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…