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:
Live every morning as if it’s the first
Let the past deal with its own misdeeds.
Live every evening as if it’s the last
Tomorrow will bring what tomorrow needs.
About the Author
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.
Copyright
First published in France as L’Équation africaine
Copyright © Éditions Julliard, 2011
First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,
London, SW1W 0NZ
This ebook edition first published in 2015
All rights reserved
© Gallic Books, 2015
The right of Yasmina Khadra to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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