Strength in What Remains

  She seemed fretful, even at times a little discouraged by the search for a bed for him, but by now he knew she wouldn’t quit. He thought, “She wants this more than I do.” How was this possible?

  Summer had arrived. One day when they were out for a walk, Sharon said, as if she had suddenly remembered, that she had a friend she called a brother. Chukwu. He came from Nigeria. He was a math professor now, at North Carolina State University, but he had spent some tough times in New York.

  Deo said that perhaps she should call this Chukwu, knowing she would anyway.

  As usual, the result was another hot trip through the city, this time to the office of a lawyer, named James O’Malley. Evidently, Chukwu had told Sharon that Deo should see this man.

  Deo wasn’t sure exactly why he needed a lawyer. He wasn’t a criminal. Something to do with immigration, he gathered.

  It was a fine-looking office. The lawyer called James, small and stylishly dressed, sat behind an enormous desk. Deo could tell that Sharon was telling James his story. He caught words like “Burundi” and “Rwanda” and “medical student.” Then Sharon told Deo that James would like to see his passport, which Deo still always carried.

  How did he come by a business visa? James asked through Sharon.

  Deo told the whole story.

  For a minute or two, James sat frowning down at the visa. Then he lifted his eyes and smiled and said something that made Sharon smile. She translated: “James says he will take your case if you promise to be his doctor.”

  Deo felt elated. Was James saying that Deo was going back to medical school? Maybe he did need a lawyer!

  Chukwu had given Sharon another suggestion, which sounded altogether familiar, even depressing. She only told him about it when it was a fait accompli. Deo had been invited to have dinner with people named Nancy and Charlie Wolf. Old friends of Chukwu’s, and, as it happened, acquaintances of Sharon’s. Nancy was an artist, Sharon said, Charlie a sociologist. They were very nice. And they had invited Deo to dinner at their apartment. It was a subway ride away, downtown, in a place called SoHo. Sharon had written down the address.

  Deo looked at it. How to get out of this?

  He had never been to that part of town, he said. “And how am I going to talk to them? What am I supposed to say?” All this was true. She couldn’t deny it.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Sharon.

  FIVE

  New York City,

  1994

  You rode up to the Wolfs’ place in a noisy old elevator, which opened into a room with large windows on one end and hundreds of books on the walls. Deo thought, “Maybe I can ask for a book.” He didn’t notice much else. He might have just awakened and found himself standing in front of these strangers, shaking hands. Mrs. Wolf, Nancy, was blond and thin and rather tall. Her hands looked busy even when they weren’t doing anything. She seemed to have a hard time standing still. She smiled and laughed a lot, sometimes in a nervous-sounding way. But she spoke too fast for him to understand the words, and it wasn’t long before he quit trying to catch up. But Mr. Wolf, Charlie, spoke to him very slowly. One word at a time. And Charlie would gesture at things to make sure Deo understood. Something about him seemed familiar and comforting. When Nancy interrupted him, Deo noticed, Charlie would stop speaking at once, and if she excused herself, he would tell her to go on. The second or third time this happened, Deo thought, “He’s like Lonjino.” There was gray in Charlie’s hair. He seemed completely calm.

  At the dinner table, which was just big enough for four, Deo tried to tell them some of his story. He was sick of feeling silenced in these situations. He thought, “I’m just going to make noise.” These people might think, “What the heck is he talking about?” But he didn’t care. As always, it felt dangerous to try to describe the violence he had seen. Mainly he tried to tell them about cows and medical school. His English kept failing him. Nancy looked more and more agitated as he talked. Suddenly, she said to him, “Never mind talking. Just eat!”

  For a while after that, he gave up on talking and tried to listen to the others. He was pretty sure that Charlie spoke about working in Africa and even living and working along with Nancy in Nigeria. But most of the conversation went on without him. Then he realized that Charlie was asking him a question, enunciating the words carefully.

  “What can we”—Charlie pointed at himself and at Nancy—“do to help?” He pointed at Deo. “You.”

