He was vaguely aware of the people passing by him, and of the cries of children, the angry shouts of
men who were yelling at their wives and children for not running fast enough. But he was busy with his
own thoughts. He kept hearing himself say silently, “This is dangerous.” Images of the fields of corpses
near Kibimba, of his cousin’s high school burning on its hilltop, had been filling the landscape of his
mind for months, particularly at night, no matter how hard he had tried to stop them. Large groups had
been his refuge, but they were dangerous now, and this was a huge group gathering at the school on the
next hilltop. He wasn’t going there.
Deo sat down a little distance off the trail. He waited until the sky was growing dark. Then he made his
way slowly along the hillside, until he was well past the village that lay to the east of the school. For
what must have been hours, he crept through tall grass, down the hillside to the edge of the valley. It
curved around the base of the plateau, like a moat. The grasses were soft and as tall as his shoulders. He
walked on very slowly in the pitch dark, for another half kilometer or so. Then he climbed partway back
up the hillside, and stood looking across the valley toward the school on the plateau.
He could see fires there and, he later thought, headlights. He knew he heard screams and voices
amplified by megaphones, echoing across the valley. Did he hear snatches of that song—“God is just.
God is never unjust. And we will finish them soon”—or did he just hear the words in his mind, having
heard that song so often? After maybe an hour, he heard occasional pops of gunfire and some dull
explosions, which he took to be grenades. Was it before then or later on that he heard the Interahamwe
had been instructed to conserve bullets? He fell asleep in the tall grass.
In his conscious mind, Deo was aware of being afraid, not of dying, but of dying the way his uncle the
doctor had, or the family in the house in Bugendena. Not that he wanted to die. Not that he wanted
desperately to live. Survival simply had its own momentum. And to survive, it was clear, he had to get
out of Rwanda.
Burundi lay to the south, and south was to the left of the wet, gray dawn. He moved mostly by night and
only cautiously during the day, running when he thought he saw or heard another person or when it
seemed as if the drums and whistles of the militia were closing in. He struggled up hills and all but
rolled down them, unable to brake. Sometimes he saw other people from a distance. Usually they were
running along the same trail or skirting the same hillside as he was. He would wait until they were out of
sight and then wait a little longer, remembering stories he’d heard, in his last refugee camp, of
militiamen pretending to flee so as to lure Tutsis out of hiding.
When he thought, it was of things like birds. Watching them from some hiding place—flocks coming
and going from some spot nearby, a sure sign of a killing site—he’d wish for reincarnation as a bird.
He’d study a fly on a leaf and think, “How lucky you are not to be a human being.” Back on the first
part of his journey, Deo had wept at the sight of corpses. Now when he found himself hiding near
bodies, he was more likely to feel laughter coming up, and he would sit there with his chest heaving,
trying not to laugh out loud and give his position away.
He had been trying to keep his body clean, at least a little, by washing in streams when he could. In the
camps, he had made himself rub his teeth and clean between them with twigs of eucalyptus.
Nevertheless, a back tooth had become infected and had come loose. It took some time and all the hand
strength he could muster to yank it out.
From the time when he had gone with friends to visit Butare, he knew that if he headed a little east of
south he would pick up the paved road to the Burundian border, the road that ran on to Bujumbura. He
aimed in that direction. So it wasn’t entirely by luck that after many days he saw headlights through the
trees. From then on, he followed the road at night, keeping a safe distance from it, as he had followed
roads when he’d been fleeing Burundi. There was a lot of traffic, and there were roadblocks, and he
could hear the joyous singing of the militiamen, almost as terrible as the actual killing it euphemistically
described. More terrible, maybe. The songs and chants made it seem as if in the world there were only
insanity and the silence of corpses. When headlights and roadblocks ceased, and he came to the banks of
a small fast-moving river, which had to be the Akanyaru, the border river, he saw the road was filled
with soldiers in Burundian uniforms and army trucks. Clearly, the Tutsi army had heard that Tutsis were
being slaughtered wholesale in Rwanda, and had known that refugees would be flocking to the border.
