He wasn’t near the equator anymore. The nights grew longer and longer. One day Nancy called to him
from her studio, “Deo, come look.”
He peered out the studio windows at snow. “Where is this coming from? It’s something that comes like
rain?”
Nancy and Charlie had wanted him to quit his job. He had simply stopped going to the grocery store.
But this meant he had to accept gifts of spending money. “I am like a parasite,” he thought when he
pocketed it. “Probably it would be better for me to go back to Central Park.” Nancy and Charlie told him
to use their phone to call Claude in Bujumbura, but he did so only once and never again, because he
found out that it cost something like five dollars a minute. So from time to time he took subways up to
Harlem and made streetcorner calls.
At the bottom of the last page of the account of his life that he’d written for Sharon, the account full of
deliberate inaccuracies, he had written with complete truthfulness: “I pray God to learn me some good
news about my family, or I will surely die. Too tired!” The news from Claude was almost always bad,
though, and sometimes dreadful. One day he learned over the phone that a cousin had been killed and
beheaded. He’d been telling Nancy about that same cousin over coffee just the day before, and he simply
was unable to stop weeping before he got back to the apartment, or to keep the news for himself when
Nancy came out of her studio to see what was wrong. She hugged him for a long time.
The world was full of dangers. Nancy’s asthma began to worry him. Winter seemed to worsen it. Then
she came down with a cold. Listening to her wheeze, Deo felt increasingly alarmed. He told her she had
to go to a doctor. She demurred, and he thought, “All right.” He went into the Black Hole, pulled his
suitcase from under the bed, took out his stethoscope, and returned with it around his neck. “Maybe I
can listen to your lungs.” He didn’t think he heard sounds of pneumonia. He still thought she should go
to a real doctor. She wouldn’t.
Deo had shown Charlie the books he’d carried from Burundi in his suitcase, and Charlie had said to
Nancy, in front of Deo, “This man loves books. He needs to go to school.” Since then, a friend of the
Wolfs had helped Deo enroll at Hunter College in an English as a Second Language class, and Deo knew
he must be doing well, because within a week he had been promoted, and his teacher had taken him to a
lunch with other teachers—to show him off, it seemed.
On Saturdays, he walked with Charlie to the greenmarket on Union Square. Charlie had been a
university professor of sociology. He knew a great deal about the city. Deo didn’t understand everything
Charlie said, but he liked to listen to Charlie discourse on the history of the streets they crossed. They’d
stop at a café and chat over coffee, then stroll over to the Strand and spend an hour or two looking at
books, and sometimes on the way home they’d stop at the Warehouse to buy some beer or a bottle of
wine, which they’d finish slowly, after dinner at the table. There, almost every night, Charlie would use
an expression new to Deo, such as “Indian summer” or “break a leg.” Nancy would turn to Deo and
begin to offer a definition, and Charlie would beg to differ with Nancy. Or Deo would interrupt Charlie
and ask a question: What did “beating a dead horse” mean? Well, it was a colloquial expression, Charlie
would say. What did “colloquial” mean? Deo would ask. It was a cliché, Nancy would answer. No,
Charlie would say, a colloquial expression was different from a cliché. Often the argument went on and
on. At first, Deo sat there feeling frustrated, wondering when they’d ever get around to answering his
question. But then this situation began to seem interesting: two people unable to resolve a question about
their native language. He’d listen to them wrangle, his spirits lifting. Even native speakers had
something to learn. His question had been a challenging one after all. He wasn’t stupid for not knowing
the answer. His situation wasn’t hopeless.
Deo lived with Nancy and Charlie for about five months before he decided he should leave, to continue
his quest for school. Charlie said he’d been speaking to an old friend back in his hometown, in Chapel
Hill in North Carolina. His friend thought Deo ought to come down there. It would be good for him to
get out of the big city, said Charlie’s friend, and it would be easy for Deo to enroll at the university there.
Deo sensed that Charlie and Nancy didn’t want him to leave. On the other hand, Charlie seemed to think
highly of North Carolina and of his own education at its great university. In the end, what Deo heard
most clearly was the word “university.”
