morning to make sure I’d be able to pin my message in the same corner of the message board that we’d been using. The breakfast crowd had disappeared and the mid-morning coffee crowd had thinned out as lunch would start in about an hour. I moved a couple messages around without anyone noticing before pinning mine in the revered bottom corner. Then I went to a table on the opposite side of the tree to order one or more coffees and wait... As the luncheon crowd grew, a very tall and thin man whose pants lifted above his socks moved to the message board on the other side of the tree. I quickly pushed the papers I’d taken out of my briefcase around my little table, but when I looked up, the feet were gone. I stood up and moved a little bit to the right and someone gestured to me wondering if I were leaving so that he could have the table. I shook my head too hastily then moved into the open: he wasn’t there. I went to the message board. My message was still there, but he had scratched out “From Jim to Jay” and wrote “From Jay to Jim.”

“Twilight hamisi [Thursday]. Bridge entrance to River Road.”

It was brutally polite. I moved quickly back to my table but an austere, hefty businessman had occupied it and what’s more, had gathered all my papers together into one, clean, perfect stack and was lording over the little table while glaring at me like a JAG. I worked on lowering my heart beat while gathering my belongings in between gulping from an empty cup of coffee and left hurriedly.

* * *

The world knew that genocide was just ‘round the corner. The racist Hutu government made no attempt to hide its hate speech from the world. Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) actually increased its transmission power to broadcast its increasingly fearful and vitriolic campaign against Tutsis and moderate Hutus far beyond the borders of tiny little Rwanda. But Jossef walked out of the kitchen when his aunts turned on the radio. The signing of the Arusha Accords in 1993 was intended to prevent “civil war” [read: genocide] with power-sharing, but this only angered the Hutu extremists who controlled not only the airwaves but all the print media. Jossef never touched a newspaper or used his desktop to search for anything but useful algorithms in accounting.

Then in January 1994, just weeks before the genocide began, the UN general commanding the peace-keeping force warned the UN Security Council that both the Rwandan government and Tutsi militia in Uganda were stockpiling tons of weapons obtained from the Jamaican mafia. Where did the money come from to pay the Caribbean warlords? The general deferred intimating that the money to both sides came from the Clinton administration’s panicked and chaotic exit from the Somali Blackhawk Down debacle. He didn’t really care about that. What he cared about was the anonymous informant that he quoted detailing the elaborate and intricate plans by the Hutus to “once and finally for all” eliminate all the Tutsis.

* * *

By mid-week Jossefs’s office was totally languid. The a/c repaired each July failed by each September. Wet season storms were met with very loud but useless radiators. Electricity outages that always seemed to hit him mid-code, left blood on his lips : he bit them so hard. ‘No, nothing wrong, boss,’ he’d answer like everyone on the line before rebooting his Compaq then watching it flicker back on like a fatigued ember in a kitchen stove. But the week that ended as April 1, 1994, was different. The trajectory of miserableness was nearing its zenith. Each day that week, everyone left a bit earlier than the day before, and the boss said nothing. Every morning there were fewer who came to work than the day before. On Friday not even the boss showed up. Without a full team, his own work ground to a halt, yet he couldn’t not come to work or not stay until the prescribed ending time. So he rewrote the same code and tested it himself, multiple times, until finally he found himself staring at a black screen with lots of white marks, no longer able to prevent negative memories: The normally splendid moments of bright sunshine piercing the thick and low March rain clouds, this year seemed as dispiriting as the flashing lights on a police car in the dead of night. February and January were deathly boring, unusually so, because the normally dramatic storms that ushered in the rainy season had tiptoed in as endless drizzle. But his stomach contracted when he remembered how chilly and solemn Christmas had been. To begin with hardly anyone attended midnight mass, when in years past all the latent sinners and repentant grifters and transients crowded the pews shoulder-to-shoulder with the few Catholics of power or wealth. But the worst was when both aged Irish priests stepped suddenly out of the greeting line as Jossef approached. The one who had baptized him turned his body quickly away but had difficulty cleaving his eyes off Jossef’s unplanned but plaintive visage. At home everyone was acting peculiar, even the children. No one spoke. No more “Dawe! Dawe!” when he returned in the evening.

