The African Equation (13 page)

He shifted in the doorway, uncertain whether to come in or go on his way. He came in, his hands behind his back, his shoulders stooped like a general who has run out of tactics.

‘I don’t like people who stand up to me,’ he said.

I didn’t react.

He stopped, then said to the wall, ‘This is the first time I’ve lost control like that. I usually handle the situation more tactfully … But the Frenchman really went too far.’ He turned to me. ‘Are the French all like that? Don’t they know how to behave themselves?’ He opened his arms and slapped them against his thighs. ‘Is it any surprise I flipped? Has anybody bothered you since you’ve been here? You’re being treated properly. You’re given food and drink, and we let you sleep in peace. You won’t find better-off hostages anywhere in the world. In other places, hostages are fed to the dogs, their throats are cut like sheep … I’ve never executed a hostage. And this Frenchman dares to mock my authority. How do you expect my men to respect me if I let my prisoners humiliate me?’

He wiped his face with his forearm.

‘It’s all a matter of discipline, doctor,’ he went on. ‘And without discipline, anything can happen. Some of my men are ready to flay you alive. They don’t care about the money. What could they buy with it, where would they go? The whole country’s ablaze. All they’ve ever known is war. And war has only one face: theirs! If it was up to them, they’d tear you to pieces just for the practice.’

He looked behind him, as if fearing to be overheard, and when he spoke again it was in a conspiratorial tone.

‘Do you think I like rotting here, having to break camp purely on guesswork and constantly moving about to avoid ambushes? Do you think I enjoy it?’

He again looked over his shoulder.

‘I’d be ready to swap my weapons, all my weapons, for your scalpel,’ he continued. ‘War’s no picnic. I suffer from it just as much as a shepherd who steps on a landmine or a little girl cut down by a stray bullet. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is safe when tragedy is established as a dogma, when wrongdoing becomes logical. If you asked the greatest of fighters or the person who’s amassed the most astonishing booty what he’d like most, he’d answer quick as a flash, “A moment’s rest!” No people are made for war. Ours no more than yours. But we haven’t been given the choice. I may be a brute, but I’d love to have a cushy job, and a little woman waiting for me in the evening, and maybe even a couple of kids who’d throw their arms around my neck when I got home from work. Just my luck, instead of a school exercise book they stuck a gun in my hand and said, “It’s every man for himself.” So I do what I can …’

I simply stared at him, hoping that I wasn’t letting him
see what I was thinking. My silence irritated him, but he could live with it. He must have realised that he had gone too far with Bruno and saw me as a witness for the prosecution whom he had to make an effort to win over. From the helpless look on his face, I didn’t get the feeling I was successfully concealing the aversion I felt for him. His bestiality had shocked me, and I didn’t think, whatever mitigating circumstances he put forward in his defence, that I could ever consider him as belonging to the human race.

He mopped himself with a handkerchief, wiped the corners of his mouth, where there was a kind of milky secretion, and put the handkerchief back in his pocket. His eyes searched for something on the ceiling, then came back to me, sizing me up. He took out a packet of Camels and offered me one, which I refused. I wanted him to go, to stop polluting the cell with his drunken breath, to leave me to the semi-darkness and the silence … He wouldn’t go. He stood there in the middle of the room, every inch a hypocrite, looking at a flaking patch of wall.

He stuck a cigarette between his lips, which were as thick and hard as wood, lit it and took a puff, putting on a show of nervousness.

‘My mother died of old age at thirty-five. Our people didn’t even have enough to buy an aspirin. In fact, we didn’t even know what an aspirin looked like. When epidemics came, we weren’t any better off than our sheep … And they want us to believe that there’s justice on earth and a God in heaven?’

He took a long drag, breathed it out through his nose, and stared at the burning tip of his cigarette, apparently finding something fascinating in it. He stood there for a
while, lost in his memories, then turned to me again.

