The African Equation (15 page)

Joma came down the hill and walked around the vehicle, his chin between his thumb and index finger, thinking. When he noticed that we were watching him, he gave us a V-sign and climbed back up onto the ridge.

‘I think our Goliath is lost,’ Bruno said to me.

‘I think so, too. We’ve been this way already. See that rock over there that looks like a jar with handles? I’m sure I saw it less than two hours ago.’

‘That’s right. We came past here in the opposite direction.’

Joma came down from the ridge again, spread an old map on the bonnet of the pick-up and started looking for points of reference. After this fruitless exercise, he hit the bonnet in annoyance.

We drove back the way we had come for dozens of kilometres until we reached a massive cliff looking down on a plain bordered by scrub. In the distance, a herd of antelopes was fleeing from a predator. Joma went and stood at the edge of the precipice, took out his map and again started looking for landmarks. An anthracite foothill to the south was bothering him. Joma checked the coordinates on the map, compared them with the landscape in front of him, and orientated himself with the help of a compass. His features relaxed, and we realised that he knew where he was now.

We stopped in the shade of a solitary acacia. The sun was starting to set. Blackmoon untied us so that we could eat the slices of dried meat he gave us in brown paper and went and sat down halfway between the pick-up, where Joma was, and us.

‘Playing hard to get or what?’ Joma shouted to him. ‘Come over here.’

Blackmoon stood up reluctantly and joined his chief, who handed him a can of food and a metal canteen.

‘What’s the matter?’

Blackmoon shrugged.

‘You usually ramble on even when you have nothing to say.’

Blackmoon lifted the canteen to his mouth in order not to reply. Joma took out a large knife, cut a piece from his slice of dried meat and bit into it without taking his eyes off his subordinate. He started talking to him in a patois that Bruno translated for me simultaneously.

‘Why don’t you say anything?’

‘Do I have to?’

‘I don’t like your silence, Chaolo. Should I take it that you’re angry with me about something but you don’t dare lance the boil?’

‘What boil?’

‘Precisely. What’s the problem?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘No kidding!’

Blackmoon turned away in order not to have to suffer Joma’s inquisitive gaze. But he knew that Joma was waiting for an explanation and that he wouldn’t give up until he got it.

‘Well?’ Joma insisted.

‘You won’t listen to me anyway.’

‘I’m not deaf.’

‘No, I don’t want to get into an argument with you.’

‘So it’s as bad as that, is it?’

‘Please, Joma, just drop it. I’m not in the mood.’

‘Just try. I’m not going to eat you.’

Blackmoon shook his head. ‘You’re going to get upset, and then you’ll make my head spin with your theories.’

‘Are you going to come out with it, or what?’ Joma roared, spattering saliva from his mouth.

‘You see? I haven’t said anything yet, and you’re already making a fuss.’

Joma put his meal down on the ground and looked his subordinate up and down, his cheekbones throbbing with anger. ‘I’m listening …’

Blackmoon hunched his shoulders and breathed in and out like a boxer on his stool after a tough round. He raised his eyes to his chief, lowered them again, then lifted them as if lifting a burden. Having summoned both his breath and his courage, he said, ‘You’re the teacher I always dreamt of having, Joma. I wasn’t your boy, I was your pupil. But I don’t like the teaching you’ve forced on me.’

‘Can’t you be a bit more precise?’

‘I’ve never refused you anything, Joma. I love you more than my father and my mother. I left my family for you, my village, everything …’

‘Get to the point, please.’

‘Let them go!’

The blade of a guillotine couldn’t have cut short the debate with such startling abruptness. Joma almost choked. Stunned by Blackmoon’s words, he blinked several times to make sure he had heard correctly. Throwing a rapid
glance in our direction, he realised that we had also heard the boy’s suggestion; he grabbed Blackmoon by the neck and pulled him close.

‘What are you talking about?’

Blackmoon started by loosening the fingers around his neck. Calmly. Then he mopped his forehead with his
cheche
and returned Joma’s fiery gaze.

