Fortunately, that group didn’t have guns, or arrows—he had seen bodies of people shot by arrows. Deo
turned back toward the forest and ran. He didn’t see the little band of refugees again.
On the next day or the day after or the day after that, he was wading through brush along the bottom of a
ravine. He heard dogs barking, and voices yelling, “Get out!” Were people being hunted, or were the
militiamen simply yelling into the forest, saying in effect to people who might be hiding there, “We see
you. Come on out.” An exhausted person might be stupid enough to obey. Deo crawled under a bush,
facedown on dark muddy ground. The barking and yells were coming from the ridge above. He heard
small crashes in the brush around him. The men must be throwing stones at random down into the
ravine. He felt a sharp pain in the small of his back. He lay writhing, clenching his teeth so as not to cry
out. After a while he heard the dogs and men moving away, and he got up and went on, reaching back
now and then to examine the wound on his back with his fingers. It might get infected, he thought. What
did it matter?
When he thought about what was going on, he thought the massacres must have been planned. He knew
from the smells in the hospital at Mutaho that the killers had jerry cans full of petrol, and he knew from
sounds he’d heard that some had guns and grenades, and clearly the killers had systems for signaling
each other, by beating sticks on their jerry cans or by blowing on whistles. From time to time in his
hiding places, he heard loud whining sounds, then the thunder of trees crashing down. And the sources
of that noise were those large, gas-powered saws. Where had such things come from, in a part of the
country where many people couldn’t afford to buy salt and only a very few owned anything that ran on
gasoline?
It had been raining off and on ever since Mutaho. A lot of the countryside had turned to mud. Deo had
thrown away his socks. His sneakers, the no-brand-name pair he had bought at the central market in
Bujumbura, had held up so far, though they had long since turned from white to brown and the laces had
broken—he’d thrown those away, too. From time to time he had to stop and clean the mud out of his
sneakers. He had slept now and then, during daylight when it didn’t seem safe to move. He would pick
out a hiding spot, not a spot that seemed safe, because no place seemed safe, but a spot that had cover
and looked comfortable. Then he’d sit or lie down and sometimes fall asleep, but never for long.
He had paused in his trek only to rest or to hide or to find food and water. From time to time he had
gotten entangled in thickets of thornbushes in the dark. He had scratches everywhere, any one of which
could become infected. He could feel an infection brewing in the wound in the small of his back. He had
diarrhea, too. What had revolted him at first no longer bothered him. Repelled at first by the thought of
drinking dirty water or eating a muddy sweet potato, he had told himself he had to be flexible. By now
the counsel was irrelevant. He couldn’t taste anything anymore.
He had been weaving his way north, moving in and out of the forest, Kibira. One rainy afternoon he
found himself outside the forest in a field of banana trees. The rain was heavy. He couldn’t stop
shivering. He was stumbling along, hugging himself. He saw swarms of flies and smelled putrefaction
before he saw the bodies. The thick grass among the banana trees was full of them. In what seemed like
only moments, he couldn’t smell them anymore. He didn’t feel like running away from bodies as he had
four or five days ago. He didn’t feel much of anything except weariness. He sat down with his back
against a bunch of banana trees. Then he saw the baby.
Just a little distance away, the figure of a woman was slumped against another bunch of banana trees.
There was dried blood on her face. She must have collapsed there and died, but the baby was alive. It
was in her lap, its little hands groping at its mother’s bared breast. And it was looking right at Deo. He
stared back at it for a long moment.
The baby wasn’t crying. “It must be wondering where it is,” he thought. It must be terrified like him.
But he couldn’t help the baby. He couldn’t even help himself.
He got to his feet and staggered off among the clumps of banana trees, deeper into the grove. He sat
down again with his back against another tangle of spindly trunks. The fronds overhead gave a little
shelter from the rain. Nothing was important anymore, not the flies or the bodies. All that mattered was
that he couldn’t see the baby.
He had no idea how long he slept. Maybe only that night and part of the next day, or maybe through two
nights. He woke up to gray daylight and rain. He didn’t move. Maybe he was dreaming. He heard
voices, and then a line of people appeared, trudging through the banana grove. About thirty people, all
women and children, walking sticks in their hands, baskets and bundles on their heads.
