The African Equation

by Yasmina Khadra

  ‘Where do you see an injured man? Where is this guy we savages are abandoning to the birds?’

  The shapeless form in question was the carcass of a jackal. As for the arm I thought I’d seen move, it was only the jackal’s paw, which one of the vultures was busy tearing to pieces.

  ‘So, who’s having visions now?’

  Joma fired a shot into the air, and the vultures flapped their wings but didn’t fly away – they were far too hungry to give up their feast.

  ‘Is there the body of a man in there, mister doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t hear that,’ he said, putting his hand to his ear.

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought …’

  ‘You thought what? That there was a man being eaten by birds or that you were surrounded by heartless savages?’

  ‘I was wrong.’

  ‘All down the line, cretin, all down the line. You don’t understand a damned thing about our continent … You’re in Africa now, and in Africa, you’re the savage.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Too easy. You can apologise to me on your knees. I did warn you: if you don’t want me to walk all over you, become invisible. Now get down on your knees and beg my forgiveness.’

  I didn’t do as he said.

  ‘On your knees, you son of a bitch, or I’ll blow your brains out.’

  The chief’s jeep left the track and came towards us.

  Joma stuck the barrel of his rifle under my chin. I didn’t give in. I had no desire to give in. I heard Moussa shouting orders; Joma wasn’t listening. His eyes bulging, his mouth wide open, he was trembling with anger. The jeep came level with us and stopped. The chief jumped down, and put his arms out to calm his subordinate.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Joma.’

  ‘The son of a bitch has to realise that the days of colonialism are long past.’

  ‘Put down your Kalashnikov.’

  ‘Not before he’s on the ground.’

  The chief didn’t dare come a step closer. Joma’s finger was on the trigger. Sweat was pouring down his forehead.

  ‘On your knees!’

  ‘Do what he asks,’ Hans yelled at me in German. ‘The man’s not in his right mind.’

  I couldn’t blink or swallow. But I wasn’t scared. I think my nerves must have given way, because I no longer had any awareness of the danger I was in. Let him get on with it, I said to myself, resigned. The situation was beyond my understanding, and I was tired, convinced that, sooner or later, this madman would shoot me. Everything in him condemned me. He had promised to cook me on a low heat until I melted in his mouth. And he would keep his word. His hatred was a programme he would not deviate from.

  ‘Please, Kurt!’ Hans cried. ‘Do as he says!’

  The chief tried to approach, but Joma pointed his weapon at him and forced him to retreat.

  ‘Don’t interfere, Moussa. This is between him and me.’

  ‘Let me remind you he’s my hostage.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about that. I took up arms to defend principles, not to line my pockets. I guarantee that if he doesn’t grovel at my feet, I’ll settle his hash right now.’

  The chief urged me to comply. I shook my head. The barrel this time was aimed at my forehead. A deep silence fell over the hillock. The men in the pick-up were standing, waiting to see my skull explode. Hans was petrified; his cries had exhausted him. Further down, on the track, the rest of the gang were motionless. Things were clearly getting worse and they were waiting to see how it was all going to end. In the sky, the two vultures circled in slow motion, their shadows skimming the ground like a bad omen.

  ‘I’ll count to three,’ Joma boomed. ‘One … two …’

  Blackmoon, whom I hadn’t seen come up behind me, kicked me hard in the shins and forced me to kneel. The irregularity of the procedure didn’t seem to bother Joma. All he cared about was seeing me on the ground.

  ‘You see?’ he said. ‘It isn’t complicated.’

  ‘What’s got into you, Joma, damn it?’ Moussa exclaimed.

  ‘I’m teaching this bastard about Africa. He needs to know that things have changed.’ He grabbed me by the throat, squeezed hard and said, ‘No one race is superior to any other. Since prehistoric times, it’s always been the balance of power that decides who’s master and who’s slave. Today, the power’s on my side. And even if to you I’m nothing but a stupid nigger, I’m the one who calls the shots. Knowledge, social rank and skin colour don’t mean a thing when you’ve got a gun shoved in your face. You thought you were God’s gift? I’m going to prove to you that you’re nothing but a little runt like the rest of us, born out of the same arsehole. Your university qualifications and your white man’s arrogance don’t matter in a place where a simple bullet’s enough to do away with all your privileges. So you were born in the West, were you? You’re lucky. Now you’re going to be reborn in Africa and you’ll understand what that means.’

