The African Equation (22 page)

‘No,’ I stammered after a long silence, ‘there must be some mistake. Hans was sold to a criminal group for money. The reason they haven’t asked for a ransom yet is because my friend is being auctioned. His last buyer will soon put in an appearance. This shepherd’s talking nonsense. Or maybe he’s an accomplice of the kidnappers and is lying to divert suspicion from himself and allow his associates to gain time. They’re hoping you’ll call off the search.’

‘Doctor—’

‘I won’t allow you to manipulate me, colonel. I refuse
to listen to you and I refuse to go with you to Khartoum. I’m not moving from here until I get an answer to my question: where is Hans Makkenroth?’

‘I understand how you feel,’ Bechter said, ‘but I can’t approve your decision. I assure you you’d be more useful to us elsewhere.’

‘We have to go back today,’ the colonel said to me. ‘We chartered the plane for the day, and it’ll be dark soon.’

‘I’m sorry, colonel. Your priorities are not the same as mine.’

As far as I was concerned, it was inconceivable that I should go back to Germany without Hans. I wanted to get out of Africa without leaving anything behind and without taking anything away with me. I wanted to dismiss anything that might mar my return to a normal life. It would be hard, very hard, but I intended to succeed because it was the only way for a survivor to learn to live again. I would be able to turn my back on the hateful memories that were dogging my heels and shake off the invective-laden voices and terrible gunshots that still echoed in my head. I would manage to convince myself that my stay in Africa had been nothing but a bad dream, and every morning that the world still had in store for me I would wake up to the sounds that were dear to me.

The delegation failed to persuade me to leave the camp. Bruno was on my side. He refused to abandon me, convinced that Hans was still alive and was being moved from one buyer to another somewhere in the desert. As the sun was going down, the two first secretaries resigned themselves and granted us a few days to think it over, on
condition that we cooperate with an officer who would remain in the camp and keep in close contact with the African Union forces deployed in the sector.

When the plane took off, I was overcome with a mixture of dread and loneliness. What if the shepherd was telling the truth? What if Hans had succumbed to his wounds? That possibility was the final blow. My knees gave way and pain gripped my body and my mind.

In the canteen, I stared at my plate without touching it. I couldn’t even have swallowed my own saliva. The rattle of knives and forks sounded to me like hailstones, crushing my thoughts into thousands of shards. Bruno noticed how badly affected I was. He took my hand, but the gesture felt like a bite. I asked him to excuse me and went outside to get some air.

I walked in the darkness without knowing where I was going. Images of Hans went round and round in my head. I saw him again at the controls of his boat, limping through a
thalweg
with his shirt clinging to his wound, not finding words to say at Jessica’s funeral, fanning himself with his hat in the sun at Sharm el-Sheikh. I had the impression that a whole chunk of my universe was missing, that the absence of Hans had created an impossible gulf between me and the world. However hard I tried to dismiss the idea he might be dead, it kept coming back, as fierce as a hornet.

Elena found me on the other side of the fence, huddled beneath a solitary tree, wild with anxiety. She leant down and talked to me, but couldn’t reach me. Unable to get any response or reaction from me, she took me in her arms and I abandoned myself to her like a child.

I needed someone.

And Elena was there.

When death tries to suck the lifeblood from you, life has to react, or it will lose all credibility. That might be what happened to me. Hans’s probable death had reactivated my survival instinct. By loving Elena, I proved to myself that I was alive. I was surprised to wake up in her bed. Surprised but reassured. My intimacy with Elena was more than a refuge for me, it enabled me to make peace with myself. Elena was embarrassed. Did she blame herself for taking advantage of the situation? She would have been wrong to think that. I needed support, and she was my rock. How could I have rejected her lips when they gave me back my soul? Hadn’t she told me she felt lonely? In making love, we had formed a common front against all the things that had swept away our moorings.

She had made coffee, put the tray down on the bedside table and gone into the bathroom to get dressed. When she returned, her eyes wandered several times around the room before coming to rest on me. ‘Now that you’ve decided to stay in the camp, what do you plan to do with your days?’ she asked. I told her that if she had no objections, I’d like to resume my work. She assured me
that the patients would be happy to be tended by me. I promised her I would join her in the treatment room as soon as I had taken a shower.

Elena had already examined half the patients by the time I joined her in the infirmary. I found her at the bedside of the old woman, who had miraculously survived and was still in intensive care. Her son, the young man with the cart, was in the next bed. He, too, was on a drip. He wouldn’t take his eyes off his mother … Elena introduced me to her patients. There were about thirty of them, from different backgrounds: old men, women and children, most of them survivors of raids. Orfane brought me a white coat and a stethoscope and gave me a row of beds to deal with. Within ten minutes, I had recovered all my old medical reflexes. A young boy grabbed me by the wrist. His case was clearly desperate. With his hairless skull, almost non-existent eyebrows and yellowish complexion, he was nothing more than a big head above a skeleton. The skin of his face crumpled like a sheet of paper when he smiled at me.

‘Is it true that in Germany there are glass houses so high they reach the clouds?’

