The African Equation

by Yasmina Khadra

  ‘I’m sorry if I offended you,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t my intention. I’d have called any man who ignores someone in distress a savage.’

  ‘The thing is, I didn’t ignore someone in distress, Dr Krausmann, but a dead jackal.’

  ‘I understand.’

  I didn’t recognise my own voice. I was hypnotised by that murderous gaze that went right through me. When nothing is certain, when right and wrong have cancelled one another out, fear becomes the most exaggerated form of surrender. Without being fully aware of what was happening, I found myself giving up. Was it fatigue, hunger, a desire to be left in peace? Or all three factors? It didn’t really matter. I didn’t want to argue with this brute. What was the point of arguing anyway? Where would it get us? You can’t negotiate with people inured to strongarm methods and perfectly aware of their own immunity. With such people, you had to make concessions. It was pointless trying to reason with them; their convictions were elsewhere. Joma was nothing but a torturer, and even if it diminishes his temporary power a torturer readily accepts his victim’s resigned submission.

  Joma was taken aback. He had come to attack me, and my unconditional surrender left him with a sense of disappointment. He hadn’t expected it and was upset to have to put off his speechifying to later. To save face, he pointed his finger at me and said, ‘You’re making progress, doctor. You’re starting to understand what being African means.’

  And he walked out.

  ‘Phew!’ Bruno said, fanning his face with his hand.

  ‘That doesn’t happen often. Joma usually hits anyone who gets in his way. What could you have said to him?’

  I preferred not to answer.

  Bruno didn’t insist. ‘Anyway, you got out of it brilliantly.’

  ‘Have you had dealings with the man?’

  ‘Not personally. But I’ve seen him at work. If you want my advice, avoid him.’

  ‘Is he vindictive?’

  ‘Worse than that, he’s crazy. Nobody likes him around here. Not his comrades in arms, nor his guardian angels. He’s like a crushing machine that’s out of control. Apparently he gets everything he says from books. He loves making speeches. But as soon as he opens his mouth, everyone tiptoes away.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll leave me alone?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’s too bored with the others.’

  Hans took off his shoes and held his bruised feet in a ray of sunshine. Indifferent to what was going on around him, he wiggled his toes in the light and massaged his ankles; his movements were abnormally limp.

  Bruno could see that there was something not quite right with my friend’s head, but he modestly refrained from lingering on the subject.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ve stopped ticking off the days, because I don’t have a pencil … Maybe three or four months …’

  ‘What?’ I cried in astonishment.

  ‘Well, the market for hostages has been saturated lately,’ he explained. ‘They’re waiting for things to settle before they restart negotiations. Ransom demands may be revised upwards … As far as I know, your government has previously given in to blackmail by pirates in order to free its subjects. It’s going to be hard to persuade it to pay out any more money, at least in the immediate future.’

  ‘Who are our kidnappers exactly? Al-Qaeda, rebels, soldiers?’

  ‘Subcontractors.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Exactly what it says: they subcontract. It’s just like any other business. There are big companies, and there are subcontractors. The people holding us are common adventurers. There are no more than twenty of them, all told. Not being powerful enough, or well enough equipped to go it alone, they subcontract. Whenever they get hold of a hostage, they offer him to a stronger group, which in turn sells him on to another, tougher gang, and so on up to the criminal or terrorist organisations that have a solid enough structure to negotiate with governments.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I admitted, out of my depth.

  Bruno scratched his temple, thinking. ‘Well, for example, I was kidnapped with a correspondent from Italian television. I know sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel like the back of my hand, and I sometimes act as a guide to Western journalists. I’ve even managed to get them interviews with particular warlords and local underworld bosses. A criminal gang grabbed us just outside Mogadishu. They sold us for five thousand dollars to a group of rebels. Then some terrorists bought us for twelve thousand dollars. They let the correspondent go because his TV channel agreed to pay the ransom, and I was handed over to some smugglers in exchange for a case of ammunition and three antipersonnel mines. Then the self-styled Captain Gerima got me from the smugglers for two hundred litres of drinking water and a second-hand crankshaft, and since then I’ve been waiting for my next buyer.’

  ‘That’s absurd.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Shhh!’ ordered Blackmoon, who had come to stand guard outside our jail, with his sabre in his hand.

  They brought us food. Rancid pancakes and shreds of dried meat.

  When Hans fell asleep, Bruno went back to his bed, put on a battered pair of glasses, leant back against the wall and opened a dog-eared old book, which he spread on his knees.

