Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  The pastor had countered by saying that Deo should tell his American friends to bring him equipment and medicines and then go away.

  “I wanted to puke right in front of him,” said Deo. “I asked him, ‘Are you drunk?’” Deo knew the man didn’t drink. Deo had wanted to insult him, and had succeeded.

  But he could be diplomatic. The province’s new governor, for instance, had become a friend and had pledged to give whatever help she could.

  We passed bunches of children. They waved and called, “Amahoro.” One called out, “Amahoro! Don’t hit my goat!” Deo laughed. “I love kids around here. They greet people.” He added, “I feel like, ‘Wow, finally, I’m with my people.’”

  Deo talked about Kayanza. In the entire village, he said, there was only one Tutsi family besides his own. It seemed that some radicalized children of neighbors had directed rebel soldiers to his family’s house during the war, but other neighbors had warned his parents, and after the family house had been burned for the third time, a large group of those country people had banded together and evicted a person who had tried to take his parents’ land. This was another reason Deo felt drawn to Kayanza. And so much the better, he said, that 99 percent of its people were Hutu.

  At the far edge of Rukomo, the road rose steeply. Trees and brush encroached on it, but it wasn’t badly rutted, no doubt because few vehicles used it. Deo remembered hiking up this road—a path, back then—with bags of cassava or sorghum grain on his head. “There were a lot of gorillas here. There used to be many monkeys, running, jumping, crossing.” They were all gone now, shot or chased away. But once in a while you could still catch a glimpse of a leopard, like a flash of sunlight in the foliage. Deo said the air up in Kayanza was cooler than down by the lake, and good summer grazing land lay nearby, and the soils were richer and more versatile than in Butanza.

  When we crested the last grade, the land opened up onto a broad plateau, and you could see what the Belgians had meant when they’d compared Burundi and Rwanda to Switzerland. You could look down to the east and see Tanganyika’s waters, like a cerulean sky. To the west, your eyes climbed tiers of mountains, often shrouded in mist, though not today. Unlike Switzerland, of course, the place lacked just about everything necessary and useful for health: sanitation, medicine, mosquito nets. Most of the people here had no access to clean water. No one had electricity. “Here you are in the land of Joe Conrad,” said Deo. “This is the heart of darkness right here.”

  On the other hand, there was an elementary school, just up ahead. While working at PIH, Deo had managed to save enough of his salary to send about one thousand dollars for that school’s reconstruction—money went a long way here. He had also saved enough over the past decade to have his parents’ house rebuilt three times. The latest version was brick, with a rusty metal roof and several real windows: a fine house in a village mainly of huts. Deo said he’d made sure it was smaller than previous ones, so it would be less conspicuous. About a year ago, he had told the village elders that he intended to get a clinic built for Kayanza. And the last time he’d come here, with his doctor friends from PIH, hundreds of villagers had turned out to welcome him and his friends. There had even been a band.

  There was no music this time, but in a field surrounded by palm trees, another crowd was waiting, hundreds of people at least. They had been waiting there for hours, one of the villagers later told Deo, adding that there had been more than a thousand, but many had left for work. For the moment, though, my attention was fixed not on the crowd, but on Deo. He had jumped out of the SUV, and was surrounded by people he seemed to know well. The couple he was embracing had to be his parents.

  I thought I saw a family resemblance. One usually does when one is looking for it. His father was an inch or two shorter than Deo, his mother about the same height as his father and thinner than both. They had dressed for their son. Deo’s father was the only man in sight wearing a sport coat—and a fedora, tilted a little backward. His mother wore what seemed like the Burundian standard for women, a blend of modesty and flair, a simple dress for a first layer and, draped over it, a beautiful outer dress with images of birds on branches dyed into the cloth. They were in their early sixties, quite old by Burundian standards, but neither seemed infirm. Both wore glasses, which lent them a slightly studious air.

