The African Equation (5 page)

He nodded. ‘One last drink?’ he suggested.

‘I don’t think so.’

I took a shower before going to bed. As on the previous nights, I planned to switch off the lights and stare at the darkness for an hour or two. I had started to read Musil on the plane taking us to Nicosia. That night, I realised that I was still on the first chapter. Incapable of concentrating on the text, I started again from the beginning. Like the night before, and the nights before that, I put on a little music, the same piece of Wagner, then, in the middle of a sentence or a metaphor, the book faded away and I found my mind wandering. And there, in the muffled silence of my mahogany-lined cabin, amid the platinum joints and the paintings on the walls, Jessica’s ghost caught up with me. I closed my eyes to dismiss it, but in vain. What I dreaded more than anything was waking up – the first thing that would come into my mind was Jessica’s death – every time I woke up I would experience the exact same emotions I had felt in that bathroom where the love of my life had slipped away from me. It was terrible. Would I ever get over it? … I wondered above all how I managed to get up, shower, shave, drink my coffee and go back up on deck to see the sea replace time … Day being merely a respite, night would find me in bed again and would spread its blackness into my thoughts and whisper in my ear, just before I drifted off, asking if I was ready or not to face the moment of waking that stood on guard, waiting for morning.

I took a sleeping pill.

As I did every night.

I was woken by the noise of something falling. The pill I’d taken had dulled my senses, and I wasn’t sure where I was. I looked for my watch, couldn’t find it, consulted the one built into the bedside table: 4.27. Someone was yelling at Hans in the next room. Suddenly, the door of my room was flung open, and a torch was shone right in my face. I didn’t have time to react before a shadowy figure rushed at me and placed something metallic against my temple. A second figure came into the room, searched for the light switch and turned it on. The ceiling light revealed two excited black men. The first was in his thirties, solidly built with shaven head and shoulders like a weightlifter’s, a brute naked from the waist up, with amulets around his arms and venom in his eyes, screaming orders at me in an unknown language. The other intruder was a slender teenager, with slashes on his face, and eyes that shone like a drug addict’s. He was pointing some kind of firearm at me, maybe a sawn-off shotgun or a home-made carbine.

The older man was a real giant and too strong for me to put up any resistance. He tore me from my bed and threw me against a wall. I was no sooner on my feet than I received a blow with a rifle butt in my stomach which bent me double. The second intruder grabbed me by the hair and forced me to kneel. His blood-red eyes travelled over my body like two man-eating ants. I had never met anyone like these two in my life. The younger man seemed to be waiting for an excuse, any excuse, to shoot me dead … The giant rummaged in the drawers, turned the mattress over to see what was underneath, and took down the paintings in search of a hidden safe. Whenever he came
across anything interesting – my watch, my sleeping pills, my wallet, my mobile phone, my belt, my sunglasses, my book – he threw it into a small, dirt-stained jute sack. The search over, he came back to me, looked into my eyes in the hope of detecting some detail that might have escaped him, lifted my chin with the tip of his Kalashnikov and yelled something at me in his language. He repeated the same question three times, in a guttural voice that made the veins on his neck throb. Not getting any answer, he hit me and pushed me out into the corridor.

In the control room, four armed men stood with guns aimed at Hans and Tao. They were all yelling at once. A fifth barred the stairway that led up on deck, moving the blade of a sabre back and forth across the palm of his hand, as sinister as an executioner getting ready to behead his victim. There was an unhealthy gleam in his eyes, and his fixed grin chilled my blood. Puny-looking, with a bony face and unusually long arms, he gave the impression of not being entirely of sound mind, especially with the grotesque pair of glasses without lenses he was wearing so casually.

Our attackers were young, some barely out of puberty, but they seemed to know exactly what they were doing. After lots of yelling and bursts of spittle, they ordered us to put our hands in the air. Hans, who had only had time to put on a pair of trousers and one sock, tried to calm them down, and was ordered to shut up and keep still.

‘No other passengers?’ a tall, thin man with bronzed skin asked the younger of the two men who had come to get me.

‘No, chief.’

The chief turned and looked at me, lingering over my underpants, my bare legs. With his revolver, he shoved me
against the wall. My Adam’s apple scraped my throat. I found it hard not to close my eyes, expecting a gunshot at any moment. I was seized with terror, and I clenched my fists to push it back.

‘Are you the pilot?’ he asked me in English.

