by Tracy Kidder
They talked most of the way to New York. But when they got up from their seats, she turned to him and said, “Au revoir.” When he reached Immigration and took a place at the end of one of the lines, he spotted her again. She was standing in another line, pretending not to see him. He looked away, down at his sneakers, blurred by tears. The spasm passed. He was used to being alone, wasn’t he? He didn’t care what happened to him anymore, did he? And what was there to fear? What could the man in the booth up ahead do to him? Whatever it might be, he’d already seen worse.
The agent stared at Deo’s documents, then started asking questions in what had to be English. There was nothing to do except smile. Then the first agent got up from his seat and called another agent over. Eventually, the second agent went off and came back with a third man—a short, burly, black-skinned man with a bunch of keys as big as a fist on his belt. He introduced himself to Deo in French. His name was Muhammad. He said he came from Senegal.
Muhammad asked Deo the agents’ questions and also some questions of his own. For the agents, he asked Deo, “Where are you coming from?” When Deo said he had come from Burundi, Muhammad made a pained face and said to him in French, “How did you get out?”
There was no time even to attempt an answer. The agents were asking another question: Deo’s visa said he was here on business. What business?
Selling coffee beans, Deo told them through Muhammad. Just keep smiling, Deo told himself. He could tell them anything they wanted to know about Burundian coffee. But they didn’t ask about coffee.
How much money did he have?
Two hundred dollars, Deo said with pride. The cash had been a gift from Jean. Exchanged for Burundian francs, it could have bought a lot of cows. But neither Muhammad nor the agents looked impressed.
Where was he staying?
Jean had told him he’d be asked this. A hotel, he said.
The agents laughed. A week in a hotel on two hundred dollars?
In 1994, airport security wasn’t what it soon would be. Muhammad said something in English to the agents. His words must have been the right ones, because after a few more questions, the agents shrugged at each other and let him through, into America.
He had no idea what he’d do next. After six months on the run, he was in the habit of not looking ahead. God had taken care of him so far. And still was taking care of him, it seemed. As this stocky and serious-looking stranger, Muhammad, walked him out of Customs, he said that Deo could stay with him in New York City. But Deo would have to wait here for three hours. Muhammad worked at the airport as a baggage handler. He had to finish his shift. Could Deo wait three hours?
Only three hours? said Deo. Of course!
He sat on a plastic chair at baggage claim, his suitcase at his feet, and watched the new world pass by. Wheeled carts in which infants rode like little princes, their parents pushing them. And people in suits, so many people in the uniform of preachers and government ministers. Almost everyone looked happy. Or at least no one looked alarmed. And no one looked terrified. These were people just going about their business, greeting their friends and their families, as if they didn’t know there were places where dogs were trotting around with human heads in their mouths. But how could they not know?
“God, why is this?” Deo asked silently.
Muhammad had a big car. He had to be a person of means to have a car, even if it was old and swayed from side to side on the road. So much went by so fast, it was hard to focus on anything, though once, amid all the wide crisscrossing pavements and the great herds of automobiles, Deo saw a car that was nearly as long as a bus. “Mon Dieu! What is that?” Deo asked.
“Sometimes they’re used as taxis,” said Muhammad.
Deo sat staring straight ahead, so as to think about this. Then they were crossing a bridge so high he felt as if he were in the airplanes again, and Muhammad said, “Manhattan,” and pointed at a horizon of buildings impossibly tall, like giant trees, like a sky of pillared clouds at sunrise in the mountains. After a time Deo began to notice vacant lots, and buildings with wood covering their windows. When Muhammad finally turned off a main avenue onto a side street, Deo wanted to ask, urgently, why they were stopping here. A few yards away, a man stood urinating against the wall of a building. The sidewalk was covered with empty cans and bottles and all sorts of paper trash. Muhammad led the way toward a brick building with broken windows and letters scribbled here and there on the walls. High up on one wall there were three letters painted, as if each letter were swollen: P E N. He followed Muhammad inside, the air reeking of urine and excrement, up a staircase with a busted railing, and finally into a room with a dirty wooden floor, a room with no door and no furniture. At the end of a dark hallway, there was a toilet, completely stopped up.
