The reaper’s merciless scythe

If happiness matters, that particular Christmas was significant. We had hired a car to travel as far as we could go. We spent Christmas on the foot of the snow-capped Kilimanjaro, whose heights were starting to drip because of what is affecting the glaciers. We debated the origins of humankind at the Ngorongoro Crater.

The next Christmas we spent in Nyarubuye, Rwanda. She wanted to see what human hands were capable of. Her heart was always inclined on the tragic side.

Nyarubuye is a village on a hill, with quaint buildings of colonial-era shops and boorish, self-projecting church spires that stand on dust lanes, bleeding with exposed drains. Village women, with children strapped on their backs, sing as they walk. Nothing about the village looks tempting to the Reaper’s scythe.

Rwandan women wear thatch crowns on their heads to balance their loads. As you climb the hill you remember another man who climbed Calvary, the real victim of the fallen nature of things. Nothing tells you that you’re about to make an encounter with gruesome scenes where numerous people died hugging tragic betrayal on church doors.

I’ve never been to Auschwitz, but I’m sure those dreary factories of death communicate from afar the nefarious deeds that were committed there. Nothing does that in Nyarubuye. All you find is mystical haunting ordinariness, a bleeding downpour of the humdrum without a trace of the hanging pall which you’d expect in a place with such gruesome history.

When you stand at the crown of the hill, where the church of death stands, you become overwhelmed by incomprehension; not sadness, not anger, not revulsion, nothing like that; just a sheer inability to penetrate the situation. Disbelief, if you like. You try to comprehend how people killed about a thousand others, people who were more or less known to them all their lives, with machetes and masus — and without remorse and guilt — just because they were of different ethnic group.

Inside the church the essence of things is stripped naked. I didn’t believe it initially but there’s high wisdom in not celebrating the place in sculpted memorial illusions. Yes, the church must remain stripped of lies and denials. Let it testify to what we’ve become; to what has happened since Calvary: bodies with gashing wounds left to decompose where they fell. Pews draped in black mummified human remains; everything melting down to the floor, to dust.

Dust to dust! Decapitated children’s skulls like those of monkeys or baboons. Ashes to ashes! Let it remain no matter how stabbing to the sight. It’s high time we faced up to what we are. If we’re blinded by the sight into despair, so be it. Does Zarathustra want to rob the Devil of his morsel? It’s time we are done with these trimmings to fit our prejudices and ignorance.

I once read in A Memoir of Iris Murdoch by the man she was married to, John Bayley, these words: “Rubbish becomes relaxing where there’s no will to disturb it.” I concur. Dust to dust! How he gets from there to Keats’s poem Hyperion I’m still trying to remember, but he quotes this particular line: “But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest…”

We talked about getting married; planning the path of our life together with the precision it took her to plan to the last detail of journeys. And then another guy wanted the mint from Pretoria, a few notes with a buffalo head on them. With one stab of a sharp object he took my mint of heaven and made her bleed by the mouth into the dirt of this world.

It left me dazed and confused, unable to penetrate the situation and stripped of my own lies. Of all the days, on Christmas Eve?

We were on our way to a river cave because I wanted to see where a Xhosa chief once cheated the whole nation into believing he was the messenger of heaven. It is still an unbearable burden for me to lift that manuscript, as if I’m to profit by her blood.

Lord of my life; I nearly tripped over my life and lost hope in humanity. I can say it now. I’ll live, because it so happens that I’m alive, but don’t ask me to find joy in it unless You send it. Silence in my own company is what I prefer at Christmas now.