Charlie and Nancy had spoken about his “going to college” in New York. It seemed to him that he was
now being offered a choice between college and university. He didn’t ask for a definition of the word
“college,” because the word was the same in French, and since the French collège meant “secondary
school,” his choice was clear. A university was what he wanted. Nancy and Charlie took him to the train
station. On the platform, Nancy burst into tears and Charlie pulled out his handkerchief and staggered
backward slightly, and Deo, putting on his toothiest smile, climbed aboard, hoping they would decide
for him that he shouldn’t go, right up until the train departed.
Charlie’s friend had found free lodgings for him, in the house of a ninety-year-old man, rather crotchety
as it turned out. At night Deo would tiptoe around, moving so quietly he thought he could have heard a
bird fly past, but in the morning the old man would say, “You woke me up.” Once, he accused Deo of
eating his watermelon. When, some months later, Deo tried a slice of watermelon for the first time in his
life, he took one bite and threw the rest away. Deo would have put up with far worse—he would gladly
have lived outdoors again—if only he could have gone to a university. Soon after he arrived, though,
Charlie’s friend said that getting him enrolled was going to be harder than she’d thought. Actually, it
turned out to be impossible. He didn’t fit into any category, and the rules were rigid. The closest Deo got
to his dream was the main library at the University of North Carolina, where he would go before or after
working his shifts as an aide at the Fair Oaks Nursing Home.
He knew right away he was the lowliest employee, the one the nurses and other aides, almost all of
whom were African-American, would summon to clean up the ugliest messes, the urine on the floor, the
shit in the bed, the food the old people spilled, the food that dribbled down the old people’s chins. He
imagined the other staff thought he was dim-witted. That was what so many assumed when you didn’t
speak their language well. So many people, he thought, don’t listen to the content of what you say but
only to the noises you make. The very idea of the place puzzled him. He remembered how hard it had
been for his parents to move out of his grandparents’ compound to the mountain Runda, how they’d
been obliged to leave several children behind for his grandparents to care for. He looked at the so-called
“residents” slumped in their wheelchairs around the nursing station, and he wondered, “Are all these old
people actually going to be here until they die? They are not going to go home?”
The job wasn’t all bad. The nursing home was an hour’s walk from the old man’s house, but Deo liked a
long walk again, now that he had gained some weight and his nausea had mostly lifted. He usually
worked twelve hours a day, for five dollars an hour, a fortune compared to his pay at Gristedes. He
didn’t mind dealing with the messes human bodies make. It was, in a general sense at least, what doctors
did. On breaks, he liked to read the residents’ medical records and pretend he was their doctor. He liked
taking temperatures and blood pressures and writing down the numbers on the appropriate form. He
liked evaluating TB tests. “I’m becoming an intellectual again,” he’d say to himself. Sometimes he’d
pore over chest X-rays just for fun, and even on occasion, in spite of his English, he would try to talk
about one resident or another to the doctor who visited periodically—just as if he were an intern on
rounds. It had been a long time since he’d been the one dispensing help, not the one asking for help.
He received a lot of blessings from the residents. And he made a friend, a dignified octogenarian named
Martha. Soon after she arrived, she said something he didn’t understand, and she smiled at him and said,
“You have no clue.”
“No clou?” he thought. “No nail?”
“Do you know what a ‘clue’ is?” Martha asked.
“Yes!” He made as if to drive a nail with a hammer.
She laughed, but in such a happy way he couldn’t feel offended. “No,” she explained. “It means, you
have no idea.”
He spent his breaks with her. She improved his English and his mood. Then one day another aide, a
hefty African-American woman, got impatient with Martha and gripped the old woman’s arm and
twisted it, right in front of Deo. Martha bled.