Muhammad said he stayed here to save money. He didn’t have to pay rent for this room. His whole reason for being in New York was to earn and save as much as he could. He would be leaving for Senegal in a few weeks. Deo should do as he had—work here for a while and save, then start a new life. But he should do this somewhere back in Africa, not in New York. “Because it’s so hard here,” Muhammad said.
In retrospect, the tenement PEN was like a warning of this truth. The next day, Muhammad led him outside and down a staircase in the sidewalk, and introduced him to the subway. They would go in the direction called “Uptown,” Muhammad said, speaking the word in English, then translating it: “Haut de la ville.”
Deo nodded, wondering, “Are we actually going to go up? Like flying?”
Muhammad took him to a grocery store. The manager said Deo should come back tomorrow if he wanted a job. The next morning Muhammad told him, “You know how to get there.” Feeling that he ought to know—he knew how to find his way around, he was not a child—Deo set off for the grocery store alone.
When he slid one of Jean’s twenty-dollar bills into the hole at the teller’s window, the woman inside asked him something, he smiled, and the next thing he knew she had shoved a whole pile of tokens back through the hole. Here he was going off to earn money and he’d already spent a fortune just to get there. But he couldn’t think how to explain. So he swept up the tokens and turned away, before the teller or anyone else might see his confusion, and raging at himself—“You are mentally retarded!”—too flustered to look for the sign that said “Uptown,” whatever “Uptown” meant, he went to the nearest platform and boarded the first train that stopped.
For most of the rest of the day, Deo rode the subways, from one end of the line to the other, again and again. He studied the maps on the walls of the cars. They were hard to read, because they were covered with writing that looked a little like the writing that said PEN. Peering, he realized a map was no good to him anyway, because he had no idea where he might be situated among the multicolored lines and foreign words and symbols. He abandoned his pride and tried to ask other passengers for help, to no avail—and how harsh their voices sounded, even the voices of people who seemed to want to help. A couple of times he disembarked and found himself surrounded by cars and people rushing by in all directions and by buildings so tall he had to search for the sky, and, feeling even more lost up there than on the trains, he went back underground and used up yet another of the expensive tokens. He peered out the train windows, at station signs that came and went too quickly for him to study, at blue and yellow lights flashing by in the tunnels, at the reflection of his own frightened-looking face in the glass. He told himself he didn’t care if this pointless journey never ended. What seemed like another voice was saying this was a catastrophe, he might be lost forever. Then he began to feel too weary to argue with himself. This weariness was strong. It was like something outside of him, like the clangings and screechings of the train, of the rocking rolling train. “No one is in control of his own life,” he told himself. The thought seemed to comfort him. He dozed off for a while.
It was evening when he finally made a lucky guess and came above ground and saw PEN. Gazing at
the façade of the abandoned tenement, he said to himself that he never wanted to leave here again. Just in case, though, he went back down to the station and studied the signs on the walls, memorizing the number and name: “125th Street.”
When Muhammad returned from work that night, Deo told him—it felt like confession—“I got lost.”
Muhammad was reassuring. He said he’d show him how to find his way around and also help him get a job. He’d do this on his next day off, a week or so away.
In the meantime, Deo stayed close to the building PEN.
TWO
New York City,
1994
Deo felt he wasn’t really here, as he left the abandoned tenement in the morning and saw the empty bottles and remnants of dinner and soiled babies’ diapers that other squatters left behind, and the roaches and rats that skittered away as he passed by. When he walked out onto the sidewalk of Malcolm X Boulevard, he was met by a noise as loud and constant as the waterfall on the Siguvyaye River, but much less peaceful: a mingled noise of car horns and sirens and shouts and babbling voices and a blaring, tuneless music made up of words he didn’t understand, words spoken emphatically over thumping sounds so deep he felt as though he heard them in his chest. The music came from cars and young men who walked by carrying boomboxes on their shoulders and basketballs under their arms and caps turned backward or sideways and pants riding so low they seemed about to fall down, all walking as if they had broken their hips. “My God,” he thought, “what happened to these people?” He asked a French-speaking friend of Muhammad’s why people were drinking alcohol out of bottles concealed in paper bags, and the man said it was illegal to drink in public. But in public was where most Burundians drank. Everything was so upside down. So many heavy people sat on the stoops of buildings. Some looked almost too heavy to walk. Back home, only the rich were fat, and yet this was obviously a poor part of New York City.
