Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

A hearse appeared, followed by a column of official cars and black limousines. The journalists started running towards the exit. The crowd behind the barrier thinned out, and I saw Claudia Reinhardt. She was standing near a group of cameramen who were feverishly packing up their equipment in order to miss nothing of the end of the spectacle. She was wearing a sober tailored suit, and gave me a reluctant smile. Gerd Bechter offered me a lift in the back of his car. I told him I was going straight home. He tried to dissuade me, but I wouldn’t listen to him and walked towards Claudia. At that moment, when my world was shrinking around me, she was my whole family.

A cluster of journalists were cooling their heels outside my house. I told Claudia not to stop. She did as she was told and took the first turning. She drove very badly. The emotion, perhaps. Earlier, when she had taken me in her arms, she had burst into tears. She was lost for words. She laughed and cried, grimaced and smiled, and shook from head to toe. The touch of her body against mine reassured me. Here I was, really here, in the flesh. I was in my country, in my city, in my element. The Frankfurt sun reconciled me to my feelings. I was free, I had my life back, and my suit had stopped chafing me. I lowered the window and couldn’t stop breathing in the air, drawing strength and confidence from it. I looked at the buildings, the cars passing us, the lawns, the advertising hoardings, the street lamps, the surface of the road, and for the first time the hiss of the wheels on the asphalt silenced the hate-laden voices and the gunshots that had been using my head for sparring practice.

Claudia suggested we go to her place. I agreed. The journalists would have to cut me some slack in the end, and then I would go home and learn to live again.

Claudia lived on the third floor of a small building in Eckenheim. I had set up my first practice in that area, two years before I got married, and had really liked the place and the people, but Jessica had wanted me to move to Sachsenhausen, near where she worked, so that we could have lunch together. We had been very close at the beginning of our relationship. It was as if we were one and the same person. We would phone each other all the time, about insignificant things — we were just happy to know that we were only a call away from each other. The phone line constituted our umbilical cord.

Claudia preceded me into the entrance hall. There was no lift. We took the stairs as quickly as possible because I had no desire to be recognised by a neighbour. My photograph, along with Hans’s, had been in the newspapers and on television for months.

‘I sent someone to clean your house,’ Claudia told me as she unlocked her door.

‘Thank you.’

In the hallway of her apartment, she took my bag and helped me off with my jacket. ‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ she said. ‘My mother will put me up for a few days.’

‘That’s very kind of you, but I really don’t want to impose. I should go back to the house. It’ll be night soon, and the journalists must have homes to go to.’

‘Makes no difference. They’ll be outside your door again first thing in the morning.’

‘In that case, I’ll go to my house in the country.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’ve been away too long. You need people around you.’

I asked her to show me the bathroom.

By the time I got back to the living room after my shower, Claudia had changed, replacing her tailored suit with flannel trousers and a sweater. She had also put on make-up and let her hair down.

‘Let me buy you dinner,’ she said. ‘I know a nice quiet restaurant not far from here.’

‘I don’t really want to go out.’

‘I don’t have anything in the fridge.’ She looked at her watch, thought for a moment, and decided to go out and bring us back something to eat.

It was the first time I had been in Claudia’s apartment. The furniture was old, but well maintained. Everything was in exactly the right place, with no unnecessary extras. The living room was small and somewhat austere. There were no pictures on the walls, just a row of photographs on a chest of drawers, a faded rug on the floor and an old leather sofa in the middle. The window, framed by flimsy curtains, looked out on a sad little square with a giant tree in abundant leaf. Cars were parked on either side, but there was nobody about. No children played, not a sound betrayed a living soul. I sat down on the sofa and switched on the television. It seemed to have been years since I had last handled a remote control. It was the fact that Jessica had so often come home late that had made me a TV addict. Her absence would prevent me from concentrating on a book or on DIY, so I preferred to wait for my wife to return, pleasantly slouched in my armchair, a can of beer in my hand, and, sip after sip, I would count off the minutes like a priest his beads.

The TV news came on. The camera cut away from the newsreader and propelled me onto the tarmac, where I saw myself getting off the plane. I noticed how big my suit looked on me, and that I had stumbled on the last step of the stairs. Hans’s coffin was taken from the hold and carried to the catafalque around which the Makkenroth family were waiting to recover the body. A young woman was crying on a relative’s shoulder. Hans’s two sons held themselves in a dignified manner, their black-clad wives by their sides. One can only gather one’s thoughts in silence …

I dozed off, or perhaps I fainted. It was probably just as well.

Five days after I got back, the funeral service took place in the Katharinenkirche, a Protestant church on the Hauptwache. The place was full to bursting. In the front rows, beside the Makkenroths, were the Chancellor and members of her government. People had come from the four corners of the world to pay their last respects to Hans. As well as the officials and national celebrities, there were people in turbans, Amazonian tribal chiefs, emirs in their ceremonial robes, ambassadors and nabobs. Hans had been not only a major industrialist, but above all a great man and a revered humanist. Outside, the street was packed with mourners. Thousands of anonymous people had been determined to celebrate the memory of this generous man who had devoted his time and fortune to the wretched of the earth. The ceremony was a very solemn one. After a speech by the Chancellor, who emphasised the dead man’s courage and selflessness, Bertram read a poem by Goethe, of whom his father had been an assiduous reader, and reminded us of his father’s principles and beliefs. By the time he rejoined his family, his face was drained of blood. Applause broke out when the coffin left the church. The cortege set off for the crematorium. I had not been invited to this final farewell, which was strictly reserved for family members. My friend’s ashes would be entrusted to the sea … The sea he had loved so much, the sea that was his deliverance and his inner world.

I thanked Claudia for her hospitality and asked her to drive me home. The reporters had realised that I didn’t want to speak to them and had gone back to their offices. Claudia offered to let me stay, just long enough for me to recover my strength. By that, I understood ‘my spirits’, and I deduced that I probably didn’t look very good. I asked her if I had changed; she began by stammering some excuses before regaining her composure and asserting that I needed to have people around me, to get some distance from the events. Hadn’t she asked for time off in order to take care of me? It was true that she had been looking after my every need, but her attention was starting to stifle me and I had to leave. I had been afraid to go out, afraid of being recognised in the street. All my life I had been discreet. Becoming an object of other people’s curiosity overnight terrified me. But shutting myself up in Claudia’s apartment was worse. I had been confined there for a week and it had worn me out. The nightmares that had undermined my sleep in Gerima’s jail were again starting to keep me awake.