I didn’t understand. He sat down next to me and explained. ‘When I was seized with the Italian journalist, we were held with a third hostage in a horrible cellar for weeks. In the dark. Tied up like sausages. Then the journalist was transferred to a separate cell, and they started to treat him better, giving him nicer food and allowing him to wash and shave. Some time later, he was released. I think your friend is going to be freed soon. You have to know how things work around here: even though these criminals don’t seem up to much, they’re well organised. They have contacts in town and among officials who communicate anything that might interest them, in real time. And then there’s the internet. They type in the names of their hostages, and in a second or two they have all the information they need. That’s what they’ve done with you and your friend. Your name can’t have told them much. Your friend’s, though, probably came with a lot of tempting details … I’ve been a prisoner for four months and I’ve learnt to sense when the wind is changing. The captain seems enthusiastic. That’s an unmistakable sign. Usually, he’s as moody as a pitbull … What exactly does Monsieur Makkenroth do?’
‘He’s in humanitarian aid.’
‘There must be something else.’
I hesitated, made sure that no prying ears were around, and admitted, ‘Hans Makkenroth is a leading industrialist in Germany, and is very rich …’
‘That explains it. Captain Gerima may already be negotiating with several groups interested in your friend. Depending on how much the “merchandise” is likely to fetch, the auction can reach an astronomical figure.’
A thousand questions were jostling for position in my head, but I was too exhausted to put them in any kind of order. I didn’t know how this kind of negotiation worked or how long it would last and, frankly, I was less and less able to see the end of the tunnel. In two weeks of captivity, I had lost my sense of judgement. My sleepless nights had exacerbated my anxieties, and every minute that passed lessened my presence of mind. I had become someone else. My voice had changed and my reflexes had grown dull. I had lost weight; an unkempt beard was engulfing my face, and the disgusting food we were served had made me ill. At this rate, I was certain I’d end up cracking or being put down like a dog.
The world was tightening around me like a straitjacket. It was a world of thirst and sunstroke where, outside the fort, nothing ever happened. Apart from the swirls of dust that the wind unleashed and abandoned immediately, and the vultures screeching in the arid sky, it was an implacable realm of silence and stillness. Even time seemed crucified on the sinister rocks that stood out against the horizon like presages of doom.
I went to take a breather by the door, which the guards left open during the day. Bruno and I were allowed to stretch our legs in a small yard marked off by a roll of barbed wire attached to posts; this was our ‘solarium’, a space of less than a hundred square metres adorned with a dead tree, at the foot of which I sometimes spent hours on end observing our kidnappers going about their business or practising quick marching, with debatable enthusiasm, beneath a leaden sun. It was after one in the afternoon; many of the pirates had retreated to their barracks while those few on fatigue duty bustled here and there. From the height of his lookout post, the sentry kept watch, his finger on the trigger. In the shade of a zinc canopy, Blackmoon sat like a plague victim in quarantine, sharpening his sabre on a pumice stone, his grotesque lensless glasses held together on his face with sticky tape. Ewana, the man who had been suffering from malaria, was smoking a joint behind a row of empty crates. He was wearing two baseball caps pulled down over his skull, one with the peak in front and the other with the peak flat against the back of his neck. Now that he had recovered, he would only appear when it was siesta time, hide in a corner and indulge in such virtual excursions. On the steps of the command post, a young boy was washing the captain’s linen; he was the ‘orderly’, who spent his days rinsing the officer’s underwear, mending his socks, polishing his shoes and his weapons and wiping his cheap stripes … Looking at these maniacs who took themselves for warlords just because they were so good at terrifying people, listening to them shouting at each other in an unintelligible dialect and laughing their heads off over some trivial thing, I couldn’t help pinching myself. On what planet had the irony of fate dumped me? What lesson was I, a newly bereaved husband, to draw from being cast adrift in this death-haunted land? … What disturbed me about my kidnappers wasn’t their offhandedness, nor the destitution to which their status as a rebel band condemned them; but there was a glaring lack of awareness in the way they went about their day-to-day lives that made their dangerousness as natural as a snake bite, and just sensing them around me, I felt I was in a kind of purgatory where it wasn’t necessary to have sinned, since the mere fact of ending up there constituted a crime.
Bruno joined me in the doorway. He placed a sympathetic hand on my shoulder; his gesture irritated me, but I didn’t move away.
