Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

When the plane took off, I was overcome with a mixture of dread and loneliness. What if the shepherd was telling the truth? What if Hans had succumbed to his wounds? That possibility was the final blow. My knees gave way and pain gripped my body and my mind.

In the canteen, I stared at my plate without touching it. I couldn’t even have swallowed my own saliva. The rattle of knives and forks sounded to me like hailstones, crushing my thoughts into thousands of shards. Bruno noticed how badly affected I was. He took my hand, but the gesture felt like a bite. I asked him to excuse me and went outside to get some air.

I walked in the darkness without knowing where I was going. Images of Hans went round and round in my head. I saw him again at the controls of his boat, limping through a thalweg with his shirt clinging to his wound, not finding words to say at Jessica’s funeral, fanning himself with his hat in the sun at Sharm el-Sheikh. I had the impression that a whole chunk of my universe was missing, that the absence of Hans had created an impossible gulf between me and the world. However hard I tried to dismiss the idea he might be dead, it kept coming back, as fierce as a hornet.

Elena found me on the other side of the fence, huddled beneath a solitary tree, wild with anxiety. She leant down and talked to me, but couldn’t reach me. Unable to get any response or reaction from me, she took me in her arms and I abandoned myself to her like a child.

I needed someone.

And Elena was there.

When death tries to suck the lifeblood from you, life has to react, or it will lose all credibility. That might be what happened to me. Hans’s probable death had reactivated my survival instinct. By loving Elena, I proved to myself that I was alive. I was surprised to wake up in her bed. Surprised but reassured. My intimacy with Elena was more than a refuge for me, it enabled me to make peace with myself. Elena was embarrassed. Did she blame herself for taking advantage of the situation? She would have been wrong to think that. I needed support, and she was my rock. How could I have rejected her lips when they gave me back my soul? Hadn’t she told me she felt lonely? In making love, we had formed a common front against all the things that had swept away our moorings.

She had made coffee, put the tray down on the bedside table and gone into the bathroom to get dressed. When she returned, her eyes wandered several times around the room before coming to rest on me. ‘Now that you’ve decided to stay in the camp, what do you plan to do with your days?’ she asked. I told her that if she had no objections, I’d like to resume my work. She assured me that the patients would be happy to be tended by me. I promised her I would join her in the treatment room as soon as I had taken a shower.

Elena had already examined half the patients by the time I joined her in the infirmary. I found her at the bedside of the old woman, who had miraculously survived and was still in intensive care. Her son, the young man with the cart, was in the next bed. He, too, was on a drip. He wouldn’t take his eyes off his mother … Elena introduced me to her patients. There were about thirty of them, from different backgrounds: old men, women and children, most of them survivors of raids. Orfane brought me a white coat and a stethoscope and gave me a row of beds to deal with. Within ten minutes, I had recovered all my old medical reflexes. A young boy grabbed me by the wrist. His case was clearly desperate. With his hairless skull, almost non-existent eyebrows and yellowish complexion, he was nothing more than a big head above a skeleton. The skin of his face crumpled like a sheet of paper when he smiled at me.

‘Is it true that in Germany there are glass houses so high they reach the clouds?’

‘Yes, it’s true,’ I said, taking his hand in mine and sitting down on the edge of his bed.

‘And do people live in them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how do they get to the top?’

‘They take the lift.’

‘What’s a lift?’

‘A kind of cage. You go inside, press a button with a number next to it, and the cage goes up by itself.’

‘That’s magic … When I’m better, I’ll go to your country and see the glass houses.’

Still smiling, he lay down again and closed his eyes.

Orfane came and told me that the director was waiting for me in his office. I finished my rounds before going.

Bruno had got there before me. He was sprawling on the sofa, his legs crossed and his arms stretched out along the back. The Sudanese colonel saw us without either the captain or Pfer. We told him our stories from the beginning, the ambush outside Mogadishu in Bruno’s case, the attack on the boat in mine, the terrible journey across scrub and desert, the disused fort where Captain Gerima had kept us prisoner, Chief Moussa, Joma the poet-pirate, the transfer of Hans, the final duel that had allowed us to escape, our meeting with Elena Juárez and her refugees. It was a detailed account, and the colonel didn’t interrupt us once: I assumed he was recording our statements on the tape recorder that stood on Pfer’s desk. When we had finished, he asked us to pay attention and went to a map of the region hanging on the wall. With an expandable pointer he pointed to three places, which he surrounded with little blue triangles: the place where Jibreel, the camp’s guide and driver, had found Bruno and me; the place where the shepherd said he had received a visit from pirates with the wounded Hans; the place where we had been kept prisoner by Captain Gerima (based on our description of the outpost and the surrounding landscape). He admitted that he couldn’t understand why the kidnappers had chosen such a bleak, hostile area instead of staying in Somalia where the trade in hostages could be carried on without too many obstacles, although he pointed out that rebels preferred to manoeuvre across borders so that if the worst came to the worst they could fall back on the neighbouring country to avoid being pursued by government forces. Bruno reminded him that we weren’t there to follow a course in military tactics, but to find Hans Makkenroth. The colonel took no notice of his words and continued his presentation. Having finished with the map, he turned to his files. He began by telling us that the authorities had nothing on the so-called Captain Gerima and that no officer who had deserted matched his description.

‘Gerima had definitely been in the army,’ Bruno insisted. ‘He isn’t Sudanese or Somali. He’s Djiboutian and speaks fluent French. He was in the regular army before being sentenced by a court martial for stealing rations and reselling them.’

The officer was exasperated by Bruno’s intervention. He clearly wasn’t accustomed to being interrupted and saw the Frenchman’s attitude as insubordination and an insult to his authority. He waited for Bruno to be quiet before resuming.

‘As for Chief Moussa, he’s known to the authorities both here and in Somalia. He’s being actively pursued in both countries. Now, with your permission, let’s see if a few faces might point us in the right direction.’ He turned his computer towards us. Photographs of men and teenage boys appeared on the screen. ‘I should make it clear that they aren’t all criminals. The one thing they have in common is that they’ve received gunshot wounds. Hospitals, clinics, dispensaries, all kinds of medical centres without exception are required to inform the police immediately of any admissions of that nature. These people may be shepherds attacked by cattle thieves, lorry drivers intercepted by highwaymen, people hit by stray bullets, people wounded in the course of tribal feuds, but also dealers and bandits arrested during police raids, smugglers, rebels, terrorists and so on. I’d be grateful if you could take a good look at them and tell me if you see any familiar faces.’