When the markings were reduced to a left palm and a thumb print, they found themselves in a low, cave-like space with three or four tunnels branching off from it. Hakim shone his dim light around and explained which tunnel had been dug in which year by which ancestor. From time to time he tapped his own chest proudly and raised his eyebrows knowingly, and Carl, who was listening attentively, couldn’t help thinking that the speaker had begun digging as a young man and continued as an adult and an old man, and that he was the grandfather, father and grandson in one person. While he was still speaking, a ghastly moan came up from the depths. Carl looked at Helen, Helen looked at the old man, and the old man acted as if he hadn’t heard anything. He was talking about how Hakim the second, or the third, had tried in vain to use a jackhammer down here, imitating the rattling of the machine with his cheeks puffed out, but couldn’t drown out the eerie noise that had briefly stopped and then continued an octave lower.
“What—is—that?” asked Helen, and Hakim put a hand to his ear.
It was silent.
“Something is groaning,” she insisted, and the old man’s face lit up.
“Ah! Something groaning? I’ll show you.”
He rushed down the steepest tunnel with his lantern. Carl and Helen stayed still and called after him that they’d seen enough and didn’t want to see any more of the tunnels. The only answer they got was the sound of his receding footsteps. The cave-like space darkened with his every step.
“Hey!” yelled Helen. “Hey!”
“You’ll never find your way out without me,” came the voice from the depths; holding each other’s hands, Carl and Helen hurried after him. The tunnel was so small that they had to squat down and waddle. Carl was nearer to the old man. Helen tried in vain to pass him and whispered in his ear in English, “If something happens, get the lamp first and then the old man. Without the lamp we’re screwed.”
On the wall was a palm with only a pinkie finger. After a few sharp turns the tunnel widened and opened into a large, reverberating dark space, a craggy grotto that was so gigantic that the light of the carbide lamp didn’t reach the far edges. The ceiling was pitch-black and was buttressed by natural columns and anthropomorphic rock formations above a muddy pool several meters across.
Carl cleared his throat and the noise rang out again, frighteningly close and directly in front of them.
From a distance, it was possible to mistake the sound for a hidden draft or something of that sort, but now it was clear: there was something living, waiting in the nearby darkness.
Hakim hopped over a few boulders and used his lamp to light the far side of the pool. A goat stood there on four shaky legs. Or at least something that must at one time have shared some similarities with a goat. Its coat had completely fallen out. There was a white film over its eyes. The animal turned its head horribly slowly toward the visitors and wheezed asthmatically. Around its neck was a heavy metal chain that was secured somewhere in the pool. A half-circle of filth and vomit along the bank offered an estimate of the length of the chain.
Hakim took a bundle of grass from his pocket and threw it to the goat. It cringed and then sniffed around on the ground for the greenery.
Beaming, Hakim pointed back and forth between the animal and his toothless mouth, smacked his lips and pressed the tips of his fingers to his lips. “My grandfather discovered it! Six or seven months and the meat is softer than soft, so tender. Tasty, tasty. It only works in the dark.”
That night Carl had nightmares again. He was lying on the beach not far from the hotel and beside him, on a bath towel, lounged a giant, fat goat with white, blinded eyes. When he looked into its eyes he immediately realized that it wasn’t the first time he had encountered them, and the voice of the dream revealed this was in reality a sphinx whose riddle it was necessary to solve.
He thought for a long time and then asked: “How might you be doing?” and the goat answered: “Fine.” He only realized at that moment with a fright that the animal could talk. Smiling, it rubbed its face with its hooves and beneath them Helen’s face appeared. Her mien. Carl sat up, aghast. A magnificent, bright-blue day out of the window. He was alone in bed. Was he still dreaming? Or something else? He heard human voices and got up to look out.
Helen was standing in front of the bungalow with a hotel employee. They were talking quietly. Helen laughed in a friendly tone, waved goodbye to the employee and went with two shopping bags under her arms to a white column between two oleander bushes in the front garden. She opened a compartment in the column with a small key, pulled out a stack of mail and leafed through it.
“Sleep well?” she asked. “I’m surprised they haven’t written to me, I’m really surprised.”
She sorted the mail into several stacks on the kitchen table. Though mail wasn’t really the right word. The contents of the mailbox consisted of two flyers for local restaurants (“quality Arabian cuisine”, “finest French dishes”), a letter from the hotel containing the code of conduct and a telephone number for emergencies (water leaks, electrical outages, Africans on the grounds), and a colorfully illustrated pamphlet in plastic wrap for Poseidon scuba-diving school (“the diving school with the trident”, “we and our cutter”, “get to know the fascinating world beneath the waves from a new perspective”) with a handwritten note on it that said: Please return pamphlet to mailbox upon departure. In addition, two crumpled tissues, an empty envelope, an empty chocolate-bar wrapper and finally a strip of paper that had been typed out on a typewriter with many crossed-out mistakes that Helen read while biting her lips and then handed to Carl without a word:
++++++Psychologist’s Office++++++
J. Carthusian Cockcroft, M.D., Corniche 27
Tel: 2791, Languages: Frnch, Engl, no
Arabic–Office houers: Mon-Thur 8-12 and
By appointment; state-of-the-art
methods–introductory rates thanks to our
++++++GRAND OPENING++++++
“What’s that about? Is this normal?” Carl turned the slip of paper around in his fingers.
