Curiously, by some kind of professional reflex, I crouched, took the patient’s hand, felt his pulse, examined him: he was in a bad way.
‘Do you have any quinine?’ I asked.
‘Not even so much as an aspirin,’ the chief retorted.
‘And what do you expect me to do?’
‘Treat him.’
‘With what?’
‘You’ll manage. You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’
I stood up and faced the chief. Again, his smugness, his affected airs stoked my aversion. Our noses were almost touching; my eyes were boring into his. I had never thought myself capable of such violent animosity. I took a step back, repelled by his drunken breath, and in a voice throbbing with scorn declared, ‘I’m a real doctor, not a witch doctor. My profession’s not about going into a trance or invoking the spirits of the ancestors to ward off evil. Your man needs drugs, not a voodoo session.’
‘Careful what you say!’ Joma threatened.
The chief quickly raised his hand to put him in his place. After pondering my words, he took my chin between his thumb and index finger, then turned away, much to the annoyance of Joma, who cried, choking with indignation, ‘What! Are you really going to let him get away with speaking to you like that?’
‘He’s right, Joma. Ewana needs drugs, and we don’t have any.’
‘That’s not the point!’ Joma protested. ‘This cretin has no right to talk down to us. Does he think he’s dealing with cavemen or what? What was all that about voodoo? If I were you, I’d grab a car jack and teach him to swallow his arrogance.’
‘That’s enough!’ the chief said. ‘It’s been a tough journey and I’m exhausted. Take the doctor back.’
With a weary hand, he dismissed us.
Once outside the tent, Joma jabbed his rifle butt into my back to make me walk faster.
‘You’re a tough guy, aren’t you?’
I didn’t reply.
He grabbed me by my shirt collar and twisted me round to face him.
‘Well, I’m an old cooking pot. A cauldron straight out of hell. We’ll soon see how tough you are. I’m going to cook you on a low heat until you melt in my mouth.’
He showed his teeth in a fierce grin.
I looked at him dejectedly, turned towards the pale sky and searched for my star among the thousands of constellations, which all seemed oblivious to my prayers tonight. A vague premonition took root in me: I’d just made myself a sworn enemy.
When I woke up, I found the chief crouching by my side. He was in his fatigues, his eyes hidden by his sunglasses. He hadn’t expected to find Hans and me in such a terrible state. He stood up, paced up and down the cave angrily, and kicked a tin can, which rolled into the shadows with a clatter. Then, unable to contain himself, he turned to Joma and screamed, ‘Have you been keeping them tied up all this time?’
‘I don’t have enough men to keep an eye on them,’ Joma said grudgingly.
‘I never asked you to chain them like that.’
Joma didn’t like the way he was being scolded. ‘What did you want me to do, Moussa? Mollycoddle them? We didn’t have anything to eat, and the joker you put in charge of looking after the hideout wasted the drinking water and let the cans of rations go off in the sun.’
‘I’m talking about the hostages, Joma. They aren’t prisoners of war, damn it.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘Yes, a big difference!’ the chief cried, exasperated by his subordinate’s attitude.
Joma gave a shudder. ‘If you have a problem with me, Moussa, talk to me in private. I don’t like being lectured in front of strangers …’
‘I don’t care if you like it or not, Joma!’ the chief spat, and left the cave.
A few minutes later, we were untied. Electric shocks went through me every time I moved a finger or a toe. My wrists were covered in blackish scabs, and my hands were grey and pale. Hans had to put himself through a crash course in order to learn to push himself off the ground and get to his feet. His joints had stiffened up and he couldn’t put his arms in front of him. The bloody patch on the back of his shirt had turned black. We were dragged to a reservoir of stagnant water, not far from the cave, to wash our faces and our clothes, which we let dry on our bodies. Hans began to sway on his stiff legs, and was shaken with convulsions; he complained of stomach pains and dizziness, but our kidnappers forbade me from going near him. After the makeshift bath, we were taken back to the cave and given a piece of fish and a slice of pancake. The brackish, polluted water from the reservoir had merely aggravated our wounds, which, now that the scabs had come off, bled and caused great excitement among the flies.