‘Yes, it’s true,’ I said, taking his hand in mine and sitting down on the edge of his bed.

‘And do people live in them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how do they get to the top?’

‘They take the lift.’

‘What’s a lift?’

‘A kind of cage. You go inside, press a button with a number next to it, and the cage goes up by itself.’

‘That’s magic … When I’m better, I’ll go to your country and see the glass houses.’

Still smiling, he lay down again and closed his eyes.

Orfane came and told me that the director was waiting for me in his office. I finished my rounds before going.

Bruno had got there before me. He was sprawling on the sofa, his legs crossed and his arms stretched out along the back. The Sudanese colonel saw us without either the captain or Pfer. We told him our stories from the beginning, the ambush outside Mogadishu in Bruno’s case, the attack on the boat in mine, the terrible journey across scrub and desert, the disused fort where Captain Gerima had kept us prisoner, Chief Moussa, Joma the poet-pirate, the transfer of Hans, the final duel that had allowed us to escape, our meeting with Elena Juárez and her refugees. It was a detailed account, and the colonel didn’t interrupt us once: I assumed he was recording our statements on the tape recorder that stood on Pfer’s desk. When we had finished, he asked us to pay attention and went to a map of the region hanging on the wall. With an expandable pointer he pointed to three places, which he surrounded with little blue triangles: the place where Jibreel, the camp’s guide and driver, had found Bruno and me; the place where the shepherd said he had received a visit from pirates with the wounded Hans; the place where we had been kept prisoner by Captain Gerima (based on our description of the outpost and the surrounding landscape). He admitted that he couldn’t understand why the kidnappers had chosen such a bleak, hostile area instead of staying in Somalia where the trade in hostages could be carried on without too many obstacles, although
he pointed out that rebels preferred to manoeuvre across borders so that if the worst came to the worst they could fall back on the neighbouring country to avoid being pursued by government forces. Bruno reminded him that we weren’t there to follow a course in military tactics, but to find Hans Makkenroth. The colonel took no notice of his words and continued his presentation. Having finished with the map, he turned to his files. He began by telling us that the authorities had nothing on the so-called Captain Gerima and that no officer who had deserted matched his description.

‘Gerima had definitely been in the army,’ Bruno insisted. ‘He isn’t Sudanese or Somali. He’s Djiboutian and speaks fluent French. He was in the regular army before being sentenced by a court martial for stealing rations and reselling them.’

The officer was exasperated by Bruno’s intervention. He clearly wasn’t accustomed to being interrupted and saw the Frenchman’s attitude as insubordination and an insult to his authority. He waited for Bruno to be quiet before resuming.

‘As for Chief Moussa, he’s known to the authorities both here and in Somalia. He’s being actively pursued in both countries. Now, with your permission, let’s see if a few faces might point us in the right direction.’ He turned his computer towards us. Photographs of men and teenage boys appeared on the screen. ‘I should make it clear that they aren’t all criminals. The one thing they have in common is that they’ve received gunshot wounds. Hospitals, clinics, dispensaries, all kinds of medical centres without exception are required to inform the police immediately of any admissions of that nature.
These people may be shepherds attacked by cattle thieves, lorry drivers intercepted by highwaymen, people hit by stray bullets, people wounded in the course of tribal feuds, but also dealers and bandits arrested during police raids, smugglers, rebels, terrorists and so on. I’d be grateful if you could take a good look at them and tell me if you see any familiar faces.’

We recognised Ewana and a second pirate, the driver of the sidecar motorcycle. Consulting his files, the colonel told us that the two suspects had been admitted to the same rural dispensary on the same night; that the first, whose real name was Babaker Ohid – thirty-one, married, four children, a cattle dealer by profession – had been shot twice, once in the thigh and once in the buttock; and that the second, Hamad Tool – twenty-six, married, two children, a former athletics champion who’d become a scrap merchant – had been shot in the hip. He asked us if we were absolutely certain we recognised them. We hadn’t the slightest doubt, we told him. He switched off his computer, put away his files, asked us another dozen questions, noting down our responses in a register, and dismissed us.

Bruno went off to find his ‘brothers’, and I my patients.

In the evening, Elena offered to show me a quiet spot a few hundred metres to the east of the camp. We went there on foot. The sun hadn’t yet set, and our shadows were long on the ground. It wasn’t very hot. There was a cool breeze in the air. Elena untied her hair, and shook it so that it spread over her shoulders. She took my hand in hers and we walked side by side like lovers. She told me about an old school friend of hers, but I wasn’t listening. Her voice was enough for me. It cradled my silence. Soon, the camp
was merely a shimmering patch behind us. Coming to an area where the ground fell away abruptly, we stopped at the edge of the precipice. Below, at the bottom of a vast basin, shaggy shrubs grew alongside wild grasses and plants besieged by midges. The vegetation was green and luxuriant, hard to imagine in this part of the desert. A spring-like aroma filled the air, which was alive with the chirping of insects. Elena photographed me from several angles, then sat down cross-legged and invited me to do the same.

