Yasmina Khadra: The African Equation

I smiled at him.

‘That’s better. You see? It doesn’t cost much to smile.’ He gave the counter a wipe with his cloth. ‘Hans has only just left, by the way. Didn’t you pass him in the street?’

‘No. When did he get back?’

‘Three days ago. Hasn’t he been to see you?’

‘No.’

‘Have you fallen out?’

‘Not at all. If he hasn’t been to see me, it must mean he has things to sort out … So he’s back from the Amazon?’

‘Apparently, yes. We didn’t have time to talk about it, but he seemed pleased with the expedition. Plus, he’s tanned, and he’s lost weight, which really suits him.’

Hans Makkenroth was an old friend. The heir of one of the richest families in Frankfurt, he ran several large companies specialising in medical equipment. But his fortune hadn’t made him inaccessible. Quite the opposite: he was often seen in quite ordinary places, melting into the crowd and avoiding gala evenings and other social events like the plague. We had met ten years earlier at Maspalomas in the Canary Islands. Hans and his wife Paula were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary, while Jessica and I were on our honeymoon. We had adjoining bungalows close to the beach. Paula and Jessica became friends, in spite of the age difference. They would invite each other over for coffee in the evening and allow us, Hans and me, to join them. Hans was interested in boats, oceans, and remote peoples. As I was receptive, Hans took an interest in me too. We became inseparable.

Paula died of a sudden devastating bout of pneumonia four years later, and, since becoming a widower, Hans had travelled the world constantly, as if in an attempt to shake off his grief. He was an exceptional sailor, fascinated by far horizons. Every year, he would set off for the unlikeliest places, carrying aid to destitute peoples deep in the Amazon jungle, or in Africa, or in remote areas of Asia.

‘Would you like something else?’ Toni asked.

‘I’m a bit peckish, but I don’t feel like seafood tonight.’

‘I have some delicious calamari.’

‘I’d rather have meat. A starter should be enough.’

Toni suggested a carpaccio of beef.

On the plasma screen above the counter, a football match was in full swing. At the far end of the room, a family was having dinner in silence, gathered around an old man who was gesturing vaguely. Two young women were chatting at a table close to the window; the snack bar’s neon sign spattered them with coloured light, adding gleaming highlights to their hair. One of the women stared at me before leaning towards her companion, who also turned to look at me. I asked for the bill and left, despite Toni insisting I have another drink. Out in the street, it had got colder.

I’d been planning to walk towards the river, in order to stretch my legs and clear my head, but the heavens opened and the rain forced me to go straight back to the car park where I’d left my car.

Because of the rain, there were traffic jams, and I didn’t get home until about 10.30. I’d been hoping Jessica might be back, but the windows of our house were still dark.

A jacket of Jessica’s lay on the chest of drawers in the hallway. I didn’t remember it being there that morning when I left for the surgery.

In our room, the bed hadn’t been disturbed.

I took off my coat, jacket and tie and went straight to the kitchen to get myself a beer. I sat down on the sofa, put my feet up on a pouffe and grabbed the remote. The first thing that came on was a political debate. I switched channels several times before coming across an underwater documentary showing sharks hunting in packs in a coral reef. Seeing the depths of the ocean had a calming effect on me, but I couldn’t really concentrate. It was eleven minutes past eleven by the clock on the wall. By my watch, too. I started channel-hopping again frantically, and finally went back to the underwater documentary. Unable to focus on any one programme in particular, I decided to take a shower before going to bed.

As I switched on the light in the bathroom, I almost fell backwards as if hit by a gust of wind. At first, I thought I was hallucinating, but it wasn’t an optical illusion, and was far more than a fleeting impression. No , I heard myself cry out. Paralysed, suspended in a celestial void, I grabbed hold of the washbasin to stop myself collapsing. My calves began to tremble, and the trembling rose to my stomach and spread through my body like a series of electric shocks. Jessica lay in the bath, fully dressed, the water up to her neck, her head twisted to the side, one arm dangling over the edge of the tub. Her hair floated around her pale face, and her half-closed eyes stared sadly at her other arm, which was folded over her stomach … It was an unbearable, nightmarish, surreal sight. Horror in all its immeasurable cruelty!

My house was swarming with intruders.

Somebody brought me a glass of water and helped me to sit down. He was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. I saw strangers bustling around me, uniformed policemen, ambulance men in white. Who were they? What were they doing in my home? Then it came back to me. I was the one who had called them. There had been a brief moment of lucidity, followed by fog. Again I couldn’t understand, couldn’t find my way through the chaos cluttering my mind. Jessica … Jessica had killed herself by swallowing two boxes of sleeping pills. Two boxes … of sleeping pills … how was it possible? … Jessica was dead … My wife had committed suicide … The love of my life had gone … In an instant, my world had disintegrated …

I took my head in both hands to stop it falling apart. Impossible to get rid of that flash image in the bathroom, that corpse in the bath … Jessica, come out of there, I beg you … How could she come out of there? How could she hear me? Her stiffness, her marble-like pallor, her fixed, icy stare were irrevocable, and yet I had run to her, taken her in my arms, shaken her, yelled at her to wake up; my cries whirled around the room, smashed into the walls, drilled into my temples. As a doctor, I knew there wasn’t much I could do; as a husband I refused to accept that. Jessica was merely a heap of flesh, a still life, but I’d laid her down on the floor and tried all kinds of things to revive her. Finally, exhausted, struck dumb with terror, I had huddled in a corner and looked at her through a kind of two-way mirror. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, wild-eyed, prostrate with grief, overwhelmed by the calamity that had struck me.

The police finally left the bathroom, after packing up their equipment. They had taken photographs and collected any clues that might explain the circumstances of my wife’s death. The ambulance men were given permission to remove the body. I watched them take Jessica out on a stretcher — Jessica reduced to a common corpse under a white sheet.

A tall man in a dark suit took me aside. He had a round face, white hair at the temples and a large bald patch. With a politeness that verged on obsequiousness, which for some reason irritated me, he asked if he could talk to me in the living room.

‘I’m Lieutenant Sturm. I’d like to ask you a few questions. I know now is hardly the best time, but I’m obliged to—’

‘No, lieutenant,’ I interrupted. ‘Now is definitely not the best moment.’

I could barely recognise my own voice, which seemed to reach me through an endless series of filters. I was furious with this policeman, and found his attitude inhuman. How dare he ask me questions when I didn’t understand what was happening? What kind of answers did he expect from someone who had just lost his bearings, his faculties, his ability to think? I was in a state of shock, crushed by a storm that was sucking me into some kind of abyss …