by Tracy Kidder
On mornings when he walked to work, he always went through part of Central Park. He would go down Malcolm X, and when he reached 110th Street, he would climb a stone stairway, overarched with leafy trees. Right there, where Central Park butts into Harlem, he had seen small groups of men, some sitting on benches, some still sleeping on blankets in the grass nearby, each, it seemed, with his own black plastic bag of belongings. It was Muhammad who had explained to him that some people actually lived in the park. The day after Deo saw the body on the sidewalk, he went to the West Africans’ apartment, the clothing factory, and retrieved from his suitcase the things he thought he’d need—a change of clothes, his toothbrush, his blanket. He put them in a plastic bag.
He slept in Central Park that night, near the 110th Street entrance. He awakened with a foul odor in his nose, which followed him all day. He realized the grass he’d chosen to sleep on was a place where the other homeless people usually went to urinate. The next evening, literally following his nose, he found a better spot, a lovely spot, a grassy slope beneath tall trees, near a public swimming pool. But in the morning he discovered the reason that place smelled better: the police didn’t tolerate camping there. He saw the police before they saw him, and quickly moved away. He understood. It was a nice public swimming pool, and it was beautiful because the police kept the area clean, and the way they kept it clean was to prevent people from shitting in it. He himself used the toilet at the store or at the apartment of the Senegalese, where he still went regularly to bathe.
The first few nights, Deo avoided the shadowy figures of other men who were living in the park. Gradually, he began to observe them from a little distance. He’d hear them talking to each other. Little by little he made out some of the words they used most often. Most weren’t in his dictionary, though, words like “mothafucker.” He could tell this was a bad word, from the way the homeless men would use it, when they were yelling at each other for instance. But he didn’t see real fighting. Actually, most of them seemed to be generous with each other, even with him, proffering their bottles wrapped in paper bags, or whatever it was they were smoking. He would say, “No, thank you.” They called him “bro,” as in, “Hey, bro, where you from?” They’d say, “Whassup?” And when he walked away from them, “Take it easy.”
“Take it easy, bro,” he’d reply, wondering, “What are they talking about?”
They weren’t much help in learning English. But they didn’t frighten him after he got used to them. Some could even be trusted to watch his plastic bag of stuff while he went off to deliver groceries. He supposed that they felt sorry for him, as he did for them. All of them were black. Most of them, he thought, suffered from one form of mental illness or another. If he got too close, he’d find himself breathing through his mouth so as not to smell them, but he felt much safer sharing the park with them than he had in the abandoned buildings, among men like the one with the knife who had robbed him.
He found places that felt private, spots of grassy or leaf-covered ground hidden by bushes. Lying on his back, looking up through leaves and branches at the stars, he felt almost at home, almost as if he’d been restored to his proper element. But always memories troubled him, even more than they had in PEN, and especially on nights when there was a moon. It was automatic: every time he saw the moon, he thought of a moonlit night when he was a little boy, lying on a mat of banana leaves in the grass of a mountain pasture, feeling utterly safe because he was with his grandfather Lonjino. Staring up at the sky, Deo had seen something he’d never noticed before, a profile of a rabbit on the face of the moon. He had told Lonjino, and Lonjino had exclaimed, “Yes, this is a rabbit!” Lonjino was certainly dead. When the militiamen came, he would have refused as usual to run away, right up until the last moment. He’d have stayed near the family compound, guarding the cows with his dogs and his spear, until it was too late.
In the park Deo found what he thought of as his own peaceful corners. Some days after work and on Sundays when it didn’t seem worth working, Deo would sit facing the fountain in the Conservatory Garden. It was kept locked at night and was therefore a place where, as he thought of it, his receptors could recover from urine-saturation. He would sit and sometimes manage not to think of home or horrors, but simply gaze at flowers and close his eyes and doze to the sound of the fountain, like the lapping waves on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.
