Truth, by Omission

by Daniel Beamish

  Finally relieved of the old woman, I trudged to the second line that the guard pointed out. It had grown even longer than what it was just a few hours earlier. We squatted and sat on our behinds, shuffling along in the mud as the line ever so slowly moved forward. In this line I was treated to some more information while making chatter with a few others around me.

  “Where are you from?” one of them asked.

  “Kigali,” I replied.

  “Kigali?” he asked. “Is it true what they say is happening there?”

  “If you mean that things are out of control and the war has now reached the city, yes, it’s true,” I said.

  “What’s your name, son?” another of the older men asked me.

  “Azikiwe … Azikiwe Olyontombo,” I said.

  “Truthfully?”

  A flush of panic set over me. I wasn’t sure what he meant. Surely they weren’t looking for me for Savard’s murder. They couldn’t have known it was me. The police were content with having Idi to blame for that.

  “What does my name matter?” I asked.

  He drew a little closer to me and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Many of those here are not who they say they are, and it’s bound to get worse. Trust me. I’ve been through this in the camps in Uganda once already. You’d be wise not to be so free about bandying your name around like that. Guard what little bit of privacy you have here.”

  “Thank you,” I said, sitting in silence for the next couple of hours as the line slowly progressed.

  When my turn finally arrived to enter the open-air tent I rose from my haunches and approached the desk. The woman seated there asked me in the finest bureaucratic banality, “Name?”

  “Alfred. Alfred’s my name.”

  “Alfred who? Have you got your papers?”

  “Alfred Olyontombo,” I answered. “And all I have is my baptismal certificate.” I showed it to her and she copied my name from it, Alfred Olyontombo.

  The intake interview and registration yielded me a laminated UN card with my name and number. “Don’t lose this,” the woman said. “You’ll need it for everything in the camp: food, water, supplies. You’re required to produce it whenever you’re asked by anyone with a UN identity badge inside the camp. You’re not to leave the camp without a movement pass. You are now a Rwandan under the protection of the United Nations, but only so long as you remain within the bounds of the camp. If you leave the camp, you will be considered an illegal immigrant in Tanzania and subject to immediate arrest. Next.”

  While waiting in the line I had considered what the older man advised me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. If, for some reason, they were ever to come looking for me for Savard’s murder, I could hide behind my new name. But even more intriguing was the opportunity to put the horrors of my past life behind me. For four years at Notre Dame de la Paix, I’d wanted to bury that past and disassociate myself from the person of my childhood. I hated Azikiwe. I became Alfred on that day, and I never used the name of Azikiwe again. In an ironic twist of fate, Savard’s christening had given me my new identity.

  Shortly after my arrival in the camp I waited like everyone else, in another line, for my turn to see a doctor. Some people were so desperate, and doctors were in such short supply, that they waited through the whole night, forming a line outside yet another dirty white tent with large UN letters stenciled on the roof. It wasn’t uncommon for the line to stretch to several dozen, sometimes more than a hundred people at a time. Those of us who could sat on our heels to avoid having to sit directly in the mud, mud that was mixed with the human excrement that had nowhere to go but to pile up throughout the camp. I avoided, for as long as I could, getting into the medical line, but puss had been oozing around my right eyeball for more than a week. In the last few days it had swollen my eye and sealed it shut. I had seen many people lose eyes to infection and violence, and I desperately didn’t want to lose mine. I took a place in line next to all other manner of disease, infection, and wound.

  Children in the line wailed, adults moaned and bickered with each other, but most people were simply resigned to sullen despondency, clinging to desperate hope that the foreign doctors might be able to salve their misery. This despondency was pervasive in the camp. The mass of migrants had become resigned to the fact that they had no homes to go back to, many in their families had been killed in the recent purges, and now starvation or illness was probably going to take the rest of them—of us.

  As my place in the line finally neared the open-walled tent that served as clinic, emergency room, and surgery center, all in one, a mother came running, wailing up the mud street carrying a child with the head of a three-year-old and the body of a baby. She attempted to run straight into the tent, but several of those at the front of the line ahead of me grabbed her and barred her. Some shouted at her in Kinyarwanda, some in French, others in Swahili and another dialect. She shouted back in another tongue that none of them understood. The kerfuffle brought a white man outside the tent. He wore only shorts and American-style sneakers and a stethoscope. He asked in French what was going on, and one of those in line explained that the lady had not waited her turn like the rest. She was thrusting her child toward him. When he asked her the problem she blabbered through her tears but no one understood her. I stepped forward and said that she was saying her son had been bitten by a snake while they gathered sticks for firewood. The child’s arm was swollen, and he had begun to convulse.

