Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  Two cigarettes and a half-cup of tea later, Lundgren was trembling like the leaves of a pea plant. As a man who was accustomed to meet all sides with distrust, particularly his own, the suspicion had plagued him from the beginning that he was being sent out as a decoy. Like a trainee sent out to get a left-handed screwdriver or off on a snipe hunt and everyone laughs at him afterward. The chicken-breasted. Point at him, look through their coke-bottle glasses and throw chalk. Only here it wouldn’t be chalk they would throw but something worse. Favorite subject: torture.

  It had not been without danger to look at the blueprints without being noticed (and it was also not easy). He’d needed to get hold of one of those illuminated devices. The text was encoded, or at least written in Arabic, which amounted to the same thing, but there were also engineering sketches. And even if Lundgren hadn’t understood them, the images had made an ample cylindrical and secret impression on him. Over the course of hundreds of pages. It definitely wasn’t just about centrifuges. Which made him uneasy. This was no snipe hunt. And it was too big for a left-handed screwdriver. He was on a real mission. He couldn’t be fooled so easily.

  And yet he still felt queasy. It wasn’t the sort of mission where failure was an option. He was in no man’s land, in the desert, and staring at him from the shadows across the street for the last two days was a toothless Arab. Continuously. Now and then he leaned forward to pray in some particular direction. Then he returned to staring at him again.

  “He always sits there, he’s crazy,” the twelve-year-old server had informed him, but one couldn’t trust her, either. Whenever he turned around she was casting fiery glances at him. A beast! That’s the way it was in these latitudes. Dumb as a straw hat. But they could look good. Like animals. Virtually a national characteristic. The golden skin! The deep black eyes! It was in their blood. But who could one trust? That was the unsettling part of the job, one couldn’t trust anyone. People were masks, the world but a façade, and behind it all were thoughts and secrets. And behind every secret another secret, like the shadow of a shadow.

  Lundgren smiled inwardly, lost in thought. And then all of a sudden, on the afternoon of the second day: catastrophe. From out of nowhere the toothless old man suddenly had a little electronic device. He tried to hide it in his hand, but Lundgren saw it out of the corner of his eye. A tiny flash in the sun. The Arab moved the little box to his ear and in the same moment a jeep came driving down the street—and that was the signal. Lundgren jumped up. He ran inside the café, hid in the bathroom. He gripped the sides of the sink and urged the face in the mirror to stay calm. Then voices. Then footsteps: Lundgren dove through the window. Forty-two degrees in the shade. He hopped a wall in stride (110 meter hurdles in 14.9 seconds, a Swedish junior national record), veered through some startled chickens, turned left twice and reached the main road on which the café was situated, still flying. He felt for the weapon hidden beneath his armpit. He switched off the safety. Thought of his wife and peered around the corner.

  He looked at the café through the sun-charged air, saw his notebook, his sunhat and his mint tea sitting alone at the table on the veranda. Before it an empty chair. Lundgren-shaped air had taken his place. On the other side of the street, in front of the green building, the stationary Arab, a transistor radio held to his ear. Music, the drone of singing. The jeep had driven past. Everything on Lundgren quivered. The twelve-year-old beauty queen waved at him friendly-shocked. Lundgren trotted back to his table like a sweaty piece of cheese. She smiled. He didn’t look at her. She stuck out her underdeveloped breasts. He ignored it. First carry out the mission, then lay the girls. Old rule.

  In the afternoon the street in front of the café began to come to life. Men hustled toward the center of town; something seemed to be going on there. Unintelligible calls, always the same word. Lundgren observed it all with a pained grimace on his face. A few hours later the masses surged back. The same calls.

  On the third day Lundgren paid the toothless old man a baksheesh to sit somewhere else. The old man took the money and remained seated. On the fourth day Lundgren greeted him with the words: “Already fucked your sheep today?” The old man just held out his hand. A white ray of light shone down and Lundgren gave him an even bigger baksheesh and laughed and smiled and he couldn’t stop smiling and noticed with what was left of his sanity that something inside him, maybe it was his brain, maybe it was the dysentery, maybe it was the sight of the nubile blackamoor princess, had pumped him full of euphoria. Euphoria was counterproductive. Euphoria was forbidden. He knew it. He knew everything. He was Lundgren.

