The African Equation

by Yasmina Khadra

  Tao, the cook, had made us a particularly delicious Oriental meal. He served us at eight on the dot and immediately withdrew. He was a short man in his fifties, with a complexion like overripe quince. Close-cropped jade-black hair crowned his ascetic face with its high, prominent cheekbones. He was discreet and efficient, always appearing and disappearing noiselessly, always on the lookout for the least sign from his employer. Hans liked him a lot. He had met him five years earlier in a hotel in Manila and had hired him on the spot. Tao was the father of a large family to whom he sent all his earnings. He never talked about his family, never complained about anything, eternally hidden behind a vague smile as calm as his soul. I had barely heard him say a word since we had been on the boat.

  After dinner, we went back up on deck. A meagre fog was doing its best to envelop the boat, but its stringy embrace unravelled in the wind and formed a kind of unstable, ghostly vault above our heads. In the bluish sky, intermittently, you could see the stars glittering gently, like dying fireflies. Apart from the lapping of the waves, there was not a sound to be heard. The silence seemed to be one with the darkness.

  Hans leant on the capstan and lit his pipe. He gazed at the glow in the bowl of the pipe, from which tiny sparks escaped, and asked me if I had ever swum in international waters.

  ‘Never more than a hundred yards from the beach,’ I replied.

  ‘That fear of cramp again?’

  ‘Exactly. It takes hold of me as soon as I go out of my depth.’

  ‘A childhood trauma, I suppose.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I don’t like taking pointless risks.’

  He nodded, puffed at his pipe, a distant smile on his lips. ‘Living means running risks every day, Kurt.’

  ‘That depends in which direction you’re running.’

  I didn’t care for the turn the conversation had taken. My situation didn’t lend itself to existential questions. Hans realised that and pretended to check the rigging, then, after an exaggerated puff at his pipe, said, ‘When I was young, I often came here to go deep-sea diving. My father loved it. I remember he would put on his diving suit faster than a sock and throw himself into the water before the instructor. He was such a stolid man usually, inflexible at work and in his private life. But as soon as he smelt the sea, he’d become as excited as a hungry kid at the sight of a chocolate waffle.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘He put me to shame, he really couldn’t keep still. And often, when he dived, the instructor had to go down and force him to come up again. My father was quite capable of following a ray or watching for a moray eel in its hole until he fainted. My mother was always worried sick about him. She wouldn’t let him take me to see the corals up close … I get goose pimples just from thinking about it. They were wonderful days … Later, with Paula, I came back here to revive those memories. But Paula wasn’t a born diver. She suffered from claustrophobia and couldn’t spend more than thirty seconds underwater.’

  I don’t know why I said to him, ‘I envy your gilded childhood. My father never even took my mother and me to the seaside. He hated water, even tap water.’

  I had embarrassed him. I was aware of how out of place my words were, and yet, driven by some need to be unpleasant, I hadn’t been able to hold them back. Hans stared at the bowl of his pipe, smoothed his well-tended beard with his other hand, pondered for a few seconds, then raised his head.

  ‘It’s true, I had a dream childhood, and above all the privilege of knowing my grandfather. He was an exceptional man who’d been a famous playwright in the 1920s. I was twelve years old and, at that age when you get all kinds of ideas in your head, I wanted to be a novelist. One day, when we were walking together in the woods, I asked him how to become a writer. My grandfather pointed to a ruin and said, “You see that stone? How much do you think it weighs? At least a ton, don’t you think? Well, it was a dwarf who carried it here on his back from the quarry over there.” I told him that was impossible, that it would take at least twenty circus strongmen to shift the stone one centimetre. To which my grandfather replied, “That’s pretty much what literature is. Finding a story for each thing and a way to make it interesting …”’

  He stopped to see if I had understood what he was getting at. Hans had always been modest: whenever he wanted to put someone in his place, he preferred subtlety to a full-frontal attack.

  Realising that I didn’t see the connection, he concluded, ‘I didn’t become a novelist, Kurt, but I learnt to find a story and a meaning in everything.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘It’s not me you have to follow, but your own path. The most solid foundation we can find is in each of us. You can lift any stone with any lever as long as you convince yourself that the stone only exists in your head. Because everything happens in here.’ And he tapped his temple with his finger.

  ‘What stone are you talking about, Hans?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I’m referring to.’

  At last I understood. I had done everything I could to avoid the thorniest of subjects, but now I had fallen in head first. Hans had probably been waiting for this opportunity since we had left Cyprus. He had been tactful enough not to provoke it, but he had hoped for it, and now I was offering it to him on a plate. I pretended to peer at the few gaps in the fog and, in order to change the subject, asked, ‘Where exactly are we?’

  Hans looked at his watch. ‘We passed the strait of Babel-Mandeb some time ago, and by dawn we should have left the Red Sea for the Gulf of Aden. If you like, we can put in at a little port I know, south of Djibouti. Not just to take on fresh supplies.’

  ‘You’re the captain.’

