We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

by Philip Gourevitch

“If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.”

Quite often, I felt that these stories were offered to me the way that shipwrecked people, neither drowned nor saved, send messages in bottles: in the hope that, even if the legends they carry can do the teller no good, they may at some other time be of use to somebody, somewhere else.

as Conrad’s Marlow said of England, “We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

“You see and you don’t see,” Annick said. “Mostly you just do things. The pictures come later. When they were crushing on the gate at Zambatt, we were crushing back on it so it didn’t fall, and people started throwing babies over. You just catch them. You do things you’d never want to see a picture of.”

“Novels are nice,” my friend said. “They stop.” He waggled his fingers to make quotation marks in the air. “They say, ‘The End.’ Very nice. A marvelous invention.