  11

  Appeal

  He who knows not where he’s going,

  Reaches his destination with every step.

  FULANI SAYING

  THE NEXT DAY POLIDORIO had the file brought to him again, a small stack of paper bound together with a thread, and he spread the contents out in front of him on his desk. On top was the transcript of the interrogation of Amadou that had taken place in the Central Commissariat; Polidorio skimmed through it quickly. He’d been present at two and knew that Amadou had stuck to his story. The last transcript consisted of one sentence: for statement see previous day.

  The rest of the file was disorganized. Polidorio first looked for the eyewitness reports. They were for the most part typed out, though some were handwritten, and included indecipherable abbreviations and stenographic codes. Almost every typed report was missing the name of the interviewer as well as the date. Presumably Karimi had prepared the reports. Canisades had been in Tindirma only once, shortly after Amadou’s arrest, Polidorio not at all. A series of idiotic phrases (“furthermore he stated for the record”, “stated the witness indignantly”) certainly suggested that someone with similar limitations to Karimi had typed or worked on the statements. Among the papers were descriptions of the crime scene, sketched maps and timelines. But also hotel receipts, indecipherable scribbles, a briefing from the Interior Ministry about handling foreign journalists. Sums of money written on a paper napkin. A retrospective transcript of the crime scene inspection: undated. A begging letter from the mother of one of the victims: incomplete. A sketch-map of two of the bodies on a floor plan of a building: no commentary. The file was one big pile of junk.

  An earlier summary of the events originated with Canisades, a crackpot assessment (“further murders in the foreigner milieu should be expected”) filed at the police station in Tindirma. The presence of foreign observers had caused considerable agitation in the oasis. Polidorio knew from Karimi that it had come to blows between him and the local police because they not only persistently shoved their faces into every camera lens but also tried to hire themselves out as private security to the surviving communards.

  There were no usable photos of the crime scene whatsoever, instead Polidorio found one paper-clipped to a blank sheet of paper, a picture of a plaque on the door of the commune. A handmade ceramic plaque adorned with green- and red-glazed flower tendrils:

  Ici vivent, travaillent, aiment Bina Gilhodes,

  Edgar Fowler, Jean Bekurtz, Tareg Weintenne,

  Michelle Vanderbilt, Brenda Johnson, Brenda Liu,

  Kula & Abdul Fattah, Lena Sjöström, Freedom

  Muller, Akasha, Christine, Akhnilo James.

  The plaque must have been from the earliest days of the commune; just two of the murder victims were among those named. Of the rest, it seemed that only about half of them still lived in the commune, as a comparison to a list of current occupants compiled by Karimi revealed. This list included twenty-one people. Next to four names stood a cross; two others were bracketed with parentheses as if their presence in the commune at the time of the crime was unknown or perhaps they had put their youth behind them.

  Polidorio groaned, tossed two aspirin in his mouth and started to read the individual witness reports. There were thirty-one in all, which by local standards—and not only local standards—was a grotesquely large number. Normally a single witness who told the truth w
ould suffice, then one tried to get the suspect to agree with that account. In this particular case the level of public interest had prevented that.

  The thirty-one witnesses were divided between five communards who were in the building at the time of the crime, and twenty-six passers-by who streamed onto the commune grounds after being attracted by the sound of the shots. The five communards described the rampage with varying precision but essentially consistently: Amadou’s unexpected appearance, his rant on questions of sexuality, his plying himself with alcohol in the communal kitchen. The weapon, the attempt to carry out the stereo—the killing of the communard Sjöström. The discovery of the case of money. Three more murders, fruit basket, escape.

  The statements by the passers-by, on the other hand, were short on substance and consisted for the most part of long-winded speculation about Amadou’s motive and the political background. Nearly all alluded to a political background. It was a common way of talking. Mentioned as a motive: jealousy, revenge, injured familial honor, ardor, spirituality and disorientation. Not mentioned: greed. As for as the meager facts (shots on the grounds, rattan suitcase, escape), most of the statements were identical right down to the wording and consequently worthless. Either the people were just blathering on about things they’d heard or Karimi had coached them.

