often kept for themselves. When the boys decided to come home to Kayanza, she didn’t scold them, she
simply wept. She and the boys were hiding in a field of maize the next time the militia came and burned
their house again.
Deo didn’t know much more about those years. He didn’t know exactly what his parents had endured in
their trek across the mountains to Tanzania, in the refugee camps across the border, in the woods around
Kayanza where they often had to hide. He didn’t want to know. On that first trip back home, he had
learned that his mother had added to her two given names another: the Kirundi word for silence. He
didn’t ask her the reason. One day some years later, she announced to Deo and one of his younger
brothers that she was going to tell her story. Deo couldn’t bear to listen. Against all he felt was right and
best for her, he turned and walked away, and in a moment his younger brother did likewise, in tears.
But these were acts committed out of too much filial feeling, not too little. Deo had never turned away
from his parents in any other sense that mattered. On the contrary, it was because they were in Kayanza
that he had adopted the village as his own. The place was certainly remote enough to suit him, I thought,
as the SUV lurched up and down on the rutted road through the palm grove. Then came a town called
Rukomo and another rutted road. There were hot springs nearby, and a good-looking clinic that was
underequipped and charged for its services and wasn’t much used. A European church group had built
that facility, Deo said as we passed, but a Burundian pastor now controlled it. “He’s like huge, Bible in
his hand, a suit, and five pens in his pocket, and a huge belly.” Some time back, Deo said, he had
imagined a joint effort to improve the clinic, but the pastor had demurred. Deo remembered arguing: “If
tomorrow you don’t have a large number of people coming to worship you, don’t be surprised. They will
be sitting in their houses, in these miserable hospitals, dying. Give them something. At least that way
they can show up on Sunday at your church.”
The pastor had countered by saying that Deo should tell his American friends to bring him equipment
and medicines and then go away.
“I wanted to puke right in front of him,” said Deo. “I asked him, ‘Are you drunk?’” Deo knew the man
didn’t drink. Deo had wanted to insult him, and had succeeded.
But he could be diplomatic. The province’s new governor, for instance, had become a friend and had
pledged to give whatever help she could.
We passed bunches of children. They waved and called, “Amahoro.” One called out, “Amahoro! Don’t
hit my goat!” Deo laughed. “I love kids around here. They greet people.” He added, “I feel like, ‘Wow,
finally, I’m with my people.’”
Deo talked about Kayanza. In the entire village, he said, there was only one Tutsi family besides his
own. It seemed that some radicalized children of neighbors had directed rebel soldiers to his family’s
house during the war, but other neighbors had warned his parents, and after the family house had been
burned for the third time, a large group of those country people had banded together and evicted a
person who had tried to take his parents’ land. This was another reason Deo felt drawn to Kayanza. And
so much the better, he said, that 99 percent of its people were Hutu.
At the far edge of Rukomo, the road rose steeply. Trees and brush encroached on it, but it wasn’t badly
rutted, no doubt because few vehicles used it. Deo remembered hiking up this road—a path, back then—
with bags of cassava or sorghum grain on his head. “There were a lot of gorillas here. There used to be
many monkeys, running, jumping, crossing.” They were all gone now, shot or chased away. But once in
a while you could still catch a glimpse of a leopard, like a flash of sunlight in the foliage. Deo said the
air up in Kayanza was cooler than down by the lake, and good summer grazing land lay nearby, and the
soils were richer and more versatile than in Butanza.
When we crested the last grade, the land opened up onto a broad plateau, and you could see what the
Belgians had meant when they’d compared Burundi and Rwanda to Switzerland. You could look down
to the east and see Tanganyika’s waters, like a cerulean sky. To the west, your eyes climbed tiers of
mountains, often shrouded in mist, though not today. Unlike Switzerland, of course, the place lacked just
about everything necessary and useful for health: sanitation, medicine, mosquito nets. Most of the
people here had no access to clean water. No one had electricity. “Here you are in the land of Joe
Conrad,” said Deo. “This is the heart of darkness right here.”
