Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  Sophomore year began with a struggle, too. He sat down at his desk in the Black Hole, opened his text to the beginning page of his assignment in the English literature survey course, and saw “Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote …”

  “Wah!” He reached for his English dictionary. There was no “whan” or “hise” or “shoures” or “soote.”

  “What is this, Chinese?”

  His teacher calmed him down, his professor in African-American literature gave him a modern English translation of Chaucer, and he finished that course with an A. He had begun to find his way around the curriculum, thanks mainly to a graduate student who befriended him. Deo was majoring in biochemistry and, for reasons that were clearly not practical, in philosophy.

  He loved his course in American literature, and most of all W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk. He read and then reread it until very late in Butler Library, a favorite place at Columbia where he often spent half the night before heading home to SoHo. There was a homeless man camped out in the subway station. Deo could smell him from a distance, but went over to his campsite anyway, and talked to the man until the train arrived. The car was all but empty. Deo sat and began reciting his favorite passage from DuBois: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” He felt DuBois might have been speaking to him, back when he’d been lugging groceries into penthouses, feeling that he would be better off in a peaceful Burundi among people as poor as he—if Burundi were peaceful. Deo went on reciting, not realizing he was murmuring aloud: “He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet.” There was just one other passenger in the car, a young man. He got up and walked quickly away.

  Deo hadn’t made many friends among his classmates at Columbia, but he had many now among graduate students and faculty. With difficulty—for a while it looked as if he might be deported—James O’Malley had argued a judge into granting Deo refugee status, but he was still waiting for permanent residency, for his green card. Nevertheless, he had joined a protest in front of city hall—it had to do with MetroCard transfers, and being a daily bus and subway rider, he was an interested party. This had felt like a significant act, something he’d never have thought or dared to do three years before, a New Yorker’s act, another investment in this place.

  One of his lives would remain forever unfinished. That was simply a fact. He was resigned to it. Another life now lay before him, with new friends, a new education, new parents.

  But he still listened many nights for news of Burundi on the French broadcast, and once in a while he still made streetcorner calls. On a day in his sophomore year he was riding the subway home from Columbia and remembered that he hadn’t talked to Claude for weeks. He got off at 125th Street. He went through the usual drill with the men who hawked long-distance calls at the pay phones. He dialed the house full of internal refugees in Bujumbura, as usual, and the voice of a bus driver named Pierre answered.

  “Is Claude there?” Deo asked in Kirundi.

  “No.”

  “This is Deo calling.”

  “Oh, Deo. I have some news for you,” said Pierre. “Some of your family are alive. Your parents also.”

  Weeks of phone calls followed, to Bujumbura from the sidewalks of Harlem, from Nancy and Charlie’s loft to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. There were searches for relatives. It was a time of reunions by phone and of gusimbura. Many aunts and uncles and cousins had died. His sister and two youngest brothers, one adopted, had been living in forests and had ended up in a military camp. Two brothers had been killed, victims of the civil war. Part of the body of one of them had been found in a swimming pool in Bujumbura. The other had died when rebel militia had attacked his high school. Deo didn’t ask after Lonjino. No one spoke the old man’s name to him over the phone, a silence that amounted to a death certificate. He had mourned Lonjino and the rest of his family already. He mourned the dead again. But his parents really were alive, in a refugee camp in Tanzania. There were months of phone calls, and many arrangements fell through, before he was notified that his mother and father were back in Burundi, resettled not in Butanza, but in Kayanza. There were no telephones there, but his favorite uncle would bring them to his house in Bujumbura so that Deo could speak to them. He made the call from Nancy and Charlie’s. They insisted, and never mind the cost.

  When you greet someone in Kirundi, you usually say, “Amahoro,” “Peace.” When you repeat Amahoro many times, as Deo did when he heard his father’s voice, it means that you are overjoyed. “Father, this is Deo!”

  “Oh, okay,” said his father. “So it’s good to hear your voice.” Then his father asked, “Are you you?”

  Yes, he was Deo!

  “Hunh,” said his father, as if he were puzzled. “I expected your voice to be changed.”

  “Why?” Deo asked.

  “Oh, okay,” his father said. “So where are you?”

  Deo said he was in America, the United States.

  “Oh, in Iburaya,” said his father.

  The voice Deo heard over the line lacked the authoritative, peremptory tone that had always been part of the memory he’d carried of his father. But maybe his father was simply shocked to hear his son’s living voice, as Deo was shocked to hear his father’s. He wasn’t sure what else his father said, if anything. His father really was alive. And what must his father be thinking? “Where is Deo right now as I speak to him? Where could he be?” But Deo had no words to describe where he was, none that could be assembled into terms his father would understand.

  Then his mother’s voice was on the line.

  “Mother, this is Deo!”

  “No. It’s not you,” he heard her declare. “This is a voice in my head.” There was a click on the line, and then silence.

