Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  After Honga, there was Ganza. More than once on the upward climb Antoine suddenly cursed, threw down his load, and stalked off up the trail toward the summit. Deo would sit down and wait. After a while Antoine would return. Deo would say, “Were you looking for some fresher air?” And they would load up again, and go on.

  The last of the truly difficult climbs was the mountain named Kabasumyi—“The Challenge of the Shepherds.” It would be dark or nearly dark by the time they trudged up the last paths to home. Antoine would often say to Deo, speaking of their parents, “I’m afraid we are not really their children.” What parents would work their own flesh and blood so hard? Antoine would say. Often as they scrabbled up the last incline, they’d see their mother standing at the top of the trail, awaiting them.

  Deo was still in elementary school when his father built another traditional, thatched-roof hut and moved them a kilometer or so away from the family compound in Butanza—a steep climb away, to the top of Runda mountain. The cows had more room to graze there, and maybe his father felt safer: there were fewer neighbors, and there was a forest nearby. Partly, Deo guessed, they moved for his mother’s sake, to give her some distance from her mother-in-law.

  Summer mornings on Runda were often windy and chilly. Deo and his brothers and younger uncles would lie around in the sun in the lee of the house before getting to work. Finding them there one morning, on her way to get water from the stream half a kilometer away, his mother put down her clay pot and gave the boys a long stare and compared them to lizards lying in the sun. He could not remember a harsher scolding from her.

  There were eight children eventually, three of them cousins his parents adopted, all but Antoine younger than Deo. It seemed to Deo that he spent more time with their mother than the others did, helping her plant beans and talking with her. People said he resembled her, both in looks and—this was a mixed compliment—in temperament. She was emotional. She cried easily, as he did, and he imagined people saying, “What’s her problem? She has children; she has a strong husband.” She could be counted on to feel sorry for neighbors’ misfortunes, and, though his voice was never as soft as hers, maybe the habit of sympathy was a weakness he caught from her, along with her tendency to get upset when even little things went wrong. Looking back, Deo felt she was both beloved and ridiculed by neighbors, because she was always giving things away, such as milk and especially salt, the sine qua non of the local cuisine, sold by the pinch in the markets. To have to beg or borrow salt was utterly demeaning. To curse someone doubly, one would say, “May you spill borrowed salt”—may you lose what you humiliated yourself to obtain. But his mother was artful. She would take pinches of salt from the supply that his father bought for the cows and wrap the salt in a banana leaf, then slip the package into the needy housewife’s hand when no one else was looking. Word had long since got around. Some people, Deo suspected, wouldn’t spend their own money on salt because they knew they could get it from her. And her generosity could leave his father fuming in the cow barn, yelling at her, “I bought salt! Where did you put it?”

  Once, only once, he overheard her arguing back at his father. She told him he was working her sons too hard. “You’re killing my children,” she said.

  His father was utterly different. If you were playing in the hut or the barn and knocked something over, he’d grab you and shake you. “I could kill you!” he’d say. Then he would visibly catch himself, and say, “Don’t do that again.” An hour or so later he would find you and apologize, and then you would probably cry. One time a man on their hill, drunk on banana beer, was beating up another neighbor, and Deo’s father grabbed the drunk, a much bigger man, and threw him to the ground. Deo watched, sick with fear—fear for his father, fear of his father. Another time, his father roughed up the local Belgian priest. Deo’s baby brother had started squalling while being christened, and in irritation the priest had slapped the baby. After the ceremony Deo’s father belted down some banana beer, then strode right into the priest’s house. The priest banished him from church, where he rarely went anyway.

  His father was well-off by local standards, but he had a lot of children to feed, and he was rather profligate with money, giving it away or buying rounds of drinks. Deo would sometimes hear his grandfather scolding his father, saying, “You shouldn’t hang out with people, drinking like this.” But Deo’s father wasn’t a drunk, and if he worked his children hard, he worked himself harder. He had saved enough to acquire the land by the lake and later, to buy another smallholding, on a hilltop not far from the lake in a town called Kayanza, where little by little he was building another house. He was often away, farming the land by the lake or tending his cows. More than by anyone else, Deo was raised by his sogo-kuru, his grandfather Lonjino.