  He pushed me away and walked back to the track like an ogre vanishing into the shadows.

  ‘What’s your problem with this man?’ Moussa yelled after him.

  ‘I don’t like his blue eyes!’ Joma shouted back.

  Arms grabbed me round the waist and lifted me from the ground. I was paralysed. Everything seemed insubstantial, grotesque, improbable. I had come close to disaster, just like the hitchhiker the other day, except that I don’t think I’d even realised how bad it had been. It was a strange feeling that scared and overwhelmed me: it was as if my mind was numb.

  Moussa fired into the air to re-establish his authority; the shots did nothing to sober me. I was helped onto the track and then into the back of the pick-up. As I was hoisted on board, Blackmoon whispered in my ear that if he hadn’t forced me to kneel, Joma would have shot me down … Shot me down? I found it hard to grasp those words. Did they have a meaning? If so, what? And to whom, the attacker or the victim? How could I resign myself to the idea that a person could be shot down as easily as a tree being felled? And yet, hadn’t Tao been thrown in the sea like a cigarette end being thrown on the ground? … Yes, you ask yourself too many questions when you’re trying to convince yourself that what you’re seeing isn’t a hallucination, that the nightmare you’re living through is one hundred per cent real. The truths you’ve been avoiding blow up in your face; the ordeals you thought were meant for others become yours with such clarity you find it hard to bear. Are they premonitory signs of the End, of a time when the dark ages and the modern world come together to give birth to destructive androids and show mankind the shortest route to its own extinction?

  My kidnappers had stopped laughing. They were staring at me in silence as if I’d returned from the dead. Unwilling to look at them, I turned away and gazed beyond the two vehicles that were following us, beyond the dust they raised, far, far away, where the earth and the sky merged and formed a line as tenuous and fragile as the thread holding me to life … Life? … Was I alive? … I had the sudden conviction that I was merely living on borrowed time.

  3

  The scrub was starting to grow scarce and, as the convoy plunged further inland, the desert became more marked, the few clumps of vegetation vanishing as if by magic. Apart from the vultures and the odd animal startled by the roar of the pick-ups, the area was like a deserted planet, deadly in its monotony, given over to heat and erosion. A jagged line of grey dwarf hills extended across the plain, like the spine of some fossilised prehistoric monster. To the north, a boulder-strewn reg stretched to infinity; to the south, the earth fell away abruptly, crisscrossed by a jumble of dried-up rivers. All at once, huddled in the shade of a low hill, there appeared a ruined fort surrounded by barbed wire. This was our kidnappers’ rearguard. They were delighted to have returned to the fold, filthy and exhausted, but safe and sound. A broken gate led to a parade ground presided over by a long-unused flagpole. On either side, lines of squat barracks, some completely collapsed, others partly burnt and covered in tattered tarpaulins and shee
ts of iron; a well with a pulley, a rubber bucket on the coping; an enclosure for a few bored-looking goats; a water tank rusted on the outside; a lorry with its bonnet torn off next to a sidecar motorcycle straight out of the last world war; and finally, opposite a hovel with wire netting around it, a clumsily whitewashed rat-trap above which flew an unidentifiable rag that was meant to be a banner: this was the ‘command post’. A group of bandits were waiting for us on the front steps – doubtless, the commanding officer’s praetorian guard, a dozen armed eccentrics, standing stiffly to attention in a way that was meant to look military but was sadly lacking in credibility. Some wore paratroopers’ uniforms with boots and berets pulled down over their eyes, others threadbare civilian clothes, with misshapen trainers, espadrilles or sandals with straps – they all raised their hands to their temples in a regulation salute when a knock-kneed officer emerged from the command post to greet our convoy.

