by Tracy Kidder
Deo didn’t exactly decide where to go. Mainly he decided not to go toward Bujumbura. He crept up to the road, then ran as fast as he could across it. Reaching the other side, he looked down the road. In the near distance, he saw a group of people sitting on the pavement. He imagined they had established a checkpoint and would grab anyone they suspected of being Tutsi. They didn’t appear to have seen him. He headed in the other direction, away from Bujumbura.
He moved in stages, pausing to sit under the cover of grasses or in a thicket, and listening for a while. Now and then he had seen people with machetes seated on the edges of roads—and, he imagined, some would be sitting in the bushes beside roads. He assumed these were militiamen, waiting like cats for prey. Several times he would be sitting and listening, surrounded by utter silence, and then quite suddenly he would hear a cry or a yell, and he felt certain this meant that someone was being slaughtered. Then utter silence would follow.
He passed around Teza, with its large tea plantations, and entered the national park, Kibira. Simply and aptly enough, the name means “Forest.” For days, he kept to the eastern edge of Kibira, moving in and out from under its immense green canopy, climbing and descending mountains six and seven thousand feet high, loping across open forest floor and wading through thick undergrowth.
Deo knew that he was heading generally north, toward Rwanda. He had visited the country on that one trip with friends from medical school, and they hadn’t run into trouble. They’d gone to visit Rwanda’s national university, in Butare, a lovely place with its own medical school—though not as good a school as Burundi’s, he felt. He knew, of course, that Rwanda had a troubled history, and he had heard the rumors of war. But according to those, the fighting was confined to the far north. Southern Rwanda would be safe, he imagined. Or safer than Burundi now. Any country would be safer than Burundi now, he thought. He had no way of knowing that Rwanda, in a little more than five months, would become safer than nowhere. Then again, it wasn’t as though he was thinking that he had to get to Rwanda. Mainly he was just going, because stopping in any one place for long seemed equivalent to waiting for a killer to find him, and moving seemed like the only way to keep down thoughts of what he’d seen.
It was impossible to plan, because he never knew where the dangers lay until he got close to them. The signs were obvious by now. Rising smoke meant burning houses up ahead, and wheeling birds a place full of corpses. Swarms of flies meant killings nearby. Sometimes he saw a dog trotting past with a severed head or an arm in its mouth. The main thing to avoid was other living human beings. It was just as Lonjino liked to say: safer with a wild animal than a human being. Deo remembered how as a child he’d hear Lonjino say this and he’d think, “What’s Grandfather talking about?”
So far he had seen other living people only from a distance—men at roadblocks and frightened unarmed people running, most vividly women, their colorful, saronglike Burundian dresses flapping as they ran. His first face-to-face encounter came somewhere in Kibira. He was making his way through woods. He was startled by the sound of coughing, not at a distance but directly overhead. He was startled, frightened, and at the same time the coughing made him think, “That sounds like pneumonia.” Looking up, he saw a boy clinging to a branch very near the treetop, like a big bird. “Keep going!” the boy whispered harshly.
There must be militiamen nearby. That must be what the boy was telling him. Looking up, Deo said silently, “God, I’m sorry.” Then he hurried on, weaving his way among tree trunks. Soon he couldn’t hear the coughing anymore. Not that he could have done anything for the boy. But any thought of trying to help hadn’t stood up, even for a minute or two, to fear. It was as if the sights and sounds and smells of the past few days—screams, corpses, burning flesh—were all collecting into something like another version of himself, another skin growing over him.
He was walking wearily through a patch of open forest floor in mountains north of Teza when from around the tall trees on the slope above him a group of men appeared, brandishing spears. There were perhaps six men and on the slope behind them he saw some women and children. The men yelled angrily at him. “Are you following us? What are you looking for?”
Deo raised his hands. Militiamen wouldn’t behave like that. Militiamen wouldn’t be traveling with women and children. These men sounded as frightened of him as he was of them and their spears. “No, no, I’m sorry,” he called up the slope. “I’m running away. I’m innocent.”
He camped with them for a day and a night in that spot. They were Tutsi farmers on the run. They had decided to stop in this piece of forest and wait for the war to be over. It couldn’t go on much longer, they said. The army would be coming. In the morning Deo awoke to find himself among a forlorn little group, wet and cold and hungry, the women and children all silent, the men talking softly about what they should do. He felt refreshed himself, with hopeful thoughts. Maybe it really was all over. He said he’d go down the mountainside and see if he could find a farm and take some cassava. Four of the men went with him. They were talking as they went, confident that their hopes were real, and militiamen in the valley must have heard their voices, because when he and the others came out of the forest, they saw men with machetes running toward them, up the steep slope, maybe two hundred meters away. Fortunately, that group didn’t have guns, or arrows—he had seen bodies of people shot by arrows. Deo turned back toward the forest and ran. He didn’t see the little band of refugees again.
