The African Equation (17 page)

‘They came for me early in the morning. They had to drag me because I couldn’t stay upright. I wanted to scream, to struggle, but I just couldn’t react. I was shaking like a leaf when they tied me to the post. It was only when I finally looked up and saw the firing squad that I realised how alone I was in the world. The whole universe had been reduced to the barrel of a rifle. The horror of it! My blood was beating louder than war drums in my temples. And it was so silent in that shooting gallery you could have heard a match being struck anywhere for miles around …’

‘I can imagine.’

‘You can’t. It’s beyond imagination. When the sergeant cried, “Take aim!” I ejaculated. Without an erection. And when he cried “Fire!” I shit myself. I didn’t hear the shots, but I really felt the bullets go through me, pulverising my ribcage, bursting open my innards. I collapsed in slow motion. I think it took me an eternity to reach the ground. I lay there in the dust, shattered, looking up at the pale sky. I didn’t feel any pain. It was as if I was gently drifting away like a puff of smoke. And just as I was about to give up the ghost, the sergeant burst out laughing. Then the firing squad also started laughing. Next, the rest of the platoon came out from behind the embankment, splitting
their sides and slapping their thighs … The sergeant helped me to my feet. He told me he’d never laughed so much in his life.’

‘It was a fake execution.’

‘That’s right, a fake execution! Just a bit of fun for soldiers stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do and bored out of their minds. “No hard feelings,” the sergeant said, patting me on the back. He gave me a packet of smuggled cigarettes by way of compensation and a kick up the backside to make sure I got out of his sight as quickly as possible …’

‘I hope you took legal action.’

‘Oh, of course,’ he said, ironically, getting to his feet. ‘Let’s go!’

‘No way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not moving from here. I don’t know where we are and I’m fed up with it. You can go if you like. But I’m staying here until fate has pity on me. One way or another.’

My decision was stupid, but I stood by it. What I said, I felt and demanded. I was at the end of my tether. It was like being on the edge of a precipice; in front was only the abyss, a sheer drop and the dreadful feeling that I was giving up. What mattered and what didn’t? The neurotic search for an unlikely salvation, or renunciation? I could no longer stand blaming myself. Bruno understood that I was going through a bad patch and was in no mood to be dissuaded. He didn’t insist, but went back to the pick-up to sort through the bags. He filled the two rucksacks with the bare essentials, placed them on a clump of grass along with the two canteens of drinking water and the automatic
rifle, crouched in the shade of a shrub and took his head in both hands.

Evening found us still in our separate spaces: I at my improvised lookout post watching the sun bleed itself dry, Bruno leaning back against his shrub. When the darkness reached my thoughts, I went back to the pickup, grabbed the jerry cans, poured petrol over the vehicle, struck a match and threw it on the bodywork. A swift flame spread through the cab and surged over the bonnet. Bruno shook his head sadly. He thought I’d gone mad. I hadn’t gone mad. I was aware how stupid my gesture must seem, but it was an act I’d thought through: I wanted to attract someone’s attention to us, and I didn’t care if that someone was a nomad or a bandit. I wasn’t afraid of being taken hostage again; the only thing I knew for sure was that I had no desire to wander in that damned desert until I died of thirst and exhaustion; I refused to end up a heap of anonymous bones surrounded by the carcasses of long-dead animals polished clean by successive sandstorms.

Day dawned. All that was left of the pick-up was a heap of charred, smoking scrap iron licked in places by the odd flickering flame. We hadn’t slept a wink, on the alert for a figure or a shadow or a noise. Nobody had come, no military patrol, no marauding gang, no camel driver, no djinn. Bruno asked me if I was pleased with my little performance and if I had recovered enough to follow him. I put one of the rucksacks on my back, draped a canteen across my shoulder and set off after him.

We walked all morning in the fierce sun, spent the afternoon in the shade of a rock, and in the evening resumed our trek until late in the night. When I took off my shoes, scraps of skin remained stuck to them. I slept until midday.

After two days of wandering, we collapsed in the middle of a stretch of scrub. We had used up half our reserves of water and our blistered shoulders could no longer bear any load. Bruno, who seemed to be holding out better than I was, suggested that I let him go off on his own to look for help. The state of my feet had slowed our progress, and the blisters were likely to become infected if left untreated. I promised him I’d be much better after a good night’s sleep.

