Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  Sometimes when Deo sat up with the light on, Nancy would knock at the door and come in and sit beside him on the bed. His English wasn’t good enough for extended conversations, and he didn’t usually feel like talking much at those times. But Nancy didn’t seem to mind. She’d simply sit with him. Some nights he fell asleep in spite of himself, at the desk, with his head on his arms. Other nights, after the radio show ended, around three A.M., he sat waiting for dawn, watching the clock, now and then looking out from the door of the Black Hole to the windows, thinking, “Why isn’t it coming faster?”

  He wasn’t near the equator anymore. The nights grew longer and longer. One day Nancy called to him from her studio, “Deo, come look.”

  He peered out the studio windows at snow. “Where is this coming from? It’s something that comes like rain?”

  Nancy and Charlie had wanted him to quit his job. He had simply stopped going to the grocery store. But this meant he had to accept gifts of spending money. “I am like a parasite,” he thought when he pocketed it. “Probably it would be better for me to go back to Central Park.” Nancy and Charlie told him to use their phone to call Claude in Bujumbura, but he did so only once and never again, because he found out that it cost something like five dollars a minute. So from time to time he took subways up to Harlem and made streetcorner calls.

  At the bottom of the last page of the account of his life that he’d written for Sharon, the account full of deliberate inaccuracies, he had written with complete truthfulness: “I pray God to learn me some good news about my family, or I will surely die. Too tired!” The news from Claude was almost always bad, though, and sometimes dreadful. One day he learned over the phone that a cousin had been killed and beheaded. He’d been telling Nancy about that same cousin over coffee just the day before, and he simply was unable to stop weeping before he got back to the apartment, or to keep the news for himself when Nancy came out of her studio to see what was wrong. She hugged him for a long time.

  The world was full of dangers. Nancy’s asthma began to worry him. Winter seemed to worsen it. Then she came down with a cold. Listening to her wheeze, Deo felt increasingly alarmed. He told her she had to go to a doctor. She demurred, and he thought, “All right.” He went into the Black Hole, pulled his suitcase from under the bed, took out his stethoscope, and returned with it around his neck. “Maybe I can listen to your lungs.” He didn’t think he heard sounds of pneumonia. He still thought she should go to a real doctor. She wouldn’t.

  Deo had shown Charlie the books he’d carried from Burundi in his suitcase, and Charlie had said to Nancy, in front of Deo, “This man loves books. He needs to go to school.” Since then, a friend of the Wolfs had helped Deo enroll at Hunter College in an English as a Second Language class, and Deo knew he must be doing well, because within a week he had been promoted, and his teacher had taken him to a lunch with other teachers—to show him off, it seemed.

  On Saturdays, he walked with Charlie to the greenmarket on Union Square. Charlie had been a university professor of sociology. He knew a great deal about the city. Deo didn’t understand everything Charlie said, but he liked to listen to Charlie discourse on the history of the streets they crossed. They’d stop at a café and chat over coffee, then stroll over to the Strand and spend an hour or two looking at books, and sometimes on the way home they’d stop at the Warehouse to buy some beer or a bottle of wine, which they’d finish slowly, after dinner at the table. There, almost every night, Charlie would use an expression new to Deo, such as “Indian summer” or “break a leg.” Nancy would turn to Deo and begin to offer a definition, and Charlie would beg to differ with Nancy. Or Deo would interrupt Charlie and ask a question: What did “beating a dead horse” mean? Well, it was a colloquial expression, Charlie would say. What did “colloquial” mean? Deo would ask. It was a cliché, Nancy would answer. No, Charlie would say, a colloquial expression was different from a cliché. Often the argument went on and on. At first, Deo sat there feeling frustrated, wondering when they’d ever get around to answering his question. But then this situation began to seem interesting: two people unable to resolve a question about their native language. He’d listen to them wrangle, his spirits lifting. Even native speakers had something to learn. His question had been a challenging one after all. He wasn’t stupid for not knowing the answer. His situation wasn’t hopeless.

  Deo lived with Nancy and Charlie for about five months before he decided he should leave, to continue his quest for school. Charlie said he’d been speaking to an old friend back in his hometown, in Chapel Hill in North Carolina. His friend thought Deo ought to come down there. It would be good for him to get out of the big city, said Charlie’s friend, and it would be easy for Deo to enroll at the university there. Deo sensed that Charlie and Nancy didn’t want him to leave. On the other hand, Charlie seemed to think highly of North Carolina and of his own education at its great university. In the end, what Deo heard most clearly was the word “university.”

  Charlie and Nancy had spoken about his “going to college” in New York. It seemed to him that he was now being offered a choice between college and university. He didn’t ask for a definition of the word “college,” because the word was the same in French, and since the French collège meant “secondary school,” his choice was clear. A university was what he wanted. Nancy and Charlie took him to the train station. On the platform, Nancy burst into tears and Charlie pulled out his handkerchief and staggered backward slightly, and Deo, putting on his toothiest smile, climbed aboard, hoping they would decide for him that he shouldn’t go, right up until the train departed.