‘There is no justice or mercy,’ he said. ‘There are those who live and those who survive, and in both scenarios, the unlucky ones suffer.’

He stubbed out his cigarette under his boot as if crushing the head of a snake. Before leaving, he stopped in the doorway and turned to face me.

‘I didn’t choose violence. It was violence that recruited me. It doesn’t matter if it was of my own free will or without my knowing. We each make do as best we can. I don’t hate anybody in particular and so I don’t see why I shouldn’t treat everyone the same. To me, black or white, innocent or guilty, victim or killer, it doesn’t matter. I’m too colour blind to tell the wheat from the chaff. And besides, what’s the wheat and what’s the chaff? What’s good for some people is bad for others. Everything depends on which side you’re on. There’s no point feeling regret or remorse. What difference does it make when the bad deed has already been done? I may have had a heart when I was little, today it’s calcified. When I put my hand on my chest, all I feel in there is anger. I don’t know how to feel sorry for people because nobody ever felt sorry for me. I’m only the hand that holds my rifle, and I don’t know which of us, me or my rifle, gives the orders.’

He left the jail. Two of his henchmen came running in the bright sun, their rifles over their shoulders, and escorted him to his ‘office’. Standing in one of the ruined buildings, Joma, who had been skinning a goat, stopped what he was doing and watched the captain and his praetorian guard cross the yard. When the three men disappeared into the command post, he perched on a low wall and kicked away a skeletal dog that had approached the animal carcass.

Bruno stirred in his corner. ‘Has he gone?’

‘Yes.’

He pushed back his mosquito net and sat up. ‘What an actor! I hope you didn’t take his little performance at face value, Monsieur Krausmann. The man’s a crocodile, and you don’t soften up a crocodile by wiping away his tears. That son of a bitch would praise the devil if it suited him. He doesn’t believe a word he says. The fact is, he’s scared. It’s my mention of the International Criminal Court that’s preying on his mind.’

I didn’t reply. I admit the captain’s words had thrown me. The human misery he embodied and his unexpected about-turn had made him less abstract to me.

That evening we were treated to better food: fresh meat, pancakes and a potato stew. In our famished state, this was a banquet.

‘You see, Monsieur Krausmann?’ Bruno said. ‘No tyrant is above the law. You just have to remind him of the fact.’

