Strength in What Remains

  “Exactly!” said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supposed to whisper here. “And neither could the killers!”

  “The killers couldn’t see the difference, too,” whispered Zacharie. “So they ask. Because they can’t tell. We are the same people.”

  Zacharie had presided over the school for two more years, then had retreated to a monastery in France. Homesickness had brought him back. He had arranged for the construction of a small monastery near the school. The building had just been completed. He took us there and gave me a copy of the book he’d written: Les quarante jeunes martyrs de Buta (Burundi 1997): Frères à la vie, à la mort (“The Forty Young Martyrs of Buta: Brothers in Life, in Death”). He would spend the rest of his days here, he said. “Praying for the world and for Burundi. I will live here, praying, working, studying. In silence.”

  FIFTEEN

  Burundi,

  2006

  We had to go to Mutaho. It was the place where Deo’s flight had begun, another place he had not revisited. The last he’d seen of Mutaho was on the night of October 22, 1993, when he was running away from it. He had heard a rumor, though, that the former hospital there, the hospital where he’d worked and boarded, had been completely demolished either during or after the war. Supposedly, a new hospital had been erected in the place of the old and bloodied one. If all this was true, no trace would remain of the massacre that he’d escaped all those years ago. But we should make the trip anyway, Deo said.

  I had located Mutaho on my map of Burundi. It lay about a third of the length of the country away from our hotel in Bujumbura—that is, we’d be covering about a third of a piece of land roughly the size of Maryland or Belgium. The route looked fairly direct. But our driver said that some of the roads I saw on the map had become dead ends or vanished altogether in the war.

  Our driver’s name was Innocent. He was another old friend of Deo’s family. Like many other Burundians, Tutsi and Hutu, Innocent had lost his wife and children during the civil war. He had met a woman who had also lost her family, and who had been raped by an HIV-positive soldier. Innocent had married her. She had died asking his forgiveness for having given him AIDS. Innocent had told Deo simply, “I miss her so much.” Innocent was, I had come to think, completely trustworthy. A careful driver, at least by Burundian standards, judicious, and calm. Innocent said the trip to Mutaho would take about three hours. If we got an early start, we would make it back to the hotel before dark, he said. To me this seemed important. The police were still closing the principal roads from nightfall into the morning.

  But we got started an hour later than planned. Then we had to make stops in downtown Bujumbura, to change money and to buy oil and gas. By the time we cleared the outskirts of the city and were riding into the mountains, I felt a little nervous. Would we get lost? Would we make it back before the main roads were closed? Would we run into another impromptu police roadblock, as we had a few days ago? We’d been held up for the better part of an hour while Deo negotiated the bribe.

  Deo appeared to be worried, too, but for different reasons.

  “Last night I know that I slept, but I had nightmares.”

  He sat in the front seat. I was in back.

  “Well, listen,” I said, “if Mutaho starts to really get to you, we just get the hell out of there.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I don’t care about stopping and seeing some new hospital.”

  “Let’s just see what …” His voice died away. He said he’d learned last night that an old childhood friend had been killed. “I didn’t know that he was killed.” He examined a wad of dog-eared, sweat-stained Burundian francs, murmuring, “They come from dirty pockets and dirty hands. These bills …” His voice was soft, a bit raspy, far away: “I didn’t know he got killed. But I believe it, of course. I need really to try, to see how many people are still … It would be much easier to find out the number of people who are my old friends who are still alive, than to look for the number who have been killed.”

  A near accident on the road up ahead made me cry out.

  Deo sounded half asleep. His voice sounded different today, slow and heavy, as if it were hard to lift. “You know what it is? They are all crazy.”