  Deo placed the call again, and got her on the phone once more. She didn’t hang up this time, but there was no way to settle into conversation with her. She was guarded, as if she felt he were trying to sell her something that she wanted but knew she couldn’t have. Besides, his mind was wandering again. It was wonderful to hear his mother’s voice, more than he had dared to hope for, and it was frightening to hear it. What exactly had happened to his mother and his father? They were old by Burundian standards. He imagined them trekking to Tanzania. He could picture the mountains they must have crossed, bent under what they’d taken of their possessions. What had they endured on the way, and in the camps? Could his mother have been raped? What if his mother began to tell him? He was trying to think how he could reconcile his feelings, all this joy and dread, into the old feelings for his parents that simply had to be preserved, and at the same time he was trying, at five of Nancy and Charlie’s dollars a minute, to think of words to convince his mother that this voice she heard was really Deo’s—she must acknowledge his existence!—all the while knowing he was going to fail.

  He had believed that his family was lost forever. His greatest burden was gone, and a new burden received. There were moments when he wished he was back on his own. Now and then he imagined leaving everything behind and slipping back at night into Central Park. But then he thought of his parents trying to rebuild their burned house in Kayanza, of his widowed grandmother in Butanza, of his siblings hiding in the forest. And here he was living off Nancy and Charlie and going to an Ivy League school where he had been mistaken for the son of a king, studying organic chemistry and philosophy. The words that came into his mind were “useless,” “selfish,” “parasite.” It would take years to become a doctor with a real salary. He should study for a practical career, so he could help his family sooner. He enrolled in a basic economics course. The class was interesting enough, but every moment he was in it felt like a betrayal of his dreams. After a week, he dropped the course, feeling ashamed.

  He thought of go
ing back to Burundi to visit, but this was impossible. He had only narrowly won refugee status. As his lawyer, James, pointed out, the immigration service might well refuse to readmit a refugee who went back to the place he had supposedly fled.

  One thing he could do was send money.

  He often stopped to see Sharon at the rectory. He’d learned through Nancy and Charlie that she used to be a nun. He didn’t ask her about this. He didn’t want to know more about her than she wanted him to know. He could tell she was always glad to see him. She’d say, “Tell me the latest.” When he delivered good news, that he had been admitted to Columbia for instance, she would give him a hug, saying, “I’m so proud of you.” She had suffered with him through the search for his parents, and for a time afterward he had asked her for money to send them. She gave him what still seemed like large sums—a hundred dollars here and there. But then he and Nancy and Charlie helped Sharon move, from the rectory to a small apartment that belonged to a rather addled lady, where Sharon occupied a tiny alcove. After seeing her lodgings and few possessions, Deo realized she was living almost like a homeless person. He didn’t want to ask her for donations after that.

  He took odd jobs, tutoring high school students in math, bartending now and then. He could always save a little from his college loans, and from the weekly envelopes labeled “Deo” that Charlie left on the kitchen counter every Monday morning.

  Charlie did this, Deo knew, to make it easy for him to accept spending money. One hundred dollars every week. From the first morning the envelope appeared, Deo hated taking it. He had spent as little as he could, hiding the remainder in the Black Hole because he thought that if he tried to give it back, Nancy and Charlie would be hurt. Now he started to save more, so as to send it to Burundi. He figured he needed only twenty dollars a week for subways to and from Columbia, and sometimes he could save part of that by walking from lower Manhattan to the campus up in Harlem. He began skipping lunch. In a biochemistry class, he and his fellow students were learning about the mechanics of starvation, how in the early stages the reactions of the liver often produce bad breath. A fellow student in that class, an acquaintance, not a friend, actually said to him, “Man, you need to eat.” Deo modified his regimen, but only by eating more during the evening meals with Nancy and Charlie.

  Getting the money to his family was harder than saving it. His family didn’t have bank accounts. He figured he had to send cash. He made a package out of postcards, gluing two cards together with money inside. He sent one of these to Antoine, then learned via Claude that the glued-together postcards had arrived, but without the money.

  Most likely the theft had happened in Burundi. But maybe, he thought, someone rifled the packet at the post office he used in New York. Maybe he should try another post office. One time he went with Nancy and Charlie to visit friends of theirs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was taking a walk alone through a residential part of the town, with money for home in his pocket. Seeing a house with an American flag on a pole out front, he went up the walk and knocked on the door. A man appeared. Deo said he wanted to send a letter. “Are you all right?” asked the man, and Deo hurried away. A national flag in Burundi meant a government building. Evidently, flags had other meanings here.

  Through a chance encounter outside the United Nations in New York, he met a Burundian expatriate who was driving a cab in the city. The man introduced Deo to friends in the Burundian consulate. Attempts at making peace in Burundi had begun. Deo volunteered to show New York to Burundian dignitaries who came to the United Nations. He did this gratis. He’d show them around, then ask them to carry money back to his relatives, usually to Antoine, who would distribute it. Deo would call Claude and ask him to tell Antoine that he had sent money. Once in a while, Deo would hear in a subsequent call that Antoine found the courier, the person whom Deo had shown around New York, and the courier claimed that he’d lost his wallet or that her suitcase had been stolen. But this procedure usually worked.