He discovered the big pond in the park, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. He would stand at the railing and gaze out at the water and his thoughts. Now and then he would join one of the passing groups of runners, jogging along with them for a while by the pond, for the sake of what he thought of as “psychological friendship.” A curious tableau, the joggers in their shorts and spandex, Deo in his long pants and sneakers and “I ♥ New York” cap. It made him feel as if he belonged there, as if he were like everyone else. He couldn’t run far anymore. Even the slowest crew of joggers would eventually leave him behind, but that was all right, he’d tell himself. There was always another group coming along that he could join.
He had acquired other spots for long thoughts. Making deliveries on the Upper East Side, he often found himself in the vicinity of a small Catholic church, St. Thomas More. Occasionally, he would park his grocery cart and go inside and say a prayer for himself and his family. In motion again, he would pass by the window of a children’s clothing shop. One day he stopped. Looking through the glass past his own reflection—he couldn’t have weighed more than sixty kilograms now, far too little for a man of medium height—he peered in at the little dresses and young gentleman’s jackets and at the price tags attached to them, and his anger flared. “Look at how little you are making, sweating, smelling like a dead body, and you can’t even buy more than a button.”
It was clear that to be a New Yorker could mean so many things that it meant practically nothing at all. He had studied the graffiti on the outer walls of subway cars, noting especially the crude, sexually explicit drawings and the vulgar words that his dictionary did contain. He had come to think of these as messages, sent from people uptown in Harlem to people downtown who shopped in places like that children’s clothing store. A phrase he’d put together out of his dictionary kept coming to him. “A different planet.” New York had many planets. Better, he thought, to be in Burundi, if Burundi were at peace, than to live on the wrong, impoverished planet in New York. This place made you feel like you were simply not a human being. How could you be a human being like everyone else, if your circumstances were this different?
He stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-sixth Street and looked at the traffic. What was going to be his future? His life and the future he had imagined had been, not interrupted, but wiped out. There was no future now that he cared to occupy. When would his life be over? Would God please hurry up and end it? It was getting dark. Rush hour was past, and cabs and cars were racing by. Maybe it would be a good idea to close his eyes and run out into the middle of the street.
He waited for the traffic light. There was an entrance to the park right in front of him, the Ninety-sixth Street entrance, a passage into the darkness beyond the streetlights. As he approached it, he felt embarrassed again, and annoyed at himself for the feeling. Anyone who happened to see him walk into the park at this hour would guess he was a homeless person. So what? He didn’t really know anyone in New York City. But as usual, he looked around, to the right and left and behind him, to make sure no one was watching.
THREE
Burundi,
1970s
“Deogratias, thanks be to God” was Latin his mother had learned in church. She had nearly died during his gestation and birth; his name was her thanksgiving. In Deo’s Burundi, the Burundi of ordinary farmers and herdsmen, many names told stories. Deo grew up with a boy whose mother called him Good Road because he had been born by the side of a trail. Some names were like social commentary, such as Nzokirantevye, which means I Won’t Be Rich Soon. And some names were harsh. He
knew a boy named A Hungry Street Dog, and another called Shit. At an early age he understood the reason. These were amazina y’ikuzo, “names for growth.” Parents were saying, “This child tastes bitter, Death. You don’t want to take him.”
Villages were called collines, hills. Deo’s home was a compound on ground carved out of the colline Butanza. A large part of his extended family lived together there—his paternal grandparents, his parents, a growing number of children, including several sons of deceased relatives, and also his grandfather’s dogs and the family’s cows, many long-horned inyambo and ankole cows. A wall of hardened clay reinforced with saplings surrounded the compound. The human beings lived in wooden buildings with thatched roofs. The smoke from cooking fires rose through holes in the centers of the roofs. The largest building was the barn; the ferns that covered its floor made soft beds for the cows, and were replaced daily by Deo and his siblings. Each cow had its own name. Among others, there was Jambo, whom his grandfather doted on, and Yanzobe, whose name means “Light-Skinned,” and Yaruyange, “Beautiful Grasses.”
