Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder [Kidder, Tracy]
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-851-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-30T16:00:00+00:00


In his conscious mind, Deo was aware of being afraid, not of dying, but of dying the way his uncle the doctor had, or the family in the house in Bugendena. Not that he wanted to die. Not that he wanted desperately to live. Survival simply had its own momentum. And to survive, it was clear, he had to get out of Rwanda.

Burundi lay to the south, and south was to the left of the wet, gray dawn. He moved mostly by night and only cautiously during the day, running when he thought he saw or heard another person or when it seemed as if the drums and whistles of the militia were closing in. He struggled up hills and all but rolled down them, unable to brake. Sometimes he saw other people from a distance. Usually they were running along the same trail or skirting the same hillside as he was. He would wait until they were out of sight and then wait a little longer, remembering stories he’d heard, in his last refugee camp, of militiamen pretending to flee so as to lure Tutsis out of hiding.

When he thought, it was of things like birds. Watching them from some hiding place—flocks coming and going from some spot nearby, a sure sign of a killing site—he’d wish for reincarnation as a bird. He’d study a fly on a leaf and think, “How lucky you are not to be a human being.” Back on the first part of his journey, Deo had wept at the sight of corpses. Now when he found himself hiding near bodies, he was more likely to feel laughter coming up, and he would sit there with his chest heaving, trying not to laugh out loud and give his position away.

He had been trying to keep his body clean, at least a little, by washing in streams when he could. In the camps, he had made himself rub his teeth and clean between them with twigs of eucalyptus. Nevertheless, a back tooth had become infected and had come loose. It took some time and all the hand strength he could muster to yank it out.

From the time when he had gone with friends to visit Butare, he knew that if he headed a little east of south he would pick up the paved road to the Burundian border, the road that ran on to Bujumbura. He aimed in that direction. So it wasn’t entirely by luck that after many days he saw headlights through the trees. From then on, he followed the road at night, keeping a safe distance from it, as he had followed roads when he’d been fleeing Burundi. There was a lot of traffic, and there were roadblocks, and he could hear the joyous singing of the militiamen, almost as terrible as the actual killing it euphemistically described. More terrible, maybe. The songs and chants made it seem as if in the world there were only insanity and the silence of corpses. When



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