i found you are my classmate at columbia but you would never be able to know me because i look like
other black people i’ve learned that you are a dog from the tutsi we palipehutu people will wipe you out
and i just want you to know that any time we want any moment we can get you around columbia we will
see you but keep in mind that we watch you everywhere you go
The email was signed “committee of palipehutu in new york.” PALIPEHUTU, along with other rebel
groups, continued to wage war against the shaky Tutsi-dominated government in Burundi. Deo
mentioned the email to a classmate, who told him to take it to the dean of students. The dean had the
email traced, but to no avail. The writer had used a public computer, most likely at an Internet café. The
dean told Deo not to worry. New York was safe, he said. Deo should stay among friends and avoid being
alone with people he didn’t know.
Deo hung a printout of the email on the wall by his desk in the Black Hole, not very far from his uncle’s
photograph. He told himself, “You better get used to this.” Keeping the threat in plain sight, he
imagined, might be a way of taming it.
But the smallest coincidence could draw him back. Simply opening a text to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land and seeing the word “April” did the trick, because that was the month in which Rwanda’s genocide
had begun. The familiar cycle would start again, the whirlpool of nightmares and waking visions and
sleeplessness to avoid nightmares and ensuing exhaustion that seemed to leave him still more vulnerable
to nightmares. He would come down with immobilizing headaches. As a medical student in Burundi,
Deo had seen people pushed away from hospitals, not only when they had no money, but sometimes just
because they were dirty and smelled bad. Now news that a relative was ill would keep him worrying for
days, imagining that his mother or a sibling might even now be receiving such treatment.
His grades suffered more or less in cadence with his nightmares and with troubling news from Burundi.
Then he would recover and do well for stretches, more than well enough in the end to make it through
Columbia.
He graduated in a spring rainstorm, especially memorable because the ceremony went on outdoors
without a tent. Nancy and Charlie and Sharon came, of course, and Lelia and James, who was still trying
to get Deo his green card, and half a dozen others, all part of the Wolfs’ wide cast of friends, Deo’s
support group.
The email from sophomore year, the warning from the supposed member of PALIPEHUTU, still hung
over his desk in the Black Hole. The paper had grown brittle. Nothing had come of the threat. It was like
the noise one hears lying in bed at night, a noise outside the house. As time goes by you doubt the noise
was real, and then again you don’t.
Chapter NINE
Burundi-Rwanda-Burundi,
1993–94
On October 22, 1993, Deo was working as an intern in a rural hospital, deep in the countryside of
northern Burundi. It was in a town called Mutaho. He had finished his third year of medical school, and
had chosen to do his first internship here, in part to get away from the clamor of Bujumbura and back to
the country. And Mutaho’s hospital had recently been improved. It was a very large hospital by
Burundian standards—three hundred beds—with a first-rate staff.
In retrospect, Deo thought he might have foreseen what was about to happen to the country. There had
been omens: the killings of 1988, the Hutu Ten Commandments, the postelection protests, his angry
classmate’s comparing him to the tail of a beheaded snake. But the election of a Hutu president,
Ndadaye, had not affected Deo in any way so far. In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable
of making the ominous into the merely strange.
He had been assigned a room in a wing of Mutaho’s hospital, a little room with a window and door that
he could lock and a narrow bed and a small table on which he kept his one change of clothes. He didn’t
have much money. When he got some time off, he took a walk or went for a run on the red dirt road that
ran roughly north and south past the hospital. More often, he hung out with the nurses, and especially
with patients. When he was with patients, he never felt lonely.
His workday began at seven-thirty, when he’d begin rounds with a doctor and nurse, checking on
patients and taking notes. On the morning of October 22, 1993, he came out of his room ready for work,
but he couldn’t find either the doctor or the nurse he was supposed to accompany. In fact, walking
around the hospital, he couldn’t find any doctors at all. He saw only a couple of nurses, at the opposite
end of one of the hospital’s many corridors. The nurses looked as if they were in a hurry. He wouldn’t
bother them. But why so few nurses and no doctors? Maybe they’d gone on vacation, and no one had
bothered to tell him: he was just a lowly student. Maybe this part of Burundi celebrated a holiday he
didn’t know about. The hospital gave him a weird feeling this morning. Then again, it was a disorienting
place—a large, concrete, single-story complex of buildings joined by open-air corridors and crisscrossed
by hallways. Mutaho was out in the middle of nowhere. He knew no one in the town. Something could
easily have happened to the medical staff without his knowing. Something bad, even. “Oh, it’s probably
just me,” he thought. “Imagining things.”