On the other hand, there was an elementary school, just up ahead. While working at PIH, Deo had
managed to save enough of his salary to send about one thousand dollars for that school’s reconstruction
—money went a long way here. He had also saved enough over the past decade to have his parents’
house rebuilt three times. The latest version was brick, with a rusty metal roof and several real windows:
a fine house in a village mainly of huts. Deo said he’d made sure it was smaller than previous ones, so it
would be less conspicuous. About a year ago, he had told the village elders that he intended to get a
clinic built for Kayanza. And the last time he’d come here, with his doctor friends from PIH, hundreds
of villagers had turned out to welcome him and his friends. There had even been a band.
There was no music this time, but in a field surrounded by palm trees, another crowd was waiting,
hundreds of people at least. They had been waiting there for hours, one of the villagers later told Deo,
adding that there had been more than a thousand, but many had left for work. For the moment, though,
my attention was fixed not on the crowd, but on Deo. He had jumped out of the SUV, and was
surrounded by people he seemed to know well. The couple he was embracing had to be his parents.
I thought I saw a family resemblance. One usually does when one is looking for it. His father was an
inch or two shorter than Deo, his mother about the same height as his father and thinner than both. They
had dressed for their son. Deo’s father was the only man in sight wearing a sport coat—and a fedora,
tilted a little backward. His mother wore what seemed like the Burundian standard for women, a blend
of modesty and flair, a simple dress for a first layer and, draped over it, a beautiful outer dress with
images of birds on branches dyed into the cloth. They were in their early sixties, quite old by Burundian
standards, but neither seemed infirm. Both wore glasses, which lent them a slightly studious air.
Deo stood with his arm around his mother’s shoulders, introducing her to his American friends and
laughing—a long-running laugh, holding a high, soft note. It seemed involuntary. It had a childlike
vulnerability. It seemed to say all at once: I’m so happy, so nervous, so excited, and I don’t know what
to do with all these feelings.
He had told me that on his last visit, he’d held palavers with the village chiefs, making sure his father
was included, and had suggested that the villagers start making bricks. Since then, Deo had heard, the
town had taken up a collection and bought a load of foundation stones. He’d also heard that his father
had largely put aside banana beer and become a leader in the brick-making. He’d heard that neighbors
now made an effort to speak to his father, and would invariably say, “Your son is so nice.” This was an
ancillary benefit he’d hoped for from the project. Ever since he’d learned his parents were alive, he had
been trying to purchase a peaceful old age for them. In this respect, it seemed to me, his incipient clinic
was already a success.
The size of the crowd, the long wait they’d put up with, made it obvious what the hope of a clinic meant
to the people of Kayanza. It also seemed obvious what Deo’s leading role in all this meant to his parents.
There was a moment, just long enough for a snapshot, when I saw Deo’s father and mother turn from
looking at their son in order to look toward each other. His mother cocked her head slightly and smiled
at Deo’s father, and his father beamed back at her.
Then his father was scowling. “Why were you late?” he said gruffly to Deo, and Deo’s high soft laugh
ran on, as he translated these words of his father’s for me. Then Deo exclaimed to me, “He is doing so
well! I was so excited to see that. He is doing so great! He was very, you know, for so many years. He’s
now very alert. He is so happy.”
“Come. Come and see the stones,” his father said to him.
The foundation stones lay in a great heap, all ready for use—except that they’d been unloaded several
hundred yards downhill from the site of the clinic-to-be. When Deo caught sight of the misplaced pile,
he halted. “This is so retarded!” He had already examined the bricks that the villagers had made. They
stood in a huge rectangular pile near the site, but they had been fired during the rains and though they
hadn’t turned to mud, they were too soft for structural duty.
But all that was okay, Deo said. The bricks could be used for paving and for the borders of the gardens
he planned—vegetable gardens and orchards to supply food to malnourished patients. And the
foundation stones could be moved.
The crowd assembled around the misplaced pile of rocks. There were greetings—chants of
“Amahoro”—and speeches, which the villagers cheered, and more speeches, and during the course of all
this, Deo exclaimed to me, “I am so happ-ee!” He said, “I really get so excited when I see people so
excited.”
