Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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(Clticago/ 19£8) Timor Mortis Inc" ASwitchboard Memory The business plan of Timor Mortis, Inc. required reconstruction of its switchboard. As soon as it was cOlnpleted, Beatrice appeared from her grave to man a position. Outgoing - from below, local- requires that she reach down, pull up a plug, and then throw the plug into a socket above her head, so that she can say to anyone, with a nUlnber, a long way off: "It's time." Incoming - from above, afar - requires that she reach up above her head, grab a plug, and throw it into a socket with the corresponding number beneath her knees. "Somebody is calling, calling, calling, calling..."
y Peter Trachtenberg 5 0 m e f e a 5 t from The Book of Calamities e'd heard the announcement on the radio that people weren't allowed to leave their homes, and we thought, okay, no problem. We heard gunshots around the neighborhood. We heard yelling. The house was surrounded by soldiers. I saw the commanding officer, he was one of our neighbors. He beat down the door. He said, lIyou, K. II - my husband's name was K. - IIWhat are you doing here when everybody else is outside being checked by security? Come out with your identity card." My husband went outside with his card, and then from April 7th till the 14th they held him at the roadblock, right nearby. So he would have seen them torturing other men and young people, young boys. They cut off men's genitals and fed them to the dogs. They hacked people to death with machetes. He watched all of it. And at two or three one morning, it was his misfortune to be tortured, too. He died on the 15th, very early in the morning. Not "he was killed," but "he died." Rwandans often used that innocuous phrase when speaking of loved ones they'd lost in the genocide. I took it for an attempt at normalization. During World War II, the Nazis had committed most of their crimes away from eyewitnesses, herding their victims to remote killing grounds or sequestering them in death camps whose function was betrayed only by the pillars of smoke that rose from their chimneys. Afterwards it was possible - if not particularly credible - for people to say they hadn't known. In Rwanda, though, the killing took place in public. Everybody saw it. All you had to do was look out through your garden gate. All over Kigali, bodies lay piled on the roadside like sacks of refuse until they were picked up by garbage trucks. Hutu office girls in white dresses picked their way to work between spreading puddles of blood. General Romeo Dallaire describes seeing one such girl slip and fall. She got up quickly, but still, he writes, "it was as if someone had painted her body and her dress with a dark red oil. She became hysterical looking at it, and the more she screamed, the more attention she drew." I What need was there for anyone to be more explicit? I hadn't been in Rwanda long before I was taking it for granted that when anyone spoke of a death ten years before, he meant a death by violence. Murder had become a natural death. On the 18th, at nine in the morning, a group of soldiers and militiamen came to my house. They told me, IIGive us the money your husband left you. 1I My husband's body was being dragged through the street, no one had buried him. They formed mountains, the bodies of all the men and boys they'd killed. And I said, III don't have any money. We don't have any money." They carried me from the living room and took me into a bedroom; my mother-in-law was shut up in another room. And from that day until the end of the war, the soldiers raped me. They were at it day and night, day and night, all of them. They came in all together, they dropped their pants at the same moment, and they raped me, jostling each other. There was always another group waiting in the living room. If one man left, another one came in to take his place, one after another. In the fifth month of my pregnancy, I aborted. They took me to the hospital for the abortion, and they told me, "We killed your brothers and sisters with machetes, but you, we're just going to rape you till you're dead." That whole time I was naked, I never had clothes on. I was completely swollen. I had infections, I kept vomiting. I couldn't even cry because I wanted to die and I couldn't die. In the midst of violence, especially if that violence is prolonged, a relationship sometimes forms between perpetrators and victims. It is not a true relationship, in the sense of something freely chosen, only the simulacrum of one or, more accurately, a parody. It may come into being because the victims implicitly understand that their survival depends on winning the good-will of their captors or because even killers - maybe especially killers - need to feel that they are good people and will seek validation of their goodness from the very ones they are about to kill. It may simply be that when human beings are forced together, over time, they fall by inertia into the lulling rhythms and protocols of society. For such reasons, a group of
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Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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