The African Equation (28 page)

I took back my hand; she took hold of it again and kept it. Her breath fluttered against my face. I suspected she might try to kiss me. Her eyes questioned mine, searched for my quivering lips, while her half-open mouth offered itself in an imperceptible movement of her head.

I recoiled.

She lowered her eyelids with their curved lashes. From the touch of her fingers, I sensed that my reaction disappointed her.

‘These things happen, Kurt. We live in a crazy world. Things get too much for us and we rush about thinking we can catch a moving train. It’s no wonder some end up on the wrong platform.’

Again, her eyes met mine and her scarlet mouth, as vivid as a wound, again brushed my lips. Her breath was burning my face now.

‘Not many people can control their anxieties,’ she went on, ‘and even fewer know what they really want.’

I pushed her away. Not violently, but firmly enough to make her let go of my hand.

‘You’re a great girl, Claudia … I’m sorry if I went too far. I have nobody else to let off steam to, but I mustn’t take advantage … I need to be alone. I have an account to settle with myself. Man to man.’

‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded, a little lost, tried to say something, gave
up. After looking at me with infinite sadness, she picked up her bag from the table and left the house, leaving the door open.

I felt much better. I had lanced the boil; now all I had to do was wait for it to heal. The guilty party had been identified, and it was Jessica. How can you take your own life over a deferred promotion? How can you believe yourself incapable of surviving failure when that failure is merely the kind of hiccup that’s supposed to make you stronger? How can you dare to fall short of your ambitions and think for a single second that there is an objective stronger than love, or more important than your own life? So many skewed questions designed to divert us from the only answer that matters: ourselves. Since time began, suspicious of anything that doesn’t make him suffer, man has been chasing after his own shadow and looking elsewhere for what he already has within reach, convinced that no redemption is possible without martyrdom, that any mishap is a mark of failure, when his greatest strength is his ability to bounce back … Man, that prodigy failing to make the most of his chances and fascinated by his own vanities, constantly torn between what he thinks he is and what he would like to be, forgetting that the healthiest way of existing is quite simply to remain oneself.

After Claudia had gone, I pulled back all the curtains, opened all the windows and let the light of day flood my house. Never had rays of sunshine seemed so bright. The weather was magnificent, weather that makes you feel alive and eager to chase the dreams you’ve allowed to languish.
I went to the bathroom, sober, sure-footed. There wasn’t a corpse in the bathtub! Or any skeletons in the closet. There was only me, Kurt Krausmann … I undressed and threw myself under a burning-hot shower; my skin was soft to the touch. After shaving and putting on aftershave, I dressed in my best shirt, my best trousers, my best jacket, and set off to do what I had promised myself as I watched the sun go down over the valley in my hostage prison. I had dinner at Erno’s Bistro, without the shadow of a ghost around me. Late that night, refreshed and sated, I got home, took a beer from the fridge and switched on my computer. This time, I clicked on Elena’s email. No message, just an attachment that I opened without hesitation. I no longer feared Pandora’s boxes. Some twenty photographs appeared. Photographs that Elena had taken of me in the camp. I was standing on the site of Hodna City, sitting on the steps of a cabin, smiling at the back of the canteen, lying in an unmade bed, standing with my arm around Bruno’s neck, examining a child in the infirmary, letting Lotta cut my hair while a swarm of children watched and laughed … Happiness flooded through my being.

I wrote to her, moved but not sure what to say.
Thank you for these beautiful memories, Elena. How are you?

I pressed
Send
.

As I stood up to go and change, a sound came from my computer. Elena had answered me. It was as if she had been waiting for my email. It was 11.45 p.m. by my watch. There was at least an hour’s time difference between Sudan and Germany. I couldn’t get over it. I sat down again and clicked on the message.

Elena:
I’d be lying if I told you I miss you and am
constantly
thinking of you. You mean nothing to me. You never existed … I’m a woman, you see? The truth would offend my modesty
.

I didn’t understand at first. On the second reading, it hit me head-on that it was a declaration of love. All at once, I realised that I had misunderstood what it was I was lacking, that it wasn’t Jessica I missed, but Elena, that my trauma had skewed my perception. All I could see was the blankness of the bad patches I had gone through. In the harshness of my inner winter, the forest of my concerns had gathered into a vast funeral pyre and had been waiting stoically for a merciful sun to descend from its cloud and set it ablaze. But in the evening, there was never any fire. My anxieties closed ranks to get me through the night, and the sun, as pale as the moon, withdrew noiselessly like a false dawn. If I had been unhappy since my return from Africa, it was because of my inability to put things in perspective. I’d been beating myself up, blaming myself for a crime I hadn’t committed, a crime of which I was the victim and the evidence. I had been holding completely the wrong trial. I had been going round in circles in an artificial maze, looking for a way out where there wasn’t one. Only someone who knows where he’s going can find a way out. I had to learn to live with what I couldn’t change and find my own path. But I had lacked the presence of mind to do so. How could I have been so thoughtless? … I reread Elena’s message, over and over, and each reading reduced the insidious brew that had crept into my subconscious. As light shone in on my dark thoughts one after the other, my brain was filled with dazzling sparks, and an unaccustomed clarity made the slightest detail around me stand out. ‘Why
are you sad?’ the marabout had asked me. ‘You shouldn’t be. Only the dead are sad because they can’t get up again.’ And I was alive. I breathed, I felt emotion, I reacted, I dreamt … I was in seventh heaven. No, I wouldn’t die blind in one eye. And I would be able to ‘share in order to reach maturity’ … My hands were shaking, my fingers got muddled up on the keyboard. I could no longer make out the letters on the keys. Hardly surprising: I was in tears.

