Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  He knew that he could swim. But he didn’t know how he had learned to. He didn’t even know how he knew he could. He could swim freestyle and breast stroke. The words and motions were immediately at his disposal.

  Helen turned around and pushed her hair behind her ears with a charmingly affected gesture. A small wave splashed up on her, she smiled a little inscrutably, and he wondered whether a human brain could ever forget an image as captivating as this one; and whether he already had.

  While he was still lying down, he felt a thought progress from deep inside him, a thought he now clearly realized had been stirring around in the dark for quite some time: what if he really did know her from before? If she knew him? If she was just putting on a show? He jumped up, ran down the beach, ran back and stumbled over two hotel guests. Helen only noticed him when he was already thigh-deep in the water, screaming. He didn’t know anyone. No one knew him. He didn’t know himself. He was lost.

  “Breathe slowly. Easy. It’s okay. You’re going to be fine.” Helen guided him up the beach by his shoulders, pressed him down to the blanket and held his arm tightly for a while.

  “Calm down.”

  “I have to do something.”

  “What do you want to do? Don’t hold your breath.”

  “I can’t sit here.”

  “Then go to a doctor.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Let us suppose that you didn’t commit a capital crime.”

  “I’m definitely on the hook for something.”

  “But you’re no murderer.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “The pulley block fell by mistake. You said so yourself.”

  “And the other stuff?”

  “What other stuff?”

  “That I have something to do with these people. I’m probably one of them.”

  “You’re paranoid. And you’re no criminal.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I’ve experienced three days and three nights of you. Particularly the nights. You are not a criminal. If you really must know: you’re a sweetheart. You couldn’t hurt a fly. That’s how you are now and my guess is that’s how you were before, too. Your main personality traits don’t change because of amnesia.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  He looked at her skeptically for a long time and then she finally stood up, bundled up the towels and nodded to him. It wasn’t love. It was something worse.

  BOOK THREE

  The Mountains

  26

  The Devil

  In pledging their faith they drink out of each other’s hands; and if they have no liquid, the parties take up some dust from the ground and lick it.

  HERODOTUS

  CARRYING A LITTLE PLASTIC BAG with a sunflower printed on it, he went to do some shopping. The store was right next to the Sheraton, 300 meters up the hill. He’d gone there the day before together with Helen; this was his first time alone. He had a hard time dealing with the strange faces on the street. When they smiled he thought he’d been recognized, and when they looked at him and didn’t smile it made him even more uneasy. A man in a trench coat stood out to him when the man stopped just as he turned around to look at him. The concierge at the Sheraton greeted him like an old friend. A one-eyed woman held out a hand.

  When he was nearly back at the bungalow with his full shopping bag, he suddenly turned and, driven by agitation, ran back to the hotel and asked the concierge if he had ever seen him before.

  “Yesterday,” the concierge confirmed.

  “But not before? You don’t know me?”

  “Bungalow 581d. With the mademoiselle. Who picked you up.”

  He walked through the alleyways with his head hanging. The despair was becoming overwhelming. Two men in dark suits who got out of a parked limousine followed him. He twice took wrong turns and didn’t notice the men until they pulled a linen sack over his head. A cord tightened around his throat. He managed to claw the fingertips of both hands inside the cord, at the same time feeling his feet being raised. He kicked but forgot to scream. His shoulders banged against metal, then he had a brief sensation of weightlessness before a hard landing. The smell of rubber, the sound of a car trunk closing, muffled acoustics. An engine being started.

  The ride in the car lasted barely five minutes. He was able to get the hood over his chin and mouth and up to the bridge of his nose, where it got stuck and pressed against his eyeballs.

  He was still working at it when the trunk opened again. He made out two men who lifted him by his feet and elbows. A third one at the wheel. He had to lean his head way back to see them. Armed men. Black car. White-gravel walkway. Green lawn in front of a huge villa, around the lawn a wall too tall to see over, beyond it the sounds of a busy street, very nearby. They had put one of his arms behind his back but otherwise not bound or gagged him. They didn’t seem to expect that he would shout for help, and the men didn’t seem to have overlooked this possibility out of negligence. So he didn’t shout. Blood dripped from his nose.

  One of the men pushed the doorbell. A squawking voice asked who was there.

  “Julius.”

  They entered an enormous entrance hall. Like something out of an American film, a tall, broad staircase with stone bannisters, plaster ornamentation and gold trim, magically flamboyant. A huge crystal mirror showed two burly men in black suits standing in an open door. Between them a wispy figure with one hand behind his back, blood coming out of his nose, and wearing a white hood that looked like a giant chef’s hat pulled down to his eyes. A few young men and women of flesh and blood stood around a splashing fountain with others made of stone. The women wore airy dresses. Looked briefly at the door. Turned away.

  The one who had just called himself Julius pushed him up the stairs and into a room. He cut the hood off him and shoved him into a leather armchair facing a heavy desk. On the desk golden writing utensils. The room was wrapped in a dark wainscoting. Oil paintings of naked women alongside the awkward circles and squares of modern art. Julius sat down on a chair in the corner. The desk chair, a cantilevered chair made of steel and blue suede, remained empty.