  Deo understood, and then again he didn’t. Did this man really want to give him help? What made him think he could? Deo said he didn’t know.

  Charlie asked the question again.

  In broken English, feeling rather irritated, Deo asked if Charlie really wished to know.

  Yes, said Charlie. Of course!

  Well, Deo told him, there was only one thing. It was impossible. To go to school.

  Charlie shook his head. Deo was wrong. “This is a country of second chances,” Charlie said very slowly.

  Second chances? Deo said.

  Many opportunities, said Charlie. Of course Deo could go back to school.

  Afterward, Deo wasn’t sure what he had said aloud to Charlie then and what he had wanted to say to him but had spoken only in his mind. The gist of it went like this: “That’s the only thing that would really help me, just to heal my brain, my mind, would be to sit down in a classroom.” He remembered how it felt to be in a classroom. Perhaps it felt better in memory than it ever had in fact, but now it seemed like the greatest pleasure he had known.

  On a hot afternoon not long after Deo first met Sharon, Goss ordered him to go outside and load a truck. As he worked, Deo noticed that he wasn’t sweating, a bad sign. Buried in heat, hefting boxes, he found he was crying, and through the film of tears he saw the faces of Goss and a couple of the cashiers in the front windows of the store. They were watching him work. They were smiling and laughing as they watched him. Then he heard Goss calling out to him from the doorway, “Hey, looks like it’s hot for you. Isn’t it hotter than this in Africa?”

  Deo thought he would celebrate the news that Goss had died, preferably killed by heat. His mind remonstrated with him over this thought, that part of his mind trained by his mother and his church. But the other part stood firm: No, I will not regret thinking this.

  Soon afterward, Goss sent him out on a delivery. Deo managed to get the groceries to the address. Afterward, he walked with his cart to the post office near the store, another of his peaceful corners. The place was air-conditioned. He sat inside for hours, unmolested—though after an hour or so one of the clerks did ask him what he was doing there. When the office was about to close, Deo walked away, leaving the grocery cart behind. He wasn’t going back to the Gristedes.

  He stayed away for five days. When he walked through the door again, the assistant manager said, “We don’t know you. You don’t work here.” The job was harder now than before, not just because he had to beg to get it back, or because Goss gave him more to do around the store, still poking him with his long stick, unnecessarily because Deo’s English vocabulary by now encompassed the functions of a grocery. He had known more difficult toil in the mountains of Burundi and worse humiliations in grade school, but always then he could believe that enduring those would lead to something better. You mastered one set of skills, in order to master bigger ones. Now he knew how to be a grocery delivery boy, and he could see nothing more ahead.

  Life seemed like an endless chain of moments, as it had when he was on the run, except that most of the moments now weren’t threatening, just dreary. In the midst of them sometimes—loading up the grocery cart, standing at a service entrance—he’d be arrested by memories of himself before the wars began, a person with dreams and plans. He’d awake from memories of hope and find himself right there, waiting for another superintendent to open up the gate, and he’d sneer at himself. Those dreams were gone. Ashes. This was it, this grocery cart, this service entrance. His life from now on was going to depend on how strong
he was physically, working in a grocery store, being paid fifteen dollars a day. More and more, living felt to Deo like a job he couldn’t wait to finish. “Be brave,” he thought. “It’s time for you to die.”

  He thought he should be more grateful for Sharon. In her company, sometimes, he could talk as if he still imagined himself becoming a doctor, even though, as it had been from the start, this was usually just a way of telling her who he used to be. She seemed so sure they’d find a place for him, and she led him around the city so cheerfully and energetically that he couldn’t help but borrow a little of her optimism. But the rejections mounted up. What did it say about him that no one was willing to lend him a bed? The feelings that came from this weren’t entirely different from the feelings that came from having people try to kill you. You wondered who they thought you were and who you were in fact. You felt utterly alone. And you felt indignant. He didn’t need borrowed salt. He could get along by himself. He knew how to survive, if he wanted to go on surviving.