Day broke. I knew that it wouldn’t bring anything more than it had already taken from me. I didn’t need to glance at the window to figure out what time it was. Here, in this anteroom to nervous breakdowns, time didn’t matter: it was just a light replacing the dark, a dull, lustreless light that flashed unpleasantly across the mind and left no trace. Day broke, and then what? As far as I was concerned, it was merely a stranger passing through, who had nothing to do with me.
Before
, day had had a meaning, a purpose. It was the work that awaited me, or a train to catch. I recognised the morning instinctively. My hand would reach out mechanically to the alarm clock and switch it off. I didn’t need it: I had a clock in my head, the alarm was merely for back-up. However sleepy I was, I would feel the dawn as a familiar presence, even in the dead of winter. I loved to sense it standing by my bedside, so tangible that I seemed to hear it breathe. That was
before
, at a time when every day had its commitments: patients to examine, fears to assuage, tasks to accomplish, plans to map out, prospects to establish. I had a status, a reputation, a schedule, lunches arranged long in advance, a watch on my wrist, a beautiful calendar on my desk; I had a mobile phone so that I could be reached anywhere, and voice mail in order not to miss
anything that might interest me; I had it all going on,
before
, I was a centre of gravity. I stepped into the world each morning surrounded by every convenience. I would find the bathroom still warm from Jessica’s shower, and that warmth would intoxicate me. I would take my shower as if setting out along a path; my day was all laid out for me. Jessica would be finishing her breakfast in the kitchen. She would give me a dazzling smile, the same smile as when we first met: an enduring smile that reinvigorated me and that I always greeted with the same delight because it was meant for me, and me alone. A slice of bread and butter in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, she would raise her lips to me and I would place a fleeting kiss on them, as befitted a happily married couple. I love you, she would say, sitting back in her chair … I love you, I would say, a tad frustrated at not finding anything more interesting to say … Is there a better formula than ‘I love you’? … Outside, Frankfurt was rolling up its sleeves. No matter if it was raining or windy, Frankfurt always worked hard. I would get in my car, make sure the rear-view mirror was properly adjusted and the windscreen spotlessly clean, and set off to win praise and personal satisfaction. The streets would be swarming with reassuring activity, the lights regulated the flow of traffic. I would switch on the radio thanks to a button on the steering wheel and let the noise of the world sweep over me: another scandal in high places; the end of a police search; the crowning of a champion; the misbehaviour of a pop star; the failure of a political initiative; a controversy about a new book; the kidnapping of a journalist in some conflict zone or other … What effect did the kidnapping of a journalist have on me? Did I even raise an eyebrow when I heard the
news? One thing was sure, I never imagined for a moment that it could happen to me. The radio! It was an essential element of driving for me. Whenever I forgot to switch it on, a good part of my morning was out of kilter. But that was
before
, when everything that now seems fundamental was simply part of a well-worn routine. How could I have believed that some things didn’t matter, that I was allowed not to care about them? … What I would have given now to get back to those simple everyday gestures, those little pleasures and concerns that gave my life its particular pattern! What I would have given now to see my letterbox again, the bills that upset me, the circulars I threw in the bin without deigning to look at what they said! I missed the esplanades, I missed the banks of the Main, I missed the noisy restaurants, I missed everything: the placid flow of the crowds on the main streets, the queues outside the cinemas, the street vendors in the squares filled with tourists, my surgery, my patients, my neighbour, my neighbour’s dog whose barking disturbed me when I was reading, my sofa that held so many wonderful memories, my can of beer sweating with coldness, my computer showing pending emails, even the constant spam I never managed to get rid of – all these fragments of life which, fitted together, made my existence an unexpected joy … But now, the fact that day broke was a pure formality. For me, it was a blank page in the proofs of my captivity, a blank page that prolonged the blank pages of yesterday and the previous days; my jigsaw puzzle was made up of pieces so identical, so anonymous, that it was impossible for me to put them in the right place. My world resembled a botched watercolour that the painter had tried angrily to erase with his bare hands. There were times when I
wondered if I wasn’t already dead and buried, with a ton of dust over my body and a void in my head. I had stopped waiting, I had stopped holding on to things; my resolve had crumbled after so many fruitless vigils; I no longer felt able to keep the vow I had made the other night not to give in.

For his part, Bruno was brooding. It helped you see more clearly, apparently: you focused on your obsession and you blotted out everything around you. It was a matter of perspective. You just had to shift the context and your viewpoint changed. Bruno no longer saw things in the same way. He had shifted the context and was starting to reduce Africa to this gang of crooks with their pinhead pupils and animal instincts, who resisted all the rules of society.

As far as Bruno was concerned, the day was a diversion, a confidence trick, a pointless effort. So he had given up. I looked at him and saw only his motionless mosquito net. He hardly stirred. The spiders’ webs displaying the corpses of midges as trophies, the lizard pretending to be a figurine pinned to the wall, the flies refusing to calm down: none of these things interested him. Bruno ignored even his wounds: he had stopped moaning with pain. I called him and he didn’t hear me. I spoke to him and he didn’t answer.
You are a goldfish in a bowl, Monsieur Krausmann,
he had said.
Your only company is a lead diver and a pirate chest opening and closing on bubbles of air
. And now he was the one shutting himself away in a bubble. Staring deep into space, Bruno was elsewhere, his face like a pale stain in the middle of his tramp’s beard. The previous day, he had spat in his soup. Out of irritation. Out of disgust, perhaps. Then he must have forgotten and had meticulously
scraped the bottom of his plate. I had thought he was over his crisis; he was only on the edge of it; an oath uttered outside, an order barked, and Bruno plunged back. I felt sad for him, and for me. We were together in the cell, but there was an ocean between us. I had loved hearing about his tribulations as a ‘wandering anchorite’, filled with humorous incidents and prophetic disappointments … What was he thinking about? His ‘forgotten trails’? Aminata? Getting himself killed in order to have done with it? When you’re brooding, you only think about one thing at a time, and from his hangdog look, he could have been thinking about anything. Renunciation is just as wearing as stubbornness. Bruno had had faith, now he had abjured it, and if he no longer knew which way to turn, it was because everything seemed to him like a trap: the danger wasn’t in staying here, the danger was inside him.

