down to that bunch of eucalyptus. So, I went down. This way. So all this, I mean, but it’s all the same. I
just, I feel like I want to throw up.”
After a time, I asked again how long he thought it had taken him to get back from here to the Burundian
border. He said he thought about four days.
“Oh boy, Deo,” I said. “I can hardly imagine. You are one tough son of a gun.”
“No, no, no.”
“Yes, you are. I mean, so many people would just give up.”
“Oh, well, you know, how many times I just thought I would give up.”
The memorial building was still locked. But after poking around awhile, Deo ran into the man who kept
the keys. His name was Emmanuel. Deo had visited this place last summer and had met Emmanuel then.
They greeted each other warmly now. Emmanuel was older and thinner than Deo, and he had a deep
dent in his forehead, a little round crater, hard not to stare at. Emmanuel, Deo explained, had lived in
Burundi for a time but had returned to this part of Rwanda a few years before the genocide. Hoping to
escape the slaughter in his village, he had fled with his family here, to the technical school at Murambi.
His wife and five children had all died in the massacre. He himself had been shot, but the bullet hadn’t
entirely penetrated his skull. He’d lain wounded, hidden among a heap of bodies. When the killers had
left, he had headed cross-country, like Deo, for Burundi. There his wound was repaired, and after a few
years he had come back to Rwanda, and eventually back to this site. He told Deo that he stayed with the
dead to repay them, because it was their bodies that had saved him. He also said that his family was
buried here, and he was not going to leave them again.
He and Deo talked and laughed like old friends. When they had met here last summer, Emmanuel had
recognized Deo’s Burundian accent, and had said that Deo looked familiar. Now Emmanuel said that he
remembered why: he’d seen Deo on an evening, twelve years and two months back, on the trail that led
to this place.
“How do you remember me?” asked Deo.
“Well, you were so skinny. You were like a walking skeleton. Now you’re fat. But your face didn’t
change.”
“No, no, no, Emmanuel. You’re confusing me with someone else.”
“No. We were on that hill over there, and people were coming from many different directions, and I was
looking at faces, because I came from here and I was scared. Everyone was afraid of each other. I saw
you and I thought, ‘I never saw this guy before.’”
“So did you talk to me, or did I talk to you?”
“No. You were not talking. You were sitting down by the path. I could see that you were sick. I told my
wife, ‘I want to help that boy,’ and she was so angry. ‘You want to help someone else when you have
your own family here?’”
This encounter seemed unlikely, though it was possible. In interviews recorded for the memorial,
Emmanuel had said that he’d come here to the technical school, seeking refuge, a couple of days before
the grand slaughter had begun. But Deo didn’t know for sure when he had arrived in the vicinity. At the
time, he hadn’t been keeping track of dates. It was, in any case, a story that I thought I would want to
believe, if I were Deo. To run into someone who claimed to have crossed his path during that time—this
had never happened to him before. It had to make the world feel less lonely.
Before we parted, Deo hugged Emmanuel, then quickly slipped him some Rwandan francs. Emmanuel
let Deo and me in to look at the exhibits. Some of the displays offered only a rather simplistic history of
the Hutu-Tutsi divide. There were a couple of videos in which survivors—Emmanuel, prominently—
described the massacre. There was also an old transistor radio of the kind Deo remembered seeing
Rwandan militiamen carrying next to their ears as they walked around refugee camps. The radio had
been a primary tool in the genocide, for whipping up murderous fervor and for organizing it. In the
museum, you pressed a button and the radio’s tinny speaker played the chant that Deo told me he’d
heard so often before and during the genocide, like a satanic inversion of a hymn: “God is just. God is
never unjust. And we will finish them soon. Keep working, keep working. We will finish them, we will
finish them soon. They are about to vanish! They are about to vanish! Don’t get tired! You are about to
be done!”
We left the museum building by the back, so as not to get Emmanuel in trouble with his boss for letting
us in before the official opening time. Crossing a sunlit, tiled floor, we passed a sleeping bag,
Emmanuel’s bed. “That’s how Emmanuel sleeps,” Deo told me. “I asked him how can he stay here. He
told me, ‘This is my home.’ And his wife died here and his children, and he’s still here. And he’s still
here, you know? I mean, that, as pain goes, that has no word. And he stays here.”
