The African Equation (2 page)

Outside, an icy wind was raking the walls. I put my coat on and walked up the street as far as the snack bar in the square. Toni the barman gave me a broad smile when he saw me come in. He poured me a tankard of beer and placed it, frothing over, on the counter. I was a regular customer for his seafood platter whenever Jessica was
late home. Toni was a lively, humorous southerner, with fiery red hair. He loved playing to the gallery with his jokes that verged on rudeness. In the neighbourhood, he was known as the Sicilian because of his spontaneity and good humour. His excessive familiarity disconcerted some customers who weren’t used to impromptu friendships, but they eventually got used to it. I liked Toni a lot, even though I was a little too reserved for his taste. He had a knack for making me loosen up, and enough tact to let it go when I didn’t react to his slaps on the back.

‘You’re not looking too good, Kurt.’

‘I’ve had a busy day.’

‘Lucky you! You should be pleased.’

‘I am.’

‘You don’t look it. I hope you didn’t leave your smile on your stethoscope.’

I smiled at him.

‘That’s better. You see? It doesn’t cost much to smile.’ He gave the counter a wipe with his cloth. ‘Hans has only just left, by the way. Didn’t you pass him in the street?’

‘No. When did he get back?’

‘Three days ago. Hasn’t he been to see you?’

‘No.’

‘Have you fallen out?’

‘Not at all. If he hasn’t been to see me, it must mean he has things to sort out … So he’s back from the Amazon?’

‘Apparently, yes. We didn’t have time to talk about it, but he seemed pleased with the expedition. Plus, he’s tanned, and he’s lost weight, which really suits him.’

Hans Makkenroth was an old friend. The heir of one of the richest families in Frankfurt, he ran several large companies specialising in medical equipment. But his
fortune hadn’t made him inaccessible. Quite the opposite: he was often seen in quite ordinary places, melting into the crowd and avoiding gala evenings and other social events like the plague. We had met ten years earlier at Maspalomas in the Canary Islands. Hans and his wife Paula were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary, while Jessica and I were on our honeymoon. We had adjoining bungalows close to the beach. Paula and Jessica became friends, in spite of the age difference. They would invite each other over for coffee in the evening and allow us, Hans and me, to join them. Hans was interested in boats, oceans, and remote peoples. As I was receptive, Hans took an interest in me too. We became inseparable.

Paula died of a sudden devastating bout of pneumonia four years later, and, since becoming a widower, Hans had travelled the world constantly, as if in an attempt to shake off his grief. He was an exceptional sailor, fascinated by far horizons. Every year, he would set off for the unlikeliest places, carrying aid to destitute peoples deep in the Amazon jungle, or in Africa, or in remote areas of Asia.

‘Would you like something else?’ Toni asked.

‘I’m a bit peckish, but I don’t feel like seafood tonight.’

‘I have some delicious calamari.’

‘I’d rather have meat. A starter should be enough.’

Toni suggested a carpaccio of beef.

On the plasma screen above the counter, a football match was in full swing. At the far end of the room, a family was having dinner in silence, gathered around an old man who was gesturing vaguely. Two young women were chatting at a table close to the window; the snack bar’s neon sign spattered them with coloured light, adding
gleaming highlights to their hair. One of the women stared at me before leaning towards her companion, who also turned to look at me. I asked for the bill and left, despite Toni insisting I have another drink. Out in the street, it had got colder.

I’d been planning to walk towards the river, in order to stretch my legs and clear my head, but the heavens opened and the rain forced me to go straight back to the car park where I’d left my car.

Because of the rain, there were traffic jams, and I didn’t get home until about 10.30. I’d been hoping Jessica might be back, but the windows of our house were still dark.

A jacket of Jessica’s lay on the chest of drawers in the hallway. I didn’t remember it being there that morning when I left for the surgery.

In our room, the bed hadn’t been disturbed.

