Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  An old Tuareg, who suffered from river blindness and had children lead him around using a broom handle, positioned himself at the scene of the crime for several days and, in exchange for a trifling baksheesh, a handful of pistachios or a nip of schnapps, told the gruesome story. He had topaz-blue eyes which no longer had pupils, and he squinted off into the distance, over the heads of his audience, and swore to have been out in the desert the day before the discovery of the body and to have been startled by a sinister sound. His underage attendants had chattered their teeth and trembled in fear; he, however, old fighter under Moussa ag Amastan, had easily recognized it as the sonic boom of an F-5. Correctly, for the children had immediately described to him a needle-thin vapor trail in the blue sky, out of the middle of which opened a golden parachute. This parachute and its shadow had circled each other across the face of the Kaafaahi cliffs like a pair of mating eagles; not long afterward a man in an expensive suit and on all fours had crept down from the mountain into the remains of some mud huts and disappeared, tugging the parachute behind him like a golden plow.

  The parachute in particular aroused general pleasure among the listeners. In later versions the narrator also discovered a sports car, an intelligence operative and four men carrying steel rods, but after a few days everyone had heard the story, and it was no longer a money-earner. On to the next thing.

  The truth was: there was no parachute. There were no steel rods. The truth was: nobody saw anything. In the entire oasis, there was just one single person who knew anything, and this person wasn’t talking. It was the woman who had rented a room to Lundgren on the day of his arrival, and she said nothing because in the tiny room she rented out was an abandoned suitcase full of wonderful things.

  Lundgren’s arrival in the oasis was unspectacular. He had made his way to Targat by train. Once there, he had thrown on a djellaba, glued on a laughable beard and started off into the desert in a shared minicab without exchanging a word with his fellow passengers. A few kilometers before Tindirma the minicab broke down, and Lundgren, who believed himself to be in a hurry, hopped onto a donkey cart. He tipped the driver to take him down a particular alleyway. Then he had himself carted around in circles for a while and finally got out two streets from the aforementioned alleyway in front of a seedy bar. Above the bar was a seedy room that was normally rented out to seedy merchants. At the moment it was vacant, as a sign in Arabic and French proclaimed. Lundgren had a reservation at the local two-star hotel, but he was no amateur. He let himself be shown the little room.

  The approximately one-hundred-year-old landlady led him up to the second floor. She had a face that consisted entirely of creases, with just two holes as eyes. She ground her jaw incessantly, and from each drooping corner of her mouth flowed a black froth. She opened a low door, behind it a washbasin, a mattress, no electricity. Cockroaches fled in single file along the baseboards. Lundgren smiled obligingly—affably—and paid for two weeks in advance. The vermin didn’t bother him. A familiar thing: where there were Arabs, there were vermin. He unrolled a plastic tarp that with the help of the aged woman he spread over the bed, and he coated the overhanging edges of it with an ocher-brown sticky paste. Then he fogged the room using a hand-pumped bug-sprayer and closed the door. Whatever was alive, died.

  The old woman was unimpressed. In the kitchen she offered Lundgren food, he declined gratefully. She pulled a bottle of home-distilled schnapps from beneath her apron, he contended not to drink alcohol on religious grounds. She proceeded to offer him in turn a coffee, a pure coffee, a rental car, a prostitute, and her granddaughter. A small girl, guaranteed not over ten! Her thin, cracked lips made smacking sounds to hint at the alluring freshness of her granddaughter. Lundgren looked at the aging woman pensively, pressed a small baksheesh into her palm, was handed a key to the room, and said his name was Herrlichkoffer but that she shouldn’t speak to anyone about it. Then he righted the mustache stuck to his upper lip and strolled out to his death.

  8

  On the Gangway

  If you look good and dress well, you don’t need a purpose in life.