Emmanuel’s choice did seem strange—to be the keeper of the keys to a place full of bones, some of
them his family’s. “I can’t presume to understand,” I said.
“You know, what I can tell you is that he’s half alive,” said Deo. “This is a guy who lost the trunk of his
life.”
Back behind the memorial building stood rows of narrow, shedlike buildings, each with its own metal
door. These, I gathered, had been the dorms and classrooms of the Murambi Technical School. Now
each chamber was filled with bones.
We stood in the doorway of one of the rooms, looking in. Bleached-white skeletons lay on wooden
tables, a dozen or so per table, all neatly arranged, side by side. Deo took a photograph. He pointed at a
mosslike tuft on one of the skulls. “This is hair.” He went on, pointing at bones: “You can see like this
was a guy. This was like a woman, you can see clothes still. You see a child here.”
We went back outside. “So at this site they counted the bodies. Fifty thousand and something people.
Most in, I think, one night.”
“You said fifty thousand?”
Deo led the way to another door. “You can open here and see like skulls. There’s some right here.
Somehow like only heads. You know. They were chopped.”
I went in first. Behind me, I heard Deo murmur that he smelled blood. Then I heard him say, “I think I
took enough pictures. I am kind of sick of this.” Then he was silent. I could hear him make a little
cough. By now I knew this meant that he was weeping.
I heard him leave the room. When I looked outside, he was walking slowly, head down, toward the
memorial building. Best to leave him alone, I thought.
On the table in front of me lay four rows of skulls, neatly aligned, ten to twelve skulls per row, and
behind the skulls, two rows of what I thought were femurs, neatly stacked, hundreds per row. From
across the valley to the west came the sound of people still singing hymns. It was utterly silent in the
room, except for a sound that for a moment I couldn’t identify—a clicking, a ticking, a dripping. It was
just the sound of the metal roof heating up in the midday sun and moving against its fastenings. I knew
that I knew the sound and its origins, but at the moment I couldn’t place it. The room was very clean,
and so were the bones. But I could have sworn that I smelled milk. I looked closely at the skulls on the
table. Most had cracks in them. Some had big chunks missing. Human beings had taken machetes and
rifle butts and those clubs with protruding nails on their business ends that Deo had described to me, and
who knows what else—rocks perhaps?—and smashed them into the heads of human beings, and then
chopped off these heads, or chopped off the heads and then bashed in the skulls, thousands of times over.
But even while telling myself this, I felt I was a world away from the hospital in Mutaho where Deo’s
flight had begun. That had seemed like a place of unfinished business. To me, this display of bones,
though far more graphic, felt much less uncanny, much less unnerving than that empty remnant of a
hospital. Here the evidence of brute, unleashed human energy was all laid out before you, and you could
imagine that human reason was putting up a stand against it. This was an intentional place, a museum, a
place thoroughly preceded by a story and expectations.
I didn’t know how to respond to all these bones. I had come expecting to feel the horror of what
Murambi memorialized, but I wasn’t sure I felt enough, or if I felt much of anything. A stupid self-
consciousness got hold of my thoughts, an invitation to falsity. “I should feel like crying,” I thought, and
sure enough, I felt tears well up. I went out to look for Deo.
Evidently, the museum had opened. A group of white-skinned people with cameras were coming down
the paths toward the school buildings.
Chapter EIGHTEEN
Rwanda,
2006
In Burundi, peace was still new, whereas Rwanda had been recovering for more than a decade. What I
saw of Rwanda, I saw from the roads we traveled. They were remarkable compared to roads in most
other poor countries I’d known, not just paved but smooth and well maintained. And they were patrolled
by cops on foot, some of whom were equipped with radar detectors and were actually trying to enforce
speed limits—and none solicited a bribe from us. We passed men dressed in pink uniforms, prisoners
convicted of crimes in the genocide, working in fields and on public buildings. We passed public
attempts at English, which I took as evidence of the flourishing enmity between the French and
Rwandan governments: a road sign that instead of “Bon Voyage” read “Good Away,” a liquor store
named Nigger Boy Saloon, which probably meant that hip-hop had arrived but without translation.
