Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  To return to the Gristedes was no relief. The manager was a white, middle-aged man whom everyone called Goss, and right from the start Deo knew that Goss hated him. The man kept a long wooden pole near his desk. Deo would see the tip of the pole coming at him and force out a smile, wanting to break the pole in half. Goss would poke him with it to get his attention, to send him in one direction or another, or sometimes, it seemed, just for fun.

  Deo searched his dictionary for English equivalents to adieu. He wanted something with more feeling than “goodbye.” He settled on “I’m finished” and “See you tomorrow.” Maybe if he said those words to Goss at the end of the day, the man would realize Deo was a good person and would keep him. Deo couldn’t afford to lose his pay, and he couldn’t bear to think he might be judged unfit even for a job as a grocery boy. But the farewells did no good. If anything, Goss seemed to hate him more. Goss would say something loudly, and the cashiers and the other delivery boys would turn and look at Deo and everyone would laugh—even the fellow delivery boy who also came from French-speaking Africa and who Deo thought was his friend.

  When no one else was nearby, when he and the other young African were stocking shelves together, Deo asked in French what it was Goss said about him that made everyone laugh.

  His friend looked away as he spoke. “For example, he says that the people where you come from are starving, and that’s why they’re killing each other. So they can eat each other.”

  Most of the other workers, Deo thought, couldn’t really be amused by a joke like that. They were only trying to please Goss. They were probably afraid for their jobs, too. And, Deo realized after a while, every delivery boy wanted Goss to favor him with the good deliveries, the deliveries to customers known for giving tips.

  Deo had a lot of experience with bargaining, but the whole idea of soliciting tips was new, and, once he understood it, repugnant. His French-speaking African friend at the store explained. No one could survive in New York on fifteen dollars a day. You had to get tips. You lingered in doorways, you cleared your throat, sometimes you asked for a tip outright. But this was the same as begging, Deo thought. Back home a self-respecting person didn’t even yawn in public, because to yawn meant you were hungry, and to admit that you were hungry was to admit that you were incompetent or, worse, that you were lazy. The beggars you saw in cities like Bujumbura were mainly displaced country people who had lost their pride. The first time a customer in a doorway held out a dollar bill toward Deo, he raised his hands as if to push the money back, and said in his thickly accented English, “No. No. Thank you very much. Eeet is okay.”

  But this didn’t happen often. It wasn’t hard to tell that whenever possible Goss sent him to tipless destinations—to addresses where a doorman took the groceries and delivered them himself and got the tip, or where customers received the groceries and quickly shut the door or said they were sorry but they didn’t have any change. It was also clear by then that the other delivery boys were usually the ones Goss picked to work at one of the other stores on days when the cashiers declared, “Slow.” Not that Deo liked riding in the back of the van across town to the A&P, but he felt wounded. By now it seemed obvious that a delivery boy belonged to a layer near the bottom of New York’s hierarchy, and also that there was a bottom to that near-bottom, which he occupied. Standing at another service entrance—they all might as well have been fringed with barbed wire—waiting for another brusque superintendent who would hardly even look at him, he wondered whether this could really be the station he had been put on earth to occupy. Not long ago he had been a student so accomplished he’d been offered a scholarship to college in Belgium. Not long ago he had been a medical student at the top of his class. “And here I am,” he thought, “being treated as someone who has a primate brain.” “God,” he said silently. “Take my life.”

  “A New Yorker.” Deo had heard the phrase around the store. Even Muhammad used it, and the Senegalese tailors and sidewalk merchants. This world, he was beginning to understand, was divided, among other ways, between people who were “New Yorkers” and people who weren’t. Within a couple of weeks, he felt he had all but mastered the subway. The trains ran like rivers, taking you anywhere. To look at his subway map was pleasing, like looking at a set of differential equations he’d solved. Never mind that he had solved only one, his route between Harlem and the Upper East Side, or that he always rode in the first car, so as to gain a little extra time to peer out the windows at the station signs and decide whether he’d reached the right stop. Riding along, subway map sticking out of his hip pocket, Deo told himself he was becoming a New Yorker, too.

  He had discovered Central Park. The first time he’d walked into it, curious about the trees on the other side of Fifth Avenue, he had thought, “My God, I just discovered a forest!” It had become one of his favorite places, along with bookstores.

  Some of the stores were like forests themselves, forests of books, more books than he’d thought there were in the world, and all in one place. He often went to the stores in the evening after work, just to recover from being poked with Goss’s stick, just to walk among the tables and shelves and pick up books and turn the pages and imagine he was reading them. The stores he liked best had chairs where he could sit and look at books he hoped one day to read. Sometimes he fell asleep in the chairs. Bookstores, he found, were one place he could sleep, but never for long, before a clerk or manager woke him up and asked him to leave.