Deo went off on rounds by himself, visiting the patients for whom he shared responsibility. The eerie
feeling grew as he made his first visits. Several times as he approached a room he heard the voices of the
patients inside, but the moment he opened the door, the talking stopped. After a while he decided to go
to the room of a malaria patient, a young man whose family lived nearby. Deo sat down on the edge of
the bed, a small bed with a rusty metal frame like his own. From previous visits, Deo had surmised that
the young man was mildly depressed. “You look fine,” Deo said cheerily, and the man smiled weakly up
at him. Deo checked his notes. He was still sitting there, chatting idly, when the patient’s brother arrived.
Deo had met him a few days before, a university student. He came in without knocking. He seemed to
be in a hurry.
Deo stood up to greet him. “Your brother’s doing fine,” Deo said. Then, knowing that the family was
local, Deo remarked, “It’s a really strange day. It’s a slow day. What’s happening?”
The brother shifted on his feet, looked one way, then another, and said, “Actually, I want to take my
brother home.”
“Home?” said Deo. “He hasn’t been discharged.”
“Deogratias, don’t you know what’s going on?”
“No. What’s going on?”
“President Ndadaye’s been killed, and they say he was killed by some Tutsis in the army, and now the
war is going on, the Hutus are retaliating and killing every Tutsi all over the country.”
This news had urgent meanings, and one of them seemed to be that there was no time to think them
through. Deo blurted out his first thought, a protest. Hadn’t Ndadaye been president for all Burundians,
both Hutu and Tutsi? Just because Ndadaye was a Hutu and his killers were Tutsis didn’t mean all Tutsis
were guilty. Deo hadn’t killed the president.
“I have nothing to do with that.” The young man was helping the patient get dressed. “I really think you
should get out of here.” Clearly, he now knew that Deo was a Tutsi, if he hadn’t guessed before.
“Please help me,” said Deo. “I don’t know anyone around here.”
That was impossible, said the patient’s brother. Some of his relatives were even now at work killing
Tutsis, he said. “I just hope you don’t get killed in front of me. That’s all I hope,” he said, as he helped
his brother get his shoes on.
The patient spoke up. There must be a way they could help Deo. The patient and his brother argued.
“I’m leaving!” the brother yelled. “If you don’t want me to help you get out of here, then stay!”
The sick boy rose. His brother helped him to the door.
“Where should I go?” Deo asked.
His patient turned. “Oh, Deogratias! I know you’re not going to survive. I always enjoyed seeing you.
You were very helpful to me. May God bless you.”
All of that Deo remembered clearly, indelibly. But then his mind grew “messy,” as he liked to say. He
remembered loud noises coming from outside and remembered running out of the patient’s room and
looking frantically around for an exit from the building, and throwing open a door only to find himself
facing a toilet. He thought he must have resembled the rats that would come out of the bush onto a road,
running this way and that. The next thing he knew, he was running back toward his room, less out of
forethought than by reflex.
The route was direct, down a long hallway and then along one of those pasages that connected the
buildings. It opened onto a part of the hospital’s dirt parking lot. He heard trucks. He heard whistles and
drums. He had crossed the open area when he heard a truck pulling in. It sounded as if it was right
behind him, chasing him. Inside the next enclosed hallway there was pandemonium—weeping and
wailing, the metal doors of rooms slamming, the sound of shoes and flip-flops slapping the concrete
floor, the sound of his own footfalls. As he ran, he had to dodge other people, relatives trying to get their
sick family members out of that place—young women with babies in their arms, elderly men and
women being carried and half carried down the halls by frantic-looking relatives.
