The African Equation

by Yasmina Khadra

  Hans was so disgusted, he didn’t say another word.

  ‘What are you going to do with us?’ I asked.

  The chief pursed his lips and thought over my question. ‘I’ll be frank with you,’ he said. ‘I don’t really care if you live or die. It’s entirely up to you if you return home safe and sound or end up in a ditch with a bullet in your head … But from now on, you’re my prisoners. What you own belongs to me, apart from your family photographs. You can already say goodbye to your boat. The spoils of war.’

  ‘It’s my boat,’ Hans protested. ‘I’m not at war with anyone. I’m just passing through. You have no right …’

  ‘There are no rights here, Mr Makkenroth. And there’s only one law: the law of the gun. And tonight the guns are on my side.’

  ‘What are you going to do with my boat? Sell it off cheap? Strip it?’

  ‘The real question is: what are we going to do with you? Am I to understand that you’re more concerned about what happens to your boat than to you? … You’re my hostages, my meal ticket. I don’t care about the Geneva Convention or UN resolutions, I’ll treat you as I see fit. From now on, I’m your god. Your fate is closely linked to my moods, so if I were you I’d try to keep on the right side of me.’

  We were forced to get dressed, our wrists were tied, and we were shut up in the room that Tao had occupied, down in the hold. The boy with the lensless glasses came and took up position in the doorway. He leant one shoulder against the door frame, tilted his head to one side and began watching us in a strange way. The stupid grin on his face sent a chill down my spine.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Hans asked me.

  ‘I think so. How about you?’

  ‘I’ll be OK … Do you realise? They threw Tao overboard!’

  ‘Do you think he’ll make it?’

  ‘He can’t swim.’

  ‘They have us at their mercy. They didn’t need to do that.’

  ‘It’s their way of showing they’re in control. People’s mindset is different in this part of the world. The life of a man and the life of a mosquito are the same to them. These people are alive now, but they come from another time.’

  The guard kept moving his greyish tongue over his lips. The stillness of his eyes accentuated my sense of unease.

  ‘Where did they spring from?’

  Hans shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I heard an engine coming closer. I thought it was the coastguard at first, but they aren’t allowed to operate in international waters. Tao came and told me that a felucca was heading straight for us. Something hit the hull. Within a fraction of a second, these maniacs were coming on board. I couldn’t do a thing.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘No idea. This area’s full of all kinds of predators: rebels, mercenaries, pirates, terrorists, smugglers, arms dealers. But I never imagined they were capable of venturing so far from their bases. I’ve done this stretch of water twice before, the last time only six months ago, and had no trouble …’

  He paused for breath. When he spoke again, his voice was heavier.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kurt. You have no idea how sorry I am to have got you mixed up in all this after what you’ve been through.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, Hans. It’s the way of things: it never rains but it pours.’

  ‘I really am sorry.’

  ‘Shhhh!’ said our guard in a whistling voice, raising his finger to his lips.

  Again, his glassy eyes sent a shiver through me.

  Hans and I were flung unceremoniously in the felucca, to be guarded by the giant with the amulets and three of his associates. The leader and the rest of the gang remained on board the yacht. As our new craft set sail for whatever fate had in store for us, we watched the boat make a series of clumsy manoeuvres before moving away in the opposite direction to ours. Hans had tears in his eyes; I saw the resentment well up in him. When the boat had faded into the darkness, he placed his chin on his bound fists and withdrew into himself.

  The felucca pitched on the waves, throwing us from side to side. In the silence of the night, the noise of the engine was like the moans of a dying pachyderm. I began feeling seasick and my migraine was getting worse. I threw up over my knees.

  The crossing seemed endless. Far in the distance, the first blood-red marks of dawn sprinkled the horizon. The wind froze my arms and knees. My back felt itchy. I couldn’t scratch myself or rub myself against the worm-eaten wood of the boat, from which big splinters as deadly as knives stuck out in places. Every now and again, the giant kicked me in the shin to stop me sleeping. Facing me, the boy with the lensless glasses was watching me constantly, a strange smile on his granite face.