  By now the crowd at the front of the tent had grown curious, and several were shouting to know what was happening. I raised my voice and repeated the explanation in the four languages that I heard being spoken. The doctor took the child in his arms, ordering me to come with them. There was no antivenin in the medical supplies. There was barely enough outdated antibiotics sent by aid organizations in Europe and America. But the doctor was able to offer tangible empathy to the soon-to-grieve mother. I translated his instructions for care of the boy, and the mother left quietly with the child held to her bare breast.

  “Come sit here. Let me look at that eye.” He had moved me ahead of the line waiting outside. And while he swabbed the crusted puss to loosen it, he asked me in French, “What language was she speaking?”

  “Not really a language, sir, a dialect from the mountains in the west,” I replied.

  “Are you from there as well?”

  “I’ve been there, sir.”

  “But you speak her dialect?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir, I speak several of the mountain dialects. They come to me easily.”

  “And your French, it’s not the Rwandan slang. Where did you learn it?”

  “No, sir. I was schooled by the white sisters in Kigali.”

  He had pried my eyelid open and had to keep swabbing it to clean it, since there wasn’t enough fresh water to waste on flushing it properly. He continued to talk as he worked. “What grade have you finished?”

  “Third secondary level, sir. Almost.”

  “Secondary? And how old are you, son?”

  “Seventeen,” I said, without hesitating to bother with accuracy, further perpetuating the lie I had almost come to believe myself.

  “Would you like a job when we get this eye fixed up? Actually, a volunteer position, but I’d see if you could eat in the Admin tent.”

  That was my first encounter with Vincent Bergeron, the French doctor. I took him up on his offer and gladly traded my idle boredom in the camp for his offer to eat rations with the UN personnel in the Admin tent. The associated benefits ended up going far beyond what I could have ever imagined. Aside from simply having something to do and a purpose inside the camp, I was treated to the companionship of one of the world’s finest, most compassionate citizens, and I was introduced to the opportunity to make amends for some of the suffering and carnage I had perpetrated.

  I started the next day, spending much
of the next four years as Vincent’s shadow, initially acting as an interpreter for him. The camp was a mixture of people from all over Rwanda. Most of them spoke French, but many could only speak Kinyarwanda, and Dr. Bergeron had no knowledge of this language. Others in the camp could speak only Swahili, another language not mastered by the doctor, and still others, like the woman with the snake-bitten child, only spoke the dialects of the villages. I was fluent in the three main languages and passable in many of the dialects, and I quickly proved my worth to the doctor. The United Nations’ staff was a conglomeration of personnel from all over the world, and the common language spoken among them was English. I’d had very little exposure to English prior to this and enjoyed the opportunity to work on another language. There was no shortage of those with whom to practice since virtually all the locals who were employed by the UN were Tanzanians and English was their common language. Vincent could speak very good English and became an excellent tutor, refining what I could pick up from others and practicing with me.

  In tagging along with Vincent as his interpreter, I kept myself busy and useful in as many other ways as I could find, assisting him in anything that he would entrust to me. He showed me how to clean and sterilize, within our limited abilities, but stressing the importance of doing everything as best as we possibly could. Lacking, as we were, many of the essentials, it became even more important to reuse instruments and materials whenever possible. Eventually we got comfortable enough that I would act in place of a nurse for him when there were none available. I took a keen interest in all these activities, and Vincent could see that I was a quick understudy. After about six months he came to me with a question.

  “You’re enjoying this, Alfred? I don’t mean the camp. I mean working around the medical staff.”

  “I do, Vincent. I like it a lot.”

  “Have you thought about your future? I mean, after you get out of the camp?”

  Of course I’d thought about it. I’d thought about it a lot, but in reality there weren’t a lot of choices to consider. Even if the war hadn’t been going on in Rwanda, there were very few options for all but the richest to do anything except some sort of menial labor.

  “What about continuing your school? Maybe going on to university?” he asked.

  “I’ve had it in my mind, Vincent. The sisters told me that there are opportunities for scholarships. But I don’t know, with the war and everything.”

  “The camp’s been open for almost a year now, and the administration is finally getting around to opening a school. They can’t possibly take everyone, but I might be able to get you in.”

  “Vincent, I’d like to go to school, but I don’t want to stop working with you.”

  “I figured that,” he said. “I think you might be able to do both.”

  The school opened using a combination of teachers from Tanzania, paid by the UN, and volunteers from among the refugees themselves. While many of us refugees came to the camp with no skills, there were also many arrivals with considerable skills, and they volunteered their services in many ways. Some of them acted as nurses, and even a few doctors stepped forward. Others picked up their trades as shoemakers or tailors or barbers. The teachers who came forward were among some of the brightest in the camp and did an admirable job with their limited resources. I was able to convince one of the Tanzanian teachers to start an English class, in which I could devote a full hour a few days per week to practicing my new language. Vincent arranged for me to attend classes the day the school started, and by going daily, from eight each morning to noon, I was able to more than gain my secondary school equivalency. The moment I finished at noon, I shot over to the clinic to start work with Vincent.

