Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

‘What possessed you to provoke that monster?’ I said.

He smiled at me through his wounds. His laughing eyes seemed to mock me. ‘Undress me,’ he said. ‘My body’s burning.’

‘You fool!’

I took off his shirt as if tearing off his skin. He clenched his teeth, but couldn’t stifle his groans. His chest was covered in marks and purplish scratches. His back had the same blue streaks, with darker patches on the shoulders and hips. I had to let him catch his breath before taking off his trousers. The skin of his knees was peeled, and his legs looked as if they had been attacked with a meat cleaver. There was a deep, suppurating cut on his left calf. The person working in the infirmary hadn’t done much, merely putting poultices over the wounds without disinfecting them and smearing antiseptic over the bruises.

Bruno pointed with his chin at the bag containing the ‘miracle powder’. ‘Put that on the open wounds … Then put the balm above my eye.’

Having nothing else to suggest, I did as I was told.

He watched me with a smile; every now and again, his smile turned to a grimace, then reappeared, enigmatic, absurd, disturbing.

‘He gave me quite a thrashing,’ he said with a hoarse laugh.

‘Where did it get you?’

‘It made a change from the general monotony, didn’t it?’

‘I don’t understand you. You’ve been telling me to be detached and keep a clear head ever since I got here, and now you go off the rails like that. He could have killed you.’

‘I did go a bit crazy,’ he admitted. ‘It happens to the toughest of us … Hans is the third hostage I’ve seen leave. It was as if a fuse blew inside me … I keep telling these sons of bitches that I’m not a hostage like the others, that I’ve been an African for forty years, that nobody in France knows what’s become of me and so no government would ask for me back, but the bastards just won’t listen to me. Even if anybody did ask for me back, I have no intention of leaving Africa. I’m an African, a wandering anchorite. I have no wife, no children, no money and no fixed abode, and my papers are years out of date … Who’s going to bother spending a small fortune on a ghost?’

‘That’s no reason to put yourself in danger.’

‘I’ve had enough,’ he said, out of breath, his smile disappearing to be replaced by an immense weariness. ‘I can’t stand it any more, I’ve had it up to here … I want to go back to the dusty roads, and walk and walk without any particular destination, walk until I pass out. These walls are blinding me.’ His voice was quivering now. ‘They’re stifling me, driving me crazy … I need wide open spaces and mirages and dromedaries. I want to stumble upon a hut in the middle of nowhere, share a shepherd’s meal and take my leave of him early in the morning; I want to turn the corner of a cathedral-shaped rock and run into an old acquaintance, walk with him a little way and lose sight of him at nightfall. I want to see my pilgrim stars again, my Great Bear and Little Bear, and my shooting stars crossing my skies like signs of destiny. And when I’m so hungry I’d take a grasshopper for a turkey, and so thirsty I could drink the sea, I’ll drop by a dive for reformed crooks and get as drunk as ten Poles, then, after spewing worse than a volcano, I’ll wipe my mouth on the whores’ petticoats and swear on their lives it won’t happen again and set off through the deserts, barely capable of staying upright, to visit the ancient tombs buried in the sand; I’ll bivouac at the foot of a rock and tell myself stories until I end up believing them more than anything in the world … That’s how it’s always been, Monsieur Krausmann, in my life and in my mind. I’m a puff of smoke blown about by contrary winds, my eyes are hunters of horizons and my heels are cut out of flying carpets …’

Broken, exhausted, moved by his own words, he huddled in his rags, brought his knees up to his stomach and made himself so small that his sobs almost drowned him.

Having wept all the tears he had in his body, he raised himself up on one elbow, turned to me and showed me his ruined teeth in a smile as tragic as a surrender.

‘My God, a bit of self-pity does you a power of good every now and again!’

In the afternoon, Captain Gerima came into our prison yard. He began by yelling at a guard, just to announce himself, then appeared in the doorway and cleared his throat. His hand on the door, he looked into the corners of the cell, and his gaze came to rest on Bruno, who had retreated beneath his mosquito net.

‘How is he?’ he asked me.

‘You almost blinded him in one eye,’ I said in disgust. I would have preferred not to speak to him at all, but it just came out.

He scratched the top of his head, embarrassed. It was obvious he’d had a bad night: he had bags under his eyes and his jowls hung flabby and formless over his jaws. To make himself look perkier, he had buttoned up his tunic, which he usually left half open over his big belly — a mark, in his opinion, of the panache befitting a rebel chief. ‘That’s a real pity!’ he said.

He was trying to be conciliatory, but as this was unusual in the life he had chosen for himself, the humility he was attempting to show struck me as pathetic and misplaced. There are people who are merely the expression of their misdeeds, vile because they have no scruples, ugly because their treachery makes them repulsive. Captain Gerima was one of them: if you held out a stick to help him up, he’d grab it to hit you with.

He shifted in the doorway, uncertain whether to come in or go on his way. He came in, his hands behind his back, his shoulders stooped like a general who has run out of tactics.

‘I don’t like people who stand up to me,’ he said.

I didn’t react.

He stopped, then said to the wall, ‘This is the first time I’ve lost control like that. I usually handle the situation more tactfully … But the Frenchman really went too far.’ He turned to me. ‘Are the French all like that? Don’t they know how to behave themselves?’ He opened his arms and slapped them against his thighs. ‘Is it any surprise I flipped? Has anybody bothered you since you’ve been here? You’re being treated properly. You’re given food and drink, and we let you sleep in peace. You won’t find better-off hostages anywhere in the world. In other places, hostages are fed to the dogs, their throats are cut like sheep … I’ve never executed a hostage. And this Frenchman dares to mock my authority. How do you expect my men to respect me if I let my prisoners humiliate me?’

He wiped his face with his forearm.

‘It’s all a matter of discipline, doctor,’ he went on. ‘And without discipline, anything can happen. Some of my men are ready to flay you alive. They don’t care about the money. What could they buy with it, where would they go? The whole country’s ablaze. All they’ve ever known is war. And war has only one face: theirs! If it was up to them, they’d tear you to pieces just for the practice.’

He looked behind him, as if fearing to be overheard, and when he spoke again it was in a conspiratorial tone.

‘Do you think I like rotting here, having to break camp purely on guesswork and constantly moving about to avoid ambushes? Do you think I enjoy it?’

He again looked over his shoulder.

‘I’d be ready to swap my weapons, all my weapons, for your scalpel,’ he continued. ‘War’s no picnic. I suffer from it just as much as a shepherd who steps on a landmine or a little girl cut down by a stray bullet. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is safe when tragedy is established as a dogma, when wrongdoing becomes logical. If you asked the greatest of fighters or the person who’s amassed the most astonishing booty what he’d like most, he’d answer quick as a flash, “A moment’s rest!” No people are made for war. Ours no more than yours. But we haven’t been given the choice. I may be a brute, but I’d love to have a cushy job, and a little woman waiting for me in the evening, and maybe even a couple of kids who’d throw their arms around my neck when I got home from work. Just my luck, instead of a school exercise book they stuck a gun in my hand and said, “It’s every man for himself.” So I do what I can …’