In Rwanda, moments were the only time he knew. He spent nearly every moment worrying about the next. Six months felt like a minute, and moments when it seemed as though there was no time in front of him felt like eternity.
The Burundian refugees were herded, loosely, into fields and woods, not camps with tents or any other kind of shelter, though occasionally someone would construct a traditional lean-to. There were, later reports would say, more than 300,000 Burundians in makeshift camps near the border. The great majority had to be Hutus, fleeing the Tutsi army’s retaliation. Periodically there were distributions of food and clothing. The stuff would come on trucks with the logo UNHCR on their doors and canvas tops. The initials stood for “United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.” Deo heard some young Rwandans who were distributing food remark, “Oh, yeah, we are helping. We are volunteers.” And he thought to himself, “How many people volunteer in Africa?” He felt sure that they were at least fellow travelers of the people who seemed to supervise everything, the Hutu militiamen.
He heard them call themselves “Interahamwe.” The name meant “Those Who Work Together.” Many walked around holding portable radios to their ears. From time to time, he saw them training. He could tell they weren’t policemen or regular soldiers, because they wore ragged civilian clothes and many were barefoot. Most were young. Sometimes they seemed like just a bunch of peasants running around with make-believe weapons. They would try to make it look as though they were just playing games, but to Deo their games looked much more like practice in the arts of clubbing and bayoneting and chopping. Once in a while men in blue and brown uniforms arrived in vehicles and supervised these exercises. “Oh no, this is not how you do it,” these uniformed men would say, laughing at the trainees. Sometimes he saw larger exercises from a distance—a crowd of men running in ragged formation across a field, carrying pieces of wood roughly shaped like rifles. Sometimes he heard them singing songs or having songs sung to them. The one he heard most often went like this: “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!”
He couldn’t tell for sure which, if any, of his fellow refugees were Tutsis. He knew most must be Hutus, and it was safest to assume that all were. Occasionally, Interahamwe would hang around with groups of refugees, around a campfire or a tree. Often these seemed like recruiting sessions. Keeping to the peripheries, never saying a word, he’d hear militiamen tell the refugees that the RPF, that army of Tutsi cockroaches from Uganda, was moving close, slaughtering Hutus. They said that the RPF had spies among them, right here, in these very refugee camps. They should be on the lookout for spies. Deo doubted all this. The last time he’d heard anything about the RPF, they were far away in the north. Indeed, the last he’d heard, a peace agreement had been made between the RPF and the Rwandan government. He figured the militiamen were trying to scare the Burundian Hutu refugees, many of whom were already bitter and militant, judging from their talk. The talk about the RPF certainly scared him, because “RPF” was clearly the equivalent of “Tutsi.” Some of the refugees would sit around angrily denouncing the “cockroaches,” and one or another of the Rwandan militiamen would say, “Someday things will be fine. Someday they’ll be over, and things will be fine.” And in every group like that, he noticed that some refugees, usually older people, sat silently with their heads bowed or made small movements—a slight shift of posture, a pursing of the lips—which he took as signs they disapproved. He would not allow himself any such liberties.
From time to time he asked himself, “Why did I come to Rwanda?” But his thoughts rarely strayed that far into the past, and almost never into the future. When the United Nations trucks arrived with food, the refugees would get in lines, and sometimes they would fight, and sometimes Rwandan militiamen would intervene. Sometimes the militiamen would inspect people in line. Usually it was the muscular young men they’d approach and pull out of line, saying, “You don’t need to be here. You need to go to work.” One time early on, he saw a group of militiamen surround a man in line. They led him some distance away, into a nearby woods, and not long afterward there was a scream, then silence. And sometimes Deo saw them pull a young woman out of the line and walk with her toward the woods. Deo would turn away and pretend not to notice. Later, he would see the same young woman coming out from among the trees, head bowed, face averted, and then three or four men would come sauntering out of the woods behind her, smiling and laughing.