The massive single explosion Wednesday night, April 6, was followed by the near simultaneous uncontrolled rattling of the house. The youngest toddler who had been abandoned in a kitchen corner began to wail. No one else, not even the normally chatty little girls, moved or uttered a sound. Everyone seemed frozen to where they were, as the single weakening wailing filled the hollow of sound. Jossef raised his eyes above his bowl of beans and rice and stared across the table at his fiancé, Mercy. It was not proper that a man comfort a toddler; Mercy should. But his loud chewing was stopped by her penetrating stare. He remembered when he first saw her at work and how beautiful she seemed as now, how reluctantly then so enthusiastically she joined his family, how pretty she looked in the black cashmere shawl that seemed to creep onto her shoulders like a baby nuzzling. He bought it in Zanzibar. She was wearing it now. She looked away from him, then sipped her soup and the wailing of the toddler ceased. She left the table without cleaning up the dishes. That last night that he lay beside her, she pretended to be asleep.

Thursday morning, April 7, 1994. It’s as if everyone has awakened from a long and unintended nap, suddenly culpable of their tardiness. His aunts frantically stuff things into reed baskets. Older children help younger children with their backpacks. The door to the fridge is open. Mercy at first speaks to him confidently and calmly, but when he fails to react, she begs him to stay home. His two aunts recede into the far wall as Mercy’s entreaties grow harsh and accusing. But he can’t parse her words because the radio’s so loud and she’s Hutu. Mixed marriages, mixed apartments and offices are common in Kigali as everyone’s first language is Kinyarwanda. But the millennia of savage enmity between Hutus and Tutsis indurated such deep alien differences that when they fought she became as foreign to him as australopithecus was to habilis. What people never understood was that Jossef’s years of silence was not because he couldn’t speak, but because he couldn’t hear. His face solemn, his eyes vacant, he patiently waits for her to calm down. He allows her to pull him towards her thick, lovely lips so that he can tap a dry goodbye kiss on a face drenched with tears before unwrapping her arms from his neck and walking out the door.

Jossef takes his normal path at his normal pace. The sky is dreary with low cloud but when he looks back down the street he realizes how alone he is. Cold mist gathers on his eyelashes. The rainy season is so tired. He tugs his denim shirt downwards and with the only anger he remembers, twists his shuka rapidly around his neck almost until he coughs. No buses farting diesel. Only one scooter speeds recklessly past him down the center of the street, its clapboard motor gobbling up his attention like the thread of an impatient spider pulling him further and further into some dastardly universe. At the corner where the Ministry is located, the traffic light is dead. He looks inside. The small lobby’s light fixture hangs twinkling as usual. He races in as if from a storm that doesn’t exist. He palms the big, unpolished knob that begins the staircase up to his office jumping two stairs at a time. The stairway ends in a large open office: there is no door or lobby. He listens but doesn’t understand a frantic conversation between the only two others in the work room with 23 desks. Their eyes widen when they see him. One runs towards him then grabs his shuka. The other arrives moments later shouting in whispers, his eyes darting about the office as if unsuccessfully fleeing a rabid bat. They try to pull him back down the stairs but he twists away. For several seconds everything stops. Perhaps they are Tutsi, perhaps Hutu, he tries to remember their names but all he remembers is darkness. What had been fear if revelation in their expressions becomes suspicion in his. All three grow utterly silent all at once. Then, they stare at him in terror. Time restarts when he hears the large brass front door downstairs in the lobby being torn open and the two men running away.

