The African Equation

by Yasmina Khadra

  ‘It’s three weeks since the captain left to join Moussa!’ the thin man cried. ‘And we haven’t heard anything from him! That isn’t normal.’

  ‘So what?’ Joma retorted, his fists on his hips.

  ‘We don’t have any more provisions,’ said a stiff teenager with unusually broad shoulders.

  ‘It isn’t only that,’ the thin man went on. ‘The captain was very clear. If we didn’t hear from him, we should evacuate the fort and fall back to Point D-15.’

  ‘How did he tell you that?’ Joma cried. ‘By telepathy? We don’t even have radio contact with him. If we’re forced to leave here, it’ll be for Station 28.’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ the tall man with the falsetto voice said. ‘The captain went to Point D-15, in the south. That’s where it’s happening. There’s nothing for us at Station 28. It’s two days further north, and we don’t have enough fuel. Plus, it’s a high-risk area, and there are only six of us. How will we fight if we’re ambushed?’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Joma roared. ‘We already talked about that yesterday. We’ll only leave this fort for Station 28. I’m in charge here. And I warn you I won’t hesitate to execute on the spot any joker who dares disobey my orders. The situation’s shambolic enough, and no form of insubordination can be tolerated.’

  ‘What do you think we are?’ the man with the necklace protested. ‘Cattle? Who are you to threaten us with death? We tell you we haven’t any more provisions, and we haven’t heard from the captain. How long are we going to stay here? Until a rival gang attacks us?’

  ‘We have to join the rest of the squad at Point D-15,’ the four ‘mutineers’ insisted. ‘That’s where it’s happening.’

  Bruno took advantage of a moment’s hesitation to intervene. ‘Haven’t you figured it out yet? Your comrades aren’t coming back. They’ve run off with the money.’

  The pirates turned as one towards our jail, thrown by Bruno’s allegations. For a few seconds, not a muscle moved on their sweat-streaked faces.

  ‘It’s perfectly obvious,’ Bruno went on, becoming bolder now. ‘You’ve been tricked, for heaven’s sake! I bet the captain and Moussa were in cahoots, that they plotted the whole thing between them. Who knows, maybe they dumped your friends in the wild and are off in some land of milk and honey right now while you’re here rotting in the sun.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Joma ordered him.

  But Bruno wouldn’t let it go. ‘Just think about it for one second.’

  Joma raised his pistol and fired twice at Bruno, who flattened himself against the wall. The shots cast a chill over the fort.

  ‘We don’t only slaughter cattle!’ Joma said to the rebels. ‘The first person who thinks it’s amusing to defy me, I’ll blow his brains out. While the captain’s away, I make the decisions. Now get back to work, and tomorrow at dawn we leave for Station 28.’

  The pirates dispersed, throwing each other grim looks.

  Late in the night, Bruno woke me. He put his hand over my mouth and motioned me to follow him to the window. In the pockmarked sky, the moon was reduced to a nail clipping. The fort was plunged in darkness. Bruno pointed with his finger. I had to concentrate to make out four figures moving furtively around the jeep; one of them climbed in and took the wheel, the other three leant on the bonnet and started pushing the vehicle towards the gate. The jeep slid gently over the sandy yard, manoeuvred carefully to get around the well, edged its way between the water tank and a heap of loose stones and noiselessly left the enclosure. It disappeared behind the embankment, and reappeared further on, still pushed by the three figures. When it reached the track leading to the valley, two or three hundred metres from the fort, its engine roared, and it set off at top speed, with the lights off. Alerted by the noise, Joma came running out of the command post in his underpants, an automatic rifle in his arms. He called his men; when nobody appeared, apart from a sleepy Blackmoon, he realised it wasn’t an attack: the four ‘mutineers’ from the previous day had just parted company with him. Cursing, he ran to the gap, peered into the valley, which was still shrouded in darkness, and started firing wildly like a maniac.

