The African Equation Read Online Free PDF Page B

and exhausted, and stoodby the window, a blanket around my shoulders, waiting for day to dawn. And dawn it did, draped in white, as if it were merely the ghost of night.
     
    ‘You have to get a grip on yourself,’ Hans Makkenroth said, ‘and fast.’
    He had been round several times. When I refused to open the door, he had threatened to call the police. The state in which he found me shocked him. He ran to the phone to call an ambulance, but I persuaded him not to. Cursing, he pushed me into the bathroom. What I saw in the mirror terrified me: I looked like a zombie.
    Hans dragged me back to the living room and forced me to listen to him. ‘When I lost Paula, I thought I was finished. She’d been everything to me. All my joys I owed to her. She was my pride, my glory, my happiness. I’d have given anything for one more year, one more month, one more day with her. But there are things we can’t negotiate, Kurt. Paula’s gone, just as every day thousands of people who are loved or hated die. That’s how life is. All kinds of things happen, we may be stricken with grief, we may be bankrupt, but the sun still rises in the morning and nothing can stop night from falling … Paula has been dead for five years and thirty-two weeks, and every morning when I wake up, I expect to find her lying beside me. Then I realise that I’m alone in my bed. So I throw off the sheets and go about my daily business.’
    I don’t know if it was Hans’s words or the vibrations of his voice that reached down into the depths of my being, but all at once my shoulders sagged and tears ran down my cheeks. I couldn’t remember having cried since I was asmall child. Curiously, I wasn’t ashamed of my weakness. My sobs seemed to clear away the blackness that had been contaminating my soul like a poisonous, putrid ink.
    ‘That’s it,’ Hans said encouragingly.
    He forced me to take a bath, shave, and change my clothes. Then he bundled me into his car and took me to a little restaurant just outside the city. He told me that he had come back to Germany to settle some issues with the Chamber of Commerce and launch a project that meant a lot to him. This would take two or three weeks, after which he would sail to the Comoros, where he was planning to equip a hospital for a charitable organisation he belonged to.
    ‘Why not come with me? My yacht is waiting for me in a harbour in Cyprus. We’ll fly to Nicosia then set off for the Gulf of Aden …’
    ‘I can’t, Hans.’
    ‘What’s stopping you? The sea’s wonderful therapy.’
    ‘Please, don’t insist. I’m not going anywhere …’

1
    Hans hadn’t been exaggerating. Out at sea, stripped of their symbolism, all points of reference were reduced, so that each thing found its true significance. I certainly found mine: I was merely a single drop among a billion tons of water. Everything I had thought I was or represented proved to have no substance. Wasn’t I like the wavelets born from the backwash and then merging with it, an illusion that emerges out of nothing and falls back into it without leaving a trace?
    I thought about my patient, Frau Biribauer.
What’s death like?
… If it was like the sea, then everything might be forgiven. Then I thought about Jessica, and caught myself smiling.
    I felt a little better, washed clean of my wounds. Like getting out of the bath after a day filled with confrontations. My grief was allowing me a semblance of respite; there was no space for it in the kingdom of shipwrecks, where sorrows drowned without arousing any dismay.
    We had been travelling for two weeks, the wind in our sails, on board a twelve-metre boat. We had left Cyprus at dawn, in glorious weather, and crossed the lustral waters of the Mediterranean, sometimes pursued by excited seagulls, sometimes escorted by pods of dolphins. Everyday was a new blessing, and when night removed us from the chaos of the world, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath of the odours emanating from the