Human Love

1

As he witnessed the betrayal of the ideals he had always fought for, his resolve did not falter In Africa the USSR abandoned bloody remnants of ideals, ruined dreams, the ghosts of those who had believed in them and died for them. I talked to him about this inglorious ending and spoke harshly, as true friends allow themselves to, of his awn commitment and the apparent futility of his remaining faithful to it. I was struck by the tone of his reply, that of truths that do not age. In his youth he had learned about the fate of a Russian general, Karbychev, who, as a prisoner of the Nazis, resisted all attempts over long months to turn him, rejecting the most tempting promises, scorning the threats, braving the tortures. On a bitterly cold day the S S made him walk outside naked and began spraying him with a jet of water. The man remained upright, motionless, slowly turning into a statue of ice… J remember having suggested to Elias that we were no longer in the same period and that our world was no longer… He interrupted me, though not rudely, to remark that he still lived in a world where a woman whose collarbone had heen smashed by a soldiers boot could be left to die. “In your Dostoyevsky,” he added, with a grim smile, “Ivan rejects the ideal society since creating it would oblige us to witness a child shedding tiny tears. Im not as rigid as that… But I am the child who saw his mother prostitute herself for a mouthful of bread. So, understand me well, it won’t be easy to make a turncoat of me…”

I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN ABOUT ELIAS ALMEIDAS LIFE. I noted down that fragment a couple of days ago in the plane, thinking I would read it out at the “African Life Stories” symposium. Each participating writer was due to present a brief personal testimony.

I quickly understood the extent to which I had been mistaken in my choice of text, so to speak. I had not been back to Africa for fifteen years…

Now at the reception where all the participants are gathered, I try to grasp in what way modes of thought and behavior have changed. Above all to grasp what it is that makes those few notes on Elias completely anachronistic to these people drinking, smiling at one another, kissing, exchanging cards. At the center of the room can be seen a nucleus formed by the dark suits of the “fat-cat Africans of the international conference circuit,” here to debate sustainable development. They are protected by a swirling mass of secretaries and press attachés. Two cameras from a television crew cut slowly through the crowd. I can make out the African writer who spoke this afternoon: in oracular tones he had extolled the ancestral magic, inaccessible to the European brain, the traditions and rites without which Africa would no longer be Africa, palaver trees, the sense of the sacred… He is chatting now to a colleague who, at the same roundtable discussion, made a slashing attack on the “nostalgia merchants,” the “gravediggers.” All those, in short, who did not believe, like him, that Africa was “surfing every new wave,” “swinging to the beat of modernity,” and even “grafting its black balls onto the anemic culture of Europe.” I can also see the lean and frail (“anemic”…) French novelist who, having made two trips to Senegal, claims to be an “adventurer into darkest Africa.” He is busy going into raptures over a group of traditional singers whose multicolored flowing robes smack of modern textile manufacture. Next to them a restless circle of rappers who will be performing this evening: smug little gigolo faces, the grimaces of spoiled children of political correctness, wearing outfits that flaunt the ugliness of a domesticated counterculture, reeking of cash. Finally, beside a score of drawings fixed to the wall, the couple I recognize: the plump white woman with beet-colored hair, one of the conference organizers, and her lover, the artist from Kinshasa. He is giving an interview to the journalists, pointing at his drawings; she watches him a little as if he were her own creation…

Is there such a great change, in fact? Over fifteen company in question has changed its name. The networks have reconstituted themselves. And only a handful of people would still be able to guess that the “upholder of the law” in question was Elias Almeida.

In fact, he has no other life than this ghostly presence in memories now grown confused, repressed, indecipherable. I remember hastily noting down the stories he told me, joining the dots between our various often chance encounters in Africa, in Europe, in the United States. But I can no longer conceive of any logic that might link these fragments, apart from the failure of all that he dreamed of, the loss of the one he loved.

Out on the terrace, I again locate Lupus, the constellation of the Wolf, in the dense black sky. Down below, on the hotels broad front steps, the crowd of guests is preparing to go and explore the night life of this African capital. The party goes on. The thick necks settle into grotesque limousines, the rank and file are assigned to broken-down minibuses. At a certain level of social clownishness, human stupidity almost inspires compassion. On the far side of the frontier, so close to this city, war rages, villages burn, adults kill children, other children become killers. The world against which Elias Almeida fought… The door onto the neighboring terrace opens; two figures hidden in the darkness settle into deck chairs. The fat white woman and her friend from Kinshasa embark on a verbose prelude to coitus.

This evening I decide to abandon the search for any rational order in the fragments of the past my memory has retained. The logic of history the causes of every war and every peace, universal morality – none of that has ever helped humanity to prevent a boot smashing a woman’s collarbone and children learning to kill. It was that night in Lunda Norte that made me wary of all those learned abstractions. Instead of history what I saw then was soldiers gripping a woman crouched on all fours, whom they had just raped and killed. One of them extracting the tiny granules of rough diamonds from her dead mouth. Now a child rigged up in a gas mask thrust his hideous head in at the window of our prison, threatening us with a weapon too heavy for his thin arms. Elias talked to him and learned that the boys father had been shot by President Neto’s regime, which was liquidating “factionalists.” Uneasily, I clung for a moment to the “historical logic” of the struggle against the enemies of the revolution. Finally I realized that what this lofty logic came down to was the gaze of that child high on cannabis, Eliass body, covered in infected wounds, and that woman’s distorted mouth, where a big breathless soldier’s fingers searched for ugly little pebbles. On his left cheek there was a scar in the form of a star. Next morning he was one of the few to escape the Cuban commandos. I had stopped with Elias close to a pit dug for the raped Zairean woman and the child with his face hidden by a gas mask. The earth was reddish brown, with a good smell of humid undergrowth. “The Kremlin will never forgive Neto for renewing contact with Mobutu… Elias murmured as if to himself. Five months later, in September 1979, Neto was dying in Moscow. The logic of history… Beside this grave for the Zairean woman and the child the notion of an archaeological dig passed through my mind as in a bad dream: what would the archaeologists of the distant future make of our civilization when they discovered this skeleton of a woman, with a few fragments of diamonds in its mouth, and that one of a masked child?