There was a sense of tension in the fort. We felt it like a migraine. It was four days since Chief Moussa had left to haggle over Hans’s head, and he hadn’t been in contact since yesterday. Captain Gerima was in a foul mood again, constantly cursing his mobile phone and muttering, ‘What the hell is he up to?’ Chief Moussa had always kept him regularly updated and now, suddenly, he was impossible to reach. At first, the captain suspected it was a problem with the network; it wasn’t. He had changed the battery several times before he realised that it wasn’t a problem with the battery either. He again started fiddling with the keys of his mobile and let it ring endlessly at the other end of the line; nobody picked up.

This loss of contact was driving him mad. He called every half-hour: nothing. Then he would emerge from his lair, in a thunderous rage, and yell at his soldiers over
trivial matters, kick the dust, swear at the top of his voice that he would beat to a pulp any bastard who dared to defy him. His men hid from him. As soon as he appeared in the doorway of his command post, they would vanish faster than ghosts. Even Joma was ill at ease whenever the captain flung his cap to the ground and stepped on it. I think our depression, Bruno’s and mine, owed a great deal to the captain’s anger. Gerima sensed that something was seriously wrong; things weren’t going as planned, and his growing anxiety exacerbated our anxiety and made the air unbreathable. Sometimes, unable to bear the captain’s cries of rage any longer, Bruno would put his hands over his ears and run to the padlocked door of our jail, intending to beg the officer to be quiet, but no sound would emerge from his lips.

At the end of the fourth day, Captain Gerima gave in to panic. He gathered his men, started up the beaten-up old lorry that had been gathering dust beneath a makeshift shelter, checked his troops’ weapons and ammunition, ordered Joma to keep an eye on the fort until he returned, climbed into a pick-up and set off in a south-easterly direction. A strange silence fell on the region. Through the window, I saw the two vehicles head out across the valley at breakneck speed. When the dust had settled, I felt as if my heart were being squeezed like a lemon. Bruno hadn’t moved from his corner. He had heard the captain’s orders bouncing off the walls, the commotion in the yard, the clatter of rifles and the rumble of engines without paying any attention to them. Now that the captain had left, I walked up and down by the door, waiting for someone to come and tell us what was going on. Only Joma, Blackmoon and three or four disorientated pirates were
left in the fort; they all looked distraught. They couldn’t grasp the turn that events were taking and felt frustrated. In the general confusion, I realised that we hadn’t been given anything to eat for twenty-four hours.

I went back to my mat and curled up.

Night arrived as abruptly as an uninvited guest, and then it was morning again. A static morning, empty and pointless. Bruno continued to hide under his mosquito net. I resented the way he had abandoned me to my solitude and the downward spiral that went with it. Having nobody to talk to any more, I feared that I too would sink into depression. There was no other way out in that kind of mental confinement. Sooner or later, you were bound to slump …

And the endless waiting reducing my living space to an obsession … Oh, the waiting, the void that sucks us in! And the incessant flies! They emerged from out of nowhere, buzzing, unbearable, invincible; they were like all the ordeals we were going through put together. I’d push them away and they’d attack again, intrepid and stubborn, like hundreds of insane leitmotivs. It was as if they had replaced the air, as if they were born from the boredom itself, as if they were the expression of the desert’s measureless ignominy. They would survive erosion and apocalypse; they would still be there when everything else was gone.