In Burundi, land was the only natural resource and, along with cows, the only wealth. Cows had long been the traditional form of large currency, the essential gift by which chiefs—and many others as well—had secured loyalty and service. Deo’s family’s herd was numerous but didn’t yield a great deal of milk, just enough to feed them all and to make butter, with some left over to give away to impoverished neighbors. Certain traditions applied to cows, at least in Deo’s family. One couldn’t take money for the milk, and no cow could be slaughtered for food, though rarely one might be sold to buy a piece of arable land or for some other truly important purpose. The family was paramount—one member’s disgrace or success belonged to all—and the herd of cows was his family’s pride, like a bank account made public, one from which you rarely made withdrawals: a source of prestige, and insurance in times of scarcity.
None of the children wore shoes, and all knew hunger, at least from time to time. August and September were arid months, when hardly anything grew and one ate mostly beans or peas that had been dried and stored. By December, in large families especially, the supplies would be depleted. Seeing neighbors whose teeth were stained green in December, you would know they had been eating leaves. It was the season for umukubi, the leaves of bean plants. You grazed like a cow, people would say.
The settlements lacked electricity, of course, and safe water supplies. The water Deo and his brothers and mother lugged home came from a stream that ran a steep two kilometers away from their hut. Infectious and parasitic illnesses were ubiquitous, and there was no public health system to measure their extent or even to identify them, let alone a clinic in the area to cure them. Every child knew the pain of illness, and, as some names implied, almost all parents knew the pain of losing a child—and many children the pain of losing a parent. Deo fetched water in the evenings after school, always racing to get to the stream before sunset, because there were frogs in the water, and if he couldn’t see them, he might scoop up tadpoles and messes of eggs along with the water. His father had received some training in veterinary medicine. He knew the germ theory of illness, so they always tried to boil their drinking water, but this was hard to do in the rainy season when firewood was usually wet.
The elders would say, “When too much is too much or too bad is too bad, we laugh as if it was too good.” As long as you could say this, you didn’t feel you were really poor. If you didn’t know what electricity was, you didn’t feel its absence. Deo and his siblings slept on woven straw mats on the dirt floor by the embers of the cooking fire, fighting for a corner of the blanket they shared. On nights of heavy downpours, he’d be awakened sooner or later by a raindrop hitting his ear and would know that more were coming. At least one nearby family was better off than his. Deo first realized this when he visited the house of a schoolmate and heard a strange pinging sound, which close examination showed was the sound of rain falling on that family’s metal roof. Many families were obviously poorer than his, families without cows or enough food even in the bountiful seasons. But for the most part, the differences seemed small, at least during his years of elementary school.
He first heard the term “Hutu” on a day in the summer before he began middle school. He was carrying a sack of grain from Butanza to another town, a hike of several hours. Passing through a grove of towering trees, he came upon an elderly woman, bent over, a load of firewood on her back. As he passed her on the trail, she yelled at him. “What are you saying? What are you saying?”
Deo looked back at her. He’d never seen her before, and he hadn’t said a word. He was frightened. Was she a ghost?
“Did you say that I’m a Hutu?” she yelled angrily. “Did you say that I’m a Hutu?”
Deo dropped his bag of grain and ran all the way back to Butanza. He found his father working on the barn and told him what had happened. “Hutu,” Deo said. “What is that?”
His father glared at him. “Shut up!” he said, and went back to work.
A year or so later—maybe it was at school or in the schoolyard—he heard the term again, along with the term “Tutsi.” Evidently, these were the names of different kinds of people in Burundi. He took his question to his father again. “Which are we?”
“Tutsi,” his father said, and added, “Don’t you have anything better to think about?”
The names seemed to have something to do with cows. If a man gave a cow to his brother, the giver might call the other his Hutu. If a family had no cows, others who owned cows might call them Hutus. It followed that people with many cows were Tutsis. Deo tried out this theory on his grandfather once, saying of a certain neighbor, “He is a great Tutsi because he has so many cows.”
His grandfather, who was usually fairly gentle with him, actually spat in his face, and said, “This is prejudice! Shut up! Who is teaching you this?”