‘It’ll work out,’ he promised. ‘Everything works out in the end.’
‘Do you think they’d kill us if they didn’t find a buyer?’
‘They’d already have done away with me. Nobody’s asking for me and I don’t have the slightest market value.’
‘They haven’t released you either.’
‘I’m sure they’ll let us go when they’ve amassed enough money to go home. Gerima’s a rogue. He can’t wait to blow all his money on whores, as far as possible from here, because he knows that if he stays here, sooner or later he’ll get caught. He’s clever. The only thing he’s interested in is lining his own pocket. At the first opportunity, he wouldn’t hesitate to get shot of these idiots who are following him blindly. It’s always been like that around here. I know lots of bandits who, after crisscrossing the bush and getting themselves talked about in the media, suddenly vanished into thin air. Where are they, do you think? In Kenya or Chad, or some country at peace where nobody knows them and they can have an easy life on the money they’ve made. They grease a few palms here and there, get hold of new identity cards, and probably a new reputation because everything can be bought in this region, including the gods and patron saints, and they start a new life, as respectable as a marabout.’
Bruno took his hand away; he must have felt my muscles contract in his grip.
‘The hostage trade has become an industry in Africa,’ he went on. ‘In the old days, I drifted from Mali to Tanzania, and it was a piece of cake. Wherever I ended up, I just had to knock at a door, any door, whether it was a house or a hut, and I automatically had board and lodgings. Those were great times. But ever since the first dollars were paid to kidnappers, the cobblers have put away their nails and their glue, the porters have given up carrying baskets for housewives, and any down-and-out imagines he’s hit the jackpot as soon as he comes across a foreigner … Governments shouldn’t have yielded to the kidnappers’ demands. At first, it was only jihadists targeting the odd aid worker. Now, it’s open season for all kinds of chancers: ex-convicts, idlers, brainwashed kids from all over the world who come to claim their visa for paradise … The groups have proliferated; some are connected with Al-Shabaab, others operate on their own account, and nobody knows what to believe any more.’
I asked Bruno to stop and went back to my straw mattress.
In the evening, the guards placed a grille over the door of our jail and padlocked it. The confinement added an extra layer of depression to the sickly smell of the room. To get a little air, I went to the window, which was just a hole in the wall with thick iron bars across it. I wanted to gaze at the sunset, to escape for a moment from the thoughts that were tormenting me. I have to hold out, I told myself. When the sun had disappeared, the darkness threw itself on the shadows like a predator on its prey, and a senescent night, totally lacking in charm or romance, and worn down by age, prepared to make the desert its tomb. I didn’t know much about the African night, yet I knew it would remain, for me, as devoid of meaning as the chance that had led me to this godforsaken spot. I thought about the nights I had known in the old days, in Frankfurt, Seville, Las Palmas, the south of France, Istanbul, Salonica; saw again the terraces with their white balconies, the gleaming shop windows, restaurant bars lined with mirrors and made mysterious by subdued lighting, the places that had filled me with awe, the streets that led me through a thousand little ordinary joys, the small parks where children played, the benches in the shade of the birches to which old people and lovers came to hear themselves living, the tourists taking photographs of each other at the foot of the monuments; I heard their singsong voices, the bursts of music drifting out of the clubs, the coaches setting off for the sun, and those nights seemed to me as subliminal and full as moons. It was amazing that a man deprived of his freedom, whose future was so uncertain, could revisit the life that had been stolen from him with such clarity, and that the small details to which he had paid no attention should come back to the surface with incredible precision and fill his heart with a nostalgia whose splendour was equalled only by the depth of his grief. So I closed my eyes and searched for the slightest little gleam that could alleviate my unhappiness; a shrill laugh, a quick run, a furtive glance, a smile, a handshake, anything that could fill my solitude with untold presences. Of course, Jessica was everywhere; I made out her perfume in the stench of my jail, recognised the swish of her dress in all the rustling around me; I longed for her in the midst of these shadows that were taking over my thoughts. Her absence left me naked, impoverished, mutilated; and there, standing by that damned window with the burning-hot bars, facing that night that had no story to tell and on which both rocks and men turned their backs, I made myself a solemn promise, a promise as unbreakable as a vow, not to weaken and, whatever happened, to get out of here and find my way back to my towns and my streets, my people and my songs, the places I had loved, the beaches where my tenderest memories lay, all my weaknesses and all my habits and all my countless illusions!