Not a sound. Saliva builds in his cheeks, a sickening taste. He stares calmly into the deep, empty office but sees only hidden formulas. Later he’ll remember the apprehension of being the only one left, but at that moment he feels an incredible tranquility. His mouth clears. His lips open slightly and he walks to his desk, slides quietly onto his chair simultaneously clicking on his Compaq that he doesn’t notice makes no hum as usual. He’d not slept all night. Neither had she. He lays his head onto folded arms.

* * *

Uncertain that he’s awake, he finally reasons that the city lights are dead. He’s ravenously hungry but it’s so dark he decides he won’t try to find the nearby store but just let rote memory take him home. Palming down the stairs, he follows the ambient light from outside that illuminates the empty lobby. He squeaks open the door, noticing that it’s not locked. Anxious, distant human rumbles rocket past him. He begins walking in the right direction. Hardly a few blocks from the center city he feels like he’s enveloped by twilight, but there is no twilight in Africa. He decides it must be from the lantern lights and flickering torches inside just a few of the homes that he passes. The further from the center and the closer to home he gets, the more jumbled then rancorous become the occasional shouting and thumping or cracking sounds that he can’t apply to any vision of what they might be. The sounds grow louder and more distinct. Someone shouts “Over here!” followed by a low whine of exhausted crying with lots of movement and the sharp snapping of something wooden. People running. People shouting. Then he hears screaming, again, but this time he picks out a single desperate child’s scream. He stops momentarily in front of his house noticing how dark and quiet it is inside. He turns the doorknob slowly. It isn’t locked, either. He opens the door, steps inside and the stench twists up his legs around his tightened stomach into his nose. Holding his breath he closes the door behind him and his stomach convulses. The smell is worse than the urinal in his office and the only sound is his belching. Methodically he reaches into his side pocket and pulls out a small black torch. Its pitiful yellow light spills reluctantly over the floor of his house, nevertheless revealing body parts scattered around like the leftovers of a truck wreck. He starts to put the parts together in his mind so he can identify his different family members but he can’t keep the pieces together, not even the small from the large. Then, over there near the kitchen table, he notices a black cashmere shawl half covering a bloodied breast and he pukes madly, his own stench driving him beyond the carnage through the kitchen out the back door. He thrusts himself outside, gasping for breath.

* * *

Jossef kept no secrets of his week long journey by foot out of Rwanda, because his deposition was essential to his status. With time, though, the story he told the old Finnish man seemed only two dimensional. He explained that he followed the city’s makeshift sewer system to the river Nyabugogo but felt no need to explain that he hid from daylight beneath the thorn tree bushes that spread thickly from the shore of the lake. There was no reason to describe the river’s sounds and a few moments of early starlight that guided him the next night to Lake Muhazi, but he did attest to twice, perhaps three or four times, making a wrong turn down one of the lake’s endless fingers that required repetitive backtracking. Finally, just before dawn on some day after it all began he saw the cathedral that the Irish priest had twice taken him to, there on the east side of the lake. The chapel was empty. He rests there for a day, filling the toilet in between sorties of deserted homesteads where he pillages rotting vegetables and steals two eggs from a squawking hen. He knew that if he could get across the arid savannah just outside the town with the cathedral that his dangers would be limited to man-eating lions and venomous snakes. So in a single night he makes the journey across the flatland to the edge of a thick forest. Looking at the thick towering canopy in front of him, a mournful whoop of a lonely hyaena lulls him to sleep in the gentle purple clover fields just before sunrise. He wakes suddenly at midday aware that the man-eating lions and venomous snakes still await him in the forest. He knows that he can’t venture into that dark green wilderness at night, so he begins to stumble out of the heat into the humid warmth of the forests that bubbles like flutes with birds and frogs. But without sleep for so long, weary and afraid, he loses his direction and darkness falls before he reaches the well-known Kagera river. He starts to sweat heavily not knowing whether to press on or hide. Another hyaena yelps, so close he hears the residual guttural moan of an empty stomach. So he rushes on, frightening a herd of zebra that like startled dogs bark while facing him. Exhausted if delirious, he finally steps into the cold water of the Kagera River.