  ROBERT PANTE

  FOR A PASSENGER who wasn’t just taking a shore leave in Targat but planned rather to disembark, Helen had astonishingly little luggage with her. A small calf-leather suitcase and somewhat smaller hard-cover case made out of black plastic. The chief steward saw the guests off. He paused at the platinum-blonde woman dressed all in white.

  “Goodbye, Mrs…”

  “Goodbye, Mr Kinsella.”

  The passengers were stalled on the gangway. Two sailors at the bottom tried to keep away the mass of people in gray djellabas, a swarm composed of porters, hotel agents and pickpockets. Cripples and merchants hung with their wares shouted agitatedly, a choir of children sang: “Donnez-moi un stylo, donnez-moi un stylo!”

  They were the first words of French that Helen had heard since college. She pushed her sunglasses up on top of her hair and was wondering whether it would be sensible to look through her bags for a writing utensil when she felt at the same moment someone grab the handle of her suitcase. A little boy had dashed halfway up the gangway. He pulled at the case with a determined look on his face. Did he want to carry it? To steal it? Helen clutched at the handle. The boy—matted black hair, narrow shoulders—fought a mute and desperate battle, then the latch of the suitcase opened and its contents plummeted into the sea in a colorful sweep of lipsticks and salves and flasks and cotton balls, followed gracefully by the open suitcase itself, its two halves spread like wings. Helen stumbled backwards.

  Mr Kinsella came running down immediately, and from below one of the sailors fought his way up through the passengers. The boy, being closed in on, slipped under the rope railing of the gangway and plopped into the narrow strip of sea between ship and pier. A drunk on the top deck clapped in applause, the boy laboriously doggy-paddled away.

  “Welcome to Africa,” said Mr Kinsella. He helped Helen to carry the remaining suitcase to the taxi stand and stood watching after her for a long time.

  The taxi driver had just a left arm and shifted gears by turning his upper body while holding the steering wheel with his knees. “Mine,” he said, wagging his right shoulder. It was his only contribution to the conversation. Along narrow, serpentine roads up the coastal range they climbed.

  The Sheraton wasn’t the only building atop the ridge, but it was the only one that with its twenty stories protruded high above the jungle.

  It had been built in the 1950s and the architect had been unable to decide between functionality and the slapped-up folklore of gaudy mosaics, pointed arches and muqarnas: an eclectic catastrophe. Certainly it wasn’t due to the lack of style alone that the hotel enjoyed such great popularity, but it played a role. Even in the off season one had to book far in advance.

  My parents had rented a two-room apartment on the ninth floor, and when they sent me out, as they so often did, in order to be able to carry out secret things behind closed doors, I explored the sprawling grounds on my own. I had the pool attendant show me how he arranged the towels, contemplated the perplexing Droste cocoa advertisement in front of the restaurant, and helped a pretty young woman sort straws at the bar. With my first French words (“numéro neuf cent dix-huit”) I ordered unlimited amounts of lemon ice cream and Coca-Cola and rode the elevator from the basement to the roof terrace and back again. The hotel employees loved me. I wore a white T-shirt with the Olympic rings on it and short lederhosen with red heart-shaped pockets.

  What the secret things were that necessitated my parents closing the door on me day after day, I had no idea. I was seven years old. I knew only that it had nothing to do with sex. Sexual relations were taboo, because all life force was contained in the seed and the seed needed to remain in the body. That’s what the great Sri Chinmoy taught. Today I believe the closed doors had something to do with the tiny plastic bags that were pinned inside my lederhosen with a safety needle during strolls through Targat. But I was neither very an
xious to find out what it was about, nor unhappy with my fate. What I liked most was to stand on the roof terrace.

  From the roof terrace of the Sheraton, one had on the ocean side a dizzying view over the bay of Targat and the little harbor. Numerous white bungalows that belonged to the hotel were scattered across the side of the ridge like sugar cubes. Rusty barges, sand-colored buildings and dirt lanes crowded around the half-circle of the sea, and every two weeks a gleaming white cruise ship bobbed up and down in the harbor, a giant ship, a floating temple that signified wealth and enjoyment to some and to others wealth and wealth alone. Toward the east, by contrast, one saw from the back side of the ridge way out into the interior of the country, over a jungle of green cauliflower, plantations and slums and on out to the endless desert, where, on clear days, the rock stack of Tindirma quivered on the horizon.

