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小说下载尽在http://bbs.txtnovel.com--书香门第【yuyu不在家】整理
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《生命如歌（英文版）》作者：[美]特雷西·基德尔
简介：若你已见证了地狱的火光，是否还能用天使般的心温暖这个世界。亲人，家园，梦想，安身立命的一切……德奥的整个世界被一场席卷布隆迪和卢旺达的大屠杀彻底粉碎。六个月残酷的逃亡，死神无处不在，放眼所见只有血红的天地和成山的尸体。机缘巧合之下，迪欧身无分文地来到了纽约。他无法与人交流，他语言一窍不通，但他却从未忘记微笑，从未放弃自己的梦想。他尽最大努力去做任何与医学有关的事情，心心念念想要在支离破碎的祖国建立医院。他知道自己还有温暖的心，他依然想用自己微不足道的力量温暖这个世界……
Strength in What Remains by Kidder, Tracy
生命如歌
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to all of the people whose names appear in this book, and my thanks for various kinds of help
to: Joyce Apfel, Robert Bagg, Jolanta Benal, Georges Borchardt, Alice Bukhman, Gene Bukhman, Evan
Camfield, Ed Cardoza, Benjamin Dreyer, Paul English, John Farber, Elliot Fratkin, Bob Freling, Philip
Gourevitch, Tony Grafton, John Graiff, Jonathan Harr, Chris Jerome, Frances Kidder, Nathaniel Kidder,
Diantha Kidder, James Leighton, Alastair Maitland, Craig Nova, Rachel Rackow, Mike Rosenthal,
Natasha Ryback, Haun Saussy, Mary Kay Smith-Fawzi, Basil Stamos, Sara Stulac, and Peter Uvin. I am
also immensely grateful to a number of Burundians, but I think it best not to mention them by name.
Special thanks, once again, to Stuart Dybek and to Kate Medina. I also want to thank Richard Todd for
all that he has done on my behalf, with a patience that has lasted thirty-five long years.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TRACY KIDDER graduated from Harvard, studied at the University of Iowa, and served as an army
officer in Vietnam. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy
Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren,
House, The Soul of a New Machine, Mountains Beyond Mountains, and My Detachment, Kidder lives
in Massachusetts and Maine.
Chapter ONE
Bujumbura–New York,
May 1994
On the outskirts of the capital, Bujumbura, there is a small international airport. It has a modern terminal
with intricate roofs and domed metal structures that resemble astronomical observatories. It is the kind
of terminal that seems designed to say that here you leave the past behind, the future has arrived, behold
the wonders of aviation. But in Burundi in 1994, for the lucky few with tickets, an airplane was just the
fastest, safest way out. It was flight. In the spring of that year, violence and chaos governed Burundi. To
the west, the hills above Bujumbura were burning. Smoke seemed to be pouring off the hills, as the
winds of mid-May carried the plumes of smoke downward in undulating sheets, in the general direction
of the airport. A large passenger jet was parked on the tarmac, and a disordered crowd was heading
toward it in sweaty haste. Deo felt as if he were being carried by the crowd, immersed in an unfamiliar
river. The faces around him were mostly white, and though many were black or brown, there was no one
whom he recognized, and so far as he could tell there were no country people. As a little boy, he had
crouched behind rocks or under trees the first times he’d seen airplanes passing overhead. He had never
been so close to a plane before. Except for buildings in the capital, this was the largest man-made thing
he’d ever seen. He mounted the staircase quickly. Only when he had entered the plane did he let himself
look back, staring from inside the doorway as if from a hiding place again.
In Deo’s mind, there was danger everywhere. If his heightened sense of drama was an inborn trait, it had
certainly been nourished. For months every situation had in fact been dangerous. Climbing the stairs a
moment before, he had imagined a voice in his head telling him not to leave. But now he stared at the
hills and he imagined that everything in Burundi was burning. Burundi had become hell. He finally
turned away, and stepped inside. In front of him were cushioned chairs with clean white cloths draped
over their backs, chairs in perfect rows with little windows on the ends. This was the most nicely
appointed room he’d ever seen. It looked like paradise compared to everything outside. If it was real, it
couldn’t last.