‘I don’t want to raise my hand to anybody any more, Joma. I’ve had enough. I want to go home. All this talk of revolution and justice and God knows what else doesn’t grab me any more. I don’t believe in any of it. For years now, we’ve been running all over the place, and I still don’t see the end of the tunnel. What’s changed since we started playing at being rebels? Not a damned thing. And you know why? Because there’s nothing to change. The world is what it is, and none of us can change it because we aren’t God.’

Joma was dumbfounded. After a long silence, he said, ‘You’re right, boy. You should have kept your mouth shut …’

We set off again as soon as the meal was over. It was Joma himself who tied our hands behind our backs, as if he didn’t trust Blackmoon. Of course, he had not lingered too long over his subordinate’s remarks. As far as he was concerned, they were just idle words spoken by a young boy overwhelmed by the turn that events were taking. All the same, it had made him slightly ill at ease. During the ride, he didn’t say another word to Blackmoon, but kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

Late that afternoon, a puncture almost catapulted us into a rock. The pick-up skidded, and Joma’s aggressive attempt to control it sent it flying over several metres. Bruno and I were almost thrown out.

Joma made us get down and ordered Blackmoon to bring him the spare wheel and the jack. After taking off his hunting vest, he crouched to loosen the wheel nuts. He removed the flat tyre, replaced it, and worked the jack. Just as he was putting the nuts back on, Blackmoon took his sabre and cut through the ropes tying Bruno and me. This gesture both surprised and terrified us. It was obvious that things were about to go downhill. Blackmoon, though, looked calm and implacable. He didn’t seem to realise the significance of his act, nor did he appear to care about the consequences.

‘It isn’t meal time yet,’ Joma yelled. ‘Tie these idiots up again, and be quick about it.’

Blackmoon interposed himself between Joma and us, impassive. ‘Let them go and let’s go home,’ he said.

Joma threw the damaged tyre in the back of the pick-up, lifted the jack and put it away in an iron case soldered to the running board, wiped his grease-stained hands on a cloth and put on his vest. In all this time, he hadn’t looked at us once.

‘Stop this nonsense, Chaolo.’

‘Why won’t you listen to me?’

‘Chaolo, you’re going too far this time,’ Joma said slowly, as if telling off a naughty child.

‘These men haven’t done anything to us.’

‘Chaolo …’

Blackmoon signalled to us to leave. Neither Bruno nor I
moved. Leave where? Leave how? We were in the middle of nowhere, our two kidnappers had fallen out, and it looked as though the situation could only end badly for us. A cold shiver went down my back. Bruno was ashen. His eyes shone with terror.

‘You taught me a whole lot of theories,’ Blackmoon said in a flat tone. ‘You told me why some things were right, and others weren’t, and I drank in your words like holy water. But you’re doing the exact opposite of what you told me, Joma. You had a good head on your shoulders when I met you, and you’ve turned bad. You lash out and you yell, and you drive me a little crazier every day. I thought war was crap, and that was what made people such pains in the arse. And I said it would all sort itself out in the end, and that one of these days when we’d dealt with the things that bothered us, we’d go home. Except that you don’t seem to want to go back to the village or become a reasonable person again, the way you were before. Do you remember? We were all right before. We didn’t ask for the moon, and we were content with simple things. Don’t you see? I miss those simple things now.’

‘Chaolo!’

‘You were unlucky, and I understand. I understand it isn’t easy to stay good after what happened to you, but we’ve gone too far. And I don’t want to follow you any more, Joma. Because I don’t know where you’re taking me. When I look behind me, I don’t see any trace of what we were, you and I. I’m not proud of the path we’ve taken. Even your books don’t smell good any more … I’ve listened to you all my life. Now you have to listen to me. I don’t have big words to persuade you, I don’t have your
education, but I want you to know that my affection for you is the same as ever and it’s because I still have it that I no longer agree with you.’

‘That’s enough now.’

‘What happened to Fatamou wasn’t because of these two men.’

Joma let out an unusually savage cry and charged at the boy. Not expecting such a lightning reaction, Blackmoon took the full force of his chief’s fist in the face. The force of the blow sent him flying; he fell on his back, then half raised himself, grimacing in terrible pain, unable to breathe. In a fraction of a second, his face crumpled and became waxen. Dazed, he groped for his glasses, found them broken in half, picked them up unsteadily and showed them to Joma with sad eyes.