  He was tired of following Sharon around, like a calf behind its mother. But she just wouldn’t quit. She kept making calls. She took him to the office of a place called Catholic Charities. A harried woman there said she’d never heard of Burundi. Why did Deo come to the United States? the woman asked, irritably.

  Sharon said she still had hopes for the Wolfs. She said Deo must have made a good impression on them, because they called her quite often in the weeks after the dinner party, to ask if she had found a proper place for him. Deo knew this must be right, because the Wolfs called him, too, leaving messages at the apartment of the West Africans in Harlem. As with Sharon, he had let the Wolfs think he was borrowing a piece of floor there. To tell them that he was really sleeping in the park would be inconsiderate, and as shameful an act as crying aloud when he’d stubbed his toes at night as a child. There were things about you that other people wouldn’t want to hear and things you wouldn’t want them to know. Often they were the same things. He thought of them as “things I keep for myself.”

  Returning the Wolfs’ calls was hard sometimes. He knew he wouldn’t be able to understand Nancy. He’d think, “God, I’m a grown man. Why am I unable to communicate?” Several times when he called and it was only Nancy who answered, he simply hung up without speaking. But usually both Charlie and Nancy would pick up the phone, and usually Deo got the gist of what Charlie said. Sometimes the Wolfs just wanted to know how he was doing. They had suggestions, too. They told him about a library up in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture—Nancy’s idea. And one day Charlie asked Deo to meet him at the New York Public Library, the landmark branch, the one with the carved stone lions out front. Charlie showed him the reading room.

  “Ooh la la!”

  Deo remembered the two libraries in Bujumbura. The country’s largest was at the university. Most of its collection had been donated, as he recalled, by Muammar Khaddafi, the dictator of Libya, back in the early 1980s, and he thought it probably hadn’t received any books since. The other was a one-room library in the center of Bujumbura, which was open to the public. He had preferred the smaller one, but both were like shabby used-book stores compared to the place that Charlie showed him. Deo felt a pang—“Oh, my poor country”—when he gazed at the New York library’s reading room and thought of the Bujumbura libraries. And a pang sometimes when he gazed at those stone lions outside the entrance. All his youth he’d heard Lonjino’s stories about lions and wished he’d had a chance to see one—but by the time Deo was born, lions had long since become part of Lonjino’s “used to be.”

  The library vastly improved New York for him. He could go inside without paying. He didn’t take out any books, and he still couldn’t read much English, but Charlie had shown him how to use the card catalogue and order a book, so he could sit in the reading room with a book that he thought he would like to read and turn the pages, imagining that he was reading them. And when he fell asleep, it usually took the staff longer to ask him to leave than at the Barnes & Noble. He had never much liked Bujumbura, a city where nothing worked right, a city that had seemed like an incipient hell when he had left it. When he thought of home, he thought, yearningly, of the palm groves by the light blue waters of Lake Tanganyika and the grazing land in the mountains. At night in New York’s great park, he could almost imagine himself back there, and when he came out onto Fifth Avenue early in the morning, he felt at moments not only weary but also nearly happy to be in this city that wasn’t Bujumbura. He was still amazed at the constant motion of the place. Always going going going going. Running like a river. He thought of all the people hiding out in abandoned buildings, all the people burrowing into little corners of the park. There was always a space for someone. It was an amazing example of human organization, deeply flawed but still amazing, and amazing to think that he had become a small part of it. Having a few friends helped.

  One time Charlie met up with him and bought him an ice cream cone. Deo had yet to see a dentist, and he knew he had cavities. When the first bite hit his molars, he almost cried out. He clenched his jaw and managed a smile, and waited until Charlie looked away. Then he tossed the cone into a trash barrel. Moments later Charlie turned and looked at him and did a double take, then declared that Deo was clearly a man who loved ice cream. On another occasion, Charlie arranged to meet him at the library, and arrived with a small mattress, a camping mattress that could be folded up into a little bundle. It was for Deo to use in the apartment in Harlem, Charlie said.

