KIGALI, Rwanda -- Gervais Tuyishime walks in from school. The 9-year-old boy drops his bag and shakes hands stiffly with his mother. Then he sits quietly on a wooden stool. No words are exchanged.

A Rawandan woman embraces her son, one of thousands born as a result of widespread rape by militia.

Most days are like that, says the mother, Alphoncina Mutuze. Her relationship with her son is an awkward one, characterized by bouts of anger out of proportion to the boy's perceived infractions, and frequently resulting in hard slaps to his face. On occasion, mother and child unexpectedly allow a hint of affection, and Mutuze embraces her only son, then quickly lets go, as if terrified of crossing a line she has willed herself to faithfully observe.

Gervais is the product of the gang rapes and sexual slavery his mother was subjected to 10 years ago during the Rwandan genocide, when the Hutu majority slaughtered about 800,000 of the minority Tutsi and their Hutu sympathizers. The dead included every member of Mutuze's family -- her parents as well as all eight siblings.

As a result, Gervais represents two irreconcilable symbols for his mother. He serves as a reminder of the terrible violation that drove her to attempt suicide by drowning. At the same time, the boy is the only known relative she has left.

"I really don't hate him but I feel this child is not mine," Mutuze says quietly, a constant refrain over several days of interviews in her one-room hilltop home in an empty-pockets neighborhood of this capital. "This child is not mine. I could not imagine how I would nurse this child. I wanted to kill this child. I looked at him and I wanted to kill him. I beat him even when I was still nursing him. I beat him even now.

"At times I try to will myself not to beat him up anymore, and I tell myself he is the only relative in the world I have. So yes, sometimes I feel that I am his mother."

Mutuze's fitful attempts to reconcile herself with her unwanted son offer a ground-level view of a larger struggle in Rwandan society, among individuals and between communities, to fashion a workable coexistence in a post-genocide society. Compelled to live together under conditions of grinding poverty, emotional turmoil and daily desperation, killers and survivors alike are feeling their way around the possibility that they could rebuild the everyday trust necessary for the normal functioning of a community shattered by genocide.

At its most fundamental, the genocide was an act of monumental betrayal, organized by the government in the service of the ideology of Hutu Power, which insisted there wasn't enough room in this small central African country for the Tutsi. The majority of the population proved to be willing executioners, and priest turned against parishioner, teacher against pupil, doctor against patient and, often, husband against wife.

"The challenge of the genocide is not simply the killing, but that husband killed wife and father killed son, and the whole moral foundation of the country was destroyed," says Domitira Mukantaganda, vice president of Rwanda's supreme court, who also oversees a grassroots quasi-judicial process designed to promote reconciliation more than the mere imposition of justice.

In this traumatized country, few groups are grappling with the legacy of the genocide with more difficulty than the thousands of women raped by the militia that spearheaded the mass killings of 10 years ago. While precise statistics are unavailable, largely because a public discussion of rape remains taboo and victims are loath to come forward, officials say about 250,000 Tutsi women were victimized.

Children born of such rapes are estimated at between 10,000 and 25,000.

Rape victims share in common with other genocide survivors the loss of family members and large-scale dispossession. But a majority of them also have to contend with HIV and the ravages of AIDS.

And many, like Mutuze, are struggling to accept the children from these unwanted encounters, and to answer uncomfortable questions from restless 9-year-olds dealing with neighborhood taunts regarding the peculiar details of their births.

The House on the Hill

Mother and son share a simple one-room house, a brick and mortar structure built four years ago with the help of a survivors' group. The main section holds simple furnishings -- two plastic chairs, a wooden table and bench. Pictures of Christ and a few choice quotes from the Book of Psalms, a staple of any Rwandan household, adorn the walls. Mother and son sleep in an alcove to the side. Corrugated iron sheets overhead provide some defense against the elements. Sunlight streams through a couple of perforations in the roof.

This was a step up from their temporary accommodations amid disdainful neighbors, an existence made worse by the arms-length treatment from old friends ashamed of the unspeakable circumstances of Mutuze's motherhood. The two had moved from dwelling to dwelling, occasionally even sleeping out in the open.