‘Look what you did to my glasses, Joma.’

‘I forbid you to talk about my private life.’

Blackmoon stared at his glasses as if contemplating a catastrophe.

‘Get up!’ Joma screamed. ‘And tie these dogs up for me!’

Blackmoon tried to raise himself, but none of his muscles responded. The expression on his face was abnormal. It was as if his features had melted, as if the light in his eyes were going out. His mouth filled with blood, which began dangling from his chin in long strands. Suddenly, a red patch appeared beneath his side and started to spread over the ground. Only then did Joma realise the gravity of the situation. He ran to Blackmoon. No sooner had he touched him than the boy let out an inhuman groan. Turning him over on his side, Joma realised that, in falling back, his protégé had impaled himself on his sabre.

‘Oh, Lord,’ he cried out, ‘what is all this?’

He clasped the boy to him, talked to him to keep him awake, begged him to hold on. But he soon realised that it was pointless. Overcome with remorse and grief, Joma turned to the sky and implored it, all the while shaking the frail body, which was draining of its blood in wild spasms … and there, before our very eyes, the brute who had tried to be as devoid of compassion as a crushing machine sank heavily to the ground and began sobbing like a little child.

Blackmoon stared at us over his chief’s shoulder then, slowly, his eyes rolled back and his neck went limp. He had given up the ghost.

Joma continued to clasp the boy to him, cradling him. His sobs spread across the plain, bounced off the rocks, whirled in the air …

Bruno ran to the pick-up and came back with the rifle that had been hanging inside the cab. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but this is where we part company.’

Tears streaming down his cheeks, Joma laid the boy with infinite care on the ground and turned to us.

‘Please don’t force me to shoot,’ Bruno went on. ‘Take what you need from the truck and let us go.’

Joma stood up, wiping his eyes with his wrist. He had never seemed so huge to me. His nostrils were quivering with a hatred that had reached its peak. Bruno took a step back. He was afraid, but refused to panic.

‘Go on, shoot!’ Joma said. ‘What are you waiting for? Show me what you have in your belly, you worm. Show some guts, damn it! Shoot!’

‘I’ve never hurt anyone, Joma. Let us go.’

‘What’s stopping you? The arms are on your side now.’

He put his hand on his belt, took out his pistol and threw it on the ground. Then he opened his arms wide and stood directly in front of Bruno.

‘But make sure you don’t miss, because I certainly wouldn’t.’

He took one step forward, two steps, three … Bruno tried to retreat, but Joma soon caught up with him. I stood there, petrified, completely overwhelmed. Although Bruno was in an agony of indecision, I could neither help him nor join him. Joma passed right by me, but didn’t even see me: he had eyes only for the Frenchman. Bruno was paralysed; Joma was only two metres from him, and no shot rang out. Suddenly, in a flash, Joma swept the rifle away with one hand and with the other grabbed Bruno by the throat. Hanging at the end of Joma’s arm, Bruno began pedalling desperately in the air. He was pushed to the ground. Joma squeezed with all his might, pressed with all his weight on Bruno’s neck. The Frenchman struggled, twisted, struck out, his heels scrabbling in the dust. For a moment, his eyes met mine, and in them I saw horror in its purest form. Soon, his fists folded over his chest, defeated, and a damp patch appeared on his trousers. Bruno was dying; Joma knew it and was waiting to gather his soul like fruit … A shot rang out! A thunderbolt from heaven couldn’t have unleashed such a noise. It shook me from head to foot. For several seconds, I stood there in a daze. Joma was knocked sideways by the impact. Incredulous at first, he let go of Bruno’s throat and lifted his hand to his own neck. When he saw the blood spurting between his fingers, he turned to me, looked me up and down with a strange kind of joy and, as his mouth filled with blood, said, ‘I’m proud of you. Now, you’re a real African.’

He collapsed onto his side, his eyes glazed and his features frozen for ever.

It was only then that I discovered a pistol in my hand.

I don’t remember what happened next.

All I know is that Bruno and I got in the pick-up and drove and drove until the night absorbed us like blotting paper.