I took off my coat, jacket and tie and went straight to the kitchen to get myself a beer. I sat down on the sofa, put my feet up on a pouffe and grabbed the remote. The first thing that came on was a political debate. I switched channels several times before coming across an underwater documentary showing sharks hunting in packs in a coral reef. Seeing the depths of the ocean had a calming effect on me, but I couldn’t really concentrate. It was eleven minutes past eleven by the clock on the wall. By my watch, too. I started channel-hopping again frantically, and finally went back to the underwater documentary. Unable to focus on any one programme in particular, I decided to take a shower before going to bed.

As I switched on the light in the bathroom, I almost fell backwards as if hit by a gust of wind. At first, I thought I was hallucinating, but it wasn’t an optical illusion, and
was far more than a fleeting impression.
No
, I heard myself cry out. Paralysed, suspended in a celestial void, I grabbed hold of the washbasin to stop myself collapsing. My calves began to tremble, and the trembling rose to my stomach and spread through my body like a series of electric shocks. Jessica lay in the bath, fully dressed, the water up to her neck, her head twisted to the side, one arm dangling over the edge of the tub. Her hair floated around her pale face, and her half-closed eyes stared sadly at her other arm, which was folded over her stomach … It was an unbearable, nightmarish, surreal sight. Horror in all its immeasurable cruelty!

My house was swarming with intruders.

Somebody brought me a glass of water and helped me to sit down. He was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. I saw strangers bustling around me, uniformed policemen, ambulance men in white. Who were they? What were they doing in my home? Then it came back to me. I was the one who had called them. There had been a brief moment of lucidity, followed by fog. Again I couldn’t understand, couldn’t find my way through the chaos cluttering my mind. Jessica … Jessica had killed herself by swallowing two boxes of sleeping pills. Two boxes … of sleeping pills … how was it possible? … Jessica was dead … My wife had committed suicide … The love of my life had gone … In an instant, my world had disintegrated …

I took my head in both hands to stop it falling apart. Impossible to get rid of that flash image in the bathroom, that
corpse
in the bath …
Jessica, come out of there, I beg you
… How could she come out of there? How could
she hear me? Her stiffness, her marble-like pallor, her fixed, icy stare were irrevocable, and yet I had run to her, taken her in my arms, shaken her, yelled at her to wake up; my cries whirled around the room, smashed into the walls, drilled into my temples. As a doctor, I knew there wasn’t much I could do; as a husband I refused to accept that. Jessica was merely a heap of flesh, a still life, but I’d laid her down on the floor and tried all kinds of things to revive her. Finally, exhausted, struck dumb with terror, I had huddled in a corner and looked at her through a kind of two-way mirror. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, wild-eyed, prostrate with grief, overwhelmed by the calamity that had struck me.

The police finally left the bathroom, after packing up their equipment. They had taken photographs and collected any clues that might explain the circumstances of my wife’s death. The ambulance men were given permission to remove the body. I watched them take Jessica out on a stretcher – Jessica reduced to a common corpse under a white sheet.

A tall man in a dark suit took me aside. He had a round face, white hair at the temples and a large bald patch. With a politeness that verged on obsequiousness, which for some reason irritated me, he asked if he could talk to me in the living room.

‘I’m Lieutenant Sturm. I’d like to ask you a few questions. I know now is hardly the best time, but I’m obliged to—’

‘No, lieutenant,’ I interrupted. ‘Now is definitely not the best moment.’

I could barely recognise my own voice, which seemed to reach me through an endless series of filters. I was furious
with this policeman, and found his attitude inhuman. How dare he ask me questions when I didn’t understand what was happening? What kind of answers did he expect from someone who had just lost his bearings, his faculties, his ability to think? I was in a state of shock, crushed by a storm that was sucking me into some kind of abyss …

There was only one thing I wanted: for my house to be silent again.

