Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  In retrospect, Deo thought he might have foreseen what was about to happen to the country. There had been omens: the killings of 1988, the Hutu Ten Commandments, the postelection protests, his angry classmate’s comparing him to the tail of a beheaded snake. But the election of a Hutu president, Ndadaye, had not affected Deo in any way so far. In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

  He had been assigned a room in a wing of Mutaho’s hospital, a little room with a window and door that he could lock and a narrow bed and a small table on which he kept his one change of clothes. He didn’t have much money. When he got some time off, he took a walk or went for a run on the red dirt road that ran roughly north and south past the hospital. More often, he hung out with the nurses, and especially with patients. When he was with patients, he never felt lonely.

  His workday began at seven-thirty, when he’d begin rounds with a doctor and nurse, checking on patients and taking notes. On the morning of October 22, 1993, he came out of his room ready for work, but he couldn’t find either the doctor or the nurse he was supposed to accompany. In fact, walking around the hospital, he couldn’t find any doctors at all. He saw only a couple of nurses, at the opposite end of one of the hospital’s many corridors. The nurses looked as if they were in a hurry. He wouldn’t bother them. But why so few nurses and no doctors? Maybe they’d gone on vacation, and no one had bothered to tell him: he was just a lowly student. Maybe this part of Burundi celebrated a holiday he didn’t know about. The hospital gave him a weird feeling this morning. Then again, it was a disorienting place—a large, concrete, single-story complex of buildings joined by open-air corridors and crisscrossed by hallways. Mutaho was out in the middle of nowhere. He knew no one in the town. Something could easily have happened to the medical staff without his knowing. Something bad, even. “Oh, it’s probably just me,” he thought. “Imagining things.”

  Deo went off on rounds by himself, visiting the patients for whom he shared responsibility. The eerie feeling grew as he made his first visits. Several times as he approached a room he heard the voices of the patients inside, but the moment he opened the door, the talking stopped. After a while he decided to go to the room of a malaria patient, a young man whose family lived nearby. Deo sat down on the edge of the bed, a small bed with a rusty metal frame like his own. From previous visits, Deo had surmised that the young man was mildly depressed. “You look fine,” Deo said cheerily, and the man smiled weakly up at him. Deo checked his notes. He was still sitting there, chatting idly, when the patient’s brother arrived. Deo had met him a few days before, a university student. He came in without knocking. He seemed to be in a hurry.

  Deo stood up to greet him. “Your brother’s doing fine,” Deo said. Then, knowing that the family was local, Deo remarked, “It’s a really strange day. It’s a slow day. What’s happening?”

  The brother shifted on his feet, looked one way, then another, and said, “Actually, I want to take my brother home.”

  “Home?” said Deo. “He hasn’t been discharged.”

  “Deogratias, don’t you know what’s going on?”

  “No. What’s going on?”

  “President Ndadaye’s been killed, and they say he was killed by some Tutsis in the army, and now the war is going on, the Hutus are retaliating and killing every Tutsi all over the country.”

  This news had urgent meanings, and one of them seemed to be that there was no time to think them through. Deo blurted out his first thought, a protest. Hadn’t Ndadaye been president for all Burundians, both Hutu and Tutsi? Just because Ndadaye was a Hutu and his killers were Tutsis didn’t mean all Tutsis were guilty. Deo hadn’t killed the president.

  “I have nothing to do with that.” The young man was helping the patient get dressed. “I really think you should get out of here.” Clearly, he now knew that Deo was a Tutsi, if he hadn’t guessed before.

  “Please help me,” said Deo. “I don’t know anyone around here.”

  That was impossible, said the patient’s brother. Some of his relatives were even now at work killing Tutsis, he said. “I just hope you don’t get killed in front of me. That’s all I hope,” he said, as he helped his brother get his shoes on.

  The patient spoke up. There must be a way they could help Deo. The patient and his brother argued. “I’m leaving!” the brother yelled. “If you don’t want me to help you get out of here, then stay!”

  The sick boy rose. His brother helped him to the door.

  “Where should I go?” Deo asked.

