additional reasons. At almost every site we went to, he wept. I don’t mean to suggest there was anything
insincere or unjustified about his tears—usually, he tried to hide them from me, and when he didn’t
succeed, he simply said, “Sorry.” After a time, I came to think that visiting memorials was in part a
willed catharsis. And why wouldn’t he have need of that?
Once, when trying to explain how it had felt to be on the run, he put his hand over the top of a teacup,
saying, “You are in a closed place, and you don’t see anything else, and you don’t believe there is
anything else.” When we visited Kayanza, it seemed to me that building a clinic really could be Deo’s
way out of that cup, his antidote to Mutaho and Murambi, his tool for mending the tear that had divided
his life—somehow, I pictured him sewing a patch over the rips in his pants, years back, in his dorm
room at Burundi’s medical school. But on our drives through Rwanda, I realized again the weight of his
memories. The most innocent views from the roads could gusimbura him. A bunch of men, probably on
lunch break, sitting at the roadside, Deo saying in a small voice, as if to himself, “That’s the way the
militiamen would sit, waiting for people who were running away.” Or a view of farmers walking along
with machetes, a ubiquitous sight, Deo murmuring, “Every time I see a machete, I just feel like …”
I think he visited memorial sites partly in order to confront the nagging trouble in his mind. To fight
back against the invasions of memory.
As for me, I welcomed those stops, at least at first. Inevitably, some people now denied that what had
happened in Rwanda was a genocide—arguing either in obvious service of the guilty, or, I think, in
service of the extreme self-pity that admits no suffering as great as one’s own. But no one else, it seemed
to me, could doubt the importance of memorial sites like the ones Deo took me to. They were a means of
keeping a history that had to be known. The fact that mass slaughters hadn’t been prevented in places all
over the world—and weren’t being prevented now—didn’t argue against these attempts to preserve the
memories of former massacres and the hope they represented, that someday “Never Again” might seem
like more than a pious, self-enhancing platitude. And surely these sites had great value for many
survivors, as public recognition of their suffering, as places to mourn their murdered friends and
families. Surely the sites were psychologically useful for some, as they seemed to be for Deo.
A lot of Western thought and psychological advice assume that it is healthy to flush out and dissect one’s
memories, and maybe this is true. And yet for all that, I began to have a simultaneous and opposite
feeling: that there was such a thing as too much remembering, that too much of it could suffocate a
person, and indeed a culture. Our tour of sites began to seem relentless. Observing Deo’s endlessly
renewed sorrow, I found myself thinking that there was something also to be said for a culture with a
word like gusimbura.
One day we drove west of Kigali, many miles north of the farthest point Deo had reached on his escape
in and out of Rwanda. We stopped at a place called Nyange, at a memorial situated at the site of a former
Catholic church, now rubble. On a day in 1994, after about two thousand Tutsis had taken refuge in the
church, its priest had told the génocidaires, “Knock it down. We’ll build another.” Everyone inside had
died. The guide told us that the ecclesiastical authorities had in fact tried to rebuild on the site. As we
left, Deo said, in a low, fierce voice, “If I were Kagame, I would rebuild the church. Out of the bones of
the victims.”
We drove on. After an hour or so, we began to see glimpses of Lake Kivu, which marks part of
Rwanda’s western border. Then a stone church hove into view, on a lovely promontory high above the
lake. Deo remembered that this was another memorial site. He ordered an unplanned stop.
A sign stood beside the dirt drive to the church. Deo read from it: “April 17. So eleven thousand, four
hundred people in like just one day. Imagine. Eleven thousand people.”
I followed Deo to the church’s front door.
He peered at a notice posted there, then yelled: “Wah!” He read the message aloud: “‘Christian love is
what brings us together here.’” The notice also reminded visitors that this was a place of worship, one
should behave respectfully. Deo’s jaw came forward. In a moment he was snapping pictures, peering in
windows, climbing on the roof of the makeshift memorial adjacent to the church. When he got back in
the vehicle, his eyes were wet. He said, “We are crazy people.”