  Not all the treks Deo and his older brother made were between Butanza and the lake. In late May, when the grass had been overgrazed and had turned into yellow stubble, various members of their extended family would set out with their cows, sometimes for their land by the lake, but often for nearer mountainsides, only four or five hours away instead of fourteen. Often Lonjino would have charge of the family’s herd.

  They would stay out for months, trading milk and manure with farmers in return for the use of their grazing land, and live on milk themselves, also on beans and cassava that Deo and his brother would carry from home. Sometimes he and Antoine would carry cooked mashes of cassava, beans, and potatoes—food so hot when they started out they’d think the tops of their heads were being burned, but often cold and smelly by the time they arrived at the camp of the herders. When Deo wasn’t carrying food, he was herding cows with his grandfather, sleeping on beds of banana leaves under the stars, wary of the dangerous snakes—cobras and mambas, adders, vipers, and asps—and frightened routinely by the harmless chameleons camouflaged in the leaves, which at first touch felt like snakes.

  In the suitcase he carried to New York, Deo had packed a photograph that someone had taken of his grandfather. Lonjino was sitting on a rough wooden bench, dressed in a homemade chamois coat, a straw hat, and a scarf: mornings and evenings, a chill descends on the mountains of Burundi. In the picture, Lonjino looked elderly and thin. His chin was lifted, and he wore a look that Deo knew well, a mixture of dignity and tight-lipped amusement at his own pretensions to dignity. It was the same face Lonjino wore when he had been listening for too long to someone he disliked and would say, “May you have an interesting life.” The same face he’d put on when his wife, Deo’s grandmother, was railing about something or other, and he’d whisper to Deo, “Stay quiet. Let her talk to herself.”

  Lonjino was friendly to most people. He was adept at listening. If he was talking and someone broke in and then apologized for interrupting him, Lonjino would say, “No, no, go ahead, go ahead.” When he spoke, his voice was so quiet and sure and his words so succinct that Deo felt that he wanted to lean toward him to listen, even when Lonjino was scolding him: for bringing back water full of tadpoles, or for stealing a bunch of bananas from a farmer whose land they camped on. Deo’s punishment for the bananas was a huge pot of milk, fresh from the cows, sickeningly warm, which Lonjino make him drink, and go on drinking even after he threw up. There was no punishment, though, for slipping on a pile of manure in the family compound and breaking Lonjino’s special banana-beer pot. Deo cried out when he fell, less from pain than fear of Lonjino’s disappointment in him. His grandfather came right out and picked him up, and said nothing about the pot.

  By the time Deo was traveling with Lonjino, the cow Yaruyange was old and useless, so decrepit you had to lift her with a stick to get her on her feet. Lonjino sold her to some strangers. The money changed hands, and then, while the other buyers sharpened their machetes on a stone, one of the men grabbed Yaruyange’s long horns and twisted her head halfway around. The cow was bellowing, the men were laughing, and Deo ran, covering his ears with his hands so as not to hear any more. Then he heard the muffled sound of Lonjino’s voice, calling, “Deo
!”

  “Yes, Sogo-kuru,” Deo called back.

  “Run and tell those men to wait for me before they slaughter Yaruyange.”

  The tall grass whipped Deo’s cheeks as he ran. The men were still sharpening their machetes when he got to the clearing. “Just wait. Just wait. My granddad has something to tell you.”

  Deo watched as Lonjino gave the men back their small wad of Burundian francs. Then Lonjino led Yaruyange back to the barn in the compound. The old cow died peacefully, and unprofitably, a few days later.