‘The other day,’ she said, ‘I saw a group of antelopes grazing down there, with their young. It was magical.’

‘It’s a real haven of peace,’ I admitted.

‘I often come here to unwind. I put a hat on in order not to get sunburnt, have a flask full of cold water close at hand, and stay here for hours waiting for the antelopes to return. I’ve also seen a jackal. It had gone to ground down there. When it saw me looking at it, it stared at me suspiciously. I got the impression it could see right through me.’

‘It might have attacked you.’

‘I don’t think so. Jackals are secretive, cowardly animals, who never take risks. If they aren’t sure they’ll succeed, they give up. Wild dogs, on the other hand, don’t need to feel threatened to attack. An old night watchman discovered that to his detriment. He got lost in the dark and we found him torn to pieces not far from the camp.’

‘Doesn’t anything nice ever happen here?’

She laughed. ‘Don’t you think this is a beautiful place, Kurt?’

I wanted to tell her that
she
was very beautiful, but didn’t dare. She took my chin between her pretty fingers,
and looked deep into my eyes. My heart pounded in my chest. Elena noticed. She moved her face closer to mine and searched for my lips, but her kiss was cut short by the laughter of two little children who had just jumped up out of the undergrowth below us. They climbed the embankment as fast as they could, stopped to make fun of us, miming languorous hugs and kisses, and ran off towards the camp, laughing triumphantly.

‘Where did they spring from?’ I said.

Elena now also laughed fondly at the antics of the two kids. ‘In Africa,’ she said, ‘even if God turns his head modestly away when two people are ready to make love, you can be surethere’s always a little boy watching somewhere.’

A week had passed since the visit from the delegation. I had moved in with Elena. By day, I took care of my patients. In the evening, Elena and I wandered around the outskirts of the camp and only came back when night had fallen. Every now and again, Bruno would join us with one or two of his mythical ‘brothers’. As far as the Frenchman was concerned, every African was a novel. But it was he, Bruno, who wrote it. Thus it was that he introduced us to Bongo, a teenage boy who had walked three thousand kilometres, without a guide and without a penny in his pocket, to see the sea. He had left his village in Nigeria in order to get to Europe. A people smuggler had promised to take him there in return for his mother’s jewellery, but had abandoned him in the Ténéré. The boy had wandered for months and months in the desert, somehow getting by, until he had come upon the camp by chance. The day
after we were introduced to him, he disappeared. He had stolen some provisions from the kitchen, a bag and some walking shoes, and had set off in search of the sea. Bruno had no doubt in his mind: sooner or later the young man would realise his dream. It was written all over his face that nothing would stop him.

One evening, Bruno came running into the canteen in a state of great excitement. He demanded silence, stretched his arms out wide in a melodramatic gesture, and with a lump in his throat declaimed:

He gave a reverential bow, then rose to his full height to savour the applause, of which there was a little. ‘
Black Moon
, by Joma Baba-Sy,’ he said, advancing through the middle of the room, where a dozen of us were having dinner.

He again asked for our attention and declared in a mocking tone, ‘My dear friends, I am leaving you. I am leaving you to your struggles, your suffering, your miseries. I’m going. I leave you courage, sacrifice, the nobility of grand causes … Yes, I yield them to you graciously. And if you wish, I bequeath you my virtues for they no longer make my soul tremble. As far as I’m concerned, the odyssey ends tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll be back with my fat partner and we’ll reinvent the world under a mosquito net …’

A few people laughed indulgently. Bruno came over to the table I was sharing with Elena, Lotta and Orfane, grabbed a free chair and sat down astride it, between the gynaecologist and the virologist. His bulging, joyful eyes rolled like white-hot marbles.

‘I’ve just come from Monsieur Pfer’s office. Guess who I had on the phone? None other than the French ambassador! He told me officially that my case had been examined with the greatest care and that I no longer had anything to worry about. I’m going to be given a new passport and an entry visa to Djibouti. Tomorrow, I’m flying to Khartoum on the freighter aircraft. The pilot has received instructions.’

‘Congratulations,’ Lotta said.

‘I’ve already told my partner the good news. She was so happy we cried like kids. My beard is still wet with my tears.’ He turned to me. ‘I’m going to miss you, Monsieur Krausmann.’

My throat was too tight to utter a sound.

He nodded his head and addressed the others. ‘And you too.’

‘You’re a likeable person, Bruno,’ Lotta said. ‘A bit scatterbrained, but very likeable.’

‘It’s the African sun that’s melted my brain. Which is all to the good. The less you think, the more chance you have of making old bones … Oh my God, how happy I am! I’m not going to sleep a wink tonight, and tomorrow will take for ever to arrive. I can already see myself at home, in my scruffy but comfortable little room … If you ever happen to be passing through Djibouti, come and see me. No need to tell me you’re coming. There’s no protocol in our house. Just go to the souk, ask after Bruno the African – that’s what they call me – and any kid will bring you to me. You won’t even have to ring the doorbell, because we don’t have one. You open the door and you’re immediately at home … Isn’t that so, Kurt?’