The African Equation Read Free Page A

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 couldshe 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 furiouswith 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