I hasten to write down what I know of Elias Almeida’s life. Without imposing any order on these fragments. Sometimes I am tempted by the novelistic play of coincidence: the poet Neto, having become president, kills thousands of men and then dies, as if in a funeral ode, by taking poison in a glass of champagne offered him by a pretty woman who, quite calmly, watches him die. An easy game, I know, these coincidences. Reality prefers failure, delay, the impossibility of communing in thought with a loved one. When he arrived in the Congo at the age of fifteen to join his father, there was an episode Elias had wanted to tell him about: a truck filled with Portuguese soldiers drives past, a burst of submachine gun fire, bullets ripping apart the foliage, birds scatter, others fall, and one limps in the dust, its wing broken. The soldiers’ laughter, the silence. The grandiose randomness of evil. Above all, Ellas wanted to tell his father about the circumstances of his mothers death. “Yes, I know I’ve been told about it,” his father said hurriedly. “Yes, that’s… how it is.”

Perhaps the true logic of life might be wholly contained in this unanswerable: “That’s how it is.”

2

Kinshasa. A black-and-white film.

A FAIR, MILKY SKIN, THICK, FLESHY THIGHS: a woman hitches up her tight-fitting skirt and settles herself into a large luxury car. Glaring lights stand out in the night, as always in Africa. The woman’s excessively golden hair glitters. Her stiletto heels oblige her to lift her knees quite high as she sits down. Her body folded up on the seat is reminiscent of a… yes, a fat turkey trussed for the oven.

In the press of the crowd on the palace staircase I intercept Elias’s look, his brief smile. No other exchange should indicate that we are acquainted. With a swift, knowing gaze he points out a face to me, amid the throng of dark suits and evening dresses. An African of about forty, tall, corpulent, a little too tightly squeezed into a designer suit. Dilated eyes, nostrils visibly quivering. He stares at the woman wriggling about on the seat, adjusting her skirt around her broad thighs, as she seeks a comfortable position for her high heels. This feverish attention is lost among the whirlwind of words of farewell, little laughs, grotesque bowings and scrapings, in which “President” and “General” are bandied back and forth, the flutter of visiting cards, the bustle of chauffeurs and bodyguards. The man devouring the turkey-woman with his eyes believes he is invisible. On his left cheek I suddenly make out a pale asterisk, the trace of a scar. The face of the soldier retrieving diamonds from the mouth of a dead woman comes back to me. A coincidence? I should like to ask Ellas, But he has gone already, and besides, would he know himself?

Several days later I learn that the man with the scar on his cheek is known to our secret services as “the Candidate” – a Zairean established in Luanda who manages the sale of Angolan oil to the Americans, who have never recognized Marxist Angola. They are thus buying oil from a phantom state! And the “Marxist” Angolans are buying themselves villas in Europe thanks to the oil sold to the American imperialists with whom they are at war. The logic of history… Washington has its money on “the Candidate,” as a probable successor to Mobutu in Zaire. Soviet intelligence have had their eye on this man for several months. The turkey-woman makes a good bait…

This frenzied tangle of world affairs, the energy of thousands of men confronting one another, plotting, selling incalculable riches, piling up millions in secret bank accounts, wooing their enemies and tearing their allies to pieces, dragging their countries into long years of war, starving whole regions, paying armies of hacks to glorify their policies, all this crazy global machinery is concentrated that evening in the fleshy body of a blond woman whom a sweating black man would like to possess.

In Elias’s look I perceive the rapid alternation between a fighters hardness and immense sadness better than before.

A brief while later the dossier on “the Candidate” is enriched by a filmed sequence: him and the turkey-woman bonded together in a monotonous coupling. From time to time the woman reaches under the man’s body to make sure the contraceptive has not slipped… There is not much light in the room, and when she gets up, the woman peers at her underclothes to avoid putting them on inside out. From the bed the man watches her doing this, with a stubborn, strangely hostile air. The other, shorter sequence has a greater variety of light and shade. In it the man’s half open mouth can be seen, his eyes slightly bulging, staring at the woman whose head thrusts up and down rhythmically as she fellates him. Then he sleeps, while the woman rummages in a briefcase and page by page photographs a thick notebook with glittering gilt edges.

At the year’s end comes the greatest surprise of all. Suddenly this whole game becomes completely pointless. The Americans abandon “the Candidate,” having found a creature more suited to their plans. French arms salesmen arrive in the marketplace and muddy the waters. In Moscow Andropov dies; power slips into an increasingly evident coma. In Luanda one tribe of corrupt men drives out another. The leaders furnish themselves with the services of new networks of traffickers. Bank account numbers are changed. The Angolan president promises the eradication, once and for all, of UNITA, which is supported by the Americans, and the immediate establishment of socialism, assisted by the USSR.

And of all this gigantic farce what remains is Elias Almeidas life, endangered several times, in order (I observe maliciously) to obtain two pieces of film in which a portly African and a buxom white woman can be seen glued together.

What also remains in my memory is Eliass look: cool determination and the sadness of one who no longer has any illusions.

Cabinda. What can be demanded of a life and a death.

Two years later we find ourselves in Cabinda, dining beside the harbor under a sky where the stars mingle with the lights on the oil rigs. Elias has just been spending time in northern Angola, “not far from the forests where those heroic UNITA idiots put us in the lockup,” he says with a smile. His right wrist is in plaster, and this shackle, too, is a reminder of that night long ago in Lunda Norte. Im on the point of asking him, in the same ironic tones, whether “the Candidate” could not by any chance be the sergeant who imprisoned us: he had a similar scar on his cheek.

A man and a woman, both of them quite elderly, appear in front of the rickety tables on the terrace where we are sitting. They walk one behind the other, joined together by two long planks, which they carry on their shoulders, one on each side of their heads. The resemblance to the wooden collars once used to keep slaves in line immediately comes to mind. “People like them live on a dollar a month,” says Elias softly without looking at me. “Joâo Alves, that apparatchik I knew in Moscow, has just bought a second house close to Lisbon. He s delighted that with the entry into Europe, property prices will go up…”

He remains silent for a long while, then, still in low tones, talks to me about his mission in Lunda Norte: to smash the diamond barter business, that vital sinew of war for UNITA (“Not to mention our ‘Marxists’ in Luanda,” he murmurs with gritted teeth). Arms for diamonds, and with the arms they conquer diamond-bearing territories and can thus buy more arms to conquer further territories. It is the same routine for oil…

“So wars a very profitable industry,” he says, nodding toward the oil rigs. “And what’s more, instead of retiring, soldiers get killed, which suits everybody. Nothing new about it as a production cycle. In the old days they stirred up conflicts between tribes to provide themselves with slaves. But slaves were hard work. You had to tie them up, rather like those two old people with their planks, take them to the coast, transport them across the ocean, give them a scrap of food… Diamonds can be turned into houses near Lisbon much quicker,”

I have an impulse to goad him into the admission I sense maturing within him: why risk his life if the dice are loaded and it is in everyone’s interest for this civil war to continue so they grow rich? I do not broach the topic head-on; I talk about the videotape of “the Candidate” and the turkey-woman. This fragment of film implied lengthy approach maneuvers, attempts at recruitment, blackmail… in the vague hope of having “our man” in a future government. Now all that work had come to nothing, producing only a video reminiscent of a third-rate blue movie.