  He opened his mouth to ask a question, but Julius lifted his weapon slightly and he stayed silent. He adjusted the bandage on his head. His wound throbbed. Voices and laughter could be heard out in the garden. A half-hour went by. Then a door opened in the wainscoting and a beaming white-haired man in shorts entered the room carrying a badminton racquet. Bloated flesh bulged out from under his sweaty T-shirt. His legs looked thinner than his arms, and his face could have come straight off a nineteenth-century physiognomic wall chart as an example of the sanguine type. Together with his clothes, his body, his motions and the surroundings, it conveyed the impression of someone upon whom nothing had been bestowed in life—and someone who hadn’t been upset about this in the slightest.

  The white-haired man sat down on the cantilevered chair, exchanged a brief glance with Julius and smiled. And was silent. He stretched out the silence for so long that its effect was nearly lost.

  “You have a lot of nerve,” he said. And then after another long pause: “We seem to have underestimated someone.”

  He had an indeterminable accent in his French.

  “Two little sausages. Isn’t that what I said? Two little sausages! We can be happy and give praise to the Most Merciful that we have the little sausages. And now this.”

  The white-haired man leaned toward him and tapped his bandage with the badminton racquet. There was an unpleasant noise from the wound.

  “I want to ask you a question. Or maybe we should start at the beginning. Can we drop the formalities? Help jog my memory, little man. You don’t mind if we speak frankly to one another, do you? Good. Do you have any idea what this is about?”

  The white-haired man looked at him for a while, plucked two blades of grass and a chunk of dirt out of the strings of his racquet and then held the piece of sports equip
ment out behind him. Julius sprang up immediately and took it from him.

  “Do you know what this is about?”

  The difficult decision between a knowingly coy facial expression or an ignorantly confused one.

  Ten seconds.

  “No, you don’t have a clue what this is about!” yelled the white-haired man. He leaned forward, pulled a charcoal-colored cardboard box out of a desk drawer and threw it across the desk. Half the size of a cigarette pack, the gold-embossed letters of some jeweler. It landed in his lap. He opened it hesitantly. A short gold chain lay inside along with a pendant that at first glance looked like a severed fingertip. The size of a fingertip, the color of a fingertip. But it was actually just a wax-colored piece of carved wood with two blood-red spots on the top of it. On the back, nearly worn down from long use, a demon’s face had been carved. The red dots were the horns. He turned the amulet in his hands, perplexed.

  “You are shocked now,” said the white-haired man, leaning back, looking satisfied. “But one must consider that beforehand: he who attacks Rome must know Rome. Have you served?”

  Julius playfully pointed his weapon at him. He struggled to find the right facial expression to reflect the feelings they must have expected him to have.

  With a sudden motion the white-haired man reached across the desk and snatched the amulet out of his fingers and then threw it back at him. “Is it voodoo or what? Some sort of protection? From people like us perhaps? Now you’re screwed. Despite your trying not to bat an eyelash. You’re a bad actor.”

  The white-haired man lowered his head to be able to look up at his face.

  “Looks like a little finger,” he continued. “Like a real finger. And it came within a hair of being an actual finger. But it isn’t one. And who do you have to thank for the fact that it isn’t one?”

  Julius blushed.

  “Heart of gold!” called the white-haired man sarcastically. “Heart of gold! Julius has five kids. When you have five kids, you get soft in the head. Automatically. And he saved my life twice. You couldn’t know that. Soft in the head, but twice saved my life. That’s a pension plan. Loyalty, right or wrong, my country. If there is one trait that I value in people above all others, it’s loyalty. The trait that’s missing in you. And do you want to know what the result of that is? I’ll tell you: I’m sitting there with the little shit on my knees and I say, the usual price, do we take the left index finger or the right? And Julius says: ouch. And then the mother shows up. Heavens! And what does the mother say? Come on, you must know: what does the mother say? Your wife. You talk with your wife after all, you’re more of the sensitive type. So what does the fat cow say?”

  Silence.

  “I hope you will excuse me the expression fat cow. I don’t want to offend anyone here; maybe she has other qualities. The fat cow. Though she’s not a good lay either.”

  Without averting his eyes, the white-haired man turned to Julius. “Or is she a good lay, Julius? She’s more of a middling fuck, or what did you think? Not really kept in good running order. But I guess your prick has better things to do. Like pissing on the word loyalty. Now the million-dollar question: What does the fat cow say about the idea of the finger? Piano player! He wants to be a piano player. Right before the main event she says he wants to be a piano player. Imagine that. Three years old and already a piano player. Unbelievable, right? Three years old, Beethoven. No problem I say, I just hope he doesn’t want to be Johan Cruyff, Beethoven and Cruyff, that would be a rare combination after all. So I grab his toe and what does the fat cow say now?”

  The white-haired man waited to see the effect of his words. He couldn’t know that they were having no effect. At least not the effects they would have had on someone who had the capacity to remember.

