The African Equation

by Yasmina Khadra

  It was a dazzlingly bright morning. The night’s slight drizzle had cleared the air and the sun was playing at being an artist. But who could stand its talent? Its light was garish, the clarity of the horizon overblown. It was a day that was playing to the gallery, trying to distinguish itself from all the others, making sure people took notice. It would be engraved for ever in my subconscious.

  I walked to the helicopter, deaf to Elena’s cries. I was in a parallel world. The inside of the aircraft stank of fuel. The engines started wheezing more and more loudly, then, like a huge dragonfly, the helicopter spun into the air. The colonel tapped me on the knee. I felt like screaming at him to keep his hand as far away from me as possible. I did nothing. My whole being was bowed like a weeping willow. The noise of the helicopter drilled into my eardrums. On the bench facing me, five armed soldiers looked out at the desert through the windows. They were the colonel’s escort. Handpicked, probably expert marksmen. Young as they were, some beardless, they were battle-hardened. Their calm was like the lull before a storm.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked the colonel.

  ‘An engagement between a detachment of the regular army and a group of rebels. Our soldiers didn’t know there was a hostage.’

  ‘A blunder, in other words?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ he exclaimed, outraged. ‘Our detachment wasn’t on active operations, it was carrying out a supply mission. It came across the rebels by chance, and they immediately opened fire to cover their retreat. Our response was perfectly appropriate. Our soldiers, I repeat, didn’t know that there was a hostage among the criminals. And we are the first to deplore this … this accident.’

  ‘Accident?’

  ‘Absolutely, sir.’

  ‘And you’re sure it’s Hans Makkenroth?’

  ‘According to the two suspects you identified from the photographs, it was definitely him. They both confessed. And they took us to the place where they buried him.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Does the embassy know?’

  ‘They were informed immediately after the discovery of the body. A plane went to pick up the ambassador very early this morning.’ He looked at his watch. ‘He’ll get there the same time as we do.’

  ‘Is it far from here?’

  ‘About two hours’ flight.’

  ‘I suppose you’re counting on me to identify the body?’

  ‘I can’t think of anybody else who’d be entitled to do so.’

  I sat back and said nothing.

  Below, pitiful hills, weary of sinking into the sand, formed lines to hold back the advance of the desert; scarlike anthracite patches told of the ages before the flood and their forests filled with game, which a cataclysm had decimated in an instant. Where was man in all this? What did he represent in the cosmic breath? Was he aware of what made him naked and isolated? Was the desert around him or inside him? … I pulled myself together. I had to empty my head. I was in too fragile a state to venture into such unknown territory.

  After two hours of noise and the stench of kerosene, the helicopter dipped to the side, straightened up again and started losing altitude. The colonel went into the cockpit to give instructions to the two pilots. Through the window, I saw a column of armoured vehicles parked along a track, soldiers and, further on, a little propeller plane beside which a delegation of civilians stood watching us land.

  The German ambassador greeted me as I got out of the helicopter. He introduced the people with him, who included Gerd Bechter. They were all grief-stricken. There were no reporters or cameramen. A high-ranking Sudanese officer whispered something to me that I didn’t catch. His obsequiousness maddened me. I was relieved to see him fall back into the ranks. I asked to be taken to see my friend. The ambassador and his staff set off after a young officer, and I trailed behind. I felt as if my shoes were sticking to the ground. A platoon of soldiers was mounting guard around a heap of stones, their rifles trained on two prisoners: Ewana, the former malaria patient, and the driver of the sidecar motorcycle. Handcuffed and in chains, they were in an indescribable state; it was obvious from the marks on their faces, limbs and clothes that they had been tortured. As I passed them, I looked them up and down. Ewana bowed his head, while his accomplice openly defied me.

  We came to six makeshift graves. Some had been desecrated by jackals or hyenas, the soldiers had done the rest. The decomposing corpses were mostly unrecognisable … Chief Moussa had his mouth open, exposing his gold tooth, a hole in the middle of his forehead … Hans, my friend Hans, was lying in the same pit as his kidnapper. His head had been smashed in, and there were black stains on his chest. His white beard quivered in the breeze, his eyes closed over his final thoughts. I wondered what he had been thinking about just before he died, what last cry he had taken away with him, if he had died instantly or if his agony had been long and cruel … My God! What a waste! What could I say in the face of such absurdity? All the words in the world seemed pointless and inappropriate. I could look at the sky, or my trembling hands, or the inscrutable faces of the soldiers and the officials, I could cry until my voice failed me, or say nothing and be one with the silence, it made no difference. And besides, what power did I have left, except for the strength to stare at my friend’s body and the courage to admit that I had arrived too late?

  ‘He came here to equip a hospital for the poor,’ I said to the two pirates.

  Ewana bowed his head a little more and stared at the ground. I lifted his chin to make him look me in the eyes and went on, ‘He came to help the poor and the defenceless. Do you understand what that means? The man lying there gave his fortune and his time so that he could deserve to be called a human being.’

  ‘Nobody asked him to do it,’ the motorcycle driver muttered.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said in disgust.