  ‘It’s up to you, Kurt. If you don’t feel like it, it doesn’t matter. We have enough to see us through the next ten days … I love the little fishing ports in this region, and their bazaars filled to the brim with plastic dishes and pointless fake chrome utensils. The people are really nice around here even when they’re trying to flog you cheap rubbish at exorbitant prices. They think every tourist is as rich as Croesus and stupid enough to take a rusty old teapot for Aladdin’s lamp. You’ll see, their spiel is such fun, you almost want to let them relieve you of your last cents just for the hell of it.’

  I shook my head. ‘To be honest, Hans, I didn’t much like it when we put in at Sharm el-Sheikh or at Port Sudan.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too many people and too much noise.’

  Hans burst out laughing. ‘I see … Your wish is my command: no stopping before the Comoros.’

  We chatted for a long time on deck, talking about this and that, steering clear of unpleasant topics. Ever since we had embarked, it was Hans who had led the conversation. I was content to listen to him, interrupting only to encourage him, especially when he got on to seafaring. I knew almost nothing about the subject, couldn’t steer or read a compass, let alone find my position on a map. With his encyclopedic knowledge, Hans loved to hold forth about the sea and about ships, from the most ancient to the most state-of-the-art. He was very proud of his boat, which he had decorated himself. Whenever he took the controls, he gave the impression he was taking charge of his own destiny. The first few days, laid low with seasickness, I would spew my guts out over the hawsehole, then collapse on a seat, wrap my arms around the bulwark, and watch Hans through the window of the control room. He would be standing erect like a conqueror, his white beard held high, like an older but wiser Captain Ahab. At first, he had invited me to the helm and explained the workings of the different dials on the control panel, showed me the radio, the radar, the tracking system, the navigation instruments, then, realising that I wasn’t taking much of it in, he had stopped ‘bothering’ me. My mind was elsewhere and his teaching bored me. I preferred to spend most of my time scanning the horizon and listening to the sails flapping in the wind.

  Although we avoided mentioning Jessica, Paula’s name came up again and again
. Hans spoke about her as if he had left her early that morning and was sure he would go home to her that night. I could tell he missed her, but he had the gift of managing things so that she remained omnipresent in his heart and mind.

  ‘It’s starting to get chilly,’ I said, energetically rubbing my arms.

  He nodded. ‘One last drink?’ he suggested.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I took a shower before going to bed. As on the previous nights, I planned to switch off the lights and stare at the darkness for an hour or two. I had started to read Musil on the plane taking us to Nicosia. That night, I realised that I was still on the first chapter. Incapable of concentrating on the text, I started again from the beginning. Like the night before, and the nights before that, I put on a little music, the same piece of Wagner, then, in the middle of a sentence or a metaphor, the book faded away and I found my mind wandering. And there, in the muffled silence of my mahogany-lined cabin, amid the platinum joints and the paintings on the walls, Jessica’s ghost caught up with me. I closed my eyes to dismiss it, but in vain. What I dreaded more than anything was waking up – the first thing that would come into my mind was Jessica’s death – every time I woke up I would experience the exact same emotions I had felt in that bathroom where the love of my life had slipped away from me. It was terrible. Would I ever get over it? … I wondered above all how I managed to get up, shower, shave, drink my coffee and go back up on deck to see the sea replace time … Day being merely a respite, night would find me in bed again and would spread its blackness into my thoughts and whisper in my ear, just before I drifted off, asking if I was ready or not to face the moment of waking that stood on guard, waiting for morning.

  I took a sleeping pill.

  As I did every night.

  *

  I was woken by the noise of something falling. The pill I’d taken had dulled my senses, and I wasn’t sure where I was. I looked for my watch, couldn’t find it, consulted the one built into the bedside table: 4.27. Someone was yelling at Hans in the next room. Suddenly, the door of my room was flung open, and a torch was shone right in my face. I didn’t have time to react before a shadowy figure rushed at me and placed something metallic against my temple. A second figure came into the room, searched for the light switch and turned it on. The ceiling light revealed two excited black men. The first was in his thirties, solidly built with shaven head and shoulders like a weightlifter’s, a brute naked from the waist up, with amulets around his arms and venom in his eyes, screaming orders at me in an unknown language. The other intruder was a slender teenager, with slashes on his face, and eyes that shone like a drug addict’s. He was pointing some kind of firearm at me, maybe a sawn-off shotgun or a home-made carbine.

  The older man was a real giant and too strong for me to put up any resistance. He tore me from my bed and threw me against a wall. I was no sooner on my feet than I received a blow with a rifle butt in my stomach which bent me double. The second intruder grabbed me by the hair and forced me to kneel. His blood-red eyes travelled over my body like two man-eating ants. I had never met anyone like these two in my life. The younger man seemed to be waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to shoot me dead … The giant rummaged in the drawers, turned the mattress over to see what was underneath, and took down the paintings in search of a hidden safe. Whenever he came across anything interesting – my watch, my sleeping pills, my wallet, my mobile phone, my belt, my sunglasses, my book – he threw it into a small, dirt-stained jute sack. The search over, he came back to me, looked into my eyes in the hope of detecting some detail that might have escaped him, lifted my chin with the tip of his Kalashnikov and yelled something at me in his language. He repeated the same question three times, in a guttural voice that made the veins on his neck throb. Not getting any answer, he hit me and pushed me out into the corridor.

