A couple of boys had been following our little party—out of curiosity, I’d imagined wrongly. Now each
in turn sidled up to Deo and told him that their mothers wanted private audiences. Deo turned to me,
issuing orders for a quick getaway: “When we get back to Butanza, get right in the car. Tell the others.”
He didn’t blame the people here. How could they know that back in Iburaya he was just a student with a
pocketful of debts? He’d known that this would happen. It was one reason he had stayed away so long.
Afterward I asked whether he had told himself he would never come back to Butanza, and whether, now
that he had, he regretted his return. He allowed as how the whole experience had been painful, that it
was tempting to reject all the obligations of family, and even of affection, and to become a loner in the
world, never setting foot in one’s old life. But he had tried that strategy, during his first months in New
York and often in his mind since then, and had always found it wanting. “It’s more painful than ‘I’m me,
and I come from here,’” he said.
The previous summer, when Deo was working at the PIH hospital in Rwanda, a patient had arrived with
a painfully enlarged spleen. The cause was not mysterious; untreated bouts of malaria often lead to
splenomegaly. But around the swelling in the patient’s abdomen there were several round burn marks,
and these puzzled the American doctors. Deo recognized them at once. Someone in the patient’s family,
probably the father, had heated the end of a metal pipe and applied it to the place that hurt. Deo’s own
father had done this to him as a boy, applying the red-hot end of a spear around an abscess on Deo’s
thigh. The pain of the burns, and the hatred he felt toward his father, had obscured the pain of the
abscess—temporarily.
“Distracting pain with pain,” Deo called this practice. It was common among peasants in Rwanda and
Burundi, who had little access to pharmacology but a lot of experience with pain. It was a gruesome and
harmful form of palliation, and for Deo it expressed a psychological truth with broad application—that
pains exist in layers, with the most excruciating at the top obscuring the pains beneath. So many years of
paying attention to the topmost pain of war, he felt, had left many of his people numb to all the rest. In
his country now, any death that wasn’t violent was accounted “a good death,” he said.
I remembered this idea many times while we were traveling in Burundi.
We stayed several days in the mountains of Bururi province. On one afternoon, Deo and his young
American friends scaled a cliff beside a waterfall. Deo still relished a hike—against all odds, I would
have thought. Above another waterfall and another cliff, he and his party of hikers came upon a
settlement of six Tutsi families. Deo had to fend off one of their bulls—“Of course, being a cowboy, I
knew how to handle it.” He spoke with some of the settlers. They told him they had fled the civil war
with their cows and seedlings and ended up there on their mountaintop, in splendid isolation, beyond the
reach of any road or even trail. “It’s beautiful up there,” Deo said, and I wondered if, for a moment, he
envied them.
On another day we visited the Séminaire du Buta, a Catholic high school in that mountainous region,
one of the best secondary schools in Burundi, and a significant place to Deo’s family. It was here, in
1997, that one of his brothers had been killed. (Another brother had narrowly escaped.) This was just the
sort of thing one didn’t talk about, at least not in Deo’s family. He didn’t tell me that he had lost a
brother at the school, not until after we had visited the place. Even then, he didn’t talk about that brother,
not what he remembered about him, not what they had done together, nothing. The only things Deo
conveyed were affection for him and grief—via silence, as I understood that silence.
An old friend of Deo’s family gave us our tour, Abbé Zacharie Bukuru, a tall, broad-shouldered priest.
He had been the school’s director back in 1997. In the midst of the civil war, brutal on all sides, Zacharie
had pulled off something remarkable. He’d managed to make peace within the student body.
He had forbidden the students their radios. Night after night he had cloistered them and let them talk,
intervening only now and then to limit the invective between the Hutu and the Tutsi boys. The proof that
this had worked arrived in a dreadful way. “Hutu, Tutsi were everywhere here together, praying together.
We were an example of unity,” Zacharie told me. He added, “They wanted—how do you say in English
—eradicate this example of living together.” By “they” he meant the contingent of rebel Hutu militia
which, on the morning of April 30, 1997, came out of the mountains and descended on the school, like
the wolf on the fold.