Day dawned. Like a pointless prayer over a deaf, wretched and naked desert. A few rocks lay crumbling in the dust, like flotsam washed up by a sea that had vanished thousands of years ago. Here and there, garlanded with poisonous colocynths, thin strips of undergrowth indicated the outlines of what had once been river banks, where now solitary acacias stood like crosses. And that was all. There was nothing else you might hope to see: no caravans, no huts, not the slightest trace of a bivouac … There’s something so perverse about the desert. It’s a code, a trap set for you, a treacherous maze where even the boldest are doomed to failure, where the faint-hearted lose themselves among the mirages, where no patron saint would respond to your call for fear of appearing ridiculous. It’s a place of prayers that go unheard, a
Via Dolorosa
that never stops expanding, where stubbornness turns to obsession and faith to madness.
Here lies the vanity of all things in this world
, the bare stones and endless vistas seem to say. For here, everything turns back to dust, the taciturn mountains and the luxuriant forests, the lost paradises and the failed empires, even the noisy reign of men … Here, in this godforsaken vastness, tornados come to abdicate and the winds die empty-handed like waves on remote beaches,
since only the inexorable course of ages is certain and invincible. Far, far in the distance, where the earth slopes into roundness, the horizon is pale and motionless, as if the night has kept it spellbound until morning … I too hadn’t slept a wink all night. Sitting paralysed on my seat in the cab. My head reverberating with gunshots. As wretched as the desert. How could I lay claim to a modicum of sleep when I hadn’t yet grasped what I had done? I had tried to reconstruct mentally what had happened and I had managed only to become even more confused. How had Joma’s pistol ended up in my hand? I hadn’t the faintest idea. My subconscious had quite simply blocked out the period of time between Bruno on the verge of dying and the shot; a blank had descended in the middle of my memories and remained suspended above the abyss into which my being had rushed. I, Dr Kurt Krausmann, who had never touched a gun in my life, had killed a man! What had driven me to such an extreme didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that I had killed a man, and I would have to live with it for the rest of my life. Bruno had tried to reason with me for much of the night. His words hadn’t reached me; I couldn’t assimilate them. He had shown me the blackish bruises on his neck and sworn that if I hadn’t intervened, he would be dead, and so would I. But that damned shot resonated endlessly in me like a wrecking ball smashing into a wall! I saw only Joma’s bulging eyes and the blood trickling from his mouth. How many times had I got out of the pick-up to throw up? My throat was sore from the vomit, and my stomach felt as if it had been turned inside out. Bruno swore he would have done the same, that there was nothing else I could have done. Of course there was nothing else I could have done, but I had
killed a man and I didn’t know how to live with a tragedy to which I had thought myself culturally alien.

Wrapped in a sheet, I got out of the cab. I shivered in spite of the heat. Electric shocks went through my joints. I hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, and all the vomiting had wrung out my insides. The place we had ended up in was hardly full of promise. It was an anonymous spot, bristling with skeletal hills, with a drab mist as a backdrop. Bruno was crouching by a wood fire, his eyes on a tiny coffee pot with a clanking lid. Clad in a brown tracksuit that was too big for his thin body – he must have found it in the duffle bag – he was poking the flames with a branch. He turned to me and said good morning in a toneless voice. I sat down on a mound of sand near the fire. A monitor lizard appeared at the top of a dune, looked at us suspiciously for a moment or two, then scurried away. Thin streaks on the ground indicated that a snake had recently passed that way. Two vultures circled in the sky, their piercing cries like darts from a blowpipe. The animal world wouldn’t let go of us, it was following our every move, treacherous and implacable.

Bruno handed me a cast-iron cup and some rusks. The coffee was burning hot. It tasted good. I didn’t touch the rusks.

‘How do you feel?’ Bruno asked, placing his hand on his bruised throat.

I didn’t reply.

Bruno finished his coffee and went to the pick-up. He took out Joma’s map and spread it on the bonnet, but couldn’t figure out our position. He told me we had a hundred litres of fuel in the jerry cans, about thirty litres of drinking water, and enough food for a week. As he
hadn’t the slightest idea where we were, he suggested we stay here to give us time to think about what to do with this sudden, unexpected freedom of ours. The site we were occupying gave us a clear 360-degree view of the plain. If a vehicle or a camel driver appeared anywhere in the vicinity, we’d be able to identify it or him with the help of the binoculars and thus avoid unpleasant encounters. Someone might just come along who could lead us out of this labyrinth of rocks and sand.

