I said, “You won the war.”

“My business was to fight,” Kagame said. “I fought. The war is over. I said, ‘Let’s share power.’ If I weren’t sincere, I would have taken over everything.” His plea for understanding suddenly seemed to carry a threat. He said, “If I wanted to be a problem, I would actually be a problem. I don’t have to dance around weeping, you see.”

Not long after this conversation, I was approached in Kigali by a man who had long been privy to the workings of Rwandan power and was himself now in the government. He told me that he wanted to be completely honest about what was going on in the country, but on an anonymous basis. He was a Hutu, and travelled with a Kalashnikov-toting soldier in tow. “Listen,” he said. “Rwanda had a dictatorship, Rwanda had a genocide, and now Rwanda has a very serious threat on the borders. You don’t have to be R.P.F. to understand what that means. You don’t have to fall into the old thinking—that if you’re not with these guys you’re with those guys.” The man went on to explain at length his view that Rwandans cannot be trusted. “Foreigners cannot know this place,” he said. “We cheat. We repeat the same little things to you over and over and tell you nothing. Even among ourselves, we lie. We have a habit of secrecy and suspicion. You can stay a whole year and you will not know what Rwandans think or what they are doing.”

I told him that this didn’t fully surprise me, because I had the impression that Rwandans spoke two languages—not Kinyarwanda and French or English but one language among themselves and another with outsiders. By way of an example, I said that I had spoken with a Rwandan lawyer who had described the difficulty of integrating his European training into his Rwandan practice. He loved the Cartesian, Napoleonic legal system, on which Rwanda’s is modelled, but he said that it didn’t correspond to Rwandan reality, which was for him an equally complete system of thought. By the same token, when this lawyer spoke with me about Rwanda, he used a language quite different from the language he would speak with fellow-Rwandans.

“You talk about this,” my visitor said, “and at the same time you say, ‘A lawyer told me such-and-such.’ A Rwandan would never tell you what someone else said, and, normally, when you told a Rwandan what you had heard from somebody he would immediately change the rhythm of his speech and close himself off to you. He would be on his guard.” He looked up and studied me for a moment. “You Westerners are so honest,” he said. He seemed depressed by the notion.

“I’m telling you,” he said. “Rwandans are petty.” I wasn’t sure of the French word that he used for “petty,” which was mesquin. When I asked him to explain it, he described someone who sounded remarkably like Iago—a confidence man, a cheater and betrayer and liar, who tries to tell everyone what he imagines they want to hear in order to maintain his own game and get what he is after. Colonel Doctor Joseph Karemera, a founding officer of the R.P.F. who is now Rwanda’s Minister of Health, told me that there is a Rwandan word for such behavior. Having described the legacy of thirty-four years of Hutu Power dictatorship as “a very bad mentality,” Karemera said, “In Kinyarwanda we call it ikinamucho—that if you want to do something you are deceitful and not straight. For example, you can come to kill me”—he clutched his throat—“and your mission is successful, but then you cry. That is ikinamucho.”

My visitor liked the word mesquin. He used it repeatedly. I remarked that he didn’t seem to have a very high opinion of his people. “I’m trying to tell you about them without lying,” he said.

A few days before I was to leave Kigali, I ran into Edmond Mrugamba, a man I had come to know around town, and he invited me to join him for a visit to a latrine into which his sister and her family had been thrown during the genocide. He had mentioned the story before, and I remembered that he made a sound—“tcha, tcha, tcha”—and chopped his hand in the air to describe his sister’s killing.

Edmond drove a Mercedes, one of the few still left in Rwanda, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt and jeans and black cowboy boots. He used to work for a German firm, and his wife was German; she had remained in Berlin with their children after the genocide. As we drove, in the direction of the airport, Edmond told me that he was a well-travelled man, and that after many trips in East Africa and in Europe he had always felt that Rwandans were the nicest, most decent people in the world. Edmond spoke quietly, with great intensity, and his face was expressive in a subtle, wincing way. He had never imagined the ugliness, the meanness—“the disease,” he said—that had afflicted Rwanda, and he could not understand how it could have been so well masked.

Near the outskirts of Kigali, we turned onto a red dirt track that descended between high reed fences surrounding modest homes. A blue metal gate leading to his sister’s house stood open. The yard was crackly dry bush strewn with rubble. A family of squatters—Tutsis just returned from Burundi—sat in the living room, playing Scrabble. Edmond ignored them. He led me around the side of the house, to a stand of dried-out banana plants. There were two holes in the ground, about a foot apart and three feet in diameter—neat, deep, machine-dug wells. Edmond grabbed hold of a bush, leaned out over the holes, and said, “You can see the tibias.” I did as he did, and saw the bones.

“Fourteen metres deep,” Edmond said. He told me that his brother-in-law had been a religious man, and on the twelfth of April last year, when the interahamwe came to his house, he had prevailed upon the killers to let him pray. After his prayers, Edmond’s brother-in-law told the militiamen that he didn’t want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. Then Edmond’s sister and his brother-in-law were thrown in on top.

Edmond took his camera out of a plastic bag and photographed the holes. “People come to Rwanda and talk of reconciliation,” he said. “It’s offensive. Imagine talking to Jews of reconciliation in 1946. Maybe in a long time, but it’s a private matter.” He reminded me that he had lost a brother as well as his sister and her family. Then he told me that he knew who his brother’s killer was, and that he sometimes saw the man around Kigali.

“I’d like to talk to him,” Edmond said. “I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving sister said, ‘Let’s denounce him.’ I saw what was happening—a wave of arrests all at once—and I said, ‘What good is prison, if he doesn’t feel what I feel? Let him live in fear.’ When the time is right, I want to make him understand that I’m not asking for his arrest but for him to live forever with what he has done. I’m asking for him to think about it for the rest of his life. It’s a kind of psychological torture.”

Edmond had thought of himself as a Rwandan—he identified his spirit with that of his people—but after the genocide he had lost that mooring. Now, to prove himself his brother’s keeper, he wanted to fix his brother’s killer with the mark of Cain. I couldn’t help thinking how well Cain had prospered: he founded the first city, and, though we don’t like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children. ♦