  “Come on, you know her, what do you think the fat cow said?”

  He listened to the white-haired man’s sermon with his head hanging, trying to feel something other than indifference. He had a family? He had a wife and child? They had been threatened? He just wasn’t able to muster any feelings for people he couldn’t remember. He tried to imagine recovering his memory and the great pain he would feel at the thought of his loved ones being physically abused, but it remained abstract, like anticipating a visit to the dentist two months down the road.

  And anyway, the words fat cow and little shit reverberated in his mind, and he had to think of Helen. Slim, platinum-blonde Helen. The only thing the white-haired man’s talking provoked in him was disgust. And fear for his own person. To get out of here whole. A few minutes earlier he had been prepared to say what he knew: that he didn’t know anything. The sad speculation over amputated limbs made clear to him what sort of person he was dealing with. He tried to stay calm.

  “Don’t cry now. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to secure your rear. And even better than securing it is not having one. Look at me. You can take Gandhi, you can take Hitler, you can take anyone. Jesus. No, my dear. Wife and child: the worst rear of all. Anyone can march on them. You’re as soft as cheese. Look at Julius: he used to be the best of the best, now he’s a wreck. I say to him, Julius, I say, what do you think we should do? And Julius rips the amulet from around the little shit’s neck and says: What do you think, boss? Isn’t this enough? Delicious. And that’s the situation now. The cow and the kid are being held. Just in case you were wondering. Or have you not been home at all in the last few days?” The white-haired man grabbed the amulet, had it perform a little dance routine as it crossed the edge of the desk, and said in a strange voice: “He thought he could hide from us. He thought so.” And then again in a normal voice: “And now I must unfortunately ask you the question that Julius already asked: Is this enough?” He held up the demon. “Or do we need to deliver the cow and calf in slices?”

  The amulet disappeared again into the cardboard box and the box into the drawer in the desk.

  “Do you know what’s next?”

  He thought for a while, bit his lip and said: “A swap.”

  “A swap,” said the white-haired man with a facial expression that alternated between jubilant and stunned. “A swap!” The white-haired man glanced at Julius, then stood up and reached his hand out across the desk in a friendly way.

  He went to shake on it, but the white-haired man pulled him forward by the arm, grabbed a metal letter-opener with his left hand, and in a single motion rammed it through his hand and into the desk. Then he sat back in his chair and made clear with a wave of the hand that he should by no means attempt to remove the letter-opener from his flesh himself. Julius aimed his gun at him.

  “Well, well, well!”

  His hand was nailed down far enough toward the other side of the desk that he couldn’t sit down or really stand up. It left him in an odd position, hovering half over the desk, making him look like someone trying to relieve himself outdoors.

  “What is it you wish to trade, my friend, and for what?”

  He gasped.

  “You admit then that you have something you can trade?”

  He whimpered.

  “That belongs to me. You admit it?”

  A minute went by. He feared for his life. What he really wanted to do was to shout it all out, but the last of his rationality held him back. Whatever it was the white-haired man wanted, he didn’t have it. He assumed, and had good reason to assume, that it had to do with something that a man named Cetrois had disappeared with into the desert on a moped a few days before. He could have voiced this supposition, of course, but then he would also have had to say that it was a supposition that he didn’t know anything more about and that he had lost his memory. Not without some logic, he concluded that in that instant he would become worthless to his counterpart. Even if they believed him. Especially then. And if they didn’t believe him, which was likely, he would only make them angrier.

  He couldn’t tell the truth. But he also couldn’t lie. In order to lie, he would have to have known what to lie about. So he bit down, holding hi
s teeth together.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” he groaned.

  “Aha, it doesn’t work that way?” The white-haired man took hold of the letter-opener as if it were the gear shift in a car and shifted once through all the gears.

  “Maybe you think this is about your family. You think it’s about something as trifling as your life. But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about justice. Because there’s one thing you can’t forget: I paid for it. And I won’t let some amateur like you screw it up.”

  “I’ll fix it! I’ll fix it!”

  “How will you fix it?”

  He cried. He looked up at the white-haired man’s face and decided to poke a little further into the dark.

  “I know who!”

  “You know who?”

  “I also know where.”

  “Where!” yelled the white-haired man.

  “If I tell you, the outlook for me is shitty.”

  “The outlook for you is already shitty.”

  “I’ll fix it, I can do it!” he yelled. Blood was bubbling up the metal blade. “You know me! And I know you! You have my family!”

  The white-haired man stared at him silently.

  “You can count on me,” he whimpered. “My wife! My beloved son! Oh, my God, oh, my God, my son, my son!” Tears spilled from his eyes. He let his face fall to the desk in order to hide it. He wondered whether he had overplayed it.

  Julius leaned forward and whispered something in the white-haired man’s ear. The white-haired man leaned back in his chair. A minute went by. Another minute.

  “Seventy-two hours,” said the white-haired man. “Then the mine is my mine again. Seventy-two hours. Otherwise fingers, toes, ears.”

  He slowly pulled the letter-opener out of his hand.