At midnight, I came to the conclusion I had to leave Frankfurt for a while. I thought about the friends from university I had lost touch with. Then I thought about my mother: I hadn’t put flowers on her grave since her funeral. I realised how quickly the time had passed, how ungrateful and selfish I’d been. My mother, my sweet mother who had died at the age of forty-four of vain prayers and terrible solitude. I could still see her in her pale dress, half mad, wandering in the cancer ward, her prematurely white hair absorbing the light filtering in through the French windows behind her.
At five in the morning, I took my car and set off for Essen.
I wandered the length and breadth of the cemetery without finding my mother’s grave. It was the caretaker who pointed it out to me. I placed a wreath on the granite stone and stood there for a while, collecting my thoughts. I had hoped to revive my memory, to summon up distant recollections, but strangely, not a single image came to mind. How was that possible? … I didn’t stay long in the cemetery. What was the point? I went to have lunch in a restaurant overlooking the lake, then called Toma Knitel, a childhood friend. His jaw must have hit the floor when he recognised my voice at the end of the line. He could barely speak for laughing. He gave me his new address in Munich and asked me to drop by the university, where he taught mathematics. I got to Munich an hour late because of an accident on the autobahn. Toma was waiting for me outside the front entrance of the university. He was pleased to see me again. His embrace felt good. He directed me to his place, a small house in a modest neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. Toma’s wife had hair as red as a maple leaf and a slightly plump figure, and was very pretty. Her name was Brigitte, and she was a Frenchwoman from Strasbourg. Her welcome immediately put me at my ease. She was delighted to meet me and to introduce her two children, twin girls who were clearly not used to strangers. We ate in, because Toma was determined that I should discover his wife’s culinary talents. Then we talked about the good old days. After a few hours, we had run out of subjects to mull over and spent the rest of the evening in a slightly alcoholic haze. As Toma had a class in the morning, I took my leave. He wanted me to stay over – I could sleep in the guest room, he said – but I had booked a room in a hotel. We said good night at about eleven; Brigitte was already in bed.
At the hotel, I didn’t take any sleeping pills. My reunion with Toma had done me a lot of good. I felt at one with myself and it occurred to me I could repeat the experiment with Willie Adler, another friend from university, who lived in Stuttgart. I would look for his phone number and call him in the morning.
Willie was happy to welcome me to his home. He had been successful in life. He owned a thriving company, lived in a beautiful house in the most fashionable neighbourhood in town, and had a lovely wife. He entrusted his two children to a babysitter and drove his wife and me to a superb restaurant on the banks of the Neckar. During the evening, he talked endlessly about his career, the astronomical contracts he was negotiating, his ambitious plans. I noticed that he had aged quite a bit: he had deep, sallow rings under his eyes, and premature baldness had deprived him of the fine head of hair he had been so proud of at university, when he played guitar in an amateur pop group. He wasn’t the same person he had been when we were twenty. He barely listened to anyone else, and his laughter rang out like a bugle. His wife watched us in silence. She seemed to be bored and constantly looked around to see if her husband’s loud voice was disturbing the other diners. It was once the wine had started to take effect that Willie really came out with it. He admitted that he was the one who had smeared my desk drawer with grease and urinated in my bed on the evening of the graduation ball. He glared at me as he told me this. I realised to my surprise that the young man I had thought was my best friend hadn’t really liked me, that he’d been secretly in love with the girl I was going out with at the time, and that he’d hated me for putting him in the shade. When he became aware that his rants were bothering the couples having dinner around us, his bitterness only increased and he became even more aggressive. His wife begged me with her eyes to put her husband’s bad behaviour down to alcohol. Willie had never been able to handle his drink, but that evening he had gone too far. I listened to him without flinching, out of respect for his wife, wishing he would shut up. After dinner, we went out into the coolness of the night. Willie was dead drunk. He could barely stand. He yelled at the valet who had taken his time bringing him his car, then leant towards me and whispered in my ear, ‘No hard feelings, Kurt. I’ve always preferred to put my cards on the table.’ His wife helped him into the passenger seat and, before taking the wheel, said to me in an embarrassed tone, ‘I’m truly sorry. Willie’s like this with most people.’
I closed the door on her and let them go.
Then I walked around the city until the rain forced me back to my hotel.
The next day, I went to Nuremberg, where I spent two days wandering the streets, then to Dresden for a spot of sightseeing. During the night, I thought about my father. I hated him so much I thought I had wiped him from my memory for good. He had been nothing but a drunkard and a brute who spent most of his time hanging around in shady bars and his nights terrorising us … A year earlier, the telephone had rung in my consulting room. The call was from a nursing home in Leipzig. The lady at the other end of the line informed me that a man named Georg Krausmann had just been admitted. He required detox treatment and had asked if I would agree to bear the cost. If I had been hit over the head with a hammer, I couldn’t have been more stunned. I had been speechless for quite a long time, then said yes and hung up.