Deo had planned for us to visit another memorial site that afternoon, another hour or so away. But first
we’d have lunch, he decided, in a restaurant down by the lake. The place was nearly empty. We chose a
good table, looking west across the waters, in the direction of what used to be named Zaire and is now
called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a vast, rich land long beset by tragedies: the long and
brutal Belgian occupation, decades of misrule after independence, and recent civil wars of great violence
and complexity, wars in which the catastrophes of Rwanda and Burundi had played a terrible part.
Something like two dozen proxy armies and militias were still fighting in the Congo. Over the past
twelve years, millions had died in the wars and from the starvation and disease that wars bring. I said to
Deo that I was confused about current events in that embattled country.
“If you understood the hearts of coltan businessmen, then you’d understand,” he said. He was referring
to an ore abundant in the Congo, very valuable because it contains an ingredient for making electronic
devices like cell phones. Coltan, along with gold and diamonds and the influx of armies and militias
from Rwanda and Burundi, had provided some of the fuel for the Congo’s wars.
“I just mean who’s fighting whom,” I said. “And—”
Suddenly, Deo was laughing loudly, saying, “Well, the number of militia groups may be the same
number of different types of minerals!”
This was amusing, but Deo’s laughter seemed oddly misshapen, out of proportion to the joke. I wanted
to find it funnier than I did.
Then beers and food arrived, and for a time Deo spoke about our plans, about stories he’d heard from his
father and grandfather of traveling to the Congo years ago and finding abundant hospitality. “People
opened the door for you even when it was dark.”
In a few minutes, Deo was laughing again. He was telling a story he had told me before, of a colonial
who had fought against the end of Belgian rule in Burundi. Deo was only partway through the story
when his barking laughter began. Supposedly the Belgian had hanged himself in despair on the day of
Burundi’s independence. Since then, Deo said, the man’s house had been turned into a restaurant. “The
Restaurant of the Hanged Man! You will see it! I’m sure you will get fish from there! Mr. Maus! He
cried! He said, ‘I am not going to leave this country!’ I’d say, ‘Go back home, man! What’s wrong with
you?’ It was the first of July 1962! He was so stupid! He hanged himself! The rope broke! Boom on the
rock! He hit his head!”
Deo quieted. “Ahhh boy,” he said.
But then he caught sight of a flock of waterbirds out over the lake, and it started again. “You wished you
could be a bird! Or even, like, an insect! Because they were not threatened!” Over his own loud laughter,
he went on: “They were not in any danger! In fact, they were feeding! They were eating to death! From!
You know, bodies! You know?”
While this lasted, I didn’t want to look at Deo’s face. This was the Deo I didn’t and couldn’t know. I
didn’t know what it was to get to that place beyond horror. But I realized that for Deo it was a necessary
place.
Once more he went silent. He went back to gazing at the lake. I sensed that his need was satisfied for
now. He was purged. He’d returned. “You see that little tiny island?” he said in his usual voice. “There’s
a big one and another one in the middle. It’s called Napoleon. Can you imagine? Napoleon hat.
Napoleon beret. Those islands belong to Congo, and if you go up north you see Congo in Goma.”
He added, “We are not going to see more memorial sites. I guess we have had enough.”
“Couldn’t be a prettier place for lunch,” I offered.
He murmured something about the loveliness of the waters. “A place like this, feeling the waves.”
“You like being near the edge,” I said.
“Yes.” He paused. “I’m actually glad that we didn’t go on to another memorial site.”
“Me too.”
We stared out at the lake. A couple of drab old wooden work boats moved slowly across our field of
vision, their engines just within our hearing, heading across Kivu toward the Congo.
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, “Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Out of what I hope is an excess of caution, I have changed the names of many people and places in
Burundi. “Goss” and “Fair Oaks Nursing Home” are also pseudonyms.
