every day. Of everybody.”
Chapter TWELVE
New York City,
2006
On Central Park South, as usual, limousines were idling on one side of the street while on the other side,
adjacent to the park—on what Deo called “the other shore”—a homeless man was sleeping on a bench
with a cardboard box over his head. The homeless man was what Deo noticed. He laughed about the box
on the man’s head, after we’d passed by. He said, “It’s sad.” He told me, “It’s hard when you don’t have
any hope. You just hope to get to the next meal. Bread and milk and cookies.” But then he laughed
again, and as if to explain, recited a Burundian saying: “When too much is too much or too bad is too
bad, we laugh as if it was too good. You just laugh instead of crying. Accidents of birth.”
At my request, Deo was taking me on a tour of his former homelessness. An unusual sort of tour,
devoted to what would have been hidden, or at least far in the background, for most people walking
through that landscape. It was those things, the things meant to be unnoticed, that jumped out at Deo.
Not the awninged and carpeted entrances to the buildings, but the little signs that read “Service
Entrance” and the wrought-iron gates and the stairs leading down to basements. This building wasn’t a
nice example of early-twentieth-century architecture; rather, it was a building with a bad service
entrance, and that building next to it had a doorman who claimed the tips that by rights should have gone
to deliverymen. Deo took me on the routes he has traveled with his grocery cart and past the grocery
stores where he had labored. One of the stores had vanished, to his consternation. I thought I could read
his feelings. This had been a part of his painful little world. How could it have vanished? How could it
be so insubstantial?
We walked into the park, to look at the various bedrooms he’d found there for himself twelve years
before.
It was impossible, at least for me, to know the story of Deo’s lost year, of his long escape and his
sojourn in crack houses and Central Park, and not imagine lingering costs. He had told me that he felt he
was overly sensitive: “When someone says something really bad, or I realize I said something ridiculous
or did something bad to someone, it really takes me days to recover, and I just don’t know why I’m such
a weak guy.” Once, when I told him he was still young, only in his thirties, he replied, “But I feel I am a
hundred and thirty.” He still had bouts of insomnia and dreams that involved immobility and appalling
quantities of blood. But the most obvious effect of his ordeal—or what I took to be an effect—was the
ungovernable quality of his memories.
For now, as we walked through the park, it was clear that he was merely repossessing memories. He was
not possessed by them, for the moment. “I will show you how I made progress,” he said, smiling, as he
led the way to what had been his last campsite in the park. It was a cozy-looking spot, like a niche in a
cathedral, a group of benches surrounding the monumental statue of a sculptor named Albert Bertel
Thorvaldsen, all under the canopy of grand old trees, and shielded from the roadways by smaller trees
and bushes. There was a little garden off to one side. Deo looked up at the bronze image of the once
famous Danish sculptor; he was clad in a belted tunic, a mallet in one hand, a chisel in the other. “He has
a hammer,” Deo said. “Too bad he was not around. He could have built a shelter for me.” Deo smiled,
surveying the spot. “This was big progress. I’m telling you, it really was great.” He pointed to a grassy
space shielded by bushes. “This is where I got my mattress stolen. Right here. This was my biggest
progress. I preferred sleeping in the park. Because I could see stars, and …” He didn’t finish the
sentence.
“It was like being in Butanza?”
“Yah. And then that was cool, but it was trouble at the same time. To bring back all those memories.
Come back to be intimate with nature, and the sky.” His voice growing soft, he talked about seeing the
shape of the rabbit on the face of the moon and being reminded by this of his grandfather.
“You didn’t know he was dead then, but you assumed he was?” I asked. It was the perfectly wrong thing
to say.
“Yah, I assumed,” he answered, and he turned and walked on. I walked with him. He murmured that his
stomach was bothering him. He didn’t speak again for a while.
I thought that he wasn’t walking through Central Park recalling a bad memory now; he was really back
in that time. Even the stomachache was probably the same, I imagined.
