Human Love

by Andrei Makine

  I see a constellation in the night sky as I move away from the glaring lights of the People’s Palace. A few seconds suffice for the realization to dawn that every one of our actions occurs beneath the giddy remoteness of these stars. And yet we do everything possible to forget this boundless judgment, to be judged only by ourselves. Long ago, in a city strewn with corpses, a man who was perhaps my only true friend and who had only a few days left to live pointed out the constellation of the Wolf to me and reminded me that we had already seen it on the night of our first meeting in the forests of northern Angola, that night when, still very young, I was so afraid to die … It was enough to let one’s gaze wander among these stars for the fear to begin to weaken and for death to seem temporary, provisional. Like our lives …

  I hear footsteps on the gravel of the path that surrounds the palace. The young woman who is guiding our group of writers runs up to me and summons me to come quickly and take my place at the “African Life Stories in Literature” roundtable discussion.

  The debate is already under way. For the first few moments I listen to it as if it were in an unknown language. In memory I am still at the side of the man who has only a few days to live as he gazes at the sky above the ruins of Mogadishu.

  Little by little the meaning of what is being said becomes clear to me. Two viewpoints confront one another: the “afro-pessimists” and the “afro-optimists.” The latter are drawn from the ranks of the Africans comfortably settled in the West, globalized blacks, to some extent. The “pessimists” speak of colonization, slavery, négritude. The “optimists” give half-smiles as they listen to them. They call for self-projection into the future, a balanced perspective on the black man s burden, a reaching out beyond the historic divides between civilizations. The “traditionalist” pitch is the inexpiable guilt of the whites, the ancestral wisdom of the African … The card played by the “moderns” is a matter-of-fact view of the colonial past, the new Africa, the continent, in the words of one of them, “bubbling with vitality and with the libido of a geyser.” The public salutes him with a burst of applause and even several shouts of “Yeah!”

  In the hall at the end of the front row I recognize the organizer with beet-colored hair, my neighbor at the hotel. She sits next to her friend, the Congolese artist. From time to time she consults her watch, then exchanges a little grimace of complicity with the young man, which means: “Once this palaver’s over, we’re off.”

  Yes, a palaver, she’s not wrong. French is the language of the colonizer, complain the “traditionalists,” the white man’s weapon that has reduced African cultures to silence. The “moderns” retort: no, French is our trophy, our spoils of war. We can do with it what we like. French has violated our African mentality. No, anorexic French is being regenerated by an insemination of négritude. This turn of phrase comes from the Togolese writer who has just been talking about “the libido of a geyser.” It scores a bull’s-eye. A guffaw of approval ripples through the hall. The line of dark suits in the front row, occupied by the “fat cats of the international conference circuit,” stirs. Hissing chuckles can be heard from them. During the morning these men have concluded their important cogitations on sustainable development in Africa and now they are relaxing as they listen to the ranting of the novelists, who are simply geisha girls performing a few choice routines for them. Encouraged by the example of the Togolese writer, the participants in the discussion set about demonstrating Africa s fecundating powers. Anything goes: animist priests, whose magic enhances mens sexual performance; women’s exuberant beauty (“breasts, two great gourds filled with milk and honey,” one of the writers quotes himself); a cunning husband’s skill at provoking the rivalry between his wives. I learn that in one African country the men call their mistresses “offices,” and that in Congolese villages the daughter to be married off is nicknamed “the little dog.” The audience laughs, the novelists vie with one another. Repudiated wives, husbands betrayed with an uncle, a father, a brother, a son … Penises “like a bamboo stem,” sweat “trickling in rivulets between her shoulder blades and streaming into the groove between her buttocks as her lover grips them” … All this accompanied by talk of sorcerers, eclipses of the sun, dances and trances.