Evidently, they had come in force to keep the Rwandan army from blocking the Tutsi refugees: to help
people like him. He had been on the run forever, it seemed—for six months, in fact. Now running was
over. He felt a moment of exhilaration. It didn’t last. Soldiers were pulling bodies out of the border river.
There were crowds of wounded everywhere.
When he crossed the bridge, a soldier approached him and asked where he wanted to go. The truck Deo
rode in to Bujumbura was packed with refugees. “Packed like meats,” he would say. “In Burundi we
don’t have sardines. So we say ‘like meats.’ ‘Like peas.’”
The truck was large, with an open back. The refugees were pressed together in the middle and nervous
teenage soldiers surrounded them, their rifles pointing out at the thickly wooded mountainsides. It was a
long ride to Bujumbura, and tense, especially when the truck slowed down and bumped along over
makeshift detours. He didn’t count the mountain bridges that had been blown up. There were several at
least, and when he stood up in the crowded truck for a change of position, he saw corpses of cows and
human beings by the sides of the road, more numerous, it seemed, on the last descent toward
Bujumbura. The soldiers helped him down to the street in front of the Coca-Cola stand in the border
district between Kamenge and Ngagara, across from the medical school and a half mile or so from his
dormitory.
The school had closed. The campus had been a killing ground, he was later told by the classmates he ran
into. Some were still around because they had nowhere else to go; Bujumbura wasn’t safe, but it was
safer than most other places. His dorm, when he first walked up to it, looked abandoned. Grass had
grown up high around it. He slept in his old room on a bare mattress. The next day he came outside and
ran into one of his closest friends, just by chance: Claude.
Claude looked at Deo and did a double take. “Deo! Are you still alive?”
Deo said he’d just returned from Rwanda. He sketched the story.
Claude told him that he had managed to go back to the area of Butanza a while ago and had found that
all of his own family had been killed. He said he’d heard that Deo’s family was gone, too.
Deo had imagined this, but to hear it was different, of course. “God. Okay. Okay.” Deo started walking.
He walked around and around the dormitory building, not knowing what to do or where to go. He felt as
though he were cramping up from diarrhea again. He felt as though he might faint. Claude walked
beside him, saying, “Hey, we can kill too. They also bleed.”
Deo thought his friend was only speaking out of grief and anger. Deo couldn’t imagine Claude killing
anyone. But who knew what had happened to Claude’s mind over the past six months? Deo avoided his
friend for a while after that. He wanted no part of that kind of talk, and he didn’t want to hear about his
own family again.
Before they parted that day, Claude did give Deo some good news. Claude said he had been out at
Prince Regent Hospital, not far from Bujumbura, and some of the students from the high school in
Kibimba were there.
“Yeah, okay,” said Deo.
“Your cousin’s there!”
Deo took a bus to the hospital the next morning. He thought it was dangerous to travel inside the city,
and no doubt more dangerous to travel outside it. He told himself he didn’t care.
Geneviève was disfigured. Beneath her bandages, one eye was gone, and part of her nose. Gauze
covered burns on her arms and legs. But she recognized him at once. “How did you survive?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Tell me how you survived. I’m fine.”
She said, as he later remembered her words: “Well, I went through a window when we were suffocating,
in this thick smoke. The auditorium was locked, and the militia had all these clubs and they were
smashing things, and everyone was trying to break through the windows and get away. But the thugs got
so busy stealing clothes of these kids and their shoes, that they forgot about some of us, and we got away
while they were fighting over the clothes and shoes, and I was able to squeeze through this window, and
I ran, and this guy threw a spear right in my eye and I fell down and they left me for dead. But I was not
dead.”
Riding back to Bujumbura in the bus, Deo thought, “Okay, the rest of my family is gone. They are
dead.” He could not live on here alone, with only a cousin for family.
He spent the night in his dorm room. The next day his old friend Jean appeared, looking for him. He’d
heard Deo was back. Jean said it wasn’t safe here at the university. Deo should come and stay with him
in his apartment. It was situated on the way to the airport, in an area the army had so far managed to
secure.