“Maybe it is here.”
“But you don’t seriously think I’m going to go?”
Helen put the contents of the shopping bags in the refrigerator, fruit basket, sink and on the table and began to cut up a pineapple. Carl followed her undecidedly.
“Introductory rates. It’s quackery.”
“You can’t ask me.”
“But I am asking you.”
“The density of psychologists probably isn’t as high here as in Manhattan. That’s why the ads look a bit different. But if you won’t go to the hospital and or anywhere else—”
“Did you notice? Houers, with an e.”
“Memory loss and persecution complex. You should definitely see a psychologist.”
“You don’t find it strange?”
“Maybe if it said ‘landmine’ or ‘women and children half price’—but you don’t need to get all worked up about a typo. It’s probably a practice aimed at tourists who’ve had a bit too much sun—”
Helen broke off her sentence when she saw his unhappy face.
“I’m scared,” Carl said softly. The paper trembled in his hand and the trembling worked its way up his arm and through his body. Helen put down the pineapple and approached him with the dripping knife. She wrapped her arms around Carl, the knife poking like a steel shark’s fin from his back, and said: “Just try it. And if it’s quackery you’ve only wasted a little time.”
“No way,” said Carl. “No way am I going there.”
31
The Tyrant of Acragas
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.
EMERSON PUGH
“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”
“I don’t know.”
“What language do you speak?”
“French.”
“What city are we in?”
“Targat.”
“What�
�s the date?”
“1972.”
“More precisely?”
“September seventh. Eighth.”
“How do you know that?”
“From the newspaper.”
“When did you read a paper?”
“Yesterday?”
“Did you know what day it was when you woke up in the barn?”
“No.”
“When you saw the date on the newspaper, did it surprise you? Or did it seem to be about what you expected?”
“About what I expected.”
“How old are you?”
“Pfff.” Carl looked at Dr Cockcroft. Dr Cockcroft had a voluminous full beard and slightly long hair that must have been blond not long ago. Eyes, nose, mouth were squeezed together in the bottom half of his face beneath the weight of his block-like forehead. He could as well have been a composer, or an astrophysicist. His hands were gigantic and his nails were chewed all the way down to the skins. He sat opposite Carl in a large, flowery, plush chair, a bit tense and decidedly unfashionable. On the small table between them sat the browned remains of an apple, Dr Cockcroft’s notebook and a Montblanc fountain pen. A TV was showing a football match with no sound. The blinds were pulled shut.
“What would you guess?” asked Dr Cockcroft.
“Thirty?”
“Do you have a family?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you remember any pets?”
“No.”
“The president of the United States?”
“Nixon.”
“France?”
“Pompidou.”
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Eight.”
“Put your fingers in the same position as mine. Right. And now a mirror image, with the other hand? Okay. Take that piece of paper there and write something.”
“What should I write?”
“Anything. Write: Dr Cockcroft has four fingers on each hand. Good. And now draw a square. And now a circle around the square? If that is a circle for you, then please draw an egg. Can you draw a three-dimensional cube? Does seeing it cause you any difficulty?”
“No.”
“Without checking, how many feet do you have?”
“What?”
“How many feet do you have?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Just answer.”
“Two,” said Carl, looking at his feet.
Dr Cockcroft took notes. “Which of the following words does not belong in the series: person—sheepdog—fish?”
“Fish… no, person. Person doesn’t belong.”
“What type of music do you like?”
“I don’t know.”
“If I was going to play something, what would you like to hear? Arabic music? European? Rock?”
“Not classical.”
“Can you name any groups? Bands?”
“The Beatles. The Kinks. Marshal Mellow.”
“Can you sing a Beatles song?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Hum a melody.”
Carl faintheartedly hummed a few notes and then, surprising even himself, said: “Yellow Submarine.”
“Can you remember what the sign behind you says?”
“Exit.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“No idea.”
“The woman who brought you here?”
“That’s not my wife.”
“The woman waiting for you outside?”
“Right.”
Dr Cockcroft gnawed on his left thumbnail. He looked at his notes and crossed something out. “And what is the name of the woman who isn’t your wife?”
“Helen.”
“Where do you live?”
“Two or three streets from here. In a bungalow.”
“With this woman?”
Carl thought for a while and then said: “Why do you want to know that?”
“Do you live with her?”
