The Devil Is a Black Dog (3 page)

We talked about Africa, Europe, and anything that came to mind. He was pleased to have my company, as he rarely saw
Europeans in these parts, especially those who weren’t on the run from the law, though these types were mostly already serving under him. For six years, he hadn’t set foot outside of Africa. He was a generous sort, and listened attentively when I told of my own travels. He spoke mostly of the difficulty in living there, the unit’s losses, the tropical sickness, and how Africa was like a huge branding iron, leaving its stamp on anybody who happened to find their way to near the equator.… A knock came at the door, and a young conscript entered.

“Commander, ten of the men would like to go into town for some R and R,” he said and clicked his heels. The commander momentarily looked over the soldier, and then assented with a wave of his hand. I watched on, dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine that anybody would want to be out in this storm. Before the conscript left the room, Lacroix called after him, “Remind them that the Blake Precept is in effect!” Noting my expression, he leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and reminded me that this was the French Foreign Legion. His men could eat this little storm for breakfast. “But much more interesting is the Blake Precept,” he said, and poured us both another whisky. He lifted his glass and said, “Let’s drink to the Blake Precept.” We drank. Then he told the story of Sam Blake.

Blake was an Australian captain who was in the Legion about five years ago. Blake wasn’t alive anymore, but he had received a posthumous Croix de le Valeur Militaire, the highest level of state and military decoration. His story went like this. He had been transferred into the Chad armed corps as a driver. During that time, the Darfur conflict was raging, and six tribes from three countries were killing each other for the region’s arable land. The frontiers were totally unstable, which is why the Legion had been deployed there.

Blake was a relaxed, quiet man. There was nothing to really distinguish him from the other soldiers; he was neither braver nor more cowardly, exactly as a true legionnaire should be. On weekends
he went into town with the others. There is not much to do in an outback dustbowl like Abéché, though there was a bar and a whorehouse. It was on one such weekend when it happened. He was drinking with a fellow officer in the bar of the town’s only hotel, when one of their translators showed up at the door and asked if they wanted to see something they would likely never find anywhere else in the world. Blake and his friend weren’t especially thirsty, so they agreed. They followed the translator, who took them to a ghost rider.

The Darfur conflict had mixed everything up and triggered a movement of the tribes. Along with the upheaval a lot of strange phenomena emerged. The ghost riders were one of them. These were locals capable of letting a ghost possess their bodies and speak with their tongue. The tribes greatly respected these people. They heaped offerings on them, and consulted them with their lives’ gravest questions.

It was already late when Blake’s group arrived at the ghost rider’s hut on the edge of town. The ghost rider was an old Kununbu man, and the fingers of his left hand were missing, though it was still possible to count on the five stumps. According to the translator, he would be visited by the spirit of a great Sudanese warlord when he clutched a white-hot ember in his hands. The two legionnaires sat on the floor of the hut and handed over gifts (scarcely worth a dollar) then waited for the old man to perform. The ghost rider smiled at them, flashing a mouth of missing teeth, then without the slightest indication of pain, put his left hand into the fire and scooped out an ember. The irises of his eyes turned white, and he spoke in a greatly altered voice.

“You are allowed one question,” said the translator. “Just one question each.”

Blake smirked and asked, “How will I die?”

“It won’t be by bullet,” said the aged man. “But you will die when you rise into the air like a bird.”

Neither of them thought much of it: Europeans hadn’t believed in things like this since the French Enlightenment, though it transpired that Blake would indeed never be hit by a bullet. That very week he was sent in a convoy to Goz Beïda, a place where it was possible to see low-flying Sudanese bombers dropping ignited barrels of gasoline over villages. On the streets eight different armies were mixing, looting anything they could. The border was mined, to be certain the tribes wouldn’t cross. Blake and perhaps thirty other people were delivering medicine to the refugee camp when they were ambushed. It wasn’t an amateur piece of work: they were lit up with sprays of gunfire from atop four hills, while RPGs on the ground took out the vehicles. Everyone died with the exception of Blake, who fled across the minefield and returned fire from the far side. When it was all over, he hadn’t suffered a scratch.