I am expecting a political rationale, a precept I had heard on his lips before now: “You can’t make a revolution in kid gloves.” “A professional should never ask himself: What’s the point? That’s a question for Hamlets.” Yes, a half-mocking reply designed to stop all Jesuitical moralizing in its tracks.

This time there is no note of irony in his voice. “You know, maybe it’s my age, but I ask less and less of life. I often think it would have been enough for me just to have been able to save that child, you remember, in Lunda Norte, the one who’d put on an old gas mask. That little lad completely high on drink and drugs. I should have told him to hide so as not to be shot in the morning…”

The old couple walk back close to the restaurant where we sit at the table. Relieved of their burden, the man and woman nevertheless walk as before, one behind the other, with the same heavy tread. Elias watches them walking away, then, without changing his tone, continues: “And with death it’s the same. When I was young I lacked all modesty, I dreamed of it being heroic, flamboyant. On the barricades, in some way or other… One day I learned how Antonio Carvalho died, my first master in Marxism. They tortured him appallingly to make him denounce me. Mine was the eye that got in their way, the ‘man from Moscow’ to be got rid of. Carvalho defeated them all because he smiled! Yes. He said nothing, just smiled. Right to the end…”

We fell silent, our eyes directed toward the ocean, toward the darkness pockmarked with flares from the oil rigs. By day and night, deep in the dense waters, steel tubes suck in the earth’s black blood. This oil is transformed into arms, then into the red blood of human beings.

Elias gives a slight shake of his head: “You say: two scraps of film with that fat pig fucking her… It’s not as simple as that. Under pressure from the Americans, that fellow had big plans. To create a real Zairean army equipped by the United States. An army of professionals, no longer those gangs of pillagers and drunkards Mobutu has at his disposal. If it had worked, we’d have had another war. And we’d have lost it. We managed to sideline that young man with his weakness for beautiful blond women… Another war. Yes. We’ve already reached seven hundred thousand dead since we started building the radiant future. And those seven hundred thousand include Carvalho. And that child buried with his gas mask on his head…”

He is aware of a note of justification in his words, the eternal reasoning of spies: devious maneuvers, this necessary evil in order to prevent a much greater evil. Yes. the ousting of one crook to save thousands of innocents… the old argument revolutionaries and other benefactors of humanity generally put forward. We exchange glances, aware of what can lie hidden behind this “necessary evil.”

Ellas begins to talk with a more relaxed, almost amused, air: “Its true that Zairean looked very like the sergeant who interrogated us at Lunda Norte. That scar from a bullet in the shape of an asterisk. But it wasn’t him. Just a man of the same type. An ambitious career soldier thrust toward the top either by ourselves or by the Westerners. One of those pawns they try to turn into a leader. Sometimes they crack. Sometimes they succeed, and you get Bokassa, Idi Amin, Mengistu, and the rest. If you can call that success. Yes, the same mold. The ingredients are always similar: money, an almost sensual desire for power, the flesh of women. I’ve met humans in this mold in Guinea-Bissau, in Brazzaville… To begin with you actually think you’re meeting the same person. And it’s not so much their physique that’s deceptive. There are big ones and little ones. No, it’s… their eyes, which seem to be saying: I’m ready for anything. Like that Zairean you saw. To ride in the limousine with that fat blond, he was ready to cover a whole country in graves.”

We walk to the end of a jetty where we can feel the keen nocturnal force of the wind off the open sea. Elias s shirt flaps around his body making him look thinner, more fragile. In my mind’s eye I have a sudden vision of him, alone, assailed by a crowd of men whose faces are impossible to make out, they look so alike. Men cast in that mold, I tell myself, against whom he strives to fight… It is a losing battle, and he knows it. History, whose course he dreamed of changing, is in fact nothing more than an elegant metaphor, and a man staring at a woman’s broad thighs as she sits on a car seat, yes, often the hungriness of such a stare counts for more in this metaphor than the noblest of ideals and the commitments to causes made by heroes.

Beneath our feet, in the marine depths, the steel tubes continue to pump the black blood that will turn into money, arms, the red blood of the dead, bought female flesh. I want to say this to Elias, to shake his faith, to mock his obstinacy. Two months previously I had seen Anna at a reception at the Soviet embassy in Maputo, where her husband had been posted. She reminded me of a big smiling doll, uttering bland inanities, batting her eyelashes with the regularity of an automaton. I was positioned somewhat to one side, and I could see that the fingers of her left hand were kneading the handle of her handbag, her thumbnail was tearing the leather, and this tensed hand was the only true and living part of this clockwork doll.

“Two months ago, at Maputo,” I say, “I ran into… Anna.”

Maputo. Beyond words.