  His patient turned. “Oh, Deogratias! I know you’re not going to survive. I always enjoyed seeing you. You were very helpful to me. May God bless you.”

  All of that Deo remembered clearly, indelibly. But then his mind grew “messy,” as he liked to say. He remembered loud noises coming from outside and remembered running out of the patient’s room and looking frantically around for an exit from the building, and throwing open a door only to find himself facing a toilet. He thought he must have resembled the rats that would come out of the bush onto a road, running this way and that. The next thing he knew, he was running back toward his room, less out of forethought than by reflex.

  The route was direct, down a long hallway and then along one of those pasages that connected the buildings. It opened onto a part of the hospital’s dirt parking lot. He heard trucks. He heard whistles and drums. He had crossed the open area when he heard a truck pulling in. It sounded as if it was right behind him, chasing him. Inside the next enclosed hallway there was pandemonium—weeping and wailing, the metal doors of rooms slamming, the sound of shoes and flip-flops slapping the concrete floor, the sound of his own footfalls. As he ran, he had to dodge other people, relatives trying to get their sick family members out of that place—young women with babies in their arms, elderly men and women being carried and half carried down the halls by frantic-looking relatives.

  He rushed into his room and crawled under his bed. He wanted to shrink. He wanted to dig a hole in the concrete floor. What if someone looked under his bed? He rolled onto his back and grabbed the rusty springs and tried to pull himself up flat against the springs. Impossible. He rolled onto his side. From under his bed, he could see across the floor to his doorway, and he realized he had forgotten to close and lock his door. He couldn’t make himself move. He curled up, burying his head in his arms, trying to bury himself in himself, trying not to breathe.

  In the following months, Deo had no room for reflection, only reaction. When he was able to think clearly about his long last day in the hospital at Mutaho, he was left mostly with questions and suppositions. As near as he could tell, both patients and staff had been a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis. All of the doctors and most of the nurses must have heard of the president’s assassination on the radio the night before, or learned about it from people who had heard the news on the radio. But why had the radicals, the militiamen, attacked the hospital? Maybe their leaders had reasoned, “There are Tutsis in that hospital and Hutus who aren’t going to help us.” But how had the militiamen managed to mobilize so quickly? Later, he would wonder if it was true, as some people claimed, that all this had been planned far in advance. And he’d think about the capriciousness of fate: he heard stories of other people who had escaped by hiding above ceilings or immersing themselves in rivers or latrines, whereas he had merely panicked and forgotten to close and lock his door.

  He had lain under his bed, covering his ears with his hands, but he could not shut out the noise that was reverberating down the tall narrow hallways outside. At one moment he thought, “Oh, God, where do I go? Should I get up and close my door?” But he was too scared to move. He heard metallic crashes, and realized these must be the sounds of militiamen throwing their shoulders against doors that were closed and locked. The sounds of smashing glass had to be militiamen bursting into rooms from outside.

  Noise seemed to be coming from everywhere, and then he heard loud voices right n
earby, just outside his doorway. He uncovered his eyes for a moment. Two pairs of ragged trouser legs and bare feet stood in his doorway. A voice said, “The cockroach is gone. He ran away.” Then the trouser legs and feet vanished.

  He heard drums and whistles. He heard male voices chanting what sounded almost like a song, one he’d never heard before. But some of the words and phrases were completely familiar. “Susuruka!” “Warm them up!” And a phrase that meant, “Get them soaked and toss them in the fire!” And “Inivo nu gutwi!” “At the level of the ear!” There was singing and laughter echoing from all directions in the narrow concrete hallways, and screams accompanying them. He peeked toward the doorway and saw a small child run past, back and forth, several times, making frantic cries.

  Then a commanding voice yelled, “Clean up!” The child’s cries ceased.

  There were loud curses and shouts. “No! I’m not going!” He heard voices begging, “Please don’t kill me!” And voices yelling, “Are you a Tutsi or a Hutu?” There was no way of knowing how many militia were there. He imagined dozens. Once or twice, he heard a gunshot. He began to smell gasoline, then smoke. The smell reminded him of cow skins being burned. He held his breath for as long as he could, for fear of taking in that smell. Then he lay panting, afraid of the sound he was making. Hiding was like running in place, a repetitive motionless motion. It went on and on.