  I gazed out at the mountain scenery and talked about bricks. Deo was very interested in bricks—where he could get the best for the least money, for the medical buildings he planned to erect in Kayanza. We passed children dressed in what had been flour sacks, full of holes. It was amazing what bicyclists on these roads carried on their backs and on the frames of their rickety machines—huge bags of charcoal, enormous arrays of jerry cans filled with palm oil, a wooden bed frame. Wherever the road ascended, we’d see half a dozen bicyclists holding on to the backs of trucks. Many riders were half naked, dressed only in dirty shorts and flip-flops. We passed one wearing no shoes at all. Deo gazed out at them. “People who have to live like that, how can they refuse to kill someone?” I knew he only half believed this, and that I shouldn’t respond.

  We drove an hour or more on the main road that rises from the plain of Bujumbura, the two-lane paved road that runs all the way north through Rwanda. The road clung to mountainsides. Some of the pavement was crumbling at the edges. Parts had been blown up years before, and rough dirt detours, carved deeper into the hillsides, still served. When we turned due east, at a town called Bugarama, the traffic thinned, the woods by the road deepened, the air cleared. We were in high country again, more than a mile high now. “So you see it’s different. The smell of the mountains, fresh smell. This area is wonderful,” Deo said.

  I tried to make some small talk. It came out sounding idiotic. “On your escape, did you ever come to places where you saw spectacular views?”

  “No,” he said. “I was not paying attention to that.”

  We rode on in silence for a while. Then he said, “This is an area that I passed through, but I don’t remember exactly where.” He gazed out his side window. I heard him murmur, “I am so scared.”

  We didn’t talk much the rest of the way. When we crossed the Mubarazi River, Deo made a sound like a stifled cry. This was the river he’d crossed twice the first morning of his escape from Mutaho. I remembered his telling me how he had followed the Mubarazi’s valley, strewn with corpses, all of his first full day on the run. He had followed the valley almost to the town of Kibimba. We were entering the outskirts of Kibimba now. Up ahead, beside the road, stood an odd-looking construction: three tiers of square pillars in concentric semicircles, holding up simple friezes. On the front of the foremost frieze, block letters read, “PLUS JAMAIS çA!”—“Never again!” Deo told Innocent to pull over beside it.

  “This is one of the rare, rare memorial sites,” said Deo. It stood across the road from the school he’d seen burning, the school where his cousin Geneviève had been, above the valley where he’d felt as though he were wading through corpses. The school’s headmaster had organized the slaughter of the Tutsi students, and had been hanged for it, Deo told me. The memorial’s white pillars were streaked with what looked like black mold. Weeds were sprouting among the flat stones in the courtyard out front.

  Innocent drove on. At Gitega, Burundi’s second city—I hardly noticed the place, and Deo didn’t have much to say about it—we turned north onto an orange dirt road.

  “My stomach’s really feeling bad,” Deo said.

  I sensed he wasn’t talking to me, but I felt I had to respond. “Do you want to go back?” My voice, I’m afraid, sounded hopeful.

  “No. No, no, no, no.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” he said. He added, “I’m going to shut up.”

  Now he was keeping his word. We rode along mostly in silence. The orange dirt road must have been graded recently. It felt smooth, too smooth, as if we were traveling a little distance above the ground, the SUV sliding around corners like a small plane in the wind. For me, everything began to seem like too much of something—the road too orange, t
he dust too thick in my nose, the silence too prolonged. I had the feeling that this trip was taking us too far into something and that if I looked back I might see the road closing up behind us. I leaned forward and told Deo, “Maybe we should just go back.”

  He turned a little toward me, and said, rather sternly, “You may not see the ocean, but right now we are in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.” It was his way of telling me to shut up. I tried to obey. Now and then he made terse comments: “This is a nightmare area. Many militiamen came from here.” “We are passing the road to Bugendena.” (I remembered his story of finding the slaughtered family, around dawn, in a village near Bugendena.) “There is the valley of the Mubarazi again.” Huge eucalyptus trees lined the sides of the road. We passed a bunch of brick houses, half fallen down, greenery poking up through the remnants of their roofs. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I came here,” Deo said, as if to himself. He meant back when he was a medical student and had asked to be sent to Mutaho’s hospital. He pointed to our left, toward the valley that sloped down from the road, a brushy-looking landscape, the place where his long flight had begun. “I went down here.” He added, in a murmur, “Trying to be as quiet as I could.”