‘No, I am,’ Hans said. ‘What do you want with us?’

The chief laughed, revealing a gold tooth, and without taking his eyes off me retorted, ‘These damned whites! They always need everything spelt out for them.’ He went up to Hans and looked him up and down. ‘Is this your boat or did you hire it?’

‘It’s my boat.’

‘Great! … French, American, British?’

‘German.’

‘Are you in business or some kind of scam?’

‘They’re spies,’ the giant with the amulets said.

‘That’s not true,’ Hans said. ‘My friend’s a doctor. And I’m in humanitarian aid. I’m supposed to be equipping a hospital in the Comoros …’

‘How touching,’ the chief said ironically, turning to Tao. ‘And the chink?’

‘He’s Filipino.’

‘The skivvy, I assume. He cleans, does the cooking, wipes your arse, attends to your every need … How much would a Filipino cook fetch on the market, Joma?’

‘You probably couldn’t give him away,’ the giant said.

‘In other words, a bad investment,’ the chief said, walking around Tao.

Tao did not flinch. He held himself erect, his face inscrutable, revealing nothing of what he was feeling.

‘Sorry,’ the chief said, ‘I’m going to have to dispense with your services. I hope you can swim.’

Immediately, the giant with the amulets took Tao by the waist. Hans tried to intervene, but a blow with a rifle butt knocked him to the floor. Tao didn’t struggle. He didn’t understand what was happening. His small body was engulfed by the black giant. I stood there petrified, in a daze, unable to react. I watched the giant take Tao up on deck. Not a muscle responded.

‘Kurt, don’t let him do it!’ Hans screamed at me from the floor.

His cries brought me to my senses. I rushed to the stairs, swept aside the boy with the sabre. There was a kind of flash inside me, followed by blackness …

Water was thrown over me. I emerged from a fog. There was blood on my vest, my boxer shorts and my thigh. I lifted my fingers to my temple: I was the one who was bleeding.

The giant with the amulets put the bucket down on the wooden floor and dug his shoe into my side. ‘This isn’t a hotel.’

The chief crouched beside me. He was young, in his early thirties, quite good-looking, with fine features and a straight nose. He wore his fatigues like a banker wearing a suit, with a self-assurance that was meant to be as seductive as it was intimidating. From his affected airs and graces, it was clear he was a product of the local middle class, someone who’d had a future at the head of his community but had turned bad.

Holding our passports in one hand, he waited for me to come back to my senses and then said, ‘Excuse our
methods, doctor. We work in the traditional way around here. With the means at our disposal.’

I looked for Hans. He was behind me, in a corner of the control room. His eye had disappeared beneath a purplish swelling.

‘Let me explain the situation,’ the chief said in perfect English. ‘The ball is in our court, but the rules of the game belong to you and your friend. You behave yourselves and we’ll treat you well. You try to be smart, and I can’t guarantee anything.’

‘Why did you throw Tao in the sea?’ Hans screamed, beside himself.

‘You mean the chink? That was a question of logistics.’

‘You killed a man, for heaven’s sake!’

‘People die every day. That’s never stopped God from sleeping soundly.’

Hans was disgusted by the chief’s words. His face was trembling with anger and his breathing was laboured. He bit his lip to restrain himself.

‘Did I say something stupid?’ the chief asked, cynically.

‘Are you trying to make me believe you don’t have any regret, any remorse?’ Hans cried, his voice throbbing with indignation.

The chief gave a toneless laugh and looked at Hans as if seeing him for the first time. After a silence, he opened his arms wide in a theatrical gesture and said, ‘To feel regret or remorse, you need to have a conscience. And I don’t have one.’

Hans was so disgusted, he didn’t say another word.

‘What are you going to do with us?’ I asked.

The chief pursed his lips and thought over my question. ‘I’ll be frank with you,’ he said. ‘I don’t really care if you
live or die. It’s entirely up to you if you return home safe and sound or end up in a ditch with a bullet in your head … But from now on, you’re my prisoners. What you own belongs to me, apart from your family photographs. You can already say goodbye to your boat. The spoils of war.’

‘It’s my boat,’ Hans protested. ‘I’m not at war with anyone. I’m just passing through. You have no right …’

‘There are no rights here, Mr Makkenroth. And there’s only one law: the law of the gun. And tonight the guns are on my side.’

‘What are you going to do with my boat? Sell it off cheap? Strip it?’

