Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

‘Stop, you’re breaking my heart … People like you disinfect their eyes the minute a beggar crosses their path. You’re just a fucking racist come to sniff our mass graves in the name of a sacrosanct Christian charity which has no more the odour of sanctity than an arsehole.’

‘You have no right to call me a racist. I won’t allow it.’

‘You see?’ he retorted. ‘Even when you’re under my control, you think you can give me orders. You’re at my mercy, completely at my mercy, and you expect me to ask YOUR permission to shoot you down like a dog …’ He shook his head. ‘These damned whites! Always drunk on their own importance. Even if you put holy water in their wine, they wouldn’t sober up.’

He went back to his room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

The valley sloped gently for some thirty kilometres before it reached a chain of rocky mountains whittled away by erosion. They weren’t really mountains: given the traumatic flatness of the surroundings, the smallest hill took on a significance ten times greater than its actual measurements, as if in this tomblike landscape, every milestone needed to exaggerate its size in order not to disappear for ever. For four hours now, Joma had been taking us across a mineral, almost lunar universe, and not for a moment had I had the feeling that we were going to get out of it. The same trails led to the same rocks, the same thirsty soil lay in the same dried-up river beds, and always that blazing sun poured its molten lava down on our heads. The motionless dust lent something both vain and definitive to the horizon — a kind of still image of the end of the world.

With my back against the duffle bag, my legs sticking to the bed of the pick-up, I watched this merry-go-round of decay turn and turn and realised that I had lost interest in everything. I didn’t even feel the need to imagine what awaited me. I was starting to understand why, in some war films, heroes who’ve repelled enemy attacks and fought valiantly for days and nights on end, emerge suddenly from their shelters and brave their attackers’ guns … In any case, I had no idea what went on in our kidnappers’ heads. I didn’t know their mindset or their conception of human relations. However hard I tried to penetrate the way Joma’s mind worked, for example, it was as if I were trying to decipher the cryptograms in an esoteric book. ‘These people are alive now, but they come from another time,’ Hans had said. I had refused to believe it at first. My upbringing and culture had taught me that as long as you kept a clear head, you could overcome any misunderstanding. But these maniacs didn’t have clear heads, and I could see no way to reason with them.

Bruno’s nose was bleeding. A bump in the road had thrown him against the side of the pick-up and almost knocked him senseless. I’d yelled to Joma to drive more carefully, and Joma had deliberately driven even more recklessly to show me how little he cared about what was happening to us in the back. Beside him, Blackmoon was silent. He hadn’t said a word since we had left the fort. He was looking but without interest, listening without hearing. Something was bothering him. He was mired in his own thoughts. Whenever Blackmoon kept a low profile, you knew he was collecting himself before bouncing back. His silence was subversive; it was the calm before the storm. There was a striking contrast between the unstable boy of those first weeks and the one now sitting in the cab, and I wasn’t convinced it was a change for the better.

About midday, we halted amid a tangle of disembowelled hillsides and scrawny shrubs. I was relieved to sit on the soft sand after the metal bed of the pick-up. Bruno, who couldn’t clean himself because his wrists were tied behind his back, had blood on his beard and half of his shirt. He slumped by my side while Joma stood at the top of a ridge and searched the surroundings with his binoculars. Crouching not far from the pick-up, Blackmoon, his sabre stuck in the sand, laboriously wiped his lensless glasses with his cheche .

Joma came down the hill and walked around the vehicle, his chin between his thumb and index finger, thinking. When he noticed that we were watching him, he gave us a V-sign and climbed back up onto the ridge.

‘I think our Goliath is lost,’ Bruno said to me.

‘I think so, too. We’ve been this way already. See that rock over there that looks like a jar with handles? I’m sure I saw it less than two hours ago.’

‘That’s right. We came past here in the opposite direction.’

Joma came down from the ridge again, spread an old map on the bonnet of the pick-up and started looking for points of reference. After this fruitless exercise, he hit the bonnet in annoyance.

We drove back the way we had come for dozens of kilometres until we reached a massive cliff looking down on a plain bordered by scrub. In the distance, a herd of antelopes was fleeing from a predator. Joma went and stood at the edge of the precipice, took out his map and again started looking for landmarks. An anthracite foothill to the south was bothering him. Joma checked the coordinates on the map, compared them with the landscape in front of him, and orientated himself with the help of a compass. His features relaxed, and we realised that he knew where he was now.

We stopped in the shade of a solitary acacia. The sun was starting to set. Blackmoon untied us so that we could eat the slices of dried meat he gave us in brown paper and went and sat down halfway between the pick-up, where Joma was, and us.

‘Playing hard to get or what?’ Joma shouted to him. ‘Come over here.’

Blackmoon stood up reluctantly and joined his chief, who handed him a can of food and a metal canteen.

‘What’s the matter?’

Blackmoon shrugged.

‘You usually ramble on even when you have nothing to say.’

Blackmoon lifted the canteen to his mouth in order not to reply. Joma took out a large knife, cut a piece from his slice of dried meat and bit into it without taking his eyes off his subordinate. He started talking to him in a patois that Bruno translated for me simultaneously.

‘Why don’t you say anything?’

‘Do I have to?’

‘I don’t like your silence, Chaolo. Should I take it that you’re angry with me about something but you don’t dare lance the boil?’

‘What boil?’

‘Precisely. What’s the problem?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘No kidding!’

Blackmoon turned away in order not to have to suffer Joma’s inquisitive gaze. But he knew that Joma was waiting for an explanation and that he wouldn’t give up until he got it.

‘Well?’ Joma insisted.

‘You won’t listen to me anyway.’

‘I’m not deaf.’

‘No, I don’t want to get into an argument with you.’

‘So it’s as bad as that, is it?’

‘Please, Joma, just drop it. I’m not in the mood.’

‘Just try. I’m not going to eat you.’

Blackmoon shook his head. ‘You’re going to get upset, and then you’ll make my head spin with your theories.’

‘Are you going to come out with it, or what?’ Joma roared, spattering saliva from his mouth.

‘You see? I haven’t said anything yet, and you’re already making a fuss.’

Joma put his meal down on the ground and looked his subordinate up and down, his cheekbones throbbing with anger. ‘I’m listening …’

Blackmoon hunched his shoulders and breathed in and out like a boxer on his stool after a tough round. He raised his eyes to his chief, lowered them again, then lifted them as if lifting a burden. Having summoned both his breath and his courage, he said, ‘You’re the teacher I always dreamt of having, Joma. I wasn’t your boy, I was your pupil. But I don’t like the teaching you’ve forced on me.’