Human Love Page 15

  He seemed not to have heard me, his gaze suddenly fixed on what no one apart from himself could see. His voice became very calm, detached. “For such a dream of fraternity to succeed there would have to be people like Kar-bychev. Yes, there would have to be a faith that drives out the little buzzing insect within us, that little fly, the fear of dying. But, above all, we should have to know how to love. Just simply to love. Then it would be unthinkable for a woman thrown to the ground to have her collarbone smashed with the kick of a boot …”

  I now remember clearly how on that night in London he told me about General Karbychev, the prisoner transformed by the Nazis into an ice statue. And I sensed then, as never before, the extent to which Elias was alone, as alone as a man upright beneath lashing cascades of water as they turn him into a block of ice.

  What I had taken for a fanciful prophecy came to pass soon afterward: the empire closed down the war in Afghanistan, was beaten hollow at Mavinga in southern Angola, prepared pathetically to abandon Ethiopia … I ran into Elias in Luanda just after the defeat at Mavinga, where the Soviet instructors turned out to be such hopeless strategists. He was emerging from a hospital where he had been treated for a number of wounds on the arms and face. I was expecting some reference to his disagreement with the battle plan, the tactical intelligence the commanders had ignored … I imagined a bitter but also grievously triumphant tone, the attitude of one who had got it right and had not been listened to. None of that. He tightened the strip of bandages around his head, smiled at me: “I have the feeling they’re going to send us all to the Horn of Africa soon. Closer to the happier Arab lands. Look, IVe got my Lawrence of Arabia headdress on already. The war no longer makes any sense, you know. There are people fighting on both sides only interested in filling their own pockets. And, if they’re lucky one day having a dozen naked pianists on piano stools of their own. Ring down the curtain!”

  When I found myself on Somali soil some months later, I did not even remember that prophetic joke. We no longer had time to recall the past: the hell of Mogadishu engulfed us in the violent and routine madness of fighting, in the recurring faces of the dead, among which only those of children could still shock us.

  3

  BEFORE ARRIVING IN MOGADISHU Elias had spent a week in Moscow, where he had seen Anna once more. He told me this in a couple of words on the telephone, just before I set off for Somalia myself. In the plane I imagined what their encounter might have been like, a Sunday in winter in a big Moscow apartment filled with objets d art accumulated during the couple’s tours abroad. As a result of working in Africa, Vadim must certainly have covered the walls in fantastic masks, spears whose shafts are decorated with bunches of sisal, shields of hippopotamus skin. And an array of figurines, mascots, and charms on every ledge. Now they’ll be able to add some of those curved daggers with jigsaw sheaths to them, I said to myself. The kind you get in the Horn of Africa …, visualizing this oppressive apartment with its thick carpets and massive furniture. Vadim had been working in Yemen. Then, after the start of the civil war there and the flight of the Soviets, they had sent him to Somalia. Anna had returned to Moscow to help their son, who was embarking on his university studies. She would soon be going to join her husband.

  I believed I could not be much mistaken in picturing her with the features of a woman of forty, still beautiful, with a figure that had become more ample, more imposing. In other words, the solid wife of an apparatchik, intelligent and self-confident, aware of her success and of the exceptional comfort of this apartment where one winters day, without any special emotion, she awaited the visit of an Angolan friend, yes, an old friend from twenty years ago.

  I pictured her thus, beautiful, calm, walking slowly through the rooms, adjusting a picture here, a mask there. And this calmness seemed to me to be the most grievous defeat to all that Elias had dreamed of.

  Our plane, an army aircraft, had headed for Addis Ababa, from which some of us were due to fly on to Mogadishu. During these long flights I was accustomed to hearing animated debates among the soldiers, each one holding forth about “his” war in this or that country in the world. This time the dark cabin remained quiet. And when the occasional conversation developed, all it amounted to was mere scraps of voices, worn out with weariness and a shared awareness: it was time to pull out of all these quagmires of the “anti-imperialist struggle.’”