  Joma remained on guard on the rampart until sunrise, clicking the breech of his rifle and every now and again letting out cries of rage that seemed to perplex the night. He took his subordinates’ defection as a personal affront. Whenever Blackmoon tried to comfort him, Joma threatened to tear his heart out with his bare hands if he didn’t shut up. Several times, he looked in our direction and, despite the distance between us and the dim light, Bruno and I felt our hair stand on end.

  Having waited in vain for a sign on the horizon, Joma went back to his room to dress. He put on a hunting vest, combat trousers and new hiking boots, hung two cartridge belts around his neck and across his chest, wrapped his head in a red scarf and came back out into the yard, his big pistol stuck in his belt and a Kalashnikov in his hand. His milky eyes sought to bury all they surveyed.

  Towards eight o’clock, he got us out of our jail and told Blackmoon to tie our wrists behind our backs.

  Joma finished hanging jerry cans of fuel on either side of the pick-up. Into the back of the vehicle, he threw a full duffle bag, a satchel with straps, two rucksacks, a box of canned food, slices of dried meat rolled in brown paper, a crate of ammunition and two goatskin canteens filled with drinking water. Bruno and I were on our knees in the dust, wondering what fate our kidnapper had in store for us as he prepared to leave the fort. Was he going to kill us? Leave us there? Take us with him? Joma was giving nothing away. He grunted orders which Blackmoon begrudgingly followed for his own protection, but without any undue haste.

  ‘What are you planning to do with us?’ Bruno asked.

  Joma carefully checked that the ropes were tight and the jerry cans well balanced. The way he was tightening the knots betrayed a growing inner anger, which Bruno’s words only served to stoke.

  ‘You say you’ve read lots of books,’ Bruno went on, ‘that you know the works of the great poets by heart. You must have learnt something from them … Let us go. Or else come with us. We’ll say you saved our lives.’

  Joma said nothing.

  ‘It’s pointless now, Joma. Actually, it’s always been pointless. If only you stepped back a bit, you’d see that what you’re doing is absurd. Why are you keeping us so far from our homes, so far from your home? What do you blame us for? Crossing your path? We’ve never done you any harm. I’m an African by adoption, and Dr Krausmann does humanitarian work. Imagine that! Humanitarian work! … Joma, for heaven’s sake, let us go. Captain Gerima is nothing but a crook, and you know it. Soldiers like him don’t fight, they just line their pockets. They don’t have any ideals or principles. They’d walk over their mother’s body for the smallest coin … Gerima is using your frustrations. He’s manipulating you. I’m certain he dumped his men in the wild and ran off with the money. Your comrades realised that. That’s why they left.’

  Joma turned on his heel, charged at Bruno and gave him a kick in the stomach that knocked the breath out of him and bent him double. Bruno fell on his side, his eyes bulging with pain.

  ‘My comrades left because of you, you son of a bitch!’ Joma said, spitting at him.

  I was horrified by this character. However many times he lashed out, I’d be just as disgusted and indignant. Things with Joma had become personal. I hated him, I hated him for what he represented: a monster in the raw, straight out of the primeval slime, with the instinctive violence of the very first fears and the very first hostilities; a big devil carved out of a block of granite with no other facet to him but his own brutality; his pumped-up body, his gestures, his voice, his megalomania, his quickness to fly off the handle, everything about him stank of murder. I hated him because he was an outrage to common sense, and because he had injected gall into my veins like poison so that I had the feeling I might end up being like him. I realised, to my immense sorrow – I was a doctor, after all – that there wasn’t room on this earth for the
two of us, that the world couldn’t contain, at the same time and in the same place, two people who had nothing in common and whom nothing seemed able to reconcile.

  Joma read my thoughts. My animosity towards him appealed in some obscure way to his vanity, as if he got most satisfaction from the disgust he inspired in me.

  ‘Do you want my photo?’ he cried.

  I didn’t reply.