I take a breath before deciding to tell him what I think of this woman, what a Russian can think of this Russian woman, and what might perhaps be missed by an African or, quite simply, the man who loved her and still loves her. I don’t have time to go on. Elias starts to talk very softly, his gaze lost in the supple motion of the waves slipping along the jetty. An evening, the same gathering of guests in an embassy garden, the same expressions, either rigid or, on the contrary, animated by the grimaces of social chitchat, the same routine conversations where no one listens to anyone. He is separated from Anna by a few feet of this air laden with hypocrisy. They cannot speak to one another; they must not betray their past in any way, not a gesture, not a smile. For them to stand so close to one another without recognizing one another is the best way of pretending to be strangers. She looks like a big, beautiful doll, he thinks, and doubtless everyone else thinks the same. He has aged, she must be telling herself; his hair is turning gray, there’s that scar on his temple, and his wrist in the plaster cast concealed by the sleeve of his shirt. She lets this doll do the talking for her, he thinks, and is becoming just as I knew her in Moscow, that quivering of the eyelashes is exactly as it used to be… For several minutes, as the guests come and go across the garden, they are left alone. Without turning his head toward Anna, Elias recites the names of streets in Moscow at random. She repeats them, in a hesitant echo, then grows bolder and murmurs: “So you haven’t forgotten them…” Other names, precious passwords, are whispered: those of little stations far away in the middle of the taiga. The beautiful doll smiles at a couple who greet her in passing. Anna whispers again, her lips hardly open: “I’ve had a letter from Sarma. They’re asking when you’ll come back… So glad to meet you… Oh, very lovely! Especially the Maputo game reserve and Inhaca Island…” The doll speaks to a couple, an extremely suntanned man, a pale, sickly looking woman. Elias moves away, carrying with him just the melody of that “when you’ll come back…”

That night in Cabinda I believe I have understood what he truly experienced at Sarma: a life that comes into being when history, having exhausted its atrocities and promises, leaves us naked beneath the sky, confronting only the gaze of the one we love.

Some weeks after that encounter with Anna at the reception he almost died in an ambush to the north of Mox-ico. He hardly mentioned it to me, not wanting to strike a warrior’s pose. All I remember is the comment he made softly, as if to himself: “When death stares us coolly in the eye we perceive that in our lives there have been a few hours of sunlight or of darkness, a few faces to which we return continually and that what has kept us alive, in fact, is the simple hope of finding them again…”

Moxico. Games for grown-ups.

For us, the years that will follow are to be a time of defeat, flight, scattering. Elias will live through them without any change of attitude, as if the goal he has always pursued had not lost all meaning. One day I will learn that he has conducted negotiations single-handedly with the men of UNITA in southern Moxico and succeeded in avoiding the resumption of fighting. Just on that occasion, just in that area, saving the lives of the inhabitants of just one village. I will remember what he said about the modesty of the tasks he henceforth set himself. In the conflagration Africa was entering into at that time, this modest success will seem to me more important than all the planning for the planet. Throughout the discussions in a hut in the village a child was playing at the other end of the room; sitting on the ground, she was building a pyramid of empty cartridge cases from a machine gun, on top of a wobbly table. When the argument was at its height, and Elias no longer had any hope of reaching agreement, and therefore of remaining alive once the bargaining broke down, the whole edifice of cartridge cases collapsed with a metallic clatter. The grownups looked round. The child froze, contrite. Elias remembered that village in Kivu half burned in the war and a little girl curled up between the legs of a low table, the child trembling so much that the piece of furniture seemed alive… He began talking again with the arrogant strength of one no longer concerned about his own survival. This indifference in the face of death, as he already knew, gives one a great advantage over those who have yet to come to terms with their fear of dying.

Brazzaville. The purity of gemstones.

He was on his way out of his hotel when two policemen in civilian clothes accosted him. Everything now happened with split-second timing. He looked them up and down scornfully, handed one of them his suitcase, and without raising his voice, ordered: “Here. Put this in my car out there. A gray Mercedes…” The trick worked perfectly. The tone of calm, peremptory authority. The policemen, who were supposed to be arresting him, obeyed, walked over to the exit, subjugated, hypnotized, and it was only once they were outside, where no “gray Mercedes” was to be seen, that they roused themselves and retraced their steps quickly. Elias had time to slip out through the side entrance, in front of which a car was waiting for him…

From those final years I retain a handful of such anecdotes that he used to recount to me with a smile when we ran into one another between flights, in the course of some mission or other. The memory of them is buried in a jumble of details that seem utterly pointless today but which were a matter of life and death at the time. The business with the suitcase… It is a routine technique, in fact, known as the “relay-object,” which he had doubtless learned during the course of his training as an intelligence agent. The procedure is simple: if anyone obstructs you, you must on any pretext whatever hand them an object that encumbers them and for which they become responsible. To a fierce gatekeeper barring your way at the entrance to a protected place you hand a briefcase, remarking: “General X’s sergeant will come to collect this at six-thirty hours. Take good care of it.” And while the guard is pondering, overwhelmed by the weight of the onus put on him, you pass through.

What remains in my memory is Elias s smile as he told me about these tricks of the trade, sometimes adding: “So in the end our practical training in Moscow wasn’t wasted. All those assaults on the presidential palace’… And by and large, I can confirm, it does happen more or less the way our instructors taught us it would. And the hardest thing of all is to avoid killing the children when there are bursts of gunfire on all sides… In our training they were celluloid dolls.”

Behind his light touch with the detail lay concealed long wars, sometimes raging, sometimes running out of steam, villages populated with corpses, and one morning, a fine spring morning, that youth dragging his mother’s body, riddled with bullet wounds, along a road in the south of Moxico. Elias took them to the nearest town. The intolerable weight of that body.

Behind the anecdote about the policemen encumbered by a “relay-suitcase” there had been very discreet negotiations that evening in Brazzaville between the emissaries of the South African regime (the demons of apartheid!) and the representatives of the socialist regime of Angola – the caution of two reptiles feeling one another in the dark, sniffing one another, hesitating between confrontation and doing a deal. And all mixed up with this nest of vipers, several CIA agents, as well as those of UNITA, and the indiscreet oilmen from Elf, and the diamond buyers (that Lebanese of Armenian origin, among others, the lid of his left eye grotesquely distended by a magnifying glass), and the arms salesmen, one of whom remarked to me one day with cheerful amazement: Tve sold such a lot, there really shouldn’t be many people left on earth

Some years later the diamond merchant would be discovered at his desk with his bloodied head resting on a pile of gemstones. The wife of the president who offered his hospitality for the secret meeting at Brazzaville would be accused of this murder. The arms salesmen would change the names of their agencies and the oilmen those of their companies. UNITA would be decapitated. But this would make no difference to the background noise at those African summits: the discreet chink of diamonds being appraised, the pumping of black blood beneath the waves, the crunch of armored vehicles on the rutted tarmac of cities in flames, the screams of raped women, children having their throats cut, the crackle of the flames on the burning roofs of huts, and somewhere at some great film festival the ecstatic whispers surrounding a star who is wearing around her neck stones of the first water, so rare, so pure…

At the emperors. Twelve pianists.