  ‘You heard me.’

  An officer slapped him, and the pirate reeled under the blow, but didn’t flinch.

  ‘Your friend is dead,’ he grunted. ‘Ewana and I will be joining him soon. They’re going to shoot us. That’s the price to be paid and we’re not haggling. You haven’t done too badly out of this so stop pissing us all off.’

  Anger and indignation exploded in me like a geyser and I threw myself at him. I tried to blind him in the eye, to tear his tongue out, to crush him with my bare hands. I looked and found only emptiness: soldiers had grabbed me by the waist, while others jumped on the pirate and dragged him away from me and towards an armoured vehicle. He put up no resistance, but continued to taunt me: ‘If you’d stayed at home in your nice silk sheets, nobody would have come looking for you!’ he cried. ‘Where did you think you were, eh? On a five-star safari? People who walk in shit shouldn’t complain if they smell bad. Your friend knew the risks, and so did we. He’s dead, and we’re going to be executed. Why are you the one who’s crying?’ His coldness burnt me like the flames of hell. I struggled to reach him and make him aware of his own wickedness, of how everything he said and did was an insult to the day and the wind and the noise and the silence, to everything that made up life. My arms were like smoke, my rage was consuming me from within. I was my own cremation. I knew there was nothing more to be done, that the wonderful friend unravelling down in his hole saw nothing of my grief – maybe he wouldn’t even agree with the way I was behaving, but what could I do? … I wanted to be somewhere else, a long way away, I wanted to shut myself up in my house in Frankfurt and resume mourning my wife. I wished I had never got on that damned boat or met anyone on my route. I wished for many pointless, ugly things, I wished to be invisible too, I wished there were oceans between me and the graves fouling the ground beneath my feet, but my demands were merely the expression of my refusal to confront the grim reality: men are the worst and the best of what nature has created; some die for an ideal, others for nothing; some perish from their own generosity, others from their own ingratitude; they tear each other apart for the same reasons, each in his own camp,
and the irony of fate presides over that terrible drama, finally reconciling, in the same foul-smelling pit, the enlightened and the unenlightened, the virtuous and the depraved, the martyr and the executioner, all delivered to everlasting death like Siamese twins in their mother’s womb.

  4

  I had hoped to take nothing away from Africa and to leave nothing there, but I was starting to realise how naive I had been. In the little plane taking me back to Germany, I knew that I was not returning in one piece. Part of me was still a prisoner in the desert, and Hans’s coffin lay in the hold. Lowering the blind over the window in order not to see the land that had stripped me of my illusions as it receded into the distance, I tried to sleep. But what sleep was there for someone who had no more dreams? I had only to close my eyes to find myself face-to-face with my obsessions. My head was throbbing with noise, the smell of mass graves clung to my nostrils, my lungs were full of sand. In Khartoum, I had spent more than an hour in the shower. I had soaped myself down a dozen times and still been unable to rid myself of the repulsive bark that had replaced my skin. My new clothes stung like nettles. My tie felt like a noose, except that I was the gallows. Opposite me, Gerd Bechter sat engrossed in a magazine, turning the pages mechanically. His mind was elsewhere, somewhere where questions don’t need answers because everything has been said. He hadn’t left me alone for a minute in Khartoum. He had come into my hotel room constantly, using any excuse to keep an eye on me, afraid I might be taken ill. True, I was nothing but a ghost lost in the mist of its own emotions, but the trials I had been through were keeping me alert. Irritated by his interference, I had asked him if maybe he wanted to share my bed. He had apologised for bothering me and gone to fetch me a drink. We had drunk until morning and slept on the same sofa …

  A TV screen indicated the route the plane was taking: we had left Sudan, then flown across Egypt and along the Mediterranean. A hostess brought me a tray of food; I declined her offer and sank into my seat. Behind me, two journalists were dozing. A young woman who had been introduced to me but whose name I couldn’t recall was leaning towards the window and staring out at the sea. Beside her, a cameraman was sleeping the sleep of the just. There were just eight passengers in the little plane, which had come specially from Berlin to repatriate us. An archipelago of eight islands separated by rivers of silence.