I had no objection to Bruno’s suggestion. To be honest, I was in far too confused a state to think of anything better.

Bruno began by making an inventory of the things we were carrying in the back of the pick-up. In the duffle bag, we found two military uniforms, a pair of shoes, some vests, a
cheche
, half a dozen full Kalashnikov magazines tied together in pairs with sticking plaster, some
wide-ranging
books on European poetry, a brand-new pair of boxer shorts, sports socks and a pile of red scarves in their original wrapping. In the rucksacks, Joma had thrown canned food, pans, packets of bread and rusks, dried meat, cases of ammunition, defensive grenades, candles, boxes of matches, an oil stove, a sachet of coffee, some powdered sugar and a pocket torch. I looked for my watch, my ring and the other objects taken from me on the boat, but didn’t find them. Bruno grabbed the satchel and opened it by forcing a small padlock. Inside, along with all kinds of papers, including several sheets in tortuous handwriting with lots of crossings out, we found a passport belonging to Joma, an indecipherable identity card, press cuttings carefully sorted into plastic wallets, a small bundle of banknotes, a blurry wedding photograph … and a book that left us stunned. It was a slim volume of poems, the
cover of which would have been utterly unremarkable if Joma’s face hadn’t been plastered all over it.

The title of the book and the name of the author were underlined in red:

Black Moon

by Joma Baba-Sy

‘Wow!’ Bruno said.

I grabbed the book from him. The back cover blurb read:
A tailor by profession, Joma Baba-Sy is also a maker of verses and a tormented soul whose impassioned tirades call on Africa to awaken.
Black Moon
is his first book, but it already establishes him as a genuine poet who is sure to make his mark on the literature of our continent. Joma Baba-Sy has been awarded the National Prize for Letters, the Léopold Senghor Prize and the Trophy for Best Committed Poetry
.

‘That brute was a poet,’ Bruno said, almost breathlessly.

Again, my limbs froze. I pulled my sheet around me and went and lay down on the dune, facing the sun. I wanted to look at the desert without seeing it, to be silent and think of nothing.

The sun had chased away the mist, and you could see to infinity. The few sticky clouds that had ventured into the sky had disintegrated, leaving in their wake only a stringy, fragile shroud. We had worn our eyes out looking through the binoculars, searching for the smallest gleam; sometimes, we thought we saw a convoy or a group of nomads, but they were only mirages. Late in the morning, we had witnessed a terrible attack by three jackals on a
stray dog. The poor, solitary beast had fought with real valour, but its attackers, more cunning than hungry, had torn it to pieces in the end. Once their dirty work was over, they had gone off along a river bed and disappeared.

We ate, drank coffee, and went back to our observation posts. Laying siege to the desert is a monotonous task … By late afternoon, I was starting to feel restless. Bruno admitted that waiting for a miracle wasn’t such a good idea after all, and we set out in a northerly direction. What a relief when, after an hour’s drive, we spotted a collection of huts! All at once, there was light at the end of our tunnel. Almost ecstatic with excitement, Bruno pulled up. He rubbed his eyes and only got out of the truck once he was sure he wasn’t hallucinating. I joined him on a hillock, impatient to get the binoculars from him.

‘There’s someone there,’ he exclaimed, stretching his arm out towards the village.

A figure was walking up and down the village square, a dog at its heels, going from one hut to another and bending to pick things up. It was a man. He was alone. The village seemed uninhabited. Bruno took back the binoculars and swept every corner, alert to a trap. But there was nothing to alarm us. The man was calmly going about his business. We decided to try our luck.

As we approached the huts, we noticed forms lying on the ground. The man didn’t seem to notice the roar of the truck, and continued to pick things up without paying any attention to us. The doors of the huts were wide open, but nothing moved inside. No women or children. The forms lying in the dust were animals, and they didn’t move. There were two donkeys in the square, some goats in the middle of an enclosure, a dromedary lying in its trough,
and here and there some dogs with twisted bodies. All of these animals were dead.

‘Something bad happened here,’ Bruno said.