Religious people, I’m told, have their meanest thoughts in church. I found myself thinking that
tomorrow morning Kayanza’s residents would wake up and still have no doctor or nurses or clean water
nearby, just this misplaced pile of rocks. I felt for a perverse moment like reminding Deo of all this. But
it was good to see him happy, as always. And after all, he knew far better than I the obstacles he faced.
As we drove away, the figures of the villagers receding in the SUV’s back window, Deo said to us, his
American friends, “Thank you so much.” His voice was tiny. It cracked. “Thank you so much for
coming to my little village.”
Chapter SEVENTEEN
Rwanda,
On my map, Deo had traced the path of his escape. The pencil line ran west, then north, from Burundi
into Rwanda. We flew to Rwanda from Bujumbura in an old propeller-driven commercial plane. We
gazed through the window together. Deo pointed out landmarks below. The paved main road between
Bujumbura and Rwanda, rising into the mountains, a road he had crossed in a hurry during his escape. A
corner of Kibira, the national forest—he’d traveled through the shadows of its deep green canopy, but
you could see great chunks had been burned and cleared since then. We couldn’t spot the hospital in
Mutaho, but it was somewhere down there, not far away.
Nothing was very far away, unless of course you were on foot and running from people who were trying
to kill you. “These are such tiny countries,” said Deo over the roar of the engines. “Here we are flying
like an old bird. We are in no hurry, but here we are already reaching Rwanda.” The entire flight took
less than half an hour, and in only about fifteen minutes we had passed over the entire landscape of his
journey, a round trip of about 150 kilometers according to my map. The banana grove where the Hutu
woman had found him—he couldn’t pick it out, of course, but Deo thought it was probably still down
there.
“What was it you told her?” I asked over the noise of the plane.
Gazing out, Deo replied, “‘I’m too tired. I’m just going to stay here.’ And she said, ‘No, no. It’s not far
to the border.’”
He couldn’t spot the border river, Akanyaru, which he had crossed two times, but he located Butare,
Rwanda’s university town, where he had yearned to go, imagining he’d find sanctuary there. Of course
there was no trace from the air of the refugee camps, just over the border in Rwanda, where he had
languished fearfully for months.
I asked him if he could see Murambi, the place where he had turned around and fled back toward
Burundi. But Murambi was off to the east, on the other side of the plane. So for a while longer it
remained wholly a place I imagined—a place where Deo had stood in tall grass on a hillside, looking
across a valley toward a massacre. “It was night,” he had told me. “And it never stopped being night.”
Deo had arranged for a driver in Rwanda, who took us the next day to the Murambi Memorial Center. It
was in the southwest, about two hours from the capital. Everything in Rwanda, Deo said, was about two
hours from the capital. The main part of the memorial was a large two-story building of brick and
concrete. A purple banner hung over the entrance. The site was much more elaborate and better cared for
than the little memorial we’d stopped at in Burundi on the way to and from Mutaho. But the banner
carried essentially the same message, a more explicit version of “Never Again.” Deo translated for me:
“Never forget the genocide and the people who were slaughtered here.”
Looking up at that banner now, with Deo beside me, I thought that in his place I’d find the message
ironic. The words weren’t meant for people with memories of the kind of thing that had happened here.
One’s own forgetfulness wasn’t the problem for people like Deo.
It was a Sunday morning, still early, and the sounds of a choir came from the town nearby. Deo muttered
some imprecations; he was far from irreligious, but he’d acquired a lot of anticlerical feeling, in part
because of all the well-attested stories of Rwandan priests aiding and abetting the genocide, and in some
cases actually wielding machetes. As we walked toward the memorial building, I thought it was obvious
why the génocidaires had chosen to lure their victims to this place. It seemed like an ideal ambush site,
an all but treeless plateau shaped like the prow of a ship, the land sloping steeply away on three sides.
Deo pointed toward the surrounding hills, his hands describing the route he had taken away from here.
“I went just down that ravine. Then I went up there just to see, and I heard people dying, and I went