On the next day or the day after or the day after that, he was wading through brush along the bottom of a ravine. He heard dogs barking, and voices yelling, “Get out!” Were people being hunted, or were the militiamen simply yelling into the forest, saying in effect to people who might be hiding there, “We see you. Come on out.” An exhausted person might be stupid enough to obey. Deo crawled under a bush, facedown on dark muddy ground. The barking and yells were coming from the ridge above. He heard small crashes in the brush around him. The men must be throwing stones at random down into the ravine. He felt a sharp pain in the small of his back. He lay writhing, clenching his teeth so as not to cry out. After a while he heard the dogs and men moving away, and he got up and went on, reaching back now and then to examine the wound on his back with his fingers. It might get infected, he thought. What did it matter?
When he thought about what was going on, he thought the massacres must have been planned. He knew from the smells in the hospital at Mutaho that the killers had jerry cans full of petrol, and he knew from sounds he’d heard that some had guns and grenades, and clearly the killers had systems for signaling each other, by beating sticks on their jerry cans or by blowing on whistles. From time to time in his hiding places, he heard loud whining sounds, then the thunder of trees crashing down. And the sources of that noise were those large, gas-powered saws. Where had such things come from, in a part of the country where many people couldn’t afford to buy salt and only a very few owned anything that ran on gasoline?
It had been raining off and on ever since Mutaho. A lot of the countryside had turned to mud. Deo had thrown away his socks. His sneakers, the no-brand-name pair he had bought at the central market in Bujumbura, had held up so far, though they had long since turned from white to brown and the laces had broken—he’d thrown those away, too. From time to time he had to stop and clean the mud out of his sneakers. He had slept now and then, during daylight when it didn’t seem safe to move. He would pick out a hiding spot, not a spot that seemed safe, because no place seemed safe, but a spot that had cover and looked comfortable. Then he’d sit or lie down and sometimes fall asleep, but never for long.
He had paused in his trek only to rest or to hide or to find food and water. From time to time he had gotten entangled in thickets of thornbushes in the dark. He had scratches everywhere, any one of which could become infected. He could feel an infection brewing in the wound in the small of his back. He had diarrhea, too. What had revolted him at first no longer bothered him. Repelled a
t first by the thought of drinking dirty water or eating a muddy sweet potato, he had told himself he had to be flexible. By now the counsel was irrelevant. He couldn’t taste anything anymore.
He had been weaving his way north, moving in and out of the forest, Kibira. One rainy afternoon he found himself outside the forest in a field of banana trees. The rain was heavy. He couldn’t stop shivering. He was stumbling along, hugging himself. He saw swarms of flies and smelled putrefaction before he saw the bodies. The thick grass among the banana trees was full of them. In what seemed like only moments, he couldn’t smell them anymore. He didn’t feel like running away from bodies as he had four or five days ago. He didn’t feel much of anything except weariness. He sat down with his back against a bunch of banana trees. Then he saw the baby.
Just a little distance away, the figure of a woman was slumped against another bunch of banana trees. There was dried blood on her face. She must have collapsed there and died, but the baby was alive. It was in her lap, its little hands groping at its mother’s bared breast. And it was looking right at Deo. He stared back at it for a long moment.
The baby wasn’t crying. “It must be wondering where it is,” he thought. It must be terrified like him. But he couldn’t help the baby. He couldn’t even help himself.
He got to his feet and staggered off among the clumps of banana trees, deeper into the grove. He sat down again with his back against another tangle of spindly trunks. The fronds overhead gave a little shelter from the rain. Nothing was important anymore, not the flies or the bodies. All that mattered was that he couldn’t see the baby.
He had no idea how long he slept. Maybe only that night and part of the next day, or maybe through two nights. He woke up to gray daylight and rain. He didn’t move. Maybe he was dreaming. He heard voices, and then a line of people appeared, trudging through the banana grove. About thirty people, all women and children, walking sticks in their hands, baskets and bundles on their heads.
One of the women left the line. She had spotted him, clearly. She was coming toward him with her walking stick. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t even make himself get up. He wanted to vanish, imagining that with an effort of will he could do this—squeeze into this banana tree.
She seemed to be a little older than his mother, forty-five or fifty, but it was hard to tell. She had a farmer’s weathered skin, missing teeth, and sinewy strength. She was carrying a baby on her back and a huge bundle on her head. Hardly a terrifying vision, but all people were terrifying. The sight of dogs devouring corpses was nothing to him anymore, compared to the sight of this woman.
“Are you alive?” she asked him in Kirundi.
“Yes,” he said. “But please don’t kill me.”
“No, no, no, no,” she said. “I want to help you. I don’t want to kill you.”
He had begun to cry, warm tears on his cheeks mixing with rainwater. “Please, if you really want to kill me, I just hope that I’m not going to be tortured. Don’t torture me.”
Her voice sounded sad. She said she knew what he was thinking. He was thinking she was a Hutu, and in fact she was. Then her voice turned, not fierce, but declarative: “But I’m a woman and I’m a mother.” That, she said, was her ubwoko, her ethnicity.
A woman and a mother. Maybe she wasn’t going to kill him after all.