  When from up there I looked out across five scoops of lemon ice cream at the curve of the globe, I was utterly happy. I was Rommel on the desert side and saved my men against the explicit orders of the Führer, I was Jacob Roggeveen at sea and discovered unknown Easter Islands, and when I was myself now and then I tried to spit on the heads of blond, brown or black ants that streamed out of the building fifty meters below me. The wind deflected my spit on the way down and for the most part I only ever hit a blue awning. To this day, I cannot answer with any certainty the question of whether on the last day of August in the year 1972 I was standing up there and noticed the American tourist and her one-armed taxi driver or whether a photograph has been superimposed on my memory. One thing, however, is certain: after Helen Gliese had picked up the key to her bungalow from the hotel reception, she immediately left the building accompanied by a young bellboy who was carrying her little calf-leather suitcase. The bellboy’s head swayed as he walked, as if he were quietly singing, and when they crossed the road he absent-mindedly tried several times to take the hand of the platinum-blonde woman.

  Helen’s bungalow was halfway down to the sea. It had two rooms and a little kitchen, a terrace with ocean view and a yellow and blue arabesque mosaic above the door in which the numerals 581 were set in red stones. A photograph of the door, like the ones seen in many newspapers at the time, hangs above my writing desk.

  9

  Spasski and Moleskine

  It is with trifling details of court life as insignificant as those related in the last chapter that we should have to fill up the history of the next four years.

  STENDHAL

  CANISADES GOT ON BETTER with the locals. He was from a small city in the north of the country; his forebears, who had been relegated to civil servants after the war of independence, had once been part of the upper class. Like Polidorio, he had studied in France. At the elite Paris boarding school he had attended for two years, he claimed to have a Jewish mother, which was not true. In Targat he boasted that he was the scion of a French industrialist family, which was also not true. In other respects Canisades was not a bad person. His easy, creative way with his own biography seemed as innate to him as his elegant manners and a charm that in middle Europe would have been called smarmy but here opened hearts. He had taken up his service in Targat shortly before Polidorio, but in contrast to him had not had any trouble acclimating. Within two weeks he knew half the city. He passed as easily in the hash dens along the waterfront as in the villas of American intellectuals, and incidentally performed his duty perfectly satisfactorily.

  Only his attempts to integrate new colleagues into the social fabric of the city had not been crowned with success. Polidorio enjoyed letting himself be talked into all sorts of things by others, but he had no use for the groups that Canisades was so eager and indiscriminate in trying to get to know. The idea of choosing a high-society party over an evening with friends would never have occurred to him, and, as with everyone for whom social vanity is unfamiliar, Polidorio struggled to see it as the driving force in others.

  What he most readily agreed to were the late-night bordello visits. Ever since Canisades had shown him how things worked on the long night of the files, the walk to the waterfront had become a beloved custom of his. Though it was difficult to say what it was that appealed to him about it. Certainly not the sexual gratification, the visits took place too infrequently for that.

  The women who worked there came from appalling circumstances, none of them had ever been to school, and anyone who supposed that their empathy or physical talents compensated for their intellectual shortcomings would be disappointed.

  Polidorio disdained them for what they did, felt ashamed for the deeds he undertook with them, and was too shy to request what he really wanted. It was more the atmosphere that drew him there, the subtle displacement of everyday life, the transgression against the order of things, something that he, by profession, had to stand against, and first and foremost the inexplicable excitement. He liked talking with the women, and it sent him into a peculiar state to know that he could do something with them if he wanted to. In this state of excitement, which gripped him reliably as soon as he started the walk to the waterfront, Polidorio constantly felt on the edge of some sort of abyss. Something deeply unsettling, yes, even demonic, that, as it does to many simple souls, appealed to him: are there perhaps hidden layers of my personality? Depths that threaten to engulf me? Though his idea of the demonic was barely more developed than the idea women’s magazines had of psychoanalysis.