  Three-quarters of the passers-by claimed to have noticed Amadou as he was first entering the complex. Polidorio had asked Asiz to show him the location of the commune on the map, the entrance was on a side street on the souk, no merchant to the left or right, lots of traffic. There was no way anyone had noticed somebody driving a car into an open gate fifteen minutes prior to pistol shots being heard inside. Even the number of shots: hundreds, dozens, lots, two.

  Further discrepancies: not Amadou but a northern European had shot bullets into the air in front of the gate, and then had handed the weapon to Amadou (one witness, interviewed by “M.M.”). A cloud had darkened the sky and facilitated Amadou’s escape (one witness, interviewed by “Q.K.”). Amadou had been wearing a gray wig “like a British judge in a movie” (one witness), had scattered large amounts of gold dust in order to cause a commotion (two witnesses), had been noticeably intoxicated (four witnesses) and had thrown up his arms upon leaving the building and with emotional words beseeched the aid of the one true God (one witness).

  The investigation of the crime scene: a couple of shell casings, an empty magazine. Two bullets in the wall, one in the ceiling between the first and second floor. The four victims had each been struck by several bullets, all bullet wounds were from close range, one in the back, the rest frontal. Little doubt about the cause of death. No sign at all of another suspect. Signed by Karimi.

  Other than the fact that the victims were white, there was nothing special about the case.

  Polidorio put the file back together, stared for a long time at the notes he had made, then went to the boss and took two days’ leave. He claimed to want to spend a little time with his recently arrived family, wrote a note asking Asiz to re-examine the fingerprints on the weapon, and got into his car.

  12

  Khamsin

  At the interface of two media of different densities flowing with different velocities, wave-like oscillations will occur.

  HELMHOLTZIAN THEOREM

  THERE WERE TWO overland routes to Tindirma. The shorter slanted through the Salt Quarter and the desert directly beyond, the other skirted the slums in a northerly arc several kilometers long and then veered off to the right just before the mountains. Polidorio didn’t know either route, opted for the shorter of the two, and within five minutes had lost his way in the Salt Quarter.

  As in every other large city, a belt of shanty towns surrounded Targat, and the willingness of authorities to repeatedly bulldoze the miserable huts off the slopes seemed to have about the same effect as the judicious pruning of a plant. After each wave of clearing, the growth came back even thicker, with roads and paths seeping into the area. Corrugated iron, canisters, debris. Everything, even the paths, seemed to be made from garbage and to grow out of garbage. In the middle of the broadest street holes cropped up in which entire families lived. Some were covered with plastic tarps and decorated with a stone crown. As Polidorio tried to turn around in a dead-end alleyway, barefoot children ran over and pressed the dirty palms of their hands against the passenger-side window. A girl on crutches blocked the way. Others joined her, in an instant a thick mob had welled up around the car. Cripples, adolescents, shrouded women. They screamed and pulled at the locked doors.

  Polidorio attempted not to make eye contact with anyone. He clutched the steering wheel with both hands and pressed the car nightmarishly slowly through the crowd. Fists beat upon the roof. When a small hole opened up before the grille of the car, he stepped on the gas and escaped into the next side street. It seemed to him a marvel that this road was long, straight and empty of people. In the distance, between the huts, he saw the nearest edges of the desert.

  He was about to lean back and relax when a noise made him wince. It seemed to come from inside the car. A look in the rear-view mirror: three smiling children. They were standing on the rear bumper, their fingers clawing the drip molding. The child in the middle had only one hand on the roof and in the other held a sickle with which he was whacking at the rear window. The speedometer said forty-five kilometers per hour. Polidorio immediately let up on the gas. Two of the stowaways jumped off, but not the child with the sickle.

  In the sandy desert he drove in gentle s-curves and the picking sound stopped. The child was now holding the sickle sideways in his mouth and gripping the drip molding with both hands. A kilometer beyond the huts the boy finally jumped off. In the rear-view mirror Polidorio watched him tumble off into the dunes with his tool.

