stifling the yelling in his mind. From the edge of the parking lot he could make out the hospital
driveway. He couldn’t see anyone out there. He ran down the drive to the main road, the orange dirt road
he’d walked and jogged along in the weeks before. On the other side of the road, he knew, lay a valley,
the valley of the Mubarazi River. The choice was easy. There might be snakes in the brush and grasses
and trees, but the road meant people. He sprinted across the road, and scrambled down the embankment
into the dark fields.
He stopped running once he reached the valley floor. He was standing in tall grass when he thought, “It’s
kind of wet.” Then he realized it was spitting rain. There had been rain on and off the last few days. The
rainy season was just beginning. It occurred to him—this was a thought cast up from memory, out of the
many crosscountry treks of his childhood—that the rain was a good thing, because it would soften the
grasses, which could be like needles when dry. Besides, in the rainy season one encountered fewer
people outdoors, and he’d always liked to run in the rain; rain had seemed to lend him energy.
Hidden in darkness, Deo tried to think. The main thing was to get away from Mutaho. Looking back in
the direction of the hospital, he could see the road, some distance away and above him. Parts of the
hospital seemed to be on fire, and fires were burning on the road in both directions. For now, he must
stay away from the road. He thought, “Where should I go? I don’t really know this place. Where should
I go?” He remembered that on long walks in previous weeks he had passed through a little town with a
Catholic church. It was about five kilometers south of the hospital. “God, maybe I should go to church,”
he said to himself. If he made it safely away from Mutaho, he would go into the church and pray, to give
thanks for deliverance from Mutaho and to ask for safe passage somewhere.
It was a long night. Deo waded through grass and thickets of thornbushes and among stands of tall trees.
Whenever he heard a noise, a cry or a yell, he would veer away from it. He moved parallel to the main
road, stopping often to listen and look. He could make out the road from the silhouettes of the towering
eucalyptus trees at its shoulders, and from the lights of what he took to be oil lamps scattered along it.
Occasionally he saw bonfires up on the road and the figures of people clustered around them. Very late
that night, thinking he was near the little town with the church, he turned toward the road and moved
gingerly until he heard voices close by, many voices. It sounded like a market. To go up on the road and
try to find the church would be a bad move. No, suicidal.
He went on through the brush, heading south, toward the next big town, Bugendena. He crossed a river
in the dark: it had to be the Mubarazi. His clothes were soaked, but the rain was warm. To travel long
distances and quickly, cross-country in the dark, wasn’t just a matter of stamina, but also of experience.
He’d had years of experience. What he had to concentrate on was his own mind, to keep himself from
running and letting out the panic that was like a sound behind a door inside him. In the first gray light of
morning, he saw a huge pile of trees up on the main road, where it intersected the smaller road to
Bugendena, and across the main road he could make out the hillside rising toward Bugendena and the
figures of people, lots of people, on that hillside. Were they running toward the town for safety? Or were
victims being taken there? He had no way of knowing. But the pile of trees and the sight of the crowd on
the hillside meant that the roads directly south from Bugendena were probably blocked. He had thought
for a moment of trying to get back home, to Butanza or Kayanza, far to the southwest. He had thought of
his family there—one reason for having thought he should go to church. But the region was much too
far away. The whole country must be on fire. He would try to get back to Bujumbura.
Birds were beginning to sing, as they always did an hour or so before samoya. The fields were lifting up
around him out of the dark, the whole world covered in gray light, and gradually, up ahead, rose the
outlines of a bunch of houses, small traditional houses of mud walls and thatched roofs. A village. The
air had the sour smell of wet ashes. He crept a little closer to the houses, bending low to keep himself
hidden. There was no need. The houses were smoking, their thatched roofs smoldering in the rain, and
there was no one in sight. He crept up to the first of the houses. It was small, little more than a hut, with
a window in one wall—a typical crude little window opening that the inhabitants would cover with
banana leaves or old clothes. He looked in. Bodies lay on the dirt floor inside. As his eyes adjusted to the
fainter interior light, he saw them individually. Three children, a man, and a woman. She was lying on
her back, and some fleshy stuff filled her opened mouth. Male genitalia. Deo turned away and ran back
the way he’d come. He didn’t encounter anyone living. No one was out working the fields that morning.