  He snorted with disdain, pushed me away with his foot and grunted, ‘Humanitarian work? That was all we needed. You blond, blue-eyed idiot with your pretty face and your Rolex watches and your Porsche, you’re in humanitarian work? You hypochondriac, racist mother’s boy who’d disinfect the pavement if you found out that a black man had been walking along it before you, you want me to believe you’re so upset by world poverty that you’d give up your creature comforts to share the sufferings of niggers with bloated stomachs?’

  ‘You don’t really believe what you’re saying,’ I said.

  ‘I stopped believing in anything the day I realised that bullets speak louder than words.’

  ‘Maybe that’s your problem.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Definitely … I’m not a racist, I’m a doctor. When I examine a patient, I don’t have time to dwell on the colour of his skin.’

  ‘Stop, you’re breaking my heart … People like you disinfect their eyes the minute a beggar crosses their path. You’re just a fucking racist come to sniff our mass graves in the name of a sacrosanct Christian charity which has no more the odour of sanctity than an arsehole.’

  ‘You have no right to call me a racist. I won’t allow it.’

  ‘You see?’ he retorted. ‘Even when you’re under my control, you think you can give me orders. You’re at my mercy, completely at my mercy, and you expect me to ask YOUR permission to shoot you down like a dog …’ He shook his head. ‘These damned whites! Always drunk on their own importance. Even if you put holy water in their wine, they wouldn’t sober up.’

  He went back to his room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

  The valley sloped gently for some thirty kilometres before it reached a chain of rocky mountains whittled away by erosion. They weren’t really mountains: given the traumatic flatness of the surroundings, the smallest hill took on a significance ten times greater than its actual measurements, as if in this tomblike landscape, every milestone needed to exaggerate its size in order not to disappear for ever. For four hours now, Joma had been taking us across a mineral, almost lunar universe, and not for a moment had I had the feeling that we were going to get out of it. The same trails led to the same rocks, the same thirsty soil lay in the same dried-up river beds, and always that blazing sun poured its molten lava down on our heads. The motionless dust lent something both vain and definitive to the horizon – a kind of still image of the end of the world.

  With my back against the duffle bag, my legs sticking to the bed of the pick-up, I watched this merry-go-round of decay turn and turn and realised that I had lost interest in everything. I didn’t even feel the need to imagine what awaited me. I was starting to understand why, in some war films, heroes who’ve repelled enemy attacks and fought valiantly for days and nights on end, emerge suddenly from their shelters and brave their attackers’ guns … In any case, I had no idea what went on in our kidnappers’ heads. I didn’t know their mindset or their conception of human relations. However hard I tried to penetrate the way Joma’s mind worked, for example, it was as if I were trying to decipher the cryptograms in an esoteric book. ‘These people are alive now, but they come from another time,’ Hans had said. I had refused to believe it at first. My upbringing and culture had taught me that as long as you kept a clear head, you could overcome any misunderstanding. But these maniacs didn’t have clear heads, and I could see no way to reason with them.

  Bruno’s nose was bleeding. A bump in the road had thrown him against the side of the pick-up and almost knocked him senseless. I’d yelled to Joma to drive more carefully, and Joma had deliberately driven even more recklessly to show me how little he cared about what was happening to us in the back. Beside him, Blackmoon was silent. He hadn’t said a word since we had left the fort. He was looking but without interest, listening without hearing. Something was bothering him. He was mired in his own thoughts. Whenever Blackmoon kept a low profile, you knew he was collecting himself before bouncing back. His silence was subversive; it was the calm before the storm. There was a striking contrast between the unstable boy of those first weeks and the one now sitting in the cab, and I wasn’t convinced it was a change for the better.

  About midday, we halted amid a tangle of disembowelled hillsides and scrawny shrubs. I was relieved to sit on the soft sand after the metal bed of the pick-up. Bruno, who couldn’t clean himself because his wrists were tied behind his back, had blood on his beard and half of his shirt. He slumped by my side while Joma stood at the top of a ridge and searched the surroundings with his binoculars. Crouching not far from the pick-up, Blackmoon, his sabre stuck in the sand, laboriously wiped his lensless glasses with his cheche.