There were hilly and mountainous landscapes almost completely covered with crops and banana groves,
one-story towns, the occasional monkey by the side of the road, churches everywhere and women
walking toward them at all hours of the day.
Superficial impressions of a country at peace. For me, they sat uneasily beside the fact that Rwanda’s
government had become a pariah in several quarters. A number of scholars and human rights groups
accused the Kagame administration of its own unacknowledged atrocities, of discriminating against the
mass of Hutus, of rigging elections, of stifling dissent, of disappearing dissenters. Some critics were
scornful of the government’s yearly commemorations of the genocide and of the continuing village-level
trials of small-time génocidaires. The government, critics said, was just trying to claim “a genocide
credit” that would excuse its autocratic ways, that would allow it to avoid discussion of the crimes Tutsis
had committed against Hutus. The critics denounced the government’s virtual ban on discussions of
ethnicity that diverged from the official line—a ploy, they said, to cover up systematic discrimination
against Hutus, which was bound to lead to more violence someday. Official Rwanda was also said to
have played an evil role in the rather recent and extraordinarily violent events in the neighboring Congo.
The Kagame administration was accused not of having started this ongoing catastrophe, but of
escalating it—and also, by a UN panel of inquiry, of having joined various other governments in
plundering the Congo’s mineral wealth.
Deo had supplied me with the most stinging critique that I’d read, by a Belgian law professor and
student of the country named Filip Reyntjens. But Deo also said of Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame,
“If he were here, I would give him a hug.” To Deo, Kagame and his government were the people who
had stopped the genocide, who had managed to bring order back to a shattered, looted country. In Deo’s
view, the critique contained far too little appreciation for the government’s accomplishments—
rebuilding institutions virtually from scratch, repatriating about two million refugees, providing security
for a traumatized population in the face of persistent armed attacks from genocidal forces in exile. He
felt that some critics, especially the French, were just trying to cover up their own failures and crimes,
and that human rights groups, as was often the case, had too little sympathy for the problems the
government still faced. Deo believed that most of Kagame’s efforts were aimed at preventing another
slaughter and at promoting prosperity—to Deo’s mind, the only way of making the current, fragile peace
endure. He did feel it was a mistake for the government to limit discussions of ethnicity, but he
understood the impulse. From his summer working for Partners In Health in rural Rwanda, among the
indigent sick, Deo had seen the country’s poverty firsthand and had heard the murmuring hatreds that
might be only temporarily suppressed. When I asked him how long he thought it would take for Hutus
and Tutsis to forget, he said, “It will probably take the time the earth has left.” But there was no war
now. Rwanda now was a paradise compared to the abattoir he’d passed through in 1994, and it left him
much more hopeful, he said, than his own homeland, indeed than most of Africa. “Kagame may not be a
perfect person,” he said. “But at least he gets something constructive done.”
It was obvious that Deo also felt grateful for Rwanda’s memorial sites. Dozens of mass graves and
memorials had been created through out the country, some large like Murambi and financed by foreign
organizations, others modest. “Villages of the dead,” Deo called them. Again and again, he directed our
driver to memorial sites, sometimes calling for a stop when we came upon one he hadn’t planned to see.
For instance, the kiosk like roadside memorial in the university town of Butare. The number of dead
housed in that little mausoleum made me think it was probably just as well Deo had never made it to
Butare back when he was on the run.
Deo had gone to Murambi once already, the summer before, and I thought if I were Deo, I wouldn’t
want to go again. Actually, I thought if I had memories like his, I would spend the rest of my life as far
away as possible from Rwanda and Burundi. But then I entertained the idea that, no, if I had places like
Murambi in my past, I might want to revisit them, if only to justify my troubled dreams.
The other memorials we visited weren’t on the tour of Deo’s life. They weren’t places he’d passed
through. I know he took me to them partly because he wanted to make me a witness. And I think he had