In the afternoon, Moussa ordered his men to get ready to evacuate the place. The tent was immediately taken down and the pirates’ kit was wrapped and loaded into the vehicles along with bags of provisions. Hans and I were shoved onto two separate pick-ups, and the little convoy set off. I was so relieved to be leaving the cave that I didn’t even think to wonder what other hellhole we were being transferred to.
We drove for hours without coming across a living soul. Towards evening, we stopped in a gorge whose ridges were crowned with undergrowth. The pirates called the place ‘the station’ – I would later discover that stations were hiding places scattered around the countryside where smugglers and rebels kept supplies of fuel and water when they were on the move. The drivers filled up the vehicles and checked the state of their tyres and the level of water in the radiators, and then, after a basic supper, we spent most of the night driving.
Very early the next day, the convoy entered an area of scrub where the paths were impassable. The ground was hard and uneven, and the vehicles bounced over it, almost knocking us senseless. We passed between narrow ravines, and the branches of the thorny shrubs rustled on the sheet-metal bodywork and scratched our backs. If one of the boulders had fallen on us, we’d have been done for. Joma drove without a thought for those of us in the back. All he knew how to do was press his foot down on the accelerator, move the wheel wildly from right to left and crank the gear stick back and forth. He didn’t care about the engine speed, or how much we were being shaken about, or the dust being thrown in our faces by the shovelful. Curiously, his clumsiness amused his associates, who burst out laughing every time a heavy jolt threw them against each other.
With my wrists tied, I held onto the seat. I could feel the knocking of the axles reverberate right through my body.
Judging by the position of the sun, we were heading due west.
The ordeal eased after a hundred kilometres. There weren’t even any ruins around to suggest anyone had ever settled in the area. A valley covered in varicose scrub stretched to infinity, anonymous, totally devoid of distinguishing features – if you were trying to figure out where you were, or if you were thinking of escaping and wanted to know which direction to go, it was a depressing prospect.
The convoy halted at the foot of a mountain shrouded in dust. It was the only thing approaching a landmark for miles around. I asked the boy who brought me food if the mountain was sacred and if he knew its name. Joma, who I hadn’t seen behind me and who had guessed where I was going with this, retorted that it was Kilimanjaro: with global warming the snow had melted, and all that was left of the legendary mountain that Hemingway loved was a mere boulder stuck in the middle of a crater, so insignificant that it would inspire neither budding griots nor visionaries at odds with authority. The boy burst out laughing, and Joma pointed two fingers at me and went ‘boom’, delighted to have scored a point.
During the stop, tied as I was to a root, I didn’t manage to catch a glimpse of Hans.
A ragged man was crouching at the top of a hill – God knows where he’d come from. At the sight of the convoy, he picked up his bundle and ran down the slope, gesticulating wildly … The pick-up swerved to the side and headed straight for him. He had now reached the edge of the track. Instead of slowing down, Joma accelerated and charged at him. Surprised by the
vehicle’s sudden detour, the stranger just had time to move back to avoid being hit. He fell backwards. Around me, the pirates shrieked with laughter and slapped their thighs … The poor man started to pick himself up from the dust, and at that moment the jeep, which was behind us, now also left the track and hurled itself at him. At first dumbfounded, he realised that he wasn’t out of trouble yet and still, by some extraordinary reflex, had to perform a superhuman feat of acrobatics to dodge the wheels passing a few inches from his head. Disoriented, he dropped his bundle and set off at a run straight up the hill, without turning. His headlong flight merely increased my kidnappers’ hilarity. There was something so indecent in their exaggerated laughter it was beyond my understanding. They were laughing proudly, as if the impunity they allowed themselves instilled in them an overwhelming sense of courage and invincibility. They were also laughing because they noticed that their attitude shocked me as much as their murderous attempts to knock a man down. Much to my despair, I realised that these men who held me captive, these men who would decide my fate, these men devoid of conscience, weren’t content with trivialising the deliberate act of killing, they also claimed it as a right.