When he had left for his internship in Mutaho, Bujumbura had seemed loud and disorderly just because
it was a city, full of vehicles and strangers and mysterious energies. Now it was a chaos. Everywhere he
looked he saw cows. Farmers fleeing to the city had brought their cows. Of course they had. He
understood the impulse. Bujumbura had become a city of refugee cows, pastured in impromptu United
Nations camps for the internally displaced, and also lowing on streetcorners, trudging along on
sidewalks, herded into narrow vacant lots behind gas stations. Propriety had been abandoned. There
were people squatting in public. There was manure and human excrement on the pavements, and in the
mornings there were also fresh bodies—on the streets and in the river, the Ntahangwa, that flowed
through town. He didn’t see nearly as many corpses as he had on his long escape, but the supply seemed
steady. Usually one day’s bodies would be gone by nightfall, but every morning there were new ones. It
rained every day, heat and humidity following. The city steamed. On the run, he had mostly lost the
ability to smell, and at moments he regretted its return.
In the imposing, once green hills above the city, the forests burned. The smoke was so thick at times you
couldn’t even see the hills. There was war up there, and something like war down here. Gangs roamed
the streets, urban youth gangs essentially, some Tutsi and some Hutu. Most of the city had been divided
up, into sections where a Hutu would be hunted down and sections where a Tutsi would be crazy to go,
but it wasn’t as if ethnicity, so hard to determine anyway among strangers, guaranteed anything. Kids
and adults walked around carrying guns and grenades. He tried to avoid both them and the occasional
corpses. Many killings, he thought in retrospect, were probably the result of armed robberies.
Deo’s friends said that everyone was trying to leave the country or saying they wished they could leave.
His friends from school said that most of the faculty was gone or about to be evacuated on special
flights, on Air France or Sabena. Jean and his parents would be flying to Paris, but Jean didn’t see how
they could take Deo with them. Everyone who knew anything about politics—and Jean was nothing if
not worldly—knew that France was the staunch ally of the Hutu regime in Rwanda. If Deo went to
France, if Jean could somehow manage to get him on the plane, he’d probably be deported. They talked
about other options. The Congo wasn’t far, just across Lake Tanganyika, but how would Deo get there,
and what would he do then? Deo even wondered about going overland to Uganda, but it was a very long
way, with a third of Burundi and all of Rwanda in between, and he’d never make it. No, said Jean, Deo
should leave Africa. He should go to the United States, to America.
Sometimes it is better not to know what is impossible. To Deo, the name meant vast wealth, a country
that probably looked like Kiriri, the tree-lined part of Bujumbura where the ambassadors’ residences
were situated, mansions behind tall stone walls. Why not America?
Jean knew some of the ropes. Deo would have to get a visa. First he’d have to go to a municipal office
and get a new identity card, then to the U.S. embassy, for a business-visitor visa. Jean’s father would
provide the letter that said Deo was going to America to sell coffee. “I don’t know anything about
coffee,” said Deo. The little library he liked was still open. Deo spent the better part of a week there,
reading about coffee beans.
For days the smell of cooked food sickened him. There was still running water occasionally in Jean’s
apartment. Deo was able to bathe. His generic sneakers had made it all the way back, but they were full
of holes and stank. He was notorious among his friends for pinching pennies and never throwing
anything away. Jean chucked out those sneakers, and bought him another pair. The abscess on Deo’s
back had resolved, leaving just a scar. His feet were a fungal nightmare, and there was nowhere to buy
medicine for them. He could brush his teeth properly now, but he knew he had cavities, because it was
painful to put anything hot or cold in his mouth. He had scars on his arms and legs. Also a scar on one
cheek. He hardly recognized himself in the mirror. He had always been thin, but wiry, farm-boy thin.
Now he was emaciated. The clothes he’d retrieved from his dorm room were at least one size too big. He
made himself as presentable as he could. Jean walked with him to the American embassy downtown.
Jean was a muzungu. The gangs didn’t mess with muzungu as a rule—from fear of the unknown, Deo
guessed.
A woman received him at the embassy, a middle-aged woman. She spoke to him in French. He gave her
