Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

‘Oh, my God!’

He didn’t add another word.

I stared at the stars until they merged together. I was stiff and cold, barely aware of the hard stones I was lying on. When, hours later, Bruno started snoring, I turned on my side and, with wild eyes, waited patiently for dawn to restore to the day what night had stolen from it.

It took us four hours of hard driving over stones as sharp as shards of glass to go a mere seventy kilometres. The ground was terraced over an interminable succession of natural paving stones, all white-hot. The pick-up swayed over the cracks, jolting and settling in an unbearable clanking of old iron. The abrupt twists of the steering wheel were grinding my wrists to a pulp. I was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I found it hard to believe that you could cross vast swathes of land without seeing any people or coming upon a village. That pirates should choose little-used roads was understandable, but that you could drive for hundreds of kilometres without glimpsing the merest hut with a semblance of life around it was driving me mad. Every time we thought we were on the verge of getting out of trouble, we found ourselves back at square one, in the middle of nowhere, facing the same inhospitable horizon and surrounded by hills crushed beneath an outrageously sovereign sun, which, after forcing the earth to its knees, was trying to subjugate the sky and its Olympians. Destiny was starting to wear the mask of farce: what was the point of going on, I wondered, since our fate was sealed? Seized with suicidal frustration, I felt like pressing down hard on the accelerator, closing my eyes and tearing straight ahead at breakneck speed …

Bruno was in no better a state than me. He had stopped peering through his binoculars at our surroundings, or suggesting which way we should go. He sat in the passenger seat, his shoulder against the door, and dozed, even though disturbed by the discordant jolts of the truck. I was angry at him for not being more insistent with the old man the previous day. He might have pointed us in the right direction; he might even have agreed to come with us. But Bruno claimed to know Africans better than anybody, to know exactly when you should make demands on them and when not. I asked him how come, after three days’ driving, he had no idea where we were. After all, he claimed to have been a guide to Western journalists and scientific expeditions. He replied in a condescending tone that in this part of the world a guide was basically someone who kept strictly to the routes he knew by heart, since you just had to deviate one millimetre from the beaten track to put yourself in as much danger as any fool …

We decided to rest in the shade of a monumental acacia whose branches were adorned with offerings to marabouts and ancestors: scarves, rag dolls, pieces of jewellery, combs tangled with hair, tiny terracotta pots at the bottom of which animal blood had dried. The area was strewn with dromedary droppings and traces of bivouacs. Near the revered tree, Bruno discovered a well without a coping, along with a rudimentary drinking trough. We washed ourselves from head to foot, cleaned our clothes and spread them over the burning stones to dry. Bruno dug out a pair of boxer shorts for me from the bottom of the duffle bag, but they were too big for me; I made do with a pair of Y-fronts and a vest, both still in their cellophane. I had lost a lot of weight. My body was covered in spots, some turning grey; I had a boil under my right armpit, with two others in my groin; my thighs had deep furrows in them and there was a thick whitish crust on my knees. Bruno preferred to stay naked. With his unkempt beard and reptilian hair, he looked like a guru. He performed a series of gymnastic moves, opened his arms wide and crossed them, crouched down and stood up again, twisted his neck so that the vertebrae cracked, then, in order to draw a smile from me, he turned his back to me and bent over to touch his toes, thus offering me the hairy indentation of his backside, which he began to wiggle in a coarse manner. He continued this clownish exhibition until I burst out laughing. Pleased with his success, he waved his arms about in a burlesque choreography and, now an angry witch doctor, now a ballerina, went from a mystic dance to a classical ballet with staggering ease. Dazzled by his sense of improvisation and his comic gifts, which I would never have suspected he possessed, I laughed until the tears ran down my face, and it was as if I were expelling all the filth polluting my body and mind.

We ate in the shade of the acacia and slept, cradled by the cool breeze.

When I woke up, I found Bruno absorbed in the book by Joma Baba-Sy. When he closed it, he made an admiring pout. He lingered over the photo on the cover and admitted to me that he couldn’t believe a mass of rage and bestiality like Joma could harbour so much sensitivity … He reopened the book, skipped several pages, stopped at a particular poem and read it out loud:

Africa,

Death’s head,

Bathing in the troubled waters

Of your horizonless seas,

What have your sunstruck bastards

Made of your memory?

On your ravaged shores

Your ballads lie rotting

Like flotsam

And in your godless sky

Your most pious wishes

Chase their own echoes.

Africa, my Africa

What has become of your tom-toms

In the silence of charnel houses?

What has become of your griots

In the blasphemy of weapons?

What has become of your tribes

In the deception of nations?

I have questioned your rivers

And your lost villages

Looked for your trophies

In the trances of your women

Nowhere have I found

Your age-old legends.

Your kings are deposed

Like your statues of wood

The voice of your traditions

Has faded and died

Your stories are told

In praise of tyrants

Your destiny denies you

Like a rejected mother

And none of my prayers

Find an echo in you.

Africa, my Africa

You have put death in one of my hands

And wrongdoing in the other

And you have stolen my masters,

My saints, prophets and apostles

Leaving me only my eyes

To weep over the insult

Your children inflict on you

Every day that God makes.

What will become of me

In the shadow of your ravens?

What can I hope

When I can no longer dream?

Perhaps to end up

Where everything began

Between a tombstone

And a cancelled vow .

‘Incredible, isn’t it?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

Bruno put the book down, rummaged in the satchel, and pulled out a wedding photograph. It showed a party taking place on a large patio hung with Chinese lanterns. Surrounded by tipsy guests, Joma posed solemnly beside his bride. Curiously, even though for two days and two nights I had been trying to shake off the crime I had committed, I found myself wanting to know a little more about my victim. Deep inside, I knew the idea was senseless, but driven by a morbid curiosity, like a murderer returning to the scene of his crime, I took the photograph from Bruno. The low quality of the image made it hard to distinguish much about Joma, who was barely recognisable among the guests. We then turned to a number of articles cut out of a poorly produced local newspaper. The texts were full of misprints; all of them praised in fulsome style ‘the force of an exceptional poet’. A somewhat more sober article included an interview in which Joma told how he had gone from being a penniless village tailor to becoming a bard. In the same interview, he expressed the opinion that ‘with the Word we can overcome adversity’. In another cutting, there was a photograph, stuck between a crossword puzzle and a game of spot the difference, showing Joma receiving a trophy from the hands of an African lady in traditional costume, with a few lines by way of caption relating the ceremony. Next, we came across a small item reporting a bomb attack which had left two children wounded and a woman dead, the woman being ‘the young wife of the poet Joma Baba-Sy who received the Léopold Senghor Prize two weeks ago’. This last sentence was underlined in red. The article had been carefully preserved in a plastic wallet.