The soldiers busted open the doors to the dormitory, and their commander—weirdly enough, a Rwandan
woman, a veteran of that genocide—ordered the students to divide themselves: “Hutu brothers over
here, Tutsi cockroaches there.” The Hutus would not abandon their schoolmates. The soldiers tried to
kill them all. It was said that some of the dying boys quoted Jesus on the cross, crying out to God to
forgive their killers because they didn’t know what they were doing. There were 150 students at the
school. Some were wounded, and many escaped. Deo’s brother, the one who survived, the one he could
talk about, had climbed down a rope ladder; he got away with a minor injury to his foot and a grave
wound to his psyche. In all, forty students were murdered.
Zacharie had been the militia’s main target. I didn’t ask him how he’d managed to escape. I had the
strong impression that he had long been asking himself that question and all its corollaries. He simply
began to tell me the story. (Zacharie was at ease in several languages, but not in English, which he spoke
out of courtesy to me.)
He was in his bedroom when he heard the first shots. “I said, ‘God, what happened?’ I said, ‘Oh, my
children, what can I do?’ I wanted to go out, to get to them, to protect them. Then I heard the second
gun.” He imitated the sound of a heavy machine gun.
He had hidden in the storeroom behind his office. He took Deo and me there. “I was dead! Try to
imagine. There was three hundred soldiers here outside. There was perhaps five hundred altogether.
They were drunk. Can you imagine? Was terrible. Inferno. They shattered this wall. We have repaired
it.”
He took us to the memorial, forty crypts painted magenta outside a small chapel. Portraits of the
murdered boys were painted on a wall above the altar. “Oh, my poor boys,” Zacharie said in a squeaky
voice, a choked parody of his deep baritone.
I stared at the faces of the dead students. “You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can’t tell you
which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus.”
“Exactly!” said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supposed to whisper here. “And neither could
the killers!”
“The killers couldn’t see the difference, too,” whispered Zacharie. “So they ask. Because they can’t tell.
We are the same people.”
Zacharie had presided over the school for two more years, then had retreated to a monastery in France.
Homesickness had brought him back. He had arranged for the construction of a small monastery near
the school. The building had just been completed. He took us there and gave me a copy of the book he’d
written: Les quarante jeunes martyrs de Buta (Burundi 1997): Frères à la vie, à la mort (“The Forty
Young Martyrs of Buta: Brothers in Life, in Death”). He would spend the rest of his days here, he said.
“Praying for the world and for Burundi. I will live here, praying, working, studying. In silence.”
Chapter FIFTEEN
Burundi,
2006
We had to go to Mutaho. It was the place where Deo’s flight had begun, another place he had not
revisited. The last he’d seen of Mutaho was on the night of October 22, 1993, when he was running
away from it. He had heard a rumor, though, that the former hospital there, the hospital where he’d
worked and boarded, had been completely demolished either during or after the war. Supposedly, a new
hospital had been erected in the place of the old and bloodied one. If all this was true, no trace would
remain of the massacre that he’d escaped all those years ago. But we should make the trip anyway, Deo
said.
I had located Mutaho on my map of Burundi. It lay about a third of the length of the country away from
our hotel in Bujumbura—that is, we’d be covering about a third of a piece of land roughly the size of
Maryland or Belgium. The route looked fairly direct. But our driver said that some of the roads I saw on
the map had become dead ends or vanished altogether in the war.
Our driver’s name was Innocent. He was another old friend of Deo’s family. Like many other
Burundians, Tutsi and Hutu, Innocent had lost his wife and children during the civil war. He had met a
woman who had also lost her family, and who had been raped by an HIV-positive soldier. Innocent had
married her. She had died asking his forgiveness for having given him AIDS. Innocent had told Deo
simply, “I miss her so much.” Innocent was, I had come to think, completely trustworthy. A careful
driver, at least by Burundian standards, judicious, and calm. Innocent said the trip to Mutaho would take
about three hours. If we got an early start, we would make it back to the hotel before dark, he said. To
me this seemed important. The police were still closing the principal roads from nightfall into the
morning.