  My neighbor was not even taking part in these terse exchanges; he was dozing, his ears blocked by the headphones of his tape recorder. His was an odd head: a very young face (he could hardly have been more than thirty) and completely white hair, that bluish, fragile white that very old men have. In the susurration of his headphones I identified a number of pieces following one another without any musical logic: the breathlessly tremulous “Petites Fleurs,” followed, who knows why, by Tchaikovsky’s “Valse Sentimentale,” which was encroached on by the breathy trilling of “Summertime,” and suddenly, after a screech that betrayed a recording from a disc, a classical fragment of wistful beauty, mingling violins and organ … I heard only the first few bars of it. My neighbor began twisting in his seat, rubbing his brow. By the glow of a small light, I could see his eyes glistening. His tape recorder was an old model, and at intervals the little cassette jammed — as it had now, since he had to take it out and adjust the tape by turning the spool with his finger. Incredulously, I saw that he was laughing softly and that his eyes were brimming with tears … He noticed my astonished glance, took off his headphones. “As soon as I stop the music I want to howl …” Not knowing how to respond to this admission, I gave a slight cough and murmured: “I see … Yes. It’s true. Music can …” But he was already talking, his eyes half closed, in the grip of a past that would not let him go. As an army doctor, he had been sent to Afghanistan at the age of twenty-six, quickly got used to restoring bodies riddled with shrapnel, repairing lacerated limbs, without any particular qualms, thanks to the indifference learned during his years as a medical student. Until that day, in the Baghlan mountains: a convoy of trucks with a tank at its head, children at the roadside laughing and waving their arms as the vehicles drove past. Invited on board by the tank crew, he is crammed into the smoke-filled turret where he can feel the force of this roaring mass of steel transmitted to his body, one that smashes through every obstacle with its tracks. This power has the effect of a fierce intoxication. He asks the driver for a light; the latter turns his head, offers him his lighter. The vehicle swerves off the road slightly, returns to it at once, but it is already too late. There is a grinding of brakes, and everything is mixed up: cold air rushing into the turret, the blinding sun, the shrill cries of the villagers, the cursing of the soldiers jumping to the ground … Then, despite all those sounds, silence falls. On the tanks tracks and under its tracks, a child’s body, crushed, hacked to pieces …

  In cases like this, he knows, some people start drinking or take refuge behind extra boorishness and cynicism, or else forget, or kill themselves. From now on he becomes a prey to these frequent attacks of weeping, a ridiculous reaction that prevents him doing his work. The solution he has found is this old tape recorder, which murmurs softly in a corner of the operating theater and which, in the end, everyone gets used to …

  I learn that he is called Leonid, that he comes from Leningrad, that his grandfather had been a doctor and died during the siege, So it was destiny or an utterly stupid mischance, that took that young man to an Afghan village where he had an impulse to smoke …

  He, too, is going to Mogadishu. “Mind you, given the situation there,” he concludes, “I think well be taking off again pretty quickly,” and he puts his headphones back on again.

  Destiny… Behind each of the shadowy figures crammed into that plane there is doubtless a story something like that day of sunshine in the Baghlan mountains, the trucks, the soldiers grinning at the children, then the shouting, the blood …

  I once more picture a pretty woman of forty, a kind of Soviet bourgeoise, seated in the
middle of a drawing room overloaded with rare and precious objects, a woman waiting for an African, yes, a black man foolish enough to have loved her for twenty years, a man grown old, who has just had several stitches removed from his arm and above his left cheekbone.