"Some of the people, they couldn't bear to look at the child because of who he was," Mutuze says. Neighborhood kids called him names. A favorite was "Little Interahamwe," after the feared militia of machete-wielding killers who hacked hundreds of thousands to death during the genocide. Interahamwe means "those who fight together" in the Kinyarwanda language.

"This boy leads a very difficult life," she says, her granite face softening briefly as she considers her son sitting on a low stool, impassive. "He's cheerful enough but everyone knows the circumstances of his birth. So other children call him Little Interahamwe. They call him this so constantly that he came to ask me what interahamwe means. I told him that these were people who killed a lot of people and were mass murderers."

Gervais just sits, quiet, speaking only when spoken to, and then only monosyllabically. A slight boy with a happy face, he exists in the straitened conditions of a child whose mother at once embraces and rejects him, and whose father is a rapist with an identity impossible to establish. With his mother's entire family murdered, the boy is even denied the protective embrace of the typical African extended family, which could have helped absorb the shocks of his young life.

In anger and perhaps in frustration, Mutuze at times similarly disparages her son, calling him Little Killer, "when I couldn't bear the sight of him." When he was 6, she wouldn't let him out to play for an entire year, even when she was out working and he was alone, because she was tired of the whispering and name-calling that his sight provoked in the neighbors.

"I was so ashamed of him," she says.

Her emotions boil over and she sobs, startling herself. "Sometimes I just cry unexpectedly," she says, "without knowing what has caused it."

One Day in April

On the afternoon of April 18, 1994, Mutuze ventured out of the Kigali confectionery factory where she had taken refuge for more than a week as a convulsion of killing seized hold of the city. She was desperate for food.

But this was a terrible time to walk around any neighborhood in Kigali. Since the genocide began April 7, following the killing in a plane crash of President Juvenal Habyarimana, the city had been completely overrun by the interahamwe, backed by government soldiers, who set up roadblocks everywhere and murdered and pillaged at will.

Mutuze came to a roadblock nearby, in the Kicukiro neighborhood.

"That was when I saw those people."

The roadblock was manned, she says, by five thugs, all of whom she knew peripherally at the factory where she worked packing cookies, candies and cooking oil. They were casual laborers there in more normal times, and went by nicknames such as Head Coach.

But now they were drunk on banana beer and the genocide had made them powerful, and they wanted her, at 20 a pretty, smooth-skinned woman, tall and slender. And alone.

"They all had machetes, and they raped me right there in the open," Mutuze says softly, her face hardening and her body rigid. She pressed her fingers and thumbs to her temple and squeezed. "It was broad daylight. As soon as the two of them were done with me, a car arrived and they told me to get up, and I ran off.

"It was the most horrific thing. They were taunting me. I was crying. I was sobbing, and thinking I was dead. I don't know how I found my way back to the factory."

Hearing the Story

As his mother describes the first of numerous times she was raped by the interahamwe, Gervais sits quietly on his stool, face in his arms, looking up to his mother without any particular expression and without a word. It is the first time, Mutuze says, that she'd told the story in his presence.

It is not a story she freely tells at any length, even at a support group she attends with other victims. In fact, when she first broached the scene at the roadblock, and was asked how many men were involved in the assault, Mutuze hit a wall. Physically and emotionally shaken, she fell into a dreadful silence, and the conversation was abandoned until the following day.

"It is taboo for women to even admit they had been gang-raped," says Mary Balikungera, executive director of Rwandan Women's Network, which tries to encourage rape victims to come forward to receive counseling and support. "The mothers don't want to be visible, and some have had their children absorbed in their wider families, so the children know they are members of a family but without knowing exactly who their parents are. Now the mothers are worried about whether to tell the children the truth."

Escape from Kigali

Not long after Mutuze's ordeal, her factory manager, an expatriate from the Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles who was arranging to flee the carnage with his family, offered to take her, too. He got the governor of Kigali, Tharcisse Renzaho, an acquaintance, to write them a letter granting safe passage. Mutuze would pose as his daughter. They fled overland to Goma, in neighboring Congo (then called Zaire), running a gauntlet of roadblocks and easing their way with well-timed bribes.

But such was Mutuze's luck that Goma, which sits across the border on Lake Kivu, also was the destination weeks later for more than 2 million Hutu refugees and the defeated army and militias of Hutu Power. They had fled westward in July 1994, ahead of the rapid advance of the mainly Tutsi rebel forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had finally put a stop to the genocide.