He never ate during the days, for fear that while standing in line he might get caught up in one of the arguments over food and be noticed, then scrutinized. It wasn’t impossible that he might come face-to-face with a Hutu who knew him from Burundi. He ate only at the evening distributions. Once in a while, when there were a lot of militiamen nearby, he avoided even those, and went hungry. Stomach cramps and diarrhea had long since become companions, and his feet itched with what he knew was fungus. The wound on his back became a hot abscess. If he had been his own patient, he would have drained it and administered antibiotics, but his immune system would have to deal with it unaided. Occasionally he would find a place to sleep by himself, a thicket of brush, a stand of ferns in the woods, but usually he slept on the ground among others, because it was dangerous to be seen alone. For the moment, it was safer to be in a crowd, and if it seemed appropriate to talk at all, safe only to talk about the weather: “Yes, it’s cold,” and “Wet again.” He would wonder sometimes whether a fellow refugee was a Tutsi or Hutu, but it didn’t feel safe even to think about that, and life seemed even more miserable when he did. “Just forget about it,” he’d tell himself.
He moved four times among the impromptu, open-air camps. Twice it was other refugees who initiated the moves, saying the place where they were camped had grown too crowded. Another time it was militiamen who suggested that some of them relocate. To Deo, another place was always better. After a month or so in a camp, he’d worry that his face was becoming too familiar. He’d imagine he had caught a glimpse of someone he knew in a crowd, or he would dream that someone had recognized him. Several times he sensed that some of the other refugees were eyeing him. It helped that he was often sick and therefore someone whom others tended to avoid. One time a militiaman called to him, “Hey. Come here and clean up this shit on the ground.” It was literal shit.
“Oh, okay,” Deo called back. “I’m coming. Just let me get a tool.” But he couldn’t risk being exposed, alone, in front of Interahamwe. He turned and disappeared into the crowd.
So when a group of refugees decided to move, he’d insinuate himself among them. He didn’t dare ask anyone, “Where are we exactly?” or “Where are we going?” But listening in on the talk at night, he gathered that he was still near the Burundian border and not very far from Butare, the Rwandan university town. Sometimes he thought of finding his way to Butare. He imagined he’d be safe there. Maybe he would find refuge at the medical school, or just someplace to stay out of the rain, someplace where there might be someone he could trust enough to talk to. But how to get there without exposing himself to soldiers or police or militiamen, and without being seen by farmers who would alert the authorities? There was no way he could get to Butare on his own.
At the third camp, an aid worker appeared, a young man, who began dispensing medicine to the sick, who were arrayed in a long line. Deo watched him. The aid worker had to teach every person how to take a pill. Deo could tell he wasn’t a militiaman. The languages of Burundi and Rwanda, though differently named, are identical for all practical purposes, but the two main accents are distinctive. This man spoke Kinyarwanda/Kirundi with a funny accent, an accent Deo had never heard before, so he figured the man was neither Burundian nor Rwandan. Médecins Sans Frontières, “Doctors Without Borders,” was painted on his pickup truck. Deo had heard of the organization in medical school.
Deo w
anted aspirin, but he didn’t dare stand in the line. He approached the young man from the side. The aid worker was saying to the next person in line, “Okay, first put the pill in your mouth, then drink this water.”
Deo whispered in French, “I know how to do this.”
The man turned to him, and asked in French, “How do you know?”
“I’m a medical student,” Deo said. He felt panic rising. He could feel the people in line staring at him, probably because of the French. He could speak openly in French, because people who had never taken a pill wouldn’t understand the language, but for that same reason he was now marked as different. “It is not safe for me. I’m afraid,” he said hurriedly to the young man. “Can you help me get out?”
“Stay here with me,” said the young man.