“The bungalow belongs to her. She’s on vacation. We met by chance.”
“After you were released from the hospital?”
“I wasn’t in the hospital. She put on the bandages.”
“Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”
“As I already said, I was attacked and… I didn’t think it was so bad.”
“Not so bad.” With his tongue Dr Cockcroft pushed a bitten-off sliver of fingernail out between his lips and then blew it away. He nodded. “I can have a look at it later, if you’d like. And what about your hand?”
“I cut myself,” said Carl, hiding the clumsily bandaged hand beside his thigh.
Dr Cockcroft glanced at his notes and sighed. “Right,” he said, “count backwards from one hundred by sevens.”
“One hundred,” said Carl, and he proceeded to count until he reached seventy and a grumbling noise from the doctor convinced him that he had done enough. Dr Cockcroft had written as he counted, and based on the way his hand moved next, he was drawing a double line beneath the notes. He sucked in the left corner of his mouth, he sucked in the right corner of his mouth. Then he flipped back a few pages and said:
“Now please tell me the whole thing again, backwards. Everything that you told me, step by step, from the moment you arrived at the bungalow.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. Backwards.”
Carl’s gaze fell on an iridescent-blue beetle that was crawling up the table leg right in front of his foot. “Right. Helen and I arrived at the bungalow. Before that we drove through Targat. Before that through the desert. Before that I spoke to Helen at the gas station. Where there was also a white VW bus with German tourists in it. Before that I had walked along beside the road. Before that they stole my wallet. The hippies. Before that I was buried in sand. The men in the jeep had driven around near me. Four men in white djellabas. Before that I’d dug myself into the sand. Before that I was running through the dunes. Before that I went out of the barn door…”
Dr Cockcroft tapped his closed fountain pen on his notes, step after step, and said: “Good, good. Well done. That’s enough. Do you drink alcohol?”
“I don’t think so.”
“No. I mean, do you want a drink?”
Dr Cockcroft went over to a small bar, poured himself a glass of bourbon and looked back over his shoulder. “Something else?”
Carl had leaned forward a bit. He thought he could make out an upside-down word in the notebook: Banser or Ganser. Beneath it a large question mark.
“No thanks.”
The psychiatrist sat back down in his chair, wheezing, took a sip of his drink, put down the nearly empty glass on the table and awkwardly pulled a giant handkerchief from his pants pocket. He took off his watch, set it down next to the glass and pen and pointed to the three objects. Then he covered them grandly with the handkerchief.
“What do a car and a boat have in common?”
“They are means of transport.”
“Anything else?”
“You can sit in them?”
“And?”
“And?” In his mind’s eye he saw Helen’s rusty pickup and the cutter in the Poseidon dive school pamphlet. Both had something to do with Helen. No, that was nonsense. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Good,” said Dr Cockcroft. “Now I’ll tell you a story. Try to remember as much as you can. The tyrant of Acragas, a man named Phalaris, had a bronze bull made by the sculptor Perillos. The bull was hollow and large enough to hold a prisoner. Set a fire beneath the sculpture and the screams of the person inside were supposed to have sounded like the bellowing of a real bull. The first person roasted for test purposes was the sculptor himself. Now tell me the story in your own words.”
“The whole story?”
“The whole story.”
“So, a man named… something had a bull made. Out of bronze. To torture people. With fire. And the sculptor was the first one to die.”
“How would you interpret
that?”
“Interpret it?”
“What is the moral of the story?”
“What moral?”
“Is there a moral to the story? Some sort of point?”
Carl looked uneasily at the beetle, which had by this point reached the top of the table leg and was feeling its way carefully up over the edge of the table.
“Think about it. What does the story boil down to?”
“Art and politics don’t go together?”
“More specifically?”
“Art is immoral?”
“That’s what you think the point of the story is?”
“I don’t know,” said Carl irritably. “The tyrant is an idiot. The sculptor is an idiot. One idiot kills the other. I can’t see much of a point.”
Dr Cockcroft nodded a bit sadly, leaned back and asked: “What is underneath the handkerchief?”
“A watch, a glass and a white bunny.”
The doctor’s face remained expressionless. “Under the handkerchief?”
“A fountain pen,” Carl corrected.
“Do you feel a strong desire to move?”
“Move how?”
“You described your first memory as ‘I’m running through the desert.’”
“My first memory was of the barn.”
“And then you ran,” said Dr Cockcroft while laboriously trying to put his watch back on. “You used the word ‘escape’.”
“Because someone was chasing me.”
“Does this desire to move still exist?”
“I’m not being followed any more.”
“Is it possible that the people chasing you will return?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Give me an assessment: what do you think the chances are that the people following you will return?”
“They didn’t just disappear into thin air. And I didn’t dream them up. If that’s what you think.” Carl held up his wounded right hand—and realized too late his mistake.
Sand Page 15
