Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

My kidnappers had stopped laughing. They were staring at me in silence as if I’d returned from the dead. Unwilling to look at them, I turned away and gazed beyond the two vehicles that were following us, beyond the dust they raised, far, far away, where the earth and the sky merged and formed a line as tenuous and fragile as the thread holding me to life … Life? … Was I alive? … I had the sudden conviction that I was merely living on borrowed time.

The scrub was starting to grow scarce and, as the convoy plunged further inland, the desert became more marked, the few clumps of vegetation vanishing as if by magic. Apart from the vultures and the odd animal startled by the roar of the pick-ups, the area was like a deserted planet, deadly in its monotony, given over to heat and erosion. A jagged line of grey dwarf hills extended across the plain, like the spine of some fossilised prehistoric monster. To the north, a boulder-strewn reg stretched to infinity; to the south, the earth fell away abruptly, crisscrossed by a jumble of dried-up rivers. All at once, huddled in the shade of a low hill, there appeared a ruined fort surrounded by barbed wire. This was our kidnappers’ rearguard. They were delighted to have returned to the fold, filthy and exhausted, but safe and sound. A broken gate led to a parade ground presided over by a long-unused flagpole. On either side, lines of squat barracks, some completely collapsed, others partly burnt and covered in tattered tarpaulins and sheets of iron; a well with a pulley, a rubber bucket on the coping; an enclosure for a few bored-looking goats; a water tank rusted on the outside; a lorry with its bonnet torn off next to a sidecar motorcycle straight out of the last world war; and finally, opposite a hovel with wire netting around it, a clumsily whitewashed rat-trap above which flew an unidentifiable rag that was meant to be a banner: this was the ‘command post’. A group of bandits were waiting for us on the front steps — doubtless, the commanding officer’s praetorian guard, a dozen armed eccentrics, standing stiffly to attention in a way that was meant to look military but was sadly lacking in credibility. Some wore paratroopers’ uniforms with boots and berets pulled down over their eyes, others threadbare civilian clothes, with misshapen trainers, espadrilles or sandals with straps — they all raised their hands to their temples in a regulation salute when a knock-kneed officer emerged from the command post to greet our convoy.

Moussa ordered his men out of the vehicles, lined them up in a row facing the command post and presented arms to the officer, who returned the salute with a smug look on his face. There was an exaggerated obsequiousness in this almost theatrical protocol that would have made me smile if Hans hadn’t just collapsed in front of me. Joma pulled him to his feet and held him upright.

The officer reviewed his troops, without paying any attention to Hans or me, listening distractedly to the report that Moussa delivered to him in a local language. He didn’t seem very interested in what his subordinate was saying. He was very dark-skinned and as solid as a rock, his shaven skull screwed to his shoulders with no neck and no chin. His face was almost featureless, just a dented sphere with dilated nostrils and protruding eyes that flashed like lightning. He wore a tunic open over his belly and an American army belt around his neck. He at last deigned to look at us. Chief Moussa handed him our passports, took a few steps back and lined up with his men. The captain leafed through our documents, looked from our photographs to our faces, wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb then came and examined us closely.

‘I’m Captain Gerima,’ he announced. ‘And this is my kingdom. I have the power of life and death. I just have to give the order … It’s fate that brought us together. You have nobody to blame but yourselves. When a fly is trapped in a web, it can’t blame the spider. That’s how life is. The world has always functioned like that, since the dawn of time. Actually, since the dawn of time, it’s always been night. The dawn of humanity isn’t quite ready to rise yet …’

Impressed with his own rhetoric, he made sure his men were too, then continued, ‘I don’t know how long you’re going to stay with us. I must warn you that nobody escapes from here. If you keep your heads down, you’ll be well treated. If you don’t, well, I won’t go into details.’

He came to a sudden stop, as if he had run out of ideas, or maybe he’d lost the thread of his speech, which he must have fine-tuned the previous night specially for us.

He turned on his freshly polished boots and disappeared back into his lair.

Two men pushed us into the hovel with the wire netting around it opposite the command post, untied us and withdrew, leaving the door open. Hans shuffled over to a mat that had been laid on the bare ground and tried to take off his shirt, but without success. I tried to help him and noticed that, in drying, the wound had closed over part of the cloth.

‘Put water on it,’ a voice suggested. ‘It’ll soften the scab.’

A white man we hadn’t noticed emerged from beneath a mosquito net in the corner. A beam of light revealed his hermit-like face: he was a man in his fifties, thin, with long grey hair tumbling over his shoulders. He had a frayed beard and was bare-chested, with prominent ribs and a sunken belly. His eyes shone like a sick man’s.

‘French?’

‘German.’

He looked pityingly at Hans. ‘Is he hurt?’

‘A sabre blow. He’s burning up.’

‘Put water on the wound. It’ll make him feel better.’

‘I’m a doctor,’ I said, making it clear to him that I could look after my friend without anyone’s help.

He took a metal flask from a heap of miscellaneous objects and came up to us. ‘This is my water ration,’ he said. ‘Everything’s rationed here, even prayers … Your friend’s in a bad way.’

Without waiting for my permission, he trickled small quantities of water on Hans’s wound, made sure the material and the scar absorbed it, then pressed delicately on the wound with his finger.

‘Journalists or aid workers?’

‘We were just passing. These pirates hijacked us out at sea … And you?’

‘Anthropologist … at least, I think so.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘Forty years … In Africa, I mean. I love Africa …’

Hans submitted to his care. The water was doing him good. In places, the scab over the wound was coming away and starting to release a few threads of the cloth.

‘Don’t move,’ the stranger advised, ‘or it’ll start to bleed …’ He poured a little more water on the part of the shirt that was stuck. ‘Sorry to have to say this, but I’m glad I have company at last. I was seriously starting to go crazy … What did you think of the big man?’ he asked, referring to the captain. ‘As a braggart, he has no equal … He’s made himself an officer and thinks he’s at the head of a real fighting force with those ten alley cats of his. I know him well. He was a sergeant-major in the regular army before he was court-martialled for smuggling. He’d been stealing from his unit’s stock of canned rations and selling them on the black market. He managed to get out of prison by greasing a few palms, and since then he’s gathered a gang of morons around him and carried on his little trade under cover of the civil war.’

‘Who are these people?’

‘Whoever they are, they’re dangerously fickle. Sometimes they call themselves resistance fighters, sometimes revolutionaries. What cause do they claim to uphold? None of them can be bothered to answer. Whenever they get an ideological thought in their heads, they invent a slogan for themselves and get drunk on it until they lose the thread. The fact is, these maniacs don’t know if they’re coming or going. They don’t think, they take aim. They don’t talk, they shoot. They don’t work, they loot. They can’t see the end of the tunnel. They’ve forgotten how things turned bad for them and have no idea how it’s going to end … You must think me very talkative, don’t you? You can’t blame me. I haven’t had anyone to talk to for a long time now, and although the walls may have ears, they’re sadly lacking in repartee.’