But we got started an hour later than planned. Then we had to make stops in downtown Bujumbura, to
change money and to buy oil and gas. By the time we cleared the outskirts of the city and were riding
into the mountains, I felt a little nervous. Would we get lost? Would we make it back before the main
roads were closed? Would we run into another impromptu police roadblock, as we had a few days ago?
We’d been held up for the better part of an hour while Deo negotiated the bribe.
Deo appeared to be worried, too, but for different reasons.
“Last night I know that I slept, but I had nightmares.”
He sat in the front seat. I was in back.
“Well, listen,” I said, “if Mutaho starts to really get to you, we just get the hell out of there.”
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t care about stopping and seeing some new hospital.”
“Let’s just see what …” His voice died away. He said he’d learned last night that an old childhood friend
had been killed. “I didn’t know that he was killed.” He examined a wad of dog-eared, sweat-stained
Burundian francs, murmuring, “They come from dirty pockets and dirty hands. These bills …” His voice
was soft, a bit raspy, far away: “I didn’t know he got killed. But I believe it, of course. I need really to
try, to see how many people are still … It would be much easier to find out the number of people who
are my old friends who are still alive, than to look for the number who have been killed.”
A near accident on the road up ahead made me cry out.
Deo sounded half asleep. His voice sounded different today, slow and heavy, as if it were hard to lift.
“You know what it is? They are all crazy.”
I gazed out at the mountain scenery and talked about bricks. Deo was very interested in bricks—where
he could get the best for the least money, for the medical buildings he planned to erect in Kayanza. We
passed children dressed in what had been flour sacks, full of holes. It was amazing what bicyclists on
these roads carried on their backs and on the frames of their rickety machines—huge bags of charcoal,
enormous arrays of jerry cans filled with palm oil, a wooden bed frame. Wherever the road ascended,
we’d see half a dozen bicyclists holding on to the backs of trucks. Many riders were half naked, dressed
only in dirty shorts and flip-flops. We passed one wearing no shoes at all. Deo gazed out at them.
“People who have to live like that, how can they refuse to kill someone?” I knew he only half believed
this, and that I shouldn’t respond.
We drove an hour or more on the main road that rises from the plain of Bujumbura, the two-lane paved
road that runs all the way north through Rwanda. The road clung to mountainsides. Some of the
pavement was crumbling at the edges. Parts had been blown up years before, and rough dirt detours,
carved deeper into the hillsides, still served. When we turned due east, at a town called Bugarama, the
traffic thinned, the woods by the road deepened, the air cleared. We were in high country again, more
than a mile high now. “So you see it’s different. The smell of the mountains, fresh smell. This area is
wonderful,” Deo said.
I tried to make some small talk. It came out sounding idiotic. “On your escape, did you ever come to
places where you saw spectacular views?”
“No,” he said. “I was not paying attention to that.”
We rode on in silence for a while. Then he said, “This is an area that I passed through, but I don’t
remember exactly where.” He gazed out his side window. I heard him murmur, “I am so scared.”
We didn’t talk much the rest of the way. When we crossed the Mubarazi River, Deo made a sound like a
stifled cry. This was the river he’d crossed twice the first morning of his escape from Mutaho. I
remembered his telling me how he had followed the Mubarazi’s valley, strewn with corpses, all of his
first full day on the run. He had followed the valley almost to the town of Kibimba. We were entering
the outskirts of Kibimba now. Up ahead, beside the road, stood an odd-looking construction: three tiers
of square pillars in concentric semicircles, holding up simple friezes. On the front of the foremost frieze,
block letters read, “PLUS JAMAIS .A!”—“Never again!” Deo told Innocent to pull over beside it.
“This is one of the rare, rare memorial sites,” said Deo. It stood across the road from the school he’d
seen burning, the school where his cousin Geneviève had been, above the valley where he’d felt as
though he were wading through corpses. The school’s headmaster had organized the slaughter of the
Tutsi students, and had been hanged for it, Deo told me. The memorial’s white pillars were streaked with
what looked like black mold. Weeds were sprouting among the flat stones in the courtyard out front.