  Deo slept on the mattress that night, in the park. He had tried out five or six sleeping places in the park. Each, it seemed to him, represented an improvement. When he found a better one, he’d think, “I’m making progress.” He had found a good place over on the West Side among some boulders, shaded by a tree. Napping there one Sunday before work—stuck to the ground like a frog—he had seen a woman in a burqa disrobing in front of her lover. “Now you’re thinking right,” he thought, stifling his laughter. He didn’t watch the rest of the proceedings. He’d found a better spot since then, the best so far. It was just off Fifth Avenue, near some benches and a towering bronze statue. He didn’t always have the place to himself. Other homeless men sometimes sat on the benches, but this spot was adjacent to very fancy neighborhoods, a spot that the police would pay attention to, so the men wouldn’t sleep there, and they’d speak only in whispers, and the area was clean. He could lie down on his mattress behind some bushes near the statue and sleep peacefully. In the morning he put the mattress in a plastic bag and left it hidden in that spot. For three nights running he found it there when he returned. On the fourth it was gone. But he didn’t much care about not having a mattress, so long as Charlie didn’t find out.

  It was near the end of summer when Sharon told him their search was over. The Wolfs had invited him to live with them. He was glad. Only good people would do this, and they must think he was a good person, too. But the news was tempered by that dulling, heavy weariness—as if every present thing were connected to his aching legs—and by the feeling that he’d bridled at since arriving in New York, that he was being forced into the position of a child. He didn’t get to decide whether the Wolfs would take him in. And he didn’t get to choose whether to accept their invitation. He didn’t want to be a person who needed rescuing, but he knew he did need it—and later he’d realize he hadn’t known the half of it; when he had heard people talk about “winter” in New York, he’d wondered if this meant there was a rainy season. To him just then only one thing seemed to matter: the Wolfs might help him go back to school.

  He was about to call Nancy and Charlie, as Sharon told him to do. Then he remembered the stolen mattress. In Burundi, household items were precious. If a family took in an orphan and the child broke a plate, the hosts might throw the kid out. Deo had known of such cases. No telling how Nancy and Charlie would react if they found out what had happened to their mattress. If he told them the whole story, they’d realize that he had lied to them, or at b
est misled them. They would know he had been sleeping in the park, and no one was going to know that about him.

  He consulted his dictionaries and prepared a question. Over the phone, he asked Charlie what he should do with the mattress.

  Charlie paused, and then, to Deo’s great relief, Charlie said, “Leave it.”

  SIX

  New York City–Chapel Hill,

  1994–95

  The apartment was very long and rather narrow. At one end were the living room and kitchen and a sleeping loft, at the other Nancy’s studio, full of her paintings and drawings, which were all about buildings, detailed and fascinating. Deo slept in the room in the middle. To satisfy the building code, a small opening had been cut high up on one wall, but otherwise the room was windowless. It had been Charlie’s office. Charlie and Nancy called it the Black Hole. A bed and a small desk were wedged between the books that covered the walls.

  It was the most comfortable room he’d ever slept in, a room fit for the end of a journey of the body, but also for the continuation of a journey of the mind. Again and again, on the perimeter of sleep, he was visited by sudden vivid images, of machete and flesh, and by those dreams in which, sooner or later, he had to run but couldn’t move. He would get out of bed and tiptoe to the bathroom and take a cold shower, as cold as he could stand, then try to stay awake. He had a radio on his desk in the Black Hole. Playing it very softly, turning the dial, his ear bent to the speaker, he discovered a station called Radio France International and on it a show called Afrique. It came on after midnight. Sometimes it carried news of the civil war back home. Terrible news as a rule, but he became, as he thought of it, addicted to the show. Charlie read The New York Times daily, and sometimes Deo would look through the paper for the name Burundi. He wouldn’t find it. Rwanda, yes, but almost never Burundi. He listened to the radio partly to hear the name Burundi, partly to stay awake and safe from dreams.