  Deo stood with his arm around his mother’s shoulders, introducing her to his American friends and laughing—a long-running laugh, holding a high, soft note. It seemed involuntary. It had a childlike vulnerability. It seemed to say all at once: I’m so happy, so nervous, so excited, and I don’t know what to do with all these feelings.

  He had told me that on his last visit, he’d held palavers with the village chiefs, making sure his father was included, and had suggested that the villagers start making bricks. Since then, Deo had heard, the town had taken up a collection and bought a load of foundation stones. He’d also heard that his father had largely put aside banana beer and become a leader in the brick-making. He’d heard that neighbors now made an effort to speak to his father, and would invariably say, “Your son is so nice.” This was an ancillary benefit he’d hoped for from the project. Ever since he’d learned his parents were alive, he had been trying to purchase a peaceful old age for them. In this respect, it seemed to me, his incipient clinic was already a success.

  The size of the crowd, the long wait they’d put up with, made it obvious what the hope of a clinic meant to the people of Kayanza. It also seemed obvious what Deo’s leading role in all this meant to his parents. There was a moment, just long enough for a snapshot, when I saw Deo’s father and mother turn from looking at their son in order to look toward each other. His mother cocked her head slightly and smiled at Deo’s father, and his father beamed back at her.

  Then his father was scowling. “Why were you late?” he said gruffly to Deo, and Deo’s high soft laugh ran on, as he translated these words of his father’s for me. Then Deo exclaimed to me, “He is doing so well! I was so excited to see that. He is doing so great! He was very, you know, for so many years. He’s now very alert. He is so happy.”

  “Come. Come and see the stones,” his father said to him.

  The foundation stones lay in a great heap, all ready for use—except that they’d been unloaded several hundred yards downhill from the site of the clinic-to-be. When Deo caught sight of the misplaced pile, he halted. “This is so retarded!” He had already examined the bricks that the villagers had made. They stood in a huge rectangular pile near the site, but they had been fired during the rains and though they hadn’t turned to mud, they were too soft for structural duty.

  But all that was okay, Deo said. The bricks could be used for paving and for the borders of the gardens he planned—vegetable gardens and orchards to supply food to malnourished patients. And the foundation stones could be moved.

  The crowd assembled around the misplaced pile of rocks. There were greetings—chants of “Amahoro”—and speeches, which the villagers cheered, and more speeches, and during the course of all this, Deo exclaimed to me, “I am so happ-ee!” He said, “I really get so excited when I see people so excited.”

  Religious people, I’m told, have their meanest thoughts in church. I found myself thinking that tomorrow morning Kayanza’s residents would wake up and still have no doctor or nurses or clean water nearby, just this misplaced pile of rocks. I felt for a perverse moment like reminding Deo of all this. But it was good to see him happy, as always. And after all, he knew far better than I the obstacles he faced.

  As we drove away, the figures of the villagers receding in the SUV’s back window, Deo said to us, his American friends, “Thank you so much.” His voice was tiny. It cracked. “Thank you so much for coming to my little village.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Rwanda,

  2006

  On my map, Deo had traced the path of his escape. The pencil line ran west, then north, from Burundi into Rwanda. We flew to Rwanda from Bujumbura in an old propelle
r-driven commercial plane. We gazed through the window together. Deo pointed out landmarks below. The paved main road between Bujumbura and Rwanda, rising into the mountains, a road he had crossed in a hurry during his escape. A corner of Kibira, the national forest—he’d traveled through the shadows of its deep green canopy, but you could see great chunks had been burned and cleared since then. We couldn’t spot the hospital in Mutaho, but it was somewhere down there, not far away.

  Nothing was very far away, unless of course you were on foot and running from people who were trying to kill you. “These are such tiny countries,” said Deo over the roar of the engines. “Here we are flying like an old bird. We are in no hurry, but here we are already reaching Rwanda.” The entire flight took less than half an hour, and in only about fifteen minutes we had passed over the entire landscape of his journey, a round trip of about 150 kilometers according to my map. The banana grove where the Hutu woman had found him—he couldn’t pick it out, of course, but Deo thought it was probably still down there.

