Evening found us still in our separate spaces: I at my improvised lookout post watching the sun bleed itself dry, Bruno leaning back against his shrub. When the darkness reached my thoughts, I went back to the pickup, grabbed the jerry cans, poured petrol over the vehicle, struck a match and threw it on the bodywork. A swift flame spread through the cab and surged over the bonnet. Bruno shook his head sadly. He thought I’d gone mad. I hadn’t gone mad. I was aware how stupid my gesture must seem, but it was an act I’d thought through: I wanted to attract someone’s attention to us, and I didn’t care if that someone was a nomad or a bandit. I wasn’t afraid of being taken hostage again; the only thing I knew for sure was that I had no desire to wander in that damned desert until I died of thirst and exhaustion; I refused to end up a heap of anonymous bones surrounded by the carcasses of long-dead animals polished clean by successive sandstorms.
Day dawned. All that was left of the pick-up was a heap of charred, smoking scrap iron licked in places by the odd flickering flame. We hadn’t slept a wink, on the alert for a figure or a shadow or a noise. Nobody had come, no military patrol, no marauding gang, no camel driver, no djinn. Bruno asked me if I was pleased with my little performance and if I had recovered enough to follow him. I put one of the rucksacks on my back, draped a canteen across my shoulder and set off after him.
*
We walked all morning in the fierce sun, spent the afternoon in the shade of a rock, and in the evening resumed our trek until late in the night. When I took off my shoes, scraps of skin remained stuck to them. I slept until midday.
After two days of wandering, we collapsed in the middle of a stretch of scrub. We had used up half our reserves of water and our blistered shoulders could no longer bear any load. Bruno, who seemed to be holding out better than I was, suggested that I let him go off on his own to look for help. The state of my feet had slowed our progress, and the blisters were likely to become infected if left untreated. I promised him I’d be much better after a good night’s sleep.
We had dinner and sank into the arms of Morpheus without even realising it.
A baby was crying as day dawned. I thought I was dreaming, but Bruno had heard it too. He was sitting up, eyes wide, trying to see where the wailing was coming from. He put a finger to his lips, ordering me to keep quiet, and grabbed his rifle. The crying was coming from a thalweg. We walked around a low wall of undergrowth and slid along a slope, unleashing tiny avalanches of stones as we passed. A woman was crouching in a copse, cradling a baby that lay snuggled against her chest. Suddenly, she turned and saw us just above her. At the sight of the rifle, she hugged her child so tightly to her she could easily have suffocated it. Bruno made a gesture with his hand to reassure her, but she was so terrified by the weapon she didn’t even see it. He said something to her in a local language. She didn’t seem to understand. I told Bruno to lower his rifle. At that moment, ragged, ghostlike figures began appearing. Within a few minutes, we were surrounded by about forty women, children and men who had been sleeping in the long grass; our intrusion had woken them and, one after the other, they emerged from their hiding place, unsure whether they should surrender or run. Bruno put his rifle down on the ground and raised his arm in a gesture of appeasement. ‘We don’t wish you any harm,’ he said. They stared at us, more concerned by our physical degradation than by the weapon on the ground. Taking us for devils, the children hid behind their mothers’ ragged skirts. There was a movement at the back of the group, and they stood aside to let a white woman through. She was a sturdy woman in her fifties, as blonde as a haystack, and it was as if providence, with a click of its fingers, had restored my people to me. I would gladly have thrown myself into her arms if it hadn’t been for the fact that the expression on her face was one of suspicion and hostility.
‘Who are you?’ she asked in English, with a strong Scandinavian accent. ‘And what do you want with us?’
‘We’re lost,’ Bruno said. ‘We’ve been drifting across the desert for days now.’
‘If that’s the case, why are you armed?’
‘We were taken hostage, and we escaped. We have no idea where we are and we don’t know where to go.’ He held out his hand and let it hang in mid-air. ‘My name’s Bruno, I’m an anthropologist, and this is Dr Krausmann.’
The woman looked us up and down, then said through clenched teeth, ‘Lotta Pedersen, gynaecologist.’
She told her companions to go back to their places and motioned with her head for us to follow her. She led us over to where another, younger white woman was sleeping beneath a vault of branches. This woman, who seemed to be in charge of the group, greeted us with a degree of respect. ‘I’m Dr Elena Juárez,’ she said, shaking our hands. Three Africans joined us, two of them in white coats with red crosses on the breast pockets. She introduced them. The youngest was Dr Orfane. He was slim and rather handsome; his tin-framed glasses made him look like a matinee idol. The other two, Omar and Samuel, both in their early thirties, were nurses.
Bruno briefly told them about our captivity, and about the way we had evaded our kidnappers before our stolen pick-up gave out on us. He omitted the tragic episode of Joma. In her turn, Dr Elena Juárez told us how, while her group was conducting a vaccination campaign, she had found herself at the head of an army of refugees. Having dropped Lotta Pedersen and Dr Orfane in a tribal village, she had left with the two male nurses to make a list of the patients in a neighbouring hamlet. On the way, their Land Rover had been put out of action by an antipersonnel mine. Then they had been pursued by armed men across the scrub and only owed their salvation to the fact that night had fallen and their driver, Jibreel, had such a good sense of direction. When they got back to the tribal village, they had found the families in a state of shock. A rebel attack was believed imminent. They had to leave quickly. So it was that the medical group now found itself, after almost a week on the road, stuck with forty fugitives. I asked Dr Juárez if they at least knew where they were going; she assured me that the group had an excellent guide, in the person of the driver, and that in three or four days, barring any unforeseen incidents, they would reach their camp, a reception centre run by the Red Cross.
‘There were twenty-eight of us at first,’ Dr Juárez said. ‘Other fleeing families have joined us on the way. Unfortunately, two old women died of exhaustion yesterday.’
A man whose eyes had rolled back jumped out in front of us. He was wearing a city suit that had seen better days, the jacket open to reveal a bare, hollow stomach. Wagging his finger, he called heaven to be his witness and declaimed in a sepulchral voice, ‘They came at dawn. They burnt down our huts, killed our goats, our donkeys and our dogs, then rounded us up in the square and started killing us, the fathers in front of their children, the babies in their mothers’ arms. If the devil had been there that day, he would have taken to his heels.’
‘It’s all right, Mr Obeid,’ Dr Juárez said, signalling to one of the nurses.
The nurse took the man to one side, put an arm around his shoulders and walked him away, talking to him softly. Dr Juárez explained that the man was a teacher, the only survivor of a massacre that had wiped out his family, and that he intoned his complaint from morning to night, blaming the shrubs and the stones.
‘We have other survivors among us, and I’m afraid their traumas are irreversible,’ Dr Orfane said. ‘What’s your speciality, Dr Krausmann?’