Perhaps he fell asleep momentarily, but the current was strong enough to carry him to the other side. He crawls onto some sand oblivious to the sparkling eyes of a croc hardly two meters from his feet. He paws his way up the embankment, his hands streaked with thin lines of blood. At the top his breathing returns to normal. He raises his head and opens his eyes. He stands up, the firmament lacing the darkness which surrounds him like the jewels on a noble’s coronet. For the first time since forever he feels relaxed looking at the night sky with its plethora of twinkling stars. His spine extends naturally, he stands truly tall and proud and turns to look back across the river, over the savannah, over the cathedral until his memories dissolve in the satanic miserableness of the last vision he would ever have of his home. He shakes his head and casts the past into oblivion. The air is cool and fresh. The ground is solid and earthy. Slowly, he walks into a different life. He’s in Tanzania.

* * *

There was nothing left of Jossef but himself. His torch, his wallet, his few useless coins and even his prized pen were gone. His shuka was ripped to shreds. His street shoes looked like ragged boots. But the people in the Tanzanian villages were kind. They were neither Hutus or Tutsi and so blessed, they were remarkably helpful. A fish truck took him to Mwanza. An old lady bought his passage on a bus to Singida, and her son gave him money to buy a ticket onwards to Arusha. The longest sleep in ten days happened on the two lunging, bumping, constantly stopping then growling-with-speed busses. Because he was tall and quiet but strangely determined, because his clothes were in tatters but seemed to fit, because he was clearly someone who had just gone through something awful but was not yet broken, several others leaving the bus with him around 3 a.m. asked him if he needed their help. But all Jossef wanted were directions to the large conference center where the “Arusha Accords” had been signed. It was only two kilometers from the bus stop, down one main street then left onto another. He arrived several hours before sunrise and fell asleep on the steps of the building. A policeman’s club woke him up and when he started to explain his situation in English, the policeman’s face contorted as if a rotten lime had been shoved into his mouth. The policeman walked away. Building janitors in uniforms and itinerant workers in all mixtures of garb were the first to arrive. They all ignored him but didn’t seem surprised that he was sitting there on the steps to the building. None stopped to ask his situation like those good Samaritans on the bus or the policeman earlier that morning. That may have been because a security man with a very large badge seemed to recognize each one of them and give them a very short time to get inside. He’d unlock the door, hold it open for them as they walked through, then close and relock it, time and time again, pausing just a moment each time to glare at Jossef. As it got later, sometimes two or even three people went through at once. He watched each one go through the door. Finally, a woman in perfectly pressed business attire and who actually looked at him as she walked up the stairs past him, stopped once inside and had some words with the security man while the two watched him. The door opened and the security man shouted, “Over here!” Jossef’s spine twisted him upwards. The security man had called out with a very bad accent in Kinyarwanda, as the woman beside him carefully scrutinized Jossef’s reaction. She then stepped back outside and with much more care than when she had passed him walking up the steps just a few moments before, set her very high heels on the steps going down with great caution. When she got back to where Jossef was still sitting, she pressed down the sides of her skirt and said. “You’re from Kigali.” In perfect Kinyarwanda, with a voice and a stern face that sliced his festering heart, releasing like worms from a rotten fruit dozens, hundreds of twisting memories of Mercy. He could do nothing but stare at her. She offered her hand which she retracted once he stood up. He followed her inside, past the rotund security man who looked much smaller than he did from the steps below and took him to a bench not far from the door. For so much commotion, it was a very small lobby, hardly large enough for the bench and the small table with its old unused lamp. She was gone before he could thank her.

Shortly thereafter, the door was permanently opened for the day, and the security man walked right by him without looking, through one of the many doors leading from the lobby. The stream of workers slowed but was now composed of executives in business attire. The first to stop, bend down and start to inquire of him in Swahili, he interrupted by saying in quiet English, “I’m from Kigali.”