I can’t explain my thought process. It was as if an irresistible force drew me to my car and sent me heading straight for Leipzig. On the way there, I wondered what I could possibly say to my father, what rational motive I could find for the visit. It made no sense, I kept telling myself; my father wouldn’t even recognise me. I was fourteen when he broke all ties with us. Even at that time, he had almost never looked at me. He would come back late at night, and disappear in the morning. He was never home on special occasions, and he wouldn’t remember my birthday or my mother’s. Often, he would vanish for weeks on end without a word and without an address where he could be reached in case of emergency. When he came back, he would bring storm clouds with him. I could still see him, staggering in the hallway, saliva dribbling from his mouth, his hand ready to strike. They were turbulent homecomings: the neighbours would knock on the walls, and sometimes call the police. I would lock myself in my room and pray for him to go away and never come back … One night, finding his packet of cigarettes empty, he turned the house upside down in search of a cigarette end. He was like a junkie desperate for a fix. After knocking my mother about – he held her responsible for every misfortune that befell us – he had left and never come back. That night, I knew God existed, because my prayer had been granted.
I got to the nursing home at about eleven in the morning. Luckily, the sky was cloudless and a sun as big as a pumpkin shone down on the establishment. The director received me in her austere office, reassured me about my father’s state of health, asked me a lot of questions about my relationship with him, asked if I planned to leave him permanently in her care, because, she said, he couldn’t manage on his own and would be better off at the home with its well-trained and highly devoted staff. I asked her if I could see my father. She called a nurse and told me to follow her.
We crossed the verdant grounds, where the patients were getting their supply of sunshine and fresh air. There were old people in wicker chairs with blankets over their legs, sickly figures walking up and down the paths, staff bustling back and forth. A sombre melancholy cast a veil over the daylight. The nurse led me into a dormitory block that looked like a place where people were left to die. A few ghosts dragged themselves along the narrow corridors, some with walking frames. My father’s room was at the end of the corridor, near the stairs. The nurse opened the door without knocking and stood aside to let me in. An old man sat huddl
ed in a wheelchair. It was my father, or what was left of him: a bundle of bones wrapped in a grey coat. All I could see of him was his unkempt hair, the chalk-white back of his neck and his thin arm dangling over the side. He didn’t turn round when he heard our footsteps behind him. Nobody had been to see him since he had arrived here, the director had told me. When he had been informed that I was coming, he hadn’t said yes or no; he had remained as inscrutable as the Sphinx … The nurse withdrew. Her heels clicked in the corridor. I closed the door behind her. My father kept staring out through the French window. I knew he wouldn’t turn round. He had never had the courage to confront things. Whenever he came back from one of his drinking sprees, I would hide in my room and cover my ears in order not to hear him yelling and overturning the furniture. Had I ever loved him? I suppose I had. Every child sees his father as a god. But I must have become disillusioned very early when I realised that you don’t have to be a hero to procreate, that it doesn’t take much and can even be an accident. Had my father loved me? He had never given me the impression that he had … Now, as soon as I entered his room, he had opted for withdrawal; he wasn’t looking at the grounds, he was running away. He had sent me a letter. Just one. It dated from the day he was admitted to the home. A kind of mea culpa. He must have been afraid I would refuse to pay his bills. Your mother was a good woman, he wrote. I left because I couldn’t hold a candle to her. He wasn’t telling me anything new. He’d been a loser, sponging off a devoted wife who had martyred herself in the observance of her marriage vows and had always hoped for the best while coping with the worst. I didn’t abandon you, I left you in peace. I hadn’t read his letter to the end. It had fallen from my hands. It had sounded as false as the bells of paradise.
I waited for him to stir, to show signs of life. My father didn’t move. He was hiding his face from me. I shook my head and was about to leave when his ruined voice rolled towards me like a dying wave.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
And he continued looking out at the grounds.
I left the room, closed the door behind me, waited a while longer in the corridor, then, certain that we had said everything there was to say even though I had said nothing at all, I joined the nurse at the foot of the stairs.
I drove in a trance.
I drove through towns and villages with no idea of where I was, the image of a dying man stuck in his wheelchair splashed all over the windscreen.
Where was I going?
I took the first exit I came to off the autobahn. A ribbon of tarmac led me through the middle of a landscape garlanded with orchards and farms and dropped me at the entrance to a small town which the mist was trying to hide from sight like forbidden fruit. A steeple, sober and dignified, watched over little houses with tiled roofs. The streets lay wrapped in a cold silence. I looked for a road sign, but couldn’t see any. I parked outside a bar and switched off the engine. It was as if my fatigue was waiting only for the engine to stop in order to overwhelm me. My shoulders sagged beneath the weight of the kilometres I had travelled and my limbs felt tight. Leaning on the wheel, I tried to summon a little strength and clear my mind … Essen, Munich, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Dresden, Leipzig … What was the meaning of this journey? Why had my father, the father I thought I had rejected, suddenly become an inescapable milestone on my road map? Why had I gone to look for forgiveness at my mother’s grave, when I hadn’t laid flowers on it for years? And what magic formula could my old university friends possibly have had that might allow me to bounce back when adversity laid me low? … The dullness of the village was startling. I had to find out where I was and how to get back to Frankfurt. I looked in the glove compartment for a map and found a packet of cigarettes that someone must have left. Without being able to stop myself, I lit up. The first puff went to my head. I had quit smoking the day I graduated as a doctor, a lifetime ago … The mist on the windscreen saddened me as much as my thoughts. A pharmacist’s sign blinked on the façade of a small shop. A little girl in a hood ran across the road. A few drops of rain hit the roof of my car … Essen, Munich, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Dresden, Leipzig, and then what? … Even if I visited every city in Germany, where would it get me? I knew I wouldn’t shake off either my grief or my shadow. The sickness I was fleeing was inside me. Wherever I went, it would be there, rooted in my flesh, playing on my weaknesses and thwarting my attempts at diversion. I needed to ward off the old demon, to drive it out of my body. With my bare hands or with forceps. Because there wasn’t room for the two of us.