  The cries of seagulls … I had dozed off. The sun had risen; the felucca threaded its way through the jagged edges of a reef, glided along a narrow, meandering passage filled with silt, and sailed up the lagoon as far as a tiny, gravelly beach. The giant threw us to the ground. The others pulled the boat out of the water and dragged it into a blind spot, where they covered it with a tarpaulin to camouflage it. We immediately set off on foot. A thalweg led us into a creek that we had to go around in order to advance further inland. After an hour’s walking, we reached a basin thick with undergrowth, where an armed adolescent stood guard. He was a short boy with stunted legs, his forehead riddled with pustules. He was wearing a dirty pair of trousers and a torn vest. The giant spoke to him in a local language, pointed to a hill and dismissed him. We retraced our steps over several kilometres. From time to time, we glimpsed the sea. I tried hard to memorise the places we were going through because I had only one idea in my head: to seize the first opportunity that presented itself to Hans and me to escape … Poor Hans! He limped in front, his shoulders sagging, his face distorted by his swollen eye. A trail of blood stuck his shirt to his back. He kept moving forward like a sleepwalker, his chin on his chest.

  We reached a cave oozing with damp and filthy with excrement and the traces of meals. It was a dark, fetid hole, its uneven roof covered with bats’ nests, its bumpy floor strewn with trails of wax as if thousands of candles had melted on it. There were rusty iron rings on the walls, some still with age-old chains through them, their joints eaten away by time and sea salt. Here and there, leftover food had blackened in the midst of crushed cans, tattered cloths and assorted rubbish. A sickly-sweet odour emanated from the corners of the cave, depleting the air. Disturbed by our arrival, flies rose in a buzzing fury and began attacking us in close-packed contingents.

  The giant ordered his men to chain us. Too exhausted to do anything, Hans let them. He could barely stand. I tried to resist the arms crushing me; some kind of handcuff rapidly closed over my wrists and I was thrown to the ground.

  ‘This is your hotel now,’ the giant announced.

  ‘You can’t leave us here,’ I protested.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My friend is hurt. This place is unhealthy and may make him worse. Can’t you put us somewhere else?’

  ‘Yes. I can tie you to a tree, or plant you in the sand, but you won’t find a better place to see Africa from up close. That’s what brings you here, isn’t it? Exoticism, wild spaces, nostalgia for lost empires …’

  ‘We aren’t tourists.’

  ‘Of course not. In Africa, there are no tourists, only voyeurs.’

  He ordered his men to follow him outside. Immediately, the flies took possession of the place again; their buzzing made the stench of the cave even more oppressive. I was nauseous, but there was nothing left in my empty belly to spew up. Hans lay down on the shit-stained ground and tried to sleep. His giving up worried me as much as his eye.

  ‘You have blood on your back,’ I said.

  ‘I was cut with a sabre as I tried to go up on deck. I wanted to throw a lifebelt to Tao.’ His face creased at the memory of the scene on the yacht. ‘When I think of Tao,’ he said, ‘you don’t know how angry I am with myself.’

  ‘There’s no point feeling guilty. We have to keep our spirits up. The
sea isn’t far. We need to know where we are. I have no intention of rotting here.’

  ‘Shhh!’ said the boy with the lensless glasses, still standing guard over the entrance to the cave.

  Night fell like the blade of a guillotine. I had drifted off to sleep. Outside, there wasn’t a sound; the boy who had been mounting guard had disappeared. I listened out: apart from the noise of the sea, nothing. At that precise moment, while a cold sweat froze my back, I became fully aware of the gravity of the situation.

  ‘Have they left?’ I asked Hans.

  Hans didn’t reply. I nudged him with my knee; he didn’t react. For a second or two, I thought he was dead. I bent over him, pinned my ear to his side; he moaned and rolled over.