The man dropped his briefcase on Jossef’s shoe. A few minutes later he escorted Jossef into a small office. An elderly man with a wizened face partially obscured by an undisciplined fop of reddish hair sat on the opposite side of a small desk cluttered with piles of paper and folders. As they entered he nervously repositioned a miniature United Nations flag in a stick-box that was about to fall off the desk between piles in the center of the desk. The two older men huffed some laconic Scandinavian at each other, and then the man who escorted him into the office walked out shutting the door loudly behind him. The old gentleman across the desk stopped fidgeting with his flag and papers and looked at Jossef warmly, trying but failing to smile. Then just as quickly he lowered his eyes back onto some piece of paper on his desk and muttered in loopy English, “Gimme a minute.”

It was more than a minute, but not too long. The old man finished reading the opened file, then signed some paper and closed the folder, walked out of the office with the file in his hand and returned ten minutes later without it, shutting the door softly behind him. He walked to a black file cabinet, took out a large manilla folder and returned to the chair behind his desk muttering to himself. He put the folder down on top of other files on the desk, actually managed a legitimate smile as he folded his hands formally and held them up to his chest as he sat back in his chair and looked at Jossef carefully for the first time. He rubbed his thumbs together as his expression soured. Then, he walked Jossef to the employee’s bathroom and took a new small bar of soap out of one of the cabinets, found a packaged toothbrush and a small razor in another, and before Jossef had hardly begun his toiletry, the man returned with a towel. Afterwards, he took Jossef to a small mgahawa for beans and rice and coffee, writing endlessly in a tiny notebook that he removed from inside his blazer, while Jossef ate so fast that he almost got sick. During all of this they said not a word to one another, though the old man was constantly muttering to himself or replying too convivially to acquaintances they happened to encounter. Jossef’s disposition improved with beans and rice. They returned to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) demilitarized headquarters just before noon. And his deposition began.

The old man teased every ounce of detail out of Jossef but when they got to the savannah abutting the forest, the old man realized how late it was and they went to a duka where a toothless Sikh took Jossef’s photograph using an old Polaroid. The old man thumbed the picture, hemming and hawing in Finnish, before raising his knobby chin determinedly and walking out of the duka with the picture in an envelope, Jossef tagging quickly behind. Back in the office he told Jossef to wait on the bench in the lobby as everyone in the office started filing by him on their way home. It forced Jossef to sit up and tug his very long legs closer into him. His heart stopped again when he saw the woman who opened the door for him that morning, come into the lobby but then on recognizing Jossef changed her mind and abruptly went back inside. His heart was still beating ferociously when she returned a few minutes later, setting two magazines and an Air Tanzania timetable on the table beside him, all the while averting Jossef’s desperate staring. An hour later, the office now eerily quiet, the security man arrived to lock the door. He hesitated and turned to ask Jossef something, but then decided not to and completed his duty from the outside, as he, too, went home. A second later the old Finnish official stormed into the lobby and stopped angrily, muttering something in Finnish at the locked door. He motioned Jossef to follow him back through his office back into the employee’s bathroom, and the two of them walked up a small step ladder set beside an opened window in a far corner, then threw their legs over the sill onto a second small step ladder placed outside the building. He took Jossef to dinner, at the same mgahawa where the rice and beans were replaced with nyama choma which Jossef realized was the first meat he’d had for a very long time. It was late when Jossef and the old man left the mgahawa. Standing studying one another through the darkness, their eyes reflected the many lanterns and dull electricity bulbs that gave purchase to the animation of happy conversation and even laughter from the many little shops that lined the street. The old man told Jossef solemnly that he would have to return again in the morning. He did not sound apologetic, but regretful. He shook Jossef’s limp hand and walked in the opposite direction from the mgahawa. Jossef watched him disappear into the wood smoke and laughter, then wandered back to the steps of the UN building and fell asleep once again on its concrete steps, almost instantly.