Of course there were a lot of people working, too, in hair-braiding salons, pawnshops, small grocery stores and liquor stores, and there seemed to be at least as many people working at tables on the sidewalks, hawking music tapes, pocketbooks, wristwatches, clothes. There was a group of Jamaicans selling a kind of bread he liked. The biggest table selling clothes belonged to a group of people from Senegal. They were friends of Muhammad’s, they spoke French, and they had an apartment in a building a block away from PEN. It was a real apartment, which they had turned into a little factory, half a dozen women and men sitting shoulder to shoulder at sewing machines, making clothes from African cloth to sell at their sidewalk table. There was no question of their inviting Deo to sleep there, the place was already so crowded. But they told him he could do as Muhammad did—leave his suitcase with them, use their phone for local calls, and wash up in their bathroom. One of the men said to Deo, “Maybe you could learn to sew.”
Deo understood this as a kindly gesture, not a serious offer. For several days after his long subway ride, he didn’t feel up to much of anything except sitting. He chose to do this on the stoop of the respectable building where the Senegalese lived. With Muhammad away at work, these people from Senegal were the nearest thing he had to friends. Their table stood nearby. Deo gazed at the street. Everyone in sight had dark skin. At moments he thought he’d been transported to an African city. Memories felt more present than this place. All by itself and randomly, it seemed, his mind shuffled through pictures of home and his family, and horrible images that he stared at stupefied, as if he were right now standing in gray dawn at the open window of the hut with the smoldering roof, staring in at the bodies on the floor. When two police cars, blue lights whirling, pulled up to the curb in front of the stoop, and several uniformed men came out of the cars yelling, he thought he must be dreaming. He awoke to see a pistol practically touching his nose. A white man in a uniform held the gun, the first white man he’d seen in Harlem. The man was shouting at him.
Over the past six months, in almost every dream he remembered, he was trying with all his will to run and his legs just wouldn’t move. This was the most vivid part of his dreams, usually the part that woke him up, legs kicking. He meant to run now. He was going to jump up and run. But then he heard another voice. It wasn’t louder than the others, but it was yelling in French: “Deo! Tu es fou? Haut les mains!” “Are you crazy? Hands up!” It was one of the Senegalese men at the clothing table. Deo’s hands shot up, as if all by themselves.
He was handcuffed and frisked. His mouth was forced open, a flashlight shined into it, his passport and visa examined—thank God, he had kept them in his pocket. Finally, a policeman’s face came up close and spat fierce-sounding words. Then the patrol cars drove off.
The cops were looking for narcotics, the Senegalese man explained. They were angry because Deo hadn’t obeyed their orders quickly enough.
It was a while before Deo’s hands stopped shaking. But the policemen didn’t put a stop to the train of his memories. The policemen seemed to have come right out of his memories. He sat again on the stoop. There was nowhere else to go. A weariness surrounded him. It felt stronger than any he had known, even on the run. It dulled his senses. It cut him off from the present. He wondered what was happening to him. No one was chasing him with a machete now, he thought. Now his body was at rest. Now it was his mind’s turn to run.