  He always spent some time with the dictionaries. Many people had looked at him oddly when he’d said, “Hi.” There had to be something wrong with the way he was saying it. At the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-third Street, he found a dictionary with an international phonetic alphabet, something his pocket dictionary didn’t have, and after a little study it all came clear. He had been pronouncing the word as if it were French. He’d been saying “Hee” instead of “Hi.” He looked around in the store for the cheapest dictionary that contained the phonetic alphabet. But it was an English-only dictionary, and after he spent half a day’s pay to own it, he realized he had solved only half his problem. When he heard a new word, he would if possible get someone to spell it for him or guess at the spelling and write the word in his notebook. Then he’d look it up in his new English dictionary and learn how to pronounce it. But most of the time he couldn’t decipher the English definition in his little phrasebook. So he’d take his notebook to the bookstore and look up the word in a French-English dictionary. It was a laborious process. Performing it was often the best part of his day.

  Many evenings he composed English sentences out of dictionaries and wrote down the words and sounded out the pronunciations in his mind. Some of the sentences he made up produced puzzled looks when he tried them out at the grocery or on a customer, but he managed to explain to a pharmacist—in a low voice so no one else would hear—that his feet were afflicted with a disgusting fungus. The cause was obvious to Deo: six months on the run in wet sneakers.

  When he had left Bujumbura, a close friend from medical school named Claude had been living in an apartment with other displaced young men. The apartment had been equipped with a telephone. Deo had made sure to take the number with him. He kept it on a piece of paper in his pocket. He asked the Senegalese clothing merchants whether he could call from the phone in their apartment. Too expensive, they said, but they showed him how to make a streetcorner call from Harlem to Bujumbura. You went out to the sidewalk to one of the open telephone stands and right away someone, almost always a man, would come up to you. He’d get you to write down the number you wanted to call, and he’d take the phone and punch in a bunch of numbers. Usually, the phone man would turn his back as he dialed—so that you couldn’t see the numbers he was pressing, Deo figured. He didn’t want to know the details of the phone men’s business, because if they were doing something illegal and he knew it, he wouldn’t want to use their services, and he didn’t know any other way he could afford to call Burundi.

  The fi
rst time Deo made a streetcorner call, the phone man demanded five dollars. Deo parted with the money reluctantly. Miraculously, the phone rang on the other end, and a voice answered in Kirundi and said that, yes, Claude was there.

  The news was bad. Civil war continued. Claude came from the same region as Deo. To speak to him was almost like speaking with family. Deo could have talked to him for hours. The phone man was making a fuss, though, telling Deo his time was up—the man’s tone of voice was unmistakable. Deo gestured him away. There was a woman standing near the phone man, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. She began yelling at Deo. He was telling Claude that he would call again soon, when from the corner of his eye, he saw the woman throw her bottle at him. He was wearing flip-flops. The bottle shattered at his toes. Deo let out a yell, turning angrily to face the woman. She was laughing at him. Deo even raised a fist. Seeing this, one of the Senegalese vendors walked over, telling Deo in French not to mess with that woman. There was a reason why it was the woman and not the man who had done that to him, the street vendor said. Here in the U.S., you don’t touch a woman. It didn’t matter whether you were the victim or not. If a woman attacked you like that, the best thing to do was to leave.

  Selling streetcorner calls was a competitive enterprise. Once he realized this, Deo haggled every time he made a call. He could almost always find a phone man who would connect him for three dollars, four at most. But that was still almost a third of a day’s pay. The money he’d brought with him was long gone, and his wages seemed to evaporate no matter how careful he was. Money went for the antifungal salve, for antacids to lessen the chronic churning in his intestines, for the food he could stomach, for his dictionaries, for subway fare. He studied the dictionary one night and the next morning descended the stairs to the subway outside the tenement PEN and tried to bargain with the teller over the price of tokens. The teller was firm but polite; maybe he wasn’t the first who had tried to bargain with her, that part of the city harbored so many Africans.

  He stopped turning down tips. They weren’t easy to come by, partly because he would never allow himself to ask for one, partly because of Goss. But the more deliveries he made the more chances he had, he reasoned. For a time he worked on Sundays. But only for tips, and Sundays were so slow that the most he could hope to get was about four dollars. A dollar was a big tip, fifty cents a decent one. The transactions were almost always short and impersonal. Once in a great while, a customer wanted to talk—for instance, a white Frenchwoman in a very tall building on 110th Street. She talked on and on to him in French, while a baby cried in another room. She seemed to view him as a compatriot. She said she knew the grocery stores treated people like him badly. He should go to the French consulate and get them to help him find a better job. She meant well, he thought, but clearly she didn’t understand. France was the friend of the génocidaires in Rwanda, and therefore his enemy. She was Catholic and would pray for him, she said. When he left, she tipped him a dollar.

