The African Equation Read online

  On the plasma screen above the counter, a football match was in full swing. At the far end of the room, a family was having dinner in silence, gathered around an old man who was gesturing vaguely. Two young women were chatting at a table close to the window; the snack bar’s neon sign spattered them with coloured light, adding gleaming highlights to their hair. One of the women stared at me before leaning towards her companion, who also turned to look at me. I asked for the bill and left, despite Toni insisting I have another drink. Out in the street, it had got colder.

  I’d been planning to walk towards the river, in order to stretch my legs and clear my head, but the heavens opened and the rain forced me to go straight back to the car park where I’d left my car.

  Because of the rain, there were traffic jams, and I didn’t get home until about 10.30. I’d been hoping Jessica might be back, but the windows of our house were still dark.

  A jacket of Jessica’s lay on the chest of drawers in the hallway. I didn’t remember it being there that morning when I left for the surgery.

  In our room, the bed hadn’t been disturbed.

  I took off my coat, jacket and tie and went straight to the kitchen to get myself a beer. I sat down on the sofa, put my feet up on a pouffe and grabbed the remote. The first thing that came on was a political debate. I switched channels several times before coming across an underwater documentary showing sharks hunting in packs in a coral reef. Seeing the depths of the ocean had a calming effect on me, but I couldn’t really concentrate. It was eleven minutes past eleven by the clock on the wall. By my watch, too. I started channel-hopping again frantically, and finally went back to the underwater documentary. Unable to focus on any one programme in particular, I decided to take a shower before going to bed.

  As I switched on the light in the bathroom, I almost fell backwards as if hit by a gust of wind. At first, I thought I was hallucinating, but it wasn’t an optical illusion, and was far more than a fleeting impression. No, I heard myself cry out. Paralysed, suspended in a celestial void, I grabbed hold of the washbasin to stop myself collapsing. My calves began to tremble, and the trembling rose to my stomach and spread through my body like a series of electric shocks. Jessica lay in the bath, fully dressed, the water up to her neck, her head twisted to the side, one arm dangling over the edge of the tub. Her hair floated around her pale face, and her half-closed eyes stared sadly at her other arm, which was folded over her stomach … It was an unbearable, nightmarish, surreal sight. Horror in all its immeasurable cruelty!

  My house was swarming with intruders.

  Somebody brought me a glass of water and helped me to sit down. He was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. I saw strangers bustling around me, uniformed policemen, ambulance men in white. Who were they? What were they doing in my home? Then it came back to me. I was the one who had called them. There had been a brief moment of lucidity, followed by fog. Again I couldn’t understand, couldn’t find my way through the chaos cluttering my mind. Jessica … Jessica had killed herself by swallowing two boxes of sleeping pills. Two boxes … of sleeping pills … how was it possible? … Jessica was dead … My wife had committed suicide … The love of my life had gone … In an instant, my world had disintegrated …

  I took my head in both hands to stop it falling apart. Impossible to get rid of that flash image in the bathroom, that corpse in the bath … Jessica, come out of there, I beg you … How could she come out of there? How could she hear me? Her stiffness, her marble-like pallor, her fixed, icy stare were irrevocable, and yet I had run to her, taken her in my arms, shaken her, yelled at her to wake up; my cries whirled around the room, smashed into the walls, drilled into my temples. As a doctor, I knew there wasn’t much I could do; as a husband I refused to accept that. Jessica was merely a heap of flesh, a still life, but I’d laid her down on the floor and tried all kinds of things to revive her. Finally, exhausted, struck dumb with terror, I had huddled in a corner and looked at her through a kind of two-way mirror. I don’t know how long I stayed like that, wild-eyed, prostrate with grief, overwhelmed by the calamity that had struck me.

  The police finally left the bathroom, after packing up their equipment. They had taken photographs and collected any clues that might explain the circumstances of my wife’s death. The ambulance men were given permission to remove the body. I watched them take Jessica out on a stretcher – Jessica reduced to a common corpse under a white sheet.

