‘No,’ I stammered after a long silence, ‘there must be some mistake. Hans was sold to a criminal group for money. The reason they haven’t asked for a ransom yet is because my friend is being auctioned. His last buyer will soon put in an appearance. This shepherd’s talking nonsense. Or maybe he’s an accomplice of the kidnappers and is lying to divert suspicion from himself and allow his associates to gain time. They’re hoping you’ll call off the search.’
‘Doctor—’
‘I won’t allow you to manipulate me, colonel. I refuse to listen to you and I refuse to go with you to Khartoum. I’m not moving from here until I get an answer to my question: where is Hans Makkenroth?’
‘I understand how you feel,’ Bechter said, ‘but I can’t approve your decision. I assure you you’d be more useful to us elsewhere.’
‘We have to go back today,’ the colonel said to me. ‘We chartered the plane for the day, and it’ll be dark soon.’
‘I’m sorry, colonel. Your priorities are not the same as mine.’
As far as I was concerned, it was inconceivable that I should go back to Germany without Hans. I wanted to get out of Africa without leaving anything behind and without taking anything away with me. I wanted to dismiss anything that might mar my return to a normal life. It would be hard, very hard, but I intended to succeed because it was the only way for a survivor to learn to live again. I would be able to turn my back on the hateful memories that were dogging my heels and shake off the invective-laden voices and terrible gunshots that still echoed in my head. I would manage to convince myself that my stay in Africa had been nothing but a bad dream, and every morning that the world still had in store for me I would wake up to the sounds that were dear to me.
The delegation failed to persuade me to leave the camp. Bruno was on my side. He refused to abandon me, convinced that Hans was still alive and was being moved from one buyer to another somewhere in the desert. As the sun was going down, the two first secretaries resigned themselves and granted us a few days to think it over, on condition that we cooperate with an officer who would remain in the camp and keep in close contact with the African Union forces deployed in the sector.
When the plane took off, I was overcome with a mixture of dread and loneliness. What if the shepherd was telling the truth? What if Hans had succumbed to his wounds? That possibility was the final blow. My knees gave way and pain gripped my body and my mind.
In the canteen, I stared at my plate without touching it. I couldn’t even have swallowed my own saliva. The rattle of knives and forks sounded to me like hailstones, crushing my thoughts into thousands of shards. Bruno noticed how badly affected I was. He took my hand, but the gesture felt like a bite. I asked him to excuse me and went outside to get some air.
I walked in the darkness without knowing where I was going. Images of Hans went round and round in my head. I saw him again at the controls of his boat, limping through a thalweg with his shirt clinging to his wound, not finding words to say at Jessica’s funeral, fanning himself with his hat in the sun at Sharm el-Sheikh. I had the impression that a whole chunk of my universe was missing, that the absence of Hans had created an impossible gulf between me and the world. However hard I tried to dismiss the idea he might be dead, it kept coming back, as fierce as a hornet.
Elena found me on the other side of the fence, huddled beneath a solitary tree, wild with anxiety. She leant down and talked to me, but couldn’t reach me. Unable to get any response or reaction from me, she took me in her arms and I abandoned myself to her like a child.
3
I needed someone.
And Elena was there.
When death tries to suck the lifeblood from you, life has to react, or it will lose all credibility. That might be what happened to me. Hans’s probable death had reactivated my survival instinct. By loving Elena, I proved to myself that I was alive. I was surprised to wake up in her bed. Surprised but reassured. My intimacy with Elena was more than a refuge for me, it enabled me to make peace with myself. Elena was embarrassed. Did she blame herself for taking advantage of the situation? She would have been wrong to think that. I needed support, and she was my rock. How could I have rejected her lips when they gave me back my soul? Hadn’t she told me she felt lonely? In making love, we had formed a common front against all the things that had swept away our moorings.
She had made coffee, put the tray down on the bedside table and gone into the bathroom to get dressed. When she returned, her eyes wandered several times around the room before coming to rest on me. ‘Now that you’ve decided to stay in the camp, what do you plan to do with your days?’ she asked. I told her that if she had no objections, I’d like to resume my work. She assured me that the patients would be happy to be tended by me. I promised her I would join her in the treatment room as soon as I had taken a shower.
Elena had already examined half the patients by the time I joined her in the infirmary. I found her at the bedside of the old woman, who had miraculously survived and was still in intensive care. Her son, the young man with the cart, was in the next bed. He, too, was on a drip. He wouldn’t take his eyes off his mother … Elena introduced me to her patients. There were about thirty of them, from different backgrounds: old men, women and children, most of them survivors of raids. Orfane brought me a white coat and a stethoscope and gave me a row of beds to deal with. Within ten minutes, I had recovered all my old medical reflexes. A young boy grabbed me by the wrist. His case was clearly desperate. With his hairless skull, almost non-existent eyebrows and yellowish complexion, he was nothing more than a big head above a skeleton. The skin of his face crumpled like a sheet of paper when he smiled at me.
‘Is it true that in Germany there are glass houses so high they reach the clouds?’
‘Yes, it’s true,’ I said, taking his hand in mine and sitting down on the edge of his bed.
‘And do people live in them?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how do they get to the top?’
‘They take the lift.’
‘What’s a lift?’
‘A kind of cage. You go inside, press a button with a number next to it, and the cage goes up by itself.’
‘That’s magic … When I’m better, I’ll go to your country and see the glass houses.’
Still smiling, he lay down again and closed his eyes.
Orfane came and told me that the director was waiting for me in his office. I finished my rounds before going.
Bruno had got there before me. He was sprawling on the sofa, his legs crossed and his arms stretched out along the back. The Sudanese colonel saw us without either the captain or Pfer. We told him our stories from the beginning, the ambush outside Mogadishu in Bruno’s case, the attack on the boat in mine, the terrible journey across scrub and desert, the disused fort where Captain Gerima had kept us prisoner, Chief Moussa, Joma the poet-pirate, the transfer of Hans, the final duel that had allowed us to escape, our meeting with Elena Juárez and her refugees. It was a detailed account, and the colonel didn’t interrupt us once: I assumed he was recording our statements on the tape recorder that stood on Pfer’s desk. When we had finished, he asked us to pay attention and went to a map of the region hanging on the wall. With an expandable pointer he pointed to three places, which he surrounded with little blue triangles: the place where Jibreel, the camp’s guide and driver, had found Bruno and me; the place where the shepherd said he had received a visit from pirates with the wounded Hans; the place where we had been kept prisoner by Captain Gerima (based on our description of the outpost and the surrounding landscape). He admitted that he couldn’t understand why the kidnappers had chosen such a bleak, hostile area instead of staying in Somalia where the trade in hostages could be carried on without too many obstacles, although he pointed out that rebels preferred to manoeuvre across borders so that if the worst came to the worst they could fall back on the neighbouring country to avoid being pursued by government forces. Bruno reminded him that we weren’t there to follow a course in military tactics, but to find Hans Makkenroth. The colonel took no notice of his words and continued his presentation. Having finished with the map, he turned to his files. He began by telling us that the authorities had nothing on the so-called Captain Gerima and that no officer who had deserted matched his description.