Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  The man ordered tea. Three minutes of silence. Then Lundgren couldn’t stand it any longer and asked: “What’s your name?”

  The man was just putting his teacup to his mouth, stopped midway and said slowly: “Yes.”

  “What’s your name?” repeated Lundgren quietly.

  “Yes!” answered the man just as quietly.

  “What’s the story?”

  “What?”

  “Your name!”

  “Huh?”

  The checkered man looked worriedly down the street in order to get the lay of the land, gestured inconspicuously with his hand to bring the volume of the conversation down, and whispered barely audibly: “What’s your name?”

  “You first,” said Lundgren.

  “You started.”

  “What?”

  “It was you who started.”

  “Fine,” said Lundgren, mimicking the hand gesture of the other man. “Herrlichkoffer.”

  “What?”

  “Herrlichkoffer. Not so loud. Or Lundgren. For you, Herrlichkoffer.”

  “For me, Herrlichkoffer.”

  “Yes! And now write your name here—here—here.”

  Lundgren pulled a memo pad out of his pocket and shoved it across the table. The checkered man wrote seven block letters on the paper. A short time later Lundgren headed to his pension. An indescribable feeling after all the excitement. All right! His brain transmitted the dispatch that the drilling for oil had been successful. A telephone would have been helpful just then. The desert is on fire, desert with one s. But there was no telephone. So the dispatch went only from Lundgren’s brain to Lundgren’s brain: VC accomplished stop the desert is on fire stop C3 hit upon oil.

  No. Bullshit. UC, not VC! No mistakes now.

  14

  Black and White

  I’m like everyone else. I’d rather watch a bad American film than a bad Norwegian film.

  JEAN-LUC GODARD

  CANISADES SWITCHED ON the TV, put his feet up on the desk and stared for a long time at the black screen. The picture tube began to crackle, a snowy analog clock appeared. It was two minutes to six.

  Canisades had spent the afternoon at the hospital trying to question the presumed victim of a mass rape, and was too tired to start the interview now. He also might as well have just skipped it. Three cousins of the victim had kept a bedside watch and made sure he was never able to see the girl. Only through the intervention of a female doctor had it been possible to conduct an interview through an improvised white curtain. The result was as unspectacular as it was predictable: no rape, just a fall down the stairs. Canisades had to have the doctor describe the nature of the injuries, the location of the hematomas, the hair pulled out by the bushel and the lacerations. He established the names of the cousins, two of whom would be charged with the rape and who took their leave of him impassively, almost cheerfully. The complaint had been filed by the eleven-year-old sister of the victim, who had seen the whole thing through a window and ran to the police, where she had the misfortune of encountering an uncorrupt official. Now the girl was sitting somewhere in the Central Commissariat, a straw doll and Targat’s only female lawyer at her side, and was probably already beginning to realize that the nicer part of her life was over.

  “You’re watching TV?” Asiz tromped through the room chewing gum, tossed a file onto the desk, scratched his back and disappeared into the next room.

  “What?” Canisades shouted after him.

  “The file.”

  “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “The fingerprints.”

  “What fingerprints?”

  “On the Mauser.”

  “What Mauser, are you stupid? The sentencing was this morning.”

  Nothing happened for five full seconds. Then Asiz’s upper body leaned back into the room. He had stopped chewing. “Don’t call me stupid, I’m just doing my job. I spent hours lifting prints off that Mauser. Don’t leave me fucking notes in my locker if you don’t want the fucking results.”

  He disappeared again. One could hear a door open in the next room.

  “Polidorio, or who was it?” Canisades called after him.

  “How should I know?”

  “So what are the results?”

  “Yeah, what indeed? Eh? You idiots, if I spent hours…”

  The rest couldn’t be heard.

  One minute before six, dramatic string music started up. Canisades leaned toward the file, but with his feet on the desk in front of him he couldn’t reach it. The music stopped, the camera zoomed out, and the snowy analog clock became part of a news studio. A very young, handsome man was sitting behind a teak table upon which, in perfect symmetry, sat a flower arrangement, a condenser microphone and a black telephone. The young man greeted the viewers in Arabic and French and then read the reports in French only.

  A parade had been held in honor of the king’s sixty-fourth birthday. There were men in white uniforms atop great white steeds, footmen in white togas decorated with peacock feathers. A high-ranking officer was appointed a provincial governor. A school had burned down. The newsreader read gravely, unctuously. As an image of a woman in a hijab standing in front of the blackened, writhing bodies of children appeared behind him, his voice cracked. With a suppressed sob, he ducked under the table, blew his nose, and then after a suitable pause read the output figures for the recently developed phosphorous mines in the north. In addition, one saw a woman in tight shorts with both legs stretched out horizontally in front of her. Beneath her a sand pit, behind her a track: Heide Rosendahl. The speaker faltered briefly and a clip showed a man with a white beach hat on his head and shoe polish on his face talking to a group of people in suits. Other men in tracksuits conducted exercises with machine guns on the flat roofs of the Olympic village. The Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom would. The Munich police commissioner had. All hostages were. Subsequently an interview of several minutes with a religious dignitary who astutely analyzed the situation.