He was too exhausted to run anymore by the time he got back to the Mubarazi. He walked along the
river, looking for a place to cross, here and there sinking into mud almost up to his knees. Perhaps he
only imagined that the river’s water was red, but there were bodies floating in it and bodies that had
fetched up on snags. He found a narrow spot and tried to leap across, but didn’t quite make it. He had to
haul himself up onto the far bank, clutching handfuls of grass, frantically. He didn’t care that his clothes
and body were filthy, he only wanted to get out of that river.
Over the next four days, or maybe more, Deo traveled about seventy kilometers. He drank from streams
and rivers, reluctantly at first, knowing the pathogens he must be swallowing. Those first few days, the
cultivated fields he passed were empty. He’d dart into one and break off a piece of sugarcane or a stalk
of corn to chew on—he knew his plants; each of those contains liquid and sugar. Or he would pull up a
root vegetable, a cassava or a sweet potato, and eat it raw, holding it up, tilting his head back, taking it
down in only one or two bites; soon he hardly bothered to wipe off the dirt. He had no map and he didn’t
know the countryside. But one time he had ridden in a bus from Mutaho to a town called Kibimba, to
visit his cousin Geneviève at her high school. Kibimba was on the way to Bujumbura. Maybe he would
be safe there. Maybe he’d find refuge at his cousin’s school.
He headed to the southwest, along the valley of the Mubarazi, keeping to woods and brush and tall grass
and avoiding all roads. In places, the river’s shallow waters seemed all but dammed with bodies, and the
valley was littered with them, the corpses and feasting dogs thickening as he approached Kibimba,
where just before sunset he saw smoke rising from a building on a hilltop. It was his cousin’s school. So
much for any notion of finding Geneviève. He turned to the west with the river and then to the north-
northwest, skirting the city of Muramvya, the ancient capital of the kingdom of Burundi, the mountains
growing steeper, until he reached a paved main road. He and some medical school friends had once
driven on it. The road ran north from Bujumbura and across the border into Rwanda, and then, he knew
from maps in geography class, right through Rwanda, all the way to Uganda.
This was the place where he had planned to turn south toward Bujumbura. He knew he must be only
about thirty kilometers from the capital. But he also knew something of the countryside he would have
to cross on the way, a mountainous area, packed with houses, and, by reputation, a stronghold of rebel
Hutu militia. He scouted the road a little, and from his hiding places he saw people in peasant clothes—
local farmers, most likely—carrying logs on their shoulders down that road in the direction of
Bujumbura. He saw one group of people cutting trees, with a huge, gasoline-powered saw. They were
making roadblocks, that seemed obvious. And they were doing so, he reasoned, in order to impede the
army. He hadn’t seen any soldiers or military trucks. The little he knew about the army didn’t inspire
confidence. It seemed possible that it had already been defeated by the Hutu militias and that Bujumbura
was even now a graveyard of Tutsis. And if people who lived along that road were making roadblocks,
they were probably also going off into the mountains beside the road and killing any Tutsis they could
find.
Deo didn’t exactly decide where to go. Mainly he decided not to go toward Bujumbura. He crept up to
the road, then ran as fast as he could across it. Reaching the other side, he looked down the road. In the
near distance, he saw a group of people sitting on the pavement. He imagined they had established a
checkpoint and would grab anyone they suspected of being Tutsi. They didn’t appear to have seen him.
He headed in the other direction, away from Bujumbura.
He moved in stages, pausing to sit under the cover of grasses or in a thicket, and listening for a while.
Now and then he had seen people with machetes seated on the edges of roads—and, he imagined, some
would be sitting in the bushes beside roads. He assumed these were militiamen, waiting like cats for
prey. Several times he would be sitting and listening, surrounded by utter silence, and then quite
suddenly he would hear a cry or a yell, and he felt certain this meant that someone was being
slaughtered. Then utter silence would follow.