  And then there was the American woman who appeared on a day when he happened to be working at the A&P on the Upper West Side. Deo was assigned to carry her groceries to her apartment. She was, he thought, quite beautiful to look at, a middle-aged woman with wonderful posture. “So elegant,” he thought, as he walked along beside her, her bags of groceries in his arms. She asked him a question. He didn’t understand it, all he could do was smile. But she smiled back, as if she actually enjoyed his company. He had picked up a baseball cap somewhere, an “I ♥ New York” cap. When they got to her apartment and he had put the groceries in her kitchen, she looked at him quizzically. She must have been looking at his cap, because she asked, “Do you really love New York?”

  This he understood. “Oh, yes!” He put on his best smile. At the moment, he felt that his answer was true, or true enough.

  She walked him to the door, and he went out to the hallway, thinking he didn’t care this time that he wasn’t getting a tip. But then he heard her say, “Wait.” He turned back. She said something he didn’t fully understand. The gist seemed to be that she didn’t believe he loved New York, and she wasn’t sure if this would really help him. She was holding the door open with one hand, and extending the other toward him. He stared at her hand. He couldn’t believe it. She was giving him a twenty-dollar bill!

  He took it. He was speechless. He was wishing he knew the words to thank her—stronger, better words than the English equivalent of Merci beaucoup.

  “Bonne chance,” she said.

  Did she speak French? If she spoke French, he would love to talk with her. But before he could get the question out, she had closed the door.

  He was living mostly on milk and bread and cookies. Once in a while he took a carrot or a few grapes from the produce bin at the grocery store. Everyone did that. It occurred to him there might be ways to steal most of his food from the Gristedes or the other stores where he worked, but that would be risky and worse than begging. Out of mild curiosity, on his way to work, he had looked at a menu posted outside a fancy restaurant on the Upper East Side. In a place like that, his day’s pay wouldn’t even buy a napkin. A place like that, he thought, might as well be on another planet, along with the juice bars, coffeehouses, hot dog stands, pizza shops he passed every day. He hardly noticed those places anymore. They weren’t just too expensive for the likes of him; they didn’t offer anything he wanted. He could remember caring about food and wanting certain foods, but over the past months he’d lost his appetite. He hadn’t studied the physiology of appetite, but it seemed as if a switch in him had simply been turned off. On the run, he’d learned to stifle hunger, and now he often had to force himself to eat, even on days when he was feeling well. It was a good thing, he thought, that his system still had lactase. Lately, milk was one of the only things he could bear to taste.

  He had felt puzzled at first at the skinniness of so many of the well-dressed women he saw on the streets and in the apartments of the Upper East Side, a skinniness that would have marked them as impoverished back home. He himself was downright skeletal, even thinner than when he had arrived in New York. Some days he would rise very early and walk the thirty blocks or so to the grocery. Once in a while, he’d walk back at the end of his twelve hours of work, to save the subway fare and to prolong the time before he arrived back at the tenement. Sometimes he’d ride the bus instead of the subway, because the bus took him back there much more slowly. His knees ached constantly. He still couldn’t sleep for long on the floor of the filthy room he shared with Muhammad, and when he did nod off he often wished he hadn’t, because of the dreams that came. He would start awake from nightmares, without much memory of the dreams themselves but with a residue of dread that felt like something interfering with his breathing, that made him afraid to go back to sleep.

  And now Muhammad was heading home to Senegal. The apartment of the Senegalese would still be a refuge, with a shower and a functioning toilet that Deo could use. But he didn’t like the prospect of sleeping in PEN, among the drunks and drug addicts and prostitutes, without his burly friend and protector. Muhammad himself didn’t think this was a good idea. Before he left, he took Deo to another abandoned tenement in Harlem, on 126th Street, and introduced him to the men squatting there. They were all African-Americans. None spoke French. Muhammad called them “friends,” but they were not friendly once Muhammad left. Almost at once they began making jokes about Deo. He couldn’t understand the jokes, but he knew they were directed at him. After he’d spent a few nights there, one of the squatters told Deo he had to pay him rent. Deo pretended not to understand. On a morning soon afterward, another of the squatters came up holding a knife and asked Deo for money. The man was big—bigger than Deo, anyway. His smile was nasty. Deo said he didn’t have any money. The man jiggled the knife in one hand and slid the other into Deo’s pocket. “Unh-hunh,” he said, as he pulled out the cash Deo had managed to save that week. “Yeah! You have money!”

  After that, Deo kept his cash in his underwear. And
he moved, to another abandoned tenement, another reeking, rat-and roach-infested place, on 131st and Third Avenue. He had found a piece of floor inside. On his second or third evening there, sitting by a broken window on the second floor, he heard gunshots. He knew the sound at once, an all too familiar sound. Deo looked out the broken window and saw people running in all directions and, on the sidewalk just below, a body lying in a spreading pool of blood. He thought, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m seeing blood again.” There were sirens. Police cars arrived, then an ambulance, and when those were gone, a crowd gathered around the pool of blood. For hours Deo lay on the floor listening to the excited voices of the sightseers on the sidewalk below. He had to get away from this place. He had to get away from Harlem.