  Gradually he became aware of silence, which frightened him, differently but as much as the sounds it had replaced. It sounded as if the world were dead and he were alone in it, a graveyard of sound. He lay in it for hours, until he realized that the light was fading around him. He peeked from under his bed toward his window. It was a darkening rectangle. All the daylight would be gone in a moment.

  When he crawled out from under his bed, he had only one thought in his mind: “Go. Get out of here. Run.” He wore the same clothes he’d put on that morning—he didn’t wear a uniform, just cotton pants and shirt, a light cloth jacket, and sneakers he’d bought some time ago at the central market in Bujumbura, the least expensive he’d been able to find.

  The stench of burned flesh was thick in the hallway. Already he could hear dogs barking and growling, fighting over the bodies no doubt. He groped his way by memory, out of the building into a grassy courtyard with a tree in the middle. He started across what had been grass. There was no moon, but he could make out the shapes on the ground. He picked his way among the bodies, slipping and sliding, stifling the yelling in his mind. From the edge of the parking lot he could make out the hospital driveway. He couldn’t see anyone out there. He ran down the drive to the main road, the orange dirt road he’d walked and jogged along in the weeks before. On the other side of the road, he knew, lay a valley, the valley of the Mubarazi River. The choice was easy. There might be snakes in the brush and grasses and trees, but the road meant people. He sprinted across the road, and scrambled down the embankment into the dark fields.

  He stopped running once he reached the valley floor. He was standing in tall grass when he thought, “It’s kind of wet.” Then he realized it was spitting rain. There had been rain on and off the last few days. The rainy season was just beginning. It occurred to him—this was a thought cast up from memory, out of the many crosscountry treks of his childhood—that the rain was a good thing, because it would soften the grasses, which could be like needles when dry. Besides, in the rainy season one encountered fewer people outdoors, and he’d always liked to run in the rain; rain had seemed to lend him energy.

  Hidden in darkness, Deo tried to think. The main thing was to get away from Mutaho. Looking back in the direction of the hospital, he could see the road, some distance away and above him. Parts of the hospital seemed to be on fire, and fires were burning on the road in both directions. For now, he must stay away from the road. He thought, “Where should I go? I don’t really know this place. Where should I go?” He remembered that on long walks in previous weeks he had passed through a little town with a Catholic church. It was about five kilometers south of the hospital. “God, maybe I should go to church,” he said to himself. If he made it safely away from Mutaho, he would go into the church and pray, to give thanks for deliverance from Mutaho and to ask for safe passage somewhere.

  It was a long night. Deo waded through grass and thickets of thornbushes and among stands of tall trees. Whenever he heard a noise, a cry or a yell, he would veer away from it. He moved parallel to the main road, stopping often to listen and look. He could make out the road from the silhouettes of the towering eucalyptus trees at its shoulders, and from the lights of what he took to be oil lamps scattered along it. Occasionally he saw bonfires up on the road and the figures of people clustered around them. Very late that night, thinking he was near the little town with the church, he turned toward the road and moved gingerly until he heard voices close by, many voices. It sounded like a market. To go up on the road and try to find the church would be a bad move. No, suicidal.

  He went on through the brush, heading south, toward the next big town, Bugendena. He crossed a river in the dark: it had to be the Mubarazi. His clothes were soaked, but the rain was warm. To travel long distances and quickly, cross-country in the dark, wasn’t just a matter of stamina, but also of experience. He’d had years of experience. What he had to concentrate on was his own mind, to keep himself from running and letting out the panic that was like a sound behind a door inside him. In the first gray light of morning, he saw a huge pile of trees up on the main road, where it intersected the smaller road to Bugendena, and across the main road he could make out the hillside rising toward Bugendena and the figures of people, lots of people, on that hillside. Were they running toward the town for safety? Or were victims being taken there? He had no way of knowing. But the pile of trees and the sight of the crowd on the hillside meant that the roads directly south from Bugendena were probably blocked. He had thought for a moment of trying to get back home, to Butanza or Kayanza, far to the southwest. He had thought of his family there—one reason for having thought he should go to church. But the region was much too far away. The whole country must be on fire. He would try to get back to Bujumbura.