  ‘Have you ever tried to escape?’

  Without looking up, he gave a little smile. ‘Where would I go? The nearest water source is eighty kilometres further south. Behind the hill, the country is flat. In front is a bare valley. We’re as unlikely to pass unnoticed as a cockroach on a tablecloth. Plus, there are guards around the camp, and they have itchy trigger fingers.’

  ‘Where are we exactly?’

  He put his book down on the floor and turned to me. ‘Somewhere in hell on earth. Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, I don’t have the slightest idea. We’re constantly on the move, often at night. This is just a stopping-off point. After three or four weeks, they’ll move to another hideout. Not to cover their tracks, but to avoid being slaughtered. There are plenty of gangs of degenerates operating in the area, and they don’t see eye to eye. The zones of influence aren’t clearly marked, and every gang wanders about according to the situation. The logistics are random; if you don’t have allies, you’re screwed. This area is controlled by rebels and bandits. The regular army aren’t strong enough to venture far out of their camps. The proof is that this fort our kidnappers are squatting in used to be an army outpost. It was evacuated after a rebel incursion, and since then, it’s been abandoned. There’s a village a hundred kilometres to the east, and as there are no more garrisons in the sector, its inhabitants have fled.’

  Hans asked us to be quiet.

  Bruno obeyed. He buried his head in a cloth that he used as a pillow and crossed his hands over his belly. After a few minutes, his breathing settled down and he started snoring.

  Outside, three guards were telling each other stories and laughing. They were speaking in their dialect, but I guessed that they were talking about raids, skirmishes, ambushes and death. They made ‘bang!’ and ‘rat-tat-tat’ sounds to represent machine-gun fire, aped their victims’ supplications, and laughed out loud at the fear one of their cronies had shown.

  Then silence fell like a guillotine.

  A breeze started hissing through the gaps in the sheet metal. Hans’s eyes were open. How did he plan to get to sleep with his eyes open? Slowly, fatigue overcame me and I drifted off.

  Late in the night, Hans woke me. He was sitting up; his ghostly silhouette could be seen clearly in the half-light.

  ‘I think Tao got away,’ he whispered in a toneless voice. ‘I’m convinced of that now. You remember when they put us in the felucca? I took a good look at my boat, there was no lifebelt on deck. Tao must have grabbed it as he was being thrown overboard. I’m sure of it. Tao’s quick. He wouldn’t have let them get away with it.’

  ‘It was pitch-black, Hans. You could hardly see the boat.’

  He frowned and la
y down again, his eyes wide open.

  Guilt was gradually driving him to a state of total denial.

  In the morning, through the door with the wire netting, I saw a ribbon of dust above a mass of stones that had once been the rampart of the fort. It was the sidecar motorcycle coming back from somewhere or other. It parked outside the command post. The rider got off and helped a man out of the sidecar. The passenger was a middle-aged, almost light-skinned mixed-race man, quite frail and stooped, his ovoid skull balding at the front; he was wearing a crumpled suit and prescription glasses and holding a threadbare bag to his chest. Captain Gerima shook his hand warmly and motioned him to follow him into his office. A few minutes later, Joma came to fetch Hans. I asked him where he was planning to take my friend. ‘To the infirmary,’ he retorted. I reminded him I was a doctor; Joma laughed and made the ridiculous statement that in Africa, all you needed was a witch doctor. Two men lifted Hans and dragged him to a shack behind the command post.

  I waited for Hans all morning and all afternoon, but he didn’t come back. When I asked after him, all I got was insults.

  ‘He’s a good doctor,’ Bruno reassured me. ‘He tended my dysentery. At least he has proper drugs.’

  ‘Is he a real doctor?’

  ‘I think so. I don’t know where he lives, but the captain sometimes sends for him when someone is seriously ill.’

  Night fell, and I still hadn’t seen Hans again.

  The next day, and in the days after that, no sign of Hans. I started to panic and asked to speak to the captain. He wouldn’t see me, but sent Joma to make it clear to me that a hostage would do better to behave himself if he wanted to get home in one piece. I dismissed these threats and demanded to know how my friend was. All I got in return was a string of curses and mimed throat cutting.

  On the fourth day, the sidecar motorcycle left the fort, with the doctor on board. Hans remained in the ‘infirmary’. It was only after a week that I saw him, a bandage around his chest, escorted by Blackmoon as far as a sheet-metal sentry box which served as the latrines.

  ‘Why are they isolating him?’ I asked Bruno, dreading a serious infection that the pirates were trying to hide from me.