  And then one evening, in a street in the Somalian capital ravaged by gunfire, I have an opportunity to talk with Elias at length. The very last opportunity. I am not aware of this at the time and am more concerned about the progress of the fighters, who are loosing off machine guns in all directions as they advance toward the fortress-villa of the presidential palace. The house where we are hiding has been ransacked and half burned and is therefore no longer interesting, which makes it safe. Even the electric cables have been ripped out, as well as the baseboards, the hinges from the doors — and beneath the window there, I can see it now, some of the bricks are already loose. The whole of Mogadishu seems to have been eviscerated, scoured right down to its mineral shell. On the doorstep of our hiding place lies an open refrigerator, doubtless abandoned by those who fled the shooting. The wrapping on a large pack of milk shows the use-by date: a surreal piece of information, the milk is good until tomorrow …

  We have just been taking part in long and fruitless negotiations with the members of Manifesto, one of the innumerable opposition forces, locked in combat with the very weak “strong man” of the regime, President Syad Barré, once a friend of the USSR, then its enemy, and now an old man shut away within the fortress of the Villa Somalia. His opponents have already formed themselves into a government, and while making speeches about the future of the country, these gentlemen are squabbling over the ministerial portfolios they count on obtaining after the overthrow of Barré. They are ready to form alliances with anyone at all — the USSR, America, the devil — in fact, with whoever will supply the most arms and money in the shortest possible time. They are hesitant and lack ruthlessness. One cannot count on them. Soon the real warlords will arrive, who will have none of their reservations. Furthermore, it is clear that the Moscow analysts have as poor an understanding of this country as the American strategists. But the salient point is that there is less and less for the experts in history to understand. For this city’s only history is mere survival, the phases of it are recorded in corpses: these two bodies, among others, a few yards from our refuge, two youths, probably the ones who had to abandon the fridge and run, and fell beneath a burst of gunfire. And the chronology of this history gone mad is documented in the use-by date on a pack of milk swollen by the heat.

  We are waiting for nightfall to be able to leave the area. The fighters will be active for another half hour, shooting, killing, stocking up their reserves of food. Then they will go back to their quarters, as they do every day, to lose themselves, some in the thirst-provoking nirvana of khat, some in the caresses of a female companion in arms. The city, dark, without water, without links to the outside world, will become a dot in space amid the stars.

  The woman Elias begins to talk about is not at all like the present-day Anna I had imagined through my half-slumber in the plane. Instead, she is thinner and weary, and when she stands against the light beside the window her pale face blends with the silvery swirling of the snowflakes outside the glass. At first, like a clockwork toy animated by the last few turns of the key, she played the part of a worldly Muscovite woman, a diplomats wife showing a friend round her luxurious apartment. But within a few minutes the clockwork runs down, comes to a standstill. “There came a time when we’d had enough of all those African bits and pieces. Besides, its better like this. With all the masks they make for the tourists, there soon won’t be any forests left…” The clockwork within her comes to life in one last spasm, just to say that, unlike other diplomats wives, she has a job and that at the embassy they have entrusted her with work on data processing … They smile at one another, aware of the futility of the roles they are trying to play: she, a modern woman who has achieved a brilliant international career, he, a champion of human rights who braves all dangers (in the falseness of those first few minutes he had spoken briefly about the battle at Mavinga, where he was wounded. What an idiot!).

  They fall silent, observe the fluttering of white above the bare trees in the courtyard. He is aware of the slender-ness of Anna’s hand in his own. She begins speaking without turning her head toward him.

  “I’ve lived a life — in fact, I constructed it, this life — which I should not have lived. And yet, you see, I feel I absolutely had to live through it, such as it was, this life, to be capable of denying it. A lot of people can probably judge their lives like this. But the difference is that you and I love one another …”

  The snow tumbles even more heavily out of the darkening air. Elias draws a breath, preparing to reply, but suddenly a toy standing on the television set comes to life: a plastic crocodile that opens its jaws, moves its feet, and emits a growl with a jazzy tune. “It’s my son’s clock. That means it s time for the television news …” They both laugh softly and wait for the reptile to finish its performance. Anna goes on talking, but in a voice as if liberated, less cautious.

  “You told me one day that the world must be changed. Because it was intolerable for a soldier to smash a woman’s collarbone with a kick of his boot. But you haven’t really succeeded in changing it, this world …”

  “I’d have hated myself if I hadn’t fought to do so …”

  “If you’d married me, you wouldn’t have had time to fight, admit it.”