The aide tried to get Deo to lie about what had happened: “You’re talking about a white person,” she
whispered fiercely. He had only vague notions about the history of race relations in America, but he
understood the words. The aide seemed to be saying that since Martha was white and Deo was black, he
should automatically take the side of a fellow black person. And this was because white people had long
oppressed black people. This was madness, he thought. How many wholly innocent Burundians and
Rwandans had been slaughtered because of offenses their fellows had committed? The aide told him if
he didn’t take her side, he’d better quit this job and leave. She was going to get him in big trouble if he
didn’t quit. He shouldn’t just quit, he should go back to Africa!
Deo followed her advice, in part. He told the authorities the truth, and not long afterward he called up
Nancy and Charlie—they had been calling him regularly the whole four months. Would it be all right if
he came back to live with them?
They met him at Penn Station and took him back to SoHo. When the elevator door opened into the
apartment, there were a lot of people there, friends such as Sharon and the lawyer James O’Malley and
O’Malley’s wife, Lelia. On the table there was a big cake spiked with candles, surrounding the figure of
a little cow resting on the frosting. Someone said, “Blow out the candles, Deo.”
“What?” he asked.
Lelia made as if to blow, and he understood.
Later, as they were cleaning up, Lelia asked Deo to pass her a paper towel. He couldn’t think what a
paper towel was. He made as if to search, to look as though he knew what it was she wanted. Then he
said, “There’s nothing.” Lelia smiled at him and walked over and got the paper towel herself.
He thought he must go back to school or die.
Soon after Deo returned from North Carolina, Nancy and Charlie asked a friend to take him on a tour of
the city’s colleges. The second stop was Columbia. When Deo passed through its stone gates, he cried
out, “This is a university!” There was no need to go further.
Deo enrolled in Columbia’s American Language Program, an ESL program essentially, but more
rigorous than most. Nancy and Charlie paid the tuition, about six thousand dollars. There were still
nights he couldn’t sleep or didn’t dare try, but he could use those hours now to read and write his papers.
He studied English through the spring and summer of 1995. Meanwhile, he had applied to become an
undergraduate in Columbia’s School of General Studies, a program fully integrated with the college
proper, created for students whose college careers had been interrupted. The standards for admission
were rigorous, but the deadline for applying was June instead of January.
Nancy and Charlie and another friend of theirs, a neurologist at Columbia’s medical school, helped him
fill out the forms, but he had to prove he’d been to school before, and he didn’t have any of his
transcripts from Burundi. He made several streetcorner calls. A friend of Claude’s went to the medical
school in Bujumbura—the school was functioning again, marginally, Deo was told. At first, the
administrators there refused to give up any of his records, because according to their files Deo was dead.
When the records finally came, he found among all the other papers a photograph of himself, a picture
of his own face with a cross drawn over it in black ink. Deo usually saved everything—receipts, letters,
snapshots. You never knew when a thing of the past might be useful to the future. But after staring at the
picture of himself dead, he tore it into several pieces and threw it in the trash.
He had to take the SAT and a bunch of special Columbia admissions and placement exams. He finished
the calculus test with time to spare. He was checking his answers when he saw a tall, well-dressed man
come into the room, a black man in a three-piece suit, clearly a personage around Columbia. The man
stood near the front of the room, beside the desk of the man who was monitoring the exam. The big man
seemed to be eyeing the would-be Columbia students, all bent over their desks, hurrying to finish on
time. But Deo was done. He slid out of his chair and carried his answer sheet to the monitor. As he
turned to go back to his desk, he heard the big man say to the monitor in a low voice, “Is he done, or did
he just give up?”
“No. It looks as if he’s done.”
“Let’s see.”
Deo watched from his desk as the two men graded his answer sheet. Then the big man looked up,
smiling across the room at him. “De-oh-Gratias! Well done!”
Chapter SEVEN
Burundi,
1976–93
By rights Deo should have hated education, and he might have, if all he’d ever known had been the
brick single-story grade school in Sangaza. It had six classrooms all in a row. Each room had two
windows, covered with metal grating but otherwise open to the air. Looking into any of the rooms would
have been for an American like looking into a one-room New England schoolhouse preserved as a
museum: a slate blackboard, rows of battered wooden desks with inkwells.
The school had been owned and run by the Catholic church. Yearly tuition was roughly the equivalent of