  ‘We’re the ones they’re isolating, Monsieur Krausmann,’ he said. ‘If our kidnappers are giving your friend such special treatment, it must mean they’ve struck a deal for him.’

  I didn’t understand. He sat down next to me and explained. ‘When I was seized with the Italian journalist, we were held with a third hostage in a horrible cellar for weeks. In the dark. Tied up like sausages. Then the journalist was transferred to a separate cell, and they started to treat him better, giving him nicer food and allowing him to wash and shave. Some time later, he was released. I think your friend is going to be freed soon. You have to know how things work around here: even though these criminals don’t seem up to much, they’re well organised. They have contacts in town and among officials who communicate anything that might interest them, in real time. And then there’s the internet. They type in the names of their hostages, and in a second or two they have all the information they need. That’s what they’ve done with you and your friend. Your name can’t have told them much. Your friend’s, though, probably came with a lot of tempting details … I’ve been a prisoner for four months and I’ve learnt to sense when the wind is changing. The captain seems enthusiastic. That’s an unmistakable sign. Usually, he’s as moody as a pitbull … What exactly does Monsieur Makkenroth do?’

  ‘He’s in humanitarian aid.’

  ‘There must be something else.’

  I hesitated, made sure that no prying ears were around, and admitted, ‘Hans Makkenroth is a leading industrialist in Germany, and is very rich …’

  ‘That explains it. Captain Gerima may already be negotiating with several groups interested in your friend. Depending on how much the “merchandise” is likely to fetch, the auction can reach an astronomical figure.’

  A thousand questions were jostling for position in my head, but I was too exhausted to put them in any kind of order. I didn’t know how this kind of negotiation worked or how long it would last and, frankly, I was less and less able to see the end of the tunnel. In two weeks of captivity, I had lost my sense of judgement. My sleepless nights had exacerbated my anxieties, and every minute that passed lessened my presence of mind. I had become someone else. My voice had changed and my reflexes had grown dull. I had lost weight; an unkempt beard was engulfing my face, and the disgusting food we were served had made me ill. At this rate, I was certain I’d end up cracking or being put down like a dog.

  The world was tightening around me like a straitjacket. It was a world of thirst and sunstroke where, outside the fort, nothing ever happened. Apart from the swirls of dust that the wind unleashed and abandoned immediately, and the vultures screeching in the arid sky, it was an implacable realm of silence and stillness. Even time seemed crucified on the sinister rocks that stood out against the horizon like presages of doom.

  I went to take a breather by the door, which the guards left open during the day. Bruno and I were allowed to stretch our legs in a small yard marked off by a roll of barbed wire attached to posts; this was our ‘solarium’, a space of less than a hundred square metres adorned with a dead tree, at the foot of which I sometimes spent hours on end observing our kidnappers going about their business or practising quick marching, with debatable enthusiasm, beneath a leaden sun. It was after one in the afternoon; many of the pirates had retreated to their barracks while those few on fatigue duty bustled here and there. From the height of his lookout post, the sentry kept watch, his finger on the trigger. In the shade of a zinc canopy, Blackmoon sat like a plague victim in quarantine, sharpening his sabre on a pumice stone, his grotesque lensless glasses held together on his face with sticky tape. Ewana, the man who had been suffering from malaria, was smoking a joint behind a row of empty crates. He was wearing two baseball caps pulled down over his skull, one with the peak in front and the other with the peak flat against the back of his neck. Now that he had recovered, he would only appear when it was siesta time, hide in a corner and indulge in such virtual excursions. On the steps of the command post, a young boy was washing the captain’s linen; he was the ‘orderly’, who spent his days rinsing the officer’s underwear, mending his socks, polishing his shoes and his weapons and wiping his cheap stripes … Looking at these maniacs who took themselves for warlords just because they were so good at terrifying people, listening to them shouting at each other in an unintelligible dialect and laughing their heads off over some trivial thing, I couldn’t help pinching myself. On what planet had the irony of fate dumped me? What lesson was I, a newly bereaved husband, to draw from being cast adrift in this death-haunted land? … What disturbed me about my kidnappers wasn’t their offhandedness, nor the destitution to which their status as a rebel band condemned them; but there was a glaring lack of awareness in the way they went about their day-to-day lives that made their dangerousness as natural as a snake bite, and just sensing them around me, I felt I was in a kind of purgatory where it wasn’t necessary to have sinned, since the mere fact of ending up there constituted a crime.