He passed around Teza, with its large tea plantations, and entered the national park, Kibira. Simply and
aptly enough, the name means “Forest.” For days, he kept to the eastern edge of Kibira, moving in and
out from under its immense green canopy, climbing and descending mountains six and seven thousand
feet high, loping across open forest floor and wading through thick undergrowth.
Deo knew that he was heading generally north, toward Rwanda. He had visited the country on that one
trip with friends from medical school, and they hadn’t run into trouble. They’d gone to visit Rwanda’s
national university, in Butare, a lovely place with its own medical school—though not as good a school
as Burundi’s, he felt. He knew, of course, that Rwanda had a troubled history, and he had heard the
rumors of war. But according to those, the fighting was confined to the far north. Southern Rwanda
would be safe, he imagined. Or safer than Burundi now. Any country would be safer than Burundi now,
he thought. He had no way of knowing that Rwanda, in a little more than five months, would become
safer than nowhere. Then again, it wasn’t as though he was thinking that he had to get to Rwanda.
Mainly he was just going, because stopping in any one place for long seemed equivalent to waiting for a
killer to find him, and moving seemed like the only way to keep down thoughts of what he’d seen.
It was impossible to plan, because he never knew where the dangers lay until he got close to them. The
signs were obvious by now. Rising smoke meant burning houses up ahead, and wheeling birds a place
full of corpses. Swarms of flies meant killings nearby. Sometimes he saw a dog trotting past with a
severed head or an arm in its mouth. The main thing to avoid was other living human beings. It was just
as Lonjino liked to say: safer with a wild animal than a human being. Deo remembered how as a child
he’d hear Lonjino say this and he’d think, “What’s Grandfather talking about?”
So far he had seen other living people only from a distance—men at roadblocks and frightened unarmed
people running, most vividly women, their colorful, saronglike Burundian dresses flapping as they ran.
His first face-to-face encounter came somewhere in Kibira. He was making his way through woods. He
was startled by the sound of coughing, not at a distance but directly overhead. He was startled,
frightened, and at the same time the coughing made him think, “That sounds like pneumonia.” Looking
up, he saw a boy clinging to a branch very near the treetop, like a big bird. “Keep going!” the boy
whispered harshly.
There must be militiamen nearby. That must be what the boy was telling him. Looking up, Deo said
silently, “God, I’m sorry.” Then he hurried on, weaving his way among tree trunks. Soon he couldn’t
hear the coughing anymore. Not that he could have done anything for the boy. But any thought of trying
to help hadn’t stood up, even for a minute or two, to fear. It was as if the sights and sounds and smells of
the past few days—screams, corpses, burning flesh—were all collecting into something like another
version of himself, another skin growing over him.
He was walking wearily through a patch of open forest floor in mountains north of Teza when from
around the tall trees on the slope above him a group of men appeared, brandishing spears. There were
perhaps six men and on the slope behind them he saw some women and children. The men yelled
angrily at him. “Are you following us? What are you looking for?”
Deo raised his hands. Militiamen wouldn’t behave like that. Militiamen wouldn’t be traveling with
women and children. These men sounded as frightened of him as he was of them and their spears. “No,
no, I’m sorry,” he called up the slope. “I’m running away. I’m innocent.”
He camped with them for a day and a night in that spot. They were Tutsi farmers on the run. They had
decided to stop in this piece of forest and wait for the war to be over. It couldn’t go on much longer, they
said. The army would be coming. In the morning Deo awoke to find himself among a forlorn little
group, wet and cold and hungry, the women and children all silent, the men talking softly about what
they should do. He felt refreshed himself, with hopeful thoughts. Maybe it really was all over. He said
he’d go down the mountainside and see if he could find a farm and take some cassava. Four of the men
went with him. They were talking as they went, confident that their hopes were real, and militiamen in
the valley must have heard their voices, because when he and the others came out of the forest, they saw
men with machetes running toward them, up the steep slope, maybe two hundred meters away.