When he had finished his work at that camp, the young man drove Deo away in his pickup. Deo asked if he could take him to Bujumbura or to Butare. The young man said he wished he could. In fact, he sometimes drove to Bujumbura to pick up medicines. Burundi was a mess, but the killing had died down, he said. The problem was Rwanda. Every road had checkpoints, where every passenger had to produce an ID. It would be too dangerous to run that gauntlet with Deo on board, too dangerous for him, too dangerous for Deo. Instead of taking Deo toward Burundi, he drove north and dropped Deo off at another makeshift outdoor refugee camp, not far from a paved road. He told Deo to stay there, and he would try to figure something out.
Some time later—days or weeks, perhaps—Deo was sleeping with other refugees in yet another open field, in utter darkness, under a drizzling sky. Suddenly, the night erupted, like a thunderstorm, a man-made thunderstorm. Flames rose on the horizon. The lights of trucks went racing past. He could hear people shouting, not in the camp, but in the settlements nearby, and choruses of voices just outside the camp, voices lifted in song: “It’s the beginning of the work…. Before the end of the night, the cockroaches are not going to wake up again.” Through a loudspeaker somewhere, he heard that chanting song: “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!” All the voices lifted in song sounded jubilant, as if they were singing the Hallelujah Chorus in the church in Sangaza at Christmastime.
For five months, Deo had been living with a stomachache, which he attributed to worms and dread. It had long been obvious that something very violent was coming in Rwanda and that it was going to be aimed at Tutsis. That had been clear since the day he’d crossed the border, and from the training of militiamen he’d witnessed and from the songs he’d heard. Over the next days he heard people say that the plane of Rwanda’s president had been shot down in Kigali the other night, the night of the fireworks. They said that Burundi’s appointed president had also been on board. Deo guessed that the event for which the militiamen had been training was now under way.
The refugee camp started to scatter. He hid among the remnant, for how long he couldn’t have said at the time; in fact, it was for several more weeks. For a while, there were still some extremists around, angry Burundian Hutus. Now and then they’d gang up on someone, saying, “You look like a cockroach.” A few people were taken away and no doubt killed. But soon the most militant had left the group. Many of the young ones, Deo later presumed, had volunteered or been forced to join the Interahamwe. Now the people left in his camp were mostly the women and children and elderly. From the accents, Deo knew that most were Burundians. Some, he guessed, were Congolese who had fled their homeland for Burundi and now were on the run again. He was now among a safer class of people, not people he could trust, but peaceful people. Many, he imagined, were Hutus who didn’t want to participate in what was going on here. Maybe there were some Burundian Tutsis hiding among them, as he was.
Around fires at night in the diminished camp, small groups would sit and speak softly to each other, as if they were friends. Maybe they were friends. Deo sometimes sat among them. No one seemed afraid of him—probably because he was so quiet and skinny and sick. He heard them tell stories that marked them as peaceful, stories told in low voices that would be dangerous to tell in a militiaman’s earshot. He heard one about a Rwandan militiaman tossing a baby into a campfire with one hand while munching on an ear of corn with the other, and many tales about the tricks militiamen would employ. One woman told how her husband had been murdered by militiamen simply because his last name was the same as that of a leader of the RPF—and, as it happened, her husband was a Hutu. Someone in the group had a transistor radio. Over it one day, Deo heard a Rwandan official declaring that displaced people should go to a town called Murambi. They would be safe there, he said.
A day or two later, a fleet of Toyota trucks drove by, men standing in the beds blowing whistles, shouting through bullhorns, saying that displaced people should go to the school in Murambi. If they were hungry, if they wanted to get out of the rain, they should go to Murambi. It seemed as though many of the people around Deo believed this. He did not. He suspected the message was meant for Tutsis, that a trap was being prepared; but when his group started walking north, he went along, because the group was his only hiding place. When more men in trucks came by offering the refugees rides to Murambi, Deo made himself scarce. His group walked on together for several days. They numbered about two hundred. Probably, he later thought, most were Burundian Hutus who didn’t know the score, who didn’t know why people were being urged to go to Murambi. Soon his group had left the vicinity of the road and were hiking through countryside, and the militiamen no longer visited them.