  Deo became, thanks to Lonjino, a connoisseur of banana beer. Deo didn’t like the drink himself, but he knew Lonjino’s taste so well that the old man would send him off to fetch beer without even telling him where to buy it, knowing that Deo would find the brew with just the right bitter taste. Sometimes, out in the mountains, Lonjino would go himself to a village and fetch his own calabash of beer to savor at the end of a day. Once, up near the waterfall on the Siguvyaye River, Deo sat with Lonjino in the shade, and figuring his grandfather might be softened up from the beer he was drinking, Deo asked—it was a momentous question—“Sogo-kuru, can you give me just one cow?”

  “I didn’t know you were that drunk,” said Lonjino.

  “I’m not drunk!” said Deo. He hadn’t even had a sip of the beer.

  Lonjino gave him the look. For a time they sat there in silence. Then Lonjino said, “I’ll give you a cow when you finish school.”

  There were many times with his grandfather in the mountain pastures when Deo felt in no hurry to become someone else. Times when the cows would take a break from grazing and lie down, and Lonjino would sit and play his flute. Back in the village, Lonjino played accompaniments on his flute while his best friend played the stringed inanga and sang the traditional songs in the traditional whispery voice. This best friend of Lonjino’s was especially equipped for traditional singing. Years before, so the story went, someone had tried to strangle him and had injured his vocal cords. Lonjino made his own flutes and many of his own melodies. It was said that one should not play flutes in the wild because snakes would come to listen. Lonjino would play anyway, and Deo would feel afraid at moments. But then he’d forget about snakes and listen to the rush of the waterfall and the flute music. Often a gaggle of colorful, long-legged birds would gather nearby—musambis, with their spiky-looking hairdos, Deo’s favorite animal after the cow. He would try to persuade the birds to dance. The trick was to wave your arms up and down, while you sang a traditional song. “Dambira musambi dambira. Dambira musambi nzoguhera. Nzogohoya akogorika yinankonge.” (“Dance for me, please. I will give you maize with the beautiful colors, if you dance for me.”) And more often than not the musambis would oblige, prancing around and flapping their wings.

  Deo looked forward to those times after sunset, when, all the chores done, his grandfather would tell stories, out in the mountains and especially back in Butanza. Children were warned not to traffic in made-up stories during daylight hours. If you did, you’d never grow up, the adults said. But fictions were permitted at nighttime, especially stories told by elders. Inside Lonjino’s house, seated with his siblings on the dirt floor around the cooking fire, Deo would wait for his grandfather to begin, thinking, “This is going to be so much fun.” Deo would feel like laughing in anticipation, trying to keep silent—or if he couldn’t, he’d go outside for a moment to get rid of his laughter, because Lonjino would be offended, even angry, if you laughed during his stories, and especially if you laughed beforehand.

  Sometimes Lonjino would weave a story together about events of the day. Sometimes he’d tell stories from the past. There was fiction in all of them. Some were fables, even if Lonjino pretended they weren’t:

  Once, Lonjino said, he had a neighbor here in Butanza. Deo and his siblings never knew him; he’d died long ago. The poor man had two lazy sons, but as he lay dying he came up with a plan to reform them. He told them he had buried money in cow horns all over his land and they could have all the money they found. So the sons dug and dug, turning over the earth everywhere, each staking his claim to a part of the land by planting trees and crops on it. The old man died, and they kept on digging and planting until they had created a sizable forest and a much improved farm. Only then did their mother tell them, “There is no money. Your father just wanted you to do something worthwhile.”

  Lonjino told that story more than once, and always ended it the same way, saying to Deo and his siblings, “Love work, and keep doing more. Don’t wait for your parents to lie to you and tell you they have money buried.”