One of the women left the line. She had spotted him, clearly. She was coming toward him with her
walking stick. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t even make himself get up. He wanted to vanish,
imagining that with an effort of will he could do this—squeeze into this banana tree.
She seemed to be a little older than his mother, forty-five or fifty, but it was hard to tell. She had a
farmer’s weathered skin, missing teeth, and sinewy strength. She was carrying a baby on her back and a
huge bundle on her head. Hardly a terrifying vision, but all people were terrifying. The sight of dogs
devouring corpses was nothing to him anymore, compared to the sight of this woman.
“Are you alive?” she asked him in Kirundi.
“Yes,” he said. “But please don’t kill me.”
“No, no, no, no,” she said. “I want to help you. I don’t want to kill you.”
He had begun to cry, warm tears on his cheeks mixing with rainwater. “Please, if you really want to kill
me, I just hope that I’m not going to be tortured. Don’t torture me.”
Her voice sounded sad. She said she knew what he was thinking. He was thinking she was a Hutu, and
in fact she was. Then her voice turned, not fierce, but declarative: “But I’m a woman and I’m a mother.”
That, she said, was her ubwoko, her ethnicity.
A woman and a mother. Maybe she wasn’t going to kill him after all.
She said she wanted to help. She wanted to get him out of this place. But Deo had entered the country of
despair. It was not uncomfortable. There was no way he could extract himself from this time and this
place. He didn’t even want to be extracted. He just didn’t want to die painfully. And he didn’t want to
move from his spot beneath the banana trees. He seemed to be content where he was. It was peaceful
right here, even though he was surrounded by bodies.
“I’m too tired,” he told the woman. “I’m just going to stay here.”
“No, no,” she said. “The border, it’s nearby.” Then she said, “Get up!”
He couldn’t trust anyone. He didn’t fully believe in her. But he obeyed her, mainly because she was so
persistent, leaning over and pulling at his upper arm, saying, “Come on, come on, please come on.”
They walked together through a mixed landscape, under tall eucalyptus, through banana groves, across
cultivated fields. Sometimes when the path was narrow, he followed behind her. Other times they
walked side by side, and she talked to him. She told him that she knew what he was going through,
because she had many Tutsi friends who had been killed and many Hutu friends, too, who had been
murdered by the army and even by militant Hutus because they had refused to join the killing or because
the militants wanted their land. One of her own grown sons had been killed by militiamen, she said. She
had been married to a Tutsi who had been killed years ago, and she had been vilified as a traitor by
radicals on her hill. She had remarried, to a Hutu; she didn’t say where he was now, and Deo didn’t ask.
She and most of the women and children of her village were fleeing both from the Hutu militiamen and
from the Tutsi army’s retaliation, which was certain to come.
He knew they must be nearing the Rwandan border. Other groups of fleeing people were joining their
procession, and the Hutu woman was getting nervous. She told him he must not tell anyone he was a
Tutsi. He must not show fear the way he had back in the banana grove. He should say he was her son.
It didn’t occur to him that he might turn back. Everything he’d witnessed told him he had to get away
from Burundi, and this was the nearest way out. He was sick to his stomach, he was beyond thought, it
was easier just to go on. As they waded across the stream that marked the border, she pulled him close to
her, an arm around his shoulders. By then it was too late to turn back. Up ahead stood bunches of armed
men, some in blue uniforms, some in brown uniforms, some in civilian clothes. They were questioning
everyone. He was aware of their Rwandan accents. “You go. You go. You! What’s your name?” He
noticed their equipment—portable radios, policeman’s nightsticks, pistols, and rifles. He felt vomit
rising. He had experienced fear before this. But this was fear in the extreme. He felt his hands shaking.
He couldn’t stop them. Several men with fierce faces were peering into his from all sides. “You look like
a cockroach,” said one. “What are you doing here?” said another. The Hutu woman tightened her arm
around his shoulder. Without realizing it, he had placed his hands on either side of his head, covering his
temples. So many of the corpses he had seen were cut at the temples, inivo nu gutwi.
