The car returns at this moment. What will stay with me of that scene is its bizarrely slow-motion pace, the cause of which I do not yet understand. Yes, the steps Elias takes, as if in a time warp. He goes up to the man in the velvet suit, hands him the briefcase. Then, with equal slowness, he hands Anna a white scarf, the one she always covered her head with against the sun… He seems to be about to speak, but the words forming on his lips are inaudible. I believe what he says is being drowned by the sudden grinding of the gate. Then by the shouts of the crowd moving forward, plunging into the American paradise that is now ajar.
The penguins jostle one another; a woman’s hysterical cry can be heard (“You’ve lost your sandal!”), the ambassador’s voice trying to discipline this mad rush, to give it a little dignity. For it is the “American imperialists,” their eternal enemies, who are about to give them shelter. I just have time to note the farcical nature of the situation and to glimpse a woman’s face in the middle of the crowd being sucked into the funnel of the gateway. This face, Anna, looking back several times, and Vadim drawing her along by her arm. I glance behind me, but I can no longer see Elias. Neither in the crowd, nor in the Somali’s jeep…
“He’s over there!” I recognize Leonid’s voice. Elias is sitting down, his back against the wheel, his eyes open, his hands trailing on the ground. His left arm, from shoulder to wrist, is red. A great patch spreads over his T-shirt as well, on his belly… We lift him up; his head moves, and he is still trying to speak. Then we notice that the gate has closed once more. Leonid yells, kicks against the steel. Two cars pass in the street. Bullets chip at the paintwork on the gate right by our heads.
A scrap of garden with trees nicked by shell splinters, a house transformed into a makeshift hospital, a butterfly (no, a humming bird) beating against the glass of an oil lamp. The stink of a generator, the bitter acidity of dirty, bloody bodies, and from time to time, like the reminder of an impossible world, the cool of the ocean breeze. The buzzing of flies in this “operating room,” the crunch of shattered phials underfoot, the continual, monotonous groaning of the wounded and their families.
Leonid works, assisted by a Somali doctor who is very slowly chewing a ball of khat. The hummingbird, intoxicated by the light, spirals down toward the busy hands. Leonid knocks it aside as one would swat a mosquito. The bullets he extracts and tosses into a metal basin make a sound similar to that given off by melting ice. From time to time the explosions obliterate all sound, then the movements of the two doctors become invested with a hint of unreality. Leonid operates without weeping. And yet his tape recorder sleeps in the big knapsack thrown down beside the door… I study his face. No, the eyes are dry, just reddened with tiredness.
He straightens up, puts down the lancet, draws a sheet over the body. “Theres no way he could have set one foot in front of the other with the wounds he had… he murmurs. His eyes stare at me without seeing me. For a fraction of a second I believe I have touched upon the truth of what has happened: the man who had reappeared before us, a black briefcase in his hand, was no longer alive but moved forward, remaining upright, propelled by a force that resided somewhere other than in the body that now lies beneath this sheet.
We spend a whole day driving around in the blazing trap that is Mogadishu. The fact of carrying a dead man sometimes helps us to pass through roadblocks. Despite the violence of the slaughter, these mortal remains seeking burial inspire a distant echo of the sacred in the fighters. In some streets the smoke from the fires is so thick that we have to pause before moving on, not knowing what we shall see when the darkness clears. It could be that man whom a shell has welded to a wall in an incrustation of blood and torn garments. Or that child, which has made itself a little airplane from the blade of an electric fan and is playing at launching it in the middle of the gunfire. Or yet again, as in an appalling nightmare, the turret of a buried tank: our attempts to escape had led us into the area of the presidential palace, which was protected by these sunken tanks, transformed into artillery pieces. The gun barrel moves with a somnambulistic slowness, points at us, stops… We make a sharp U-turn and drive away, feeling on the backs of our necks the full weight of this weapon taking aim.
A helicopter passes in the sky. We know at once that this is the Americans evacuating their personnel – and the members of the Soviet embassy – onto the aircraft carrier Guam. I remember Elias s words: “You’ll soon be best friends with the Americans
At nightfall our driver leaves us several miles north of Mogadishu. He tells us he has run out of gas, and we have run out of money to pay for his services. During the night Leonid goes off toward the harbor, hoping to find some means of getting us onto a boat. The fever that was beginning to shake me the previous day changes into a fit of the shivers, which I cannot throw off, even pressed against the wall of a blockhouse that still holds the heat of the day. I wrap myself in a tarpaulin sheet found among the carcasses of cars. For a moment my shivering calms down. I adjust the blanket on Eliass body then clasp his hand in mine. It seems icy to me, but like that of a man who has come in from a winter night, from the great plains of snow. The borderline between his death and my life seems incredibly fine. The same sand, still warm, beneath our bodies. The same slightly ashen darkness of the ocean. The same receding banks of cloud in the sky. Never before have I felt the presence of an absent one so intensely.
Leonid returns. He has had the luck to meet the engineer from a small cargo boat, quite an elderly man who trained in the USSR. This nostalgia was not enough, however: Leonid had to give him both our watches and the money found in the leather pouch Elias carried on his belt.
Our embarkation takes place amid the ferocious melee of people staking their all to survive. No priority for anyone – men push women aside, trample on children. Leonid goes first, gripping the top end of the blanket in which Elias’s body is wrapped. What helps his progress is his weeping malady, which suddenly overcomes him again. Even in the midst of this throng, people stand aside from what they take to be a supernatural being, a young man with completely white hair, his features disfigured by sobbing. I find it difficult to follow him, breathless, my jaws clenched to stop my teeth chattering at each spasm of fever. A child clings to my jacket and is dragged through the crowd on the landing stage. “YouVe got malaria!” Leonid shouts suddenly as if this diagnosis could make my task easier.
We collapse at the stern of the boat in a seething mass of bodies, bundles, chests, ropes. The deck is covered in fine coal dust, which mingles with the white powder escaping from the sacks of flour being transported by half a dozen men as they brutally thrust aside the refugees and their wretched luggage. This loading reassures us a little: it is doubtless humanitarian aid that has been diverted and is due to be unloaded in some foreign port, along with ourselves.
At the end of the night the cargo boat attempts to berth. The outline of a jetty can be seen emerging from the darkness, a few lights… And then there are these interminable seconds when we are still moving forward, even though the boats engines have already gone into reverse at full power. From the jetty a heavy machine gun is raking it with, one might say, the infantile glee of having found a target exposed, as if in a shooting gallery The cries of those afraid of being killed are, as always, more shrill than the moans of those who have just been hit. A wild-looking man approaches the deckhouse, seeking refuge, sits down, spits blood. A woman beside me, all hunched up, scrapes patiently at the flaking paintwork on the coal-blackened deck. She will carry on with her demented activity throughout the day, as if to give just measure to the madness that surrounds us.