  Canisades had folded both hands behind his head, opened his mouth wide and was moving his jaw back and forth with a cracking sound. Then he took his legs down from the desk and grabbed the file. The A4 sheet of paper with the fingerprints was sitting on top. Standard text, beneath that two square spaces each with a doughy print in the middle.

  “Targat,” said the newsreader.

  Canisades looked up. The screen showed a picture of a white delivery van with grates over the windows that had been rammed up against a wall by a twelve-ton truck and burst open like a tin can. Amadou Amadou, sentenced to death in the morning for multiple homicide, had been sprung from custody during his transfer to the site of the execution. Turning to the photo, the newsreader indicated with both arms the intersecting directions of the two vehicles, explained the circumstances of the accident, and closed with a quote from the police general, who in turn stated that the escaped prisoner would be back in custody shortly and wished that Allah granted peace upon his soul because man would not. He stacked the pile of papers on the desk in front of him and cleared his throat. The camera zoomed back in on the analog clock. It was quarter-past six.

  Canisades contemplated the squares. A right thumb from the weapon, clearly visible, and Amadou’s right thumb, taken ten days ago at the station house. Identical.

  BOOK TWO

  The Desert

  15

  Tabula Rasa

  At the distance of another ten days’ journey from the Garamantes, is another hill of salt, and water, and men live around it who are called Atarantes; they are the only people we know of who have not personal names. For the name Atarantes belongs to them collectively, but to each one of them no name is given.

  HERODOTUS

  AVIEW LIKE ON A THEATER STAGE, two dark wooden planks right and left serving as improvised curtains. In the narrow wedge between, the high, blue sky, nearly white, light and painful on the retina. Below, the desert. In the desert three men in white djellabas. At first the three men
are indistinguishable, then they become a short one, a fat one and a nondescript one. Their mouths are moving, their hands flit. The short one speaks to the fat one, in his arms the fat one holds a rattan suitcase that lights up in the sun. After a while the nondescript one disappears from view. The fat one hits his own chin with the flat of his hand and purses his lips. The short one laughs. He strikes a comically exaggerated stance, with a fist extended as if he wants to attack the fat one in the very next moment. Then he really does attack the fat one and the fat one knocks him to the ground. The rattan suitcase falls to the sand, a gush of paper money flies out of it. The nondescript one re-enters the picture and talks to the other two. They bend down to gather the money. When the wind shifts, their voices become audible. They are talking about a man named Cetrois, assure one another that it wasn’t their fault. That they are not to blame. Then they all stop still simultaneously and stare in the same direction. Only the hands of the fat one continue automatically to feel around for bills in the sand. The short one turns to the nondescript one and whispers something to him. The nondescript one holds up an imaginary bundle of money and then stuffs it into an imaginary pocket. The noise of a diesel motor sounds in the distance. Offstage a car door closes. A fourth man enters the picture, also wearing a white djellaba. His face and voice are not so different from the others, but his bearing seems more purposeful. He speaks broken French peppered with Arabic and English.

  “Do you have it?” asks the fourth man, and the short one says that they smashed in someone’s skull.

  “Larbi smashed in someone’s skull. With the carjack. It cracked like rotten wood.”

  “Do you have it?” repeats the fourth man, and the short one turns to the fat one, and the fat one says: “Cetrois took off with it into the desert.”

  “I thought you smashed in his skull?”

  “Not Cetrois.”

  “Then who?”

  “No idea.”

  “Where is Cetrois?”

  “He won’t get far.”

  “Where is he!” The fourth grabs the fat one by the collar.

  The fat one, the short one and the nondescript one each raise one arm simultaneously and with some effort all synchronize the direction they are pointing.

  “Why are you standing around?”

  “He’s on a moped!”

  “I thought he was on foot?”

  “Yeah, but he went into a barn. And came out again on a moped.”

  “Where’s your car? And god damn it, what is with that shitty suitcase?” The fourth grabs the rattan suitcase out of the fat man’s arms. The money starts to swirl out of it again.

  “Well if I can just finish speaking!” says the short one.

  The fourth man pulls out a pistol and points it at the short one, who steps sideways, shrieking. The fourth man kicks him so powerfully in the crotch that he flies out of the picture.

  “You can see his trail,” calls the nondescript man.

  “Then show me the trail!” says the fourth.

  The short man re-enters the picture, hunched. One arm across his stomach, the other held up as if in defense.

