My eyes went from the kidnappers to the poor wretch clambering up the hill. I was incapable of distinguishing the horror I felt from the pity. At that moment, the pirates and the man were part of the same human misery. Any protest on my part was doomed in advance: there was nothing I could say or do … I thought of my previous life, so delightful and easy that it seemed like a joke. A sanitised life, as well timed and ordered as a musical score, where every day began and ended in the same way: a kiss when I woke, another when I got back from work, another before switching off the light in the bedroom, with I love yous at the end of every phone call and text message — in short, the ordinary happiness you take for granted, as unquestionable as a fait accompli … Oh, that happiness, the philosopher’s stone, the domestic dream, the earthly paradise of which you’re both the baleful god and the privileged devil … that damned happiness that rests on so little but overrides all other ambitions and fantasies … that happiness which, when you come down to it, has only its self-delusion as protection and its innocence as an alibi … Had I suspected how vulnerable it was? Not for a moment … Then, one evening, one ordinary evening, no different from any of the thousands of evenings that went before it, everything turns upside down. What you’ve built, what you were sure was yours, suddenly vanishes in the blink of an eye. You realise you were sleepwalking along a wire. Overnight, the dashing Kurt Krausmann who used to be so concerned that the creases in his trousers were straight, the solemn and serious Dr Krausmann wakes to find himself in the back of a clapped-out pick-up, surrounded by ragged-looking killers, in the middle of an unknown country where the death of a man is worth no more than the act that causes it … How sad it all was!
The sun was just starting to go down on that second day when we reached a plateau from which the rays ricocheted off as if from a mirror, dotting the surrounding area with false oases. It was a stony, charcoal-grey land, that was turning completely into desert. Strips of undergrowth indicated the place where a river had once flowed. There were a few scrawny trees here and there, their branches lifted to the sky like arms raised in surrender, but still no villages anywhere to be seen.
We spent the night in a ravine, and very early the next day the convoy headed due west to a new station. This time, the hiding place seemed to have been discovered and looted by other bandits, leaving nothing but empty jerry cans and sacks that had been ripped open. As the place was no longer safe, Moussa ordered his men to carry straight on to the next station. A blazing sun pursued us all the way there. The pick-up was like a furnace. I was dripping with sweat, my back burnt by the slatted sides and my feet by the floor. Exhausted and discouraged, forced to continue on their way without food or drink, our kidnappers resigned themselves to the bumpy terrain. Some dozed, their mouths open, their weapons between their thighs. As for Blackmoon, he remained on alert, keeping a close eye on me as if I were the only thing that mattered.
Coming out of a stony maze, the jeep overtook us and forced the two pick-ups to fall into line behind it. Chief Moussa got out and lifted the binoculars to his eyes. He pointed to something in the distance. Joma took the binoculars from his hands, looked through them for a long time, then nodded. ‘Village at nine o’clock!’ Moussa said, getting back in his jeep. The three vehicles veered south and headed straight for the village, which was actually nothing but a ragged settlement.
Alerted by the humming of the engines, swarms of kids emerged from the huts and started running at top speed towards a stony column to take shelter. The youngest of them, naked from head to foot, stumbled and fell. He must have hurt himself badly because he lay there on the ground without moving. Two small boys stopped and yelled at him to get back on his feet then ran back to help him up, and disappeared again quickly behind the rocks. The pirates’ three vehicles moved into a small open space surrounded by half a dozen huts, most of them deserted. Moussa was the first to get out. He fired in the air to flush out the inhabitants, but without success. His men plunged into the huts, screaming like animals. Some came out empty-handed, others with wretched pieces of booty: a foul-smelling pancake, an opened sachet of powdered milk, an old blanket. An old man was sitting outside his hut, his body propped up on an ancient stick. Dressed in an overcoat as old as the world, his skull hairless, his expression opaque, there he sat, calmly, paying no heed to this bandit raid, as if he had spent his whole life being robbed. Beside him, on a tattered mat, an old woman was watching the agitation around her without really seeing it. In her ageless face, her two eyes were so eroded by trachoma they were almost extinguished. The loincloth she was wearing barely concealed her nakedness. Her withered breasts, which seemed to have suckled whole generations, hung over her skeletal sides like two dried marrows. In the poverty of their configuration, there was a kind of topography of misfortune. Two of the pirates rushed into the hut and brought out a bleating goat. The old couple didn’t move, didn’t even turn to look. They sat there, immutable, like two stuffed animals.
I was shocked by the shameless way the thieves were robbing people as destitute as these, and even more by the old couple’s detachment as they watched themselves being relieved of their only goat, probably the only thing they owned, without saying a word, without making a gesture, as if it were the slightest of misfortunes, a mere formality.
Moussa ordered his men to withdraw. The vehicles drove around intimidatingly in the middle of the empty huts, a few shots were fired in the air to celebrate this pathetic raid, and the convoy set off again. I don’t know why, but when the pick-up drove past the old couple sitting dazed on the threshold of their hut, I showed them my tied wrists — maybe I was trying, through this superfluous reflex, to ask their forgiveness for being the reluctant witness to such a despicable act. One of the pirates, who had noticed my gesture, gave an ironic grin, as if to say: What could you have done if your hands had been free, except hide your face?
*
On the fourth day, we came out onto a plateau of cosmic emptiness, without a trace of greenery, without one drop of water, without a single patch of shade: an expanse of burning stones, where the reflections were as sharp as a razor, a land from just after the Big Bang, still engorged with fire, which had kept its original ochre hue like the first layer of sediment from before the first rains, the first grass, the first stirrings of life.