The African Equation by Yasmina Khadra Page B

poured a little more water on the part of the shirt that was stuck. ‘Sorry to have to say this, but I’m glad I have company at last. I was seriously starting to gocrazy … What did you think of the big man?’ he asked, referring to the captain. ‘As a braggart, he has no equal … He’s made himself an officer and thinks he’s at the head of a real fighting force with those ten alley cats of his. I know him well. He was a sergeant-major in the regular army before he was court-martialled for smuggling. He’d been stealing from his unit’s stock of canned rations and selling them on the black market. He managed to get out of prison by greasing a few palms, and since then he’s gathered a gang of morons around him and carried on his little trade under cover of the civil war.’
    ‘Who are these people?’
    ‘Whoever they are, they’re dangerously fickle. Sometimes they call themselves resistance fighters, sometimes revolutionaries. What cause do they claim to uphold? None of them can be bothered to answer. Whenever they get an ideological thought in their heads, they invent a slogan for themselves and get drunk on it until they lose the thread. The fact is, these maniacs don’t know if they’re coming or going. They don’t think, they take aim. They don’t talk, they shoot. They don’t work, they loot. They can’t see the end of the tunnel. They’ve forgotten how things turned bad for them and have no idea how it’s going to end … You must think me very talkative, don’t you? You can’t blame me. I haven’t had anyone to talk to for a long time now, and although the walls may have ears, they’re sadly lacking in repartee.’
    All at once, he held out his hand.
    ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. You soon lose your manners around here … My name’s Bruno, I’m from Bordeaux in France.’
    ‘This is Hans, and I’m Kurt …’
    ‘Pleased to meet you, even though the circumstances and the place are not ideal …’
    I helped Hans to take off his shirt and laid him on his stomach. The cut on his back was a large one, going across half his hip. Now that the scab had softened, you could see the wound bed; it was bad, hatched with tiny blood vessels oozing pus, the lips dark brown at the edges and turned out; the tissue around it had turned pale and was starting to get thinner along a strip of at least a centimetre while a purplish-grey patch spread on either side of the cut, from the vertebrae to the top of the groin.
    ‘Not a pretty sight,’ the Frenchman observed.
    ‘I need to clean the wound and also find something to lower the fever.’
    The Frenchman went back to his straw mattress to get a little plastic sachet and a bottle filled with a disgusting-looking ointment. ‘Spread that on the wound.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘A powder made from medicinal plants which disinfects and heals at the same time. And the ointment reduces itching.’
    ‘That’s out of the question. There are enough germs in the wound already—’
    ‘Please,’ he interrupted me calmly. ‘There are no drugs here. You make do with what you can get. Trust me if you really want to stop your friend getting gangrene.’
    Reluctantly, almost humiliated at being forced to opt for what I thought of as a quack remedy, I took the sachet, then hesitated. Bruno asked me to let him do it. Without waiting for my approval, he bent over Hans’s wound.
    ‘It’ll make him feel better, you’ll see,’ he promised, clearly trying to make up for having stepped on my toes.
    No sooner had Bruno finished treating Hans than Joma appeared. He was tipsy. His body filled the doorway, and he had to bend his head to get through. He swayed in the middle of the room, his hands on his hips, muscles throbbing in his bare chest. He looked me up and down and kissed the amulets around his biceps – two leather pouches embroidered with multicoloured threads and tied to his arms with thin strips.
    ‘You still haven’t apologised to me,’