The region was all hills and narrow valleys. It was still light when he got a glimpse of what he figured must be “Murambi,” a large school set on a hilltop plateau and made up of many narrow single-story buildings, each about the size of his old elementary school. From the distance he saw crowds milling around the buildings.
The next thing Deo knew, the next thing he would remember being aware of, his little crowd of refugees had disappeared, and he was on a hillside, and all around him people were running, propelled, it seemed, by screams from the town to the east. He heard voices around him saying, “If we can make it to the school we’ll be safe.” He stayed among the hustling, panicky crowds, until he found himself in a little wood, at a crossroads of sorts. Here streams of people were coming from several directions, women and children and men with frightened eyes and contorted faces, all running down this hillside to the valley, and up the next hillside toward the school. From their accents, he knew that most of the crowd streaming by was Rwandan, and since they were fleeing, most must be Tutsis.
Deo felt weak, for the moment too weak and sick to walk any farther, and also too frightened. He sat down by the crossroads. Then he got up and walked a few feet down the trail, and sat again. Someone stopped and said to him, “Come on, you can make it.” Deo shook his head without even looking up.
He was vaguely aware of the people passing by him, and of the cries of children, the angry shouts of men who were yelling at their wives and children for not running fast enough. But he was busy with his own thoughts. He kept hearing himself say silently, “This is dangerous.” Images of the fields of corpses near Kibimba, of his cousin’s high school burning on its hilltop, had been filling the landscape of his mind for months, particularly at night, no matter how hard he had tried to stop them. Large groups had been his refuge, but they were dangerous now, and this was a huge group gathering at the school on the next hilltop. He wasn’t going there.
Deo sat down a little distance off the trail. He waited until the sky was growing dark. Then he made his way slowly along the hillside, until he was well past the village that lay to the east of the school. For what must have been hours, he crept through tall grass, down the hillside to the edge of the valley. It curved around the base of the plateau, like a moat. The grasses were soft and as tall as his shoulders. He walked on very slowly in
the pitch dark, for another half kilometer or so. Then he climbed partway back up the hillside, and stood looking across the valley toward the school on the plateau.
He could see fires there and, he later thought, headlights. He knew he heard screams and voices amplified by megaphones, echoing across the valley. Did he hear snatches of that song—“God is just. God is never unjust. And we will finish them soon”—or did he just hear the words in his mind, having heard that song so often? After maybe an hour, he heard occasional pops of gunfire and some dull explosions, which he took to be grenades. Was it before then or later on that he heard the Interahamwe had been instructed to conserve bullets? He fell asleep in the tall grass.
In his conscious mind, Deo was aware of being afraid, not of dying, but of dying the way his uncle the doctor had, or the family in the house in Bugendena. Not that he wanted to die. Not that he wanted desperately to live. Survival simply had its own momentum. And to survive, it was clear, he had to get out of Rwanda.
Burundi lay to the south, and south was to the left of the wet, gray dawn. He moved mostly by night and only cautiously during the day, running when he thought he saw or heard another person or when it seemed as if the drums and whistles of the militia were closing in. He struggled up hills and all but rolled down them, unable to brake. Sometimes he saw other people from a distance. Usually they were running along the same trail or skirting the same hillside as he was. He would wait until they were out of sight and then wait a little longer, remembering stories he’d heard, in his last refugee camp, of militiamen pretending to flee so as to lure Tutsis out of hiding.
When he thought, it was of things like birds. Watching them from some hiding place—flocks coming and going from some spot nearby, a sure sign of a killing site—he’d wish for reincarnation as a bird. He’d study a fly on a leaf and think, “How lucky you are not to be a human being.” Back on the first part of his journey, Deo had wept at the sight of corpses. Now when he found himself hiding near bodies, he was more likely to feel laughter coming up, and he would sit there with his chest heaving, trying not to laugh out loud and give his position away.