He rushed into his room and crawled under his bed. He wanted to shrink. He wanted to dig a hole in the
concrete floor. What if someone looked under his bed? He rolled onto his back and grabbed the rusty
springs and tried to pull himself up flat against the springs. Impossible. He rolled onto his side. From
under his bed, he could see across the floor to his doorway, and he realized he had forgotten to close and
lock his door. He couldn’t make himself move. He curled up, burying his head in his arms, trying to
bury himself in himself, trying not to breathe.
In the following months, Deo had no room for reflection, only reaction. When he was able to think
clearly about his long last day in the hospital at Mutaho, he was left mostly with questions and
suppositions. As near as he could tell, both patients and staff had been a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis. All
of the doctors and most of the nurses must have heard of the president’s assassination on the radio the
night before, or learned about it from people who had heard the news on the radio. But why had the
radicals, the militiamen, attacked the hospital? Maybe their leaders had reasoned, “There are Tutsis in
that hospital and Hutus who aren’t going to help us.” But how had the militiamen managed to mobilize
so quickly? Later, he would wonder if it was true, as some people claimed, that all this had been planned
far in advance. And he’d think about the capriciousness of fate: he heard stories of other people who had
escaped by hiding above ceilings or immersing themselves in rivers or latrines, whereas he had merely
panicked and forgotten to close and lock his door.
He had lain under his bed, covering his ears with his hands, but he could not shut out the noise that was
reverberating down the tall narrow hallways outside. At one moment he thought, “Oh, God, where do I
go? Should I get up and close my door?” But he was too scared to move. He heard metallic crashes, and
realized these must be the sounds of militiamen throwing their shoulders against doors that were closed
and locked. The sounds of smashing glass had to be militiamen bursting into rooms from outside.
Noise seemed to be coming from everywhere, and then he heard loud voices right nearby, just outside
his doorway. He uncovered his eyes for a moment. Two pairs of ragged trouser legs and bare feet stood
in his doorway. A voice said, “The cockroach is gone. He ran away.” Then the trouser legs and feet
vanished.
He heard drums and whistles. He heard male voices chanting what sounded almost like a song, one he’d
never heard before. But some of the words and phrases were completely familiar. “Susuruka!” “Warm
them up!” And a phrase that meant, “Get them soaked and toss them in the fire!” And “Inivo nu gutwi!”
“At the level of the ear!” There was singing and laughter echoing from all directions in the narrow
concrete hallways, and screams accompanying them. He peeked toward the doorway and saw a small
child run past, back and forth, several times, making frantic cries.
Then a commanding voice yelled, “Clean up!” The child’s cries ceased.
There were loud curses and shouts. “No! I’m not going!” He heard voices begging, “Please don’t kill
me!” And voices yelling, “Are you a Tutsi or a Hutu?” There was no way of knowing how many militia
were there. He imagined dozens. Once or twice, he heard a gunshot. He began to smell gasoline, then
smoke. The smell reminded him of cow skins being burned. He held his breath for as long as he could,
for fear of taking in that smell. Then he lay panting, afraid of the sound he was making. Hiding was like
running in place, a repetitive motionless motion. It went on and on.
Gradually he became aware of silence, which frightened him, differently but as much as the sounds it
had replaced. It sounded as if the world were dead and he were alone in it, a graveyard of sound. He lay
in it for hours, until he realized that the light was fading around him. He peeked from under his bed
toward his window. It was a darkening rectangle. All the daylight would be gone in a moment.
When he crawled out from under his bed, he had only one thought in his mind: “Go. Get out of here.
Run.” He wore the same clothes he’d put on that morning—he didn’t wear a uniform, just cotton pants
and shirt, a light cloth jacket, and sneakers he’d bought some time ago at the central market in
Bujumbura, the least expensive he’d been able to find.
The stench of burned flesh was thick in the hallway. Already he could hear dogs barking and growling,
fighting over the bodies no doubt. He groped his way by memory, out of the building into a grassy
courtyard with a tree in the middle. He started across what had been grass. There was no moon, but he
could make out the shapes on the ground. He picked his way among the bodies, slipping and sliding,