She said she wanted to help. She wanted to get him out of this place. But Deo had entered the country of despair. It was not uncomfortable. There was no way he could extract himself from this time and this place. He didn’t even want to be extracted. He just didn’t want to die painfully. And he didn’t want to move from his spot beneath the banana trees. He seemed to be content where he was. It was peaceful right here, even though he was surrounded by bodies.
“I’m too tired,” he told the woman. “I’m just going to stay here.”
“No, no,” she said. “The border, it’s nearby.” Then she said, “Get up!”
He couldn’t trust anyone. He didn’t fully believe in her. But he obeyed her, mainly because she was so persistent, leaning over and pulling at his upper arm, saying, “Come on, come on, please come on.”
They walked together through a mixed landscape, under tall eucalyptus, through banana groves, across cultivated fields. Sometimes when the path was narrow, he followed behind her. Other times they walked side by side, and she talked to him. She told him that she knew what he was going through, because she had many Tutsi friends who had been killed and many Hutu friends, too, who had been murdered by the army and even by militant Hutus because they had refused to join the killing or because the militants wanted their land. One of her own grown sons had been killed by militiamen, she said. She had been married to a Tutsi who had been killed years ago, and she had been vilified as a traitor by radicals on her hill. She had remarried, to a Hutu; she didn’t say where he was now, and Deo didn’t ask. She and most of the women and children of her village were fleeing both from the Hutu militiamen and from the Tutsi army’s retaliation, which was certain to come.
He knew they must be nearing the Rwandan border. Other groups of fleeing people were joining their procession, and the Hutu woman was getting nervous. She told him he must not tell anyone he was a Tutsi. He must not show fear the way he had back in the banana grove. He should say he was her son.
It didn’t occur to him that he might turn back. Everything he’d witnessed told him he had to get away from Burundi, and this was the nearest way out. He was sick to his stomach, he was beyond thought, it was easier just to go on. As they waded across the stream that marked the border, she pulled him close to her, an arm around his shoulders. By then it was too late to turn back. Up ahead stood bunches of armed men, some in blue uniforms, some in brown uniforms, some in civilian clothes. They were questioning everyone. He was aware of their Rwandan accents. “You go. You go. You! What’s your name?” He noticed their equipment—portable radios, policeman’s nightsticks, pistols, and rifles. He felt vomit rising. He had experienced fear before this. But this was fear in the extreme. He felt his hands shaking. He couldn’t stop them. Several men with fierce faces were peering into his from all sides. “You look like a cockroach,” said one. “What are you doing here?” said another. The Hutu woman tightened her arm around his shoulder. Without realizing it, he had placed his hands on either side of his head, covering his temples. So many of the corpses he had seen were cut at the temples, inivo nu gutwi.
“Open your eyes!” A sneering face was pressing very close to his. “You look like you are afraid.”
Clearly the men on the riverbank were looking for Tutsis among the refugees. But physical stereotypes were all they had to go on, since Burundian IDs no longer revealed ethnicity. One of the interrogators raised a bayoneted rifle, so that the blade of the bayonet touched the tip of Deo’s nose. He flicked Deo’s nose back and forth without cutting into it, and said something about its being too thin for a Hutu nose. Then he lifted the point of the blade to Deo’s hairline—Deo was only twenty-one, but he had a widow’s peak, not a straight hairline across the forehead. “Look at this,” said the man with the bayonet.
The Hutu woman still had her arm around Deo. She pulled him half behind her, away from the bayonet. “Don’t torture my son. He’s been so sick.”
“What? Sick?” said one of the interrogators.
“He can’t handle it, he’s not useful,” said another.
“You need to die anyway,” said a third, peering in at Deo’s face.
“No, no, no. This is my son!” said the woman.
There were a lot of people crossing the little river. The interrogators couldn’t spend all day on him. One of them grabbed Deo’s left wrist and tied a piece of black cloth around it. “Go over there to that group. We’ll question you later.”
“No, I’m telling you, he’s my son,” said the woman.
“If you want to go with him, go with him,” said one of the men.
Beyond the interrogators lay a wide field, full of people milling around
. Many voices were talking all at once. Some were shouting. People were hurrying this way and that. The woman walked Deo a little distance toward the group of suspected Tutsis, all clustered together in a corner of the field. Then she stopped and made as if to adjust her clothing. She was dressed in the traditional Burundian way, in layers—first a shirt and skirt, then a wrapping of brightly colored cloth, and finally another colorful wrapping that wound around her back and held the baby in place. She loosened the cloth of the outer dress, and then as she began to refasten it, she dropped a fold over Deo’s left forearm and hand and quickly untied the piece of black cloth. Then she put her arm around Deo again, and walked on with him a little way.
Another group of militiamen passed by. They stopped her and Deo. For a moment Deo thought they must have seen her remove the cloth. “What are you doing? You belong over this way.” They pointed toward the main group of refugees, milling about in the field.
“Oh, I just want to find a seat,” said the woman. “My son is sick.”
“Are you Hutus?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Over there.” They pointed toward that main group and turned away.
The woman walked Deo a little farther on, then whispered to him, “Genda!” “Run!”
He obeyed. He ran to the crowd, the human forest, the only hiding place in sight. It was the last time he saw her.
