The African Equation (4 page)

The last bastion keeping me a tiny bit sane had fallen.
I felt a tightness in my throat, and couldn’t utter a syllable. Torn between indignation and anger, incredulous and dazed, I didn’t know which way to turn. Jessica had taken her own life because her board of directors hadn’t promoted her! I found it inconceivable, inexcusable. It was as if Jessica had just killed herself for the second time.

My house became a funeral urn filled with ashes. All my hopes, all my certainties had gone up in smoke.

Time seemed to have stopped. Everything around me was clogged, unable to move. I would get up in the morning, botch my day’s work and return home in the evening as if to a labyrinth, trying to shake off the ghosts of those no longer with me. I didn’t even feel the need to switch the lights on. What good was a lamp against the shadows that were blinding me?

At the surgery, I found it hard to concentrate on my work. How many times did I prescribe inappropriate treatments before realising, or before being picked up on it by my patients? Emma saw that things couldn’t go on like this … I was forced to entrust my surgery to Dr Regina Hölm, my usual replacement when I was on holiday. I went home to pack my bags. It had occurred to me that spending some time in the country, where I had a second home, would allow me to get back on my feet. I hadn’t gone fifty kilometres before I did a U-turn and drove back to Frankfurt. No, I wouldn’t have the strength to be alone in that little stone house perched at the top of a verdant hill. It had been our nest, Jessica’s and mine, our retreat when we wanted to get away from the city’s pollution and noise, its constraints and anxieties. We would go there for
weekends, to recharge our batteries and make love with the passion of teenagers. It was a lovely spot, camouflaged by tall trees, where only the odd hiker ventured and where the wind singing in the leaves would dispel our worries. There was a fireplace in the living room, and a sofa on which we would lie in each other’s arms, blissfully happy, and listen to the wood crackling in the hearth. No, I couldn’t go there and trample on so many wonderful memories.

For two days, I shut myself up in my house in Frankfurt, with the blinds down, the lights off and the phone off the hook. I didn’t open the door to anybody. I kept asking myself how a beautiful, much-loved woman with a fabulous career ahead of her could disregard all the chances she had and take her own life …
If your mind hadn’t been elsewhere, you might have been able to avoid this tragedy
, Wolfgang had said. His reproaches reversed the roles, swapped the perpetrator and the victim, confused the crime and the punishment. Had Jessica given me a sign I hadn’t recognised? Could I have changed the course of events if I had been more vigilant?

One night, in pouring rain, I went out and wandered the streets. I walked past red lights blinking at the intersections, little parks, neon signs, advertising hoardings appearing and disappearing in the darkness, empty benches. The noise of my footsteps preceded me. Tired of walking, soaked to the bone, I stopped on the banks of the Main and gazed down at the shimmering reflections of the street lamps on the river. And there too, try as I might to forget, to shake off my pain, the image of Jessica lying lifeless in the bathtub emerged from the waves and shattered any respite I’d hoped to grant myself.

I went back home, shivering and exhausted, and stood
by the window, a blanket around my shoulders, waiting for day to dawn. And dawn it did, draped in white, as if it were merely the ghost of night.

‘You have to get a grip on yourself,’ Hans Makkenroth said, ‘and fast.’

He had been round several times. When I refused to open the door, he had threatened to call the police. The state in which he found me shocked him. He ran to the phone to call an ambulance, but I persuaded him not to. Cursing, he pushed me into the bathroom. What I saw in the mirror terrified me: I looked like a zombie.

Hans dragged me back to the living room and forced me to listen to him. ‘When I lost Paula, I thought I was finished. She’d been everything to me. All my joys I owed to her. She was my pride, my glory, my happiness. I’d have given anything for one more year, one more month, one more day with her. But there are things we can’t negotiate, Kurt. Paula’s gone, just as every day thousands of people who are loved or hated die. That’s how life is. All kinds of things happen, we may be stricken with grief, we may be bankrupt, but the sun still rises in the morning and nothing can stop night from falling … Paula has been dead for five years and thirty-two weeks, and every morning when I wake up, I expect to find her lying beside me. Then I realise that I’m alone in my bed. So I throw off the sheets and go about my daily business.’

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.

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.