We had dinner and sank into the arms of Morpheus without even realising it.

A baby was crying as day dawned. I thought I was dreaming, but Bruno had heard it too. He was sitting up, eyes wide, trying to see where the wailing was coming from. He put a finger to his lips, ordering me to keep quiet, and grabbed his rifle. The crying was coming from a
thalweg
. We walked around a low wall of undergrowth and slid along a slope, unleashing tiny avalanches of stones as we passed. A woman was crouching in a copse, cradling a baby that lay snuggled against her chest. Suddenly, she turned and saw us just above her. At the sight of the rifle, she hugged her child so tightly to her she could easily have suffocated it. Bruno made a gesture with his hand to reassure her, but she was so terrified by the weapon she didn’t even see it. He said something to her in a local language. She didn’t seem to understand. I told
Bruno to lower his rifle. At that moment, ragged, ghostlike figures began appearing. Within a few minutes, we were surrounded by about forty women, children and men who had been sleeping in the long grass; our intrusion had woken them and, one after the other, they emerged from their hiding place, unsure whether they should surrender or run. Bruno put his rifle down on the ground and raised his arm in a gesture of appeasement. ‘We don’t wish you any harm,’ he said. They stared at us, more concerned by our physical degradation than by the weapon on the ground. Taking us for devils, the children hid behind their mothers’ ragged skirts. There was a movement at the back of the group, and they stood aside to let a white woman through. She was a sturdy woman in her fifties, as blonde as a haystack, and it was as if providence, with a click of its fingers, had restored my people to me. I would gladly have thrown myself into her arms if it hadn’t been for the fact that the expression on her face was one of suspicion and hostility.

‘Who are you?’ she asked in English, with a strong Scandinavian accent. ‘And what do you want with us?’

‘We’re lost,’ Bruno said. ‘We’ve been drifting across the desert for days now.’

‘If that’s the case, why are you armed?’

‘We were taken hostage, and we escaped. We have no idea where we are and we don’t know where to go.’ He held out his hand and let it hang in mid-air. ‘My name’s Bruno, I’m an anthropologist, and this is Dr Krausmann.’

The woman looked us up and down, then said through clenched teeth, ‘Lotta Pedersen, gynaecologist.’

She told her companions to go back to their places and motioned with her head for us to follow her. She led us
over to where another, younger white woman was sleeping beneath a vault of branches. This woman, who seemed to be in charge of the group, greeted us with a degree of respect. ‘I’m Dr Elena Juárez,’ she said, shaking our hands. Three Africans joined us, two of them in white coats with red crosses on the breast pockets. She introduced them. The youngest was Dr Orfane. He was slim and rather handsome; his tin-framed glasses made him look like a matinee idol. The other two, Omar and Samuel, both in their early thirties, were nurses.

Bruno briefly told them about our captivity, and about the way we had evaded our kidnappers before our stolen pick-up gave out on us. He omitted the tragic episode of Joma. In her turn, Dr Elena Juárez told us how, while her group was conducting a vaccination campaign, she had found herself at the head of an army of refugees. Having dropped Lotta Pedersen and Dr Orfane in a tribal village, she had left with the two male nurses to make a list of the patients in a neighbouring hamlet. On the way, their Land Rover had been put out of action by an antipersonnel mine. Then they had been pursued by armed men across the scrub and only owed their salvation to the fact that night had fallen and their driver, Jibreel, had such a good sense of direction. When they got back to the tribal village, they had found the families in a state of shock. A rebel attack was believed imminent. They had to leave quickly. So it was that the medical group now found itself, after almost a week on the road, stuck with forty fugitives. I asked Dr Juárez if they at least knew where they were going; she assured me that the group had an excellent guide, in the person of the driver, and that in three or four days, barring
any unforeseen incidents, they would reach their camp, a reception centre run by the Red Cross.

‘There were twenty-eight of us at first,’ Dr Juárez said. ‘Other fleeing families have joined us on the way. Unfortunately, two old women died of exhaustion yesterday.’

A man whose eyes had rolled back jumped out in front of us. He was wearing a city suit that had seen better days, the jacket open to reveal a bare, hollow stomach. Wagging his finger, he called heaven to be his witness and declaimed in a sepulchral voice, ‘They came at dawn. They burnt down our huts, killed our goats, our donkeys and our dogs, then rounded us up in the square and started killing us, the fathers in front of their children, the babies in their mothers’ arms. If the devil had been there that day, he would have taken to his heels.’