  Moussa ordered his men out of the vehicles, lined them up in a row facing the command post and presented arms to the officer, who returned the salute with a smug look on his face. There was an exaggerated obsequiousness in this almost theatrical protocol that would have made me smile if Hans hadn’t just collapsed in front of me. Joma pulled him to his feet and held him upright.

  The officer reviewed his troops, without paying any attention to Hans or me, listening distractedly to the report that Moussa delivered to him in a local language. He didn’t seem very interested in what his subordinate was saying. He was very dark-skinned and as solid as a rock, his shaven skull screwed to his shoulders with no neck and no chin. His face was almost featureless, just a dented sphere with dilated nostrils and protruding eyes that flashed like lightning. He wore a tunic open over his belly and an American army belt around his neck. He at last deigned to look at us. Chief Moussa handed him our passports, took a few steps back and lined up with his men. The captain leafed through our documents, looked from our photographs to our faces, wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb then came and examined us closely.

  ‘I’m Captain Gerima,’ he announced. ‘And this is my kingdom. I have the power of life and death. I just have to give the order … It’s fate that brought us together. You have nobody to blame but yourselves. When a fly is trapped in a web, it can’t blame the spider. That’s how life is. The world has always functioned like that, since the dawn of time. Actually, since the dawn of time, it’s always been night. The dawn of humanity isn’t quite ready to rise yet …’

  Impressed with his own rhetoric, he made sure his men were too, then continued, ‘I don’t know how long you’re going to stay with us. I must warn you that nobody escapes from here. If you keep your heads down, you’ll be well treated. If you don’t, well, I won’t go into details.’

  He came to a sudden stop, as if he had run out of ideas, or maybe he’d lost the thread of his speech, which he must have fine-tuned the previous night specially for us.

  He turned on his freshly polished boots and disappeared back into his lair.

  Two men pushed us into the hovel with the wire netting around it opposite the command post, untied us and withdrew, leaving the door open. Hans shuffled over to a mat that had been laid on the bare ground and tried to take off his shirt, but without success. I tried to help him and noticed that, in drying, the wound had closed over part of the cloth.

  ‘Put water on it,’ a voice suggested. ‘It’ll soften the scab.’

  A white man we hadn’t noticed emerged from beneath a mosquito net in the corner. A beam of light revealed his hermit-like face: he was a man in his fifties, thin, with long grey hair tumbling over his shoulders. He had a frayed beard and was bare-chested, with prominent ribs and a sunken belly. His eyes shone like a sick man’s.

  ‘French?’

  ‘German.’

  He looked pityingly at Hans. ‘Is he hurt?’

  ‘A sabre blow. He’s burning up.’

  ‘Put water on the wound. It’ll make him feel better.’

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ I said, making it clear to him that I could look after my friend without anyone’s help.

  He took a metal flask from a heap of miscellaneous objects and came up to us. ‘This is my water ration,’ he said. ‘Everything’s rationed here, even prayers … Your friend’s in a bad way.’

  Without waiting for my permission, he trickled small quantities of water on Hans’s wound, made sure the material and the scar absorbed it, then pressed delicately on the wound with his finger.

  ‘Journalists or aid workers?’

  ‘We were just passing. These pirates hijacked us out at sea … And you?’

  ‘Anthropologist … at least, I think so.’

  ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘Forty years … In Africa, I mean. I love Africa …’

  Hans submitted to his care. The water was doing him good. In places, the scab over the wound was coming away and starting to release a few threads of the cloth.

  ‘Don’t move,’ the stranger advised, ‘or it’ll start to bleed …’ He poured a little more water on the part of the shirt that was stuck. ‘Sorry to have to say this, but I’m glad I have company at last. I was seriously starting to go crazy … What did you think of the big man?’ he asked, referring to the captain. ‘As a braggart, he has no equal … He’s made himself an officer and thinks he’s at the head of a real fighting force with those ten alley cats of his. I know him well. He was a sergeant-major in the regular army before he was court-martialled for smuggling. He’d been stealing from his unit’s stock of canned rations and selling them on the black market. He managed to get out of prison by greasing a few palms, and since then he’s gathered a gang of morons around him and carried on his little trade under cover of the civil war.’

  ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘Whoever they are, they’re dangerously fickle. Sometimes they call themselves resistance fighters, sometimes revolutionaries. What cause do they claim to uphold? None of them can be bothered to answer. Whenever they get an ideological thought in their heads, they invent a slogan for themselves and get drunk on it until they lose the thread. The fact is, these maniacs don’t know if they’re coming or going. They don’t think, they take aim. They don’t talk, they shoot. They don’t work, they loot. They can’t see the end of the tunnel. They’ve forgotten how things turned bad for them and have no idea how it’s going to end … You must think me very talkative, don’t you? You can’t blame me. I haven’t had anyone to talk to for a long time now, and although the walls may have ears, they’re sadly lacking in repartee.’

  All at once, he held out his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. You soon lose your manners around here … My name’s Bruno, I’m from Bordeaux in France.’

  ‘This is Hans, and I’m Kurt …’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, even though the circumstances and the place are not ideal …’

  I helped Hans to take off his shirt and laid him on his stomach. The cut on his back was a large one, going across half his hip. Now that the scab had softened, you could see the wound bed; it was bad, hatched with tiny blood vessels oozing pus, the lips dark brown at the edges and turned out; the tissue around it had turned pale and was starting to get thinner along a strip of at least a centimetre while a purplish-grey patch spread on either side of the cut, from the vertebrae to the top of the groin.

  ‘Not a pretty sight,’ the Frenchman observed.

  ‘I need to clean the wound and also find something to lower the fever.’

  The Frenchman went back to his straw mattress to get a little plastic sachet and a bottle filled with a disgusting-looking ointment. ‘Spread that on the wound.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A powder made from medicinal plants which disinfects and heals at the same time. And the ointment reduces itching.’

  ‘That’s out of the question. There are enough germs in the wound already—’

  ‘Please,’ he interrupted me calmly. ‘There are no drugs her
e. You make do with what you can get. Trust me if you really want to stop your friend getting gangrene.’

  Reluctantly, almost humiliated at being forced to opt for what I thought of as a quack remedy, I took the sachet, then hesitated. Bruno asked me to let him do it. Without waiting for my approval, he bent over Hans’s wound.

  ‘It’ll make him feel better, you’ll see,’ he promised, clearly trying to make up for having stepped on my toes.

  No sooner had Bruno finished treating Hans than Joma appeared. He was tipsy. His body filled the doorway, and he had to bend his head to get through. He swayed in the middle of the room, his hands on his hips, muscles throbbing in his bare chest. He looked me up and down and kissed the amulets around his biceps – two leather pouches embroidered with multicoloured threads and tied to his arms with thin strips.

  ‘You still haven’t apologised to me,’ he said, twisting his neck like a wrestler.

  The disgust I felt for him changed suddenly into an uncontrollable, debilitating dizziness.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he went on, ‘even savages have self-respect.’

  Bruno tried to intervene, but Joma raised a finger to stop him.

  ‘You stay out of this, or I’ll pull your haemorrhoids out through your ears.’

  Having put Bruno in his place, Joma opened his arms wide, delighted to have me to himself.

  ‘What gives you the right to call us savages? Did you pick us off a baobab tree? I’d really like to know what makes us savages. War? Your wars are beyond cataclysmic. Poverty? We owe that to you. Ignorance? What makes you think you’re more cultivated than I am? I’m sure I’ve read more books than the whole of your family combined, starting with you. I know Lermontov, Blake, Hölderlin, Byron, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Lamarck, Neruda, Goethe and Pushkin by heart.’ He was getting excited now, ticking the names off on his fingers while his voice grew louder. ‘So, Dr Kurt Krausmann, what makes me a savage and you a civilised man? What is it you see in me? Somebody black even to the whites of his eyes?’