I stubbed out my cigarette on the pavement and walked into the bar. A woman stood behind the counter, her face in her hands and her eyes staring into space, paying no attention to the two young men sitting at a table at the far end of the room. She jumped when I ordered a beer and a cheese sandwich. After serving me half-heartedly, she went back to her corner and resumed her daydreams.
‘Is there a hotel around here?’ I asked.
She shook her head.
I left a banknote on the counter and went back to my car. The sky had darkened; a faulty lamp was flickering at the end of the street. The memory of my father came back to provoke me. I got in and thought about what I should do: find a hotel for the night or keep driving. An old man with a newspaper under his arm walked past me, dragging his leg. He reminded me of Wolfgang walking away in the rain, weighed down by grief. Wolfgang! Why wasn’t he on my list? Had I forgotten him, or had I deliberately left him out? There was no rhyme or reason to this trip. All these unlikely reunions, this whole laborious itinerary intended to somehow purge my mind, were merely a desperate manoeuvre to get away from what I couldn’t accept. It was pointless to look for a hotel. The answers to my questions were buried somewhere in my house.
Somebody was ringing the doorbell. The noise drilled into my head. My hangover was so bad I found it hard to get up. The daylight hurt my eyes. The sun was at its height. I don’t know how many hours or days I had slept. My mouth furry, my movements laborious, I slipped out of bed, looked for my slippers, couldn’t find them, and went barefoot to the door. It was the postman. He was surprised to see me in vest and pants, looking quite untidy, and handed me a registered package. I signed for it and slammed the door in his face. I hadn’t done it deliberately. It was a mistake, due to my drunken state, and I immediately realised how rude it was. I opened the door again to apologise, but the postman had already disappeared. I staggered to the kitchen – I didn’t dare go to the bathroom yet – stuck my head in the sink and let the water from the tap lash me, then went back to my bedroom and tore the wrapping off the package. Inside, I found a small book with a letter in it. The book was Black Moon, Joma’s collection, dedicated to his ‘desert rose, Fatamou’. In the letter, Bruno had written:
My dear Kurt,
I think of you every day. I hope you’re well. For my part, things have settled down. I’m reunited with my partner, and I’m living in her house, in Djibouti. Her name is Souad, like the other one, except that she’s too huge to be a dancer and she snores like a diesel engine. But when she gets up early in the morning, she lights up my life. I hesitated for a long time before sending you Joma’s book. I’d never forgive myself if the only memory you had of Africa was a jail and a gang of idiots. We never become battle-hardened, and I know how false the concept is. Often, it’s those who have triumphed over misfortune who are the least ready to confront it a second time. I thought I knew everything about Africa, its hardships and about-turns, and yet, with every false move, I don’t merely stumble, I fall like a child learning to walk. But whatever nasty surprises are lurking around the corner, I refuse to believe that Africa is nothing but violence and poverty, just as I refuse to believe that Joma Baba-Sy was merely a brute with a narrow mind and no heart. I would be at peace with you if you read his poems. They say what we did not deign to hear; maybe one day they might block out the voice reminding us of the wrongs we endured.
For you, in the name of the suffering we shared, I will always keep the faith of those
who have come through the same ordeal with greater wisdom than anger.
Fraternally yours (in Africa, we are all brothers)
Bruno
At the bottom of the page, there was an email address and a telephone number.
Claudia insisted that I emerge from my ‘lair’. ‘You look like a peasant,’ she said. Not having the strength to resist her, I gave in. She took me to a restaurant just outside town. The subdued lighting soothed me. We sat down at the far end of the room. There were only three other couples having dinner. Nobody recognised us. Claudia ordered the dish of the day for both of us. We ate in silence. She seemed hesitant. Every time she was about to say something, she changed her mind and dropped it. We were in the middle of the meal when a dapper, plump-faced middle-aged man came and said hello. He was wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a gold wristwatch. I didn’t know him. Claudia invited him to join us. He pretended to hesitate before accepting. The smile he gave me went right through me. I didn’t appreciate the liberty Claudia had taken in imposing a stranger on me.
‘Let me introduce Dr Brandt, an eminent psychologist.’
The man hastened to hold out his hand. ‘I’m delighted, Dr Krausmann. Claudia assures me you’re reacting very well after what happened to you.’
So she had told him about me.
I signalled to the waiter and asked for the bill. I couldn’t stand the thought of spending a minute longer in the company of someone who had a head start on me.
The African Equation Page 26