  Tales of men and women, and yet at no time, I tell myself in perplexity, does love appear, plain love, with its insane generosity, its spirit of self-sacrifice. Here the talk is of prénuptial bargaining, long marriage rituals, and a whole commerce of paid-for couplings and bride prices, even virginity being rewarded with a goat…

  A memory comes back to me, the tale of a man tortured with the strappado, deprived of food and water, who told me he would have accepted that suffering all over again in order to find himself for a moment beside the woman he loved.

  The notion of talking about him here, in this hall, suddenly seems to me urgent and vital. And completely unthinkable. For what is taking place here is a well-rehearsed performance in which everyone plays his role: the cantankerous “traditionalists” talking of slavery, the smiling “moderns” exalting sexual négritude, the enthusiastic audience, the condescending notabilities. This is playacting, true to its illusory nature: the show being staged has no connection with the life unfolding beyond these walls.

  Beyond these walls, a few hours away from Conakry, lie two countries in their death throes, Sierra Leone and Liberia, peopled with ghosts forever at one another’s throats on soil crammed with gold and diamonds. Land where more mines are planted than crops. The playacting makes it possible to forget this for as long as the show lasts. The intellectuals perform their verbal pirouettes, the leaders signal their approval by puffing up their greasy chops, the audience relishes the spicy witticisms (“Africa is an afrodisiac!” yells the Togolese writer). The organizer with her beet-colored hair fidgets slightly on her chair, impatient to be mounted again by her Congolese friend. And at this very moment in a Liberian village a woman is being raped, a child’s arm is being cut off. This is no mere probability. It is a statistical certainty.

  The man gazing at the constellation of the Wolf was no dreamer. Quite simply, he knew that the viewpoint of the stars made it possible to tear down the walls behind which human beings hide for the satisfaction of remaining blind.

  As I study the hall, I reflect that it was this world here, this masquerade, that Elias detested the most. A world of which, at this moment, I am a part.

  During the last days we spent in the furnace of Mogadishu, he must have understood perfectly that he was henceforth “beyond redemption”: useless now to the Soviets, who were making their catastrophic exit, but above all, undesirable in his native Angola. For more than a week I did not see him, even in the distance, and I was comforted by this: I dreaded hearing him talk about the hopelessness of his situation. Not having seen him, I hoped he had succeeded in leaving Mogadishu by his own means. I remembered the thought that had crossed my mind from time to time in the past: Why did he not give up all these increasingly absurd games of war and espionage and settle somewhere in the West? In truth, I still did not understand what Anna meant to him. Years later that handful of words he had exchanged with her in Moscow would come back to me: “To go back … Back to Sarma …”

  A new outburst of laughter in the hall. My neighbor on the platform nudges me with his elbow and whispers a joke in my ear, the sense of which eludes me. I am back in the world Elias detested. The participants begin reading their texts about Africa, one after the other. So my own betrayal will have to come to this too.

  5

  THE FIRST IMPRESSION: a flock of penguins, huddled close together, hiding their young ones inside the crowd. The men have their backs turned to the street, one of those streets that gunfire renders unusually noisy with nowhere to hide. The plaintive voices of women can be heard, the wailing of children. Yes, penguins: the mens dark suits, the women’s pale dresses. Everyone has tried to put on as many clothes as possible, despite the sun, so as not to have to leave them behind in this Mogadishu in flames. The cr
owd Is pressed up against the closed gates of the American embassy They are the Soviets; the USSR embassy has just been sacked, and at this moment the looters are snatching up everything which may still be of use or could be sold. The houses in the capital have been dismembered like the carcasses of animals, down to their entrails, down to the scraping of the bones. The penguins have already witnessed the knackers’ handiwork and are massed together now. terrorized, pressed up against the American fortress.