EPILOGUE
Burundi, June
2006–08
For the rest of the summer of 2006, Deo worked on the underpinnings of a clinic in Kayanza. It seemed
to him that he awoke every day with a list of ten things to do and was lucky if he accomplished one.
When he returned to medical school, he tried by email and midnight phone calls to manage the project.
Both endeavors suffered. In November, he withdrew from Dartmouth. He told me once, “If people say,
‘Before he died, Deo became a doctor,’ that would be all right.” In 2009, he would resume that dream,
elsewhere. In the interim, he threw himself into clinic-building.
On his trips to and from Burundi, Deo had always dreaded the moment when he had to pass through
U.S. Immigration. One time, agents took him to a room and grilled him, trying, he thought, to make him
angry, trying, he imagined, to create a pretext for rescinding his green card. And they succeeded in
making him angry, but he managed not to let it show. On another occasion, an agent said she’d never
heard of a country called Burundi. “Are you sure it isn’t Burma?” she asked him. Before he could catch
himself, Deo had replied, “Well, it was Burundi yesterday when I left.” But she didn’t seem to sense that
she was being mocked, and let him pass eventually.
It was mostly relief from worries at Immigration that Deo expected to feel when, in 2007, he took the
oath to become a U.S. citizen. But he found the ceremony surprisingly moving, and afterward, when he
walked out of the huge federal office building in Manhattan, the feeling he’d had for years, the feeling
he’d had right up until just a moment ago, came back to him: “You walked around chin up, but in your
mind you felt like you were hiding, like you were a criminal.” He looked up and down the crowded
street. “Hey, I’m like everyone around here now.”
In effect, he became at once both an American citizen and a virtual expatriate, spending most of his time
on the hilltop plateau of Kayanza, carrying rocks and planting trees and sleeping in a tent.
Deo had been greatly taken with the myth of Sisyphus when he’d encountered it at Columbia. “Pushing
the rock” was his term for trying to build a not-for-profit medical facility in a desperately poor country.
But the task was more nearly like the labors of Hercules, a succession of varied obstacles. He had to get
title to the land, permits to import equipment and medicines, and nonprofit status in Burundi as well as
in the United States, and to accomplish any of those tasks, he had to overcome the suspicions, even at
first the hostility, of several Burundian officials.
Buildings had to be designed. Materials had to be purchased and trucks rented to transport them, and the
trucks were always breaking down. Masons had to be hired. They also had to be supervised. So did one
enterprising driver, who would siphon gas from his truck and resell it. And the person hired to supervise
the work had to be supervised himself, and eventually fired, because he kept disappearing in the middle
of the day to drink banana beer, taking the work crew with him. (One of Deo’s brothers, all of eighteen
years old, took over the job; he had no experience but could work for free.)
Provision had to be made for sanitation and clean water and, someday, for electricity. Staff had to be
chosen and trained. Money had to be raised to pay for all of that and more. And from time to time, Deo
had to overcome his own disillusionment. He had imagined many difficulties, but experiencing them
was different, sometimes like “a knife in the heart,” he said. He shouldn’t have been surprised or even
upset, but he was both at first, whenever someone he’d considered an ally turned out to be interested
only in personal gain.
Alone in his tent, he’d awake in the middle of the night, the world so dark and quiet around him that
he’d wonder, “Am I alive?” In the half-awake state of infinite dire possibility, his fears seemed
invariably to go to the partially constructed buildings of the clinic. He’d get up and survey the work site
with his miner’s flashlight, just to make sure the buildings hadn’t collapsed, or been stolen.
Deo often complained that progress was slow. To me, it looked rapid. In what seemed like no time at all,
he had made allies of many government officials, who on one occasion scotched an attempt by a group
of soldiers to appropriate one of the clinic’s just finished buildings. Later, after a group of rebels—
bandits, really—tried to raid Kayanza, the government provided a constant security detail. It was
reported that the president himself had good words for the project. Friends at Partners In Health offered
counsel and help with every conceivable problem and also training for nurses and community health
workers. Members of Deo’s family did various jobs. A host of Deo’s American friends came over to