“This, Jossef, is good for thirty days,” the old man who was wearing the same clothes for the second day said, raising his right hand holding an official looking United Nations C5 brown envelope fulsome with important things. He sat down on the bench and Jossef scooted closer to him.

He pulled out of the large envelope a dull brown thin wallet and opened it. Slipped into the right plastic pocket was the picture of him taken in the duka with an embossed stamp of the “United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees,” which somehow elevated his left ear higher than his right. In the opposite side’s slated pocket was a durable cardboard identity card that Jossef would not read for days, or weeks. The top of the card had his name in very large letters, then a slash, then “May 19, 1994.” In a smaller font centered on the next line was “BENACO.”

The old man then removed a second thinner white envelope from the C5 and handed it to Jossef. With a nod of the old man’s head, Jossef counted out ten $10 U.S. notes. Jossef’s eyes widened and his mouth opened.

“It is not from me,” the man interrupted the mute.

Jossef could ask nothing further. His silence agitated the old man.

“I can do nothing more for you,” the old man announced to the floor, slapping both his thighs simultaneously as though to propel himself upwards thereby releasing his hair all over his face as he stood up. “Benaco is likely just where you came from,” he said as if it were obvious as he wiped his hair back onto his scalp. He puckered a smile as though to assure Jossef that it was just routine that he would now have to go back to the bus stop, buy a ticket back to Singida, then one to Mwanza and then another back to the border with Rwanda. As Jossef was laboring through all these thoughts, the old Finn pursed his lips and forced one feeble hand onto Jossef’s shoulder, coughed and shook Jossef slightly before withdrawing his hand and continuing in a somewhat disinterested voice and lowered gaze, “It’s mostly Hutus, now.” He let the remark sit for a few seconds. Then, the U.N. Representative for the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) inside the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) demilitarized headquarters which was already slated to become the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), bowed his head reverently, pursed his lips and walked away.

* * *

Within days of the April 8/9 genocide of Tutsis, the tide began to quickly turn against the Hutus. Some say the Tutsi in Uganda were well prepared, that a weapon supply line from the notorious prison/arms depot at Mbara to Tutsi militias in Kisoro was fully activated even before the death and destruction in Kigali had begun. Whether true or not, something heinously organized swept down into Rwanda from Uganda with a vengeance unseen in contemporary, genocidal wars. In less than a couple weeks the Hutus were fleeing every city, every nook and cranny in this tiny country. “My memory is still fresh,” wrote Rev. John Rutsindintwarane in a Lutheran World Organization blogpost of April 28. The reverend lamented, “...more than 700,000 Rwandan refugees almost exclusively Hutu flooded into Benaco ...in one single human wave.” Before too long, the camp was the largest ever operated by UNHCR. Jossef fled Hutus slaughtering Tutsis like himself. Now he was being sent to a refugee camp composed “mostly of” hundreds of thousands of Hutus who had fled the much more powerfully avenging Tutsis who were now in the process of wiping Hutus off the face of the earth.

* * *

The “River Road settlement” was not too long a walk from the Norfolk. It was not yet a completely foolish act for a young white man to walk into the slum, although it was well on its way to becoming the “half-life” portrayed so well in the 2012 movie. Violence had yet to mature. Like found in virtually every developing African metropolis in the mid 1990s River Road was mostly a place of horrid smells and lost hope, a sort of retreat for the failed and forgotten. Nice looking Norwegians in Abercrombie and Fitch blue jeans walked fearlessly among the sick and depraved, gesturing to one another about their plans to resurrect hope and justice, never locking glances with the dozens of eyes that followed them like magnets. Kathleen and I garnered Rotary International support to open the first girls orphanage in River Road. There were three other functioning orphanages but none for girls. Like all wonderful Norwegian and Rotary and xxx Family Foundation projects in the mid 1990s, the elaborate mission statements would later read like parodies not policies. On opening day of the orphanage for 35 girls, a line of malnourished little women with gnarled hairs and sunken cheeks serpentined endlessly out of the wooden front door of the orphanage down the alleys and muddied pathways, through the broken doors of old clinics and over rivulets and puddles of unspeakable liquids until some little girls were doing nothing but walking in circles. The UK manager quickly rewrote the operations rules so that he didn’t run out of band-Aids: thenceforth, each “candidate” had to be less than thirteen years old (impossible to determine), have a baby or expect one (more easily determined) and was probably infected by HIV-AIDS (likely everyone). So I was acutely familiar with how depressingly and irrevocably sad it was when darkness ended a day’s hope in the River Road settlement. Did Jossef know that? Just as he seemed so familiar with Delamere bar spies?