Yet another detail strangely preserved from oblivion: it could be called a dumb show, for the performance was entirely silent and the recounting of it left us speechless, giving rise to an almost metaphysical amazement. One of Bokassas residences, a room where the lights are low; a dozen piano stools in a row occupied by naked women who have their backs turned. A hand clap, and in a perfectly synchronized movement all twelve of them swivel round to face the master, who has a strangely weary, almost aggrieved air, as if this carnal treasure disappoints him profoundly… The vision of these “beautiful pianists with no piano,” as Elias called them, was on a level with other acts of depravity dreamed up by the tyrants of that continent, the pharaonic cathedrals and castles erected upon the graves of famine victims. But the twelve piano stools went further, for this spinning harem touched the most sensitive spot in a man’s heart: the impossibility of loving, even while possessing so much flesh, purchased in Africa, in Europe, and elsewhere… The master of the pianists – the “Emperor 1 – would be overthrown a year later in a country strewn with mutilated bodies. And amid all the jumble of wealth and obscenities that such a reign leaves in its wake, we are left with the picture of those twelve piano stools, absurdly lined up in a hall hung with valuable pelts.

Moscow. The death of a poet.

That vignette would soon find its echo during the trip to Moscow on which Elias accompanied President Agostinho Neto. The poison that killed the president had the characteristic of causing a spasm in the cardiac muscle, which made the death appear to be a perfectly convincing heart attack. It took just a psychological trigger, an additional rush of blood, to unleash the effect of the substance… The president was entering the suite placed at his disposal when in a small circular room he was passing through, this woman (she was busy cleaning the keyboard of a grand piano: a discordant lament of merry notes) greeted him and informed him that she would be taking care of his nocturnal requirements. The sentence was uttered in correct but somewhat rudimentary Portuguese, allowing for some ambiguity: nocturnal requirements?… A young blond woman, an apron fitting tightly over broad hips, emphasizing a slender waist… She stared at him as if awaiting a reply. He hesitated, sat down in an armchair, smiled at her. She settled down on the piano stool, as if she were resting for a moment before resuming her dusting. Beside the armchair, on a low table, stood several bottles of drink. Did he succumb straight away? After a glass? After an embrace? Or did they have time to undress and he to take his pleasure? The next day the Soviet authorities announced that the Angolan president, suffering from a serious illness, had come to the USSR to be treated, but despite all the efforts of the best doctors, he had not survived.

Elias will retain from all this the piano stool he had seen the previous day when he brought a dispatch to the presidents secretary. A quite ordinary black stool, like the ones the Central African tyrant’s “pianists” had spun round on. Details, yes, but it was perhaps the first time that he perceived with such intensity the supreme absurdity that ruled the lives and deaths of human beings. Before they left, the Soviets showed the members of the Angolan delegation a short documentary film. It was an account of the conflict between perfidious Somalia and faithful Ethiopia. Panoramic shots displayed the titanic disembarking of hundreds of armored vehicles, entire squadrons, countless artillery pieces. A complete prepackaged war, handed on a plate by the empire to its Ethiopian protégé. And then the results: arid stretches of the Ogaden in Ethiopia, covered in Somalian corpses and the debris of their weapons. At its close, the camera, no doubt mounted on a helicopter, swooped down over endless columns of distraught prisoners. The film had no sound track, and this silence gave the images an even more crushing force, a bleak and categorical argument. It was a lesson, yes. The Angolan leaders were supposed to appreciate the weight of the vengeance that fell upon the enemies of the empire.

Moscow. An hour with Anna.

Elias had an extremely brief meeting with Anna, on the very last evening of that visit to Moscow. Agostinho Neto s body, the entrails cleaned of all trace of poison, had already been prepared to be sent back to Luanda. In subdued tones the members of the delegation, some devastated, some relieved, were discussing the film they had just seen. Elias managed to escape, rang up from a public phone box, learned that Anna was celebrating her husband Vadims birthday with friends. She went down into the park where Elias was waiting for her, and they began walking under the mild September rain by a light reminiscent of the soft blue haze of a spring they had never lived through together. At first sight Annas face seemed to him coarsened by a fixed smile intended for her guests, by smooth, impersonal makeup. Little by little the showers banished this fixity from her features, and he saw, perhaps only with the vision that lay hidden in his heart, the young woman who once used to lead him through the snow-covered streets of Moscow. The one who believed in a knight brave enough to go down into the arena and bring back a glove for his fair lady. The one who boarded the train with the scent of a forest In winter clinging to the gray wool of her dress… They hardly spoke, and before parting (she had to hurry back to rejoin the guests, doubtless already uneasy about her absence), they embraced with such violence that he slightly grazed his lip in this clumsy and feverish kiss.

The logic of history.

I know they saw one another again in Africa on several occasions, even during the years when the USSR’s Imperial adventure on the black continent was drawing to a close. Lucapa, Kinshasa, Maputo, Mogadishu… Elias spoke little of them to me, and it was especially those few days spent in Moscow at the time of Neto’s death that he sought to describe to me, as if they offered a digest of all the contradictions of his life as a fighter. He told me things he did not have time to recount to Anna, and in any case would never have told her. Details that suddenly offered proof of the madness of history Yes, piano stools and a dozen whores trained to spin round on them at a hand clap. And that stool where a young woman sits before supervising a man s death agony with professional calm. And beyond the farcical insanity of these coincidences, millions of men pitched against one another in the name of a hatred that will appear stupid the next day, after these men have been bled to death. So then another hatred will have to be invented and dressed up in humanistic or messianic rags, placated with the sound of tank tracks on the tarmac of ruined cities, with the roar of big guns firing on unarmed men. And all of this so that in a great hall where the walls are hung with pelts, a man, weary of massacres, wealth, and female flesh, should rest his heavy and nauseated gaze on the backsides of women as they spin round on their piano stools. And so that another man, an occasional poet, should suddenly let his glass of brandy slip onto the carpet and tumble out of his armchair, his eyes rolling upward, at the feet of a woman whose breasts he has just been fondling. The circle is complete. History has done its work.

There are a few loose ends, of no use to the specialists who will be writing it: that diamond merchant, his face crushed into a glittering mound of gemstones, and in a documentary film about the war between Ethiopia and Somalia, a sequence that probably passed unnoticed by the makers, a goat wounded by shrapnel thrashing about around its stake as the columns of victorious armored vehicles surge past.

All he had to counter to the insanity of this farce, in truth, was his love.

London. Postscript to history.