For Mutuze, a young Tutsi woman in a sea of Hutu refugees herded into vast camps in the shadow of the Nyiragongo mountains, her nightmares had only just begun.

The refugee camps hastily erected in Goma spread out over an unyielding lunar landscape of volcanic rock. In the first few days the miserable multitudes, in shock at their sudden dislocation, milled about as if in a trance, hungry and exhausted. In their vulnerable condition, a cholera epidemic struck, killing as many as 7,000 every day for two hellish weeks. At dawn each day thousands of bodies wrapped in straw littered the camps or were stacked by roadsides. At dusk, smoke from tens of thousands of cooking fires rose in the fading light and the volcanoes bubbled menacingly in the distance, creating a surreal backdrop for the unfolding calamity.

'Lied to Save Myself'

In a section of Mugunga, the largest of he camps, Mutuze found herself in the company of 25 others, a lone Tutsi trying desperately to conceal her identity where exposure guaranteed death. Only she and six others in her corner of the camp survived the cholera outbreak. The question was whether she could survive the interahamwe and soldiers of the defeated Rwandan Armed Forces, who controlled the camp as they'd controlled the country they'd just abandoned.

"Most of the time I lied to save myself, telling the others I am Hutu," she says. "But some people would look at me and say, 'You're Tutsi.' Men took advantage of this and took me to their tents and protected me that way.

"Some men were claiming me. Because I was young some men were fighting over me. One soldier took me with him, and he always had to fight off the others who were trying to lay claim to me. That man was able to keep me for some time. I considered this lucky, because there was another Tutsi girl who was gang-raped and she died. Yes, she did die. My life was like that."

But inevitably the pressure built on the soldier to get rid of the Tutsi "snake," and that he should finish the "work" they had started and very nearly completed inside Rwanda by killing Mutuze.

"The man succumbed after some time and sent me away," she says. "He wanted to kill me at first, but then looked at me and said, 'Someone else can kill you.' Another man claimed me shortly afterwards." Thus was the young woman passed from hand to hand, essentially serving as a sex slave in exchange for permission to stay alive. Then, a few months later, came the telltale signs of pregnancy.

Driven Toward Suicide

"I started feeling sick. I had no desire to eat or do anything at all," she says. "When I realized I was pregnant, I first thought of suicide, then abortion. I had many bad thoughts on my mind constantly; abortion was the main thought. Unfortunately there was no way I could afford it because it could have been a death sentence if some of those in the camp found out. They would say that is our child; the child is Hutu."

Mutuze fell into a dark mood, brooding, looking for a way to end it all. Early in 1995, when she was about five months pregnant -- she's lost all precise recollection of time save the day she was first gang-raped -- Mutuze walked into nearby Lake Kivu, attempting to drown herself.

"I felt my youth had gone away and I was useless," she says. "I had no one to talk to. Those were terrible moments that I constantly wished for death. There was no one to confide in, not even God." Some fishermen nearby spotted Mutuze before she slipped beneath the waves, and thwarted her. With the cluster of refugees around her by then extra-vigilant, she carried the pregnancy to term and, in June or July of 1995 -- she couldn't tell for certain -- Mutuze gave birth to a son in a makeshift medical tent run by Doctors Without Borders, the relief agency.

What to call such a baby?

Aurea Kayiganwa, advocacy director for Avega, the main Rwandan association for genocide widows, says the anger, despair and shame felt by many a raped survivor can be measured in the names they have given -- or have allowed family members to give -- their children.

"In Rwandan culture, a baby's name must fit the circumstances of its birth," says Kayiganwa. This is equally true in almost any African society, where names mark a major event, usually heroic, or are aspirational, a yearning for the good and great things that parents everywhere wish for their children. But among the rape victims of Rwanda's genocide, children's names took on a gnarled and bitter quality. In addition to Little Interahamwe, many children born of rape are called Jiyamubandi ("The Intruder"); Niyigena ("It's God's Plan," given a child as if with a sigh of resignation); Mbuzukongira ("I am at a loss,") or Ntahobitabaye ("It's not only me.")