  Vincent became a role model for me, the one person in my life that I most wanted to emulate. The gentleness and heartfelt empathy with which he cared for each patient astounded me. No matter how tired he was or how hopeless the situation he was treating, he gave his all toward making each patient feel special and gave them all a measure of hope. For me, he gave me hope for mankind. If he could be like this then surely I could, too. And if we did it, maybe some others would join in, and little by little we could make a difference for the camp, for others, for the greater world.

  Vincent wasn’t just a good person, he was a skilled and meticulous doctor. These too became traits I sought to emulate when I made the decision to try to move into medicine as a career. Vincent explained things to me with endless patience, impressing upon me the basics of caring for the infirm. One of the things that I noticed Vincent doing far more than any of the other doctors was taking notes. In fact, when he was too busy to make the notes himself, he would sometimes dictate to me as he worked, and I would scribble his words down exactly as he spoke them in his logs.

  “A good doctor can never take too many notes,” he once advised. “You’ll see hundreds of patients. You have to have good notes about them.”

  Vincent actually saw thousands of patients, and he made scrupulous notes about every encounter and every treatment. And even months later, when I had completely forgotten one individual or another, a patient would show up and Vincent had a recollection of them.

  “Just by taking the notes, your memory is stimulated,” he said. “And then when you need to refer back, if you have a good classification system, you can easily recall previous encounters with the patient. Sometimes this will make a big difference in how you approach their treatments. And don’t forget the personal notes. Your personal notes can heal the patient. Treatment notes will help you treat the patient; personal notes will help you heal the patient.” He emphasized this over and over. It was what set him apart from, and above, other doctors. Vincent took notes about things which, at first, I thought were insignificant—things like a little boy’s favorite toy or how a woman’s aging mother was doing. He insisted that these were the things that healed patients. When he would look to his notes after months and sometimes even years and pick out these little details, he was able to instill a confidence in the patient. “Healing,” he said, “is about confidence, positive outlook, and willpower. Treatment is of no value if you can’t heal someone, for that you have to make them trust you, believe in you, give them confidence.”

  At the end of each day, unfailingly, usually while I tidied up and prepared for the overnight shift of nurses, Vincent would make entries into his daily log. This was his personal diary. Of course, it was always in his own handwriting, and he would never dictate these notes to me. And even though I never saw the contents, he told me that he would summarize his day, the highlights, the problems, and his personal feelings about things.

  By the time I had been in the camp at Nkwenda for a couple of years, I was well entrenched in my studies at the school and my apprenticeship in the clinic. The camp itself had grown exponentially and now approached nearly fifty thousand. The UN struggled mightily to keep up, but it was impossible. The squalor and disease and destitution multiplied. We were inundated with more and more patients in the clinic, able to do less and less for them.

  Following Vincent’s example, I chatted with the patients and used humor to comfort them and turn their minds away from their ailments. One day while stitching up one of the patients I asked him how long he had been in the camp.

  “Only last week, Doctor,” he answered. Many of them called me “doctor” and Vincent suggested that it was better not to confuse them by explaining that I wasn’t.

  “Where have you come from?” I asked, trying to keep him occupied while I sutured him without any anesthetic. “Any hope on the outside?”

  “I’ve come from Kigali,” he answered. “And no, there’s not much positive news to give you. If there were, I probably wouldn’t have come here.”

  “True enough, true enough. Where in Kigali?”

  “The south of the city.”

  “That’s where I’m from,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know of any news from
the school run by the white sisters there, Notre Dame de la Paix?”

  “Oh, Doctor. The depravity of some men knows no lows. They closed the school more than a year ago.”

  I just nodded my head. I had expected as much. The sisters had said if things got too bad they would be forced to go home. It was sad news for me. I had spent four good years there turning around my life, largely thanks to the generous nuns. I had pretty much given up hope of ever being able to return there, and with this news it was finalized.

  Not even a week later, Vincent came to me in the clinic and said there was a man asking for me. “He claims he knows you, says he has news of your old school.”

  Thinking it must be the man I had stitched up last week I walked out to the front looking for him.

  “Right here, Azi. Right here,” a whisper came from behind.

  I knew the voice instantly and grew cold at the sound. Turning to face him, just inches away from me, I could smell the stench of his breath and felt it blowing hot in my face. He surprised me when he lit up with a big smile.

  “Azi, they told me I could find you here.”

  I cut him off. “Alfred,” I said. “I am Alfred here, Idi.”

  “Alfred. Of course. I understand. And I’m not Idi. I’m Erasto.”

  I smirked when he said this because I knew the name. It was a common one across the eastern parts of the country and it meant “man of peace.”