The plane was packed, but he felt entirely alone. He had a seat by a window. Something told him not to
look out, and something told him to look. He did both. His hands were shaking. He felt he was about to
vomit. Everyone had heard stories of planes being shot down, not only the Rwandan president’s plane
back in April but others as well. He was waiting for this to happen after the plane took off. For several
long minutes, whenever he glanced out the window all he saw was smoke. When the air cleared and he
could see the landscape below, he realized that they must already have crossed the Akanyaru River,
which meant they had left Burundi and were now above Rwanda. He had crossed a lot of the land down
there on foot. It wasn’t all that small. To see it transformed into a tiny piece of time and space—this
could only happen in a dream.
He gazed down, face pressed against the windowpane. Plumes of smoke were also rising from the
ground of what he took to be Rwanda—if anything, more smoke than around Bujumbura. A lot of it was
coming from the banks of muddy-looking rivers. He thought, “People are being slaughtered down
there.” But those sights didn’t last long. When he realized he wasn’t seeing smoke anymore, he took his
face away from the window and felt himself begin to relax, a long-forgotten feeling.
He liked the cushioned chair. He liked the sensation of flight. How wonderful to travel in an easy chair
instead of on foot. He began to realize how constricted his intestines and stomach had felt, as if wound
into knots for months on end, as the tightness seeped away. Maybe the worst was over now, or maybe he
was just in shock. “I don’t really know where I’m going,” he thought. But if there was to be no end to
this trip, that would be all right. A memory from world history class surfaced. Maybe he was like that
man who got lost and discovered America. He craned his neck and looked upward through the window.
There was nothing but darkening blue. He looked down and realized just how high above the ground he
was seated. “Imagine if this plane crashes,” he thought. “That would be awful.” Then he said to himself,
“I don’t care. It would be a good death.”
For the moment, he was content with that thought, and with everything around him. The only slightly
troubling thing was the absence of French in the cabin. He knew for a fact—he’d been taught it was so
since elementary school—that French was the universal language, and universal because it was the best
of all languages. He knew Russians owned this plane. Only Aeroflot, he’d been told, was still offering
commercial flights from Bujumbura. So it wasn’t strange that all the signs in the cabin were in a foreign
script. But he couldn’t find a single word written in French, even on the various cards in the seat pocket.
The plane landed in Entebbe, in Uganda. As he waited in the terminal for his next flight, Deo watched
what looked like a big family make a fuss over a young man about his age, a fellow passenger as it
turned out. When the flight started to board, the whole bunch around this boy began weeping and
wailing. The young man was wiping tears from his eyes as he walked toward the plane. Probably he was
just going away on a trip. Probably he would be coming back soon. In his mind, Deo spoke to the young
man: “You are in tears. For what? Here you have this huge crowd of family.” He felt surprised, as if by a
distant memory, that there were, after all, many small reasons for people to cry. His own mind kept
moving from one extreme to another. Everything was a crisis, and nothing that wasn’t a crisis mattered.
He thought that if he were as lucky as that boy and still had that much family left, he wouldn’t be crying.
For that matter, he wouldn’t be boarding airplanes, leaving his country behind.
Deo had grown up barefoot in Burundi, but for a peasant boy he had done well. He was twenty-four.
Until recently he had been a medical student, for three years at or near the top of his class. In his old
faux-leather suitcase, which he had reluctantly turned over to the baggage handler in the airport in
Bujumbura, he had packed some of the evidence of his success: the French dictionary that elementary
school teachers gave only to prized students, and the general clinical text and one of the stethoscopes
that he had saved up to buy. But he had spent the past six months on the run, first from the eruption of
violence in Burundi, then from the slaughter in Rwanda.
In geography class in school, Deo had learned that the most important parts of the world were France
and Burundi’s colonial master, Belgium. When someone he knew, usually a priest, was going abroad,
that person was said to be going to “Iburaya.” And while this usually meant Belgium or France, it could
also mean any place that was far away and hard to imagine. Deo was heading for Iburaya. In this case,
that meant New York City.
He had one wealthy friend who had seen more of the world than East Central Africa, a fellow medical
student named Jean. And it was Jean who had decided that New York was where he should go. Deo was
traveling on a commercial visa. Jean’s French father had written a letter identifying Deo as an employee
on a mission to America. He was supposed to be going to New York to sell coffee. Deo had read up on
coffee beans in case he was questioned, but he wasn’t selling anything. Jean’s father had also paid for
the plane tickets. A fat booklet of tickets.