  Sometimes Lonjino would begin his stories by saying, “It used to be …” Deo sensed pain in these words. And sometimes he heard indignation—when for instance Lonjino told stories about colonial days and the Belgians. Back then, Burundi and Rwanda were essentially tiny adjuncts of the vast Belgian Congo. Like many other Burundian men, Lonjino had worked in the Congo tapping rubber trees. Unlike some others, he had survived the experience intact, returning home unharmed after a year. Lonjino told of a fellow worker, a huge, powerful man, whom the Belgians beat to death with the kamoke, the whip. If you were late to work, Lonjino said, they would make you lie down, and beat you from the legs up to the neck, eight times. Top to bottom and bottom to top. And each full circuit was counted as one, so it was really sixteen beatings, Lonjino would say. The victims would lie bleeding from their heels, naked on the ground. Other men would go back home after months of this abuse, and they would beat their wives and their children, destroying their families.

  From Lonjino, Deo first heard about the onerous taxes the Belgians imposed, how small owners of cows or crops had to turn over the best part of their milk, produce, and meat to the local Burundian chiefs, who administered the hills for the colonists. Lonjino talked about how, during the struggle for independence, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Belgian helicopters sometimes appeared overhead—“like bees,” he said. And he seemed to be in mourning himself when he told of how the nation grieved after Prince Rwagasore, the man leading Burundi to independence, was shot to death, with an elephant gun, at a restaurant by Lake Tanganyika. Shot by a man from a place called Greece, but Lonjino believed that the Belgians arranged the killing. Finally, there was the happy ending—independence, the time, Lonjino would say, when he and his family could at long last drink as much of their own cows’ milk as they liked.

  Lonjino had a whispery laugh, nearly soundless. In the glow of the cooking fire, Deo would see his grandfather’s shoulders shake and his fine white teeth light up. Knowing that Lonjino was laughing, Deo knew that all was right with the world.

  On an evening when Deo was five or maybe six years old, his mother hovering over the fire, cooking supper, he heard a man’s voice call his father’s name from outside. “Prosper! Prosper!” It was his mother’s cousin, from many kilometers away. He was breathing hard. He stood at the fence outside the compound, panting and shouting angrily at Deo’s father, saying words like these: “What are you doing? You are going to be burned down in your house with your children and your wife! How stupid are you? What are you doing? Can’t you go out and know what’s going on?”

  Deo’s father was easily provoked, as a rule, but he didn’t answer. Deo’s mother listened quietly and then she said to her cousin, “Thank you.”

  The memory of that evening had lost some detail by the time Deo was a teenager. But he remembered the men of the family removing the pile of wood that blocked the lone entrance to the compound, and being hustled out into the dark toward a place with tall trees while his grandfather’s dogs barked. He also remembered hearing his older brother ask the adults what was going on—and the adults didn’t answer.

  For what seemed like a very long time, his family and several others camped out among nearby wooded hilltops, moving again and again. Most of the men of his family had taken the cows somewhere to safety. He and the rest of his siblings stayed with the women. There were downpours and lightning at night. In the daytime, one or anothe
r of the adult women would leave them and return with food from their gardens—squashes, bananas, potatoes. The women kept watch from the hilltops. He’d hear them asking each other whether they saw houses burning. When they finally went home to the compound, their cow barn had in fact been burned. Only Lonjino had stayed there, with his dogs and his spear. He must have left at the last moment and hidden out in the banana groves.

  The barn was rebuilt, and normal life resumed. No one told Deo exactly what had happened, and, being a very obedient child, he didn’t dare to ask. In second grade you were obliged to read a book of fables. All of them frightened Deo, especially the one entitled “What Killed You, Head?” The fable went like this:

  There once was a man who went out walking. On the trail, he met a head rolling across his path.

  He started bothering the rolling head with questions: “What killed you, head?”

  The head replied: “Would you keep going and stop reminding me of unpleasant things? I died a hero, but you will be killed by your own tongue.”

  The man continued his walk. When he arrived at his destination, he told the people there: “Do you know what I saw? I met a rolling head on my way here, and I asked it: ‘What killed you, head?’ And it replied: ‘I died a hero, but you will be killed by your own tongue.’”