she said.
When the call ended she stood under some stairs, hiding among a collection of abandoned luggage trolleys. It was as if somebody had taken a hammer and smashed the pile of fragments she had so carefully gathered together. Now they were smaller than ever, even harder to match with one another.
I'm the pattern, she thought. Just now the pieces are combining to form my face. Nothing else.
As she was about to board the flight for Johannesburg shortly before eleven, she hesitated. What I'm doing is madness. I'm travelling into the fog instead of out of it.
She continued drinking during the night. Sitting next to her was a black woman who appeared to be afflicted with stomach pains. They did not speak to each other, merely exchanged looks.
Even as she had been waiting to board the flight in Madrid, it had struck Louise that there was nothing to indicate that they were about to travel to an African country. There were few black or coloured passengers, most of them were Europeans.
What did she know about the Dark Continent? Where was Africa in her consciousness? While she was a student in Uppsala, the struggle against apartheid had been an important part of the so-called solidarity movement. She had taken part in various demonstrations, without really having put her heart into it. As far as she was concerned Nelson Mandela was an enigmatic person who possessed almost superhuman abilities, like the Greek philosophers she read about in her course books. Africa did not really exist. It was a continent made up of blurred images, many of them unbearable. Flies swarming over the eyes of starving children, apathetic mothers with pendulous dugs. She recalled photographs of Idi Amin and his son, dressed up like tin soldiers in their grotesque uniforms. She had always thought that she could detect hatred in the eyes of Africans, but was that in fact her own fear reflected in dark mirrors?
During the night they flew over the Sahara. She was travelling to a continent that was for her as blank and unexplored as it had been for the Europeans who ventured there hundreds of years previously. It suddenly struck her that she had forgotten all about the possible need of injections. Would the authorities allow her into the country? Would she fall ill? Should she not have taken tablets against malaria? She had no idea.
She tried to watch a film during the night when all the lights had been turned off, but she was constantly being distracted. She pulled the blanket up to her chin, tilted her seat backwards and closed her eyes.
Almost immediately she gave a start and opened them again in the darkness. What was it she had asked herself? How do you search for something somebody else has been searching for? She was incapable of thinking the question through, it eluded her. She closed her eyes again. She occasionally dozed off, but twice clambered over the sleeping woman by her side to fetch a glass of water.
Over the tropics they hit a patch of turbulence, the whole aeroplane shuddered, the seat belt light came on. She looked out of the window and saw that they were passing over a violent thunderstorm. Flashes of lightning bored holes through the darkness, as if somebody were holding a giant welding gun in his hands. Vulcan, she thought, in his smithy, hammering away at his anvil.
As dawn broke she saw the first faint strips of light on the horizon. She had breakfast, felt her angst clenching its fist in her stomach, and was eventually able to make out the brownish-grey countryside down below. But wasn't Africa supposed to be lush green? What she could see looked more like a desert, or fields of burnt stubble.
She hated landing, it always scared her. She closed her eyes and took tight hold of the armrests. The aircraft thudded down onto the tarmac, slowed down, swung round towards one of the terminal buildings and came to a halt. She remained seated, preferring not to jostle with the rest of the passengers who seemed in a tremendous hurry to get out of their cage. The African heat with all its strange smells filtered slowly through the sterile airconditioning system. She started to breathe again. The heat and the smells reminded her of Greece, even though the details were different. This was not thyme and rosemary. Different spices, perhaps pepper or cinnamon, she thought. The smoke from wood fires.
She left the aircraft, followed the transfer