My eyes went from the kidnappers to the poor wretch clambering up the hill. I was incapable of distinguishing the horror I felt from the pity. At that moment, the pirates and the man were part of the same human misery. Any protest on my part was doomed in advance: there was nothing I could say or do … I thought of my previous life, so delightful and easy that it seemed like a joke. A sanitised life, as well timed and ordered as a musical score, where every day began and ended in the same way: a kiss when I woke, another when I got back from work, another before switching off the light in the bedroom, with I love yous at the end of every phone call and text message – in short, the ordinary happiness you take for granted, as unquestionable as a fait accompli … Oh, that happiness, the philosopher’s stone, the domestic dream, the earthly paradise of which you’re both the baleful god and the privileged devil … that damned happiness that rests on so little but overrides all other ambitions and fantasies … that happiness which, when you come down to it, has only its self-delusion as protection and its innocence as an alibi … Had I suspected how vulnerable it was? Not for a moment … Then, one evening, one ordinary evening, no different from any of the thousands of evenings that went before it, everything turns upside down. What you’ve built, what you were sure was yours, suddenly vanishes in the blink of an eye. You realise you were sleepwalking along a wire. Overnight, the dashing Kurt Krausmann who used to be so concerned that the creases in his trousers were straight, the solemn and serious Dr Krausmann wakes to find himself in the back of a clapped-out pick-up, surrounded by ragged-looking killers, in the middle of an unknown country where the death of a man is worth no more than the act that causes it … How sad it all was!
The sun was just starting to go down on that second day when we reached a plateau from which the rays ricocheted off as if from a mirror, dotting the surrounding area with false oases. It was a stony, charcoal-grey land, that was turning completely into desert. Strips of undergrowth indicated the place where a river had once flowed. There were a few scrawny trees here and there, their branches lifted to the sky like arms raised in surrender, but still no villages anywhere to be seen.
We spent the night in a ravine, and very early the next day the convoy headed due west to a new station. This time, the hiding place seemed to have been discovered and looted by other bandits, leaving nothing but empty jerry cans and sacks that had been ripped open. As the place was no longer safe, Moussa ordered his men to carry straight on to the next station. A blazing sun pursued us all the way there. The pick-up was like a furnace. I was dripping with sweat, my back burnt by the slatted sides and my feet by the floor. Exhausted and discouraged, forced to continue on their way without food or drink, our kidnappers resigned themselves to the bumpy terrain. Some dozed, their mouths open, their weapons between their thighs. As for Blackmoon, he remained on alert, keeping a close eye on me as if I were the only thing that mattered.
Coming out of a stony maze, the jeep overtook us and forced the two pick-ups to fall into line behind it. Chief Moussa got out and lifted the binoculars to his eyes. He pointed to something in the distance. Joma took the binoculars from his hands, looked through them for a long time, then nodded. ‘Village at nine o’clock!’ Moussa said, getting back in his jeep. The three vehicles veered south and headed straight for the village, which was actually nothing but a ragged settlement.