  “To get away from the road?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  A little farther on, Innocent turned onto a well-tended dirt road, passed through a flimsy gate, and stopped. Up ahead lay the remnants of the hospital. It had not been demolished and replaced after all. Much of what had been here thirteen years ago was gone, but a piece of the original remained, as it happened the very piece in which Deo had lived. And the remnant, a bunch of one-story concrete buildings, had evidently been repaired and repainted, from white to a mustardy yellow. Deo sat silently, staring at the buildings through the windshield. Just then a man crossed our field of vision, paying no attention to us. A farmer perhaps, and he was carrying a brand-new machete, its blade still encased in clear plastic.

  “Oh, my God,” murmured Deo in English, his voice barely audible. Then he spoke to Innocent in Kirundi. “Look at that.”

  Deo translated Innocent’s response for me: “Maybe this is one of the machetes left over.”

  “Don’t say that, Innocent,” Deo answered.

  Innocent, it seemed to me, had an abundance of sangfroid, but he knew the history of this place and he had reason to be spooked by the sight of machetes. So he called the man over for a chat, just to ease his own mind, just to make sure, I think, that this was merely a farmer and not a malevolent apparition.

  About half a dozen people were sitting on a concrete ledge in front of the hospital. They were staring at us. “So what are we going to do here?” I asked Deo.

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He had been gazing out the windshield with the lassitude of the bedridden, a little slumped in his seat, a little slack-jawed, and now it was as if he’d been shocked back to action. He sat up. He looked different from any version of Deo I’d known, not so much confident as fierce, under his jaunty black bush hat, in his aviator-style dark glasses. He leaned out the side window and called to the people sitting in front of the hospital. “Amahoro! Mura kome?” “Peace! How are you?”

  He opened his door. As he closed it behind him, he said, “At this moment, I don’t care. I want to go inside.”

  He wasn’t speaking to me. I tried to get his attention. “Well, I do care, Deo. So …” But he wasn’t listening.

  A young man came up to us, the person in charge of the facility. The people who worked for him called him “the doctor.” (“He’s not,” Deo told me. “He’s a nurse. He has a tenth-grade education.”) Deo addressed “the doctor” in a friendly, executive way, like a man giving orders who knows they’ll be obeyed. He told “the doctor” we had come from the United States to look at hospitals, with an eye to learning more about nutrition programs.

  “The doctor” led us inside. I had been struck by the tidiness of the facility’s exterior, its swept grounds, its good repair. The innards were something else altogether, a warren of narrow interior hallways, empty and echoing, open at their ends to the outdoors. The walls were streaked with bird shit. From somewhere outside came the bleating of a goat. There was a screeching of birds, amplified by the tall narrow concrete walls, and a flock of what looked like sparrows flew over our heads. I looked up. Dozens of wasps’ nests hung just overhead, suspended from the high concrete ceilings on immensely long, weblike tethers. I remembered a phrase from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whited sepulchres.” (“Whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones.”) I had seen a photograph of a hallway of this hospital taken after the massacre, with a burned body in the foreground, the whole picture dark purple in my memory. “What are we doing?” I said to Deo.

  He didn’t answer. He was chatting with “the doctor” and trying the handles of metal doors, opening one door after another, onto identical-looking rooms, all empty of patients. In several there was a rusty bed frame but no mattress. In one, there was a cylindrical piece of equipment, some sort of medical device that clearly hadn’t been used in years—I didn’t look at it closely. I felt as if I were holding my breath against the moment when we would get out of there. Deo was trying another door handle, his false smile for “the doctor” gone for the moment, an alert, angry look passing over his face. The door wouldn’t open. He turned to me, looked me in the eyes, then looked at the doorknob. I didn’t understand right away that he was showing me his former room, the place where he’d left his door open and death had passed him by. It was just as well I didn’t get his meaning. As it was, I was having a hard time hanging on to a pretense of equanimity.