  A tall man in a dark suit took me aside. He had a round face, white hair at the temples and a large bald patch. With a politeness that verged on obsequiousness, which for some reason irritated me, he asked if he could talk to me in the living room.

  ‘I’m Lieutenant Sturm. I’d like to ask you a few questions. I know now is hardly the best time, but I’m obliged to—’

  ‘No, lieutenant,’ I interrupted. ‘Now is definitely not the best moment.’

  I could barely recognise my own voice, which seemed to reach me through an endless series of filters. I was furious with this policeman, and found his attitude inhuman. How dare he ask me questions when I didn’t understand what was happening? What kind of answers did he expect from someone who had just lost his bearings, his faculties, his ability to think? I was in a state of shock, crushed by a storm that was sucking me into some kind of abyss …

  There was only one thing I wanted: for my house to be silent again.

  The lieutenant came back early the next day, flanked by two inscrutable inspectors I took an immediate dislike to. He introduced them briefly and asked if they could come in. I stood aside to let them pass. Reluctantly. I wasn’t up to receiving visitors. I needed to be alone, to close the shutters over my windows, to wall myself up in darkness and pretend I wasn’t in. My grief had replaced time, the world, the whole of the universe. I felt so small in its grip, so infinitesimal that a tear would have drowned me. And then there was that incredible tiredness. I felt shattered. I hadn’t slept a wink all night. The more that macabre scene in the bathroom had come back to me, the less I could grasp it. It was like a recurring dream, like being chronically seasick. I think I threw up several times. Or maybe I had just felt nauseous a lot. I wasn’t sure of anything. Jessica’s suicide was a terrifying mystery … The truth was, I didn’t want to sleep. Sleep would have been the worst torture. Why sleep? Just to realise, when I woke up, that Jessica was dead? How could I have survived the repeated shock of that brutal awakening? … No, the one thing I mustn’t do was sleep … When the ambulance and the police cars had left the night before, I had switched off the lights and locked the shutters, then retreated to a corner of my room and kept sleep at bay until morning, conscious that no ray of sunlight would help me to see clearly in my grief.

  I led the three police officers into the living room. They sat down on the sofa. I remained standing, not sure exactly what to do. The lieutenant pointed to an armchair and waited for me to sit in it before asking me if Jessica had any reason to take her own life. He had asked me the question almost reluctantly. I stared at him in bewilderment. After turning the question over and over in my head, I replied that I found it hard to believe that Jessica was dead, that I was still expecting her to wake up. The lieutenant nodded politely, and asked me the same question again as if my words were irrelevant and he wanted me to keep strictly to the facts, the reasons that might have led a person like Jessica to kill herself. From his way of looking at me, I realised that he was merely suggesting a preliminary hypothesis before moving on to another, more carefully thought-out one, because as far as he was concerned, there was nothing for the moment to prove that it was suicide. Becoming aware of his lack of tact, he straightened his tie and asked me straight out how Jessica had been lately. I replied that she had been nervous, evasive, secretive, but that never for a moment would I have thought her capable of such a desperate act. The lieutenant didn’t appear satisfied with my answer: clearly, it didn’t get him very far. After smoothing the ridge of his nose, he passed his hand over his bald spot, with
out taking his eyes off me, and asked me if my wife had left a note …

  ‘A note?’

  ‘Or maybe a recording,’ he said, ‘something like that.’

  ‘I haven’t checked,’ I said.

  The lieutenant wanted to know if my wife and I had been going through a ‘rough patch’. He turned his eyes away as he asked the question. I assured him that Jessica and I had got on really well and never quarrelled. I began shaking, embarrassed at having to talk to strangers about my private life. Routine as this questioning was, there was a kind of shamelessness about it that I couldn’t stand. It was as if the three policemen suspected me and were trying to catch me out. Their cold, unwavering pedantry exasperated me. The lieutenant scribbled some notes in a little book, then raised his fist to his mouth, cleared his throat and told me that according to the pathologist, my wife’s death had occurred between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. He asked me to tell them about my movements the day before. I told him I had left the house at 8.30 so as to be at the surgery by 9.15, that I had seen patients until 1, that I had gone out to have lunch before going back to work … All at once, I was afraid. What if they asked me what I’d been doing between 1 and 3.30? How could I prove that I had been sitting alone on a bench in the park, without any convincing witnesses, while my patients sat twiddling their thumbs in the waiting room of my surgery?