  “Even yesterday I should have replied: wrong, of course I would! But I don’t want to lie anymore. If I’d married you, I’d have become a fat Angolan apparatchik who’d spend his time opening accounts in the West and counting everything in barrels and carats … And I’d have looked like … Yes, that crocodile. But less fun.”

  She seems not to have heard his joking remark.

  “In the end this was the thought that kept me alive. I said to myself: Very well, I’m living with a man I don’t love. The years go by, and it will always be like this. Till I die. And then I remembered that woman they laid on the ground in front of her child, and the child sees his mother’s collarbone is broken … And then I said to myself that the only way to love you was to let you fight against that world. I suffered a lot but I believed I was doing the right thing. And now it’s too late. We can’t go back anymore …”

  They do not switch on the lights, and in the darkness Elias can see Annas eyes, her gaze lost in an invisible procession of days, suns, moments.

  “But what if we tried to go back?” It is suddenly hard for him to control his voice, although it is finally saying precisely what he wanted to say An improbable but unbelievably real, true, and vital dream. He tries to makt it less abrupt, to find a justification, an excuse for it. “You know, Anna, to tell you the truth, I shall soon have very little choice. There won’t be much of a future for the person IVe been all this time. Your country no longer needs me. Mine, governed as it is, will do everything in its power to make me disappear. So I’ll be forced to go back. I thought we could do it together …”

  “Go back … But go back where?”

  “Back to Sarma.”

  He leaves her at nightfall. The streets are already almost empty, the same streets, he thinks, as twenty years ago, the same slow swirling of the snow …

  A few dozen yards from his hotel three men suddenly block his path. Young, dressed in leather jackets. Heavy, wary faces. Elias steps aside slightly, feels his muscles tense ready for a fight. In a flash all the disgust for these Moscow brawls floods in: the collective beating up of a dirty negro. Except that now, facing these three cretins in their leather gear, there stands a body covered in scars, raked by bullets. He clenches his fists, lowers his chin.

  “Excuse me. Can you change this for a few dollars?” Their English accents are comical, and indeed the whole performance makes their faces look singularly foolish. All three of them look like recalcitrant pupils taking an oral exam.

  “No dollars,” he rep
lies. “Just Mongolian tugriks!” He smiles, walks round the trio, who are lost in confusion over how to translate his reply. On arriving at the hotel, he goes to the bar and orders a drink.

  In this country “a few dollars” has replaced the urge to smash a black persons face in. The progress is undeniable. He drinks, shuts his eyes. Deep within him these words that no longer belong to anyone resonate on their own in their fragile truth: “To go back … Back to Sarma …”

  The days that followed our conversation in the burned-out house were filled with bombardments and gunfire, the panic of foreigners fleeing the city, the rage or despair of the Somalis staying behind there, often to be killed. I did not see Elias again, nor did I have time to think again about his words. Once only, in a brief grievous insight, I perceived that his love for Anna, their love, resembled that great gulf of the sky on the night we had spoken together for the last time. A superbly starry sky above a city that was getting ready to die. Like that black chasm, their love needed no words, too remote from the lives of human beings. Within myself I could feel a wariness, a doubt, the need for proof.

  And yet I sensed that belief in this love was the ultimate belief of my own life, the faith beyond which nothing here on earth would have made sense any longer.

  From the threshold of our shelter we had followed the shuffling of furtive footfalls in the street, shadows slipping along. Elias tilted his head back and murmured: “Do you remember the sky in Lunda Norte? Hold on, I’m going to find the constellation of the Wolf …”

  4

  A WHOLE LIFETIME SEPARATES ME FROM THAT NIGHT in Somalia. Mogadishu in ruins, a capital that, with obstinacy, almost with relish, was committing suicide day by day. And now, at the other end of Africa, in a quite different Africa, the tranquil streets of Conakry, this big hotel facing the sea, the nauseating feeling of being a rich tourist in the tropics.