A 'Thanksgiving'

Such was Mutuze's aversion to her newborn son that she wanted to name him War, or at least Zaire, as a reminder of the nightmarish camp where she became a sex slave. But some of the women in the camp prevailed on her to do otherwise, and she was finally persuaded to accept a name they chose -- Tuyishime, which stands for "Thanksgiving."

"I wanted to call him something bad, but these women said that would not be good because it was not his choice to be born," she says, casting a sideways glance at the boy, who seems to be following the conversation with rapt attention, all the while without losing the gentle smile that appears to be a permanent feature of his handsome face.

If Gervais feels any emotion other than general happiness, it never is readily apparent. His is not a particularly active face, save for the eyes, which move constantly to take in his surroundings but almost never betray anything beyond blissful contentment.

And so his expression remains constant as his mother says as follows: "I thought of killing this baby. I did not feel even a single moment of affection for this baby. The thing that prevented me from killing it was that I would be killed myself, and killed badly, by those who claimed it was theirs.

"I would love to give him away to somebody else who can take care of him."

The instinct for rejection of a child born of rape is very powerful in victims, says Jean Damascene Ndayambaje, an associate professor of experimental psychology at the National University of Rwanda, who has seen many such patients over the past decade. He speaks of a young woman who was so insistent on abortion that she had to be tied down and given a Caesarian.

"She totally rejected the child and the child had to be taken to an orphanage," says Ndayambaje, who heads the university's department of mental health, in the southern city of Butare. "I counseled her for three months. Even the girl's family had to get some counseling so they could allow the woman and child to be reintegrated back into the family."

Mutuze says she thinks often how much lighter her load would be if any members of her family had survived the Rwandan Holocaust.

Little Girl Spoiled

She was born in 1974 in the village of Musange outside the central town of Gikongoro, the youngest of nine children of a cattle rearer, Petero Gasimba, and his wife, Atanasia Bwumgura, who nursed the young Mutuze until she entered first grade.

Mutuze was particularly close to her oldest brother, Pierre Hakizimana, who doted on his baby sister, fended off neighborhood bullies and bought her sweets. "He was a trader, and he had the means," she says, her voice a bit unsteady at the memory. "I am heartbroken when I think of him. He loved me so."

At the suggestion of her sister, Bridgette Mukamusoni, who had married and relocated to Kigali, Mutuze moved to the capital in 1987. She never had more than a sixth-grade education, and it took a while before she found a job at the factory, called Sakirwa, where she packed soap and other products. By this time, around 1991, the political temperature was rising in Kigali and around the country. After more than three decades of persecution, including periodic pogroms that had forced hundreds of thousands of the minority Tutsi into refugee camps in neighboring countries, the children of those refugees had formed a rebel army and invaded from Uganda, determined to reclaim their right to live in their homeland.

As the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front pushed steadily into Rwanda, the government mobilized the population into a genocidal frenzy, telling the Hutu that their very existence was in jeopardy. Between 1991 and 1993, killing a Tutsi was no longer seen as a crime. "Even in 1990 people were getting killed," Mutuze says. "At our factory things were getting worse by 1993. Senior Tutsi managers who were termed accomplices began to get killed. There was a lot of tension and we were very worried. We did not know what tomorrow would bring."

By 1994, the regime's killing machine was in full cry. The United Nations, at the active instigation of the Clinton administration, was resistant to intervention; Washington was still reeling from the killing U.S. Army Rangers in Somalia in October 1993.

When the downing of the Rwandan presidential jet on the night of April 6, 1994, provided the spark for the final conflagration, every Tutsi in Kigali was running for cover. Mutuze sought refuge at the factory. But as supplies ran low and desperation rose, she ventured out on the afternoon of April 18, and ran smack into the roadblock where the first of her many rapists awaited.

Driven to Goma with the help of her factory manager, she would endure the refugee camp for the next two years.

A Long Trek Home

With life increasingly intolerable in the camps in Goma, Mutuze decided in 1996 that she had to find a way back home.

"I was so fed up and decided to walk back to Rwanda," she says. "At that time I no longer cared whether I lived."

More than a million Hutu refugees would follow her footsteps within a few weeks, but when Mutuze set off for Rwanda by foot, she met only the occasional straggler. The year-old Gervais was strapped to her back for the trek east through the Virunga range, and then southward to Gikongoro, and her ancestral village. The journey took three months, and it was all for naught. Her entire family had been butchered in the genocide, as had much of the local Tutsi population.