  Charlie’s friend had found free lodgings for him, in the house of a ninety-year-old man, rather crotchety as it turned out. At night Deo would tiptoe around, moving so quietly he thought he could have heard a bird fly past, but in the morning the old man would say, “You woke me up.” Once, he accused Deo of eating his watermelon. When, some months later, Deo tried a slice of watermelon for the first time in his life, he took one bite and threw the rest away. Deo would have put up with far worse—he would gladly have lived outdoors again—if only he could have gone to a university. Soon after he arrived, though, Charlie’s friend said that getting him enrolled was going to be harder than she’d thought. Actually, it turned out to be impossible. He didn’t fit into any category, and the rules were rigid. The closest Deo got to his dream was the main library at the University of North Carolina, where he would go before or after working his shifts as an aide at the Fair Oaks Nursing Home.

  He knew right away he was the lowliest employee, the one the nurses and other aides, almost all of whom were African-American, would summon to clean up the ugliest messes, the urine on the floor, the shit in the bed, the food the old people spilled, the food that dribbled down the old people’s chins. He imagined the other staff thought he was dim-witted. That was what so many assumed when you didn’t speak their language well. So many people, he thought, don’t listen to the content of what you say but only to the noises you make. The very idea of the place puzzled him. He remembered how hard it had been for his parents to move out of his grandparents’ compound to the mountain Runda, how they’d been obliged to leave several children behind for his grandparents to care for. He looked at the so-called “residents” slumped in their wheelchairs around the nursing station, and he wondered, “Are all these old people actually going to be here until they die? They are not going to go home?”

  The job wasn’t all bad. The nursing home was an hour’s walk from the old man’s house, but Deo liked a long walk again, now that he had gained some weight and his nausea had mostly lifted. He usually worked twelve hours a day, for five dollars an hour, a fortune compared to his pay at Gristedes. He didn’t mind dealing with the messes human bodies make. It was, in a general sense at least, what doctors did. On breaks, he liked to read the residents’ medical records and pretend he was their doctor. He liked taking temperatures and blood pressures and writing down the numbers on the appropriate
form. He liked evaluating TB tests. “I’m becoming an intellectual again,” he’d say to himself. Sometimes he’d pore over chest X-rays just for fun, and even on occasion, in spite of his English, he would try to talk about one resident or another to the doctor who visited periodically—just as if he were an intern on rounds. It had been a long time since he’d been the one dispensing help, not the one asking for help.

  He received a lot of blessings from the residents. And he made a friend, a dignified octogenarian named Martha. Soon after she arrived, she said something he didn’t understand, and she smiled at him and said, “You have no clue.”

  “No clou?” he thought. “No nail?”

  “Do you know what a ‘clue’ is?” Martha asked.

  “Yes!” He made as if to drive a nail with a hammer.

  She laughed, but in such a happy way he couldn’t feel offended. “No,” she explained. “It means, you have no idea.”

  He spent his breaks with her. She improved his English and his mood. Then one day another aide, a hefty African-American woman, got impatient with Martha and gripped the old woman’s arm and twisted it, right in front of Deo. Martha bled.

  The aide tried to get Deo to lie about what had happened: “You’re talking about a white person,” she whispered fiercely. He had only vague notions about the history of race relations in America, but he understood the words. The aide seemed to be saying that since Martha was white and Deo was black, he should automatically take the side of a fellow black person. And this was because white people had long oppressed black people. This was madness, he thought. How many wholly innocent Burundians and Rwandans had been slaughtered because of offenses their fellows had committed? The aide told him if he didn’t take her side, he’d better quit this job and leave. She was going to get him in big trouble if he didn’t quit. He shouldn’t just quit, he should go back to Africa!

  Deo followed her advice, in part. He told the authorities the truth, and not long afterward he called up Nancy and Charlie—they had been calling him regularly the whole four months. Would it be all right if he came back to live with them?

  They met him at Penn Station and took him back to SoHo. When the elevator door opened into the apartment, there were a lot of people there, friends such as Sharon and the lawyer James O’Malley and O’Malley’s wife, Lelia. On the table there was a big cake spiked with candles, surrounding the figure of a little cow resting on the frosting. Someone said, “Blow out the candles, Deo.”

  “What?” he asked.

  Lelia made as if to blow, and he understood.

  Later, as they were cleaning up, Lelia asked Deo to pass her a paper towel. He couldn’t think what a paper towel was. He made as if to search, to look as though he knew what it was she wanted. Then he said, “There’s nothing.” Lelia smiled at him and walked over and got the paper towel herself.

  He thought he must go back to school or die.

  Soon after Deo returned from North Carolina, Nancy and Charlie asked a friend to take him on a tour of the city’s colleges. The second stop was Columbia. When Deo passed through its stone gates, he cried out, “This is a university!” There was no need to go further.

  Deo enrolled in Columbia’s American Language Program, an ESL program essentially, but more rigorous than most. Nancy and Charlie paid the tuition, about six thousand dollars. There were still nights he couldn’t sleep or didn’t dare try, but he could use those hours now to read and write his papers. He studied English through the spring and summer of 1995. Meanwhile, he had applied to become an undergraduate in Columbia’s School of General Studies, a program fully integrated with the college proper, created for students whose college careers had been interrupted. The standards for admission were rigorous, but the deadline for applying was June instead of January.