Deo asked his older brother in private about the man with many cows. Wasn’t he a Tutsi? Deo asked. His brother said no, actually that man was a Hutu. And according to his brother, so was the family with the metal roof. It was all very confusing. Everyone he knew lived much the same life—though his older brother, Antoine, insisted that he and Deo had to work a lot harder than other boys. Deo was inclined to agree.
Farming was difficult in that region, the terrain very steep, the soil poor. Deo’s father had raised some cash—probably by selling a precious cow; Deo was too young to know—and had bought a hectare of fertile land near the shore of Lake Tanganyika, where the family grew cassava and rice and beans and bananas, also some oranges and mangoes. There was no house or even a hut there. When it came to a home, his father preferred the mountains. One did not ask many questions of one’s father, but gradually the reasons became obvious: the mountains’ relative lack of mosquitoes, and their distance from the big towns and cities, full of malign influences for growing boys and girls and potentially more dangerous for everyone, given the country’s recent history of violence—a history largely unknown to Deo, and indecipherable, like the whispers of an overheard conversation among elders.
Most of the food raised by the lake was for the family and had to be carried to Butanza, a trip that for a bird would have measured about twenty-five kilometers. But on foot the trip was nearly twice that long and full of steep climbs and descents. It took about fourteen hours. Deo made it for the first time when he was about ten and many years of going barefoot lay before him. They would set out before samoya, and he soon learned to feel relieved when they left in moonlight and he could make out stones and roots on the paths. Inevitably, when there was no moon, he stubbed his toes. He knew by then that crying aloud was not acceptable. He’d fall to the ground curling up over his wounded toes, struggling not to cry, and then would get up and go on, hurrying after the others, sniffling until the pain subsided.
Soon he and Antoine were making the journey once a week and alone. Both of them were still small, too small to lift a sack of cassava onto their h
eads without help. On hot days they took off their shirts and used them to cushion the loads. Sometimes they made head cushions of banana leaves, called ingata. On the first stretch, climbing up from the lake, they had to cross footbridges of logs over the streams that fed the Rwaba River, and sometimes, especially if it was raining and the logs were slippery, one of them would lose his balance and his load. Then they would have to go back to get more cassava. To arrive in Butanza without food meant trouble, and shame.
After the Rwaba River came the mountains. Three stood out. Honga was first, a long and arduous climb and the most frightening, because from a certain cliff near the summit on stormy days Deo really feared he would be blown off and come to rest like the blackened and now rusting skeleton of the automobile that lay on a grassy slope down below.
An uncle, a brother of Deo’s father, had owned that car, and had died in it—in 1972, it was said. Deo had been just a baby, and didn’t remember his uncle, only the good stories about him and, cars having been a very unusual sight, an image of his uncle’s car, a Volkswagen Bug, which was white before it got burned. People said that his uncle had been sent by priests to Europe for some medical training and that afterward his uncle had come back and worked as a doctor. People feeling ill in Butanza would say, “Oh, we miss your uncle. Oh, if only your uncle were alive.” How could Deo not ask for the story? For a long time he was told his uncle had died in an accident. Then when Deo was about twelve, one of his younger uncles said, out of everyone else’s hearing, “No, he was killed.” Crossing the summit of Honga, Deo would tell himself not to look, but he always would. He’d see the car’s skeleton in the mountain grass, then avert his eyes and look at Antoine and see that his brother was doing the same. He and Antoine would pass by without speaking, as solemn as if they were in church.
He couldn’t recall hearing any other stories about killings, even such cryptic stories, during those years of hiking the mountains. They always encountered many others who were hiking in the same direction, up and down the paths and dirt roads. Most became friends for the duration of the trip. When they were still small, there were grown-ups and older kids willing to help them put their sacks of cassava back on their heads after a rest. In later years, there were fellow teenagers to trade jokes and stories with. All were comrades in toil, Deo felt. He respected especially the men who carried palm oil up from the lakefront on bicycles, great loads of yellow jerry cans tied onto their bikes, the barefoot men pushing their loads up the dirt roads toward Kirimiro in Gitega province for days on end. He remembered this as a time of amahoro, of peace, when, as he later put it to himself, people were still people.