I saw him again in London, scarcely two years before the disappearance of the USSR, before the “end of history,” as proclaimed by a Japanese visionary, whom everyone took seriously at the time. It was the honeymoon between Russia and the West, a great “phew!” of relief at the grinning softness of the empire that, with Gorbachev, was learning to smile and calling this “democracy” For the first time, perhaps, I perceived in Elias’s words the sarcasm of a man betrayed. “You 11 see,” he had said. “You’re going to become best friends with the USA, ultra-obedient students of capitalism. When the USSR no longer exists…”

Such remarks seemed preposterous at the time. The empire had lost none of its power and was capable, as some years previously, of waging several wars at once, in Afghanistan, in Ethiopia, in Angola… Unwilling to contradict him for fear of upsetting the one within him whose life had been lived in the name of a dream, I adopted the somewhat condescending tone (I now realize) authorized by the crushing weight of our country when addressing our allies, the “auxiliaries” of the USSR’s messianic project. Half seriously and half in jest, I remarked that you can’t make a revolution “in kid gloves” and that history, as Lenin said, “is not the sidewalk on the Nevsky Prospekt.” I had heard these maxims tossed out like epigrams, from Elias’s own lips.

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 replies. “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.

I see a constellation in the night sky as I move away from the glaring lights of the People’s Palace. A few seconds suffice for the realization to dawn that every one of our actions occurs beneath the giddy remoteness of these stars. And yet we do everything possible to forget this boundless judgment, to be judged only by ourselves. Long ago, in a city strewn with corpses, a man who was perhaps my only true friend and who had only a few days left to live pointed out the constellation of the Wolf to me and reminded me that we had already seen it on the night of our first meeting in the forests of northern Angola, that night when, still very young, I was so afraid to die… It was enough to let one’s gaze wander among these stars for the fear to begin to weaken and for death to seem temporary, provisional. Like our lives…

I hear footsteps on the gravel of the path that surrounds the palace. The young woman who is guiding our group of writers runs up to me and summons me to come quickly and take my place at the “African Life Stories in Literature” roundtable discussion.

The debate is already under way. For the first few moments I listen to it as if it were in an unknown language. In memory I am still at the side of the man who has only a few days to live as he gazes at the sky above the ruins of Mogadishu.

Little by little the meaning of what is being said becomes clear to me. Two viewpoints confront one another: the “afro-pessimists” and the “afro-optimists.” The latter are drawn from the ranks of the Africans comfortably settled in the West, globalized blacks, to some extent. The “pessimists” speak of colonization, slavery, négritude. The “optimists” give half-smiles as they listen to them. They call for self-projection into the future, a balanced perspective on the black man s burden, a reaching out beyond the historic divides between civilizations. The “traditionalist” pitch is the inexpiable guilt of the whites, the ancestral wisdom of the African… The card played by the “moderns” is a matter-of-fact view of the colonial past, the new Africa, the continent, in the words of one of them, “bubbling with vitality and with the libido of a geyser.” The public salutes him with a burst of applause and even several shouts of “Yeah!”

In the hall at the end of the front row I recognize the organizer with beet-colored hair, my neighbor at the hotel. She sits next to her friend, the Congolese artist. From time to time she consults her watch, then exchanges a little grimace of complicity with the young man, which means: “Once this palaver’s over, we’re off.”

Yes, a palaver, she’s not wrong. French is the language of the colonizer, complain the “traditionalists,” the white man’s weapon that has reduced African cultures to silence. The “moderns” retort: no, French is our trophy, our spoils of war. We can do with it what we like. French has violated our African mentality. No, anorexic French is being regenerated by an insemination of négritude. This turn of phrase comes from the Togolese writer who has just been talking about “the libido of a geyser.” It scores a bull’s-eye. A guffaw of approval ripples through the hall. The line of dark suits in the front row, occupied by the “fat cats of the international conference circuit,” stirs. Hissing chuckles can be heard from them. During the morning these men have concluded their important cogitations on sustainable development in Africa and now they are relaxing as they listen to the ranting of the novelists, who are simply geisha girls performing a few choice routines for them. Encouraged by the example of the Togolese writer, the participants in the discussion set about demonstrating Africa s fecundating powers. Anything goes: animist priests, whose magic enhances mens sexual performance; women’s exuberant beauty (“breasts, two great gourds filled with milk and honey,” one of the writers quotes himself); a cunning husband’s skill at provoking the rivalry between his wives. I learn that in one African country the men call their mistresses “offices,” and that in Congolese villages the daughter to be married off is nicknamed “the little dog.” The audience laughs, the novelists vie with one another. Repudiated wives, husbands betrayed with an uncle, a father, a brother, a son… Penises “like a bamboo stem,” sweat “trickling in rivulets between her shoulder blades and streaming into the groove between her buttocks as her lover grips them”… All this accompanied by talk of sorcerers, eclipses of the sun, dances and trances.

Tales of men and women, and yet at no time, I tell myself in perplexity, does love appear, plain love, with its insane generosity, its spirit of self-sacrifice. Here the talk is of prénuptial bargaining, long marriage rituals, and a whole commerce of paid-for couplings and bride prices, even virginity being rewarded with a goat…

A memory comes back to me, the tale of a man tortured with the strappado, deprived of food and water, who told me he would have accepted that suffering all over again in order to find himself for a moment beside the woman he loved.

The notion of talking about him here, in this hall, suddenly seems to me urgent and vital. And completely unthinkable. For what is taking place here is a well-rehearsed performance in which everyone plays his role: the cantankerous “traditionalists” talking of slavery, the smiling “moderns” exalting sexual négritude, the enthusiastic audience, the condescending notabilities. This is playacting, true to its illusory nature: the show being staged has no connection with the life unfolding beyond these walls.

Beyond these walls, a few hours away from Conakry, lie two countries in their death throes, Sierra Leone and Liberia, peopled with ghosts forever at one another’s throats on soil crammed with gold and diamonds. Land where more mines are planted than crops. The playacting makes it possible to forget this for as long as the show lasts. The intellectuals perform their verbal pirouettes, the leaders signal their approval by puffing up their greasy chops, the audience relishes the spicy witticisms (“Africa is an afrodisiac!” yells the Togolese writer). The organizer with her beet-colored hair fidgets slightly on her chair, impatient to be mounted again by her Congolese friend. And at this very moment in a Liberian village a woman is being raped, a child’s arm is being cut off. This is no mere probability. It is a statistical certainty.