“Open your eyes!” A sneering face was pressing very close to his. “You look like you are afraid.”
Clearly the men on the riverbank were looking for Tutsis among the refugees. But physical stereotypes
were all they had to go on, since Burundian IDs no longer revealed ethnicity. One of the interrogators
raised a bayoneted rifle, so that the blade of the bayonet touched the tip of Deo’s nose. He flicked Deo’s
nose back and forth without cutting into it, and said something about its being too thin for a Hutu nose.
Then he lifted the point of the blade to Deo’s hairline—Deo was only twenty-one, but he had a widow’s
peak, not a straight hairline across the forehead. “Look at this,” said the man with the bayonet.
The Hutu woman still had her arm around Deo. She pulled him half behind her, away from the bayonet.
“Don’t torture my son. He’s been so sick.”
“What? Sick?” said one of the interrogators.
“He can’t handle it, he’s not useful,” said another.
“You need to die anyway,” said a third, peering in at Deo’s face.
“No, no, no. This is my son!” said the woman.
There were a lot of people crossing the little river. The interrogators couldn’t spend all day on him. One
of them grabbed Deo’s left wrist and tied a piece of black cloth around it. “Go over there to that group.
We’ll question you later.”
“No, I’m telling you, he’s my son,” said the woman.
“If you want to go with him, go with him,” said one of the men.
Beyond the interrogators lay a wide field, full of people milling around. Many voices were talking all at
once. Some were shouting. People were hurrying this way and that. The woman walked Deo a little
distance toward the group of suspected Tutsis, all clustered together in a corner of the field. Then she
stopped and made as if to adjust her clothing. She was dressed in the traditional Burundian way, in
layers—first a shirt and skirt, then a wrapping of brightly colored cloth, and finally another colorful
wrapping that wound around her back and held the baby in place. She loosened the cloth of the outer
dress, and then as she began to refasten it, she dropped a fold over Deo’s left forearm and hand and
quickly untied the piece of black cloth. Then she put her arm around Deo again, and walked on with him
a little way.
Another group of militiamen passed by. They stopped her and Deo. For a moment Deo thought they
must have seen her remove the cloth. “What are you doing? You belong over this way.” They pointed
toward the main group of refugees, milling about in the field.
“Oh, I just want to find a seat,” said the woman. “My son is sick.”
“Are you Hutus?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Over there.” They pointed toward that main group and turned away.
The woman walked Deo a little farther on, then whispered to him, “Genda!” “Run!”
He obeyed. He ran to the crowd, the human forest, the only hiding place in sight. It was the last time he
saw her.
In Rwanda, moments were the only time he knew. He spent nearly every moment worrying about the
next. Six months felt like a minute, and moments when it seemed as though there was no time in front of
him felt like eternity.
The Burundian refugees were herded, loosely, into fields and woods, not camps with tents or any other
kind of shelter, though occasionally someone would construct a traditional lean-to. There were, later
reports would say, more than 300,000 Burundians in makeshift camps near the border. The great
majority had to be Hutus, fleeing the Tutsi army’s retaliation. Periodically there were distributions of
food and clothing. The stuff would come on trucks with the logo UNHCR on their doors and canvas
tops. The initials stood for “United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.” Deo heard some young
Rwandans who were distributing food remark, “Oh, yeah, we are helping. We are volunteers.” And he
thought to himself, “How many people volunteer in Africa?” He felt sure that they were at least fellow
travelers of the people who seemed to supervise everything, the Hutu militiamen.
He heard them call themselves “Interahamwe.” The name meant “Those Who Work Together.” Many
walked around holding portable radios to their ears. From time to time, he saw them training. He could
tell they weren’t policemen or regular soldiers, because they wore ragged civilian clothes and many
were barefoot. Most were young. Sometimes they seemed like just a bunch of peasants running around
with make-believe weapons. They would try to make it look as though they were just playing games, but
to Deo their games looked much more like practice in the arts of clubbing and bayoneting and chopping.
Once in a while men in blue and brown uniforms arrived in vehicles and supervised these exercises. “Oh
