For his part, Bruno was brooding. It helped you see more clearly, apparently: you focused on your obsession and you blotted out everything around you. It was a matter of perspective. You just had to shift the context and your viewpoint changed. Bruno no longer saw things in the same way. He had shifted the context and was starting to reduce Africa to this gang of crooks with their pinhead pupils and animal instincts, who resisted all the rules of society.
As far as Bruno was concerned, the day was a diversion, a confidence trick, a pointless effort. So he had given up. I looked at him and saw only his motionless mosquito net. He hardly stirred. The spiders’ webs displaying the corpses of midges as trophies, the lizard pretending to be a figurine pinned to the wall, the flies refusing to calm down: none of these things interested him. Bruno ignored even his wounds: he had stopped moaning with pain. I called him and he didn’t hear me. I spoke to him and he didn’t answer. You are a goldfish in a bowl, Monsieur Krausmann, he had said. Your only company is a lead diver and a pirate chest opening and closing on bubbles of air. And now he was the one shutting himself away in a bubble. Staring deep into space, Bruno was elsewhere, his face like a pale stain in the middle of his tramp’s beard. The previous day, he had spat in his soup. Out of irritation. Out of disgust, perhaps. Then he must have forgotten and had meticulously scraped the bottom of his plate. I had thought he was over his crisis; he was only on the edge of it; an oath uttered outside, an order barked, and Bruno plunged back. I felt sad for him, and for me. We were together in the cell, but there was an ocean between us. I had loved hearing about his tribulations as a ‘wandering anchorite’, filled with humorous incidents and prophetic disappointments … What was he thinking about? His ‘forgotten trails’? Aminata? Getting himself killed in order to have done with it? When you’re brooding, you only think about one thing at a time, and from his hangdog look, he could have been thinking about anything. Renunciation is just as wearing as stubbornness. Bruno had had faith, now he had abjured it, and if he no longer knew which way to turn, it was because everything seemed to him like a trap: the danger wasn’t in staying here, the danger was inside him.
There was a sense of tension in the fort. We felt it like a migraine. It was four days since Chief Moussa had left to haggle over Hans’s head, and he hadn’t been in contact since yesterday. Captain Gerima was in a foul mood again, constantly cursing his mobile phone and muttering, ‘What the hell is he up to?’ Chief Moussa had always kept him regularly updated and now, suddenly, he was impossible to reach. At first, the captain suspected it was a problem with the network; it wasn’t. He had changed the battery several times before he realised that it wasn’t a problem with the battery either. He again started fiddling with the keys of his mobile and let it ring endlessly at the other end of the line; nobody picked up.
This loss of contact was driving him mad. He called every half-hour: nothing. Then he would emerge from his lair, in a thunderous rage, and yell at his soldiers over trivial matters, kick the dust, swear at the top of his voice that he would beat to a pulp any bastard who dared to defy him. His men hid from him. As soon as he appeared in the doorway of his command post, they would vanish faster than ghosts. Even Joma was ill at ease whenever the captain flung his cap to the ground and stepped on it. I think our depression, Bruno’s and mine, owed a great deal to the captain’s anger. Gerima sensed that something was seriously wrong; things weren’t going as planned, and his growing anxiety exacerbated our anxiety and made the air unbreathable. Sometimes, unable to bear the captain’s cries of rage any longer, Bruno would put his hands over his ears and run to the padlocked door of our jail, intending to beg the officer to be quiet, but no sound would emerge from his lips.