Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

All at once, he held out his hand.

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. You soon lose your manners around here … My name’s Bruno, I’m from Bordeaux in France.’

‘This is Hans, and I’m Kurt …’

‘Pleased to meet you, even though the circumstances and the place are not ideal …’

I helped Hans to take off his shirt and laid him on his stomach. The cut on his back was a large one, going across half his hip. Now that the scab had softened, you could see the wound bed; it was bad, hatched with tiny blood vessels oozing pus, the lips dark brown at the edges and turned out; the tissue around it had turned pale and was starting to get thinner along a strip of at least a centimetre while a purplish-grey patch spread on either side of the cut, from the vertebrae to the top of the groin.

‘Not a pretty sight,’ the Frenchman observed.

‘I need to clean the wound and also find something to lower the fever.’

The Frenchman went back to his straw mattress to get a little plastic sachet and a bottle filled with a disgusting-looking ointment. ‘Spread that on the wound.’

‘What is it?’

‘A powder made from medicinal plants which disinfects and heals at the same time. And the ointment reduces itching.’

‘That’s out of the question. There are enough germs in the wound already—’

‘Please,’ he interrupted me calmly. ‘There are no drugs here. You make do with what you can get. Trust me if you really want to stop your friend getting gangrene.’

Reluctantly, almost humiliated at being forced to opt for what I thought of as a quack remedy, I took the sachet, then hesitated. Bruno asked me to let him do it. Without waiting for my approval, he bent over Hans’s wound.

‘It’ll make him feel better, you’ll see,’ he promised, clearly trying to make up for having stepped on my toes.

No sooner had Bruno finished treating Hans than Joma appeared. He was tipsy. His body filled the doorway, and he had to bend his head to get through. He swayed in the middle of the room, his hands on his hips, muscles throbbing in his bare chest. He looked me up and down and kissed the amulets around his biceps — two leather pouches embroidered with multicoloured threads and tied to his arms with thin strips.

‘You still haven’t apologised to me,’ he said, twisting his neck like a wrestler.

The disgust I felt for him changed suddenly into an uncontrollable, debilitating dizziness.

‘Oh, yes,’ he went on, ‘even savages have self-respect.’

Bruno tried to intervene, but Joma raised a finger to stop him.

‘You stay out of this, or I’ll pull your haemorrhoids out through your ears.’

Having put Bruno in his place, Joma opened his arms wide, delighted to have me to himself.

‘What gives you the right to call us savages? Did you pick us off a baobab tree? I’d really like to know what makes us savages. War? Your wars are beyond cataclysmic. Poverty? We owe that to you. Ignorance? What makes you think you’re more cultivated than I am? I’m sure I’ve read more books than the whole of your family combined, starting with you. I know Lermontov, Blake, Hölderlin, Byron, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Lamarck, Neruda, Goethe and Pushkin by heart.’ He was getting excited now, ticking the names off on his fingers while his voice grew louder. ‘So, Dr Kurt Krausmann, what makes me a savage and you a civilised man? What is it you see in me? Somebody black even to the whites of his eyes?’

‘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.’