If only he could surrender himself to sleep. He had slept on dirt floors most of his life, and in forests and fields, but it was hard to surrender to sleep on the piece of floor that Muhammad had staked out inside the tenement. At night the adjacent rooms filled up with other squatters. Lying awake in the dark, on his blanket, his mind cycling through images he couldn’t find a way to stop, he heard babies crying, drunken voices arguing, muffled moans and grunts that he recognized as sounds of sex, disgusting because public. Usually he dozed off only a little before dawn. Awakening at first light, he was apt to think, “Oh, it’s samoya.” The word meant “one o’clock” literally, but on the hill where Deo grew up there were no clocks, and samoya was the name for the first hour of daylight. For a moment he was himself again, a medical student with a family that loved him and owned a fine herd of cows. Then he’d realize that the light was coming through the broken windows of the tenement, and he wondered who was Deo now.
Muhammad reminded Deo a little of his favorite uncle, a man of few words and completely reliable. On a Saturday morning, Muhammad handed him a subway map, and Deo spent the day learning how to read it, as they rode the trains beneath Manhattan. Along the way he followed Muhammad to a store named Gristedes, on the Upper East Side. The job was delivering groceries, and the terms were twelve hours a day, six days a week, fifteen dollars a day, no lunch break.
At a bookstore near the grocery, Deo bought a pocket-size French-English dictionary and a little notebook. “Slow” was one of the first words he looked up. It also had a practical meaning at the grocery. When one of the cashiers made a sour face and declared, “Slow,” she was saying that there weren’t many customers around, and this meant that Deo would be ordered to stock shelves or be sent to the basement to clean up or, once in a while, be dispatched to another store, called A&P or Sloan’s or Food Emporium, which all seemed to be connected somehow. The A&P was across town. He’d be driven there in the back of a van, riding among brooms and other tools. There was no seat. He tried to brace himself against the walls, but the first time the van made a turn, he lost his balance and slammed into one of the walls, clattering among the tools. One of the men riding up front—he was African and spoke French—called back over his shoulder, “Hey! Careful with the tools back there!” Sounding worried, the man asked, “Did one of my brooms fall out?” In his mind, Deo answered, “No, it’s just me.” He laughed to himself—this was the way you managed discomfort back home—and thought: “Somehow I wish I could be treated like a broom.”
Mostly he delivered groceries, from seven in the morning until seven at night. He had looked up the essential words. These were “service” and “entrance” an
d “delivery.” “Where is the service entrance?” was the first English phrase he mastered. Having no one else to tell them to, he told himself his jokes. “Delivery,” he decided, was his American name. Out on foot with his grocery cart, he would ring the bell at the door or metal gate that read “Service Entrance.” A voice would growl through the intercom, “Who is it?”
“Delivery.”
Some addresses were better than others. Some were only a short walk away, some had service entrances at street level which weren’t hard to negotiate, some were easier than others to find—along Park Avenue, for instance, the street signs showed the numbers on a block. By the end of his day, though, it seemed as if every delivery was fifteen blocks from the store and every entrance was like the one off Park Avenue that had a wrought-iron gate fringed with barbed wire and a sign by the bell that read “Please wait five minutes for superintendent.” The first time Deo came there, he took out his pocket dictionary and spent the five minutes looking up those words. Now he simply stood and waited at the iron door, weary in his legs, weary all over, feeling a wave of nausea waft upward toward his chest, threatening to turn into tears. When the superintendents arrived, often after more than five minutes, Deo would say, “Hi”—according to his pocket dictionary, this was a friendly greeting—but as often as not the superintendents wouldn’t bother to answer. They unlocked the gates, but only a few held the doors open for him. Deo would lift the bags of groceries out of his shopping cart, hold the gate open with his foot, and inch down narrow, clanging metal stairs. He’d shoulder open the next door, make his way past the trash cans of an untidy, gray basement, ride up on the service elevator, then lug the bags down carpeted hallways to apartment doors. Behind some of them he had glimpses of rooms that looked like pictures he’d seen at school of Belgian palaces. Most of the people who opened the doors were polite but brusque and almost never friendly. Many just looked at him oddly when he offered his “Hi.” Sometimes as he walked back toward the store near the end of another long day, he’d stop and stare at the canopied, carpeted front entrances of Park Avenue apartment buildings, and bitter thoughts rose up: “I just do not deserve to use an entrance like that. And yet I am bringing them their food. Don’t respect me, but at least respect your food.”