  Deo had tried to describe his nightmares to me. In the telling, they hadn’t seemed unusual. Everyone has bad dreams. Even the most sheltered are chased by bogeymen from time to time. Up until now I hadn’t fully understood the difference: that even his most lurid dreams weren’t weirder or more frightening than what inspired them. He didn’t wake up from his nightmares thankful they weren’t real. Now, for the first time, I thought I could imagine what it might have been like for him during some of those nights in the comfy Black Hole in SoHo. At the moment, in that corridor of the fake hospital—all that money spent on fixing up an empty shell in a country full of illness—everything felt eerie in the worst sense. It was as if I were looking around inside a dream of Deo’s, a dream I was in, and looking around at the cause of the dream simultaneously.

  This was a place of unreason, and at the moment I had no faith at all in the power of reason against it. Part of the problem, I think, was that for the moment I didn’t trust Deo. The smile he turned on “the doctor” was radiant. I’d never seen him so angry.

  Why were there no patients in the hospital? Deo asked.

  “The doctor” replied that people had felt reluctant to come here since “the crisis.”

  La Crise had become the common euphemism for the civil war, the euphemism favored by many Burundians when speaking to strangers, because if you used a more descriptive term you might reveal your ethnicity and which side you’d been on. Oh? Deo said, the light from his smile flaring. What “crisis” was that?

  “The doctor” frowned. He must have sensed we weren’t the people Deo had said we were. In any case, he had stopped smiling. Deo didn’t seem to care. “Do you want to take a picture?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said. “I left my camera in the car.” I muttered, “Let’s get out of here.” At any moment, I imagined, “the doctor” would go off and bring back who knew what.

  Deo didn’t seem to hear me. He was telling me what “the doctor” had told him, that the place had been renovated back in 2000.

  “I see that it’s functioning really well,” I replied.

  “And the whole thing is empty,” Deo went on. We were standing on a concrete porch now, facing an interior courtyard, open to the sun. There was a tree in the middle, and grass. Deo said, “This is where I was. This courtyard was fu
ll of bodies. I came out here, and I went this way.”

  “I think we should go, Deo.”

  “Yah,” he said. But he went on talking, in a low and ruminating voice: “It was much bigger than this. But the site … They replaced the windows. Around here, right here, this ground was covered with bodies. I was right here. Around here on these grasses, packed with bodies. They were really just coming down these hallways and knocking down the doors and killing the people inside.”

  “Let’s go back to Bujumbura,” I said.

  “Mura koze.” Deo was thanking “the doctor.” Innocent had pulled the car up closer to the building. He had also opened the doors. Clearly, he too was eager to leave. I climbed in. Deo climbed in. Then Deo got out again, with his camera. He strode away and started taking pictures. “The doctor,” I saw, had rejoined his crew on the concrete ledge. They stared at Deo.

  It seemed as though he took pictures for a very long time, though it was probably only a few minutes before he got back in the car, no longer smiling, but with his jaw still hard.

  Innocent had kept the engine running. He said, as he drove out through the chicken-wire gate, “Deo, I don’t feel comfortable here.”

  “Innocent,” said Deo, “where in Burundi do you feel comfortable?”

  Innocent didn’t answer.

  As we drove on, Deo looked out at the valley across which he’d begun his long escape, in the dark, almost thirteen years before.

  “There were all these drums, and houses around here were burning.”

  “It was the middle of the night, right?”

  “Yah. All day I stayed along the river Mubarazi.”

  On the way back, Deo wanted to drive through Bugendena, the first town he’d skirted on his escape. Innocent took the turn off the main road, but then I made a fuss. Hadn’t Deo heard that Bugendena was patrolled by former militiamen? Hadn’t we seen enough for today? I’m afraid I grew vehement.