The lieutenant came back early the next day, flanked by two inscrutable inspectors I took an immediate dislike to. He introduced them briefly and asked if they could come in. I stood aside to let them pass. Reluctantly. I wasn’t up to receiving visitors. I needed to be alone, to close the shutters over my windows, to wall myself up in darkness and pretend I wasn’t in. My grief had replaced time, the world, the whole of the universe. I felt so small in its grip, so infinitesimal that a tear would have drowned me. And then there was that incredible tiredness. I felt shattered. I hadn’t slept a wink all night. The more that macabre scene in the bathroom had come back to me, the less I could grasp it. It was like a recurring dream, like being chronically seasick. I think I threw up several times. Or maybe I had just felt nauseous a lot. I wasn’t sure of anything. Jessica’s suicide was a terrifying mystery … The truth was, I didn’t want to sleep. Sleep would have been the worst torture. Why sleep? Just to realise, when I woke up, that Jessica was dead? How could I have survived the repeated shock of that brutal awakening? … No, the one thing I mustn’t do was sleep … When the ambulance and the police cars had left the night before, I had switched off the lights and
locked the shutters, then retreated to a corner of my room and kept sleep at bay until morning, conscious that no ray of sunlight would help me to see clearly in my grief.

I led the three police officers into the living room. They sat down on the sofa. I remained standing, not sure exactly what to do. The lieutenant pointed to an armchair and waited for me to sit in it before asking me if Jessica had any reason to take her own life. He had asked me the question almost reluctantly. I stared at him in bewilderment. After turning the question over and over in my head, I replied that I found it hard to believe that Jessica was dead, that I was still expecting her to wake up. The lieutenant nodded politely, and asked me the same question again as if my words were irrelevant and he wanted me to keep strictly to the facts, the reasons that might have led a person like Jessica to kill herself. From his way of looking at me, I realised that he was merely suggesting a preliminary hypothesis before moving on to another, more carefully thought-out one, because as far as he was concerned, there was nothing for the moment to prove that it was suicide. Becoming aware of his lack of tact, he straightened his tie and asked me straight out how Jessica had been lately. I replied that she had been nervous, evasive, secretive, but that never for a moment would I have thought her capable of such a desperate act. The lieutenant didn’t appear satisfied with my answer: clearly, it didn’t get him very far. After smoothing the ridge of his nose, he passed his hand over his bald spot, without taking his eyes off me, and asked me if my wife had left a note …

‘A note?’

‘Or maybe a recording,’ he said, ‘something like that.’

‘I haven’t checked,’ I said.

The lieutenant wanted to know if my wife and I had been going through a ‘rough patch’. He turned his eyes away as he asked the question. I assured him that Jessica and I had got on really well and never quarrelled. I began shaking, embarrassed at having to talk to strangers about my private life. Routine as this questioning was, there was a kind of shamelessness about it that I couldn’t stand. It was as if the three policemen suspected me and were trying to catch me out. Their cold, unwavering pedantry exasperated me. The lieutenant scribbled some notes in a little book, then raised his fist to his mouth, cleared his throat and told me that according to the pathologist, my wife’s death had occurred between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. He asked me to tell them about my movements the day before. I told him I had left the house at 8.30 so as to be at the surgery by 9.15, that I had seen patients until 1, that I had gone out to have lunch before going back to work … All at once, I was afraid. What if they asked me what I’d been doing between 1 and 3.30? How could I prove that I had been sitting alone on a bench in the park, without any convincing witnesses, while my patients sat twiddling their thumbs in the waiting room of my surgery?

The two inspectors were taking down my statement with false detachment, insensitive to the turmoil they were causing. I hated them for hounding me like this, for ignoring my grief and continuing to bombard me with questions, shamelessly rummaging in every nook and cranny of my married life. I was waiting stoically for them to leave, to get out of my sight. At the end of the interview, the lieutenant put his notebook away in the inside pocket of his trench coat and asked if he could help me in any way. I didn’t answer him. He nodded and
handed me his card, pointing out his telephone number in case I remembered any detail that might be of use to him.

Once the policemen had left, I took my head in both hands and tried to think about nothing.

Emma phoned to tell me that my patients were getting impatient. I asked her to apologise to them for me and to cancel all my appointments in the coming days. She asked if anything was wrong.

‘Jessica’s dead,’ I said in a toneless voice.

‘My God!’ she exclaimed.

She was silent for a long while at the other end of the line, then hung up.

I stared at the receiver in my hand, not knowing what to do with it.

A few neighbours came round to see me. The previous night’s flurry of activity hadn’t escaped them. The arrival of the ambulance and the police cars with their flashing lights must have kept them awake. Now it was daylight, they wanted to find out what was going on.