  Bruno joined me in the doorway. He placed a sympathetic hand on my shoulder; his gesture irritated me, but I didn’t move away.

  ‘It’ll work out,’ he promised. ‘Everything works out in the end.’

  ‘Do you think they’d kill us if they didn’t find a buyer?’

  ‘They’d already have done away with me. Nobody’s asking for me and I don’t have the slightest market value.’

  ‘They haven’t released you either.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll let us go when they’ve amassed enough money to go home. Gerima’s a rogue. He can’t wait to blow all his money on whores, as far as possible from here, because he knows that if he stays here, sooner or later he’ll get caught. He’s clever. The only thing he’s interested in is lining his own pocket. At the first opportunity, he wouldn’t hesit
ate to get shot of these idiots who are following him blindly. It’s always been like that around here. I know lots of bandits who, after crisscrossing the bush and getting themselves talked about in the media, suddenly vanished into thin air. Where are they, do you think? In Kenya or Chad, or some country at peace where nobody knows them and they can have an easy life on the money they’ve made. They grease a few palms here and there, get hold of new identity cards, and probably a new reputation because everything can be bought in this region, including the gods and patron saints, and they start a new life, as respectable as a marabout.’

  Bruno took his hand away; he must have felt my muscles contract in his grip.

  ‘The hostage trade has become an industry in Africa,’ he went on. ‘In the old days, I drifted from Mali to Tanzania, and it was a piece of cake. Wherever I ended up, I just had to knock at a door, any door, whether it was a house or a hut, and I automatically had board and lodgings. Those were great times. But ever since the first dollars were paid to kidnappers, the cobblers have put away their nails and their glue, the porters have given up carrying baskets for housewives, and any down-and-out imagines he’s hit the jackpot as soon as he comes across a foreigner … Governments shouldn’t have yielded to the kidnappers’ demands. At first, it was only jihadists targeting the odd aid worker. Now, it’s open season for all kinds of chancers: ex-convicts, idlers, brainwashed kids from all over the world who come to claim their visa for paradise … The groups have proliferated; some are connected with Al-Shabaab, others operate on their own account, and nobody knows what to believe any more.’

  I asked Bruno to stop and went back to my straw mattress.

  In the evening, the guards placed a grille over the door of our jail and padlocked it. The confinement added an extra layer of depression to the sickly smell of the room. To get a little air, I went to the window, which was just a hole in the wall with thick iron bars across it. I wanted to gaze at the sunset, to escape for a moment from the thoughts that were tormenting me. I have to hold out, I told myself. When the sun had disappeared, the darkness threw itself on the shadows like a predator on its prey, and a senescent night, totally lacking in charm or romance, and worn down by age, prepared to make the desert its tomb. I didn’t know much about the African night, yet I knew it would remain, for me, as devoid of meaning as the chance that had led me to this godforsaken spot. I thought about the nights I had known in the old days, in Frankfurt, Seville, Las Palmas, the south of France, Istanbul, Salonica; saw again the terraces with their white balconies, the gleaming shop windows, restaurant bars lined with mirrors and made mysterious by subdued lighting, the places that had filled me with awe, the streets that led me through a thousand little ordinary joys, the small parks where children played, the benches in the shade of the birches to which old people and lovers came to hear themselves living, the tourists taking photographs of each other at the foot of the monuments; I heard their singsong voices, the bursts of music drifting out of the clubs, the coaches setting off for the sun, and those nights seemed to me as subliminal and full as moons. It was amazing that a man deprived of his freedom, whose future was so uncertain, could revisit the life that had been stolen from him with such clarity, and that the small details to which he had paid no attention should come back to the surface with incredible precision and fill his heart with a nostalgia whose splendour was equalled only by the depth of his grief. So I closed my eyes and searched for the slightest little gleam that could alleviate my unhappiness; a shrill laugh, a quick run, a furtive glance, a smile, a handshake, anything that could fill my solitude with untold presences. Of course, Jessica was everywhere; I made out her perfume in the stench of my jail, recognised the swish of her dress in all the rustling around me; I longed for her in the midst of these shadows that were taking over my thoughts. Her absence left me naked, impoverished, mutilated; and there, standing by that damned window with the burning-hot bars, facing that night that had no story to tell and on which both rocks and men turned their backs, I made myself a solemn promise, a promise as unbreakable as a vow, not to weaken and, whatever happened, to get out of here and find my way back to my towns and my streets, my people and my songs, the places I had loved, the beaches where my tenderest memories lay, all my weaknesses and all my habits and all my countless illusions!