Alerted by the humming of the engines, swarms of kids emerged from the huts and started running at top speed towards a stony column to take shelter. The youngest of them, naked from head to foot, stumbled and fell. He must have hurt himself badly because he lay there on the ground without moving. Two small boys stopped and yelled at him to get back on his feet then ran back to help him up, and disappeared again quickly behind the rocks. The pirates’ three vehicles moved into a small open space surrounded by half a dozen huts, most of them deserted. Moussa was the first to get out. He fired in the air to flush out the inhabitants, but without success. His men plunged into the huts, screaming like animals. Some came out empty-handed, others with wretched pieces of booty: a foul-smelling pancake, an opened sachet of powdered milk, an old blanket. An old man was sitting outside his hut, his body propped up on an ancient stick. Dressed in an overcoat as old as the world, his skull hairless, his expression opaque, there he sat, calmly, paying no heed to this bandit raid, as if he had spent his whole life being robbed. Beside him, on a tattered mat, an old woman was watching the agitation around her without really seeing it. In her ageless face, her two eyes were so eroded by trachoma they were almost extinguished. The loincloth she was wearing barely concealed her nakedness. Her withered breasts, which seemed to have suckled whole generations, hung over her skeletal sides like two dried marrows. In the poverty of their configuration, there was a kind of topography of misfortune. Two of the pirates rushed into the hut and brought out a bleating goat. The old couple didn’t move, didn’t even turn to look. They sat there, immutable, like two stuffed animals.
I was shocked by the shameless way the thieves were robbing people as destitute as these, and even more by the old couple’s detachment as they watched themselves being relieved of their only goat, probably the only thing they owned, without saying a word, without making a gesture, as if it were the slightest of misfortunes, a mere formality.
Moussa ordered his men to withdraw. The vehicles drove around intimidatingly in the middle of the empty huts, a few shots were fired in the air to celebrate this pathetic raid, and the convoy set off again. I don’t know why, but when the pick-up drove past the old couple sitting dazed on the threshold of their hut, I showed them my tied wrists – maybe I was trying, through this superfluous reflex, to ask their forgiveness for being the reluctant witness to such a despicable act. One of the pirates, who had noticed my gesture, gave an ironic grin, as if to say: What could you have done if your hands had been free, except hide your face?
*
On the fourth day, we came out onto a plateau of cosmic emptiness, without a trace of greenery, without one drop of water, without a single patch of shade: an expanse of burning stones, where the reflections were as sharp as a razor, a land from just after the Big Bang, still engorged with fire, which had kept its original ochre hue like the first layer of sediment from before the first rains, the first grass, the first stirrings of life.
Two birds of prey were whirling in the sky. The false majesty of their circling did not augur well. On a bare hillock, a group of vultures were swarming around a shapeless form. Was it an animal or a human being? The vultures took turns dipping into their prey, as calmly and shamelessly as partygoers savouring a well-deserved meal. The largest of them turned to the convoy, in no way bothered, even though the track was very close. I clearly made out its hairless neck and blood-smeared beak. Suddenly, I thought I saw an arm move amid the wings.
‘Ther
e’s a man there,’ I yelled at the driver. ‘Stop, there’s a man being eaten by vultures, and he’s still alive …’
My kidnappers woke with a start and instinctively grabbed their weapons, expecting an enemy attack. Joma just kept on driving.
‘Stop, please! I tell you there’s an injured man …’
Joma glanced at me in the rear-view mirror and tapped his temple with his finger.
‘I’m not imagining things. I saw him move. He’s alive … Stop right now …’
On the hillock, the vultures moved their wings in a dance of death, and again I thought I saw the arm move. I threw myself at the back of the cab, and knocked on it.
‘You have no hearts. You’re monsters. Stop, stop, you bunch of savages …’
Joma braked so sharply that the jeep behind us nearly crashed into us … The word ‘savages’ had slipped out. I couldn’t take it back or downplay it. I only became aware of how serious it was when it rang out over the noise of the pick-up, bearing as it did centuries of tragedy and trauma. I didn’t think it for a second but, through some dormant mechanism, I had said it. And Joma had heard it … He jumped out, ran along the side of the vehicle, grabbed me by my shirt collar and pulled me over the side. I fell on my stomach, face down. He took me by the hair and lifted me up. His face was distorted with anger and hatred.
He pushed and kicked me towards the hillock, without saying anything.
‘What’s going on, damn it?’ Moussa asked, coming to a halt by the side of the road. ‘Where’s he taking him?’
When we got within twenty metres of the hillock, Joma crushed the back of my neck between his fingers.
The African Equation Page 7