The man gazing at the constellation of the Wolf was no dreamer. Quite simply, he knew that the viewpoint of the stars made it possible to tear down the walls behind which human beings hide for the satisfaction of remaining blind.

As I study the hall, I reflect that it was this world here, this masquerade, that Elias detested the most. A world of which, at this moment, I am a part.

During the last days we spent in the furnace of Mogadishu, he must have understood perfectly that he was henceforth “beyond redemption”: useless now to the Soviets, who were making their catastrophic exit, but above all, undesirable in his native Angola. For more than a week I did not see him, even in the distance, and I was comforted by this: I dreaded hearing him talk about the hopelessness of his situation. Not having seen him, I hoped he had succeeded in leaving Mogadishu by his own means. I remembered the thought that had crossed my mind from time to time in the past: Why did he not give up all these increasingly absurd games of war and espionage and settle somewhere in the West? In truth, I still did not understand what Anna meant to him. Years later that handful of words he had exchanged with her in Moscow would come back to me: “To go back… Back to Sarma…”

A new outburst of laughter in the hall. My neighbor on the platform nudges me with his elbow and whispers a joke in my ear, the sense of which eludes me. I am back in the world Elias detested. The participants begin reading their texts about Africa, one after the other. So my own betrayal will have to come to this too.

5

THE FIRST IMPRESSION: a flock of penguins, huddled close together, hiding their young ones inside the crowd. The men have their backs turned to the street, one of those streets that gunfire renders unusually noisy with nowhere to hide. The plaintive voices of women can be heard, the wailing of children. Yes, penguins: the mens dark suits, the women’s pale dresses. Everyone has tried to put on as many clothes as possible, despite the sun, so as not to have to leave them behind in this Mogadishu in flames. The crowd Is pressed up against the closed gates of the American embassy They are the Soviets; the USSR embassy has just been sacked, and at this moment the looters are snatching up everything which may still be of use or could be sold. The houses in the capital have been dismembered like the carcasses of animals, down to their entrails, down to the scraping of the bones. The penguins have already witnessed the knackers’ handiwork and are massed together now. terrorized, pressed up against the American fortress.

I can see them from a car parked at the crossroads where a pile of plastic gas cans is burning. Beside me is Leonid, the doctor I met on the plane flying into Mogadishu. We are trying to negotiate with the representative of some armed band or other who dangles in front of us the possibility of evacuating the embassy personnel by air. Several days ago Leonid operated on this Somali fighters brother. The reward could therefore be this right of passage to the airport, to an aircraft coming from Addis Ababa. But the negotiations are dragging; the representative indicates that he would also like to receive some ready cash…

The sun is already heating the roof of the car appallingly. The crowd of penguins on the other side of the road has become spotted with white: the women have covered their heads with panama hats or scarves, the men have donned the caps tourists wear. Indeed they look like an organized outing, an excursion to a site. I can make out the stooping figure of Vadim, who is talking to the ambassador, and a little to one side, outside the circle of penguins, Anna. Her gaze is directed toward the next street, where the ragged fighters are busy mounting a machine gun on a jeep. In the haste of the preparations and the flight, she must have forgotten that light white scarf that I have seen on her head on several occasions… From time to time she runs her hand through her hair, as if to drive away the heat.

Suddenly a truck hurtles across the street, overturning the pile of gas cans on which the flames are dying down amid a stink of plastic. A burst of bullets rakes the enclosure surrounding the American embassy screams from women and oaths from men ring out in the crowd of penguins. Someone starts rattling at the heavy gate, which is still closed. Behind the houses with their windows blown out by explosions an eruption of black smoke arises and thickens. The air grows dark; the sun is eclipsed, then reappears, looking like a vast moon. Panic splits up the crowd into little groups, families, no doubt, then the din of a further explosion welds it together again with the animal fear of a tribe. In the car the Somali who was promising us a passage to the airport retracts. He must have realized that he lacked the time to extract wads of dollars from these terrorized foreigners. It seems easier to go off and loot a villa. Leonid insists, raises his voice. He is disfigured by tears, the weeping sickness he contracted one day in the mountains to the north of Kabul. He proposes a price to the Somali, gets out of the car, goes to report to the ambassador. I station myself in front of the vehicle so as to reduce the temptation for our savior to take off. There are fresh explosions beyond the row of houses, the thump of mortar fire. In the middle of the crowd of bodies pressed together I notice the face of a very small child, who smiles at me, then hides, then reappears…

The roar from an artillery piece in the distance at first prevents me from understanding the argument that suddenly erupts within the group. In fact, it is one man yelling his head off. He is thickset, dressed in a velvet suit, his brow dripping with sweat. He seems first to be barking, then spluttering threats, while pointing his finger at Vadim. The latter backs away in the face of these violent attacks, mumbling excuses. They have separated from the crowd and are speaking louder; I finally grasp the reason for the confrontation. The man in the velvet suit is accusing Vadim of having left a computer behind at the embassy as well as (he emits a viperish hiss) a briefcase containing “top secret” diskettes… “Just you wait! Back in Moscow well take good care of you. And as for your diplomatic passport, you can chuck that down the pan straight away! And let me point out that your wife had access to that computer, too…”

Anna, who has joined them, hears these last few words and tries to explain that, amid all the shooting, in a building on fire, there was no time to go and open the safe and take out the briefcase in question. The man feels caught out by this observation, for he is the one, given his function, who should have rescued these “top secret” diskettes. But he is already fabricating an alibi for himself, looking for scapegoats. “Just you wait! Back in Moscow heads will roll. Just you wait. Expect the worst. I’m warning you…”

A figure I do not recognize at once: a man dressed in a simple T-shirt and jeans. Elias. He must have been standing a couple of yards behind me, beside the car. He has heard everything. “What’s the combination for the safe?” he asks, addressing the man in the velvet suit. “Why? What do you mean? Do you expect me…” The man’s voice is choked. “The combination?” repeats Elias more softly, looking at Vadim, who turns away slightly. Anna swiftly reels off a string of figures. An explosion very close at hand deafens us; the crowd of penguins utters a howl. I have time to see Elias offering the driver a fistful of notes. The car drives off.

A continuous drumming of fists on the steel of the gate. Then an amazing lull, as if an armistice had finally been agreed. Unless it’s the hour of prayer. The setting sun is still burning hot but will rapidly sink into the equatorial night. The smoke has already filled the city with an oily, suffocating dusk.

