Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  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.

  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 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?
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  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.

  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.”