Yasmina Khadra: The African Equation

I don’t know if it was Hans’s words or the vibrations of his voice that reached down into the depths of my being, but all at once my shoulders sagged and tears ran down my cheeks. I couldn’t remember having cried since I was a small child. Curiously, I wasn’t ashamed of my weakness. My sobs seemed to clear away the blackness that had been contaminating my soul like a poisonous, putrid ink.

‘That’s it,’ Hans said encouragingly.

He forced me to take a bath, shave, and change my clothes. Then he bundled me into his car and took me to a little restaurant just outside the city. He told me that he had come back to Germany to settle some issues with the Chamber of Commerce and launch a project that meant a lot to him. This would take two or three weeks, after which he would sail to the Comoros, where he was planning to equip a hospital for a charitable organisation he belonged to.

‘Why not come with me? My yacht is waiting for me in a harbour in Cyprus. We’ll fly to Nicosia then set off for the Gulf of Aden …’

‘I can’t, Hans.’

‘What’s stopping you? The sea’s wonderful therapy.’

‘Please, don’t insist. I’m not going anywhere …’

Hans hadn’t been exaggerating. Out at sea, stripped of their symbolism, all points of reference were reduced, so that each thing found its true significance. I certainly found mine: I was merely a single drop among a billion tons of water. Everything I had thought I was or represented proved to have no substance. Wasn’t I like the wavelets born from the backwash and then merging with it, an illusion that emerges out of nothing and falls back into it without leaving a trace?

I thought about my patient, Frau Biribauer. What’s death like? … If it was like the sea, then everything might be forgiven. Then I thought about Jessica, and caught myself smiling.

I felt a little better, washed clean of my wounds. Like getting out of the bath after a day filled with confrontations. My grief was allowing me a semblance of respite; there was no space for it in the kingdom of shipwrecks, where sorrows drowned without arousing any dismay.

We had been travelling for two weeks, the wind in our sails, on board a twelve-metre boat. We had left Cyprus at dawn, in glorious weather, and crossed the lustral waters of the Mediterranean, sometimes pursued by excited seagulls, sometimes escorted by pods of dolphins. Every day was a new blessing, and when night removed us from the chaos of the world, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of the odours emanating from the depths like so many reminiscences flooding back from the dawn of time. I felt as if I had regained my inner peace.

I loved to perch on the side of the boat and peer at the horizon. It was something I never tired of. It would free me of my anxieties, as if I were being reborn: a forceps birth of course, but a determined one. The sea tore my grief apart like waves hitting a reef. Of course, when the water receded, rocks would emerge amid the foam, but I could deal with that. I clung to the rigging of the foresail and offered my chest to the wind. I sometimes spent hours on end without thinking of anything specific. The lapping of the waves against the hull cradled my soul. Occasionally, a passenger liner would pass in the distance, and I would follow it with my eyes until it had faded into the sea spray; occasionally, too, through a curtain of mist, I would glimpse a surreptitious shore — was it the Farasan Islands, or the Dahlak Archipelago, or else a mirage? What did it matter? The only thing that mattered was the emotion it aroused.

Hans no longer interrupted me. Whenever he joined me on deck and found me in a kind of ecstatic communion with the naked sky and the sea, he would back away.

Two weeks spent gliding over the calm waters. Only once had a storm whipped the midday breeze into a frenzy, after which a heavy swell had slowed us down; the next day, the Mediterranean had unrolled before us a mother-of-pearl carpet on which the first glints of daylight sparkled. Towards evening, shimmering streaks lashed the surface of the water and, with the sunset and its fires, we witnessed a breathtaking spectacle in which red and black fused in a fresco worthy of the northern lights. To crown our wonder, dolphins leapt from the waves, as rapid as torpedoes, proud of their perfect fuselage that propelled them into the air like fleeting gleams of crystal. At times, fascinated by their lavish choreography of synchronisation and magic, I had the impression my pulse was adjusting its rhythm to the waves that they unleashed.

Intoxicated by nature’s generosity, I joined Hans in the recess that served as a dining room. Above a leather sofa set in glistening wood hung a portrait of Paula. I supposed there were others on the boat … How did he manage to live with a ghost and keep a cool head? … Hans smiled at me as if he had read my thoughts. He pushed his glasses back up onto his forehead and shifted on his seat, pleased to have company at last. I felt embarrassed to have made him wary of what he said to me. I sensed that he turned every word over in his mind before risking it out loud, for fear of hitting my weak spot, convinced that the mere mention of Jessica’s name might plunge me back into my unhappiness, which wasn’t necessarily the case.

‘Land in sight?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t checked,’ I said.

‘Come and sit down … How about a drink before dinner?’

‘I’m already drunk on space and wind.’

‘You should put a hat on. It isn’t sensible to stay bareheaded in the sun for too long.’

‘The wind blew mine away yesterday morning.’

‘I have others, if you like.’

‘No, thanks, don’t worry about me. I’m fine, honestly.’

‘Happy to hear you say so.’

Running out of ideas, he drummed on the table. He must have exhausted his favourite subjects. Since we had left Cyprus, every evening after dinner, he had told me about his humanitarian expeditions. He knew everything there was to know about the primitive tribes of the Amazon. He had made it his life’s work to fight on behalf of these dispossessed and defenceless populations, chased from their lands by excessive deforestation and unregulated poaching, and forced to wander the jungle in search of shelter from which they would be driven again and again until they perished, uprooted and destitute. To illustrate his stories, he would show me photographs he had taken at the ‘scene of the crime’. There he was, in shirt and shorts, posing with naked women and children outside straw huts; holding an old shaman in his arms; pointing at a giant anaconda that had died trying to swallow a crocodile; sharing an ancient peace pipe with a tribal chief who looked like a totem; standing in the path of monstrous machines that were devastating a clearing; protesting against local administrators … Hans travelled relentlessly. Since Paula’s death, he had delegated the running of his businesses to his two sons and stalked human misery all over the world. As he put it, maturity lay in sharing, because the true vocation of man was to be useful.

Tao, the cook, had made us a particularly delicious Oriental meal. He served us at eight on the dot and immediately withdrew. He was a short man in his fifties, with a complexion like overripe quince. Close-cropped jade-black hair crowned his ascetic face with its high, prominent cheekbones. He was discreet and efficient, always appearing and disappearing noiselessly, always on the lookout for the least sign from his employer. Hans liked him a lot. He had met him five years earlier in a hotel in Manila and had hired him on the spot. Tao was the father of a large family to whom he sent all his earnings. He never talked about his family, never complained about anything, eternally hidden behind a vague smile as calm as his soul. I had barely heard him say a word since we had been on the boat.