  I was racked with hunger and thirst, but I didn’t care. A tension I had never known was choking me. There was nothing inside me but dark thoughts and dread. I sensed that I was in danger. I didn’t want to go back to sleep: I wanted to look into the darkness and assume it was night, a moonless, starless night like those I had known in Frankfurt in winter; I wanted to keep my eyes wide open and familiarise myself with what I couldn’t see; this was perhaps the last time I could cling to something that kept me alive … Hans had given up. I disturbed him when I spoke to him; he would answer reluctantly, out of politeness. I imagined him struggling with Tao’s ghost. But I needed to talk, to say something, no matter what, to ask questions to which I wouldn’t demand answers; Hans’s silence left me defenceless. Silence is the cruellest medium for panic; it turns doubt into an obsession, darkness into claustrophobia. What were they going to do with us? Death was prowling around us; I could have touched it but I was afraid to provoke it. I listened out for a voice or an animal cry that would burst through that awful, crushing silence, but it was pointless. Outside, the night was like a sarcophagus; it stank of mustiness and rotting flesh. I was scared …

  In the morning, a teenage boy brought us something to eat: a kind of thick, lumpy soup. The smell alone made me nauseous.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked.

  ‘Here we eat and don’t ask questions. It isn’t every day we have something to get our teeth into.’

  The boy seemed bored, as if he was being forced to do tasks he hated. He was very tall, with prominent shoulder blades, an angular face and a tuft of frizzy hair cut into a diamond shape in the middle of his shaven skull. A tattoo showing a girl’s face and the letter f adorned his right shoulder. I turned and held out my arms so that he could untie me. He stepped back warily.

  ‘How can we eat with our hands behind our backs?’ I said.

  ‘Does sir need a trolley?’ the giant grunted, appearing suddenly as if emerging out of the stone. ‘A chromeplated trolley with embroidered white place mats, silver cutlery and crystal glasses?’

  He chased away the boy, who left without hurrying, then pushed the pan in my direction with his foot.

  ‘If you really want to feel Africa at its most authentic, you just have to smell your meal. Of course, it looks like vomit, but isn’t it already a foretaste of the great journey of initiation?’

  ‘How can we possibly eat with these chains?’

  ‘By licking the pan, like animals.’

  He walked over to Hans, who was still lying on his side.

  ‘He’s been hurt,’ I said.

  The giant bent over Hans and pulled up his shirt to see the state of the wound. ‘I’ve seen worse,’ he muttered. ‘He’ll get over it.’

  ‘I’m a doctor. I need to examine him.’

  ‘I tell you it isn’t serious.’

  ‘And I tell you his wound will get infected if—’

  With one hand, he grabbed me by the throat, stifling the rest of my protest.

  ‘Don’t raise your voice to me,’ he said, opening wide his huge white eyes. ‘I hate that.’

  His fingers closed over my carotid artery; their throbbing reached my temples.

  ‘You’re in Africa … you’re in my home, and here, I’m the master. When you talk to Joma, you take care what you say … And stop looking at me like that or I’ll gouge your eyes out with a toothpick.’

  My brain was starting to lack air.

  ‘Have you got that?’

  Spit from his mouth spattered my face. Scornfully, he pushed me away.

  ‘I don’t like you,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  He made as if to leave the cave, then turned back, shaking with suppressed rage as if an age-old resentment, silenced for centuries, had caught up with him and overwhelmed him. In his massive face, as black as coal, his nostrils quivered in time with the spasms making his cheeks twitch.

  ‘You must be wondering what kind of creature I am, not enough of a primate to be tamed, nor human enough to be moved.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re insinuating.’

  His hand landed on my cheek, so hard that my skull bounced off the rock. In a sudden surge of pride and revolt, I stood up again to confront him. Our breaths met. He raised his arm. I defied him, my neck stretched to breaking point. Unable to make me back down, he gave up on the idea of hitting me again and left the cave like a devil deserting the body of a possessed man.