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.

In the morning, traveling within a few miles of the shore, we pass alongside fabulous gardens whose abundance cuts into the dry and ocherous line of the coast. Houses hidden in their greenery, hinting at shade and coolness. A town to the south of Mogadishu, Merca, no doubt – a paradise before the hell of a day baked by the sun and thirst.

An important day for both of us. We have to rid ourselves of our fear, the sentimentality of memories, of all notion of superiority in the face of this suffering human mass, this woman scratching at the flaking paintwork. We are all fraternally united by the spark of life that still glows in us all. And when, after another attempt at landing and more shooting, the people around us lie down on the deck, we do the same, pressed up against these emaciated bodies, protecting the body of Elias stretched out between us.

At the approach of night (our second night at sea), the boat sails farther from the coast, then suddenly stops. Incredulous, we hear the engine wheezing as it slows down, then finally, and even more unbelievably, silence. Or rather the inhalations and exhalations of the heap of human beings on the deck, their groaning, murmuring, rustling. The night is perfectly calm, without any breeze, and these quiet voices filter out from the darkness with striking intimacy. My own breathing, made jerky by the fever, seems to me deafening. Leonid sits up, removes his headphones, and in their susurration I recognize one of the tunes I know, which he listens to over and over again to struggle against his tears.

We do not know if the ship will move on and what its destination will be. This uncertainty no longer concerns us. We speak briefly about Elias and decide what we must now do. Leonid clears a way for himself, stepping over recumbent bodies, and disappears into the bowels of the ship. He returns quickly, laden with a heavy cast iron cogwheel and an old, worn length of rope…

Elias s face, as we look at it for the last time, appears relaxed, like that of one asleep. I am afraid lest this body, in its blanket bound with ropes, might look like a parcel. But its outline is more reminiscent of a carved block of stone. To the foot of this block Leonid fastens the cogwheel.

The level of the cargo boats afterdeck is a few feet above the water. We lay out the body along the steel gunwale, then rise upright above him, only able to honor him by standing clumsily to attention thus, among passengers who lie, sit, and stand. The silence of a moment ago has given way to an increasingly violent hubbub. People are remonstrating with the crew members, hammering on the wheel-house door. While the boat was under way it mattered little to them where it was bound for, since we were traveling away from death. Now death assumes the face of this calm, moonless night, without a breath of air – immobility, thirst, this boat stock-still amid the murky darkness of sky and ocean. I see a man with a long knife in his hand slicing through the crowd to reach a sailor, who points an automatic pistol at him; it is strangely small, almost a toy Two other men grapple with one another, yelling, thrusting one another against a metal companionway The weeping of the children blends together for a moment into a shrill chorus; then only the woman scraping at the deck seems totally separate from the madness of the people whose shouting is an attempt to keep death at bay I see that, in fact, she is obstinately cleaning the dirty surface: a very smooth little square is already gleaming beneath her fingers.

Without conferring, Leonid and I pause for a breathing space, a moment of silence – he, his face streaming with tears that he no longer even notices, myself, attempting to contain the fever that freezes me. The woman cleaning the deck is slowly drawing closer to the place where we threw down our gear.

THE QUESTION MUST HAVE BEEN ASKED ONCE ALREADY, for the chairman seems to be repeating it with the slow insistence one adopts when faced with a foreigner who is not quick on the uptake. I really only gather my wits at the moment when this voice with carefully enunciated syllables is uttering the final words. An embarrassed silence. I rouse myself from my memories, encounter the looks, amused or uneasy, of the other participants in the roundtable discussion, the chairman’s frozen smile… The Togolese writer, inexhaustible this evening, saves the situation: I’d like to take advantage of my Russian colleague’s confusion to tell you that, during his travels in the East, Flaubert saw nothing shocking in a woman profiting from her body with total freedom. In African women this utilitarian attitude is very widespread…” The debate resumes; the chairman is visibly relieved. This fragment sticks in my mind: “with total freedom.” The freedom of the African woman selling her body…

Just now, when I felt I was still present In that room, a hardened, trenchant Indignation tore at nerves within me that I had thought long since blanketed in indifference. I loathed that gang of International bureaucrats, sitting there In the front row after a week of palavers and meals In a luxury hotel. I remarked to myself what I had had occasion to observe twenty years earlier: How many children could be saved for the price of just one of those suits each of these monstrous Africans was wearing? I loathed the intellectual geisha girls, performing their “afrodisiac Africa” routine for these blasé spectators, instead of being up in arms. They were carving up the continent just like that photo I had seen in a book as a child long ago: a dismembered elephant. Its head, the trunk, the body the legs… everyone got their share that evening. The bureaucrats, the intellectuals, the audience who, for want of anything better, were laughing at these grandstanding writers’ banter. And even that organizer with her locks dyed the color of beets; she had contrived to carve herself a portion of flesh, the body of the young Congolese…

At a certain moment the sight of their faces became too painful for me. I hastened to plunge back into that terrible night in Somalia, compounded of massacre, screaming, and thirst, but where nevertheless I managed to breathe. I knew that the past could only end in death for some, flight for others, and for the two of us a long, chaotic return (a week convalescing in Addis Ababa), a return to a homeland, to that USSR which, by the end of the same year, would no longer exist. And yet on this boat adrift on an ocean at night, the sovereign truth of life broke through: the certainty that the passing of a man who loved does not signify the death of the love he carried within him.

The violence of the voices flayed by despair, the movement of shadows through the tangle of bodies, two laments intermingled, that of a mother and of her child. And that woman still scraping at the decks dirty surface. Slowly she draws closer to the place where we threw down our gear…

The sound erupts suddenly. Powerfully vibrant organ music, interwoven with violins. The woman must have turned up the volume of the tape recorder Leonid left beside our bags. She did it with the same action as her scraping, turning it up fully. Consciously or not? With the inspired awareness of madness, let us say. For only this tragic and triumphant thunder is capable of cutting through the madness that has taken hold of the boat. People freeze. Voices fall silent. The heady outburst of organ music protects the boats solitude.

Elias’s body disappears slowly. The water is so calm that this human shape looks as if it were rising amid the stars, into a sky deeper than the sky.

When the music stops, very clearly, amid absolute silence, a child’s sigh can be heard.