  Joma came down the hill and walked around the vehicle, his chin between his thumb and index finger, thinking. When he noticed that we were watching him, he gave us a V-sign and climbed back up onto the ridge.

  ‘I think our Goliath is lost,’ Bruno said to me.

  ‘I think so, too. We’ve been this way already. See that rock over there that looks like a jar with handles? I’m sure I saw it less than two hours ago.’

  ‘That’s right. We came past here in the opposite direction.’

  Joma came down from the ridge again, spread an old map on the bonnet of the pick-up and started looking for points of reference. After this fruitless exercise, he hit the bonnet in annoyance.

  We drove back the way we had come for dozens of kilometres until we reached a massive cliff looking down on a plain bordered by scrub. In the distance, a herd of antelopes was fleeing from a predator. Joma went and stood at the edge of the precipice, took out his map and again started looking for landmarks. An anthracite foothill to the south was bothering him. Joma checked the coordinates on the map, compared them with the landscape in front of him, and orientated himself with the help of a compass. His features relaxed, and we realised that he knew where he was now.

  We stopped in the shade of a solitary acacia. The sun was starting to set. Blackmoon untied us so that we could eat the slices of dried meat he gave us in brown paper and went and sat down halfway between the pick-up, where Joma was, and us.

  ‘Playing hard to get or what?’ Joma shouted to him. ‘Come over here.’

  Blackmoon stood up reluctantly and joined his chief, who handed him a can of food and a metal canteen.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Blackmoon shrugged.

  ‘You usually ramble on even when you have nothing to say.’

  Blackmoon lifted the canteen to his mouth in order not to reply. Joma took out a large knife, cut a piece from his slice of dried meat and bit into it without taking his eyes off his subordinate. He started talking to him in a patois that Bruno translated for me simultaneously.

  ‘Why don’t you say anything?’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘I don’t like your silence, Chaolo. Should I take it that you’re angry with me about something but you don’t dare lance the boil?’

  ‘What boil?’

  ‘Precisely. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘No kidding!’

  Blackmoon turned away in order not to have to suffer Joma’s inquisitive gaze. But he knew that Joma was waiting for an explanation and that he wouldn’t give up until he got it.

  ‘Well?’ Joma insisted.

  ‘You won’t listen to me anyway.’

  ‘I’m not deaf.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to get into an argument with you.’

  ‘So it’s as bad as that, is it?’

  ‘Please, Joma,
just drop it. I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘Just try. I’m not going to eat you.’

  Blackmoon shook his head. ‘You’re going to get upset, and then you’ll make my head spin with your theories.’

  ‘Are you going to come out with it, or what?’ Joma roared, spattering saliva from his mouth.

  ‘You see? I haven’t said anything yet, and you’re already making a fuss.’

  Joma put his meal down on the ground and looked his subordinate up and down, his cheekbones throbbing with anger. ‘I’m listening …’

  Blackmoon hunched his shoulders and breathed in and out like a boxer on his stool after a tough round. He raised his eyes to his chief, lowered them again, then lifted them as if lifting a burden. Having summoned both his breath and his courage, he said, ‘You’re the teacher I always dreamt of having, Joma. I wasn’t your boy, I was your pupil. But I don’t like the teaching you’ve forced on me.’

  ‘Can’t you be a bit more precise?’

  ‘I’ve never refused you anything, Joma. I love you more than my father and my mother. I left my family for you, my village, everything …’

  ‘Get to the point, please.’

  ‘Let them go!’

  The blade of a guillotine couldn’t have cut short the debate with such startling abruptness. Joma almost choked. Stunned by Blackmoon’s words, he blinked several times to make sure he had heard correctly. Throwing a rapid glance in our direction, he realised that we had also heard the boy’s suggestion; he grabbed Blackmoon by the neck and pulled him close.