The man was gathering branches and leaves in the square. His arms were laden with bundles of sticks. He hadn’t yet noticed us, in spite of the noise of our vehicle; maybe he was deliberately ignoring us. His dog, which had run away when it heard us arrive, started back towards its master, although without going too close, ready to scuttle away again. It made a curious impression on me, with its ears down and its tail between its hind legs: it seemed to be in a state of shock.

We parked the pick-up at the entrance to the village and got out, our senses on the alert. The animals were lying in pools of blood. There were bloodstains everywhere, some indicating where bodies had been dragged. Bullet cartridges glittered amid the stones. As slowly as a sleepwalker, the man went over to one of the huts, laid his burden down and came back to get the pieces of wood that marked off the enclosure where the goats had been killed. Bruno said something to him in an African dialect, but the man didn’t hear him. He was a doddery old fellow with a stooped back and white hair, as thin and dry as a nail. His face was chiselled, with hollow cheeks that made the bones stand out. His absent gaze seemed to be swallowed up by the curdled white of his shaded eyes.

A terrible buzzing came from the hut. Human corpses lay inside it, besieged by thousands of frenzied flies. You could see arms and legs, the bodies of women and children heaped one on top of the other, some naked and displaying open wounds. Paralysed by the sight, we were immediately overcome by the terrible stench of putrefaction, a stench
the scarves over our faces were unable to keep at bay.

‘I’ve seen lots of massacres in my life,’ Bruno said with a mixture of sorrow and disgust, ‘and every time it’s made me sick.’

‘Do you think it was Gerima’s men?’

‘I don’t see any tyre marks on the ground.’ He pointed to horse droppings and countless hoof prints in the sand. ‘These poor devils were attacked by horsemen. There are all kinds of criminal gangs operating like this. They decimate isolated families who are unfortunate enough to be in their path.’

‘I don’t understand what goes on in these monsters’ minds.’

‘A goldfish can’t bring the complexity of the ocean back to the tranquillity of its bowl, Dr Krausmann,’ Bruno said with a hint of reproach.

‘I don’t live on another planet,’ I retorted, exasperated that he could still come out with these insinuations after all I had been through.

‘Neither does a goldfish. But what does it know about storms? The world has become colour blind. On both sides, everything is either black or white, and nobody cares to put things into perspective. Good and evil are ancient history. These days, it’s a matter of predators and prey. The predators are obsessed with extending their living space, the prey with their survival.’

‘You’ve been too long in Africa, Bruno.’

‘What is Africa, or Asia or America?’ he said in disgust. ‘It’s all the same. Whether you call it a brothel or a whorehouse, it’s the soul that’s in it that determines its vocation. Whether you say “it smells bad” or “it stinks” doesn’t change the air around you. The South Pole is only
the North Pole lying flat on its back, and the West is only the East on the other side of the street. And do you know why, Monsieur Krausmann? Because there are no more shades of grey. And when there are no more shades of grey, anybody can rationalise anything, even the worst atrocity.’

Evening was starting to fall. The old man had finished his wood gathering, still walking back and forth in front of us, still ignoring us. Only once had he raised his hand, stopping Bruno dead in his tracks as he went to help him, and waited for the Frenchman to step back before continuing to gather branches; not once did he so much as glance at us. We had now been waiting there for half an hour, hoping he would pay us a moment’s attention. We needed to know where we were, if there was a town not too far from here, or a barracks, or anybody who could take charge of us. Bruno had tried to talk to the old man, taking care not to upset him, but it was as if he had been addressing a djinn, as if they walked right through each other like shadows. Was the old man blind and deaf? No, he could see and hear, he was simply refusing to talk to us. He stood there, dignified, outside the hut. From the way his lips were moving, we realised he was praying. Next, he grabbed a can of petrol that stood at his feet, poured its contents over the lifeless bodies, sprinkled the branches and the walls, struck a match and threw it into the hut. A blue flame spread over the bundles of wood, making first the foliage, then the straw flare up, and becoming thicker as it reached the walls. Soon, acrid smoke was escaping through the cracks in the roof while the crackling grew louder. The old man watched the fire spread its greedy tentacles, twist the branches in its flames, then, like a
whirlwind, engulf the bodies and the few pieces of makeshift furniture surrounding them.