  I can see them from a car parked at the crossroads where a pile of plastic gas cans is burning. Beside me is Leonid, the doctor I met on the plane flying into Mogadishu. We are trying to negotiate with the representative of some armed band or other who dangles in front of us the possibility of evacuating the embassy personnel by air. Several days ago Leonid operated on this Somali fighters brother. The reward could therefore be this right of passage to the airport, to an aircraft coming from Addis Ababa. But the negotiations are dragging; the representative indicates that he would also like to receive some ready cash …

  The sun is already heating the roof of the car appallingly. The crowd of penguins on the other side of the road has become spotted with white: the women have covered their heads with panama hats or scarves, the men have donned the caps tourists wear. Indeed they look like an organized outing, an excursion to a site. I can make out the stooping figure of Vadim, who is talking to the ambassador, and a little to one side, outside the circle of penguins, Anna. Her gaze is directed toward the next street, where the ragged fighters are busy mounting a machine gun on a jeep. In the haste of the preparations and the flight, she must have forgotten that light white scarf that I have seen on her head on several occasions … From time to time she runs her hand through her hair, as if to drive away the heat.

  Suddenly a truck hurtles across the street, overturning the pile of gas cans on which the flames are dying down amid a stink of plastic. A burst of bullets rakes the enclosure surrounding the American embassy screams from women and oaths from men ring out in the crowd of penguins. Someone starts rattling at the heavy gate, which is still closed. Behind the houses with their windows blown out by explosions an eruption of black smoke arises and thickens. The air grows dark; the sun is eclipsed, then reappears, looking like a vast moon. Panic splits up the crowd into little groups, families, no doubt, then the din of a further explosion welds it together again with the animal fear of a tribe. In the car the Somali who was promising us a passage to the airport retracts. He must have realized that he lacked the time to extract wads of dollars from these terrorized foreigners. It seems easier to go off and loot a villa. Leonid insists, raises his voice. He is disfigured by tears, the weeping sickness he contracted one day in the mountains to the north of Kabul. He proposes a price to the Somali, gets out of the car, goes to report to the ambassador. I station myself in front of the vehicle so as to reduce the temptation for our savior to take off. There are fresh explosions beyond the row of houses, the thump of mortar fire. In the middle of the crowd of bodies pressed together I notice the face of a very small child, who smiles at me, then hides, then reappears …

  The roar from an artillery piece in the distance at first prevents me from understanding the argument that suddenly erupts within the group. In fact, it is one man yelling his head off. He is thickset, dressed in a velvet suit, his brow dripping with sweat. He seems first to be barking, then spluttering threats, while pointing his finger at Vadim. The latter backs away in the face of these violent attacks, mumbling excuses. They have separated from the crowd and are speaking louder; I finally grasp the reason for the confrontation. The man in the velvet suit is accusing Vadim of having left a computer behind at the embassy as well as (he emits a viperish hiss) a briefcase containing “top secret” diskettes … “Just you wait! Back in Moscow well take good care of you. And as for your diplomatic passport, you can chuck that down the pan straight away! And let me point out that your wife had access to that computer, too …”

  Anna, who has joined them, hears these last few words and tries to explain that, amid all the shooting, in a building on fire, there was no time to go and open the safe and take out the briefcase in question. The man feels caught out by this observation, for he is the one, given his function, who should have rescued these “top secret” diskettes. But he is already fabricating an alibi for himself, looking for scapegoats. “Just you wait! Back in Moscow heads will roll. Just you wait. Expect the worst. I’m warning you …”

  A figure I do not recognize at once: a man dressed in a simple T-shirt and jeans. Elias. He must have been standing a couple of yards behind me, beside the car. He has heard everything. “What’s the combination for the safe?” he asks, addressing the man in the velvet suit. “Why? What do you mean? Do you expect me …” The man’s voice is choked. “The combination?” repeats Elias more softly, looking at Vadim, who turns away slightly. Anna swiftly reels off a string of figures. An explosion very close at hand deafens us; the crowd of penguins utters a howl. I have time to see Elias offering the driver a fistful of notes. The car drives off.

  A continuous drumming of fists on the steel of the gate. Then an amazing lull, as if an armistice had finally been agreed. Unless it’s the hour of prayer. The setting sun is still burning hot but will rapidly sink into the equatorial night. The smoke has already filled the city with an oily, suffocating dusk.