  “We nearly had him,” he laments. “We were right there. I had him right in front of the grille of the car! But then Cetrois went into the dunes and the Chevy got stuck in the god damn dunes. So we followed him on foot and Larbi was directly behind Cetrois—and as if we were climbing over a dune!” He held his hands at shoulder height and put a look of surprise on his face.

  “There was money everywhere!” assisted the fat one.

  “And I mean German money!” said the short one. “We’ll split it four ways, obviously. Thirty-thirty-ten, just to mention an address, I mean, three times thirty and then… ten. We can make it twenty-eight or twenty-five…”

  A shot rings out and the short man falls to the ground. For a moment he lies there motionless, then he starts to roll around, gazing at his unwounded body.

  “Where is Cetrois? Show me the damn trail!” roars the fourth, standing over the short man and holding the pistol behind him, pointing at the horizon.

  “There! There! There!” yells the nondescript one and runs out of the picture. The fourth follows him, as does the short one.

  The fat man bends over the rattan suitcase and the fourth comes back immediately. He has turned the weapon around in his hand and hits the fat man on the head with the handle. He takes a fistful of notes and rubs them in the fat man’s face. “Do you know who that is? That is Goethe. No, of course you don’t know. Who is Goethe? Fucking Goethe is a fucking East German. This is fucking East German money, the lot of it’s not worth twenty dollars. Show me the miserable trail, and if we don’t catch him—pray! Pray!”

  He walks out of the picture again with the fat one behind him.

  The voice of the short man from offstage: “The one whose skull Larbi smashed in. You’re not listening! Cetrois went into the barn and a minute later came out on a moped. We were three hundred meters behind him—no chance. So we went into the barn, too, maybe there was another moped? And there was this guy. So of course we asked him: where was he going? Where was he going?… Because we knew. And he didn’t say, so then Larbi smashed in his skull with the carjack. And we couldn’t get anywhere on foot… and since we knew you were on your way with the jeep… at any moment… don’t make any accusations…”

  Their voices become quieter. The opening and closing of car doors. Unintelligible. An engine starting and one more sentence shouted over the noise: “You asshole, what if he deploys the line!”

  Then nothing more.

  16

  Possibilities of Awakening

  “Fantômas.”

  “Qu’avez-vous dit?”

  “J’ai dit Fantômas.”

  “Et qu’est-ce que cela signifie?”

  “Rien… Tout!”

  PIERRE SOUVESTRE, MARCEL ALLAIN

  AT THE SAME MOMENT the men disappeared from the right side of the picture, the sun popped up behind the left wooden board like an actor in a light comedy. The clattering sound of the diesel engine traced a horizontal arc along the horizon.

  The radiance. The silence. He tried to turn his head and felt pains he couldn’t pinpoint. As if a fist were trying to push his eyes out of his head from the inside. He blinked. With his hand he felt around and, where he had expected to find a hole in his skull, found a giant lump. Dried blood and slime. They had smashed his head in. Why? He closed his eyes and opened them again: still the same thing, apparently reality. His first thought was: escape. He needed to flee. He didn’t know why, but his body knew. Everything in his body wanted to get out of here.

  That raised the panic-fueled question of where he should flee. That in turn raised the question of where he was. The view between the boards offered no information. Empty desert. He didn’t know how he got here. He didn’t know if they’d even smashed in his skull. He couldn’t remember. And he also couldn’t remember who the man was whose skull had been smashed in, even if he was that man. He didn’t know his own name.

  The first quarter-turn on his axis was so difficult that he couldn’t tell whether he was in pain or his muscles had failed. He let himself lean back again and tried to lift his head. Sweating and wheezing, he looked around at the part of the room nearest to where he was lying against the wall. A hammer seemed to slam against the inside of his skull and made words appear rhythmically, like flashcards, in the rhythm of his heartbeat, attic, timber wall, amnesia, pulley, titration flask and sand heap.

  The fact that such difficult words as titration flask and amnesia were still available in his memory came as some relief to him. The fact that nothing beyond these words entered his mind, nothing that could shed light on the situation, alarmed him. His own name did not surface. It wasn’t on the tip of his tongue either, as he had believed a moment before. He lifted his head a little more.

  What he saw was an attic perhaps seven or eight meters across and of indeterminate length. One end was completely swathed in darkness, whil
e dusty light seeped into the other end from a window-like opening. Tables jutted up into the light surrounded by metal instruments and plastic canisters. On the tables small glass flasks, on the floor larger ones. The floor around the tables covered with sand. A laboratory? In an attic in the desert?

  From a balcony up above, a pulley hung from a heavy iron chain and dangled down through a large, square hole in the floor.

  He looked around for a long time, gazing at and coming up with the names for all the objects he seemed to recognize and then, after he had purposefully not thought about it for a while, he tried to apply the momentum to finding the flashcard with his identity on it.