  The two inspectors were taking down my statement with false detachment, insensitive to the turmoil they were causing. I hated them for hounding me like this, for ignoring my grief and continuing to bombard me with questions, shamelessly rummaging in every nook and cranny of my married life. I was waiting stoically for them to leave, to get out of my sight. At the end of the interview, the lieutenant put his notebook away in the inside pocket of his trench coat and asked if he could help me in any way. I didn’t answer him. He nodded and handed me his card, pointing out his telephone number in case I remembered any detail that might be of use to him.

  Once the policemen had left, I took my head in both hands and tried to think about nothing.

  Emma phoned to tell me that my patients were getting impatient. I asked her to apologise to them for me and to cancel all my appointments in the coming days. She asked if anything was wrong.

  ‘Jessica’s dead,’ I said in a toneless voice.

  ‘My God!’ she exclaimed.

  She was silent for a long while at the other end of the line, then hung up.

  I stared at the receiver in my hand, not knowing what to do with it.

  A few neighbours came round to see me. The previous night’s flurry of activity hadn’t escaped them. The arrival of the ambulance and the police cars with their flashing lights must have kept them awake. Now it was daylight, they wanted to find out what was going on.

  About midday, alerted by Emma, Hans Makkenroth came to see me. He was deeply shocked by what had happened. ‘What a tragedy!’ he said, putting his arms around me.

  We sat at the table in the kitchen and listened to the rain drumming on the window pane. Without saying a word. Without moving.

  After a while, Emma arrived. She was appropriately dressed in a black tailored suit. It was clear from her red eyes that she had been crying. She was kind enough not to overburden me with her condolences, which might have proved awkward. Instead, she busied herself fetching us something to drink.

  By the time night fell, the three of us were so lost in our own thoughts that it hadn’t occurred to any of us to switch the light on in the room. We hadn’t eaten anything all day, and our glasses were still full. I told Emma she should go home.

  ‘My children are with my mother,’ she said. ‘I can stay.’

  ‘It really isn’t necessary.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t need me?’

  ‘I’ll be all right, Emma.’

  Before leaving, she reminded me that I had her mobile number and that I could call her whenever I liked. I promised her I would.

  Then I turned to Hans.

  ‘I’m not leaving you alone,’ he hastened to announce in a commanding tone.

  He called Toni and ordered dinner for us.

  It was drizzling in the cemetery, and the greyness made the place all the more melancholy. The ceremony took place on a square of lawn demarcated by stony paths. The friends who had come to see Jessica to her last resting place huddled together beside the brown grave, some carrying umbrellas, others in raincoats. Jessica’s father, Wolfgang Brodersen, stared intently at the coffin in which his daughter lay. He had arrived that morning from Berlin and had preferred to get in touch with the undertakers rather than contact me. From the way he was keeping his distance and saying nothing, I realised that he was angry with me. We had never been especially friendly. A former soldier, trained to be stoic, he spoke little and kept his opinions to himself. He had hesitated for a long time before consenting to Jessica marrying me, and hadn’t stayed long at our wedding. I couldn’t remember seeing him at the reception. A widower, solitary and stubborn, he avoided weddings and parties at all costs. On the rare occasions when Jessica and I had been in Berlin, he had given the impression that we were in his way. I had no idea why he was so hostile to me. Maybe that was how military men were: forced to live far from home, they developed a hard shell that made them resistant to the joys of family life. Or maybe, having no one else since his wife’s death, he had felt possessive towards Jessica and hadn’t looked kindly on the idea of someone taking his only remaining relative from him. I admit I hadn’t blamed him or looked for excuses. Not that it would have changed much in our relationship. It was a pity, that was all. He loved Jessica. Although he hated showing his feelings, I just had to see him looking at his daughter to know how much he loved her. And Jessica loved him. In spite of her father’s excessive reserve, she had no qualms about running to him and flinging her arms around him every time she saw him. He would stand there for a moment, his arms rigid at his sides, in the grip of an inner struggle, before returning her embrace.