Twilight? Sometimes in Africa’s dark and algebraic failures are lost the simple truths, and I suppose in that mechanism of losing one might create a twilight. The stubborn certainty that goodness can ripen from any situation scrambles the impossible into the plausible, and that too – like losing one’s faith – transits if for but a moment the netherworld of reality. Twilight? There is no twilight in Africa. I knew that. I’d lived and worked for years nearly smack dab on the equator. Sunrise springs into being like a switched-on bedroom light. Sunset at best is forgettable. Twilight? There were the end-of-the-rainy season low lying horizon clouds when for a fleeting instant I’d be reminded of the night hawks high in the sky above my aunt’s apartment darting into the high sun above, then twisting their bodies and disappearing into the twilight. But not in Africa. Only in the despair that moans through the alleys of River Roads, or out of the empty the bellies of the hyaena, or only when the lanterns glitter in the wood smoke, is there anything like twilight in Africa.

* * *

At the front entrance to River Road, just before the bridge over the putrid river, there was an old tree that had somehow remained standing. Likely it was too thick and rotten for firewood. Everyone knew it was the guardian of the slum. Inside the slum there were probably thousands of meeting places, but for a white man meeting a black man, there was only this one.

Silhouettes of figures walked all about, mostly slowly. I stopped about five feet before the old tree. It struck me how fateful this sick, old, big piece of wood was: My first contact with Jossef circled a similar tree, although one that didn’t grow out of the manure of abject want, but in the middle of a lovely coffee shop where cheese Danish were the best in the continent. Would this be our last communication? There was no electricity in the slum, of course, but there were infinite kerosene lamps, candles and random fires, so there was a particular ambient light capable of identifying the unwanted as well as throwing heavy shadows over those who enforced the need to know. The tree shielded me from much of that. As with my cubby hole table at the Stanley Hotel, I felt secure in my place. Minutes passed. Shafts of darkness crept around the tree like smoke wandering off a dying fire. More minutes passed. Silhouettes sprang from the base of the tree then retracted like a pack of eels. The underworld seemed to be considering whether to absorb or expel me. Too many minutes passed. I turned to go.

Standing completely still behind me, he continued watching me without expression as I unintentionally and nakedly faced him. I was now the shadow. He was the animate being, irradiated by the flickering lights of the slum that I sensed behind me like a stalking leopard. No twilight compromised his slick black skin, but that awful, sentient ambient light behind me crept over a face so narrow it looked like the keel of a boat. It wasn’t hot at all, but the slum’s biology twisted colorfully in the many beads of sweat that pocked his face. His wide pupils engulfed the white of his eyes and I had an uncontrollable thought that he was dead. Like every Watutsi, he was tall and magnificent despite his ragged attire. A narrow cut on his right cheek was either yet wet with brown blood or throbbing reflections. Increasingly chaotic waves of disorganized light and shadows punctuated bits of his sweaty self, like the dissolving spots of starlight in an infinite night sky. He was as elusive to me then as he is in memory. He wanted to, but could not, reveal his secrets. That tension – moral to me, existential to him – sealed his refusal to tell me his story just as it had kept him from whispering a single word as a child.

