Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

Bruno took advantage of a moment’s hesitation to intervene. ‘Haven’t you figured it out yet? Your comrades aren’t coming back. They’ve run off with the money.’

The pirates turned as one towards our jail, thrown by Bruno’s allegations. For a few seconds, not a muscle moved on their sweat-streaked faces.

‘It’s perfectly obvious,’ Bruno went on, becoming bolder now. ‘You’ve been tricked, for heaven’s sake! I bet the captain and Moussa were in cahoots, that they plotted the whole thing between them. Who knows, maybe they dumped your friends in the wild and are off in some land of milk and honey right now while you’re here rotting in the sun.’

‘Shut up,’ Joma ordered him.

But Bruno wouldn’t let it go. ‘Just think about it for one second.’

Joma raised his pistol and fired twice at Bruno, who flattened himself against the wall. The shots cast a chill over the fort.

‘We don’t only slaughter cattle!’ Joma said to the rebels. ‘The first person who thinks it’s amusing to defy me, I’ll blow his brains out. While the captain’s away, I make the decisions. Now get back to work, and tomorrow at dawn we leave for Station 28.’

The pirates dispersed, throwing each other grim looks.

Late in the night, Bruno woke me. He put his hand over my mouth and motioned me to follow him to the window. In the pockmarked sky, the moon was reduced to a nail clipping. The fort was plunged in darkness. Bruno pointed with his finger. I had to concentrate to make out four figures moving furtively around the jeep; one of them climbed in and took the wheel, the other three leant on the bonnet and started pushing the vehicle towards the gate. The jeep slid gently over the sandy yard, manoeuvred carefully to get around the well, edged its way between the water tank and a heap of loose stones and noiselessly left the enclosure. It disappeared behind the embankment, and reappeared further on, still pushed by the three figures. When it reached the track leading to the valley, two or three hundred metres from the fort, its engine roared, and it set off at top speed, with the lights off. Alerted by the noise, Joma came running out of the command post in his underpants, an automatic rifle in his arms. He called his men; when nobody appeared, apart from a sleepy Blackmoon, he realised it wasn’t an attack: the four ‘mutineers’ from the previous day had just parted company with him. Cursing, he ran to the gap, peered into the valley, which was still shrouded in darkness, and started firing wildly like a maniac.

Joma remained on guard on the rampart until sunrise, clicking the breech of his rifle and every now and again letting out cries of rage that seemed to perplex the night. He took his subordinates’ defection as a personal affront. Whenever Blackmoon tried to comfort him, Joma threatened to tear his heart out with his bare hands if he didn’t shut up. Several times, he looked in our direction and, despite the distance between us and the dim light, Bruno and I felt our hair stand on end.

Having waited in vain for a sign on the horizon, Joma went back to his room to dress. He put on a hunting vest, combat trousers and new hiking boots, hung two cartridge belts around his neck and across his chest, wrapped his head in a red scarf and came back out into the yard, his big pistol stuck in his belt and a Kalashnikov in his hand. His milky eyes sought to bury all they surveyed.

Towards eight o’clock, he got us out of our jail and told Blackmoon to tie our wrists behind our backs.

Joma finished hanging jerry cans of fuel on either side of the pick-up. Into the back of the vehicle, he threw a full duffle bag, a satchel with straps, two rucksacks, a box of canned food, slices of dried meat rolled in brown paper, a crate of ammunition and two goatskin canteens filled with drinking water. Bruno and I were on our knees in the dust, wondering what fate our kidnapper had in store for us as he prepared to leave the fort. Was he going to kill us? Leave us there? Take us with him? Joma was giving nothing away. He grunted orders which Blackmoon begrudgingly followed for his own protection, but without any undue haste.

‘What are you planning to do with us?’ Bruno asked.

Joma carefully checked that the ropes were tight and the jerry cans well balanced. The way he was tightening the knots betrayed a growing inner anger, which Bruno’s words only served to stoke.

‘You say you’ve read lots of books,’ Bruno went on, ‘that you know the works of the great poets by heart. You must have learnt something from them … Let us go. Or else come with us. We’ll say you saved our lives.’

Joma said nothing.

‘It’s pointless now, Joma. Actually, it’s always been pointless. If only you stepped back a bit, you’d see that what you’re doing is absurd. Why are you keeping us so far from our homes, so far from your home? What do you blame us for? Crossing your path? We’ve never done you any harm. I’m an African by adoption, and Dr Krausmann does humanitarian work. Imagine that! Humanitarian work! … Joma, for heaven’s sake, let us go. Captain Gerima is nothing but a crook, and you know it. Soldiers like him don’t fight, they just line their pockets. They don’t have any ideals or principles. They’d walk over their mother’s body for the smallest coin … Gerima is using your frustrations. He’s manipulating you. I’m certain he dumped his men in the wild and ran off with the money. Your comrades realised that. That’s why they left.’

Joma turned on his heel, charged at Bruno and gave him a kick in the stomach that knocked the breath out of him and bent him double. Bruno fell on his side, his eyes bulging with pain.

‘My comrades left because of you, you son of a bitch!’ Joma said, spitting at him.

I was horrified by this character. However many times he lashed out, I’d be just as disgusted and indignant. Things with Joma had become personal. I hated him, I hated him for what he represented: a monster in the raw, straight out of the primeval slime, with the instinctive violence of the very first fears and the very first hostilities; a big devil carved out of a block of granite with no other facet to him but his own brutality; his pumped-up body, his gestures, his voice, his megalomania, his quickness to fly off the handle, everything about him stank of murder. I hated him because he was an outrage to common sense, and because he had injected gall into my veins like poison so that I had the feeling I might end up being like him. I realised, to my immense sorrow — I was a doctor, after all — that there wasn’t room on this earth for the two of us, that the world couldn’t contain, at the same time and in the same place, two people who had nothing in common and whom nothing seemed able to reconcile.

Joma read my thoughts. My animosity towards him appealed in some obscure way to his vanity, as if he got most satisfaction from the disgust he inspired in me.

‘Do you want my photo?’ he cried.

I didn’t reply.

He snorted with disdain, pushed me away with his foot and grunted, ‘Humanitarian work? That was all we needed. You blond, blue-eyed idiot with your pretty face and your Rolex watches and your Porsche, you’re in humanitarian work? You hypochondriac, racist mother’s boy who’d disinfect the pavement if you found out that a black man had been walking along it before you, you want me to believe you’re so upset by world poverty that you’d give up your creature comforts to share the sufferings of niggers with bloated stomachs?’

‘You don’t really believe what you’re saying,’ I said.

‘I stopped believing in anything the day I realised that bullets speak louder than words.’

‘Maybe that’s your problem.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘Definitely … I’m not a racist, I’m a doctor. When I examine a patient, I don’t have time to dwell on the colour of his skin.’