  “What was it you told her?” I asked over the noise of the plane.

  Gazing out, Deo replied, “‘I’m too tired. I’m just going to stay here.’ And she said, ‘No, no. It’s not far to the border.’”

  He couldn’t spot the border river, Akanyaru, which he had crossed two times, but he located Butare, Rwanda’s university town, where he had yearned to go, imagining he’d find sanctuary there. Of course there was no trace from the air of the refugee camps, just over the border in Rwanda, where he had languished fearfully for months.

  I asked him if he could see Murambi, the place where he had turned around and fled back toward Burundi. But Murambi was off to the east, on the other side of the plane. So for a while longer it remained wholly a place I imagined—a place where Deo had stood in tall grass on a hillside, looking across a valley toward a massacre. “It was night,” he had told me. “And it never stopped being night.”

  Deo had arranged for a driver in Rwanda, who took us the next day to the Murambi Memorial Center. It was in the southwest, about two hours from the capital. Everything in Rwanda, Deo said, was about two hours from the capital. The main part of the memorial was a large two-story building of brick and concrete. A purple banner hung over the entrance. The site was much more elaborate and better cared for than the little memorial we’d stopped at in Burundi on the way to and from Mutaho. But the banner carried essentially the same message, a more explicit version of “Never Again.” Deo translated for me: “Never forget the genocide and the people who were slaughtered here.”

  Looking up at that banner now, with Deo beside me, I thought that in his place I’d find the message ironic. The words weren’t meant for people with memories of the kind of thing that had happened here. One’s own forgetfulness wasn’t the problem for people like Deo.

  It was a Sunday morning, still early, and the sounds of a choir came from the town nearby. Deo muttered some imprecations; he was far from irreligious, but he’d acquired a lot of anticlerical feeling, in part because of all the well-attested stories of Rwandan priests aiding and abetting the genocide, and in some cases actually wielding machetes. As we walked toward the memorial building, I thought it was obvious why the génocidaires had chosen to lure their victims to this place. It seemed like an ideal ambush site, an all but treeless plateau shaped like the prow of a ship, the land sloping steeply away on three sides. Deo pointed toward the surrounding hills, his hands describing the route he had taken away from here. “I went just down that ravine. Then I went up there just to see, and I heard people dying, and I went down to that bunch of eucalyptus. So, I went down. This way. So all this, I mean, but it’s all the same. I just, I feel like I want to throw up.”

  After a time, I asked again how long he thought it had taken him to get back from here to the Burundian border. He said he thought about four days.

  “Oh boy, Deo,” I said. “I can hardly imagine. You are one tough son of a gun.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “Yes, you are. I mean, so many people would just give up.”

  “Oh, well, you know, how many times I just thought I would give up.”

  The memorial building was still locked. But after poking around awhile, Deo ran into the man who kept the keys. His name was Emmanuel. Deo had visited this place last summer and had met Emmanuel then. They greeted each other warmly now. Emmanuel was older and thinner than Deo, and he had a deep dent in his forehead, a little round crater, hard not to stare at. Emmanuel, Deo explained, had lived in Burundi for a time but had returned to this part of Rwanda a few years before the genocide. Hoping to escape the slaughter in his village, he had fled with his family here, to the technical school at Murambi. His wife and five children had all died in the massacre. He himself had been shot, but the bullet hadn’t entirely penetrated his skull. He’d lain wounded, hidden among a heap of bodies. When the killers had left, he had headed cross-country, like Deo, for Burundi. There his wound was repaired, and after a few years he had come back to Rwanda, and eventually back to this site. He told Deo that he stayed with the dead to repay them, because it was their bodies that had saved him. He also said that his family was buried here, and he was not going to leave them again.