Twilight would protect us equally, give us time to retreat into our own private thoughts and help us muster a way out of this. But there is no twilight in Africa. He knew that. Yet he had fulfilled my deal avoiding any embarrassment to me, even as he demonstrated his life was forever to be kept unknown. So neither did I talk. The lines I had rehearsed in my head multiple times, borne from my simple pinned notes, that I had to know exactly why I was doing this or I wouldn’t... vanished like the ethereal dreams as I wake up.

I held out my hand as any well-dressed white man would be expected to do, but twisted it downwards. He cupped his hand under mine and I let drop the three tightly folded hundred dollar bills into his palm.

He needn’t have continued the handshake, but he held onto my hand for what seemed like a dangerous interval, and I finally managed to say with great difficulty between gulps of breath, “When it’s all over... you tell your story... All of it! No secrets.” My voice was hoarse and muffled so I cleared it loudly and started again, but words evaporated as he stared at me. “When it’s over,” I repeated so slowly and softly to myself as if what was happening could ever be over. He kept staring at me, still holding my hand. His pupils contracted, revealing the jaundice above which transferred such pain into me that I shut my own eyes.

I don’t remember him leaving. What I remember is suddenly the awful stench of the slum, the not-so-distant cacophony of static from a transistor radio and the on-again, off-again melodies of a far away adeyo-adeyo, low hums and buzzes of actual speech I couldn’t understand mixing with the crackling of a couple nearby fires and the multiple splashes of people bathing or washing clothes in the putrid river. A breeze blew my unkempt hair into my unblinking eyes and then the simultaneous bumping of a thug on my right and another on my left made me actually giddy. My pockets were empty. I had nothing. I didn’t even have Jossef’s secret. They left me alone as I slipped on the slum’s outer muds and kicked my way back into the white luxury of the Norfolk Hotel where I lay down on my bed in the dark and stayed wide awake the whole night long.

* * *

There is no twilight in Africa, but sometimes the thinnest of cracks can be seen between the moment of abject darkness and sudden light.

Well, it’s all over. It’s been over for more than 31 years. After he made it to America, for a while I’d contact him, probing him for the full story. Almost everything I learned came from Jay, not him. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of Jossef’s with their stories, and yet none achieved serious public exposure until the 2004 movie, Hotel Rwanda. And that seemed to exhaust the bucket of interest available from the American public. A million souls exterminated with their stories. Benacos and their hundreds of thousands of other stories like Jossef’s moved out of the darkness and suspended in a twilight: told but not really, dramatized but not revealed, a movie poster poaching horrible truths to make entertainment. Thirty-five years after a Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front general, Paul Kagame, invaded Rwanda from Uganda triggering the ultimate genocides four years later, Paul Kagame remains Rwanda’s strongman and one of the most vicious dictators in the world. Yet who today marshals the rationale to call Paul Kagame a monster? Many liken him to an African Marshal Tito. And like Trump by the way, he’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize quite a few times! These guys move in and out of the twilight like bats zipping through the moon shadows of a tangled Hans Christian Anderssen forest.

I had little intention of revealing Jossef’s story until I watched Senator Padilla on his stomach being hand-cuffed by brownshirts in a Los Angeles government office. Senator Padilla’s face reminded me of Jossef, not Jossef’s aquiline features but an expression that was a lack of expression, a visage of such disbelief that it instantly mortifies into compliance. The very victim questions the reality of his victimization. And then even as we lift them off the floor, take off their shackles and send them on a plane to freedom, time passes, the horror dissipates and the story drops into the void between what happened and what dare be remembered. The bright three-point white lights in the press room, the flashing sheen of the machete, the incandescence of a sulfurized explosion – wracked with such extreme and instantaneous pain... the next moment, the moment of truth, flees into the twilight. But there is no twilight in Africa. No place to shelter waiting revelation. No place to preserve besieged truths until we can rally the courage to reclaim them. No twilight in Africa. Now no twilight in L.A., either.