‘The real question is: what are we going to do with you? Am I to understand that you’re more concerned about what happens to your boat than to you? … You’re my hostages, my meal ticket. I don’t care about the Geneva Convention or UN resolutions, I’ll treat you as I see fit. From now on, I’m your god. Your fate is closely linked to my moods, so if I were you I’d try to keep on the right side of me.’

We were forced to get dressed, our wrists were tied, and we were shut up in the room that Tao had occupied, down in the hold. The boy with the lensless glasses came and took up position in the doorway. He leant one shoulder against the door frame, tilted his head to one side and began watching us in a strange way. The stupid grin on his face sent a chill down my spine.

‘Are you all right?’ Hans asked me.

‘I think so. How about you?’

‘I’ll be OK … Do you realise? They threw Tao overboard!’

‘Do you think he’ll make it?’

‘He can’t swim.’

‘They have us at their mercy. They didn’t need to do that.’

‘It’s their way of showing they’re in control. People’s mindset is different in this part of the world. The life of a man and the life of a mosquito are the same to them. These people are alive now, but they come from another time.’

The guard kept moving his greyish tongue over his lips. The stillness of his eyes accentuated my sense of unease.

‘Where did they spring from?’

Hans shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I heard an engine coming closer. I thought it was the coastguard at first, but they aren’t allowed to operate in international waters. Tao came and told me that a felucca was heading straight for us. Something hit the hull. Within a fraction of a second, these maniacs were coming on board. I couldn’t do a thing.’

‘Who are they?’

‘No idea. This area’s full of all kinds of predators: rebels, mercenaries, pirates, terrorists, smugglers, arms dealers. But I never imagined they were capable of venturing so far from their bases. I’ve done this stretch of water twice before, the last time only six months ago, and had no trouble …’

He paused for breath. When he spoke again, his voice was heavier.

‘I’m sorry, Kurt. You have no idea how sorry I am to have got you mixed up in all this after what you’ve been through.’

‘It’s not your fault, Hans. It’s the way of things: it never rains but it pours.’

‘I really am sorry.’

‘Shhhh!’ said our guard in a whistling voice, raising his finger to his lips.

Again, his glassy eyes sent a shiver through me.

Hans and I were flung unceremoniously in the felucca, to be guarded by the giant with the amulets and three of his associates. The leader and the rest of the gang remained on board the yacht. As our new craft set sail for whatever fate had in store for us, we watched the boat make a series of clumsy manoeuvres before moving away in the opposite direction to ours. Hans had tears in his eyes; I saw the resentment well up in him. When the boat had faded into the darkness, he placed his chin on his bound fists and withdrew into himself.

The felucca pitched on the waves, throwing us from side to side. In the silence of the night, the noise of the engine was like the moans of a dying pachyderm. I began feeling seasick and my migraine was getting worse. I threw up over my knees.

The crossing seemed endless. Far in the distance, the first blood-red marks of dawn sprinkled the horizon. The wind froze my arms and knees. My back felt itchy. I couldn’t scratch myself or rub myself against the
worm-eaten
wood of the boat, from which big splinters as deadly as knives stuck out in places. Every now and again, the giant kicked me in the shin to stop me sleeping. Facing me, the boy with the lensless glasses was watching me constantly, a strange smile on his granite face.

The cries of seagulls … I had dozed off. The sun had risen; the felucca threaded its way through the jagged edges of a reef, glided along a narrow, meandering passage filled
with silt, and sailed up the lagoon as far as a tiny, gravelly beach. The giant threw us to the ground. The others pulled the boat out of the water and dragged it into a blind spot, where they covered it with a tarpaulin to camouflage it. We immediately set off on foot. A
thalweg
led us into a creek that we had to go around in order to advance further inland. After an hour’s walking, we reached a basin thick with undergrowth, where an armed adolescent stood guard. He was a short boy with stunted legs, his forehead riddled with pustules. He was wearing a dirty pair of trousers and a torn vest. The giant spoke to him in a local language, pointed to a hill and dismissed him. We retraced our steps over several kilometres. From time to time, we glimpsed the sea. I tried hard to memorise the places we were going through because I had only one idea in my head: to seize the first opportunity that presented itself to Hans and me to escape … Poor Hans! He limped in front, his shoulders sagging, his face distorted by his swollen eye. A trail of blood stuck his shirt to his back. He kept moving forward like a sleepwalker, his chin on his chest.