The minutes stretched like shooting pains, trying to tear me apart. There is no worse torture than waiting, especially when there is no certainty as to where it will lead. I had the impression I was fermenting. I couldn’t keep still. My bed was made of thorns. I no longer dared look through the window or go out in the yard. I was afraid of every
moment, afraid it would reach out and scratch me. What did I actually think about? I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t think I was even thinking. My brain worked only intermittently. My sense of touch had grown vague. I no longer felt things in the same way. Everything irritated me, everything bothered me. I was worried. My anxieties were too much for me. I couldn’t handle them. I was shooting off in all directions. Doubts had anaesthetised my faculties. It was as if I were looking through panes of frosted glass. And what I had dreaded happened: the great dizziness took hold of me so swiftly I had no chance to register what was happening. Vague memories hovered around me, appearing and disappearing in the gloom, like ethereal souls. I would reach out my hand to an image; it would wilt between my fingers and scatter into a multitude of spirals. It had started! Except that I had no idea where it would lead me. I was aware of every noise, of every second that passed, and at the same time I had no control over the way things developed. I was slipping surreptitiously into a parallel world. I saw everything and understood nothing. I knew Bruno wasn’t asleep, that he was only pretending; I knew I was finding it hard to regulate my breathing; I knew above all that, like a wandering spirit squatting in my body, the dizziness that had replaced me would lead me to the edge of an abyss and I would never find my way out again …

The grille squeaked, and a figure came in and put a tray down on the floor. I stood up, went out for my ‘walk’ … A hand tried to stop me, but I shook it off. I crossed the yard, heading for the gap in the rampart that looked out over the valley, that valley that seemed a place of utter perdition … ‘The prisoner’s getting away!’ a guard cried.
Someone worked the breech of a rifle; I sensed that I was in the line of fire, felt it on the back of my neck like a burn, and waited for the shot, which would be immediately followed by my flesh exploding; it would be sure to hurt, but I wouldn’t cry out … ‘The prisoner’s getting away!’ I also heard Bruno’s voice: ‘Don’t be a fool, come back!’ I was walking on shifting sands. The rampart was twenty metres away, ten metres … ‘Let him go,’ Joma ordered. ‘Get back to work, I’ll deal with him …’ I went through the gap, tumbled down a steep path, and walked straight ahead, across the valley. The burning stones spurred the soles of my shoes. I walked. Without turning round. The sun beat down, cascaded over my shoulders like lava. The sweat steamed on my face, blinding me. I walked, walked … The soles of my shoes were nothing but molten lead; there was not a single tree to give me shade. The mouth of hell was breathing into my throat, setting my lungs on fire, turning my head into a brazier; I started to sway, but didn’t stop. I tried to speed up, but my legs wouldn’t follow me; I felt as if I were pulling a rock. After a few kilometres, my last strength abandoned me. I was a shadow swept along by its own laboured breathing. A jeep came up behind me and drew level. All I could see was its bonnet bumping along on my right. When I stumbled, it overtook me by a length and had to slow down to be level with me again. Joma was at the wheel. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he said. ‘You aren’t in Trafalgar Square, you’re in the desert. There are no tempting shop windows around here, no street performers in the square, no pigeons to come and eat out of your hand …’ I dragged myself on, hallucinating, gasping for breath, but determined. ‘You’re not going anywhere, old man. In front of you, and behind
you, there’s only madness and death. Sooner or later you’re going to pass out, and I’ll be forced to tie you to the back of the jeep and take you back to the starting post.’ Joma didn’t try to bar my way; he drove slowly by my side, amused and curious to see just how long I could stay upright.