The genocidaires of Gikongoro, as those in neighboring Kibuye province, were particularly thorough in their "work" of exterminating the Tutsi. Even now, the killing has not completely stopped. In October last year a survivor was brutally murdered to prevent any possibility of testifying against some of the killers. In early March, five people were sentenced to die for the murder.

"The whole place was empty; it was ghostly," Mutuze says now. "I did not spend even a single night in there. I kept walking." After various detours for another year, she ended back in Kigali.

Mother and Son

Seven years after mother and son arrived in Kigali, their relationship remains highly conflicted. Gervais is desperate to win his mother's love, according to caseworkers from Avega, the widows association. "You can see that the child unconditionally loves his mother," says Kayiganwa, who has worked closely with both, "even after the abuse she sometimes inflicts on him."

Mutuze admits to moments of intimacy shared with her son, though these are few, she says, and usually fleeting. She recalls taking him once to a wedding in the western town of Kibuye, and both stayed in a hotel for the first time and seemed to temporarily set aside their daily struggle. On occasion Gervais makes his mother breakfast porridge, and both sit down to share the meal. While she has no steady job and money is perennially scarce, now and then she finds enough to buy him candy -- "which he likes very much" -- just like her brother did when she was a child.

Kayiganwa, the Avega official, is not surprised by this. "I can tell you as a mother," she says. "There is one thing that cannot be erased, and that is a mother's love."

Nevertheless, Mutuze says, her urge to be physically separated from Gervais remains close to overpowering.

"I can't say this is a child that brings me joy," she says. "If you know anyone in America who would like to take this child, perhaps it would be better for him and for me." Then she feels compelled to add: "I feel like giving him away not just because I hate him but because I can't properly care for him. He could end up being a mayibobo [street child]. I don't feel that this is the life I would want for him."

Were Mutuze to actually give the child up for adoption, Kayiganwa says the mother would likely be miserably unhappy and most certainly lonely. "I think Gervais is someone that makes her life bearable," Kayiganwa says.

In all the many hours of conversations over several days, Mutuze never once refers to Gervais as "my son," or even by name. Throughout, she speaks of him in an arms-length way, calling him "this child," or "that boy." He is in third grade at an Italian-run school for orphans, but she doesn't know his teacher's name.

"Sometimes when I get annoyed with him I lash out about how he was born. I call him interahamwe, and it's out and too late before I can restrain myself," she says. "He asks, 'But you say interahamwe are killers,' and I have to tell him he is not interahamwe.

"I have never seen this child being sad, despite the fact that I beat him and sometimes tell him that I am not his mother. He is an obedient child, but I don't know why I beat him often. When I go out and have a little money and I buy him something, I don't know why I do that either."

To cope with her torment, Mutuze attends a support group of fellow survivors. Members of a Pentecostal congregation with whom she worships also drop by from time to time, she says, especially when she has recurring nightmares or thinks every other man she encounters in the street bears perfect resemblance to one of her assailants.

"It is comforting -- not really comforting, but you feel better," she says. "I still feel suicidal when I remember the events of 1994, with all my family dead. I can't say that I have overcome. It is still a daily struggle. I don't know how I have survived all this so far."

To fend off the attentions of men, she has worn a wedding band since 1999, like a crucifix that might ward off a vampire. Her opinion of men remains extremely low. "Every man is a selfish individual who is a liar and who wants to take advantage of me," she says, with some vehemence. "So I have decided I am never going that route in my life. Liars who only want to create problems for me. And I am not even beautiful. Why would anyone want someone like me?"

But even in the depths of her despair, she says she has reason to be thankful which, in retrospect, makes appropriate the choice of a name for her son. While sample studies have consistently shown a majority of rape victims were infected with HIV and thousands have died over the past decade, Mutuze is free of the virus. Her propensity to expect the worst out of life led her to distrust the initial negative test result. "I had myself tested many times since I couldn't believe it," she says. "But I don't have it." What she does have is a son she has convinced herself she needs to give up.

"I just wish someone will adopt him so he has a chance at a good life in the future," Mutuze says. "When he grows up and pursues a life of his own, I hope he will look at me as someone who tried to be a good mother, despite all the difficult circumstances."