When he returned to the camp, he was called a hero and immediately promoted. The other legionnaires embraced him, patted him on the back, and said he was born under a lucky star, and that’s why he didn’t take a bullet. But Blake wouldn’t talk about the incident and whenever anybody asked, he just began to hum. Everybody knew you couldn’t survive something like this without divine intervention. After that, the commander tried to give him less dangerous assignments, but Blake only volunteered for riskier and riskier missions. And he returned from each one. As his brothers-in-arms fell, he remained unscratched, fearless even in the fiercest hail of bullets. News of his heroics spread, and he was promoted to captain. Blake was up for anything aside from flying in a plane. This was the one thing nobody could persuade him to do.

The news of Blake soon reached the Legion’s top brass. The story pleased one of the generals, and he decided that the time had come to give a commendation to the young officer. He telegrammed his decision to the camp commander, who then read
the decree out loud in front of the whole detachment. When the news broke among the soldiers, they took the hero on their shoulders. Blake was the only one who wasn’t celebrating. The commendation, he learned, would be handed out in Paris. And he would have to fly there. As the time for the ceremony approached, Blake became increasingly nervous; he fought and spoke disrespectfully to his superiors, so that they would demote him and he would be passed over for the medal. His superiors, however, just thought it was the pressure showing, and let the digressions go, even overlooking it when he returned from leave terribly drunk with two prostitutes.

The day arrived when he was to fly to Paris. The Legion had sent a private plane especially for the occasion, with two generals aboard to escort him. Blake, however, wouldn’t leave the barracks. He shouted out that he would shoot anybody who tried to put him on the plane, and didn’t they know that the ghost rider said he would die if he flew? The military police had to put him in shackles and drag him to the plane as he whimpered between them like a child. The entire company saw it and heard what he said, and thought the poor guy had gone crazy.

The plane never arrived in Paris. Due to a technical problem the pilot had to make an emergency landing before even reaching the Chad border. The plane exploded on impact. There were no survivors. As talk of this episode got around, more and more soldiers began to visit the ghost riders. It got so bad that some soldiers gave up showering, shaving, wearing the Kepi Blanc, and one wouldn’t even ride in a car, heeding what a ghost rider had forewarned. The camp commander instituted a penalty to get them back in line. This is how the Blake Precept was born. If any legionnaire was caught consulting a ghost rider, he would be locked away for four weeks in solitary confinement, and in Africa it averages 105 degrees, so it’s nobody’s idea of fun.…

After the commander finished the story, we continued drinking, then later went to play poker in the canteen. I was lucky, winning almost a hundred bucks. The storm raged on into the night, so they showed me to a bed. I slept very well. The morning was bright, clear, and beautiful; the Haboob had blown back to Sudan. The commander insisted on having breakfast with me before I left. At the canteen, the Blake Precept was still on my mind. Now there was almost nobody at the camp who would have known Blake personally, outside of the commander and a repairman from barrack number three. I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I asked the commander how well he knew Blake. “I was with him in the ghost rider’s hut,” he said, and stopped eating. He looked me in the eye. “Don’t worry, everything will be OK for me, so long as Lake Chad doesn’t dry up.”

I made my flight to N’Djamena, and from there I traveled on to Tripoli and then Cairo. In my hurry, I forgot all about Commander Lacroix. I arrived in Cairo and threw myself into my work. Four months later, on a Cairo-to-Budapest flight, the commander popped into my mind, when, after the meal, I opened the in-flight magazine. There was a longish article about how Lake Chad was drying up at an astounding rate, and now it didn’t even reach Nigeria. A brief shudder ran through me as I recalled the prophecy of the ghost rider. Later that spring it wasn’t totally unexpected news that the rebels had attacked and taken Abéché. There were no survivors.

W
hen Mubarak stepped down, the cafés reopened. I thought this would be a good time to go for a few glasses of beer and wash away the taste of tear gas. I got in a cab and told the driver to take me to the Horreya Café, at the end of the Corniche, on Falaki Square.

The wind from the open window ruffled my shirt. The Nile was red with the desert’s piercing sun. Boats bobbed in the water, their lights out.

A sand-colored Abrams tank stood at the intersection, slowing traffic, the barrel pointing toward the city center. At the gun turret slouched a mustached soldier. A younger conscript was checking the papers of the people in our lane, his AK-47 clattering against his shoulder when he leaned into the open windows. His fatigues were colored brown with patches of sweat.