  In the control room, four armed men stood with guns aimed at Hans and Tao. They were all yelling at once. A fifth barred the stairway that led up on deck, moving the blade of a sabre back and forth across the palm of his hand, as sinister as an executioner getting ready to behead his victim. There was an unhealthy gleam in his eyes, and his fixed grin chilled my blood. Puny-looking, with a bony face and unusually long arms, he gave the impression of not being entirely of sound mind, especially with the grotesque pair of glasses without lenses he was wearing so casually.

  Our attackers were young, some barely out of puberty, but they seemed to know exactly what they were doing. After lots of yelling and bursts of spittle, they ordered us to put our hands in the air. Hans, who had only had time to put on a pair of trousers and one sock, tried to calm them down, and was ordered to shut up and keep still.

  ‘No other passengers?’ a tall, thin man with bronzed skin asked the younger of the two men who had come to get me.

  ‘No, chief.’

  The chief turned and looked at me, lingering over my underpants, my bare legs. With his revolver, he shoved me against the wall. My Adam’s apple scraped my throat. I found it hard not to close my eyes, expecting a gunshot at any moment. I was seized with terror, and I clenched my fists to push it back.

  ‘Are you the pilot?’ he asked me in English.

  ‘No, I am,’ Hans said. ‘What do you want with us?’

  The chief laughed, revealing a gold tooth, and without taking his eyes off me retorted, ‘These damned whites! They always need everything spelt out for them.’ He went up to Hans and looked him up and down. ‘Is this your boat or did you hire it?’

  ‘It’s my boat.’

  ‘Great! … French, American, British?’

  ‘German.’

  ‘Are you in business or some kind of scam?’

  ‘They’re spies,’ the giant with the amulets said.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Hans said. ‘My friend’s a doctor. And I’m in humanitarian aid. I’m supposed to be equipping a hospital in the Comoros …’

  ‘How touching,’ the chief said ironically, turning to Tao. ‘And the chink?’

  ‘He’s Filipino.’

  ‘The skivvy, I assume. He cleans, does the cooking, wipes your arse, attends to your every need … How much would a Filipino cook fetch on the market, Joma?’

  ‘You probably couldn’t give him away,’ the giant said.

  ‘In other words, a bad investment,’ the chief said, walking around Tao.

  Tao did not flinch. He held himself erect, his face inscrutable, revealing nothing of what he was feeling.

  ‘Sorry,’ the chief said, ‘I’m going to have to dispense with your services. I hope you can swim.’

  Immediately, the giant with the amulets took Tao by the waist. Hans tried to intervene, but a blow with a rifle butt knocked him to the floor. Tao didn’t struggle. He didn’t understand what was happening. His small body was engulfed by the black giant. I stood there petrified, in a daze, unable to react. I watched the giant take Tao up on deck. Not a muscle responded.

  ‘Kurt, don’t let him do it!’ Hans screamed at me from the floor.

  His cries brought me to my senses. I rushed to the stairs, swept aside the boy with the sabre. There was a kind of flash inside me, followed by blackness …

  Water was thrown over me. I emerged from a fog. There was blood on my vest, my boxer shorts and my thigh. I lifted my fingers to my temple: I was the one who was bleeding.

  The giant with the amulets put the bucket down on the wooden floor and dug his shoe into my side. ‘This isn’t a hotel.’

  The chief crouched beside me. He was young, in his early thirties, quite good-looking, with fine features and a straight nose. He wore his fatigues like a banker wearing a suit, with a self-assurance that was meant to be as seductive as it was intimidating. From his affected airs and graces, it was clear he was a product of the local middle class, someone who’d had a future at the head of his community but had turned bad.

  Holding our passports in one hand, he waited for me to come back to my senses and then said, ‘Excuse our methods, doctor. We wo
rk in the traditional way around here. With the means at our disposal.’

  I looked for Hans. He was behind me, in a corner of the control room. His eye had disappeared beneath a purplish swelling.

  ‘Let me explain the situation,’ the chief said in perfect English. ‘The ball is in our court, but the rules of the game belong to you and your friend. You behave yourselves and we’ll treat you well. You try to be smart, and I can’t guarantee anything.’

  ‘Why did you throw Tao in the sea?’ Hans screamed, beside himself.

  ‘You mean the chink? That was a question of logistics.’

  ‘You killed a man, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘People die every day. That’s never stopped God from sleeping soundly.’

  Hans was disgusted by the chief’s words. His face was trembling with anger and his breathing was laboured. He bit his lip to restrain himself.

  ‘Did I say something stupid?’ the chief asked, cynically.

  ‘Are you trying to make me believe you don’t have any regret, any remorse?’ Hans cried, his voice throbbing with indignation.

  The chief gave a toneless laugh and looked at Hans as if seeing him for the first time. After a silence, he opened his arms wide in a theatrical gesture and said, ‘To feel regret or remorse, you need to have a conscience. And I don’t have one.’