Yasmina Khadra - The African Equation

At midnight, I came to the conclusion I had to leave Frankfurt for a while. I thought about the friends from university I had lost touch with. Then I thought about my mother: I hadn’t put flowers on her grave since her funeral. I realised how quickly the time had passed, how ungrateful and selfish I’d been. My mother, my sweet mother who had died at the age of forty-four of vain prayers and terrible solitude. I could still see her in her pale dress, half mad, wandering in the cancer ward, her prematurely white hair absorbing the light filtering in through the French windows behind her.

At five in the morning, I took my car and set off for Essen.

I wandered the length and breadth of the cemetery without finding my mother’s grave. It was the caretaker who pointed it out to me. I placed a wreath on the granite stone and stood there for a while, collecting my thoughts. I had hoped to revive my memory, to summon up distant recollections, but strangely, not a single image came to mind. How was that possible? … I didn’t stay long in the cemetery. What was the point? I went to have lunch in a restaurant overlooking the lake, then called Toma Knitel, a childhood friend. His jaw must have hit the floor when he recognised my voice at the end of the line. He could barely speak for laughing. He gave me his new address in Munich and asked me to drop by the university, where he taught mathematics. I got to Munich an hour late because of an accident on the autobahn. Toma was waiting for me outside the front entrance of the university. He was pleased to see me again. His embrace felt good. He directed me to his place, a small house in a modest neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. Toma’s wife had hair as red as a maple leaf and a slightly plump figure, and was very pretty. Her name was Brigitte, and she was a Frenchwoman from Strasbourg. Her welcome immediately put me at my ease. She was delighted to meet me and to introduce her two children, twin girls who were clearly not used to strangers. We ate in, because Toma was determined that I should discover his wife’s culinary talents. Then we talked about the good old days. After a few hours, we had run out of subjects to mull over and spent the rest of the evening in a slightly alcoholic haze. As Toma had a class in the morning, I took my leave. He wanted me to stay over — I could sleep in the guest room, he said — but I had booked a room in a hotel. We said good night at about eleven; Brigitte was already in bed.

At the hotel, I didn’t take any sleeping pills. My reunion with Toma had done me a lot of good. I felt at one with myself and it occurred to me I could repeat the experiment with Willie Adler, another friend from university, who lived in Stuttgart. I would look for his phone number and call him in the morning.

Willie was happy to welcome me to his home. He had been successful in life. He owned a thriving company, lived in a beautiful house in the most fashionable neighbourhood in town, and had a lovely wife. He entrusted his two children to a babysitter and drove his wife and me to a superb restaurant on the banks of the Neckar. During the evening, he talked endlessly about his career, the astronomical contracts he was negotiating, his ambitious plans. I noticed that he had aged quite a bit: he had deep, sallow rings under his eyes, and premature baldness had deprived him of the fine head of hair he had been so proud of at university, when he played guitar in an amateur pop group. He wasn’t the same person he had been when we were twenty. He barely listened to anyone else, and his laughter rang out like a bugle. His wife watched us in silence. She seemed to be bored and constantly looked around to see if her husband’s loud voice was disturbing the other diners. It was once the wine had started to take effect that Willie really came out with it. He admitted that he was the one who had smeared my desk drawer with grease and urinated in my bed on the evening of the graduation ball. He glared at me as he told me this. I realised to my surprise that the young man I had thought was my best friend hadn’t really liked me, that he’d been secretly in love with the girl I was going out with at the time, and that he’d hated me for putting him in the shade. When he became aware that his rants were bothering the couples having dinner around us, his bitterness only increased and he became even more aggressive. His wife begged me with her eyes to put her husband’s bad behaviour down to alcohol. Willie had never been able to handle his drink, but that evening he had gone too far. I listened to him without flinching, out of respect for his wife, wishing he would shut up. After dinner, we went out into the coolness of the night. Willie was dead drunk. He could barely stand. He yelled at the valet who had taken his time bringing him his car, then leant towards me and whispered in my ear, ‘No hard feelings, Kurt. I’ve always preferred to put my cards on the table.’ His wife helped him into the passenger seat and, before taking the wheel, said to me in an embarrassed tone, ‘I’m truly sorry. Willie’s like this with most people.’

I closed the door on her and let them go.

Then I walked around the city until the rain forced me back to my hotel.

The next day, I went to Nuremberg, where I spent two days wandering the streets, then to Dresden for a spot of sightseeing. During the night, I thought about my father. I hated him so much I thought I had wiped him from my memory for good. He had been nothing but a drunkard and a brute who spent most of his time hanging around in shady bars and his nights terrorising us … A year earlier, the telephone had rung in my consulting room. The call was from a nursing home in Leipzig. The lady at the other end of the line informed me that a man named Georg Krausmann had just been admitted. He required detox treatment and had asked if I would agree to bear the cost. If I had been hit over the head with a hammer, I couldn’t have been more stunned. I had been speechless for quite a long time, then said yes and hung up.

I can’t explain my thought process. It was as if an irresistible force drew me to my car and sent me heading straight for Leipzig. On the way there, I wondered what I could possibly say to my father, what rational motive I could find for the visit. It made no sense, I kept telling myself; my father wouldn’t even recognise me. I was fourteen when he broke all ties with us. Even at that time, he had almost never looked at me. He would come back late at night, and disappear in the morning. He was never home on special occasions, and he wouldn’t remember my birthday or my mother’s. Often, he would vanish for weeks on end without a word and without an address where he could be reached in case of emergency. When he came back, he would bring storm clouds with him. I could still see him, staggering in the hallway, saliva dribbling from his mouth, his hand ready to strike. They were turbulent homecomings: the neighbours would knock on the walls, and sometimes call the police. I would lock myself in my room and pray for him to go away and never come back … One night, finding his packet of cigarettes empty, he turned the house upside down in search of a cigarette end. He was like a junkie desperate for a fix. After knocking my mother about — he held her responsible for every misfortune that befell us — he had left and never come back. That night, I knew God existed, because my prayer had been granted.

I got to the nursing home at about eleven in the morning. Luckily, the sky was cloudless and a sun as big as a pumpkin shone down on the establishment. The director received me in her austere office, reassured me about my father’s state of health, asked me a lot of questions about my relationship with him, asked if I planned to leave him permanently in her care, because, she said, he couldn’t manage on his own and would be better off at the home with its well-trained and highly devoted staff. I asked her if I could see my father. She called a nurse and told me to follow her.