“Good evening,” he said, and had a look at my passport. He indicated that we could carry on. The taxi driver and I exchanged glances.

“It’s freedom,” the man said with a smile. He was used to the police taking foreigners from his car.

“Let’s not celebrate just yet.”

We continued on, taking the long way around Tahrir Square, which was closed off by the military. At Saad Zaghloul Square I decided to get out and walk a bit. There were hardly any people on the streets. Shards of broken glass grated under my sandals, and smoke still rose from the smoldering trash cans that had been used as barricades. It felt good to walk in the city center, with nobody out to kill me. I had covered the whole revolution. After a few days I got used to the tear gas, but not the explosions from the Molotov cocktails or the sound of machine-gun fire. On the other hand, I had become accustomed to living without my usual comforts. Alcohol was the first to go, then I quit smoking, and then as the situation got worse, hot showers, and finally bedding. It’s entirely possible to sleep well on potato sacks, among rats, if you happen to find yourself in a produce market, hiding from a bloodthirsty mob that wants your neck.

Biled, the alcoholic Coptic headwaiter, was standing outside the Horreya, smoking. I took a long drag from my own cigarette, ground the butt into the side of my sandal, then kicked it into the street.

“I thought they would have arrested you by now,” he said with a smile once he noticed me.

“They did. Three times.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“They let me go.”

“Well, that’s a different story. Go on, take a seat in the back.”

We shook hands, and I made my way to the rear of the café, which was cordoned off. Biled didn’t like the beer drinkers to sit by the window, lest it provoke the devout Muslims outside. He sent everybody to the back if the place wasn’t full, or if he
had yet to drink enough not to care. I sat down. Without asking, he put an Egyptian Stella in front of me. The beer was cold, the foam bubbling over the rim and flowing down the bottle in a thin stream, wetting my fingers. I lifted it to my lips and took a long swig. I savored the sensation of the bubbly liquid flooding the back of my mouth until the smell of malt rose into my nose. I felt like a new man.

After I finished the beer, I looked around the café, hoping to spot somebody I knew. It is not good to drink alone. I didn’t count on finding a foreigner; most had left the country at the first sign of trouble, and the Western journalists would all be drinking at flashy places like the Hilton Ramses or the Estoril, where it’s possible to buy foreign-made beer. A few of the usual gay boys sat at the tables draped with fly-shit covered plastic tablecloths, and a group of shorthaired Sudanese hookers were trawling for customers. I called over to Biled to bring me another beer. Somebody at the bar had left behind the day’s issue of
Al-Ahram.
The front page lauded the victims of the revolution. The martyrs’ faces were emblazoned in miniature hand-drawn portraits. The headline printed in red announced, “840 DEAD IN THREE WEEKS.” Underneath it the subheading read, “THE NUMBER OF WOUNDED STANDS ABOVE 6,000.”

I looked up when a new customer entered and watched a man of around sixty sit down at a table near me. He was dressed in a white jellabiya and a white traditional hat, and he wore a beard that was cut and dyed according to the Sunnah dictates. His forehead was darkened by the callus that adorned the devout, who prayed with their heads to the rug five times a day.

“What can I bring you, Doctor?” asked Biled.

“A Stella.”

The headwaiter placed a beer in front of the man, who immediately slugged it down.

“Another.”

“As you wish, Doctor.”

I sat by, astounded. You rarely meet an alcoholic Islamist in Cairo. Biled picked up on my surprise, stepped over to my table, and intoned quietly in my ear, “Don’t bother Ahmed Salem. I’ll explain the whole thing later.”

I returned to my beer and continued to look over the paper. The Islamist stared ahead of himself and drank mechanically. In under half an hour, seven empty bottles of Stella sat before him. My head awash in beer, I lost myself again in the paper. It was highly entertaining to read about how the military and the people were friends, and of the impending democratic reforms, and the celebration of “our new heroes.” I then noticed that somebody was standing next to my table. It was one of the Sudanese prostitutes. She wore a flower-patterned dress, and stood with her hands on her hips, flashing a perfect row-full of white teeth.