I answered Elena:
I’m on my way!

The marathon process I’d had to go through to be accredited by the Red Cross had worn me out. I’d really had to battle to obtain a visa, since the Sudanese consular authorities didn’t look kindly on my return to their country. But all that was over. I was on the plane, and the plane had got to the runway. As the pilot gathered speed, I thought about Blackmoon. I saw him again with his sabre and his lensless glasses, sometimes sitting on a stone, sometimes hugging the walls; remembered our first conversation in the cave when he told me about his father who worshipped Franz Beckenbauer, his passion for the books he would never read, the teacher he would have liked to be, his mood swings that turned him without warning from an easy-going teenager into an impulsive hooligan. What a strange boy! In a flash, his innocent smile could replace that cold look of his that made me ill at ease, that look I couldn’t bear longer than two seconds. What message had he been trying to communicate to me? Was it a distress call I had been unable to decode? I saw him in Gerima’s prison, drawing my attention to the piece
of bread into which he had slipped Hans Makkenroth’s note.
Stand firm. Every day is a miracle
. And again on that fateful track, trying to reason with Joma. Joma who was doomed to seek elsewhere what he had within reach; Joma, that twisted poet who had thought that with the Word you could overcome adversity and who, if he had listened to himself, would have realised that no rifle carried further than a good word … The plane took off. Beside me, a young woman leafed calmly through her magazine. A child started crying. I closed my eyes and projected myself across an African desert as hot and disturbing as a strong fever. Beneath the marabout tree, Bruno was naked; he was dancing like a djinn and showing me his pale buttocks.
That’s Africa
, he cried, pointing to the young man with the cart who was carrying his mother on his back and who, at that moment, in his absolute generosity and courage, embodied selflessness. Good old Bruno, nobody knew better than he did how to look beyond the surface of things and give a fallen land its nobility. I was in a hurry to see him again, to once more experience his old-world romanticism, his exuberant chauvinism, his incorrigible optimism. I could already see him opening his arms to me, arms as wide as a bay, generous and proud of being what he was, with his saint-like forbearance and his opiate daydreams. We would sit by a campfire, and as I looked in the sky for a constellation made to measure for me, he would tell me about Aminata whose eyes shone like a thousand jewels, Souad the dancer who hadn’t hesitated to sacrifice love for a pimp’s promise, the low dives where he slept off both his binges and his sorrows, the indomitable peoples wandering where the desert winds took them, the
filthy huts where you had board and lodging at any hour of the day or night, the human beings whose rags I saw but not their souls … I thought about Lotta, and Orfane, and Bidan the contortionist, and Forha the one-armed man, and that old veteran Mambo with his giant body confined in his makeshift bed, his disconcerting comments, his elephant-like indolence and his categorical refusal to admit that men could walk on the moon without offending gods and wolves … As the plane emerged from the clouds to conquer a sky as blue and limpid as a cherub’s dream, the sun hit me full in the face. Like grace. As if emanating from the light, Elena’s face appeared on the horizon. I laid my head back against my seat and let the memories take over. I recalled points of reference, gestures of help, an outstretched hand, another hand caressing, a face smiling in the middle of the night, a lip melting into a beloved lip and the song of a griot transcending prayers. Then I thought about Elena, about the days and nights ahead of us, the brand-new paths opening up to us, and I told myself that the desert is not finite but virgin, that its dust is pure and its mirages stimulating, that where love sows, the harvest is limitless because everything is possible when heart and mind combine. As my flesh remembered every one of Elena’s kisses, as I felt her slender fingers running over my body in a multitude of happy quivers, and her mouth pouring its intoxicating nectar into mine, and her arms carrying me higher than a trophy, and her eyes absorbing my anxieties, and her breath ruffling my senses with millions of vows, there suddenly flashed into my mind these redemptive lines of Joma’s which I had learnt by heart:

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of award-winning Algerian author Mohammed Moulessehoul. His novels include
The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack,
and
The Sirens of Baghdad
. In 2011 Yasmina Khadra was awarded the prestigious Grand prix de la littérature Henri Gal by the Académie Française.

Howard Curtis’s many translations from French and Italian include works by Balzac, Flaubert, Pirandello, Jean-Claude Izzo, Marek Halter and Gianrico Carofiglio. For Gallic, he has translated four novels by Jean-François Parot.

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