Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

The third week of my captivity ended with a sandstorm that lasted three days and three nights. I thought I was going to choke to death. With a cheche around my head, my eyes swollen and irritated, I felt as if the dust was getting in through my pores. I’d never seen a sandstorm before, and I discovered this extraordinary phenomenon in a kind of delirium. It was like a malevolent flood, as if a Pandora’s box had unleashed on the world incessant gusts of wrath and evil spells. The sky and the earth had disappeared in a pandemonium of noise and obscurity; I could no longer tell day from night. All you could hear were the torrents of sand rolling across the desert and moaning elegiacally in the crevices. Then the storm suddenly abated and, as if by magic, everything went back to its accustomed place. The heat resumed its obsessive hum and the horizon its frustrating emptiness.

I had only glimpsed Hans twice since we had been separated. He was walking a little better now. Blackmoon let me know that my friend was getting special treatment and that in the evening he was taken for a walk behind the hill to help him recover. The atmosphere in the fort was fairly relaxed; the captain was in a good mood and Chief Moussa, who had left with his henchmen to plunder the nearest villages, had come back, the two pick-ups overflowing with provisions.

Bruno and I were crouching by the door of our prison. Blackmoon stepped over the little barrier and walked to the foot of the dead tree, with a book in his hand and without his sabre. It was unusual for him to appear without it; it was as if he were missing a limb; he seemed different, an ordinary young man, calm, pleasant to look at. Without even glancing at us, he sat down on a clod of earth and immersed himself in his book, which remained obstinately open at the same page.

‘What have you done with your sabre, Chaolo?’ Bruno asked.

Blackmoon pretended not to have heard. When Bruno asked him the same question again, he looked around as if the Frenchman had been addressing someone else, then pointed to his own chest and said, ‘Are you talking to me?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘My name’s not Chaolo.’

‘Oh, really? Since when?’

Blackmoon shrugged and went back to his book. ‘It isn’t my name any more,’ he said after a pause, and gave me an exaggerated wink, as if asking me to enlighten Bruno.

‘He has a combat name now,’ I said. ‘It’s Blackmoon.’

‘Impressive,’ Bruno said, concealing a smile behind his hand. ‘Is that why you got rid of your sabre?’

‘It isn’t a sabre, it’s a machete,’ Blackmoon said with a hint of irritation. ‘I lent it to the cook. He needs it to cut up the animal.’

Bruno passed his swollen fingers through his beard, scratched his cheek and, ignoring the signals I was making to avoid things turning nasty, ventured, ‘Now that you have a combat name, they’re surely going to let you have a sub-machine gun.’

Blackmoon seemed happy to play the Frenchman’s game. He pushed his glasses back towards his forehead and said, ‘The only time they put a gun in my hands, it went off by itself, and the stray bullet hit Chief Moussa’s dog and killed it. Captain Gerima, who’s a bit of a sorcerer, told me the spirit of firearms is incompatible with mine. Since then, I’ve carried a machete.’

He fell silent while a young pirate walked past pushing a wheelbarrow.

Bruno waited for the rest of the story, but it didn’t come. ‘What are you reading?’ he asked to restart the conversation.

‘I can’t read.’

‘What do you mean, you can’t read? You’ve been looking at that book for ages.’

‘I like looking at the words. For me, they’re better than drawings. They have so many mysteries. So I look at them and try to decode their secrets.’

‘You can spend hours on end engrossed in a book just to look at the words?’

‘Why, do you have a problem with that?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘It doesn’t bother me. I sit down under a tree or on a rock, I open my book, I look at it and I feel fine … The only thing I regret is that I never went to college.’

‘What job would you have chosen if you had?’

‘Teacher,’ he said without hesitation. ‘There was one in my village. He was distinguished, and people treated him with respect. Every time he passed our house, I stood up to be polite. He had style, that teacher. My father said it was because he possessed knowledge, and nothing’s above knowledge.’

‘Is that why you wear glasses? Because it makes you look like a teacher?’

‘There’s no law against dreaming, is there?’

‘Of course, it’s the one right there’s no law against … I assume you followed Moussa because he possesses knowledge?’

Blackmoon gave a scornful grin. ‘Moussa doesn’t possess anything. Joma says he’s an intellectual, and an intellectual is a big talker who shows off like a circus horse. A poser, that’s all Moussa is. He doesn’t believe a damned word of the speeches he bores us with.’

‘In that case, why do you stay with him?’

‘I’m not with him, I’m with Joma.’

‘Is he a relative of yours?’

‘Joma doesn’t have any family. He says he came into the world directly from the sky, like a shooting star.’

‘And why do you stay with Joma?’

‘I like him. He isn’t easy to get on with, but he’s straight. I’ve known him for years. He was a tailor in the market in my village and I was his boy.’

‘What does that mean, his boy?’ I asked Bruno.

‘It means I did everything for him,’ Blackmoon replied. ‘I maintained his moped, put away his rolls of cloth, ran errands for him. In return, he took care of me … It was good in the old days,’ he said with a sigh. ‘We had an easy life. We didn’t ask for much. Actually, we didn’t know if there was anything else …’

He bowed his head, saddened by the memory of that period of his life.

‘What happened?’ Bruno insisted.

‘What?’ Blackmoon, who had been lost in the past, said with a start. ‘What happened? Something that’s not going to stop now.’ His voice had turned dark and hoarse. ‘It was a mess. A bomb wiped out the market. We never understood why. Maybe because there was nothing to understand. Joma lost his workshop and his reason for living. He gave his sewing machines, his rolls of cloth and his scissors to his creditors and went off to war. I followed him …’

He was interrupted by Ewana who was back from the latrines. ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Ewana said. ‘He’s a loser. He’d piss off a dead man in his grave just by praying for his soul.’

‘Fuck you,’ Blackmoon said.

‘What would you fuck me with, scarecrow? You don’t even have balls.’ Ewana disappeared behind a ruined building.

Blackmoon started breathing heavily. His Adam’s apple rose and fell in his throat like a piston. Slowly, his face stopped twitching and his eyes grew calm.

‘What about you, don’t you have any family either?’ Bruno asked.

Blackmoon frowned, thought for a minute, then looked the Frenchman up and down. ‘You aren’t a shrink by any chance, are you? How do you always manage to get me to talk? You aren’t stealing my soul like the griots?’

‘I’m not a griot.’

‘Then what’s your trick?’

‘I don’t have a trick. We’re talking, that’s all. Man to man. Without any ulterior motive. I listen to you frankly and you open your heart to me.’

Blackmoon pondered Bruno’s arguments and found them admissible. ‘Maybe you’re right. It isn’t that I don’t trust you, but around here, if you trust people too much, you’re a dead man. You never know when the lightning’s going to strike … Joma doesn’t believe in God or anyone. But he knows that with me, he can sleep easy. If he asked me to die for him, I’d do it … And even so, he doesn’t trust me.’