He collapsed onto his side, his eyes glazed and his features frozen for ever.
It was only then that I discovered a pistol in my hand.
I don’t remember what happened next.
All I know is that Bruno and I got in the pick-up and drove and drove until the night absorbed us like blotting paper.
8
Day dawned. Like a pointless prayer over a deaf, wretched and naked desert. A few rocks lay crumbling in the dust, like flotsam washed up by a sea that had vanished thousands of years ago. Here and there, garlanded with poisonous colocynths, thin strips of undergrowth indicated the outlines of what had once been river banks, where now solitary acacias stood like crosses. And that was all. There was nothing else you might hope to see: no caravans, no huts, not the slightest trace of a bivouac … There’s something so perverse about the desert. It’s a code, a trap set for you, a treacherous maze where even the boldest are doomed to failure, where the faint-hearted lose themselves among the mirages, where no patron saint would respond to your call for fear of appearing ridiculous. It’s a place of prayers that go unheard, a Via Dolorosa that never stops expanding, where stubbornness turns to obsession and faith to madness. Here lies the vanity of all things in this world, the bare stones and endless vistas seem to say. For here, everything turns back to dust, the taciturn mountains and the luxuriant forests, the lost paradises and the failed empires, even the noisy reign of men … Here, in this godforsaken vastness, tornados come to abdicate and the winds die empty-handed like waves on remote beaches, since only the inexorable course of ages is certain and invincible. Far, far in the distance, where the earth slopes into roundness, the horizon is pale and motionless, as if the night has kept it spellbound until morning … I too hadn’t slept a wink all night. Sitting paralysed on my seat in the cab. My head reverberating with gunshots. As wretched as the desert. How could I lay claim to a modicum of sleep when I hadn’t yet grasped what I had done? I had tried to reconstruct mentally what had happened and I had managed only to become even more confused. How had Joma’s pistol ended up in my hand? I hadn’t the faintest idea. My subconscious had quite simply blocked out the period of time between Bruno on the verge of dying and the shot; a blank had descended in the middle of my memories and remained suspended above the abyss into which my being had rushed. I, Dr Kurt Krausmann, who had never touched a gun in my life, had killed a man! What had driven me to such an extreme didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that I had killed a man, and I would have to live with it for the rest of my life. Bruno had tried to reason with me for much of the night. His words hadn’t reached me; I couldn’t assimilate them. He had shown me the blackish bruises on his neck and sworn that if I hadn’t intervened, he would be dead, and so would I. But that damned shot resonated endlessly in me like a wrecking ball smashing into a wall! I saw only Joma’s bulging eyes and the blood trickling from his mouth. How many times had I got out of the pick-up to throw up? My throat was sore from the vomit, and my stomach felt as if it had been turned inside out. Bruno swore he would have done the same, that there was nothing else I could have done. Of course there was nothing else I could have done, but I had killed a man and I didn’t know how to live with a tragedy to which I had thought myself culturally alien.
Wrapped in a sheet, I got out of the cab. I shivered in spite of the heat. Electric shocks went through my joints. I hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day, and all the vomiting had wrung out my insides. The place we had ended up in was hardly full of promise. It was an anonymous spot, bristling with skeletal hills, with a drab mist as a backdrop. Bruno was crouching by a wood fire, his eyes on a tiny coffee pot with a clanking lid. Clad in a brown tracksuit that was too big for his thin body — he must have found it in the duffle bag — he was poking the flames with a branch. He turned to me and said good morning in a toneless voice. I sat down on a mound of sand near the fire. A monitor lizard appeared at the top of a dune, looked at us suspiciously for a moment or two, then scurried away. Thin streaks on the ground indicated that a snake had recently passed that way. Two vultures circled in the sky, their piercing cries like darts from a blowpipe. The animal world wouldn’t let go of us, it was following our every move, treacherous and implacable.
Bruno handed me a cast-iron cup and some rusks. The coffee was burning hot. It tasted good. I didn’t touch the rusks.
‘How do you feel?’ Bruno asked, placing his hand on his bruised throat.
I didn’t reply.
Bruno finished his coffee and went to the pick-up. He took out Joma’s map and spread it on the bonnet, but couldn’t figure out our position. He told me we had a hundred litres of fuel in the jerry cans, about thirty litres of drinking water, and enough food for a week. As he hadn’t the slightest idea where we were, he suggested we stay here to give us time to think about what to do with this sudden, unexpected freedom of ours. The site we were occupying gave us a clear 360-degree view of the plain. If a vehicle or a camel driver appeared anywhere in the vicinity, we’d be able to identify it or him with the help of the binoculars and thus avoid unpleasant encounters. Someone might just come along who could lead us out of this labyrinth of rocks and sand.
I had no objection to Bruno’s suggestion. To be honest, I was in far too confused a state to think of anything better.
Bruno began by making an inventory of the things we were carrying in the back of the pick-up. In the duffle bag, we found two military uniforms, a pair of shoes, some vests, a cheche, half a dozen full Kalashnikov magazines tied together in pairs with sticking plaster, some wide-ranging books on European poetry, a brand-new pair of boxer shorts, sports socks and a pile of red scarves in their original wrapping. In the rucksacks, Joma had thrown canned food, pans, packets of bread and rusks, dried meat, cases of ammunition, defensive grenades, candles, boxes of matches, an oil stove, a sachet of coffee, some powdered sugar and a pocket torch. I looked for my watch, my ring and the other objects taken from me on the boat, but didn’t find them. Bruno grabbed the satchel and opened it by forcing a small padlock. Inside, along with all kinds of papers, including several sheets in tortuous handwriting with lots of crossings out, we found a passport belonging to Joma, an indecipherable identity card, press cuttings carefully sorted into plastic wallets, a small bundle of banknotes, a blurry wedding photograph … and a book that left us stunned. It was a slim volume of poems, the cover of which would have been utterly unremarkable if Joma’s face hadn’t been plastered all over it.
The title of the book and the name of the author were underlined in red:
Black Moon
by Joma Baba-Sy
‘Wow!’ Bruno said.
I grabbed the book from him. The back cover blurb read: A tailor by profession, Joma Baba-Sy is also a maker of verses and a tormented soul whose impassioned tirades call on Africa to awaken. Black Moon is his first book, but it already establishes him as a genuine poet who is sure to make his mark on the literature of our continent. Joma Baba-Sy has been awarded the National Prize for Letters, the Léopold Senghor Prize and the Trophy for Best Committed Poetry.
‘That brute was a poet,’ Bruno said, almost breathlessly.