Joma remained on guard on the rampart until sunrise, clicking the breech of his rifle and every now and again letting out cries of rage that seemed to perplex the night. He took his subordinates’ defection as a personal affront. Whenever Blackmoon tried to comfort him, Joma threatened to tear his heart out with his bare hands if he didn’t shut up. Several times, he looked in our direction and, despite the distance between us and the dim light, Bruno and I felt our hair stand on end.
Having waited in vain for a sign on the horizon, Joma went back to his room to dress. He put on a hunting vest, combat trousers and new hiking boots, hung two cartridge belts around his neck and across his chest, wrapped his head in a red scarf and came back out into the yard, his big pistol stuck in his belt and a Kalashnikov in his hand. His milky eyes sought to bury all they surveyed.
Towards eight o’clock, he got us out of our jail and told Blackmoon to tie our wrists behind our backs.
Joma finished hanging jerry cans of fuel on either side of the pick-up. Into the back of the vehicle, he threw a full duffle bag, a satchel with straps, two rucksacks, a box of canned food, slices of dried meat rolled in brown paper, a crate of ammunition and two goatskin canteens filled with drinking water. Bruno and I were on our knees in the dust, wondering what fate our kidnapper had in store for us as he prepared to leave the fort. Was he going to kill us? Leave us there? Take us with him? Joma was giving nothing away. He grunted orders which Blackmoon begrudgingly followed for his own protection, but without any undue haste.
‘What are you planning to do with us?’ Bruno asked.
Joma carefully checked that the ropes were tight and the jerry cans well balanced. The way he was tightening the knots betrayed a growing inner anger, which Bruno’s words only served to stoke.
‘You say you’ve read lots of books,’ Bruno went on, ‘that you know the works of the great poets by heart. You must have learnt something from them … Let us go. Or else come with us. We’ll say you saved our lives.’
Joma said nothing.
‘It’s pointless now, Joma. Actually, it’s always been pointless. If only you stepped back a bit, you’d see that what you’re doing is absurd. Why are you keeping us so far from our homes, so far from your home? What do you blame us for? Crossing your path? We’ve never done you any harm. I’m an African by adoption, and Dr Krausmann does humanitarian work. Imagine that! Humanitarian work! … Joma, for heaven’s sake, let us go. Captain Gerima is nothing but a crook, and you know it. Soldiers like him don’t fight, they just line their pockets. They don’t have any ideals or principles. They’d walk over their mother’s body for the smallest coin … Gerima is using your frustrations. He’s manipulating you. I’m certain he dumped his men in the wild and ran off with the money. Your comrades realised that. That’s why they left.’
Joma turned on his heel, charged at Bruno and gave him a kick in the stomach that knocked the breath out of him and bent him double. Bruno fell on his side, his eyes bulging with pain.
‘My comrades left because of you, you son of a bitch!’ Joma said, spitting at him.
I was horrified by this character. However many times he lashed out, I’d be just as disgusted and indignant. Things with Joma had become personal. I hated him, I hated him for what he represented: a monster in the raw, straight out of the primeval slime, with the instinctive violence of the very first fears and the very first hostilities; a big devil carved out of a block of granite with no other facet to him but his own brutality; his pumped-up body, his gestures, his voice, his megalomania, his quickness to fly off the handle, everything about him stank of murder. I hated him because he was an outrage to common sense, and because he had injected gall into my veins like poison so that I had the feeling I might end up being like him. I realised, to my immense sorrow — I was a doctor, after all — that there wasn’t room on this earth for the two of us, that the world couldn’t contain, at the same time and in the same place, two people who had nothing in common and whom nothing seemed able to reconcile.
Joma read my thoughts. My animosity towards him appealed in some obscure way to his vanity, as if he got most satisfaction from the disgust he inspired in me.
‘Do you want my photo?’ he cried.
I didn’t reply.
He snorted with disdain, pushed me away with his foot and grunted, ‘Humanitarian work? That was all we needed. You blond, blue-eyed idiot with your pretty face and your Rolex watches and your Porsche, you’re in humanitarian work? You hypochondriac, racist mother’s boy who’d disinfect the pavement if you found out that a black man had been walking along it before you, you want me to believe you’re so upset by world poverty that you’d give up your creature comforts to share the sufferings of niggers with bloated stomachs?’
‘You don’t really believe what you’re saying,’ I said.
‘I stopped believing in anything the day I realised that bullets speak louder than words.’
‘Maybe that’s your problem.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Definitely … I’m not a racist, I’m a doctor. When I examine a patient, I don’t have time to dwell on the colour of his skin.’
‘Stop, you’re breaking my heart … People like you disinfect their eyes the minute a beggar crosses their path. You’re just a fucking racist come to sniff our mass graves in the name of a sacrosanct Christian charity which has no more the odour of sanctity than an arsehole.’
‘You have no right to call me a racist. I won’t allow it.’
‘You see?’ he retorted. ‘Even when you’re under my control, you think you can give me orders. You’re at my mercy, completely at my mercy, and you expect me to ask YOUR permission to shoot you down like a dog …’ He shook his head. ‘These damned whites! Always drunk on their own importance. Even if you put holy water in their wine, they wouldn’t sober up.’
He went back to his room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.
The valley sloped gently for some thirty kilometres before it reached a chain of rocky mountains whittled away by erosion. They weren’t really mountains: given the traumatic flatness of the surroundings, the smallest hill took on a significance ten times greater than its actual measurements, as if in this tomblike landscape, every milestone needed to exaggerate its size in order not to disappear for ever. For four hours now, Joma had been taking us across a mineral, almost lunar universe, and not for a moment had I had the feeling that we were going to get out of it. The same trails led to the same rocks, the same thirsty soil lay in the same dried-up river beds, and always that blazing sun poured its molten lava down on our heads. The motionless dust lent something both vain and definitive to the horizon — a kind of still image of the end of the world.
With my back against the duffle bag, my legs sticking to the bed of the pick-up, I watched this merry-go-round of decay turn and turn and realised that I had lost interest in everything. I didn’t even feel the need to imagine what awaited me. I was starting to understand why, in some war films, heroes who’ve repelled enemy attacks and fought valiantly for days and nights on end, emerge suddenly from their shelters and brave their attackers’ guns … In any case, I had no idea what went on in our kidnappers’ heads. I didn’t know their mindset or their conception of human relations. However hard I tried to penetrate the way Joma’s mind worked, for example, it was as if I were trying to decipher the cryptograms in an esoteric book. ‘These people are alive now, but they come from another time,’ Hans had said. I had refused to believe it at first. My upbringing and culture had taught me that as long as you kept a clear head, you could overcome any misunderstanding. But these maniacs didn’t have clear heads, and I could see no way to reason with them.