  Among the friends present at the funeral was Hans Makkenroth. From time to time, he would give me a sign of his support. Behind him, Emma shivered under her umbrella, the tip of her nose red with cold. Beside her, Toni was almost invisible behind the collar of his coat. To his right, Claudia Reinhardt, a colleague of Jessica’s, kept wiping her tear-stained eyes with a tissue. She had been great friends with my wife and spent more time at our house than with her family. Claudia was a lively, funny girl. It was she who had urged Jessica to join a gym, and they had gone to aerobics classes together. She gave me a sad little smile, to which I responded with a slight nod, then plunged her nose back in her tissue and didn’t look up again.

  After the ceremony, people dispersed. Doors started slamming, and one after the other, the cars left the cemetery. I was aware only of the crunching of tyres on the gravel. When silence had returned, Hans Makkenroth came to me and said in a low voice, ‘It’s over, Kurt. Let’s go.’

  ‘What’s over?’ I said.

  ‘What started one day.’

  ‘Do you think it’s as simple as that?’

  ‘Nothing’s simple in life, Kurt, but we have to make do.’

  I threw a last glance at the grave. ‘You may be right, Hans, but that doesn’t tell us how to make do.’

  ‘Time will take care of that.’

  ‘I don’t believe you …’

  Hans raised his hands in surrender. The fact was, he had no answer for that, and realised that saying the wrong thing would only make things worse. He was sorry he hadn’t found the words to comfort me, and was angry at himself for not keeping quiet.

  Emma, Claudia and a few of my neighbours had come back to the house. Much to my surprise, my father-in-law, Wolfgang Brodersen, was there too, sitting slumped on a chair near the balcony. I had been thinking he had already left for Berlin. He stood up, put his glass down on a chest of drawers and waited for me to approach him before he opened the French window and suggested I follow him onto the balcony. He began by looking up at the coppery sky,
as if trying to get his thoughts into some kind of order, then turned his piercing eyes on me and let me have it: ‘How could you have allowed her to get into such a state of despair?’

  ‘I can assure you I didn’t see it coming.’

  ‘Precisely,’ he said, ‘precisely … You should have been paying attention. If your mind hadn’t been elsewhere, you might have been able to avoid this tragedy. There are signs we can’t ignore. People don’t kill themselves on a whim. Jessica was a strong character. She wouldn’t have given in to some stupid little problem. She was my daughter. I knew her better than anyone. She was a fighter, she always got back on her feet … What could have driven her to such an absurd, violent end?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s not the answer I expected from a husband. You were the person who was closest to her. She must have given you some kind of warning. Of course, she wasn’t the kind of girl who would panic over just anything, but she was intelligent enough to confide in her husband. If you didn’t see it coming, it was because Jessica was suffering in silence. You had your mind on other things, I assume, and that’s what led her to such a monstrous act.’

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’ I said, outraged at his insinuations.

  ‘I was married too. My wife didn’t need to draw me a picture.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ I interrupted. ‘Jessica was my wife and I loved her more than anything in the world. I understand your grief, I feel it just as much as you do. I don’t know what Jessica was hiding from me. I don’t know what was wrong with her. Not a minute goes by when I don’t ask myself why she did what she did.’

  Wolfgang looked at me in silence. On the balcony, his breathing replaced the murmur of the rain. He unclenched his fist and stood there facing me, his eyes fixed on mine. ‘May I ask you an indiscreet question?’

  ‘You might as well. Go ahead.’