I apologized for mentioning his grandfather’s death. He didn’t respond. I didn’t think he was ignoring
me. He just didn’t seem to know I was there. He walked on, toward the Reservoir. He stood at the fence
gazing out at the water, squads of joggers passing behind us. Gradually, he seemed to return. “This was
…” He paused. “Very relaxing to me.”
He had found a better place to recover, of course. I wanted to visit it with him. We took the subway
uptown to Columbia. As we walked through the gates, Deo’s mood changed utterly. He might have been
a student again, conducting a campus tour. “The gym is right here. It’s huge! It is a-mazing…. Every
student here after freshman year, you have your own mailbox. It’s really cool…. You see this building
here, this is physics. You go down, there are nine floors down. It blows my mind. This one here is
astronomy…. Oh, this is the math department. Oh my God, I made a lot of money from that department.
Teaching children. And this is chemistry. The chemistry department is quite famous, it competes with
Berkeley…. I loved it here.”
Deo stopped on the steps of Low Library and pointed across the quadrangle at another monumental
building, a product of the Italian Renaissance Revival, one of many all around us. This one advertised
itself with names carved in the granite frieze above its broad front: HOMER, HERODOTUS,
SOPHOCLES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, DEMOSTHENES, CICERO, VERGIL. “That is the Butler
Library. It’s such a beautiful library. I love it. It’s the library in my heart.” He was laughing softly. “I
loved that library. I like to be back here, actually.”
“This was a happy place,” I suggested.
“Oh my God yes!” He was smiling. “Gosh, I really miss being here.” He added, “The sad thing was I
didn’t make many friends with students my age. It’s such a lost opportunity, you know. These are
people, they intellectually grow up with you.”
He remembered a classmate, a woman, who had seemed to take a great interest in him, even giving him
presents.
“Was she pretty?” I asked.
“Very pretty girl,” he said.
I laughed. “What’s the matter with you?”
“She said, ‘Always when I study with you I do so well.’ She was always, you know, saying, ‘When we
go to medical school we can apply together.’”
“Where did she go?”
“I have no idea. I never kept in touch, I never … I’m terrible.”
I wondered whether the problem was that most of his classmates were wealthy and he wasn’t.
“Well, actually I was,” he replied. “I had Nancy and Charlie. I mean here.” He tapped the left side of his
chest.
We walked on. Inside this building was where he’d studied Chaucer. “Oh, boy. That was not easy.”
And here was Philosophy Hall, an official National Historic Landmark, where John Dewey, among other
luminaries, once kept an office. A casting of Rodin’s Thinker sat on a granite pedestal out front, bronze
chin on hand.
The Thinker bears about the same relation to sculpture as the Mona Lisa does to painting, or “Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to poetry—a great work of art that has become hard to see for itself,
buried under banal associations and dumb jokes. But for the moment at least, the sculpture seemed
renewed, a monument to the attempt at answering the kinds of questions Deo had brought through the
arched doorway and up the marble stairs of Philosophy Hall. And it felt odd to be standing with Deo in
front of such a monument, because the thing itself and everything it represented seemed so far removed
from the source of those questions of his.
Deo’s course of study had puzzled me. You’d expect a penniless immigrant to major in something
marketable, like computer science. But he had taken as many philosophy courses as he could fit
alongside his biochemistry major, and he’d gone on taking philosophy courses all his four years here.
Some time ago I had asked him why. He had said, “I wanted to understand what had happened to me.”
Since coming to the United States, Deo had read some of the history that underlay what he’d endured.
But when he had arrived here at Columbia, his main interest hadn’t been historical. To me, his quest
sounded spiritual. How to reckon with the fact that, unlike some other genocides, the slaughters he had
witnessed had been mainly low-tech mayhem, committed mostly with machetes, spears, bows and
arrows? This had been true in Rwanda especially. It had been possible to kill many hundreds of
thousands with hand tools only because large minorities of the population had participated. “The
Belgians made a big mess, yes,” Deo said to me. “But what kind of a human being are you, if you can
take a machete and kill your neighbors?”
