“I GUESS the soothsayer was wrong,” I teased my mother-in-law when we got back to Kampala. She laughed.

     I called Jean. ‘We still don’t have the other passports,” he said. So I flew back to Bujumbura for an all-court press. What was supposed to have taken two days had stretched out to nearly a month. During this visit, I stayed with cousins in the ethnically cleansed, Huruless quartier of Nyakabiga. These cousins had no compassion for the Hutus. Cousin Josephine’s sister, who was married to Cousin Leonard’s brother, and three of her children had just been killed in Kigali, and the brother and the one remaining child were among the tens of thousands of Tutsis still trapped in Rwanda. With several dozen Tutsis, the\ had been stuck for the previous six weeks without plumbing or electricity in the Hotel des Milles Collines, drinking and cooking with the water in the swimming pool, and protected by sx casques bleus.

       The day after my return, Jean learned that the passports were ready but hadn’t been signed, because the commissioner whose signature was needed had been arrested: he was a Hutu, and weapons had been found in his home. Two days later, our go-between brought Gilbert’s passport. It had been signed by the new commissioner, but the stamp with the commissioner’s name and title was missing, so it had to go back.
 On Wednesday, the family came down to Bujumbura for the third time that week, hoping that all the passports would be ready, but they weren’t. So we decided to go to the Embassy and apply for visas for just Antoine, Pascaline, and Jean—the crucial visas. If they got theirs, it would be difficult for the Embassy to turn down the children. The consular officer interviewed the three of them together; I was not invited. After about fifteen minutes, they returned to the waiting room, looking sombre. But when we got out on the street Jean patted his attaché case, gave a little thumbs-up sign, and broke into a big smile. “She was really friendly,” Jean said. “She asked my father why he was going and he said, ‘C’est pour le mariage.’ Mv father is not a man who anyone could believe would tell a lie. ‘Why wouldn’t you stay?’ she went on. ‘Moi? At my age?’ he said. ‘To do what?’ She looked at his bank statement and asked Are you going to liquidate your account?’ and he said no.” Apparently, it was the indisputable fact that the Rwagasanas were leaving their property and savings in Burundi that persuaded the official of their intentions to return. The next day, Jean picked up the passports, stamped with three-month tourist visas. 

      On the following Tuesday night— the final hour, because the consular officer was leaving for two weeks on Thursday, the wedding date (which we were locked into) was in eleven days, and the plane tickets still had to be express-mailed from New York—the children’s passports were delivered, and the next morning Antoine and I trooped back down to the Embassy with the children. The consular officer kept them in with her for a very long time. I started to get worried.

      “She asked us so many questions and I felt beaucoup de peur,’ Gilbert said when he finally got out. “At first, we played dumb. She asked me how long I was going to stay, and I said, ‘Two weeks. We’re going back right after the wedding. There’s nothing else we want to see or do in America.’ “Where’s your return plane reservation?’ she asked. I said, ‘My father has it.’ She called him in and he said he didn’t have it. But he got out of this brilliantly by saying ‘I showed it to you last time.’ Then we all started telling her stories, and we really got into it. In the end, she smiled and gave us the visas. But I thought for a while she was going to say non.”

      ON May 21st, Janvier’s wedding day—and the day a front-page Times article reported that as many as ten thousand corpses had been washed into Lake Victoria—my wife and I and the Rwagasanas were standing on our deck in upstate New York, surveying miles of forest. I handed each of them a glass of champagne and pointed out a shadbush that was in showy bloom and was alive with spring warbiers. “You have come at the perfect time,” I said. “For the next four months, this will seem like the most beautiful place on earth.”

      Pascaline wondered why the United States couldn’t give some of this empty land to the people who were stateless, and Antoine asked, “Are there any wild beasts in this forest?”
“Only deer, coyotes—which are like jackals—red foxes, and the rare bear,” I said. “There are no lions, no spitting cobras, no interahamwe with machetes. There is no danger here. Welcome.”