Yasmina Khadra: The African Equation

After dinner, we went back up on deck. A meagre fog was doing its best to envelop the boat, but its stringy embrace unravelled in the wind and formed a kind of unstable, ghostly vault above our heads. In the bluish sky, intermittently, you could see the stars glittering gently, like dying fireflies. Apart from the lapping of the waves, there was not a sound to be heard. The silence seemed to be one with the darkness.

Hans leant on the capstan and lit his pipe. He gazed at the glow in the bowl of the pipe, from which tiny sparks escaped, and asked me if I had ever swum in international waters.

‘Never more than a hundred yards from the beach,’ I replied.

‘That fear of cramp again?’

‘Exactly. It takes hold of me as soon as I go out of my depth.’

‘A childhood trauma, I suppose.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t like taking pointless risks.’

He nodded, puffed at his pipe, a distant smile on his lips. ‘Living means running risks every day, Kurt.’

‘That depends in which direction you’re running.’

I didn’t care for the turn the conversation had taken. My situation didn’t lend itself to existential questions. Hans realised that and pretended to check the rigging, then, after an exaggerated puff at his pipe, said, ‘When I was young, I often came here to go deep-sea diving. My father loved it. I remember he would put on his diving suit faster than a sock and throw himself into the water before the instructor. He was such a stolid man usually, inflexible at work and in his private life. But as soon as he smelt the sea, he’d become as excited as a hungry kid at the sight of a chocolate waffle.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘He put me to shame, he really couldn’t keep still. And often, when he dived, the instructor had to go down and force him to come up again. My father was quite capable of following a ray or watching for a moray eel in its hole until he fainted. My mother was always worried sick about him. She wouldn’t let him take me to see the corals up close … I get goose pimples just from thinking about it. They were wonderful days … Later, with Paula, I came back here to revive those memories. But Paula wasn’t a born diver. She suffered from claustrophobia and couldn’t spend more than thirty seconds underwater.’

I don’t know why I said to him, ‘I envy your gilded childhood. My father never even took my mother and me to the seaside. He hated water, even tap water.’

I had embarrassed him. I was aware of how out of place my words were, and yet, driven by some need to be unpleasant, I hadn’t been able to hold them back. Hans stared at the bowl of his pipe, smoothed his well-tended beard with his other hand, pondered for a few seconds, then raised his head.

‘It’s true, I had a dream childhood, and above all the privilege of knowing my grandfather. He was an exceptional man who’d been a famous playwright in the 1920s. I was twelve years old and, at that age when you get all kinds of ideas in your head, I wanted to be a novelist. One day, when we were walking together in the woods, I asked him how to become a writer. My grandfather pointed to a ruin and said, “You see that stone? How much do you think it weighs? At least a ton, don’t you think? Well, it was a dwarf who carried it here on his back from the quarry over there.” I told him that was impossible, that it would take at least twenty circus strongmen to shift the stone one centimetre. To which my grandfather replied, “That’s pretty much what literature is. Finding a story for each thing and a way to make it interesting …”’

He stopped to see if I had understood what he was getting at. Hans had always been modest: whenever he wanted to put someone in his place, he preferred subtlety to a full-frontal attack.

Realising that I didn’t see the connection, he concluded, ‘I didn’t become a novelist, Kurt, but I learnt to find a story and a meaning in everything.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘It’s not me you have to follow, but your own path. The most solid foundation we can find is in each of us. You can lift any stone with any lever as long as you convince yourself that the stone only exists in your head. Because everything happens in here.’ And he tapped his temple with his finger.

‘What stone are you talking about, Hans?’

‘You know perfectly well what I’m referring to.’

At last I understood. I had done everything I could to avoid the thorniest of subjects, but now I had fallen in head first. Hans had probably been waiting for this opportunity since we had left Cyprus. He had been tactful enough not to provoke it, but he had hoped for it, and now I was offering it to him on a plate. I pretended to peer at the few gaps in the fog and, in order to change the subject, asked, ‘Where exactly are we?’

Hans looked at his watch. ‘We passed the strait of Babel-Mandeb some time ago, and by dawn we should have left the Red Sea for the Gulf of Aden. If you like, we can put in at a little port I know, south of Djibouti. Not just to take on fresh supplies.’

‘You’re the captain.’

‘It’s up to you, Kurt. If you don’t feel like it, it doesn’t matter. We have enough to see us through the next ten days … I love the little fishing ports in this region, and their bazaars filled to the brim with plastic dishes and pointless fake chrome utensils. The people are really nice around here even when they’re trying to flog you cheap rubbish at exorbitant prices. They think every tourist is as rich as Croesus and stupid enough to take a rusty old teapot for Aladdin’s lamp. You’ll see, their spiel is such fun, you almost want to let them relieve you of your last cents just for the hell of it.’

I shook my head. ‘To be honest, Hans, I didn’t much like it when we put in at Sharm el-Sheikh or at Port Sudan.’

‘Why?’

‘Too many people and too much noise.’

Hans burst out laughing. ‘I see … Your wish is my command: no stopping before the Comoros.’

We chatted for a long time on deck, talking about this and that, steering clear of unpleasant topics. Ever since we had embarked, it was Hans who had led the conversation. I was content to listen to him, interrupting only to encourage him, especially when he got on to seafaring. I knew almost nothing about the subject, couldn’t steer or read a compass, let alone find my position on a map. With his encyclopedic knowledge, Hans loved to hold forth about the sea and about ships, from the most ancient to the most state-of-the-art. He was very proud of his boat, which he had decorated himself. Whenever he took the controls, he gave the impression he was taking charge of his own destiny. The first few days, laid low with seasickness, I would spew my guts out over the hawsehole, then collapse on a seat, wrap my arms around the bulwark, and watch Hans through the window of the control room. He would be standing erect like a conqueror, his white beard held high, like an older but wiser Captain Ahab. At first, he had invited me to the helm and explained the workings of the different dials on the control panel, showed me the radio, the radar, the tracking system, the navigation instruments, then, realising that I wasn’t taking much of it in, he had stopped ‘bothering’ me. My mind was elsewhere and his teaching bored me. I preferred to spend most of my time scanning the horizon and listening to the sails flapping in the wind.

Although we avoided mentioning Jessica, Paula’s name came up again and again. Hans spoke about her as if he had left her early that morning and was sure he would go home to her that night. I could tell he missed her, but he had the gift of managing things so that she remained omnipresent in his heart and mind.

‘It’s starting to get chilly,’ I said, energetically rubbing my arms.