  In return, and also to relieve his conscience, he provided his favorites with chemical treasures from the evidence room, official documents and tip-offs about raids, and even though he wasn’t doing anything different from any other police officer who went to a bordello, he still felt what he was doing was a bit sinister, unfathomable and crazy. Perhaps the most sinister aspect, however, was that two-thirds of his take-home pay disappeared into this abyss. It goes without saying that Polidorio’s wife lived humbly and knew nothing of all of this.

  But on the evening of the day on which the two commissars had interrogated Amadou together, they did not go to the port district. Canisades had asked Polidorio to keep his schedule clear but hadn’t revealed where he wanted to go, and Polidorio had with tempered enthusiasm acquiesced.

  “Not to the god damn Americans,” he said when he saw Canisades in his best suit. “Please, not to the god damn Americans.” And Canisades said: “Don’t make such a fuss.”

  In first gear the police car crept up the serpentine road of the coastal range and stopped among limousines and convertibles with white-wall tires across from a sumptuous villa from the 1940s. The villa belonged to one of the two American writers who lived in the city. It was surrounded by a high white wall with an oversized art deco portal in front of which tourists liked to have their pictures taken during the daytime. The portal consisted of two stylized columns of papyrus sheaves, before which were two androgynous youths with slender marble bodies, their feet hanging in the air mid-step as if they were running toward one another. The runner on the left was carrying a hammer and had a triangle in the crook of his arm; he was smiling. The one on the right had a whip and a trellis in his hand, and a deep buttock-like groove on his forehead expressed a dubious sculptural rage. Thirty years since the erection of the villa nobody knew any more how to explain the symbolic implications.

  The clinks and laughter of a party wafted over the walls, and Polidorio asked with a sigh which of the two writers lived here.

  “Just clench your butt cheeks.” Canisades pulled on the cord that rang the doorbell.

  “I really am interested.”

  “Then read one of their books.”

  “I tried. So who lives here?”

  “There are mnemonic devices,” said Canisades. “Those things look like chess figures.”

  As far as Polidorio could tell, there were a lot of Americans in Canisades’ circle of acquaintances who had three things in common: they did something with art, something with drugs, and something devious when it came to sexuality. The two most prominent were the writers Canisades had dubbed
Spasski and Moleskine in an effort to make it easier to distinguish them. Both were regarded as candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Spasski for a long while already, Moleskine only recently and as more of a dark horse.

  Spasski was from Vermont and didn’t really like to see himself as American. In his eyes he was more the distinguished European type. He wore suits from Paris, enthused about technical advancements, and disdained his colleagues for their antiquated notebooks. Every day, with great discipline, he hammered out exactly four pages on a black portable typewriter, and evenings on the waterfront he tried to break the Sicilian defenses of local chess hustlers.

  Why he poured such effort and passion into playing chess was not entirely clear. He pursued it in an amateurish manner and didn’t seem to improve. In his last book there had been a scene in which the mysterious hero, having emerged from the underclass, demonstrated his razor-sharp intellect in passing by wiping out a Serbian grand master using a Sokolsky opening plus a queen sacrifice in the middlegame. A critic at the New York Times noted that he had already read the same scene, or one very similar to it, in two other books by the same author; fourteen days later the editorial office received a parcel from Africa that contained nothing but a decaying rat.

  Moleskine on the other hand preferred more manly subject matter. He was a slender, asthenic type, suffered from the long-term effects of an uncured case of TB, and had a PhD in philosophy, which he liked to conceal from company. The best-known photo showed him in boxing gloves. The second-best-known showed him standing on the beach in Targat with his pants down, urinating on a copy of The Queen’s Gambit, by his colleague Spasski.