  The car returns at this moment. What will stay with me of that scene is its bizarrely slow-motion pace, the cause of which I do not yet understand. Yes, the steps Elias takes, as if in a time warp. He goes up to the man in the velvet suit, hands him the briefcase. Then, with equal slowness, he hands Anna a white scarf, the one she always covered her head with against the sun … He seems to be about to speak, but the words forming on his lips are inaudible. I believe what he says is being drowned by the sudden grinding of the gate. Then by the shouts of the crowd moving forward, plunging into the American paradise that is now ajar.

  The penguins jostle one another; a woman’s hysterical cry can be heard (“You’ve lost your sandal!”), the ambassador’s voice trying to discipline this mad rush, to give it a little dignity. For it is the “American imperialists,” their eternal enemies, who are about to give them shelter. I just have time to note the farcical nature of the situation and to glimpse a woman’s face in the middle of the crowd being sucked into the funnel of the gateway. This face, Anna, looking back several times, and Vadim drawing her along by her arm. I glance behind me, but I can no longer see Elias. Neither in the crowd, nor in the Somali’s jeep …

  “He’s over there!” I recognize Leonid’s voice. Elias is sitting down, his back against the wheel, his eyes open, his hands trailing on the ground. His left arm, from shoulder to wrist, is red. A great patch spreads over his T-shirt as well, on his belly … We lift him up; his head moves, and he is still trying to speak. Then we notice that the gate has closed once more. Leonid yells, kicks against the steel. Two cars pass in the street. Bullets chip at the paintwork on the gate right by our heads.

  A scrap of garden with trees nicked by shell splinters, a house transformed into a makeshift hospital, a butterfly (no, a humming bird) beating against the glass of an oil lamp. The stink of a generator, the bitter acidity of dirty, bloody bodies, and from time to time, like the reminder of an impossible world, the cool of the ocean breeze. The buzzing of flies in this “operating room,” the crunch of shattered phials underfoot, the continual, monotonous groaning of the wounded and their families.

  Leonid works, assisted by a Somali doctor who is very slowly chewing a ball of khat. The hummingbird, intoxicated by the light, spirals down toward the busy hands. Leonid knocks it aside as one would swat a mosquito. The bullets he extracts and tosses into a metal basin make a sound similar to that given off by melting ice. From time to time the explosions obliterate all sound, then the movements of the two doctors become invested with a hint of unreality. Leonid operates without weeping. And yet his tape recorder sleeps in the big knapsack thrown down beside t
he door … I study his face. No, the eyes are dry, just reddened with tiredness.

  He straightens up, puts down the lancet, draws a sheet over the body. “Theres no way he could have set one foot in front of the other with the wounds he had … he murmurs. His eyes stare at me without seeing me. For a fraction of a second I believe I have touched upon the truth of what has happened: the man who had reappeared before us, a black briefcase in his hand, was no longer alive but moved forward, remaining upright, propelled by a force that resided somewhere other than in the body that now lies beneath this sheet.

  We spend a whole day driving around in the blazing trap that is Mogadishu. The fact of carrying a dead man sometimes helps us to pass through roadblocks. Despite the violence of the slaughter, these mortal remains seeking burial inspire a distant echo of the sacred in the fighters. In some streets the smoke from the fires is so thick that we have to pause before moving on, not knowing what we shall see when the darkness clears. It could be that man whom a shell has welded to a wall in an incrustation of blood and torn garments. Or that child, which has made itself a little airplane from the blade of an electric fan and is playing at launching it in the middle of the gunfire. Or yet again, as in an appalling nightmare, the turret of a buried tank: our attempts to escape had led us into the area of the presidential palace, which was protected by these sunken tanks, transformed into artillery pieces. The gun barrel moves with a somnambulistic slowness, points at us, stops … We make a sharp U-turn and drive away, feeling on the backs of our necks the full weight of this weapon taking aim.