From Entebbe, Deo flew to Cairo, then to Moscow. He slept a lot. He would wake with a start and look
around the cabin. When he realized that no one resembled anyone he knew, he would relax again.
During his medical training and in his country’s history, pigmentation had certainly mattered, but he
wasn’t troubled by the near total whiteness of the faces around him on the plane that he boarded in
Moscow. White skin hadn’t been a marker of danger these past months. He had heard of French soldiers
behaving badly in Rwanda, and had even caught glimpses of them training militiamen in the camps, but
waking up and seeing a white person in the next seat wasn’t alarming. No one called him a cockroach.
No one held a machete. You learned what to look out for, and after a while you learned to ignore the
irrelevant. He did wonder again from time to time why he wasn’t hearing people speak French.
When his flight from Moscow landed, he was half asleep. He followed the other passengers out of the
plane. He thought this must be New York. The first thing to do was find his bag. But the airport terminal
distracted him. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before, an indoor place of shops where everyone
looked happy. And everyone was large. Compared to him anyway. He’d never been heavy, but his pants,
which had fit all right six months before, were bunched up at the waist. When he looked down at
himself, the end of his belt seemed as long to him as a monkey’s tail. His belly was concave under his
shirt. Here in Iburaya everyone’s clothes looked better than his.
He started walking. Looking around for a sign with a luggage symbol on it, he came to a corridor with a
glassed-in wall. He glanced out, then stopped and stared. There were green fields out there in the
distance, and on those fields cows were grazing. From this far away, they might have been his family’s
herd. His last images of cows were of murdered and suffering animals—decapitated cows and cows with
their front legs chopped off, still alive and bellowing by the sides of the road to Bujumbura and even in
Bujumbura. These cows looked so happy, just like the people around him. How was this possible?
A voice was speaking to him. He turned and saw a man in uniform, a policeman. The man looked even
bigger than everyone else. He seemed friendly, though. Deo spoke to him in French, but the man shook
his head and smiled. Then another gigantic-looking policeman joined them. He asked a question in what
Deo guessed was English. Then a woman who had been sitting nearby got up and walked over—French,
at long last French, coming out of her mouth along with cigarette smoke.
Perhaps she could help, the woman said in French.
Deo thought: “God, I’m still in your hands.”
She did the interpreting. The airport policemen wanted to see Deo’s passport and visa and ticket. Deo
wanted to know where he should go to pick up his bag.
The policemen looked surprised. One of them asked another question. The woman said to Deo, “The
man asks, ‘Do you know where you are?’”
“Yes,” said Deo. “New York City.”
She broke into a smile, and translated this for the uniformed men. They looked at each other and
laughed, and the woman explained to Deo that he was in a country called Ireland, in a place called
Shannon Airport.
He chatted with the woman afterward. She told him she was Russian. What mattered to Deo was that she
spoke French. After such long solitude, it felt wonderful to talk, so wonderful that for a while he forgot
all he knew about the importance of silence, the silence he’d been taught as a child, the silence he had
needed over the past six months. She asked him where he came from, and before he knew it he had said
too much. She started asking questions. He was from Burundi? And had escaped from Rwanda? She had
been to Rwanda. She was a journalist. She planned to write about the terrible events there. It was a
genocide, wasn’t it? Was he a Tutsi?
She arranged to sit next to him on the flight to New York. He felt glad for the company, and besieged by
her questions. She wanted to know all about his experiences. To answer felt dangerous. She wasn’t just a
stranger, she was a journalist. What would she write? What if she found out his name and used it? Would
bad people read it and come to find him in New York? He tried to tell her as little as possible. “It was
terrible. It was disgusting,” he’d say, and turning toward the airplane’s window, he’d see images he
didn’t want in his mind—a gray dawn and a hut with a burned thatch roof smoldering in the rain, a pack
of dogs snarling over something he wasn’t going to look at, swarms of flies like a warning in the air
above a banana grove ahead. He’d turn back to her to chase away the visions. She seemed like a friend,