  Nancy and Charlie and another friend of theirs, a neurologist at Columbia’s medical school, helped him fill out the forms, but he had to prove he’d been to school before, and he didn’t have any of his transcripts from Burundi. He made several streetcorner calls. A friend of Claude’s went to the medical school in Bujumbura—the school was functioning again, marginally, Deo was told. At first, the administrators there refused to give up any of his records, because according to their files Deo was dead. When the records finally came, he found among all the other papers a photograph of himself, a picture of his own face with a cross drawn over it in black ink. Deo usually saved everything—receipts, letters, snapshots. You never knew when a thing of the past might be useful to the future. But after staring at the picture of himself dead, he tore it into several pieces and threw it in the trash.

  He had to take the SAT and a bunch of special Columbia admissions and placement exams. He finished the calculus test with time to spare. He was checking his answers when he saw a tall, well-dressed man come into the room, a black man in a three-piece suit, clearly a personage around Columbia. The man stood near the front of the room, beside the desk of the man who was monitoring the exam. The big man seemed to be eyeing the would-be Columbia students, all bent over their desks, hurrying to finish on time. But Deo was done. He slid out of his chair and carried his answer sheet to the monitor. As he turned to go back to his desk, he heard the big man say to the monitor in a low voice, “Is he done, or did he just give up?”

  “No. It looks as if he’s done.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Deo watched from his desk as the two men graded his answer sheet. Then the big man looked up, smiling across the room at him. “De-oh-Gratias! Well done!”

  SEVEN

  Burundi,

  1976–93

  By rights Deo should have hated education, and he might have, if all he’d ever known had been the brick single-story grade school in Sangaza. It had six classrooms all in a row. Each room had two windows, covered with metal grating but otherwise open to the air. Looking into any of the rooms would have been for an American like looking into a one-room New England schoolhouse preserved as a museum: a slate blackboard, rows of battered wooden desks with inkwells.

  The school had been owned and run by the Catholic church. Yearly tuition was roughly the equivalent of a U.S. dollar, a large sum. Deo’s parents said they couldn’t afford to buy him a pen, only one pencil, but they were determined to send their children to school. And so were many other families in the region, too many by the time Deo was six years old and eligible for first grade. Since there wasn’t room for all the applicants, the authorities seem to have reasoned that some children either weren’t old enough or weren’t ready for school. They had a peculiar way of weeding those kids out.

  On the morning of enrollment day, Deo stood on the dirt field in front of the school in a line of about seventy-five boys and girls, all jostling each other. “I was ahead of you!” “No, you weren’t!” Parents hovered at the fringes, whispering commands to their children: “Be quiet!” “Stay in line!” Preoccupied with keeping his place in the line, Deo didn’t notice the procedure being enacted up at the head of the line. Before he knew it, he was standing there alone. From his vantage point, only a few feet above ground level, everything looked enormous—not only the building but also the steps in front of him, and especially the bearded white man, the muzungu, who was seated in a metal chair at the top of the steps just outside the metal door to the first-grade classroom. This was the local Belgian priest, nicknamed We Can’t Escape You, conducting interrogations in Kirundi.

  “Touch your ear like this,” said the man to Deo. The white man quickly bent his right arm over his own head and briefly touched his own left ear.

  Deo stared at him, astonished.

  “Out!” said the man.

  Deo just stood there, staring.

  The man was sitting with his legs crossed. He lifted a foot off his knee and brushed Deo aside with it. “Out!”

  Deo was led away by his mother. She was in tears. His father bent over him. “Are you stupid? Why didn’t you stretch your skinny arm?”

  Deo never did learn the provenance of t
he touch-your-ear-with-the-opposite-hand theory of human development. His parents had him practice the procedure at home. He started school the next year, at seven.

  One pair of shorts and a T-shirt lasted a year. He or his mother would wash them at night. In the morning when he took them down from the rope that hung over the cooking fire, his clothes were never quite dry and he’d smell the smoke in them all day, but you went to school in washed clothes or else. He got his copybook, gathered his lunch of beans wrapped in banana leaf, and headed out. On the way, he broke off a twig of an especially fragrant variety of eucalyptus, mashing one end with his teeth, then brushing his teeth with it as he walked along.

  School lay three long descents and three steep climbs away. Down from the compound in Butanza—the family hadn’t yet moved onto the mountain Runda—up along paths that cut through pastures and banana groves and gardens of beans, and quickly through a dense wood where, he’d heard people say, bad spirits lurked, then down again to a stream bottom, a small piece of open flat land, where sometimes he and his classmates would meet up with kids from the Protestant school in Nanga and play soccer, or fight, or both. (The Protestants usually won. Deo and his classmates would go away saying to each other, “Oh well, what do they do, these stupid kids from Nanga? They spend all their time just fighting and playing.”) He climbed through more woods, through a field of ferns with huge fronds, then crossed a barren, stony hilltop whose trees, people said, had been cut down before he was born and turned into charcoal. This spot marked the beginning of the last leg. If he had been punctual, he could relax when he got here.