  He let the car coast to a stop. The sweat had dripped all the way down to his shoes. He got a bottle of water out of the trunk. With the bottle in his right hand and waving his left wildly in the air, he climbed the tallest nearby dune and looked around. Off to the side up ahead he caught sight of a row of telegraph poles running at an angle in an east-west direction that probably marked the way to Tindirma. Otherwise just sand. He drank some of the water and shook the rest over his head and then skidded back down to his car.

  He had been on the dirt road about three-quarters of an hour when he noticed something peculiar on the horizon. A small, yellow, dirty cloud that was slowly expanding. He watched it closely. After a few minutes it had overtaken the breadth of the horizon. He had never seen anything like it but knew immediately what it was. Up on the tops of the dunes, little flags of sand were already whipping around. The wind was picking up, the sky was turning dark brown. Finally there was a moment of stillness. Then the car was hit with such force that it was nearly thrown from the road. Polidorio stopped completely. A blast of sand was aimed at his windshield; he could barely make out the front of the hood. There was a crackling and pattering as if the car were on fire. Polidorio sat still for nearly an hour.

  While he waited, it occurred to him that Amadou had been arrested somewhere near here, shortly after he had committed the four murders. Or perhaps had not committed them. The thought went through his head that in the conditions of this landscape, not only was a human life insignificant but, philosophically speaking, so were four human lives or even the entirety of human life. Polidorio wasn’t sure how he had hit upon this idea. Sitting in his office, something of the like would not only not seem philosophical, it would seem banal. With fingers wet with sweat, he switched on the radio. No reception. The desert flew horizontally past him. When the road became dimly visible again Polidorio tried to drive on, but his wheels just spun. He put a towel around his head and opened the car door. A bucketful of sand flew into the car, he closed the door.

  Once the wind had died down enough for him to get out of the car safely, piles of sand nestled aerodynamically around the shape of the car. A few meters in front of the car stood a sign that hadn’t been there before. The top of it w
as sticking out of a dune as tall as a person, it was triangular and rusted and the writing was barely legible: 102… the rest indecipherable.

  The color of the sky changed to light ocher. Polidorio worked with his hands and forearms to clear the sand from the rear of the car and tried to get it rolling again with traction mats laid beneath the tires. He needed nearly half an hour to get it going and then another hour to reach Tindirma, and then, once there, another ten minutes of conversation with the members of the commune to figure out that they were credible. That they had told the truth. And that the crime couldn’t have played out any differently from the way it was documented in the transcripts. One hundred and two.

  13

  At work

  Well, what’s there to say about capital punishment? I’m not against it. Revenge is all it is, but what’s wrong with revenge?

  RICHARD EUGENE HICKOCK

  THE CAMEL had one leg tied up. On three stilts it reeled around between the lanky men who were looking at its mouth and hooves. Lundgren wondered how many of the camel’s legs one could tie up before it fell over. One was possible, two difficult, presumably three would be night-night. Physics wasn’t his passion, as previously mentioned, but it also wasn’t as if it didn’t interest him at all. Lundgren was a naturally curious person, one who was thirsty for knowledge, undogmatic and cosmopolitan, but not bogged down in the swamp of liberalism. He could listen, he had a sense for what was going on in other people that bordered on eerie, a finely tuned power of observation. Always had. The girls in his school were the first to pick up on it. They liked him. The boys liked him too, even if they were a bit jealous of him because of the girls. Lundgren, shining middle point of the Moreno sociogram. El lobo. And he was the collegial type. Father a social democrat. When the teacher turned around during a test, Lundgren held his test booklet up so everyone could see it. In physics too, and biology. Lundgren. He laughed. He would go to a camel market and pay ten dollars to tie up a second leg. Front right leg and back left. Or front right and back right. Ten dollars. Then he’d put his legs up and watch. What a crazy gag! Lundgren pictured the whole thing in his head. Hilarious. He would have told someone about it if he could have told someone about it. When he was finished with his mission here. First the mission, then the camel. Then the beauty queen. Or perhaps first the beauty queen, then the camel. He laughed so hard he cried. When he opened his eyes again, a man was sitting next to him at the table. A man in sunburnt clothing and checkered skin. Lundgren put up his professional façade again in fractions of a second. Kawock! There was a man sitting next to him. He looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He made sure to appear to be looking elsewhere. It was the man. The man, the man, the man.