  He and Deo talked and laughed like old friends. When they had met here last summer, Emmanuel had recognized Deo’s Burundian accent, and had said that Deo looked familiar. Now Emmanuel said that he remembered why: he’d seen Deo on an evening, twelve years and two months back, on the trail that led to this place.

  “How do you remember me?” asked Deo.

  “Well, you were so skinny. You were like a walking skeleton. Now you’re fat. But your face didn’t change.”

  “No, no, no, Emmanuel. You’re confusing me with someone else.”

  “No. We were on that hill over there, and people were coming from many different directions, and I was looking at faces, because I came from here and I was scared. Everyone was afraid of each other. I saw you and I thought, ‘I never saw this guy before.’”

  “So did you talk to me, or did I talk to you?”

  “No. You were not talking. You were sitting down by the path. I could see that you were sick. I told my wife, ‘I want to help that boy,’ and she was so angry. ‘You want to help someone else when you have your own family here?’”

  This encounter seemed unlikely, though it was possible. In interviews recorded for the memorial, Emmanuel had said that he’d come here to the technical school, seeking refuge, a couple of days before the grand slaughter had begun. But Deo didn’t know for sure when he had arrived in the vicinity. At the time, he hadn’t been keeping track of dates. It was, in any case, a story that I thought I would want to believe, if I were Deo. To run into someone who claimed to have crossed his path during that time—this had never happened to him before. It had to make the world feel less lonely.

  Before we parted, Deo hugged Emmanuel, then quickly slipped him some Rwandan francs. Emmanuel let Deo and me in to look at the exhibits. Some of the displays offered only a rather simplistic history of the Hutu-Tutsi divide. There were a couple of videos in which survivors—Emmanuel, prominently—described the massacre. There was also an old transistor radio of the kind Deo remembered seeing Rwandan militiamen carrying next to their ears as they walked around refugee camps. The radio had been a primary tool in the genocide, for whipping up murderous fervor and for organizing it. In the museum, you pressed a button and the radio’s tinny speaker played the chant that Deo told me he’d heard so often before and during the genocide, like a satanic inversion of a hymn: “God is just. God is never unjust. And we will finish them soon. Keep working, keep working. We will finish them, we will finish them soon. They are about to vanish! They are about to vanish! Don’t get tired! You are about to be done!”

  We left the museum building by the back, so as not to get Emmanuel in trouble with his boss for letting us in before the official opening time. Crossing a sunlit, tiled floor, we passed a sleeping bag, Emmanuel’s bed. “Th
at’s how Emmanuel sleeps,” Deo told me. “I asked him how can he stay here. He told me, ‘This is my home.’ And his wife died here and his children, and he’s still here. And he’s still here, you know? I mean, that, as pain goes, that has no word. And he stays here.”

  Emmanuel’s choice did seem strange—to be the keeper of the keys to a place full of bones, some of them his family’s. “I can’t presume to understand,” I said.

  “You know, what I can tell you is that he’s half alive,” said Deo. “This is a guy who lost the trunk of his life.”

  Back behind the memorial building stood rows of narrow, shedlike buildings, each with its own metal door. These, I gathered, had been the dorms and classrooms of the Murambi Technical School. Now each chamber was filled with bones.

  We stood in the doorway of one of the rooms, looking in. Bleached-white skeletons lay on wooden tables, a dozen or so per table, all neatly arranged, side by side. Deo took a photograph. He pointed at a mosslike tuft on one of the skulls. “This is hair.” He went on, pointing at bones: “You can see like this was a guy. This was like a woman, you can see clothes still. You see a child here.”

  We went back outside. “So at this site they counted the bodies. Fifty thousand and something people. Most in, I think, one night.”

  “You said fifty thousand?”

  Deo led the way to another door. “You can open here and see like skulls. There’s some right here. Somehow like only heads. You know. They were chopped.”