  When Deo had started giving tours, he had hoped they would make him feel connected to Burundi. He went about the job with some missionary zeal at first. He’d take his fellow Burundians to the World Trade Center, and pointing up, he’d say, “Look. Look at how people built and constructed a country, as opposed to us.” But many seemed less interested in the sights than in shopping—usually for sheets; he never asked why. After a while Deo came to think that most didn’t want to see New York so much as they wanted to be able to say they had seen it. Deo continued giving tours until he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Anyone who has been far away from home has felt the oddness of its seeming at once very close and very far away. Home as he’d known it was right there in the light of dawn at the windows in Nancy and Charlie’s front room, in the thoughts that arose as he bent over the radio in the Black Hole late at night, listening for news of Burundi. But he was conscious—it felt like grief—of the great physical distance and the impossibility of actually being home. Nancy must have sensed all this. When Deo’s uncle sent a photograph of himself, she had it framed and hung it over Deo’s desk.

  He tried to return to his studies. When he had first heard his parents were alive, everything else had fallen aside for him, including Columbia. Bad news from home could still overwhelm him. During junior year, he missed weeks of school and didn’t fully realize it, until he returned to the class in organic chemistry, long the crucible of pre-med students, and found he understood almost nothing of the lecture. He explained what had happened to the professor, who urged him to drop the course and take it again the next semester. Deo said he couldn’t do that, the professor offered to tutor him weekly, and after the course ended the professor wrote a letter for Deo’s file, saying that Deo’s C plus in the course was not a true reflection of his abilities.

  Americans, Deo thought, seemed to look forward to evening. He dreaded it. Not that he never slept, but he still found himself awake many nights, wishing for perpetual daylight as he sat over his textbooks in the Black Hole. At the urging of a friend he went to see a psychiatrist. In the midst of telling his story, he sensed that the psychiatrist was shocked. The doctor said he had no experience with Deo’s sort of trauma. Maybe Deo could find someone from a culture that had been obliged to deal with injuries like his. It was the first time that Deo had tried to tell his story out loud, really tell it in full. He left reproaching himself. What was he thinking, talking like that, pitying himself? He could handle his own problems.

  Early in his sophomore year, on October 10, 1996, he had found this message in his email. It was written in Kirundi, in lowercase and without punctuation. He translated it later for the authorities. It read:

  i found you are my classmate at columbia but you would never be able to know me because i look like other black people i’ve learned that you are a dog from the tutsi we palipehutu people will wipe you out and i just want you to know that any time we want any moment we can get you around columbia we will see you but keep in mind that we watch you everywhere you go

  The email was signed “committee of palipehutu in new york.” PALIPEHUTU, along with other rebel groups, continued to wage war against the shaky Tutsi-dominated government in Burundi. Deo mentioned the email to a classmate, who told him to take it to the dean of students. The dean had the email traced, but to no avail. The writer had used a public computer, most likely at an Internet café. The dean told Deo not to worry. New York was safe, he said. Deo should stay among friends and avoid being alone with people he didn’t know.

  Deo hung a printout of the email on the wall by his desk in the Black Hole, not very far from his uncle’s photograph. He told himself, “You better get used to this.” Keeping the threat in plain sight, he imagined, might be a way of taming it.

  But the smallest coincidence could draw him back. Simply opening a text to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and seeing the word “April” did the trick, because that was the month in which Rwanda’s genocide had begun. The familiar cycle would start again, the w
hirlpool of nightmares and waking visions and sleeplessness to avoid nightmares and ensuing exhaustion that seemed to leave him still more vulnerable to nightmares. He would come down with immobilizing headaches. As a medical student in Burundi, Deo had seen people pushed away from hospitals, not only when they had no money, but sometimes just because they were dirty and smelled bad. Now news that a relative was ill would keep him worrying for days, imagining that his mother or a sibling might even now be receiving such treatment.

  His grades suffered more or less in cadence with his nightmares and with troubling news from Burundi. Then he would recover and do well for stretches, more than well enough in the end to make it through Columbia.

  He graduated in a spring rainstorm, especially memorable because the ceremony went on outdoors without a tent. Nancy and Charlie and Sharon came, of course, and Lelia and James, who was still trying to get Deo his green card, and half a dozen others, all part of the Wolfs’ wide cast of friends, Deo’s support group.

  The email from sophomore year, the warning from the supposed member of PALIPEHUTU, still hung over his desk in the Black Hole. The paper had grown brittle. Nothing had come of the threat. It was like the noise one hears lying in bed at night, a noise outside the house. As time goes by you doubt the noise was real, and then again you don’t.

  NINE

  Burundi-Rwanda-Burundi,

  1993–94

  On October 22, 1993, Deo was working as an intern in a rural hospital, deep in the countryside of northern Burundi. It was in a town called Mutaho. He had finished his third year of medical school, and had chosen to do his first internship here, in part to get away from the clamor of Bujumbura and back to the country. And Mutaho’s hospital had recently been improved. It was a very large hospital by Burundian standards—three hundred beds—with a first-rate staff.