  On the second day, it was the boy with the lensless glasses who brought us our food. Again, that rancid, sticky goo that left a rotten aftertaste on the palate and made us belch for hours on end. At first, I didn’t think I could swallow a mouthful without throwing up, but hunger masks nutritional horrors the way spices conceal bland food … The boy gave a start when I pushed the pan away with my foot. Not grasping the meaning of my gesture, he didn’t take much notice of it; he was only surprised that I could turn down a meal. He sat down on a bump in the ground and, with his sabre between his thighs, looked at me with a curious stare. Since the attack on the yacht, this boy had intrigued me. His gaze was an enigma; there was no way to guess what was brewing behind it. His eyes were small – light brown, surrounded by a sandy white, the edges of the irises gnawed by tiny milky pellets – but inscrutable, and so fascinating that they almost overshadowed the rest of his face. They were the only things you saw above a puny body, two arms barely thicker than broomsticks and two legs straight as crutches … Eyes as troubling as a sudden, inexplicable sense of dread.

  ‘Joma isn’t easy to get on with,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s best not to tease him. He goes crazy sometimes for no reason.’

  Unsure where he was trying to lead me, I refrained from reacting. Seeing him there with his sabre, while Hans and I were defenceless, didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

  ‘Are you really German?’

  I didn’t reply.

  My silence offended him. His jaws clenched. He was barely containing his temper. He adjusted his lensless glasses, examined his nails, sniffed and muttered, ‘Do I look like a spy?’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Do I look like a spy?’

  ‘I never said you were.’

  ‘Then why don’t you answer me? I’m not trying to grill you.’

  Again, I said nothing. I was afraid that a clumsy remark on my part might upset him. The look in his eyes, the way he fiddled with his glasses and worried about his fingers, his various facial expressions, sometimes vague, sometimes more defined, suggested how deeply unstable he was.

  ‘Joma says you’re either mercenaries or spies.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Of course, the others don’t believe him. Joma reads too many books; he sees the bad in everyone. Plus, he’s allergic to white people.’

  ‘If the others don’t agree with him, why don’t they let us go?’ Hans asked, still lying curled up, without turning.

  ‘They’re not in charge. Joma isn’t either. It’s Chief Moussa who gives the orders.’

  ‘Where is Chief Moussa?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘When he feels like it. He has to get rid of the boat first …’

  He scratched his back
with his sabre, embarrassed. He wanted to talk, but had run out of ideas. I needed him to talk, in order to know who his accomplices were, what they were planning to do with us, where we were; above all, I needed to get an idea of our chances of getting out of here, to believe in them with the force of desperation, just as a condemned man who has exhausted every possibility and refuses to give up believes in a miracle. I thought there was a chance I could get through to the boy. Who was to say? Surely there was no such thing as a criminal completely resistant to emotion; as long as he had something resembling a soul, however deeply buried it was in his animal-like nature, it was still possible to reach him provided you could find a chink in his armour.

  ‘Are you also allergic to white people?’ I asked, in order to encourage him to continue.

  ‘Not especially,’ he replied, pushing his spectacles up towards his eyebrows. ‘I don’t meet them often. The first time I saw a white person for real was three years ago. It was a guy from the Red Cross. For Joma, the Red Cross is a modern version of the missionaries. You know, those guys in cassocks who used to spread the good word among the tribes. Joma is convinced they’re the same bunch of spies, except that the white fathers had the Bible, and the medics have vaccines.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I objected. ‘How can he say something as stupid as that? The Red Cross is a nongovernmental body. It takes action where you live and where we live too. A lot of people working for it have paid with their lives for the help they gave others. They’re everywhere where people suffer, without distinction of colour of skin or religion. They don’t baulk in the face of war, dictatorships, epidemics, or imprisonment. Your friend is being unfair and way off the mark. If he can’t recognise one of the most generous acts of our time, it’s because he’s blind and heartless.’

  ‘Personally, I don’t give a damn. Whether they’re spies or mercenaries isn’t going to change anything in my life. And besides, I’m not into politics.’