  I imagined all the people waiting for us in Frankfurt. The Makkenroth family in full mourning. Friends of the dead man. His neighbours. His staff. The officials stiff with solemnity. The television channels. All the clichés wrapped in greyness. Closed faces. Empty eyes … I couldn’t see any place for me there. I had prepared nothing. I would say nothing. I would walk in the dead man’s shadow and follow the funeral procession without asking any questions. I was in a state of shock. What I felt didn’t matter. I would wait patiently for things to settle. Then I would take the plunge. Hans would be upset with me if I didn’t survive him. Life is a succession of ambiguities and acts of bravado. You learn more every day, and every day you wipe the slate clean and start again. In reality, there is no irrefutable truth, there are only beliefs. When one turns out to be unfounded, you make up another and cling to it come hell or high water. Life is a shipwreck, and whether or not you survive depends not on providence but on stubbornness. There are those who give up and die, and others who rethink everything … I recalled the image of the marabout dying on his camp bed, his face as pale as parchment. His tremulous voice reached me in a sigh from beyond the grave. What was it he had said? It came back to me: ‘For a heart to continue to beat its defiance, it must look to failure for the sap of its survival.’ Why had I fled that old man? Maybe because he could read me like an open book. Maybe because he had stripped me bare with his eyes. I had always hated exposing my nakedness to strangers. At Maspalomas, there had been a stretch of beach reserved for nudists. I could never bring myself to venture there. In a few hours, when I was thrown to the wolves on a runway swarming with important people and journalists, I would feel as naked and wretched as a worm, and I would hate the whole world … Then interest would move to the coffin and the Makkenroth family, and there, too, I would catch myself resenting all those people turning their backs on me, already ignoring me and delivering me, with hands and feet tied, to the most pernicious of solitudes … I wanted to have done with it all, to confront my tomorrows, which I guessed would be totally different from my yesterdays and wouldn’t conform to whatever idea I might have about them, because another chapter, another episode, another story would make me a different man, someone I would find hard to grasp and to tame. ‘What have we really learnt from what we think we know?’ Hans used to say. ‘Habits? Reflexes? Work during the week and a let-up on our days off? What do we know of the people we wave at in the morning and who disappear from our lives the minute they turn the corner of the street? If living were merely existing for oneself, what would make me any better than the trees that grow bare in winter and are covered in spring while I do the opposite?’ Hans wasn’t wrong. What have we really learnt from what we think we know? I had thought that Jessica was the centre of my life; Jessica had gone, and the earth had not moved one millimetre. I had thought my career was all mapped out, my future assured, and I had discovered how a trifle can start to unravel this tissue of lies. There are rules we follow in order not to bother with other rules; we adopt them because they suit us and make us believe that we can do without the rest. We convince ourselves that what is convenient for us systematically wipes out what isn’t. All my life, I had firmly believed in maturely thought-out choices, choices I had accepted and which I had worked hard to fulfil. Because every choice is a risk, no matter how hard we try to think it through … So why second guess? Why prepare to hate the whole world before I had even landed? Let things come instead of going to look for them; often they are not where we think they are.

  We reached Frankfurt at about four in the afternoon. The jet touched down on the tarmac as if on velvet. Through the window, I saw the parade of glass façades, planes connected to gates, service vehicles, wagons overflowing with baggage, wide buses … and the sun. It was a nice day in my city. I had been expecting an overcast sky, with drizzle and wind appropriate to the occasion, instead of which a glorious afternoon was rolling out the red carpet for us. How to define the feeling that overcame me the moment the wheels of the jet touched my native soil? Impossible to describe it. Impossible to contain it. A remarkable alchemy took possession of my being, of every drop of my blood. I was millions of emotions … The jet rolled along a secondary runway, circumvented several small blocks, and at last stopped outside a structure that looked like some kind of grand reception area. Journalists were waiting impatiently behind a barrier. Flashbulbs started popping, and reached a peak as I got off the plane. The Chancellor and a few members of her government greeted me at the foot of the stairs. Not having eaten since Khartoum, I didn’t feel well. Somebody whispered something to me, but I didn’t catch it. Since everyone was smiling, I did the same. Happiness is contagious. Chests restricted my breathing, arms encircled my body, hands engulfed mine. The Chancellor was so moved she had tears in her eyes. She said something to me, but the yelling of the journalists drowned it out. I thanked her. I heard myself thanking everyone for everything. Behind the official staff, the Makkenroth family were having to grin and bear it; clearly, this media attention, these ministers, the whole performance was intruding on their mourning. I would learn later that they had wanted things to be done as privately as possible, but protocol had other requirements. I went up to Bertram, Hans’s oldest son. I had known him for years. We threw our arms around each other. The hug was a brief one. His wife, hidden behind a black veil, lightly touched my fingertips. Mathias, the younger son, patted me on the back. I had met him two or three times, but couldn’t remember where. He was a taciturn, mysterious young man. Deeply affected by the loss of his father, he avoided looking me in the eyes. An old lady, doubtless the senior member of the family, leant towards me and whispered, ‘
We don’t want to know anything about what happened, Herr Krausmann. Hans is dead, and that’s all that matters.’ Her voice was low, but what she said sounded like a warning. Hans’s coffin was taken from the hold of the plane and placed on a catafalque covered with flowers. Again, there was an explosion of flashbulbs. There was a stirring within the Makkenroth family, but it was quickly stifled. The Chancellor made a moving statement to the press, then held the microphone out to me. I raised my hand in refusal, much to the disappointment of the journalists, who were eager for a speech. What could I say, what could I add? The embassy people had worn me out in Khartoum, and I couldn’t wait to go home. Bertram agreed to address the journalists. He was concise and fair: ‘My father always felt that it was through sharing that one reached maturity. He shared his fortune, his time and his humanity with the poor all over the world, and he shared their sufferings and tragedies, too. Hans Makkenroth didn’t do things by half. He was generous and sincere, and never promised what he couldn’t deliver. He loved people, and many returned that love. He was an exceptional man. He gave so much of himself to others that they have kept him for ever.’