‘It’s all right, Mr Obeid,’ Dr Juárez said, signalling to one of the nurses.

The nurse took the man to one side, put an arm around his shoulders and walked him away, talking to him softly. Dr Juárez explained that the man was a teacher, the only survivor of a massacre that had wiped out his family, and that he intoned his complaint from morning to night, blaming the shrubs and the stones.

‘We have other survivors among us, and I’m afraid their traumas are irreversible,’ Dr Orfane said. ‘What’s your speciality, Dr Krausmann?’

‘General medicine.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ Dr Juárez said, and ordered the group to break camp.

Bruno and I went back to look for our rucksacks, which
we had left on the other side of the
thalweg
. When we returned, Lotta asked us to hand over the rifle to Jibreel, a tall, well-built man in a turban. Relieved, Bruno did as he was told. We set off, Dr Juárez and the guide in front, Lotta and Dr Orfane in the middle, and the two nurses bringing up the rear. Bruno and I trotted behind a ragged young man dragging a cart on which an old, weary-eyed woman lay – it wasn’t exactly a cart, more a clever assembly of wooden planks fitted with arms from a barrow and mounted on two moped wheels. The rims of the wheels scraped on the stones, making the cart sway. The old woman was very slight, like a mummy removed from its sarcophagus. Her wasted body shuddered each time there was a jolt. It was a pitiful, tragic sight. The young man was pulling his cart with unflinching energy, at an even pace, as heedless of the effort he was making as an automaton.

‘Is she your grandmother?’ Bruno asked him.

‘My mother,’ the young man said.

‘Oh, I’m sorry! … Is she sick?’

‘Can’t hide anything from you, can we?’

The young man’s tone was sharp. Bruno offered to relieve him, and received a respectful but categorical refusal.

‘My friend here is a doctor,’ Bruno said. ‘If you like, he can examine her.’

‘There’s no need, sir.’

‘What she has may be serious,’ Bruno insisted.

‘There is nothing serious in life, except the harm we do.’

The young man had started walking faster, to make it clear to us that he wanted to be left alone.

Ahead of us, the line of survivors dragged themselves along as best they could, bundles on their heads, babies
on their backs, giving me an overarching image of a terrible world whose infamy I barely grasped and for which nothing in my life had prepared me. A world whose merciless gods had lost all the skin from their fingers, so often had they washed their hands of it. A Sisyphean world abandoned to the cowardice of men and the ravages of epidemics, a world of torture and violence, where contingents of the living dead wandered from place to place through a thousand torments, hope crucified on their foreheads and their shoulders collapsing beneath the weight of a nameless curse.

At the first stop, I took Bruno to task. I pointed out to him that I was old enough to offer my services without needing an intermediary. He was taken aback. In point of fact, I was scared to approach these people myself. Their misfortune both overwhelmed and horrified me. I could find a whole heap of unanswerable excuses for myself, justifying my attitude by the fact that I had been through an incredible ordeal and pretending that having not washed for so long I had developed a kind of hypochondria. Yes, I could invent all kinds of get-out clauses, but I wouldn’t be able to hide my face. Never having had to deal with this kind of patient, and having neither gloves nor masks nor any other kind of protection at my disposal, I was afraid of being contaminated by some tropical microbe. I wasn’t proud of myself, but I couldn’t help it.

Bruno unwound his scarf and ran to give a hand to Lotta, who was busy calming the delirious teacher. Even though he had refrained from judging me, I was convinced he was disappointed in me.

An hour later, I found myself with a child in my arms – his mother had fainted and could no longer carry him. He
was a puny boy, his skin withering on his bones. Dressed in something resembling a vest, his belly bloated and his skull bald, he stared at me with his empty eyes. I took his fingers out of his mouth; he kept them on his chin for a moment then stuffed them between his lips again. I took them out once more; understanding that I didn’t want him to put them back in his mouth, he turned away and flopped onto my shoulder. Without thinking, I put my hand out and hugged his sparrow-like body. I felt his little heart beating against mine. Something in me was falling back into place. I was becoming a human being again.