This was the kind of question he’d been hoping to get answered here in his philosophy classes, questions
about the nature of good and evil, humanity and God. They arose in him, insistently, because of his
continuing discomfort in the world. He had told me, for instance, “Mutaho terrorized me. Before the
genocide, I probably was na.ve in terms of believing people, trusting people. Now I am always trying to
be very careful. We are talking about teachers killing their students, priests killing their parishioners.
Who is left to trust, really? God? God the most powerful, who let everything happen?” And people here
on this campus, people he did trust not to harm him, couldn’t imagine what he’d witnessed. Deo had felt
like a stranger, he said, among his classmates. One time, he’d told a fellow student that he’d grown up
tending cows, and the other student had asked earnestly, “Did you keep the milk in the refrigerator?”
He’d had experiences his classmates couldn’t possibly relate to their own. He had walked around the
campus wearing a pleasant smile to cover up feelings that he knew no one else could share. And on the
occasions when the few close friends who knew he’d witnessed genocide asked him about what he’d
been through, he didn’t know how to explain. He had not yet met Paul Farmer and Joia. He had not yet
told his story in full. He had thought, “There are no words.” But he had begun to look for words here at
Columbia.
I imagined him sitting late at night in one of Butler Library’s twenty-four-hour study rooms, poring over
the likes of Kant and Hume and Plato, his favorite of all the philosophers he read, looking for a means to
close the gap between what he’d experienced and what he was able to say, looking for something
reliable in a world that had become untrustworthy, looking for some sort of structured belief, some grand
encyclopedia with an index in which he could look up “genocide” and learn where it fit in the universe.
He was, I imagined, looking for an antidote to loneliness, both cosmic and personal. And needless to say,
he hadn’t quite found it.
I liked to think of Deo here on this lovely campus, safe and far away from horror after all that he’d
endured. But that distance and safety must also, inevitably, have stood like a wall between his memories
and his attempts to make sense of them. What Deo had experienced made Deo mysterious, especially
here. I tried to picture him with his books on his way to philosophy classes, hurrying past the Thinker,
several tons of gravitas that might have said to a less experienced undergraduate, “This is what thinking
looks like.” We didn’t go inside the building. I asked him what the rooms were like.
“Very beautiful rooms,” he said. He described big tables and heavy chairs and large windows.
Deo had some authority to speak about evil—far more than other undergraduates. He must have been
tempted to do what he’d ended up doing at Partners In Health—to get up in a philosophy class and tell
his story. This, I imagined, would have quieted the room. But he’d never done that. The closest he’d
come was in the introductory course in moral philosophy.
“The instructor was a pretty young guy, pretty intense guy,” Deo remembered. “He said to the class,
‘Animals are not rational, only human beings are rational.’ That was very interesting to me. I said, ‘Well,
can you explain to me how we are rational, and animals are not rational?’ And the instructor said,
‘Animals kill for food. They act on instinct, that’s it.’”
Deo had tried to digest this. He had known cows and he had known militiamen, and for rationality he
thought he’d take cows any day. All the instincts bred into him at Burundian schools warned against
disputing a teacher’s statements, but he couldn’t help himself. He said to the instructor that his family
used to have dozens of cows, each of which had a name. You could call Yaruyange and only Yaruyange
would come. How could it be said that a cow didn’t think, when every cow he’d grown up with not only
knew her own name but recognized her babies among all the others and knew how to take care of hers?
Cows did all sorts of interesting things, and not all could be explained with a word like “instinct.” How
could the instructor say that all animals were stupid, that they didn’t think, that they had no free will?
Maybe we human beings simply didn’t understand their languages. Maybe we hadn’t evolved that far.
Maybe animals were laughing at us. If animals killed only for food—as they usually but not always did
—then they were more rational than people. What about Rwanda? What did that say about human
rationality?
Rwanda was an extreme example, said the instructor, a special case.
There were about forty students in the class, all silent. “Probably they were thinking I was a little
annoying,” Deo said. But he couldn’t stop. He kept on arguing, the class ended, he cornered the
instructor in the doorway, and he went on arguing with him for another half hour. When the instructor
finally said he had to catch a subway, Deo said he was going to the subway, too. “I followed him