  Birds were beginning to sing, as they always did an hour or so before samoya. The fields were lifting up around him out of the dark, the whole world covered in gray light, and gradually, up ahead, rose the outlines of a bunch of houses, small traditional houses of mud walls and thatched roofs. A village. The air had the sour smell of wet ashes. He crept a little closer to the houses, bending low to keep himself hidden. There was no need. The houses were smoking, their thatched roofs smoldering in the rain, and there was no one in sight. He crept up to the first of the houses. It was small, little more than a hut, with a window in one wall—a typical crude little window opening that the inhabitants would cover with banana leaves or old clothes. He looked in. Bodies lay on the dirt floor inside. As his eyes adjusted to the fainter interior light, he saw them individually. Three children, a man, and a woman. She was lying on her back, and some fleshy stuff filled her opened mouth. Male genitalia. Deo turned away and ran back the way he’d come. He didn’t encounter anyone living. No one was out working the fields that morning.

  He was too exhausted to run anymore by the time he got back to the Mubarazi. He walked along the river, looking for a place to cross, here and there sinking into mud almost up to his knees. Perhaps he only imagined that the river’s water was red, but there were bodies floating in it and bodies that had fetched up on snags. He found a narrow spot and tried to leap across, but didn’t quite make it. He had to haul himself up onto the far bank, clutching handfuls of grass, frantically. He didn’t care that his clothes and body were filthy, he only wanted to get out of that river.

  Over the next four days, or maybe more, Deo traveled about seventy kilometers. He drank from streams and rivers, reluctantly at first, knowing the pathogens he must be swallowing. Those first few days, the cultivated fields he passed were empty. He’d dart into one and break off a piece of su
garcane or a stalk of corn to chew on—he knew his plants; each of those contains liquid and sugar. Or he would pull up a root vegetable, a cassava or a sweet potato, and eat it raw, holding it up, tilting his head back, taking it down in only one or two bites; soon he hardly bothered to wipe off the dirt. He had no map and he didn’t know the countryside. But one time he had ridden in a bus from Mutaho to a town called Kibimba, to visit his cousin Geneviève at her high school. Kibimba was on the way to Bujumbura. Maybe he would be safe there. Maybe he’d find refuge at his cousin’s school.

  He headed to the southwest, along the valley of the Mubarazi, keeping to woods and brush and tall grass and avoiding all roads. In places, the river’s shallow waters seemed all but dammed with bodies, and the valley was littered with them, the corpses and feasting dogs thickening as he approached Kibimba, where just before sunset he saw smoke rising from a building on a hilltop. It was his cousin’s school. So much for any notion of finding Geneviève. He turned to the west with the river and then to the north-northwest, skirting the city of Muramvya, the ancient capital of the kingdom of Burundi, the mountains growing steeper, until he reached a paved main road. He and some medical school friends had once driven on it. The road ran north from Bujumbura and across the border into Rwanda, and then, he knew from maps in geography class, right through Rwanda, all the way to Uganda.

  This was the place where he had planned to turn south toward Bujumbura. He knew he must be only about thirty kilometers from the capital. But he also knew something of the countryside he would have to cross on the way, a mountainous area, packed with houses, and, by reputation, a stronghold of rebel Hutu militia. He scouted the road a little, and from his hiding places he saw people in peasant clothes—local farmers, most likely—carrying logs on their shoulders down that road in the direction of Bujumbura. He saw one group of people cutting trees, with a huge, gasoline-powered saw. They were making roadblocks, that seemed obvious. And they were doing so, he reasoned, in order to impede the army. He hadn’t seen any soldiers or military trucks. The little he knew about the army didn’t inspire confidence. It seemed possible that it had already been defeated by the Hutu militias and that Bujumbura was even now a graveyard of Tutsis. And if people who lived along that road were making roadblocks, they were probably also going off into the mountains beside the road and killing any Tutsis they could find.